"This is the best of times, and it's also the worst of times," Dickens wrote at the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, which is also very suitable in this day and age.
We are in an era of open civilization and prosperity of science and technology, the productive forces are constantly progressing, and the level of human wisdom is also moving to a higher level, but we can smell a hint of danger, that is, while science and technology continue to advance, people's moral literacy is missing.
Peng Lin, a professor of history at Tsinghua University, once lamented in an interview: "Chinese fall into a group of losses, and the half-human era is rampant." ”
01 The advent of the half-human era
The word "half-human" was first proposed by Mr. Liang Sicheng and can be simply understood as a person who cannot fully develop. Mr. Liang Sicheng mainly wants to use this to criticize the country's education system and criticize the division of students' minds and personalities in the liberal arts and sciences of universities.
He pointed out that the state pays too much attention to the results of a certain subject or several subjects, and education distinguishes the various disciplines in too much detail, resulting in the education received by students being too one-sided and failing to develop in an all-round way, so that it will lead to students' thinking being too one-sided, unable to look at the problem comprehensively, and lacking competitiveness on the road ahead.
In the words of Mr. Liang Sicheng: "At two extremes, there are two kinds of deformed people: 'hollow people' who only understand technology and have pale souls, and 'marginal people' who do not understand science and technology and talk about humanities. ”
The era has come to this day, the education system is constantly reforming, and few people remember the word "half-human" mentioned by Liang Sicheng, but in fact, we have unconsciously fallen into a "half-human era".
From the perspective of education, the many years of liberal arts and sciences have made liberal arts students do not understand science, science students do not understand liberal arts, the two are separated from each other, which makes children who are still in adolescence fall into a strange circle: liberal arts students are not familiar with some basic scientific common sense, often lack rational logical thinking, science students lack humanistic values, sometimes too rational, no human touch.
In recent years, our country has also carried out a certain college entrance examination reform in response to this situation, in addition to the three subjects of Chinese, mathematics and English, high school students can choose two subjects on the basis of physics and history.
This expands the freedom of students' choice, biased towards the combination of arts and sciences, but there are still many problems in nature, students who choose physics and students who choose history are still different, I believe that in the future, this education policy will continue to improve.
The "half-person" referred to by Professor Peng Lin, in addition to the meaning of criticizing contemporary education, also indicates that it is a contemporary person who has learned professional knowledge theories and skills, but has no humanistic quality.
If put on a larger level, the "half-human age" is not only a problem of the education system, but also the prevalence of utilitarianism and moral corruption in the absence of young people to fully develop.
Wang Yingji, associate professor of the Department of Communication Studies at Beijing Normal University, said: "There is a utilitarian value orientation in any era to help people cope with problems that urgently need to be solved. A reporter once did a survey: Why do some young people pursue "useful and useless" too much?
72.4% of respondents believe that the reason is that utilitarianism is rampant. In this era of rapid development, it is not surprising that young people have utilitarianism due to some increasing competitive pressure, but in contrast, the previous young people are more ambitious.
For example, students will insist on learning painting because they like art, they will study agriculture to solve the country's food shortage, and they will learn astrologery and physics for the country's aerospace engineering.
Today's college students are in order to choose a major for employment, put their interest in employment before the very few, feel that finance, law is good for employment, then get together to learn these majors, and philosophy, literature and other majors compared to the more practical science and engineering choices are very few people.
In college, students are more likely to spend their time on internships that enrich their resumes than in clubs and societies they are interested in.
Young people learn something, always focusing on "useful or useless", rather than asking themselves what they like.
This is only one aspect of this, the so-called utilitarianism, that is, the value orientation of interests, people have become more willing to believe that the source of all good is interests. If we pursue profit too much, we will erase our sense of independent thinking and the normal needs of our hearts.
In the words of Wen Rumin, a professor at Peking University, "Some young people are too utilitarian and too old to be old, and they lack the youthful atmosphere of the past." ”
The prevalence of utilitarianism is a problem that gradually accumulates in the process of social development, and it is not a bad thing to have a little utilitarian idea, but if it is too utilitarian, it is easy to lead to some moral problems.
For example, a few years ago, the elderly fell down "can not help" has become a hot topic in society, people from all walks of life who hold two opinions, until now there are many people in the discussion, but in the past, there are old people who fell, passers-by will not hesitate to come forward to help lift up.
There is nothing wrong with some old people themselves consuming society's trust, but the moral indifference that emerges in an increasingly profit-oriented society is also a problem.
Over time, children fall into the water and no one saves them, no one comes forward to commit crimes, and more seriously, utilitarianism leads to the degeneration of the whole society.
02 The mass loss caused by the half-human age
Another problem pointed out by Professor Penglin is the mass loss caused by the half-human age.
Mass disorientation mainly refers to people's blind, irrational speech or behavior when interacting or socializing in groups, which can be understood as being driven by herd psychology, and the masses are unconsciously lost in a wave of thoughts or discourses.
We can also understand it by psychologist Jung's concept of the "collective unconscious", for example, just as a group did not originally think that the use of luxury goods was a manifestation of status, but for some reason it became a deep-rooted view in people's minds, and over time everyone thought so, which was a kind of "collective unconscious".
The views of collective disorientation and collective unconsciousness are often connected with online violence and online public opinion in modern society.
French psychologist Gustav Le Pen said in the book "The Ragtag Crowd" that the feelings and thoughts of people gathered in groups will turn in the same direction, and the conscious personality will disappear, forming a collective psychology, which is characterized by impulsivity, changeability and impatience, easy to be suggested, easy to be gullible, exaggerated and simple, and there will also be paranoid, arbitrary, conservative tendencies.
