On the issue of traditional morality, how should we deal with the relationship between inheritance and innovation

When China's reform and opening up enters a critical transition period, the deep changes in economic relations make China's moral construction still face many new situations and problems, and a sense of moral crisis emerges accordingly. As some aspirants have pointed out, the most serious value crisis in contemporary Chinese society is not the loss of moral ideals or the proliferation of utilitarianism and secular culture, but the threat of collapse of the bottom line of civic ethics in Chinese culture. Some people have no sense of shame, shame and disgrace in their hearts, so that the shame is not shameful in the society and the honor is not honor. Not knowing honor and shame makes the moral conscience of the Chinese nation and the concept of honor and shame suffer unprecedented impact. The most basic value norms and moral bottom line in Chinese culture are being threatened, and the emergence of this crisis is not only in China, but also in the reform and opening up of Chinese society, like what usually happens to all national cultures in the world during the transition period. Therefore, the moral state of the society is relatively stable. In an open and rapidly changing social environment, the decline of traditional values and the emergence of moral crises are inevitable. How to build a new culture and a new morality in China is a problem of the century that we have not really solved in the twentieth century. In the face of the moral crisis, we should not attribute the root cause of the crisis to the reform and opening-up itself, but should pay attention to the crisis while trying to reconstruct the morality of the new period. The reason is that "modern social reform itself is a process of realizing the reallocation and effective use of social resources through the adjustment and change of the basic structure of society. It is a modern, rationalized practical movement that creates more effective and rational forms of socio-political, economic and cultural operations. It needs not only the support of reason and order, but also the cooperation and support of a new type of moral resources and social ethical order adapted to the requirements of this social transformation. In this sense, the modern social reforms of the past two decades have been fundamentally conducive to the growth of new moral concepts and the reconstruction of social and ethical order". The current society indeed needs a reconstruction of social ethics and an adjustment of personal morality. Moreover, the Chinese government and people at all levels are paying more and more attention to the construction of civic morality, and the Chinese people have learned that the cultivation of the necessary ethical order and personal virtues has become a basic qualification for whether we can truly enter a modernized society. The acquisition of this concept of morality is one of the most valuable civilizational achievements that China has gained at a heavy moral cost in the last two decades.

When the people were worried about the smooth progress of modernization because of the crisis of social morality, General Secretary Hu Jintao put forward the socialist concept of honor and disgrace of "eight honors and eight disgraces". The "Eight Honors and Eight Shames" concept of socialist honor and disgrace rejects the elements of moral culture that have lost their reality and reasonableness, introduces the elements of ethics and morality that embody the spirit of the times, and forms an organic structure and ecology with the essence of traditional ethics and morality, reflecting the forward direction of advanced culture. The "Eight Honors and Eight Shames" not only points out the key points of China's ideological and moral construction, but also adds new contents to the reconstruction of the moral system of the Chinese nation's concept of honor and shame in the new period. It points out the direction for shaping socialist citizens with good moral cultivation and promoting the formation and development of a good social atmosphere. It is a great policy of the country, a condensation of the spirit of the times, and an inheritance and innovation of the excellent traditional Chinese morality. It enables the people to see that the construction of modernized morality has finally been given a clear and firm direction, and that the structural transformation of social ethics has finally been initiated. At the same time, its operation is becoming more and more standardized and perfected, making people realize that the construction of a new social order depends more and more on the soundness of social public **** rationality and the soundness of the law. The practice of modernization depends more and more on the investment of cultural capital in addition to material and technological capital, and on the spiritual support of social and cultural values and the maintenance of ethical and moral order.