How to treat the essence and dross of traditional culture correctly?

The correct attitude towards traditional culture is to "take its essence and discard its dross", criticize inheritance and make the past serve the present. We should continue to maintain and carry forward the positive contents of traditional culture that meet the requirements of social development.

For things that are backward, decadent and unsuitable for social development in traditional culture, we should "change customs" and consciously transform or eliminate them. Since modern times, there have been two opposing ideological tendencies in the attitude towards China's traditional culture: one is the quintessence school, which thinks that China's traditional culture is correct and should be fully affirmed, and people are not allowed to have any doubts and criticisms about it, otherwise they will forget their ancestors and worship the foreign countries; Second, the Westernization School, adopting a nihilistic or cancelation attitude, totally negates China's traditional culture, denounces it as "feudalism, superstition, backwardness" or even "reaction", blames the poverty and backwardness of modern China on traditional culture, and advocates totally abandoning China's traditional culture and totally westernizing it.

1. In the face of traditional culture, we should dialectically understand their functions in real life and distinguish the essence from the dross. We should continue to maintain and carry forward the positive contents of traditional culture that meet the requirements of social development; Things that are backward, decadent and unsuitable for social development in traditional culture must be reformed and eliminated. Develop on the basis of inheritance, inherit in the process of development, grasp the relationship between cultural inheritance and development, criticize and inherit traditional culture, and constantly innovate.

2. Specifically, those excellent value principles formed in long-term historical practice can be transformed into the spirit of the times to inherit. For example, the vigorous and promising spirit of "Tian Xing Jian, a gentleman strives for self-improvement"; Independent personality of "wealth can't be lewd, poverty can't be moved, and power can't be bent"; The sense of hardship of "taking the world as joy and worrying about the world"; Social ideal of "social harmony" and "unification of the world"; And so on, can easily be transformed into a new spirit of the times.

3. For some content, we can abandon its feudal ideological core and extract its beneficial spiritual factors, making it a useful ideological element in today's new cultural construction. For example, we can transform the ancient people-oriented thought from the perspective that the people are the masters of the country. For another example, the Confucian thought of "self-cultivation" and "cultivation" still has practical significance today.

4. The dross in traditional culture must be denied and discarded. For example, the female view of "three obedience and four virtues", the natural view of "the sky remains the same, so does the Tao", and the feudal hierarchy view of "neither humble nor supercilious, and the distinction between noble and humble".