In the past, it was difficult for a person's voice to be widely disseminated, but now, through the Internet, a person's voice can become the voice of tens of millions of people.
Some things, such as the temporarily covered up criminal facts, can better publicize the crime through network public opinion, help the victims get out of the sea of suffering, or help more potential victims, but more often the truth cannot be fully interpreted, and "the original independent concept of the individual is drowned out by the madness of the group."
People only see the one-sidedness of things, they take it out of context, sometimes it doesn't matter at all, what people want is just a carnival of public opinion.
In a recent article published by People, there is a sentence that makes a lot of sense: "The spirit of the classical Internet is open, this spirit brings unprecedented freedom, technology once dedicated to allowing people to hear small or lonely voices in a space that is vast by connection, and now it has personally created a door for itself, locking some people in it, unable to break free." 」 ”
For the reason of anonymity and information can be actively hidden, most people do not have any responsibility for random occurrences on the Internet, people can vent all their dissatisfaction with reality on the Internet, speak out on the Internet, is it true or false, and what does it matter to the masses?
Netizens can send a few photos of young pregnant women taken on the subway to the Internet at will, just because pregnant women will not be disheveled, makeup is more exquisite, it is ironic that she is a fake pregnancy "pregnant", which is completely a voice without any factual basis.
After the famous Internet celebrity papi sauce shared a photo of herself holding a child on the social platform, someone immediately said that her child followed the father's surname, papi sauce independent female persona collapsed, a bunch of people followed the echo, but the child does not follow the father's surname, and the female independence is not independent, what is the relationship?
Social platforms are filled with rhetoric that incites the antagonism of men and women, which seems pointless and childish.
Liu Xuezhou, a teenager whose adoptive parents died twice, was touched when he saw the news that Sun Zhuo was found, and wanted to find his biological parents through the power of the Internet, but when he proposed that he wanted to live with his biological parents, he was accused of being a "white-eyed wolf" by them, saying that Liu Xuezhou was the person who destroyed their lives, and the two sides had their own opinions.
At this time, online violence followed, and many people speculated about Liu Xuezhou with the greatest malice, which became the last straw that crushed him, and the teenager went to the beach and chose to end his life.
Henan Zhengzhou suffered a heavy rainstorm, the domestic brand Hongxing Erke donated 50 million, which directly pulled the netizens' favorability to the full, and all the products sold in its live broadcast room were emptied.
But then there were people who carried out moral kidnapping, accusing those company brands that donated less than Hongxing Erke, and even pouring into various live broadcast rooms to insult the anchors who sold other brand products, sometimes rising to the level of personality insults, and then there were voices questioning the amount of Hongxing Erke's donations, fortunately, two charities confirmed Hongxing Erke's donations...
The private lives of some public figures have been put on the Internet for the masses to judge, often there are two opposing views, but right or wrong, netizens do not care, every storm has passed, netizens gradually lose the interest in discussion, but sometimes the harm caused by verbal criticism can never be eliminated, or how to say that people are fearful?
Chinese society has not always been irrational, but in the era of increasing impetuosity, everyone is easily led by a relatively "loud" voice and drowns themselves in the sea of people.
Then, unconsciously, the crowd raised their knives, brewing one bloodless violence after another.
03 Promote all-round development
Whether it is the half-human age, the group is lost, or the slightly rational person, we should reflect on the back of all this and the strategy of coping. Some scholars have spoken out one after another, pointing out that it is necessary to "walk out of the half-human era," to "improve the humanistic quality of the masses," and to "develop in an all-round way."
These views are not unreasonable, but it is still a long and difficult process to do. The starting point of "half-person education" is to cultivate elite, high-level and cutting-edge talents for the country, and contemporary society still needs such education.
But can we optimize it on this basis so that young people can develop more comprehensively, and while they are familiar with professional theories and skills, they can also have enough moral literacy and the spirit of independent thinking?
Professor Peng Lin believes that it is precisely because of the lack of etiquette that society will enter the era of half-people, so the most direct approach is to let etiquette education teach modern people the necessary moral qualities.
He stressed that the culture of lile is the difference between people and animals, the difference between civilized people and barbarians, and the core of Chinese culture, which should be passed on.
When many people marveled at Professor Peng Lin's profound knowledge of liturgy, he just smiled and said, "In ancient times, this was just a very common thing. Indeed, the lack of etiquette and morality in modern people is not a day or two, and even this situation has a tendency to become more and more intense.
In the past, most children received all kinds of information from the previous generation, but now it is different, children have many channels to obtain information, and the whole society will teach children a lot of things.
However, this sometimes leads to children becoming more and more self-centered, do not know respect, do not understand humility, do not do anything for fear of loss, not rational enough, and are easy to be led by the voices of others.
Therefore, it can be said that it is urgent to strengthen etiquette, so that people can achieve "respect, quietness, purity, and elegance", and this requires the joint efforts of the family, school, and society.
It is not a bad thing that a person has a personality, but this personality is best reflected in the ability to think independently.
Everyone is unique, then we also have unique thoughts, but this level of thinking needs to be stimulated.
The writer Jiang Fangzhou once said that if a person does not read, his values can only be determined by the people around him.
The accumulation of knowledge and experience through reading is undoubtedly an effective way to cultivate the ability to think independently. In the speech of others, we often cannot see the comprehensiveness of things, but when we encounter things, we can look at them with a calm and rational eye as much as possible and give our thoughts a little space.
At the educational level, promoting the all-round development of students is an important task that has been often talked about, and to this day, we are still trying to complete this task.
The half-human era and the mass loss are not insurmountable obstacles, and I believe that as long as the education is proper, the Chinese youth are still bright.