One thing I don’t quite understand is that the pop music youngsters listen to while at work isn’t really interfering with their work.I believe it does.But those young men and women – excuse me, many teenagers at school and college students, too – seem nonchalantly happy partaking of pleasure and carrying on work at the same time.
Of course, I belong to the old, old generation and probably cannot understand their pop culture; the only symbol of which I can identify is hit songs of Michael Jackson.(In Japan, a popular moniker its New People generation attached to a 50-year-old two decades ago was “fossil,” which certainly was that of a man; and in the eyes of the youngsters of that country now, I must be a fossilized prehistoric Neanderthal or Homo erectus.)But I still remember my anthropology professor never tired of reminding students that men were happiest when work was play and vice versa.I envy the youth their ability to combine play and work.
The fact, however, remains that the younger generation is less eager to learn, much less hard-working, more Machiavellian, and much more hedonistic. I don’t know this is due to pop culture, which is sweeping across the world.But I am certain it has everything to do with the rapid ethical erosion in Taiwan.
There is little doubt that the erosion in ethics is equally fast or even faster in China.That’s why Confucianism is being revived to halt a precipitous cultural decline and fall.Nobody knows Confucian ethics will stop or just to slow down the juggernaut of pop culture, but the boom a young university instructor started for the publishing industry with her annotations of “The Analects” of China’s greatest sage is one sign that young people are relearning the ages-old values that have sustained Chinese civilization as the world’s oldest continuing one.The book by Yu Dan, the authoress, has been a bestseller for months in China.She has an increasingly large readership, while the Confucius boom is expected to last for quite some time to come.Perhaps the old sage may help China syncretize pop culture.
Yu Dan has come to Taiwan to promote her book.I wish her every success.I hope her book will trigger a similar boom in Taiwan.
People love Yu Dan’s book because she writes in an easy-to-read and easy-to-understand Chinese.That alone isn’t a mean achievement.Never mind her critics blasting her for her wrong or distorted interpretation of what was said in dialogue between Confucius and his disciples. She has misinterpreted many a passage in the Confucian analects, but that doesn’t matter, for the main thrust of the teachings is not lost.She has an ability to get her messages across to readers, the fundamental asset of writers which, alas, most of my younger Chinese-writing contemporaries in Taiwan have failed to acquire or lost somewhere in their otherwise brilliant career.
Good writers in Chinese are needed, sadly, to unite and harmonize pop culture, which is now getting bigger, pervasive, and powerful enough to override Confucian ethics, which are little different fundamentally from the Protestant ethic.Compare the basic teachings of Confucius with those in the Holy Bible.You’ll find they are almost exactly the same, except that no God is praised in Confucian China.
Rapid industrialization and its concomitant modernization have made high-tech amenities available to the great majority of the people in Taiwan, who think they belong to the middle class.There’s a television in almost every room.There are wireless Internet all over the house, an iPod for every child, a cellphone for every teenager, a cable channel for every perversion, call-waiting, text messaging, and whatnots.There are books, too.But serious books are by and large never read.Well, no one can blame the young too harshly.There aren’t good books around anyway, for there aren’t good writers.
Ours is no longer those good old days when Confucius and other sages had exclusive access to the brain of every teenager.Remember when there was no TV and one had to borrow good books to read from a public library or one’s friend born with a silver spoon in his mouth?I could not afford to buy all the classics in Chinese, Japanese as well as Western I wished to read.I borrowed them.So did most of my friends.In those days which the youngsters today regard as our bad old days, there was no television network for youthful rock stars to play their music nonstop and espouse their immature life philosophies on a daily basis.Many other entertainers of every color are abusing that privilege, too.They’re redefining cultural norms that were once set by people of great intelligence.
This is the real problem we are facing.On an average, college students study their books an hour a day.Eight out of every ten of them justify cheating for getting good grades.People shun hard work.Saving is the thing of the past.One has to spend, spend, spend with borrowed money.Government corruption?That’s the way of life.Oh, it’s almost a national pastime.So is tax-evasion.Anybody who gets caught is stupid, period.Clever guys become judges and prosecutors or lawyers.Or even the president of the republic.
The now much hated Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek tried his hand at a Confucian revival twice in his lifetime.He launched what is known as the New Life Movement in China in the 1930s to counter the de-Confucianizing effect of the May Fourth Movement of 1919.He failed.The Marco Polo Bridge Incident triggered the undeclared Sino-Japanese war in 1937.In the 1960s, Chiang ordered a Chinese Cultural Renaissance in Taiwan.The campaign was a flop.Former President Lee Teng-hui also tried in the 1990s.Nothing stopped the onslaught of pop and other young cultures.
May Yu Dan’s visit to Taipei kick off a lasting Confucius boom in Taiwan!Let our writers join in an untiring effort to help the youth recover our all but lost values.
（本文刊載於96.05.07 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）