Chapter 65 Chapter 11 Cultural Revolution 4

4 The cultural revolution in the late 20th century was a revolution in which the individual triumphed over society, in other words, a revolution that broke the intertwined texture of human beings and society.For a long time, the texture of society has not only defined the real relationship and organizational form among human beings, but also determined the general norms of human relationship and the expected behavior patterns between people and each other.Although the roles of people in society are not necessarily formally stipulated in writing, they are all traceable in advance.Therefore, once the old behavioral rules are broken or lose their rational basis, people will feel anxious and have nothing to rely on.The previous generation was familiar with this set of laws, but now they feel deeply lost; the next generation is ignorant of human affairs, and only knows the shifting society in front of them.Between the two generations, it is naturally difficult to communicate and understand.

In this atmosphere of variation, naturally emerged the conflict situation described by a Brazilian anthropologist in the 1980s.Usually, as a middle-class man in Brazil, under the influence and education of traditional Mediterranean culture that emphasizes honor and shame, facing the increasing incidents of robbery and rape in modern society, it stands to reason that, as a gentleman, he should rather die than Will stand up to protect his girlfriend or wallet.As for a lady, she would rather die than surrender, and never suffer such a "worse than death" misfortune.But in the reality of life in the metropolis at the end of the 20th century, any resistance may not be able to restore the woman's "famousness" and money in her pocket.Therefore, the most rational way to deal with it is to obey orders, so as not to anger the bandits, but instead make the villains actually attack and hurt people, or even kill them.As for women's renown, the so-called keeping a virgin before marriage and committing to chastity after marriage, among men and women who were educated and liberated in the 1980s, under their assumptions about sexual behavior and their actual behavior, mingjie and No, what exactly are you holding on to?But as anthropologists' studies have shown, despite the impact of new ideas and new morals, such experiences still leave victims with great pain and indelible scars.Even other relatively minor encounters often bring about mental uneasiness and torture—such as normal non-violent sexual intercourse and so on.No matter how unreasonable the old norms are, once they do not exist, the replacement may not necessarily be some kind of rational new order. There are no rules and no consensus, which makes everyone panic all day long.

Fortunately, in the vast majority of human societies in the world, the old social structure and customs have not been completely disintegrated despite the unprecedented turbulent changes in the past quarter of a century.The existence of the old order is especially important for the poor, because the relief and support of relatives and neighbors are indispensable for people to survive and succeed in a changing world.In most parts of the third world, the network of relatives and neighbors is a collection of all resources, including the provision of information, the division of labor, the common source of manpower and capital, the mechanism of savings function, and the cooperation system to ensure social welfare security.In fact, the examples of economic success in certain parts of the planet—such as the Far East—could not be explained at all without close family partnerships.

In more traditional societies, due to the success of the corporate economy in the new era, the legitimacy of the old social order based on unequal relations has been undermined. The theoretical foundations that were relied upon on the basis of pre-existing structures of inequality have been eroded.Therefore, in the past, Indian princes with wealth and wealth have always been able to enjoy themselves as they please without worrying about their subjects' coveting or hatred (just as the British royal family has never been questioned about tax exemption, and it was not changed until the 1990s).Because the princes and nobles belong to and represent special roles in the social class—or even in the universe; their status and identity are considered to be an indispensable force and symbol for maintaining the stability of their kingdom.In a somewhat similar situation, the privileges and luxuries enjoyed by the Japanese tycoons are likewise less objectionable.As long as the luxury they have is not reserved for their personal enjoyment, but comes along with their functional role in the economic society.Just like the privileges enjoyed by members of the British cabinet, such as cars and official residences, belong to their positions rather than individuals. Once they leave their positions, these luxury items will also go with their positions within a few hours.The wealth distribution in Japan is actually far less serious than that in European and American societies. However, under the great economic prosperity of Japan in the 1980s, the huge accumulation of personal wealth and the unabashed display of wealth made the rich in Japan The high-level phenomenon of living standards and the contrast between them and ordinary Japanese people are becoming more and more prominent—the living conditions of the Japanese people are far inferior to those in Europe and the United States—the impression of this strong contrast can be deeply felt even when viewed from a distance arrive.The reason for this may be that for the first time in history, the Japanese public began to believe that the contributions of the wealthy Japanese to the country and society were not enough to guarantee their rightful enjoyment of privileges.

