Chapter 23 In a normal society, it is better to have less animal nature

Many years ago, when my son was in kindergarten, he was called "Liu Nao Nao" by the children.Therefore, "Fan Paopao" and "Guo Tiaotiao", two frequently used media terms in 2008, are comparable to the idioms and intelligence level of kindergarten children. I don't know much about Fan Paopao's overall situation, so I can only give some opinions on his small incidents after the earthquake.The trivial matter of Fan Paopao must involve moral issues, and it must also involve freedom issues.Those who criticize Fan Paopao cannot do without moral standards, and those who defend Fan Paopao cannot do without personal freedom and individual rights.These two issues have been debated for a long time in human history, so I will magnify this small matter and talk about it.

Fan Paopao's behavior and its theoretical basis belong to the category of individual freedom.Some advocates of liberalism also criticized Fan Paopao's "freedom" as not real freedom at all, as if Fan Paopao had polluted the freedom in their minds.This point of view seems to say - your freedom is not freedom, my freedom is freedom.What is freedom, in the end, becomes a thinking exercise of abstract concepts.In fact, one only needs to look at the background of Fan's "running and freedom" to make it clearer. Fan's "Running Freedom" belongs to the trend of advocating individual rights and personal freedom in modern Europe. From the standpoint of a purely "natural person", there is not much to blame. Many Western theorists have advocated many years ago. It's fresh.However, the background of this concept of personal freedom is the moral disillusionment after the strict regulation of religious morality in the Middle Ages in Europe. Therefore, this concept of freedom is a bit special.In the name of God in the European Middle Ages, many moral restrictions were imposed on people’s secular life. For example, sex life can only be for the reproduction of offspring, not for pleasure. And so on.It can be said that in the European Middle Ages, there was an extremely strict moral authority, or in other words, there was a universal morality that was not human-oriented.In the modern history of Europe, since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, all kinds of theories about individual rights and individual freedom emerged under this background.

Due to the existence of extremely strict religious moral authority, liberalism, which opposes this moral authority, inevitably exerts too much force.In layman's terms, religious moral authority and social hierarchy control personal freedom too strictly, and the resistance of liberalism is super strong. Due to the law of overcorrection and extremes, personal freedom that resists the moral authority of the Middle Ages is indeed wrong in many respects. Going too far.In an era that requires revolution and change, it is a common law to use extremes to meet extremes.Therefore, because the moral authority of the European Middle Ages was too strict, the extreme backlash of liberalism became the natural freedom of "natural persons" who did not need any moral constraints.Fan Paopao's freedom is undoubtedly the acceptance of the freedom at that point in time. From the perspective of the curve, it is the lowest point of morality and the highest point of freedom.

However, Fan Paopao, who is in the modern age, accepts the European concept of freedom hundreds of years ago, obviously outdated, and has not kept up with the pace of the ancestors.A society always needs morality. The concept of freedom hundreds of years ago, after hundreds of years of free practice, has caused many bad social phenomena. Therefore, there have been many reflections and specific corrections on the old-fashioned freedom in the Western patriarchs. .This is also the reason why Fan Paopao's freedom was criticized by some liberals, saying that he was defiled by freedom.Because the new freedom hundreds of years later is indeed different from the old freedom hundreds of years ago.This difference is mainly reflected in two aspects:

First, public morality restricts individual freedom.Many freedoms in the old-fashioned era of absolute freedom are gradually re-constrained by morality. For example, sexual behavior can be very free at home, but not very free in public places.In the 1960s, with the spread of hippies in Europe and the United States, sexual behavior in public places almost became a universal custom, but was eventually suppressed.Now, although there are still traces of sexual freedom in public places in some nudist camps and nudist beaches, they are still subject to considerable restrictions.From another perspective, although public morality restricts freedom in the public sphere, in the name of the right to privacy, the limits of freedom in the personal sphere are still very open.Now there will be no time when men and women are required to have sex in private, as in the Middle Ages in Europe, where they cannot take off their clothes.Thus, over the course of centuries, the old liberties have been transformed and now come into balance with the new morality.On the curve, freedom is reduced, morality is improved, and there is a mutual compromise.Fan Paopao's first mistake was not clearly seeing that old-fashioned freedom was no longer fashionable.

