I just bought a new laptop, ASUS’s new UL30V. A 13-inch widescreen, much lighter and more portable than my old laptop. ASUS’s biggest selling point is its super-durable battery: in power-saving mode, it is said to last 12 hours. It has both discrete and integrated graphics; when saving power, you can switch off the discrete card, and it still plays games just fine. All in all, I’m pretty satisfied. I bought it at a nearby computer market. The first shop quoted 6,000; after bargaining, I got it down to 5,750. The second shop opened at 5,250, and after haggling for ages I finally closed the deal at 5,000—yet it still ended up 200 yuan more expensive than on JD.com… Of course, the advantage of buying in person is that you can weigh the machine in your own hands, get it sooner, and have someone help install the (pirated) Win7 system. The guy doing the installation even tried to make a little extra on the side, strongly pushing protective film for the LCD screen and keyboard, asking 100 yuan for it. I didn’t pay him any mind, and the little brother immediately turned hostile; not a single kind word remained, and he impatiently sent me on my way.
As it happened, in the random CD bundle, besides the driver disc, I naturally found the magic device called “Green Dam.” Of course, I don’t know how many people will install this thing; perhaps some parents buying computers for their children will still install it…
What I was thinking about here was the issue of information control: should parents and society impose some kind of control over the channels through which information spreads? In particular, should certain sensitive topics become a kind of public taboo?
In the abstract, the answer is certainly yes. Responsible parents need to control the information their children are exposed to; this is part of education. Education itself contains a process of selecting information. “Cultivation” cannot mean passing on everything known by the older generation to the younger one without discrimination—that is impossible anyway. Rather, different information must be selected and limited, and conveyed in different ways; throughout this process, one’s own values are bound to seep in. Media are not neutral. Any kind of communication is bound to carry a certain value orientation. A completely neutral medium of information does not exist, and a completely neutral communicator of information is also a fantasy. To insert one’s own judgment when transmitting information, to emphasize some things and obscure others, is an entirely proper responsibility.
On the other hand, parents also should indeed appropriately restrict children from too early an exposure to certain specific content—sex is the typical example—because a child’s personality is not yet mature, and their independent judgment still needs to be cultivated into shape by elders. Good parents should of course respect a child’s personal independence, but if one were to treat an underage child entirely as an equal individual, that would not be respect but irresponsibility. Back when I read Postman’s The Disappearance of Childhood, I felt this very deeply too—“childhood” is shaped by “secrets,” and the loss of “secrets” leads to the destruction of the boundary between children and adults, causing the infantilization of society, and so on. In short, I strongly support preserving certain realms of “secrets” in social culture.
So, am I supposed to support Green Dam? Am I supposed to support our country’s methods of controlling information? Quite the contrary! Because this secret is not that secret. In our thoroughly paternalized system, what these “parents” are struggling to guard is not the realm of secrets as the boundary between children and adults, but their own ugly faces, guilty parents that they are. The “taboos” we set up do not provide a separation between children and adults; instead, they erase that separation—under this paternalistic system, every member is required to become a child. What this society contains is not a responsible attitude of treating children as children, but rather the attitude of treating everyone as children, and then carrying out its control accordingly. Thus, everything children cannot look at is at the same time something adults are also not allowed to look at. We can control the ears and eyes of adults in the name of protecting children. So if someone asks: why can’t I have access to certain information? The answer is: “Do you have children?”—the logic being: because it’s bad for children to see these things, you can’t see them either. Thus China doesn’t need to establish any rating system, because everyone is regarded as a ten-year-old child.
Such a pathological concealment is completely different from preserving secrets for children. One is an educational strategy undertaken to guide children toward healthy growth and ultimately teach them to become adults with independent personalities; the other is to make adults lose their sound judgment, and to turn everyone into incomplete children who always need parental supervision and support.
Every culture has its taboos, but even if they are all taboos, they can take radically different forms. Two extreme examples are the Muslim taboo against eating pork and the Hindu taboo against eating beef. People who don’t know the context may feel that these two taboos are very similar, but in fact there is a fundamental difference between them—Muslims think pigs are the filthiest and most unclean things, so they must not be touched; Hindus think cows are sacred and sublime things, so they must not be touched.
If I say that I support parents, in their communication with children, treating matters like sex as a kind of taboo that should be avoided, then this taboo exists because sex is something sacred and mysterious, something too “advanced,” and therefore children should not touch it for the time being; it is not because sex is something evil and dirty, something too “low-level,” and therefore children should not come into contact with it, so only low-level adults may come into contact with it…
Of course, the abuse of desire can be said to be “low-level,” but to never dare face one’s own desires, never dare face one’s own “body,” is an even more childish mentality. To regard a sound and natural body as evil only blurs the boundary between good and evil, and in the end “good” can only degenerate into some empty and abstract slogans. This is precisely the situation in China today. On the surface, our society seems to be the most moral, the most proper existence of all; but in reality it has lost ethical boundaries, and allows the private desires of those in power to expand without limit. You may say that this is because reality is not ideal enough, and so on. Yet the real crux of the matter is that this society’s moral “ideals” have never dared to face real life. In the name of caring for children, it is actually escaping reality. They are not caring about real children as responsible adults, but rather, in the name of an abstract and absolute “parent,” they are caring about a fictitiously constructed “child.” By borrowing this group of abstract “children,” the “parents” can obtain a pretext for concealing the truth.
