Composition morality plus traditional culture

At the time of social transformation, people are experiencing the pain of value shock and many people's behavior anomie. When exploring ways to end suffering and rebuild social norms, many people turn their attention to tradition. "Traditional culture and contemporary moral construction", a noticeable topic in recent two years, is produced under this background. This article makes two comments on this topic.

First, treat traditional culture with full rational spirit.

Traditional culture, including traditional ethics, has very complex content and nature. How to treat it, when we have full rational spirit, otherwise we will inevitably go astray. But on this issue, some people just show such a lack of rational spirit, and even are dominated by an extremely harmful irrational trend of thought to a great extent. Needless to say, among the people, all kinds of fake cultures and historical sites are rampant, and some bad psychology and despicable habits created by long-term historical traces are wantonly expressed. As far as academic circles are concerned, irrational and even anti-rational phenomena have also appeared in this field which should have the most rational spirit.

The irrationality of academic circles is mainly manifested in two aspects. On the one hand, based on the realistic position, I have unrealistic expectations for traditional culture to solve various problems currently faced. In this way, it not only imposes heavy tasks on traditional culture, but also creates a style of study that is eager for quick success and instant benefit, far-fetched and reckless. This is particularly prominent in the field of ethics. For example, racking their brains to explore the so-called "Confucian economic ethics", trying to find the root of current economic activities in the process of establishing a market economic system from ancient traditions, seems to climb Confucianism and engage in a market economy, but no matter how irrelevant this climb is. Another example is to praise the bureaucracy and official morality under the autocratic imperial power without analysis as a panacea to solve the corruption of cadres, but it not only intentionally or unintentionally covers up the essence of feudal bureaucracy and the decadent official style of that era, but also avoids the root of corruption today.

Holding this practical attitude of playing with history on demand is too romantic for traditional culture. Although practicality and romance seem to be opposite, they are like two sides of the same coin in the tradition of irrational treatment, relying on each other and complementing each other. Some scholars often turn to the ideal and norms of "filial piety" when they feel that the problems faced by interpersonal relationships in modern society turn to tradition. However, when it comes to "filial piety", it lacks due prudence and realistic spirit, giving people a picture of historical pastoral poetry with the concept of "filial piety" as the leading factor, respecting the old and loving the young, and being happy. But "filial piety" certainly includes respecting and caring for the elderly, paying attention to the natural connection between people, and maintaining and strengthening this emotional connection. It also has the obvious paradoxical content of "filial piety has three", and it is absurd to express absolute patriarchy as the core norm of patriarchal clan system and autocratic hierarchy, and transplant this absolute patriarchy to the relationship between monarch and minister. This extremely absurd and arbitrary side has a very cruel nature, and it is often full of blood when it is realized in history. Putting aside these historical contents attached to filial piety and talking about China's tradition of filial piety with a romantic attitude of long-distance aesthetics will not only help contemporary moral construction, but also deceive and mislead people because the historical truth is lost in romantic fantasy.

The above criticism is not to deny tradition. The fact that China's ethical culture has been inherited for more than two thousand years reminds people that the construction of new ethical culture is not a work unrelated to tradition. We can never imagine that we can abandon the traditional ethical culture and build a new ethical culture building in an open space at will. History can neither be avoided nor cut off. If we cut off and avoid history, even the best ideas cannot be realized because of lack of foundation. What's more, everyone is immersed in the historical tradition of the past to varying degrees. Tradition plays a role in contemporary people all the time, which constitutes our objective background. More importantly, whether it is the modernity of the ethical spirit we pursue or the modernity of other aspects of society, as American scholar ingels pointed out: "From the perspective of historical development, the modernization tendency itself is a healthy continuation and extension of human traditional civilization." The problem is that this healthy continuation and extension can be achieved not through a pragmatic and romantic attitude towards tradition, but only through appeal to reason spirit, on the basis of serious reflection, cleaning and analysis of tradition, transforming its valuable content, so as to realize creative transformation to adapt to modern society.

Treating tradition with rational spirit not only means honesty and rigor in academic research, but also means putting the investigation of traditional culture in the background of world culture. Since modern times, with the increasingly extensive and in-depth exchanges between ethnic groups, the value of different cultures has been increasingly understood by people, and various cultural models have coexisted. The communication and understanding between different cultures has become an important trend of cultural development. However, culture, as a manifestation of people's way of life, no matter how different different different cultures are, is superficial compared with those differences that make everyone become the same kind. No difference can hide the consistency of people's characteristics and needs, and the universality of the basic survival problems they face. These consistency or * * * universality constitute the value basis for human beings to transcend geographical, cultural and ethnic boundaries. This determines that the healthy continuation and continuation of any kind of cultural tradition must be based on the recognition and respect of the basic values and corresponding axioms of mankind, so it is required that the investigation of tradition be placed in the background of world culture, rather than isolated from this background and the development process of human civilization. This vision and mind, which is based on our own nation and pays attention to the whole world at the same time, not only prevents us from wandering between arrogance and self-pity with narrow nationalism on traditional issues, but also enables us to truly discover the excellent components of tradition, find the combination of tradition and modern civilization, and transform them into an indispensable part of international culture.