Optimism and Pessimism Take Turns — What Can We Do? | Is This Society Too Good to Young People? (The End)
QDaily interviewed 20 people, most of them from academia, the media and publishing. What they share is a long-standing interest in public affairs and a hope of passing on a “good society.” The question we put to them: as the younger generation becomes more and more the mainstream of society, is this the future world we hoped for?
QDaily interviewed 20 people, most of them from academia, the media and publishing. What they share is a long-standing interest in public affairs and a hope of passing on a “good society.” The question we put to them: as the younger generation becomes more and more the mainstream of society, is this the future world we hoped for?
Nothing that happened to anyone fits the end of this series better than what happened to the high school senior who told his own frustrating little story on Zhihu.
The student, said to be from the high school affiliated with Northwestern Polytechnical University, described how a classmate reported to the local education bureau that the school was still holding extra classes on smog days. The bureau passed the call along to the school, and the teachers, the school and the parents all blamed the student.
From beginning to end, his post is nothing but bewilderment at the adult world.
Is this society really too good to young people?
When we think about what kind of society we will leave behind, our first instinct is that young people are the victims. But when people still younger than us — those aggrieved high schoolers, say — look at this society, we may be the ones doing the harm.
Xu Zhiyuan, a writer and media figure, is at work on a biography of Liang Qichao, and Liang's idea of the “new citizen” has left him with a lot to say: “Are we new citizens? We are certainly not. So many people love to believe rumors, so many people have no sense of individual rights.”
Like him, the legal scholar Zheng Ge also brought up the “new citizen” in his interview: when institution-building falters or gets bent out of shape, Liang Qichao's theory of the new citizen still puts its hopes in people improving.
This is part of society's long transition — perhaps the most important part of it. “Every generation forgets the one before it. China's transition has taken a long time; it has been in transition the whole while, and it has never finished,” Xu Zhiyuan said. “Every predicament we face now, they [Liang Qichao's generation] already had then. The difference is that China is now a strong country, and back then it was a weak one. That makes the country more arrogant, and the transition harder.”
The 20 people we interviewed differ in age and in what they do, but all of them have an intellectual's ambition and a confidence that society can turn toward the good.
Liu Bo thinks a person's religious identity as a Muslim takes nothing away from their right to speak. Zhou Baosong hopes people will not too easily give up the pursuit of a good life and a just society, will not fall into thinking that everything comes down to money and power, and will take part in more public life. Liu Qing says the voices and the things that don't pander to you may do more to stir your reason and your thinking. Xu Zhiyuan says that more of the time we should be asking ourselves what we ought to be doing — whether we can be more active, more able to act.
Over six articles, we worked through all 79 questions with these people: how to face dissent and voices unlike your own; how to avoid conspiratorial thinking; how to protect your own privacy and how to handle other people's; how to find the truth in a tangled world…
Their answers are not necessarily a cure for our confusion or a manual for how to behave, but we believe they will keep the thinking going. As the economist Lu Ming argues, when we face problems that keep getting more complicated, do we have a way of thinking that gets us close to what is real? As Zhou Baosong, the young political philosopher from Hong Kong, puts it, he hopes every patriot who marches out onto Facebook will stop and think: why do you have to jump the firewall to go declare your patriotism on someone else's ground? Wouldn't it be better to let more information in, so you don't have to jump the wall at all?
“Russell Jacoby wrote The Last Intellectuals in the 1980s, about how intellectuals were speaking up less and less about their era and being taken less and less seriously. It became obvious after 9/11. In the 1980s they had strong views about Reagan and published statements of protest in The New York Times. After 9/11 they still signed joint statements, but the impact on the real world was much smaller.” Xu Zhiyuan lays the America that has now elected Donald Trump partly at the door of a society given over to entertainment and of the absence of intellectuals. It is exactly the problem we face now.
The last article in this series, “Is this society really too good to young people?”, has no final answer. All we can be sure of is this: this society is one we ourselves take part in, build, complete and, in the end, define.
80. Even if your voice is faint, do what is in your power to do.
Liang Wendao
Writer, media figure
In the end, I think, it comes down to living decently. By “living decently” I mean this: however the world looks, whatever the situation, if there is something within your power to do, you should still do it. However faint the voice, we may all have to do things we know are bound to fail, because it isn't a question of results — it's a question of moral responsibility. The example I often give: if you see a little girl fall into a river, you go straight in after her. You don't have time to stand on the bank doing sums — if I go in now, what are my chances of saving her? I've worked it out, the odds are only 23%, which means a 77% chance I won't save her, so forget it, I won't go in. No. Whatever the odds, you think about how to save her first.
Why? Because it is a moral responsibility. Moral responsibility is not about how the thing you do turns out in the end; it is about what you ought to do.