Latest Comments
- benjaminbai
2010-02-13 00:57:36 Anonymous 123.116.40.48
This issue of the sacred and the filthy reminds me of Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger; I had read it rather cursorily before because of Wu Fei’s class… I always feel that her theory and what you’re saying are somewhat at odds. In a few days I’ll go find that book and flip through it again; next time I’ll chat with you about this issue… mm-hm
- Gu Chi
2010-02-13 01:31:58
What I’m talking about hasn’t yet reached the level of cultural anthropology… Of course, I’m quite interested in this topic.
In any case, roughly speaking, there are two different forms of “taboo.” One is something base or so-called unclean; the other is a taboo of the lofty and the sacred. The former is something the more “advanced” a person is, the less they should come into contact with; the latter is the opposite—the more lowly a person is, the less they should come into contact with it. And when it comes to setting sexual taboos for children, I only support the kind of taboo that takes sex as “higher-order” and “secret,” not the kind that takes sex as base and filthy. Of course, I’m not saying there should be no taboos concerning impurity. A culture should certainly have some taboos concerning impurity; however, this kind of taboo has nothing to do with protecting children. It is, first and foremost, a taboo for adults themselves. The problem in China today is not so much that there are too many taboos, but rather that there are no taboos at all. The overgeneralization and abuse of taboo have caused us to be completely unable to tell where the boundaries of taboo lie.， - unic
2010-02-21 22:43:03 Anonymous 210.77.59.5
Muslims think pigs are the filthiest and most unclean things, so they must not be touched; Hindus think cows are sacred and sublime things
By the way·····I once heard someone say that Muslims don’t eat pork because pigs are their benefactors or some such absurdity—turns out it may have been mixed up with [Indian beef]…
Now I’ll move on to an extended topic. As for pornography, aside from restrictions for children, what is actually the best approach for adults? Is it not to guide them at all, and let them freely come into contact with it, or something else? In your view, how should the independent personality of the adult public be cultivated? - Gu Chi
2010-02-22 10:43:31
An adult’s independent personality does not need to be “cultivated.” Cultivation is for children. An adult, by definition, is a personality that has matured; it is no longer a matter of cultivation, but of respect. Of course, one can say that in mass society, adults are infantilized and lack independent personality, and so on—that is another matter. In terms of policy, however, adults should always be treated as mature people.
As for guiding people’s exposure to pornography, the principle is the same as with guidance regarding non-pornographic content: everyone should guide, according to their own values, whatever it is they help transmit. As a whole social institution, there will of course also be a certain guiding bias; there are biases in the content of news, variety shows, film and television dramas, and so on, encouraging one kind, restricting another, and so forth. Guidance for pornography is in this same sense; it does not mean that because something is pornography, it should be restricted as a whole, or that adults should be guided to avoid contact with pornographic works as much as possible. Pornographic works mainly stimulate sexual desire, but that does not mean they are necessarily bad things. In fact, many other works are stimulating appetite, the desire for power, the desire for money, the desire to conquer, the desire to control, and so on. There are plenty of things that stimulate desire. If things that stimulate desire are bad things, then everyone might as well spend all day fasting and chanting Buddha’s name. Of course, the stimulation of desire needs guidance and cannot be allowed to run wild. Pornographic content needs guidance; this is the same as food-related content needing guidance—you shouldn’t keep airing, day after day, food shows about things like eating pangolins, eating whales, eating monkey brains, and the like. Such food content should be subject to certain restrictions; pornography is similar. - unic
2010-02-23 20:32:37 Anonymous 210.77.59.5
Present-day pornography, while stimulating sexual desire, inevitably also carries an attitude toward sexual desire. Why does the attitude toward sexual desire expressed in existing pornography show a certain uniformity? Is this related to the fact that it lacks a sufficiently open platform for development?
- Gu Chi
2010-02-24 10:34:57
This… I don’t know what “existing pornography” you’ve come into contact with, nor what the so-called “uniformity” is. Indeed, Chinese pornography today, because it has no open platform, is entirely designated illegal and immoral, so it cannot have rich forms of expression. But if you look at European and American pornography and Japanese pornography, then you really cannot say that they show any uniformity in their attitude toward sexual desire. Just from the most naked /-\ films alone, you can already see that different cultures have radically different interpretations of sexual desire; not to mention the pornographic content carried along in films, literary and artistic works, advertisements, animated films, and so on—the forms are diverse in the extreme.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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