No escape, just a sense of reality
Under the secondary disaster of the epidemic, what we fear is not only the virus itself, but also many uncertainties that cannot be guessed. In this panic, it is useless to “lie down”, and it is useless to escape. But what is the meaning of not escaping, not giving up the right to think? Today, I share a letter from the author Bo Lin to her friend Wu Qi. In her letter, she talked about why it is very important to firmly grasp the right and freedom of thinking when the consensus in the public opinion field is torn apart and the inner emptiness cannot be avoided.
The spring of this year is about to leave, and the spread of the epidemic and strict prevention and control measures seem to be difficult to fulfill the beautiful vision made at the beginning of the year. If you also have relatives and friends you care about, you might as well pick up a pen and write a letter, starting from your own confusion and rethinking your public life today. Please submit the open letter to [email protected].
No escape, just a sense of reality
Written by: Berlin
Wu Qi,
The last time I wrote you a letter, it seemed that it was already BC. It was too long ago. At that time, I had just started freelance writing, about to start a new way of life, and I had a passion for all the injustices around me. I remember when I said to you that my belief in life is to be a strong person in body and mind.
It’s been almost five years, and the changes around me have left me speechless. We live in masks, swipe the health code to eat in restaurants, and scan the itinerary code to go to the hospital to see a doctor. I was riding the subway last week and saw two or three young people standing stiffly at the subway gate. They tried to swipe the subway code on their mobile phones to enter the station, but they all showed their health codes. The gates of the subway are not human eyes, so there will be no response. A young man jumped and yelled, “What’s wrong! My health code is green! Why didn’t you let me in?!”
I wonder if this is some kind of pandemic-era PTSD?
I still can’t get used to the life of wearing a mask. On the premise of not endangering public safety, when meeting with friends, I am always the first person to take off the mask. At the same time, I also silently hope that the other party can take off the mask, so that I can see the other party’s smile, dimples, slaps Yawning, blowing your nose, picking your teeth, whatever, that’s the heat of a person. I will do my best to pass the heat out. Although I can often clearly perceive the boundary between people, it is my obsession to try to get close to the boundary. I’m not trying to cross this border, just a little closer, it’s always easier to help each other when we’re in trouble.
We don’t meet often on weekdays, and many issues are discussed repeatedly in face-to-face exchanges, but now I’m still sitting here writing an open letter to you, as if the discussion will never be sufficient. The reason is of course our exchanges on daily issues. This time, the reason is the feedback you received in the interview “Russian-Ukrainian War and Everyday Meaning” that you did on the podcast with Mr. Xiang Biao, which made me feel astonished and let me You feel at a loss. With regard to the collective emotions of distant wars and nearby epidemics, about the unprecedented tearing of consensus that is going through, you say that your sense of emptiness strikes again, and you don’t know the value of our work.
The movie “Genius Catcher”
As usual, I play the role of giving you a booster. We often call each other “comrades in arms”, and we all perceive that we will be standing on an invisible battlefield for a long time, with a concept of Leviathan. Persistent struggle. Gradually, you and I both discovered that comrades-in-arms in the same trench were drifting away one by one. The social changes in the last five years alone, and the reality-level crit experienced by many people, are enough to change a person’s stance, attitude, and behavior.
I can actually understand this kind of “fading away”. If our only weapon to fight against the concept of Leviathan is an open and firm vision and mind (a kind of self-expectation), then we must listen to and tolerate all doubts , and take them as a tonic. This is of course difficult, and even I feel that it is contrary to human instinct. In today’s public opinion environment that is easily to blame, you need to stand in line and express your position, and then the public opinion will give you a label on this basis to facilitate the next step. Simple and rude dualistic legislation is a tried-and-true magic weapon, whether it is in the Internet violence movement, fan circle culture, or feedback on the operation of public policies.
It becomes embarrassing not to stand in line, but it is also considered dangerous and naive to express an opinion hastily and directly. So there are two safest ways to do it, either choose a “pie” with similar ideas to yourself and follow the trend; or simply keep silent, but doing so is also dangerous, “You are protecting yourself!”, “Where are the intellectuals? “We are no strangers to accusations.
Don’t criticize human nature, don’t torture human nature, this is a self-requirement that I have repeatedly emphasized to myself in recent years. Here I am not trying to excuse or explain the aphasia of intellectuals or even the ostrich mentality of those who pretended to be in good times. In fact, there is no excuse for this. For intellectuals, aphasia is dereliction of duty. Even for you and me (if I am an intellectual too), I have never been shy about taking a knife on myself. You know that.