81. Don't sell yourself short and assume what you do is useless.
Zhou Baosong
Associate Professor of Philosophy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
First, I think, don't underestimate the power of one person. Don't say we look so small. Facing a huge system, a lot of people feel that nothing they do matters, and that produces a strong sense of powerlessness that easily turns into cynicism and nihilism. I often stress that society is made up of every individual, that everyone lives in this world, so don't sell yourself short and assume what you do is useless.
Second, don't give up so easily on the pursuit of a good life and a just society. Don't fall too far into a way of thinking that judges everything by money and power. It is only possible if we all work at it together. If everyone gives up that easily, we may well end up in a self-fulfilling prophecy: everyone believes such a society is impossible, so such a society can never come about. Then we slowly accept reality, accept that reality cannot be changed — and it really cannot be changed.
Third, when we take part in public life and try to realize certain values, what I think we need to see is that this isn't only for other people or for the world outside us; we are perfecting ourselves. If we all care about our own lives, we need to ask ourselves one question seriously: when we try to be a person of integrity, it is not only for others, but to perfect ourselves. That may sound rather empty, but it is something Confucian culture takes very seriously: only by perfecting ourselves can we live a reasonably good life.
I have in fact been trying to set an example of this all along. Look at my Weibo — I've had it for five or six years, and on that platform I have kept encouraging and pushing for discussion with some quality to it, without personal attacks. I have kept at that work. I have never given up on the platform, and I have gone on having fairly serious discussions with young people there. I'm not all that pessimistic — plenty of young people are in fact getting better. What we are building is an atmosphere of mutual respect; nobody comes at you looking for a fight right off the bat, unless they have some ulterior motive.
Two years ago I started a discussion about freedom, and it ended up watched by more than a million people, with thousands of comments. Most people were able to hold their own views and at the same time recognize that others could hold different ones; over the course of the discussion they slowly learned to tolerate, to listen to and to accept people who think differently. That has to be learned. In our middle schools and universities we also need to cultivate this kind of “civic virtue.” As a citizen you gradually build up the qualities of respecting other people and being able to talk with them. This is something China badly lacks and badly needs to work on.
It's like learning to swim: you can only learn to swim in the water. Building a good space for discussion takes everyone working at it. Coming back to intellectuals, or so-called opinion leaders — they can in fact play a very important role. How to carry on reasonably rational debate in a public space is something we all have to work on together.
82. Do you really think watching reality shows every day does no harm?
Xu Zhiyuan Writer, media figure
What I think is most lacking is a habit of self-examination. I have also seen plenty of intellectuals talk about other people as if they were full of righteous indignation, when they themselves may have committed more of the same faults than anyone. If you can't criticize yourself, how can you criticize your era?
We have been talking about Chinese society for more than a hundred years, and its most important feature is that everyone talks about everyone else. Very few are willing to start from themselves: I will meet my own responsibility, I will become the one who acts. Everyone hopes that once I have finished talking, you will be the one who acts. What's wrong with our society? As if you had no problem at all.
Ordinary people ought to build up basic values about right and wrong — including what they hold in esteem and what they admire, something plain and unadorned. But in Chinese society even that plain thing has disappeared.
Fixing it will take a long time. Everyone will run into trouble, just as America did in electing Trump. Do you really think watching reality shows every day does no harm? Watching that kind of shameless bluster every day will not go on being harmless. Being a happy fool in this society — you think there are no consequences? There are always consequences. Trump is the consequence of more than a decade in which America turned everything into entertainment. And they will take America into a state of enormous disorder, and everyone will bear that disaster.
Chinese society should not be arrogant and should not be closed off — that is what we should be most wary of. All of China needs a basic humanistic education. At bottom, a humanistic education means understanding yourself and understanding others. The enormous failure of Chinese education has thrown all of this into relief: we all went through a mechanical kind of schooling, so we have no feeling, no sense of ourselves or of other people. People live like animals.
As an individual, I should be on guard: I ought to stop using WeChat, it scatters my attention too much. I also need to guard against not being brave enough, against sliding into compromise with society.
83. Only when you are clear-eyed about your own blind spots and ignorance, and don't assume you must be right, can you talk with other people.
Tong Zongjin Associate Professor of Law, China University of Political Science and Law
First, every one of us has blind spots. When you, as a journalist, ask me this question, it seems to assume that the person being interviewed is clear-headed, when in fact he may not be. Every one of us can be deceived, but the most important thing, I think, is that each of us has to be clearly aware that we are ignorant, and that on certain matters we may be deceived. Knowing that is the beginning of possibly not being deceived: you have to believe at all times that you may be ignorant, that on any given matter you may not be absolutely right. Only when you start to doubt yourself can you then doubt other people's voices on a matter, doubt the official voice, doubt certain people's voices. Doubting those things has doubting yourself as its precondition. That, I think, is perhaps the first point. And only when you don't assume you must be right can you talk with other people.
