VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2
A New Order for Culture
The first chapter poured six ladles of water and put the fire on you out: you will not die, you are a champion, you were not laid off, you were let out, and with your eyes open there is still time to turn. The fire is out, you are on your feet, so where do we go from here? This chapter is about warming the heart. The human heart has long been missing something, and that something has to be raised back up again. With the fire out, this chapter takes up education. Culture is handing down. It is real people of character passing the good things they have lived and gathered down, soaking them into one generation after another. This, AI cannot take, because it has no life that it has lived, and no body. Raising people stands on two legs. Character education is the only medicine for the sickness of torment in this world. Science education gives character a clear pair of eyes. A school's number one job is to settle people and raise their character, and then to choose, from among them, the ones who can truly get things done. Get these two legs standing, and even religion, the most sensitive thing of all, is settled with a single move. Twelve sections, starting from you, the person, walking into the courtyard of the school, and going all the way to the student ID card you have carried in your pocket since you were six.
Section One does not talk about institutions yet. It takes a good look at you first. The fire of Volume I made a great many people shut the book after two pages. You took it page by page to the end, then caught those six ladles of firefighting water one at a time, and came to rest, steady, on this page. You are a champion among champions. You can sit still. When the fire reached you, you did not curse in the street, you did not slump down, you steadied your mind and read on, and that steadiness is itself a kind of character. A person high in character who has also come to see positions clearly is exactly the person who should be invited out to do great things. Then you walk out of the prison called work and into the courtyard of the school. This time you are not the child being managed. You are the grown person who comes both to hand down and to patch up. This book is only the teacher at the edge of the platform, lighting a small lamp. The one who does the great work is you, the student.
Section Two first saves a batch of people who have not been sleeping lately. Teachers, professors, private tutors open their phones and see nothing but news of the AI tutor: ask it a question at two in the morning and it never gets annoyed. The whole ring that one big company carries along, the cooks, barbers, masseurs, opera singers, every one of them holding a skill practiced out over ten or twenty years, are losing their nerve too. This section nails one line down dead: AI is not the expert, AI is a tool, and no one ever said the blackboard is the teacher or the wok is the cook. Handing the mechanical work to it is right. But the one most precious thing, the teacher who lays a hand on your shoulder, the old master's decades of feel in his hands, the tremble in the performer's voice up on the stage, that it cannot do. It has no life that it has lived, no body. It is only an empty megaphone. You will become more precious than you were before.
Section Three takes that most precious thing you are guarding and tells it at the large scale. It is called culture. Culture is handing down, the older generation passing what it has lived, gathered, and come to understand down to the younger one. Your mother passes her signature dish down to your wife, the old carpenter passes the joinery down to his apprentice, a father at the dinner table says be decent, and all of that is culture. That illiterate old farmer knows what seed goes into the ground at which turn of the season, and in a whole life never took the smallest advantage of anyone. No culture is also culture. If even they have a way to be saved, by what reasoning do you think you are finished? Stand up, then turn back and reach a hand to the one who has it harder than you. The root of it is in four words: people soak into people. A child turns honest because there is, beside him, a person living honestly, and that honesty soaks into him a little at a time. AI cannot join this chain.
Section Four pulls the one thing that matters most out of that whole broad field: character. Dig the fire of Volume I all the way down and it is all torment, and torment comes from a shortage of character. Passing laws and setting up offices is walling the flood, not curing it. The one and only medicine is character education. Then it invites out the ancestors' good virtues. Benevolence: Confucius said, do not do to others what you would not want done to you, and one layer higher, if you want to stand, help others stand, if you want to get on, help others get on, being willing to pull people up as well. Righteousness: Mencius spoke of giving up life itself for the sake of what is right, and brought down small, it means seeing it through once you have taken something on, even at a loss. Good faith: Confucius said, a person without good faith, I cannot see what he is good for. Good faith is the bridge between people, and for a child forced from young to borrow an address, that bridge collapses. Filial love: Confucius's student Youzi said that filial love is the root of benevolence, and the ability to cherish another person is first learned at home.
