VOLUME V, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 2

VOLUME V, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 2

Wei Is Neutral. What Is Made by Human Hands Is Wei

The last section carried the character wei out as a tool and called it the handiest ruler we have for seeing through the law. But that ruler has been sitting under a thick layer of dust for more than two thousand years. This section does nothing else. It wipes the character clean and hands it back the way Xunzi first wrote it.

Start with something odd. The way this character gets used today runs almost exactly against what it first meant. In the Chinese world, wei has hardened into a bad word. It lives inside hypocrisy, disguise, forgery, the false gentleman, pseudoscience. See it, and your first gut reaction is: fake, cheating, not real. That reaction is not the reader's fault. It is what layer after layer of usage ground the character into over two thousand years. But when Xunzi set down those three words, that what is man-made is wei, fake was nowhere in his mind. To see this, you have to go back to what he actually wrote.

Xunzi's full sentence runs like this: human nature runs to the bad, and whatever good is in a person is wei, is made. Xunzi is saying that a person is born carrying appetite and the urge to grab and fight, and that this part is inborn. But a person also carries good, and that good is not inborn. It is wei. It is made, worked up little by little through the teaching of elders and the guidance of ritual. So the wei here is the made of man-made, not the false of falsehood. Put into plain speech today, the sentence means roughly this. No one is born good. Good is taught into a person and cultivated in a person after birth. Xunzi is not calling good a fake. He is saying the very opposite. Good is the thing a person builds with his own hands, and it is the thing most worth treasuring. Under his brush, wei carries real weight.

Hold onto that, because this is exactly what makes the character remarkable. To Xunzi, ritual is wei, culture is wei, and the good a person cultivates in himself after birth is wei. Wei is not some grimy thing to dodge. It is the very margin by which a human being rises above an animal. So how did a character carrying such honest weight sink into a word people sling as an insult? That is the trail to follow next.

The fall has a clear line to it. Around 100 AD, in the Eastern Han, the scholar Xu Shen wrote his great dictionary of characters, and there he glossed wei first of all as deceit, noting that it is built from the person radical with wei for its sound. Xu Shen already stood more than three hundred years downstream from Xunzi. Putting deceit as the character's first meaning was already a stretched, secondary sense. But the shape of the character does not lie. A person radical joined to the graph for do or make gives you, at the root, the thing a person does. Xunzi's proud character, the one that carried ritual and culture, had in three hundred years slid, in Xu Shen's hand, to deceit as its leading sense.

Why would it stretch toward deceit? The path is not hard to trace. Man-made things get set next to natural ones and measured against them. A paper flower made by hand cannot match a real flower on the branch. A manufactured smile may be hiding something behind it. Compare and compare, and a person forms the impression that whatever is man-made is somehow less true than what nature grew. One more step, and the man-made becomes the put-on, becomes the fake.

This kind of drift is common in Chinese characters. Take the word we now translate as feudal. At the start it named a concrete arrangement, the granting of lands to lords and the setting up of their domains. Later it got swung around into a slur meaning backward and hidebound, with nothing left of what it first pointed to. Wei walked the same road. It was not born dirty. Two thousand years of tongues rubbed it dirty. Once you see that wear for what it is, a single character can no longer bluff you.

The single most important sentence in wiping the character clean is this. Man-made does not mean fake. Wei is simply the made, with no praise and no blame attached. It only sets the natural and the man-made apart. The last section used the tree and the table, the river and the canal, so there is no need to repeat them. Only one thing needs adding, and it is the crucial one. A man-made thing is not a fake thing. A table is built by people, and it truly holds what you set on it. A canal is dug by people, and it truly carries boats. A law is set up by people, and it truly holds conduct in check and truly settles disputes. Man-made speaks to where a thing came from, not to whether it is a lie. Hearing man-made as false is a threshold that two thousand years of prejudice left lying in the road. Step over it, and you can finally see where the law really stands. The law is wei. It is carved by human hands. It was not handed down from heaven.

That sounds like an ordinary sentence, and it is the bedrock of this entire volume. Once you grant that the law is made by people, you can start asking the real questions. Who made it? Why? For whom? And you can start saying the other thing too. It was made badly, so it can be made over. As long as a thing is still treated as handed down from heaven, not one of those questions can even leave your mouth.

Here is why this layer has to be nailed shut. There is always someone who wants to say the law fell out of the sky. In real life the law gets talked about as if it were heaven-granted all the time. Natural law, divine law, universal and not to be broken, a fundamental charter sacred and untouchable. Every one of these phrases pushes the law toward not man-made. Push it far enough and the law gets enshrined as a god, a thing you may not question and may not remake.

But the moment the law is set up on the altar, the trouble starts. Who is standing behind that altar? People, still. A particular set of people who make the law, who interpret it, who draw their advantage from it. When they call the thing they built sacred and untouchable, they are quietly enshrining themselves along with it, so that anyone who moves to change the law now looks like he is committing sacrilege. The sanctity of the law is, a great deal of the time, a shield held up in front of a particular group to keep the questions off. This is not to say that everyone who speaks of the law with gravity is up to something. Wanting people to respect the law is a fine thing in itself. But once gravity turns into you may not ask, and respect turns into kneeling, it is worth taking one good look at who exactly is standing under that shield.