Second, you still need to read more. When one thing has taken over your mind, you may come to feel it is entirely right. Every one of us is a blind man; only as you feel more and more of the elephant does the shape of the elephant gradually emerge.
84. Using identity to pick your position may end up spoiling your judgment about the thing itself.
Liu Bo Opinion and Public Policy Editor, FT Chinese
A person's religious identity as a Muslim takes nothing away from their right to speak. My view is that it is a normal religion.
This year I wrote a piece for the Chinese-language site of The New York Times, “Have Chinese People Come Down With ‘Islamophobia’?”. Islam is a major world religion with 1.6 billion followers; in China, Muslims and other Chinese have lived together for more than a thousand years. In short, it is a normal religion. Muslims all have the right to speak, and should not be treated as criminal suspects or suspected for no reason.
What I really dislike now is the word “whitewashing,” as if saying that Islam is not the problem amounts to “whitewashing.” There is a basic principle in law: without a trial, without due process, anyone should be regarded as innocent, a citizen with full and free rights. This is a consensus of civilization.
Chinese people and Muslims have lived together for more than a thousand years; Muslims are in fact already part of this society. Many people build an image of Muslims in their heads as closed off and violent, but if you spend more time around Muslims, you will see that they are the same as us. They come in every variety, and some think very openly. Their thinking can lean toward freedom and democracy, they can go in for science, and none of that breaks with their faith. The Taliban are Muslims, for instance, but Malala (the Nobel Peace Prize laureate) is a Muslim too. Malala doesn't feel that pursuing gender equality conflicts with her religious faith; on the contrary, she feels her religion requires her to do it, and that this is where the true spirit of Islam lies.
I didn't write that piece to “defend” Muslims. Cursing people and putting them down is cheap, and it usually falls into a vicious circle of mutual insult. Respecting others in order to earn their respect costs something, but the return is higher too. We shouldn't do the cheap thing; we should do the thing worth doing. I think it's understandable for ordinary people to say narrow-minded things, but as an intellectual you have to look into the facts before you have the right to speak. If intellectuals are willing to play that part, to act as a bridge, it does everyone good. So why not do it?
Political correctness, I think, isn't some morally unattainable principle — it isn't that by speaking in a politically correct way I become superior to anyone. It is not only a moral question; we can think about it purely in terms of interests. At a time when economic growth is fairly slow and society has a vacuum where its values and beliefs should be, we have to be wary of conflict between ethnic groups, which sharpens social tensions. Advocating political correctness can reduce potential conflict, and that is in everyone's immediate interest.
Take this American election. One very interesting phenomenon is identity politics. At the heart of identity politics is the idea that what political judgment a person makes depends mainly not on interest but on identity. I'm white, so I support Trump; I'm a member of a minority, so I support Hillary Clinton.
Carried to its extreme, identity politics decides that whatever your identity is, you must hold a certain political view and must be different from us. That oversimplifies society and is very dangerous. You should really think of it this way: I am Han Chinese, but I am not defined by the label “Han.” I have many other identities: I'm a journalist, I'm a commentator, at home I'm someone's husband and someone's son. Everyone is complicated; I hold all sorts of views, and it is quite possible that I agree with my ethnic-minority friends on many questions and disagree with my Han friends on many others. A great many things cut across “identity.” You can't define me by my identity.
The “identity politics” habit of mind can not only produce prejudice against other people and do them harm, it can also work against your own interests. For example, the Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman recently wrote in The New York Times that a Democratic administration is actually rather good for lower-income whites: welfare such as health care would be kept, and the rich would be taxed. So why did so many whites vote for Trump? Because they were unhappy with immigrants and unhappy with Clinton. That is identity-politics thinking, and in the end it works against their own interests.
85. Is transition easier or harder for a powerful country?
Xu Zhiyuan Writer, media figure
I've been writing a biography of Liang Qichao lately, and (what strikes me most) is how much history resembles itself. Every generation forgets the one before it. China's transition has taken a long time; it has been in transition the whole while, and it has never finished. Every predicament we face now, they had then too. The difference is that China is now a strong country, and back then it was a weak one. That makes the country more arrogant, and the transition harder.
Are we new citizens? We are certainly not. We are still facing the question of how to become them. So many people love to believe rumors, so many people have no sense of individual rights.
