Chapter 24 The Academic Decay of Our Times

so outrageous academic importer In the first half of the last century, outstanding figures such as Liang Qichao, Liang Shuming, Guo Moruo, Lu Simian, Pan Guangdan, Qian Mu, Chen Yinke, and Fei Xiaotong emerged in the Chinese academic and ideological circles.During the New China period, there were indeed problems with academic thinking. As a social thought, Marxism originally had a strong explanatory power, but once it became a dogma, it constrained our understanding of society. In the past 30 years, the academic world has been lively enough. Given the dramatic changes in Chinese society over the past 100 years, the stimulation felt by the social nerves should be strong enough, and the driving force of academic thinking should not be a problem.But why don't we see much originality?Of course, returning to the world system and becoming an apprentice again with Britain and the United States is a relatively fundamental reason.Since you are an apprentice, you have nothing of your own, everything belongs to the master.In fact, this problem also existed in the era of Mao Zedong, and Marxism was not Chinese. At that time, China was just an apprentice with another master in the West.Therefore, from a broad historical perspective, only when China completes the rebirth of modernization, reaches the forefront of the world, and let the masters retire and be laid off, can China's academic culture really take off.

But it has to be said from the other side that the humanities and social sciences are not the same as the natural sciences. They have strong local and national characteristics, and their universality is far lower than the latter.You can learn something from outside masters and solve common problems, but the part that belongs to you completely, you have no master, you can only regard yourself as a master. This fall in 1840, China was really stunned, the world was spinning, and everyone looked like a master.Originally, "Chinese style and Western application" is more suitable for humanities and social sciences than anywhere else. In the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, this batch of scholars, who read the Four Books, Five Classics, History Records and Hanshu since childhood, just wanted to Westernize the Chinese "body" as a dog If you throw it away, you have to find it yourself. Lu Xun is an example.The young student said to him, you are so familiar with old things, we think you are awesome!Lu Xun said, where is this and where is it? I don’t want to throw away those things but I can’t throw them away!At that time, I just wanted to throw away everything, including traditional Chinese medicine, Chinese opera, and Chinese characters, but how could it be so easy to throw away these things?So later on, "nationalization" and "national style" were mentioned, "combining the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with China's concrete practice", and "making the past serve the present, and making foreign things serve China."Ordinarily, by following this path, one can get out of social science with Chinese characteristics. Do you think that at that time, the emperor, the revisionists, and the anti-rebels would all be ignored, and you would not be the only one left?But in the end, I didn't even have myself left—there was no academics during the "Cultural Revolution", because there were too many unnecessary things and a serious lack of nutrition, so I made myself skinny, and everything was out of the question.

The intellectual elites in the 1980s and 1990s were born in the era when feudalism, capitalism, and revisionism were all banned. They have never read the Four Books and Five Classics. All they read is "Midnight Chicken Crowing". Let's start, not to mention that they don't want to use Chinese and Western skills anymore.I have a friend who was studying in the history department of Peking University in the late 1970s. He said: I haven’t read anything in the past four years, and I’ve only read foreign languages—I haven’t read it yet!His situation is of course a bit extreme, but it is also quite representative.Take foreign languages ​​as an example.In a normal society, those who can speak seven or eight foreign languages ​​are just “magic” in the eyes of the public. It should be similar to how we see people threading needles with their feet, and it will make us admire, but It won't make us feel inferior.As mentioned earlier, one of the important reasons why Qian Zhongshu became popular in the academic world in the 1980s to the whole society in the 1990s was that he knew many foreign languages.I think there are people in China who can speak many kinds of local dialects, but they have not been spread and become a good story.In fact, it is useless to know Swahili, Vietnamese Lao, even Russian and Spanish, and they are still the languages ​​of those countries with high per capita GDP.From here we can see the economic basis of the social psychology and academic atmosphere at that time. Simply put, it is the ratio of US dollar to RMB 1:8.Let's talk about the third reason: learn from wholesalers, retailers, advertisers, and transportation teams to get rich quickly. When I went abroad in the 1980s, I could save a meal and bring back a small gadget. Regardless of the size of the gadget, it has a lot of influence. If you put it at home, the female classmates are likely to become girlfriends when they meet.At that time, I often heard that some scholars went abroad to eat instant noodles in order to bring back more gadgets. Because they could not keep up with their nutrition, they would carry them down when they got off the plane when they returned home.Scholars went to the west to learn Buddhist scriptures, and got back the dollar mark and great future. They were surrounded by flowers, illuminated by spotlights, blocked by matchmakers, and drifted erratically. Where did they remember the "Chinese body and western use"? He only hated himself for this "body" "I was born wrong, unfortunately I was born on both sides of the Yellow River, so I can only stand on the high slope of the loess and face the wind to criticize myself, saying that the system, culture, race, history, and topography of the loess are all bad. .Neither is good, what should I do?Some people with grand political ambitions said, let us transform the Eastern Land into the Western Paradise.Others said that it will be the Year of the Monkey, and we will try to immigrate directly to the West.In the process of fighting for immigration, they found that the best thing about Xitian is that the visa office of the embassy is not good-not everyone signs.