Section Five invites out the last two, integrity and courage. Integrity is clean hands. A sum of money that should have paid for a poor person's medicine or put textbooks in children's hands is tucked away, and the millions harmed have nowhere even to cry out. Setting the word integrity in a person from young is worth more than catching a hundred corrupt officials after the fact. Courage: Confucius said, to see what is right and not do it is to have no courage. The bad run wild, often, because the good dare not speak. With all six invited out, it draws them in toward the plainest place, toward three words: tormenting no one. The ancestors spoke of it everywhere, and this book sets it out on its own. Its threshold is the lowest, as low as waiting in line and not cutting in, something even an illiterate old farmer can do. Its reach is the widest, and its cure the surest. And this medicine can only be lived out for the child to see, by a real person who torments no one.
Section Six opens with a line that will startle you: a school's number one job is to be a prison. In at a fixed hour, out at a fixed hour, walls, bells, and put plainly it is custodial protection, it is settling, catching a whole generation of children steadily, so the parents can go out to work with their minds at ease. Grades come after. Turn this toward the age of AI, and it becomes an enormous thing. A great mass of adults has been let out, and people cannot sit idle; idle too long, the heart panics. In the old script of the first three times machines replaced people, about a hundred million people fell exactly this way. The method is very plain: let the unemployed parents go into their children's schools and sit in alongside them, patching up their own character too. The child watches his parents learning to be people, and that is people soaking into people. Stay together long enough and whose character is real cannot stay hidden, and good people are chosen, layer by layer. The dirty-handed are invited down to patch up again, and the clean-handed are invited up to do the work.
Section Seven turns around and asks who wrecked education. Not the teachers, not the students, not the parents. It was the people who designed the education system, who took turning out grades as the number one job. One wrong note at the top, and the teacher becomes a machine for turning out grades, and the child, from age six, cares only about scoring two points higher than his classmate. Even a good-hearted person who gets the number one job wrong only wrecks things more thoroughly the harder he works. Then it takes you to San Francisco. In 1998 California's statewide standardized test was set back up and the scores were made public, and families with means moved away one after another; the students left and the money shrank with them. A female superintendent came from out of town and took up the ruined mess in a moment of crisis. The superintendent is the warden, and that is not the slightest insult to her. She recognized the property tax bills from wealthy neighborhoods and the insurance papers for luxury cars, saw clearly who was rich and who was poor, and set the settling of people straight. The district later became the highest-scoring urban school district in all of California.
Section Eight is about the yardstick of the standardized test alone. The same test paper looks as fair as anything could be. But sit a child with a one-on-one tutor and cram schools, and a child who has to mind his little brothers and sisters after school, in front of the same paper, and what it measures is whose family has money. Once the score rankings go public, the district house becomes the ticket, house prices are driven sky-high, and the poor cannot even rent. The cruelest cut is that some poor families borrow an address, and a child of six or seven, stepping through the school door, learns as his first lesson to cheat, and has to keep cheating for years. Character handed down wrong from young also travels down the chain of people soaking into people, and hands out a whole string of forever-cheats. This account is not to be charged to the poor. It is to be charged to that yardstick. The yardstick should be taken down. Wherever a child lives, he goes to the school at his own front door.
Section Nine moves the eye to the stage, the radio, the television, and the little screen in everyone's hand. That great mass of people who cannot read cannot read this book; they know the world by watching and listening, and how many old people learned their whole lives' truths of being a person from old operas. They have nowhere to check, and what they see they take for real. In the age of AI, fake videos, fake voices, and fake news are made to look exactly like the real thing, and the least guarded are the first to be cheated. There is only one way: if it is fake, say so plainly. Label it, this was made by AI, and that line is drawn right back. Whoever passes the fake off as real is spreading lies, and that creator is committing a crime. The crime is not AI's. It is the person's.