As for the West, decades of social revolutions have wrought even more profound havoc.Its extremes can be glimpsed in the public discussion of ideology in the West.Especially the unthought-out, lacking any analytical depth, just because everyone wants to make it more visible in the public announcement.A readily available example is the once-popular idea in feminist circles that women's housework should also be valued at market prices (and even paid accordingly); Justification for abortion reform on the grounds of an extremely abstract and unlimited individual "right to choose" (by individuals, I mean women).The influence of neo-classical economics (neo-classical) is pervasive, and it has increasingly replaced the traditional position of theology in Western secular society, and under the influence of the extremely individualistic American law (American cultural hegemony has contributed to the flames). , Such remarks are more encouraged and become more and more popular.Even British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher provided an outlet for her political speech. She once said: "There is no society, only individuals." (There is no society, only individuals.)

Although the theory is extreme, the actual actions are not far behind. In the 1970s, social reformers in Anglo-Saxon countries saw the terrible treatment of the mentally ill and mentally handicapped in hospitals. After being horrified, they launched a campaign to liberate the patients from isolation as much as possible and let "neighbors in the community take care of them" .But in the cities of Western society, there are no community neighbors who live together to support this responsibility.The family relationship is gone, and no one knows these poor people who have been forgotten, so there are only streets like New York, where these outcasts of society are taken in, and the streets and alleys are full of homeless wanderers.Talking to themselves every day, begging for a living, a broken plastic bag is all their belongings.If you are unlucky (maybe it can be counted as good luck, depending on which angle you look at), one day, they will be moved from the hospital that drove them out to the prison.And in the United States, prisons have become the main shelters for social problems in the United States—especially African Americans. In 1991, in the United States, which had the highest proportion of inmates in the world—1 in every 100,000 people—reportedly 15 percent were mentally ill (Walker, 1991; Human Development, 1991, p. 32 , Fig. 2.10).

The individualism of the new morality did the most damage to the traditional family and the organized religious system of the West, both of which collapsed severely in the second third of the 20th century.The cohesive forces that held Roman Catholic society together in the past are now falling apart with alarming speed.In the late 1960s, the number of Masses in Quebec, Canada, dropped from 80% to 20%; the traditionally high birth rate of French-Canadians in the area also fell below the Canadian average (Bernier/ Boily 1986).The women's liberation movement, or more specifically, women's demands for birth control, including the right to abortion and divorce, drew the deepest rift between the church and the women who made up the majority of church believers in the nineteenth century (see Capital's 1980s. This divisiveness is becoming more pronounced every day in Catholic countries such as Ireland, Italy in the pope's own house, and even Poland after the fall of communism. The number of people consecrated to the priesthood or other forms of religious life, The number of people who are sincerely or superficially willing to keep celibacy and holiness is decreasing day by day. In short, no matter whether the change is good or bad, the power of the church to control the moral and material life of believers has been greatly reduced; There is a deep black hole between the commandments of life and the reality of human behavior in the late 20th century. As for other Western churches that have never been as dominant as Catholicism over believers, even some ancient Protestant sects, their The power of numbers declined even more rapidly.

