At exactly 9 o’clock, after taking our seats, in order to let the waiter notice that there were people in the non-smoking area, I pressed the order button first. Not long after, a waiter poked his head in and looked around, then brought in a glass of water. But after that there was no further movement; not until 9:41 did classmate Bai arrive, and I had no choice but to call the waiter over to place the order, otherwise who knows how long it would have taken before he remembered me……
Classmate Bai sat there for a whole morning, leafing through the *Introduction to Phenomenology* I had brought, and also bringing *Notes on Mortal Life and the Meaning of Sacrifice* for me to browse. We talked about a number of topics before and after lunch.
We began mainly with the spread of Christianity in rural China, discussing whether this infiltration of Western culture (along with scholars’ efforts to popularize Christian culture) would cause the gradual disappearance of Chinese traditional culture, and so on.
I emphasized a anti-essentialist view of culture. “Culture” is not some transhistorical “entity”; “culture” is not a being in the world of ideas, but rather exists as a community’s actual way of life. Tradition, as “tradition,” lies precisely in the fact that it is always being inherited and transformed; that is what makes it tradition. Otherwise it is not “traditional culture,” but merely dead ancient culture.
So when it comes to the intrusion of Christian culture, several issues need to be noted.
First, a living cultural tradition will inevitably remain in constant contact with the outside world and receive influences from it. Whether a tradition “dies out” does not chiefly depend on whether it changes, but on the continuity of its historical self-identification. While accepting outside influences, scholars reflect on and popularize the concepts and influences behind these cultural changes, and in a sense this actually helps preserve cultural inheritance, because only by knowing oneself can one establish oneself more fully. If a person can only remember what he looked like several years ago, yet is oblivious to his new changes in recent years, then that person probably has no future. People with a future must not only be able to remember the past, but also be able to face up to change.
Second, the so-called “Christian culture” has never been a single entity. Even in the context of Western culture, certain distinctions are worth making: on the one hand, there is the difference between Christian culture and “modern culture.” In fact, “modernization,” as a kind of “anti-culture,” is the strongest threat to “traditional culture.” Any traditional culture, whether the Confucian tradition or the Christian tradition, is some kind of “tradition that values tradition”; people respect the rites, habits, and ideas handed down by their predecessors, and thus this culture can be transmitted onward. Modern culture, however, is marked precisely by “anti-tradition,” by a break with the ancients. Even in the West, modernity likewise causes the dissolution of the Christian cultural tradition.
On the other hand, even within Western culture, the Christian tradition is not monolithic. No matter which civilization we are talking about, rural culture is always different from urban culture. Especially in the West, where the upper and lower classes, the nobility and the common people, are separated, the same Christianity is transmitted differently among theologians and the upper classes than it is in rural society. Before modern times, rural culture was always some kind of oral culture rather than a written one. If we understand Christianity through reading documents, then what we learn about Christianity—its characteristics, spirit, ideas, and so on—actually does not constitute the main substance of its transmission in rural Christianity. Abstract and lofty notions such as human nature, eternal life, atonement, and so forth are simply not valued in rural culture. Oral culture pays more attention to relations between people; rural religion is more embodied in daily life, associations, and rituals.
Therefore, when examining the impact of the spread of Christianity on China’s rural cultural traditions, one cannot be confined to abstract concepts and say that because a religion is named “Christian,” it is Western culture and fundamentally different from religions named after the Buddha or the Earth God. The key is to look at people’s way of life, their rites and rhythms of living, and whether these have undergone a profound transformation because of the spread of Christianity.
Speaking of the two modes of transmission in urban and rural culture, we then moved on to the issue of migrant workers. In fact, what most severely damages rural traditional culture is of course modernization, or the urbanization that accompanies it. The special issue manifested in China is the problem of migrant workers. Classmate Bai mentioned that migrant workers bring modern urban culture back to the countryside, which is certainly true, but that still reflects a way of thinking that treats culture as some kind of conceptual entity, as if migrant workers cause cultural change by absorbing certain ideas in the city and then passing those ideas on to rural people. In fact, if culture is understood as a way of life and a pattern of interpersonal relations, then the very departure of migrant workers has already greatly changed rural culture.
After finishing lunch, classmate Bai left. In the afternoon, Water, Chigua Wang, Duruo, and other old friends came by, and unexpectedly, two newcomers also arrived. An OP enthusiast from the Department of Physics, class of ’09, and his companion came for the discussion. Starting from the situation in the philosophy department, I finally spoke about the topics of “the mechanization of force” and “the naturalization of mathematics.”
In the afternoon and evening, the staff at New Island still maintained their abysmal service level; requests for water, for ordering, for serving dishes, and so on were met with response times that could probably be measured in half-hour units. The wireless internet was also broken.
There was still a little over a hundred yuan left, and more than a dozen drinks. I’ll come back next semester to deal with it.
【The New Island Salon temporarily comes to an end】
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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