At the time of social transformation, people are experiencing the pain of value shock and many people's behavioral misconduct. When searching for ways to end labor pain and rebuild social norms, many people have turned their attention to tradition. "Traditional culture and contemporary moral construction", a topic that has attracted much attention in the past two years, was born in this context. This article discusses two opinions on this topic.
Traditional culture, including traditional ethics and morals, has very complex content and nature. How to deal with it must be fully rational, otherwise it will inevitably go astray. But on this issue, some people appear to be so irrational that they are even dominated by an extremely harmful irrational trend of thought to a large extent. Not to mention that among the people, all kinds of pseudo-culture and fake monuments are rampant, and some bad psychology and despicable habits created by long-standing historical traces are freely expressed. Just talking about academia, in this field that should have the most rational spirit, there are also irrational and even anti-rational phenomena.
The irrationality in academia mainly manifests itself in two aspects. On the one hand, based on a practical standpoint, there are unrealistic expectations for using traditional culture to solve various problems currently faced. The result is that it not only places excessive tasks on traditional culture, but also creates a style of study that is eager for quick success, far-fetched, frivolous and not serious. This is particularly true in the field of ethics. For example, we rack our brains to discover the so-called "Confucian economic ethics" and try to find the roots and righteousness of the current economic activities in the process of establishing a market economic system from ancient traditions. It seems that we have to climb up to Confucianism to build a market economy, but regardless of this This connection is so far-fetched. Another example is praising the official governance and official ethics under the autocratic imperial power without analysis, and using this as a panacea to solve cadre corruption. However, it intentionally or unintentionally conceals the essence of feudal officialdom and the very decadent side of the official style of that era. It also avoids the root causes of corruption today.
Going hand in hand with this practical attitude of playing with history as needed is an overly romantic attitude towards traditional culture. Although practicality and romance seem to be opposites, in treating tradition irrationally, they are like two sides of the same coin, relying on and complementing each other. When some scholars feel that the problems faced by interpersonal relationships in modern society turn to tradition, they often turn to the ideals and norms of "filial piety". However, when talking about "filial piety", it lacks the due prudence and realistic spirit, and paints a picture of a historical pastoral scene dominated by the concept of "filial piety" in which fathers are kind and sons are filial, the old are respected and the young are respected, and everyone is happy. However, "filial piety" certainly includes the aspect of respecting, caring for the elderly, paying attention to the natural connection between people, and maintaining and strengthening this emotional connection. It also has the obviously paradoxical content of "there are three types of unfilial piety, and the greatest is not having offspring." It also serves as a patriarchal system. It expresses the absurdity of absolute paternal power and the absurdity of judging right and wrong based on status, as well as the arbitrariness of transplanting this absolute paternal power to the relationship between monarch and ministers to "serve the emperor with filial piety". When this extremely absurd and arbitrary aspect was realized in history, it was very cruel and often full of blood. Putting aside these historical contents that are originally attached to "filial piety", talking about China's "filial piety" tradition in a romantic and distant aesthetic manner will not only not help the construction of contemporary morality, but also cause the history to be ignored. The truth is buried in romantic fantasy, which actually deceives and misleads people.
The above criticism is not meant to deny tradition. The fact that our country’s ethical culture has been inherited for more than two thousand years reminds people that the construction of a new ethical culture is not a task that is unrelated to tradition. We can never imagine that we can abandon traditional ethical culture and build a new ethical and cultural edifice on an empty piece of land as we please. History can neither be avoided nor cut off. If history is cut off or avoided, no matter how good the idea is, it will not be realized due to lack of foundation. What's more, everyone is immersed in the historical traditions of the past to varying degrees. Traditions are always acting on contemporary people and constitute the objective background in which we are placed. More importantly, whether it is the modernity of the ethical spirit we pursue or the modernity of other aspects of society, as the American scholar Ingalls pointed out: "From the perspective of historical development, the trend of modernization itself is a healthy development of human traditional civilization. Continuation and extension. "The problem is that this healthy continuation and extension cannot be achieved through a pragmatic and romantic attitude toward tradition, but can only be achieved by resorting to a rational spirit and transforming the tradition based on serious reflection, cleanup, and analysis. The valuable content enables it to achieve creative transformation to adapt to modern society.
Treating tradition with a rational spirit not only means honesty and rigor in scholarship, but also means placing the investigation of traditional culture in the context of the world's larger culture. In modern times, with the increasingly extensive and in-depth exchanges between various ethnic groups, the value of different cultures has been increasingly understood by people, multiple cultural models coexist, and communication and understanding between heterogeneous cultures have become an important trend in cultural development. However, culture is the expression of people's way of existence. No matter how different cultures are, the differences are superficial compared with the uniformity that makes all people the same. No differences can conceal the consistency in characteristics and needs of people and the universality of the basic survival problems they face. These consistency or universality constitute the basis of human common values ??that transcend geographical, cultural and racial boundaries.
This determines that the healthy continuation and extension of any cultural tradition must be based on the recognition and respect of basic human values ??and corresponding axioms. Therefore, it requires that the investigation of tradition be placed in the context of world culture, rather than divorced from this background and human beings. The development of civilization proceeds in isolation. This kind of vision and mind based on our own nation while focusing on the world not only prevents us from wandering between arrogance and self-compassion with a narrow nationalist sentiment on traditional issues, but also enables us to truly By discovering the outstanding elements of tradition, we can find the juncture between tradition and modern civilization and transform it into an indispensable component of the international cultural community.