From a material point of view, the consequences of the relaxation of traditional family cohesion are even more serious.We all know that the family is not only a tool for passing on the family line, but also an economic mechanism of social cooperation, and the main force that maintains the agricultural society and the early industrial economy (local and global).Because at the end of the 19th century, capital had not been concentrated in a large amount; and the large enterprise, the predecessor of the modern large corporate organization, was the "visible hand" that would supplement Adam Smith's "invisible hand" in market activities (Chandler, 1977 ), and it hadn’t yet emerged at that time, so there was a lack of an “impersonal” capital enterprise structure in society.But there is another more important reason why the family plays a major role in economic activities, that is, the market at that time still lacked the main ingredient that is indispensable in the operation of any private profit system, that is, trust in rights and obligations—— Or its legal incarnation, the guarantee of contract enforcement.Work in this area has traditionally been done by the state (the individualist political theorists of the seventeenth century knew this well), or by the strength of kinship communities.Therefore, the huge profits and high risks involved in international trade, banking and finance, and remote operations often require the combination of family methods to achieve success. It is even better if they are carried out by groups with a common sense of religious unity, such as Jews, Quakers (Quakers), Huguenots (Huguenots, editor's note: French Calvinists are called), etc. are examples of this.In fact, even today in the late 20th century, this type of relationship combination is still an indispensable element for criminal organizations, because the business operated by the underworld group is illegal, and naturally there is no law to protect or guarantee its contracts. The only people who can be trusted are family ties and the threat of death.The most successful underworld organization is the Calabria Mafia, whose members include a family of several brothers (Ciconte, 1992, pp. 361-362).

As time goes by, the close solidarity of non-economic groups is gradually destroyed, and the moral relationship among them also disappears.Inherent moral systems also predate bourgeois industrial society and are accepted as an integral part of it.However, today's old moral vocabulary, such as rights and responsibilities, mutual obligations, sinful virtues, sacrifice and dedication, conscience and morality, rewards and punishments, and various concepts that deal with and define interpersonal and social relations, can no longer be translated into a new language that satisfies human beings in the new era.Once these conceptual systems are no longer regarded as a method of regulating social order, and can no longer guarantee social cooperation and the continuation of social life, their actual ability to regulate and organize human social life will disappear.Their value has plummeted, and they have shrunk from a real force that restricts social behavior to a choice expression of personal opinions. At most, they can only require the law to recognize the supreme significance they occupy.Life is full of uncertainty and unpredictability.The compass needle of social life no longer points to the eternal north; the landmarks on the map are useless. Since the 1960s, the phenomenon of being at a loss has become more and more obvious in most developed countries, leading to the birth of various new theories.From liberalism advocating extreme openness of the market to "postmodernism", there are all kinds of things, but they usually avoid the focus of value judgments.At best, it only degrades value judgments as the only remaining common denominator under unlimited individual freedom.

The great social liberation was naturally widely welcomed by the people at the beginning, and it was believed that its benefits were infinite and the price paid was very low-only the deep-rooted and stubborn reactionaries hated it.People have never associated the meaning of social liberation with economic liberalization.And a few lucky nations, favored by God, have waves of prosperity washed over their people, not only bringing prosperity, but also strengthening it with extremely generous and all-encompassing social welfare.For a moment, the remnants of social disintegration seemed to disappear.Although single-parent families (mainly single mothers) still mean that they may not be able to recover from poverty for a lifetime, but under the modern welfare state system, it also means that their basic living conditions are guaranteed for life.Pensions, welfare measures, and nursing homes for the elderly in the later years of life take care of society's elders; for children either cannot, or no longer feel obligated to support their aging parents.Likewise, other responsibilities that traditionally belonged to the family, such as the task of raising babies, were transferred from mothers to nurseries and nurseries, taking care of the needs of working women, as socialists hoped.