Section Ten sets the line from before into the hardest sentence of all: the door where people are raised, AI may not enter. The courtyard has two doors. The assisting door is thrown open to AI, grading papers, plugging into formulas, and let it do that well. The door where people are raised, it may not enter. A child sees the teacher do what he promised and understands good faith. He sees the teacher stay just as careful with no one watching and understands being upright when no one is looking. From an empty shell, all a child can learn is an empty shell. The words are hard, and yet this is saving AI. A tool's whole meaning is in being used by people, and if people are crowded out, AI is finished too. The ancestors said, when the skin is gone, what does the hair cling to? People are the skin, and AI is the hair. A good hammer's best fate is to be used, a whole life long, by a good carpenter.
Section Eleven adds the other leg to the raising of people. Handing down is like water flowing down, and clear water and muddy water flow down the same. A true thing: there is a deadly sickness, and in some of the places troubled by it, when a loved one passes, the family wash his body with their own hands and gently hold him once. But that sickness is at its most deadly at exactly the moment a person has just died, and a farewell full of the deepest feeling becomes one parting after another. Poisonous folk remedies, and the month of rest after birth spent wrapped up tight in the summer heat that has cost lives, are good hearts handed down into disasters. So culture must not be handed down blindly; it has to pass through a gate, and that gate is called science. Character minds whether a person is willing to do good, and science minds whether he is able to do it right. Character with no science is a blind man with no eyes. Science with no character is a madman with no direction. Only with both legs at once does a person stand steady.
Section Twelve takes religion, the most sensitive thing of all, and shows how the two legs are used together. For thousands of years, people either dared not touch it, or banned it and set off great chaos. Here it takes one move: you want to believe, that is fine, but learn to understand it first; pass the exam, get a license, and renew it every year. The religion course studies all the religions of the world and learns mutual respect, and that is the leg of character. The science course lays bare the absurd, harmful parts, such as forbidding a person to see a doctor or to have a blood transfusion, and that is the leg of science. When you hear the word license, do not jolt. The student ID card you got at six is a license, and getting a new one each school year is renewing it, because you moved up a grade and your position changed. From the student ID to the religious license and the AI-operator's license, it is all one line.
With the twelve sections walked, what this chapter sets up is one thing: position. Raising people is the real person's position; that most precious thing, that chain of people soaking into people, AI cannot take over. AI stays inside the assisting door and does the mechanical work well. Raising people stands on two legs: character minds whether a person is willing to do good, and science minds whether he is able to do it right. The school first settles people well, adults and children patch up their character together, and then the ones who can get things done are chosen from among them. With the heart warmed back up, people can meet one another as real people. But the thing you fear most has not been spoken of yet: once the work is taken away, what do you live on? The next chapter takes you into the new order for the economy, to see whether those names people have quarreled over for a hundred years, peeled open, are all the same one thing: settling people.
Contents of This Chapter
One. If You Can Read This Page, You Are One of the People Who Should Be Running Education
Two. Your Position Is One AI Cannot Take
Three. Culture Is What Gets Handed Down, and That Is as It Should Be
Four. The Root of Torment, and Benevolence, Righteousness, Good Faith, and Filial Love
Five. Integrity and Courage, and Tormenting No One
Six. The School Is a Prison: Hold People Safely, Then Find the Ones Who Can Get Things Done
Seven. The Root Sickness: The System Designers Got the Number One Job Wrong
Eight. The Yardstick of the Standardized Test: It Helps the Rich and Harms the Poor
Nine. Stage, Radio, and Television: If It Is Fake, Say So Plainly
Eleven. Culture Must Not Be Handed Down Blindly: The Other Leg of Raising People Is Science
Twelve. One Move for Religion, and Holding a License, Renewing the Card
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
One. If You Can Read This Page, You Are One of the People Who Should Be Running Education