What role should the state actually play? Should a market economy be set up? They were debating all of it too. It's just that while the questions are the same, the ways of solving them are different. The shared problem is that we have not become a modern society — we have not even become a modern state — and we have to find our own way to solve it. Liang Qichao in his day was also talking about public and private morality, but his approach was his; we have our own approach now.
The method looks simple enough: on the outside you build a judicial system, you establish press freedom and so on; on the inside you need a sense of personal responsibility. Laying that whole system out in words is easy, but carrying out each piece of it is very hard, and that takes new wisdom.
I think it is a kind of self-redemption. You have to create a voice that some people can trust, instead of relying on other people — can you create it yourself? As a journalist, say, can you write things sustained enough that people come to feel your judgment is accurate, or worth trusting, worth looking forward to? Say I'm an intellectual: over all this time, has my analysis and judgment been something worth looking forward to, trustworthy, honest — not necessarily always right, but an honest voice? Is that the case or not? If more and more of these points add up, then this society will slowly go through some small changes.
(The End)
Below are all the questions we raised in this series. If you're interested, click through to read them:
1. Why are fewer and fewer people willing to “reason things out”?
4. Why have people lost the ability to listen to one another?
5. How have internet celebrities taken over our space, step by step?
6. Why do we waste so much time on so many trivial private matters? Wang Baoqiang, for instance.
7. With private conversations being made public everywhere, can we still have a safe space to speak?
8. Why do so many people believe Zhao Wei is a Freemason?
9. Why do we believe no one, or dare not believe anyone?
10. Why don't people even trust the media anymore?
12. Why do we no longer even have the right to say the Spring Festival Gala is bad?
13. Should cameras be in university classrooms?
14. How did conspiracy theories like the Freemasons become popular?
15. Why have we become the victims of this society's fondness for conspiracy theories?
16. How do we break out of conspiratorial and paranoid ways of thinking?
17. Why is a lack of respect and trust the most worrying thing in a society?
18. Why is empathy so important?
19. What change can business bring to a world short on public spirit?
20. Looking at paid online commenters from another angle, why can they be tolerated?
21. Why do we make money off people's dark psychology and base instincts?
22. Is it a good thing for a society to have no consensus?
23. Even for an ordinary person, having more chances to be heard is a good thing.
25. Why are young people in Japan not taken seriously?
26. Why do we seem to grow narrower even as we have more ways of seeing the world?
28. Why is consensus getting harder and harder to reach? Is that a bad thing?
30. For instance, why do our parents find it harder to accept homosexuality?
31. If, as some say, there really is “no consensus,” then how does mainstream opinion form?
32. So what are the things we should have consensus on?
33. The world can't have only one voice, but it can have some shared reference points.
35. On specialized scientific questions, like smog, why is there no authoritative voice instead?
37. The scientific spirit is a way of thinking — one that is always willing to revise your views.
38. Why do events we consider important often get overlooked?
39. Why is fake news more likely to appear in the social media era?
40. Why do people believe the opinions of those like them rather than the facts?
41. Why do we always suspect someone must be “attacking” or “backing” a certain side?
42. Why is closed-off WeChat more likely than Weibo to produce “post-truth”?
44. Why can professionalism make up for the problem of bias?
45. Why does professional reporting help reduce the spread of rumors?
46. Why is having a stance, even having bias, not something to fear?
49. When did privacy emerge as a legal right? Why isn't it just some trivial little secret?
50. Why is it inappropriate to make chat logs public on the internet?
52. How should we set boundaries? Should we set boundaries at all?
54. What's the worst outcome? Do we need to redefine morality?
57. Defining the public sphere and the public interest is an important task — so who should do it?
58. Why can't we make wise judgments based only on our own experience and common sense?
59. What limits our judgment on social issues?
62. Why do people generally lack empathy on this issue?
63. Why should we think about problems as a whole? How might we benefit from doing so?
68. Why, as more and more information becomes shareable, do we grow narrower and narrower?
69. Why is public trust so easy to lose?
71. Why do doctor-patient conflicts happen so frequently?
72. Why is having the right to know a precondition for ordinary people to feel protected?
73. Why must you bear responsibility when speaking in the public sphere?
74. Why is it said that our problems come from too much regulation?
75. Why shouldn't an economist say “I'm already tired of modernization”?
77. What does a civilized society look like? Why is it something to aspire to?
78. When it comes to building consensus, what can economists and individuals each do?
79. What does a just society look like?
80. Even if your voice is faint, do what is in your power to do.
81. Don't sell yourself short and assume what you do is useless.
82. Do you really think watching reality shows every day does no harm?
84. Using identity to pick your position may end up spoiling your judgment about the thing itself.
85. Is transition easier or harder for a powerful country?
These are the 20 intellectuals we interviewed — you can go on following what they have to say:
Cover image from: Shmoop
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.