Therefore, under the command of various advanced ideas, whether it is based on rational planning and inference, or the historical trend of actual life, they all move in the same direction.These include various critiques of the traditional family—either because it places women, children, and adolescents in a subservient position, or from the point of view of general emancipation.In short, theory and fact go hand in hand.Materially, the public help provided by the community is obviously better than what most families can prepare for themselves (or because of poverty or other reasons).Just looking at the children in democratic countries, after two wars, they are healthier than before, and their nutrition is more balanced, which is obviously enough to prove the correctness of this statement.Today, at the end of the century, despite frequent attacks by governments and people who advocate free markets, the welfare system still exists in the wealthiest countries.What's more, sociologists and anthropologists have observed a common phenomenon, that is, "the more government-led institutions, generally speaking, the importance of the role of kinship also decreases."For better or for worse, "the status of the family has indeed been reduced by the increasingly individualized economy and society in industrial society." (Goody, 1968, p. 402-403) In short, it has long been predicted that the common The community (Gemeinschaft) is giving way to the communal society (Gesellschaft)—communities and individuals, interrelated in a society where each other is anonymous.In terms of material benefits, the modern social economy is obviously far superior to traditional economic activities based on community and family organizations.Ordinary people may not be aware of the fact that until the middle of the 20th century, modern industrial society still relied heavily on the symbiosis of the old community and family values ​​with the new society.Therefore, the impact caused by the rapid disintegration of the former is naturally no small matter.This phenomenon was particularly evident in the era when neoliberal consciousness became popular, that is, the 1980s. At this time, the so-called "underclass" (underclass) to describe the lowest level of society entered the vocabulary of social and political science.The lower class refers to those in a developed market society with full employment who are unable or unwilling to obtain a livelihood for themselves and their families in the market economy.And this market economy, with subsidies from the social welfare and security system, is obviously working well, and it can at least meet the needs of two-thirds of the population in society—at least until the 1990s.Peter Glotz, a politician of German social democrats, was very worried about this situation, so he invented a new term: "the Two Thirds Society". The term 'underclass' itself, like 'underworld', connotes a status of exclusion from 'normal' society, often subject to public provision (slum housing and welfare).The disadvantage is that it can only be obtained from the black market or even the underworld, that is, economic activities and sources other than government finance.However, since the breakdown of family ties is particularly evident in these social strata, the people they can rely on for underground economic activities are also extremely limited and unstable.Because even outside the scope of official control and illegal economic activities, it is difficult to operate effectively without close kinship.We can attest to this from the Third World and its influx of immigrants into North America. Most of the Negroes in the United States are urban poor, so they have become the representative population of this "lower class".They are excluded from normal society, do not belong to it, and in the case of many black young men, do not enter the labor force.In fact, most young black men, especially men, see themselves as outlaws or sociopaths at all.But this phenomenon has nothing to do with skin color and is not limited to blacks.With the decline of labor-based industries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this unfortunate "underclass" began to emerge in many countries.The civilian residences built by government authorities to meet the living needs of ordinary people are now full of "lower class" residents, but the residents here have no sense of community, let alone the mutual assistance provided by relatives.In this mob jungle described by Hobbes, full of violent and arrogant teenagers, residents live in fear day and night, and even the last remaining thread of traditional sense of community-neighborhood relationship-has almost disappeared. Only in countries where the disintegration of family ties has not yet affected has a sense of community survived to some degree.There, people living next to each other still have relationships other than social animals, and the social order is thus preserved, but most of them live in abject economic conditions.Brazil's "underclass" is an example. In the mid-1980s, more than 60% of the country’s income was captured by the upper 20% of the population; while the bottom 40% of the population received only 10% or less of the total income (UN World Social Situation, 1984, p. .84).In life, not only the social status is unequal, but also the economic status does not match.But Brazil's lower classes, in general, are not as dazed as the urban poor of the developed world, where old norms of behavior are dismantled and replaced by an uncertain void. with a deep sense of insecurity. The saddest strange phenomenon at the end of the 20th century is the 20-year civil war in Northern Ireland. Although the society is backward, the social structure is traditional, coupled with the raging wars and serious unemployment, but in terms of generally measurable standards of social tranquility and stability, The life of residents in Northern Ireland is not only better than that of most cities in the UK, but even safer.Comparing the two, wouldn't it be extremely contradictory and sad. The biggest impact brought about by the collapse of traditional values ​​is not the loss of the economic support provided by the