Chapter 7 Men and women are different

In the last article, I said that the family is a business community in China’s rural society. In any business community, discipline must be maintained, and discipline excludes personal relationships.Here we have encountered the basic problem of traditional Chinese emotional orientation.Although I have mentioned some of them in the previous article, I still want to extend and develop them in this article. I use the term emotional orientation to refer to the direction in which a person develops his emotions, but this direction is regulated by culture. Therefore, when analyzing a cultural pattern, we should pay attention to the direction in which personal emotions can develop according to the culture, referred to as Emotionally oriented. "Emotion" can be seen from two aspects: psychology can explain the nature and type of emotion from the physiological changes of the body, while sociology can look at the role of emotion in the relationship between people.Emotions, anger, sorrow, and joy are certainly physiological phenomena, but they always occur in the context of personnel affairs and affect the relationship between personnel and personnel. Like other personal behaviors, they get their meaning at the level of social phenomena.

In terms of psychology, emotion refers to an internal behavior that leads to external behavior. William James said that feelings are visceral changes.This change forms the tendency of the movement, itself a state of tension, the force that initiates the action.When the connection between a stimulus and a response is, through practice, fairly fixed, more or less automatic, no tension in the body takes place, that is to say, without strong emotions.Affection often occurs in situations where new responses are attempted and old ones blocked. The so-called emotion here is equivalent to the common so-called excitement, emotional, or even angry.Using fire to describe emotion refers to the dynamic and tense state. From the perspective of social relations, emotion is destructive and creative.Agitation of emotion changes the original relationship.That is to say, if you want to maintain a fixed social relationship, you have to avoid emotional excitement.In fact, emotional indifference is a sign of stable social relations.That's why I said in the last article that discipline excludes personal relationships.

The power to stabilize social relations is not emotion, but understanding.The so-called understanding refers to accepting the same meaning system.The same stimulus elicits the same response.In my two articles on "Writing to the Countryside", I have already mentioned the intimacy caused by familiarity.Intimacy is not the same as arousal.It is cohesive and has a continuous effect. It is wordless, unlike the clang and sound when emotions are unrestrained, singing, crying and wailing are indispensable cooperation when excited. Oswald Spengler once said in "Western Lu Shen Theory" that there were two cultural models in the West, one he called the Apollonian, and the other he called the Faustian.The Apronian culture believes that there is a perfect order in the arrangement of the universe. This order is beyond the creation of human beings. Humans just accept it, settle in its place, and maintain it; but human beings do not even have the power to maintain it, and heaven is lost. Yes, the golden age is over.This is the spirit of Western classics.Modern culture is Faustian.They regard conflict as the basis of existence, and life is the overcoming of obstacles; without obstacles, life loses its meaning.They see the future as an endless creative process, constantly changing.

These two cultural views can be used to understand the difference in emotional orientation between rural society and modern society.Rustic society is subaltern, modern society is Faustian.The difference between the two spirits is also reflected in the most basic social life of the two societies. Rural society relies on intimate and long-term co-living to coordinate the mutual behavior of each individual. The social connection is grown, familiar, and to a certain extent makes people feel that it is automatic.Only among those who were born and died there can such an intimate community be cultivated, in which individuals have a high degree of understanding.Likes and dislikes, even the smell is average.To achieve this state, there is a condition, that is, there is no difference that prevents full understanding among people.The location of space has indeed become less of a factor that hinders people's understanding in rural society.People live in the same small world, which is more or less isolated and has no important contact with other groups of people.In terms of time, people of each generation are born, aged, sick and died in the same cycle, a formula.It is true that young people can not understand the feelings of older people when they have not experienced old life. Age is somewhat of a barrier, but this barrier is one aspect. Older people can understand young people. , They can even predict the problems that young people will encounter.When young people use older people as a reference blueprint for their lives, the so-called "not knowing" is not a divide.

What prevents those who live together in rural society from being fully aware of is individual biological differences.This difference does not come from having very different genetic traits, which would not be so pronounced in small communities where intergenerational marriages occur.It is men and women that always divide people's biological differences.Just because no one has ever experienced the difference between the sexes, our knowledge of it is always indirect; what we can say about the difference is more or less superficial.In real life, no one will feel the gap between the opposite sex, but the content of the difference is always a guess and cannot be understood.

