On the Attitude Toward “Chinese Traditional Values” and “Western Modern Values”

7,726 characters2005.12.22

Modern society, especially contemporary Chinese society, is marked by one outstanding predicament: a crisis of faith, that is, a loss of values.

To say that values have been lost is entirely different from saying that values have become “pluralized.” The pluralization of values is a good thing, but the problem is that people’s values today are not richer or more varied; rather, they are confused, depleted, and full of blank spaces.

In modern times, in the industrial era and even the information age, the earth has become smaller and smaller, yet the distance between people has become greater and greater; the number of species humans recognize is greater than at any previous time, yet species extinction is happening faster than at any previous time; people work harder than in any earlier era, yet they understand the purpose of labor less than ever before; people’s lifespans are longer than in any previous era, yet they are less clear than ever about the meaning of living; people can explore the essence of matter more than at any previous time, yet they understand the essence of human beings less than ever……

People are laboring hard at something; they also know how to do it, yet they have forgotten why they ought to do it. Exploration and labor have lost their original meaning and have instead become something habitual, carried on by inertia.

Whether in the East or the West, whether among conservatives or radicals, the more common consensus is this: we need to reflect on or rebuild our values. The question is how to reflect, and how to rebuild.

The state of values in contemporary China includes two kinds of problems: on the one hand, the collapse of Chinese traditional values; on the other, the influx of Western modern values. Thus there are also two paths toward restoring values: mining the reasonable elements in Chinese traditional culture, and absorbing the advanced aspects of Western modern spirit. These two paths are not in conflict; in fact, we need to work in both directions at once. What I want to discuss in this essay is not which of these two paths is better or worse, but rather what sort of mindset we should have when we make efforts in these two directions.

When dealing with ancient Chinese traditional thought, we often hear the slogan “remove the dross, retain the essence.” There is nothing wrong with this phrase itself, but whenever I hear people use it, I often feel uncomfortable. It turns out that this attitude itself is problematic! If one follows the logic of this phrase, one seems to be looking for the “essence,” but in practice one is always picking out the “dross.” People take perverse delight in finding fault and forget what they themselves should be doing! A whole pile of fruit, some sweet and some rotten—are you going to “remove the dross, retain the essence”? First, there are so many rotten ones that you can’t pick them all out; second, if you rummage and stir everything around, you may well end up crushing the good fruit too; third, the more you pick, the angrier and more resentful you become, and in the end you probably won’t have the mood to enjoy and savor the sweet fruit anymore; finally, once picking becomes a habit, you may forget your mission altogether and instead stand before a mountain-high heap of rotten fruit that you yourself have picked out, smug and proud of yourself…… Clearly, when a pile of good fruit and a pile of rotten fruit are mixed together, a smart person will choose the good fruit. Pick out one and you can taste one—delicious and nutritious, and your stomach knows best the benefits involved. Although those who pick out mountain-sized heaps of rotten fruit may appear to have “impressive results,” unbeknownst to them their bellies remain empty all the same.

There is nothing wrong with removing the dross, and nothing wrong with retaining the essence; what is problematic is the mindset with which these eight characters are carried out. For Chinese traditional culture contains a great deal of dross. If we place removing the dross first, we often discover that this work is endless, because there is simply too much dross to pick through. Many people then easily sink into this illusion of accomplishment, imagining they have completed a great deal of critical work, and their “achievements” do indeed seem impressive on the surface, because it is quite easy to pick out the stale and backward elements in traditional culture. But if, after picking out a great heap of rotten fruit, we forget in our self-righteousness to enjoy those good fruits, then what meaning does our effort have?

China’s traditional values are indeed stale and backward, but that is only in comparison with Western modern civilization; this is a comparison across different eras, and such a comparison is very unfair. What if we compare China with Western Europe of the same period? What about China’s Tang and Song dynasties compared with the Western Middle Ages? What about Zheng He’s voyages to the Western Oceans compared with the West’s slave trade and colonial plunder? When Chinese traditional values are compared with Western traditional values, can we still so confidently and righteously say that China is “backward”? We must not forget that Western modern civilization did not arise out of thin air, but was built upon the “stale” Middle Ages and the “bloody” colonial period. So when we think about how China might establish the values of modern civilization, we can refer to the historical experience of how the West generated modern culture on the basis of its own tradition.

We note that the development of Western culture did not go through a stage of wholesale denial and criticism of traditional values. Quite the contrary: the West emerged from the darkness of the Middle Ages through the “Renaissance” — by tracing back to the cultural traditions of ancient Greece and ancient Rome; and the slogan shouted by the Protestant Reformation was “return to the Bible” — a return to the roots of Christian culture. This shows that re-identifying and reinterpreting traditional culture is precisely an effective path to establishing new values and getting out of cultural predicaments!

Wu Guosheng said it well: “The overcoming of a cultural crisis usually depends mainly on activating the culture’s own internal mechanisms of repair and healing; other cultures may play a supplementary role, and such a supplementary role can only exert itself through the creative interpretation of the mother culture.” (Freedom in Science, p. 5) No matter how much effort we make on the path of absorbing Western modern spirit, if we cannot activate the intrinsic strength of Chinese traditional culture, the values we establish will forever be rootless values; indeed, this will only further deepen our confusion — not knowing what sort of people we are, because we do not know where we come from, and thus we will also not know where we are going.

Ancient Chinese tradition is our “mother culture,” while the West is the “forerunner” of modernization. In dealing with one’s “mother culture,” naturally one should adopt a mindset somewhat like the way one treats one’s mother. We may “objectively” comment that a mother’s thinking is aging, stale, and so on; none of this is wrong. And of course a mother has many teachings worth listening to and inheriting. But should we then examine our mother with a “critical” attitude? I think that bowing one’s head like a child and quietly listening to one’s mother’s teachings is the better attitude, because if a person loses respect and reverence for his own mother, for his own ancestors, for the source of his own life, then that person becomes a rootless person! By contrast, toward the “forerunner,” we may as well adopt a more critical eye, because he runs ahead of us; we can see the setbacks and detours the forerunner encountered, and thus carefully avoid them, and only in this way can we eventually catch up.

We certainly must criticize stale and backward things, but this cannot be rootless criticism. The Renaissance sought to overthrow the darkness of the Middle Ages by borrowing strength from older wisdom; the Protestant Reformation sought to break the authority of the Catholic Church by finding its foundation in the source of Christianity — the Bible; and we too must not focus only on “criticism” and forget about “seeking our roots”!

There will certainly be some outdated ideas in traditional culture, but we need to understand exactly what attitude we ought to take toward traditional culture: if it is with a “fault-finding” mindset, then by all means one can seize on those dross elements and talk endlessly about them. But the ones now “having problems” are we modern people; it is we who are facing the predicament of value loss, while ancient wisdom is the source and treasure that gives us inspiration, and it is also the homeland that allows us always to possess a sense of spiritual belonging. Only if we adopt a mindset of “treasure-seeking,” “root-seeking,” and “inheritance” can we better negate the dross while preserving and developing its essence.

December 22, 2005