family and the community in the past, because these functions can often be replaced in rich welfare states, but in poor countries, they are absolutely The majority of the population still has only the help of relatives to rely on (see Chapters 13 and 16 for the situation in socialist countries).The biggest crisis brought about by the collapse of traditional values ​​lies in the disintegration of the value system and traditional customs that regulate human behavior.The disappearance of traditional norms is widely felt, so in the United States there is the rise of so-called "identity politics" (identity politics) to replace the disappearance of traditional identity (this phenomenon began to become quite significant in the late 1960s significantly).Those who identify with are generally based on ethnicity, nationality or religion.In addition, there is still a nostalgic movement with a strong smell of gunpowder, intending to restore a safe and orderly imaginary time.New ethos such as these reflect the undirected confusion of the human heart.But these movements are desperate cries for help—to find a “community” to belong to in the middle of nowhere, to find a family refuge in a lonely world, to find a place to hide in the unforgiving jungle—rather than actively implemented. plan.Severe punishments are usually used in vain, and it is obviously difficult to solve or deter the increasingly rampant crime phenomenon.But every politician who is well versed in political affairs knows that common people who follow the rules can no longer tolerate all kinds of anti-social behaviors. Therefore, no matter whether their calls for criminals to be punished are rational or not, smart politicians will naturally succumb to their pressure. This is where the disintegration of old social structures and values ​​poses a danger to human politics.What's more, as the 1980s progressed, under the banner of a purely market economy, the thriving capitalist economy began to be shaken. Adam Smith believed that the pursuit of personal interests requires several motivations as energy sources.These include what he considers the "habit of labor" at the root of human motivation, and the willingness to defer labor returns, the saving and investing of future rewards, customs of mutual trust, and the need to seek personal Various other explicit attitudes in the rational behavior of profit maximization.These factors are the needs of the operation of the capitalist system, but have no real relationship with the pursuit of personal interests.The family as a thing provided the motivations mentioned above for early capitalism.For the so-called "labor habits of work," habits of obedience and loyalty—including the allegiance of corporate executives to the corporation—and a variety of other behaviors that had nothing to do with the rational choice of maximizing personal utility, became integral to early capitalism. part of the whole.Without these conditions, capitalism would still work, but it would be so bizarre that it would even trouble business itself—an anomaly that begins with the “take over” of big corporations. can be seen in.In addition, in the 1980s, there was a speculative storm that swept through the financial circles of super free market economies (such as the United Kingdom and the United States), completely destroying all the relations between the economic system with production as the main body and the pursuit of profits, and let us have a glimpse One of the strange phenomena.Growth cannot be based solely on the pursuit of profit; therefore, in other capitalist countries (Germany, Japan, France) that have not forgotten this principle, the aforementioned strange flame frenzy in the United Kingdom and the United States cannot easily make waves. Karl Polanyi has studied the collapse of nineteenth-century civilization during the First World War and has drawn a conclusion from it.That is, the assumptions on which civilization in the nineteenth century was built had a very special and unprecedented character—namely, assumptions about the autonomy and universality of the market economy.He believes that the "human nature of exchange" advocated by Adam Smith has contributed to "an industrial system in which the nature of exchange is the source of all activities, and the economic, political, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of human beings. , are all governed by this nature.” (Polanyi, 1945, pp.50-51) This is true, but Polanyi is inevitably suspected of exaggerating the capitalist phenomenon of his time.Similarly, the pursuit of personal economic interests by many people often does not automatically ensure the prosperity of the country; the degree of correlation between the two has also been praised by Adam Smith. The necessary condition for human survival activities—air—is often taken for granted by us; similarly, capitalism also ignores the environmental conditions in which it lives, operates, and inherits from the past.It is only when the air is suddenly thin and scarce that we discover how indispensable it is.In other words, capitalism succeeds because it is not just capitalism.The pursuit and accumulation of the highest profit is a necessary condition for the success of capitalism, but not a sufficient condition.The cultural changes that have taken place over a third of a century have not only eroded the historical environmental assets inherited by capitalism, but also demonstrated the difficulties that capitalism will encounter when these assets are gone. In the 1970s and 1980s, neoliberalism took off and finally stood on the ashes of the communist regime to claim victory.However, history is very ironic. The moment of victory is the moment when its operation starts to fail.The market economy has triumphed, but its emptiness and inefficiency can no longer be whitewashed. The impact of cultural change is great, and the urban "industrial market economy" living in the heart of old capitalism naturally feels the deepest.But the immense impact of this cultural upheaval at the end of the 20th century also completely changed the social and economic landscape of the "Third World".Below, we discuss this so-called "third world".