Second, professional ethics restrict personal freedom.After hundreds of years of practice of old-fashioned freedom, people have discovered that it is not enough to restrict individual freedom with public morality. Public morality can only be used in public places. In many non-public professional occasions, personal freedom also needs to be restricted.In fact, professional ethics is not new.As early as in ancient Greece, Hippocrates' "Oath" can be regarded as the earliest mature professional ethics.However, because the universal morality stipulated by medieval religion was so strong, professional ethics in that era was often mixed with the universal morality and did not stand out.There are more occupational divisions in modern society than in ancient times, and the regulations and constraints of professional ethics are getting higher and higher in the context of weakening public morality.Fan Paopao's second mistake was that he ignored the new trend that the ancestors had improved their professional ethics.

From the above analysis, it can be seen that the reason why Fan Paopao was criticized is that one is to magnify the old-fashioned personal freedom hundreds of years ago to the modern public society for promotion; the other is to still foolishly promote the old-fashioned in places where professional ethics is needed. Hardcore "Freedom".Therefore, Fan Paopao really didn't keep pace with the times and keep up with the pace of the ancestors' progress in terms of freedom, which may be due to poor information and poor vision.So, why do so many people agree with Fan Paopao, and even desperately defend Fan Paopao's rights?In my opinion, this is because modern Chinese liberals, for the purpose of pragmatism, have generally misunderstood Chinese history.This may or may not be intentional.

Look at 100 years ago, and even today, almost none of the various criticisms of moral degeneration, moral hypocrisy, and moral corruption in ancient China were emotions, metaphors, and morals that were used when criticizing religious and moral authority in European history. The words used, the angles used.It is no exaggeration to say that in the past hundred years in China, the liberalism that criticized traditional morality has completely copied the ideas and methods of Western criticism of religious moral authority.They actually equate the ancient Chinese moral tradition with the religious and moral authority of the European Middle Ages.From today's point of view, if the old European liberalism is smashing houses with a hammer, Chinese liberalism is smashing eggs with the same hammer.They did not distinguish that the Chinese moral system was very different from the religious moral authority of the European Middle Ages.For example, Europe has monks at the top of society, but China does not have these privileged classes of professional moralists; European hierarchies are very rigid, while Chinese hierarchies are much more flexible than them, and so on.

To put it simply, the moral system in ancient China was not as strict and inhuman as the religious morality of Europe. Therefore, if the old-fashioned freedom in Europe hundreds of years ago beat religious morality to death, then this is too destructive. Weapons will destroy China's morality to the point of dying.However, this behavior of destroying morality has not allowed the Chinese to truly gain freedom, and it is difficult for the Chinese to obtain due reflection on this old-fashioned Western freedom through practice.What is even more strange is that for a long period of time in the last century, the Chinese actually borrowed the method of European religious and moral authority to severely attack individual freedom.The result is that China is almost in a situation that lacks both morality and freedom.In this situation, the Fan Paopaos are very short-sighted and resort to the outdated weapons of the European ancestors hundreds of years ago, trying to save the Chinese compatriots from the fire and water.This is why some people support Fan Paopao.

Therefore, from the standpoint of learning from the West, Fan Paopao should also learn something new, not just the old-fashioned ones. In the event of an earthquake, he should show professional ethics instead of the old-fashioned freedom hundreds of years ago. , so he was wrong; if from the standpoint of promoting tradition, Fan Paopao only emphasized individual rights and gave up moral behavior, so that morality, which was already in short supply, was severely absent on an extremely important and critical occasion, so he was also wrong ; If you stand on the standpoint of combining Chinese and Western and learning from each other's strengths to make up for your weaknesses, Fan Paopao is even more indifferent to both sides, and both sides are not pleasing to the both sides.

In any case, on the whole, the current moral force in Chinese society is not too much, but too little.It is not wrong for Fan Paopao to learn from the West. However, we should learn and apply some really useful things according to the actual needs of Chinese society.If you apply other people's theories mechanically, others realize their mistakes and are already correcting and making up for it. Fan Paopao's vision is still so short-sighted. Don't say that Chinese people want to criticize, I am afraid that Western teachers will not appreciate it. Besides, no one is a "natural person" who has truly escaped from culture and society. Therefore, the rights of the so-called "natural person" can only be used as a reference, not a standard.From "natural persons" who have no social relationship and no cultural background, the theoretical natural rights are derived, which are often similar to the instincts of animals.For example, when disasters such as earthquakes occur, animals generally flee in all directions, and it is useless to give them any moral education.When religious and moral authority turns people into puppets, it does make sense to use human animal nature to resist coquettishly and mischievously.However, in a society of normal people, it is better to have less of this animality.