Xunzi's three words lift the shield right off. The law is wei. It is a man-made matter. A man-made matter can be set up, which means it can be changed, which means it is not final, which means it has no business being worshiped as a god. That one stroke gently invites the law down off the altar and sets it back in its true place, a tool in human hands.

Someone will worry at once that taking the law off the altar strips it of its weight. That worry has the direction backward. A man-made thing can carry plenty of weight. The table bears the load, the canal carries the boat, the law holds conduct in check, and none of that rests on the lie that the thing is not man-made. It rests on how the thing actually works. Weight does not come from a hollow word like sacred. It comes from something solid: is the thing useful, and does it shelter people? Whether a law stands or not turns on its content, on how it is enforced, on whether people's hearts consent to it. Restoring the law to wei does not drain its weight. It moves its weight off an empty phrase and onto a real thing.

And here is the sentence that matters most. To measure whether a law is right, there is only one ruler: does it shelter people? The law's original job is to block the strong from seizing the weak, to block the powerful from bullying the powerless, to keep the little that each person is born with from being torn away. Hold that duty and a law stands true. Reverse it, so that the law becomes a tool for the strong to press the weak and the powerful to strip the powerless, and then no matter how tidy its articles or how impressive its signboard, it has already slid off the place where it ought to stand. From here on, take every law and lay this one ruler against it.

The same law, turned to shelter people or turned to strip them, can keep every word of its text unchanged and still land in two opposite places. A law against theft protects the things in every person's hands, and that is sheltering people. But take that very same enforcement muscle and aim it only at guarding the share of those who already hold the most, and at blocking the road of those who were cheated from getting their own back, and now it is stripping people. The ruler does not read the signboard. It reads only where the thing lands. This ruler is what Volume IV called tormenting no one, now set down onto the law, and several of the sections ahead lean on it.

But a man-made thing cannot shake one problem loose. It leans on people at every turn, and people cannot be counted on. The one who makes the law is a person. The one who enforces it is a person. The one who judges is a person. The one held in check is a person too. Every one of them carries his own appetite, his own bias, his own blind spots, and that brings us to the deepest layer of wei. The law is a man-made tool, and a tool does not move on its own. A hammer needs a hand to lift it, and a law needs someone to enforce it, and the one who enforces is himself another layer of wei.

So the whole of the law, from making to enforcing to judging to obeying, is wei stacked on top of wei. Let the person at any one layer tilt, and the whole thing tilts with him. A law can be written on paper as blind and even-handed as iron, and still, coming down on a real person, it has to pass first through whom the lawmaker favored, then through whom the enforcer goes easy on and whom he leans on hard, then through how the judge reads it and whether he calls it light or heavy. A dead line of text, traveling from the page to a living person, crosses several layers of living people, and each layer can bend it a little. By the time it lands, it is no longer the clean law that sat on the page.

That is the true face of wei stacked on wei. However beautiful a law is, once it lands in the hands of one imperfect person after another, its coming out bent is all but certain. Saying this is not meant to make anyone lose heart over the law. It is meant to keep anyone from treating the law as a god that cannot err, so that when it does come out bent, you can recognize it, and you can still change it.

By now a reader may feel the weight of it. If the law is man-made and also forever imperfect, then what do we keep it for? Laozi answered that twenty-five hundred years ago with a line about cooking. Governing a great state, he said, is like frying a small fish. Once it is in the pan, you cannot keep turning it, because the more you turn it the more it falls to pieces. He is not saying scrap the law. He is saying use the law with restraint, so that the little bend built into every wei falls on ordinary people as lightly as possible. Confucius meant the same thing. In hearing lawsuits, he said, I am no different from anyone else, but what I truly want is a world where there are no lawsuits at all.

Follow that one more step and you arrive at the highest place in this whole chapter. Since the law leans on people layer by layer and can bend at every turn, its most ideal end is to be needed less and less. Everyone learns to hold himself in check, to seize from no one and bully no one, and as disputes thin out, the occasions for reaching for the law naturally thin out with them. That layer is the summit of the chapter. It is only touched here, and the sections ahead will walk their way up to it.

So this section sets down its third layer. The law is wei, a man-made matter, necessarily imperfect, and it must be used with restraint. Set that firmly and every discussion that follows has its ground tone. When you hear of the law's benefits, remember it is wei, and the benefits are relative. When you hear of the law's abuse, remember it is wei, and a man-made thing is bound to be abused. When you hear of reforming the law, remember the reform is itself wei, and will bring its own new bend.

There is no perfect law, no law that is right forever, no law that cannot be changed. This layer was not set by this book. Xunzi set it more than twenty-two hundred years ago. This work only carries wei back out of the prejudice of later ages and says it once more in today's plain speech, so that when we take up the law in the sections ahead, there is a clean tool in hand to work with.

The next section opens a hotter question. Whom is the law actually made for? For the strong or for the weak, for the ones seated up top or for the countless ordinary people below? That has always been the deepest quarrel there is about the law, and the ancestors laid it out early too. Reader, walk into the next section carrying this set of tools: natural law, wei, and the fact that a man-made thing is forever imperfect.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.

Section Three. Whom the Law Serves.