The embarrassment of the times: the connection with the ghost It doesn't matter if you don't give up the visa, they are still in line with the West.Because of the dark connection, sometimes interesting results will be obtained.Just to give an example, I used to work on the English version of "Chinese Social Sciences", and once I came across a manuscript about Chinese literature, in which there was such a word "maternal care tendency of the new quality of life in the world". It looks great.I found the author and said: This is going to be translated into English. I guess you also translated it from English. Can you tell me the original text?He said: I also copied it, I don’t know how to say it in the original text.I said: Then you can explain it to me in common language.He said: Just explain yourself.I said: Is it a new life?He said: Yes, yes, that's what it means.The author is actually quite simple and really a good person, not a new and new human being who is bluffing at all, and he is in his 40s, and he can speak well, but he said that now the academic world eats this kind of thing-obviously forced to do so.This kind of thing has been everywhere in historical theory and literary criticism since the 1990s.I once browsed magazines and saw "D-line effect on the A level" and "F-line effect on the B level". I thought it was about diodes or something, but it was actually a Chinese drama.Scholars who have come to this point are really not learning from the West, but pretending to be the West, because the West does not seem to have reached this point.The chain store "California Beef Noodle King" opened in Beijing is said to be headquartered in California and has a history of one or two hundred years.Someone who loves this noodle went to California and wanted to try the authentic one, but after inquiring, there was no such shop.Some time ago, there was a political scientist in Hong Kong, Professor Ding Xueliang, who went abroad from the mainland and went there. He criticized that Chinese economists are not up to the international academic level (that is, how many articles have been published in foreign magazines). People, caused an uproar at the time, so I have an impression of this person.A second-class car bought a tabloid, and there happened to be an article introducing him as the first person in China who "can taste foreign wine".Later, I saw another report about his successful climbing path from the mountains of Anhui to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Academy of Social Sciences, and then to Harvard University. It is really a small example of personal struggle!He could only fill in the year and month for his date of birth, because his family was too poor to afford a calendar, and his parents only remembered the days when he was born and ready to be fed. It rained heavily, probably in midsummer.Recently, I turned to his blog and browsed, and saw that the articles he wrote were all parentheses and foreign words like "Guan Zhuan", and then I saw that the foreign words were power, freedom, people, etc. To frighten the out-of-school peasant brothers in Anhui.Originally, the struggle from the bottom up deserves everyone's understanding and sympathy, because it embodies a spirit of fairness and brings vigor and vitality to society.But it is not very interesting to struggle yourself into a lame "higher Chinese" like this, and this kind of situation cannot be said to be a rare phenomenon among scholars today.With these "sleep and tie" scholars as professors, doctoral supervisors, and academic leaders, how can you expect China to soon have originality, "spirit of freedom", in line with China's reality, and able to guide China's development? What about academic culture?

Some time ago, a male teacher at China University of Political Science and Law was hacked to death by a male student. The reason is said to be because of a female student.The whole story of this incident is not completely clear, but it can be seen from the information disclosed in the online newspaper.This teacher is in his 40s and comes from the countryside of Hubei. He has studied in France for many years and feels that "French blood" flows in his veins. He wants to wear red plaid pants to make himself a romantic scene on the university campus.This is not enough, he also wrote poems in "Xu Zhimo style" to female students, boasted to students in class that his French is better than Chinese, and held French wine appreciation parties at home, it felt as if he was born in France It's like being adopted by someone.There's nothing wrong with him coming from the bottom, trying to get a quick upper-class status badge.But unfortunately, he got a French coat of arms, and France is all about affairs. ——If it was the British or German style, it would not have ended like this.He is in the middle age, and his heart may not be free, but it may not be too much.But since he wears the French badge of "Mediterranean Red Sails", he has to spend it. If he doesn't spend it, others will say that his badge is borrowed by others.Then there was a flash of cold light, and blood spattered everywhere.I feel sorry for his wife who is five months pregnant, and I also feel sorry for the poor parents of the male student who have just brought up their child through frugal living.Behind this tragedy, there are obviously factors of worshiping foreign culture.

Having said that, since the end of the 1990s, the foreign enslavement of academics should be said to be a little better. The reason is relatively simple-scholars have received more renminbi.The thousands of scientific research funds issued by the state are no longer called money. They are often tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands. They are all made by the hard work of hundreds of millions of laborers.Unexpectedly, greedy scholars swarmed up and wiped it out in an instant-a nonsense piece of "My View on Scientific Development" that no one could understand or know how to read defrauded several farmers in the west of their income for a year!The leader of a certain unit confided to the following scholars: You can cheat small money (research funds) yourself, and I will help you cheat big money (to the Ministry of Finance).To what extent the scientific research funds established in these years have contributed to the healthy development of Chinese academics, and to what extent they have led to the robbery of people's assets by intellectual elites is a question worth exploring.

Academic corruption has now become so commonplace that no one takes it seriously.Due to the corruption of academics, scholars are becoming less and less like scholars. They look like little secretaries in the officialdom and small vendors in the market.When I was young, the store sellers would yell when they saw children being mischievous: Student, is this what the school taught you?At that time, society had high expectations for the moral standards of scholars.Who still takes scholars seriously nowadays?They don't take themselves seriously either. In the septic tank of society, they are not the most at ease, but they are also able to splash.From a historical point of view, scholars have always been regarded as a relatively healthy force in society. Isn’t it all scholars who take their coffins to take office, and the country is ruined?Compared with other groups, scholars are always "up and down the past and the present", and they are most likely to transcend their own experience and interests, cut off the chain of evil, break the cycle of corruption, and become the start-up fund for social improvement as mentioned above.But today, you can see that they either stuck their heads in the arms of those in power, or sat crookedly on the laps of capitalists, or were surrounded by two masters one night at a time.I wonder how they can decay so fast!