This gender gap is a fundamental impediment in a society in which people interact with full understanding.It is only in their ideal paradise that this gap is bridged: the obliteration of sex by the religionists, consciously or not, is by no means accidental.Complete morality must be fully understood without any separation, and this cannot be sought between men and women who have long drawn a biological gap. The physiological differentiation of men and women is for the purpose of procreation, but procreation stipulates the union of men and women.This combination is based on difference, not on sameness.It is difficult and full of obstacles to seek full understanding on the basis of differences, and it requires constant seeking of unity in creation, which is a Faustian attempt.Faust is a symbol of emotion, and takes the excitement and constant change of emotion as the main thread of life.The Faustian attempt is also endless, because the final unity is never complete, it is only a process of seeking common ground.Not only that, but the deeper the common life of men and women develops, the deeper the degree of difference will be, the more powerful the obstacles to seeking common ground will be, and the more powerful the creativity used to overcome the obstacles will be. From Faust's standpoint In other words, the vitality is also stronger because of it, and the meaning of life is also deeper because of it.

It would be wrong to think of Faustian love between the sexes as a means of entering into a reproductive relationship.Being in love is an adventure, a groping for the unknown.This is different from friendship. Friendship can stop understanding to a certain extent, but love does not stop, it is pursuit.This kind of attempt is not for practical purposes. It is the creation of life experience, and it can also be said to be the creation of life meaning, but it is not economic production or a career.The continuation of love depends on bringing forth the new through the old, constantly overcoming obstacles, and constantly discovering obstacles. What is to be obtained is this process, not the result of this process.From the results, it can be said that there is no achievement.Not only is there no achievement, but it also makes social relations unstable, and makes it difficult for businesses that depend on social relations to operate smoothly.According to modern culture, the development of emotional excitement between men and women has made the cause of childbearing faltering.The Faustian spirit is indeed undermining this fundamental social enterprise, which is to be run by society unless it otherwise seeks to do so.

This kind of spirit cannot exist in rural society.It does not need to create new social relations, which are determined at birth, and it is even more afraid of the destruction of social relations, because what rural society seeks is stability.It is sublime.The relations between a man and a woman must be arranged in such a way that no passionate passions arise between them.That is the principle that men and women are different. "Men and women are different" means that men and women do not need to seek the same and separate them in life.This separation is not only physical, the so-called incompatibility between men and women, but also psychological. Men and women only operate according to certain rules in the business of division of labor and cooperation in the economic and reproductive business, and they do not hope for a psychological bond from each other.

In terms of social structure, as mentioned in the previous article, the same-sex combination took place.This can be clearly seen in our rural society.The same-sex combination and the family combination are interlaced in principle, because the family whose function is reproduction is always the combination of the opposite sex.Therefore, the unity of "family" in rural society is affected by this same-sex combination and is not easy to consolidate.So the family replaced the family, and the family is a monophyletic combination with the same sex as the main and the opposite sex as the supplement.In rural Chinese society, the family is the basic community, and the same-sex principle is more important than the opposite-sex principle.

There are different boundaries between men and women, so that the traditional Chinese emotional orientation is biased towards the development of the same sex.We can’t say exactly how common perverted homosexuality and narcissism are; but the intimate combination of “I don’t want to be born on the same day, but I hope to die on the same day” in the rural society’s sworn organizations shows that the direction of love has entered into a same-sex relationship. The level of the first layer is not very shallow.The extreme example on the female side is the sister organization in South China, which is also full of Feng Xiaoqing's narcissistic tone in women's literature.It's a pity that we have too little analysis of the emotional life of Chinese people, and we can only say so much about this aspect.

The lack of an effort to find common ground between the sexes also reduces an incentive that is not materialistically intended.The practical spirit in China's rural society settled down to the color of the world.Confucianism does not talk about ghosts, "worshiping gods as if they exist", it can be said that they have no interest in anything other than personal life.Ordinary people are even more capable of making the kingdom of heaven a reality; they don't want to change their ideals into reality, and the kingdom of heaven is realized in this world, but they use reality as the draft of their ideals and push the present world into the kingdom of heaven.The attitude towards life is self-denial to accommodate the external, that is, to change oneself to fit the external order.So we can say that it's classical, but it's also Yapuro. Social order limits individuality, and in order to maintain order, all elements capable of causing destruction of order are contained.The gap between men and women has since been bridged.Rural society is a society where men and women are different, and it is also a stable society.