What I want to really discuss with you is what is important to intellectuals in the public opinion field that is going through a storm every day? In my opinion, the important thing is not whether or not to speak for the first time, but the situation in which you decide to speak.
Perhaps, using the word intellectual still makes me feel a little awkward. I always feel that I am just an “intellectual youth”, regardless of age, but the absorption of knowledge and concepts of the world is still in a state of youth, and I have no ability to guide others. However, I still want to share some ideas with you, which are actually my “exotics”. Because now the ecology of the public opinion field is often blamed, and I have been stuck in my throat. Isn’t it the same for you?
You know I like the British thinker Isaiah Berlin very much, and I almost feel like I’m too late for the writings of this “philosopher of emotions”. The changes in domestic and foreign situations in recent years have made me more and more aware of Berlin’s value. In Berlin’s vast collection of essays, I recently reread “The Sense of Reality”. I really reread it word for word, and I can’t stop sighing that the concept of real money is so close at hand.
Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997)
Although Berlin is a liberal thinker who believes in pluralism, he sympathizes with socialism and supports national identity. Therefore, he is an embarrassing person in the academic and ideological circles. Leftists dislike him as right, while rightists dislike him as left. But he is not a centrist, nor a believer in relativism. He is such an embarrassing person. In fact, the bottom line has always been there. It’s just that people from different factions choose to ignore it for their own reasons. His bottom line: There is no substitute for reality. Guided by a sense of reality, we cannot give up the right to think.
In this collection of essays, “reality” is the key to understanding Berlin’s intricate concepts of romanticism, nationalism, neoliberalism, socialism, and so on. I will make a long story short and quote a passage of Berlin’s interpretation of “sense of reality”: “There is also a kind of improvisation, immediate response, the ability to assess the situation, knowing when to act and when to wait. This is any formula, secret recipe, There is no panacea or the kind of means that treats specific situations as instances of general laws.” “Maybe it’s experimental wisdom, or practical reason, anyway, it’s a feeling of knowing what’s OK and what’s not.” .”
The feeling of knowing what “works” and what “doesn’t work” sounds wicked, akin to mysticism, but in fact this may be the truth of our lives. Berlin, in the words of Tolstoy, warns us that “the ‘particles’ that make up life are too small, too different in kind, alternate with each other too quickly, and combine too complicatedly for our being and action to be too inexorable. The most important part is missing, so that the minimum abstraction and the minimum generalization and finalization cannot be obtained at all”. To put it plainly: reality is too complicated. In this case, the need to stand in line and express a position quickly is undoubtedly a simplified and lazy approach. Those who follow the trend easily give up their freedom to think independently about complex reality.
Freedom, there are too many things we can talk about, and it is not easy to expand, it is easy to be big and unreasonable, and it is just talk on paper. When discussing with Danny, she was helpless to the emotional violence that swept her face in the Internet world, and you and I felt uncomfortable with the practice of taking advantage of the topic and entraining private goods in the opposition. The current situation is that no matter official or private, official media or self-media, when any event occurs, everyone seems to be waiting for a “reversal”. Stand in line, abuse, refute rumors…until the next hot spot arrives. What I want to say is that this free expression that seems to be hidden behind the screen is an abuse of freedom.
TV series “Newsroom (Season 1)”
You say that you have a bad feeling, as if there is a force on the Internet that wants to destroy everything that is established and deny it completely, which makes you unable to understand. Mr. Xiang Biao said that young people in China now view the framework of international relations (such as the Russian-Ukrainian war) as if they were in a primitive jungle, because the unresolved involution ecology in China is irreversibly shaping the thinking mode of young people, which makes him worried . And I am more disturbed if my peers, even younger than me, come to think that we are free to break new ground in destroying the rubble of our intellectual heritage.
I drew an analogy with Danny: the current concept field is like a big open space with no runway, and people are running towards their destination. Because there is no running track, the runners will gradually forget the trajectory, so anyone can change their route and squeeze others aside by brute force. If the competition is fierce enough, it will turn into hand-to-hand combat, followed by a stampede. Who will get there? So, we should be allowed to run freely, but with an idea in mind: everyone has a track, let’s race fairly on our own track. Sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, it doesn’t matter. But ignoring the runway line can only hurt both sides. And the background color of freedom is the invisible runway lines. The runway line is the basic principle, the bottom line.
The cyberbullying that occurs easily at random events anytime, anywhere is undoubtedly the greatest abuse of freedom. So as an “educated youth”, what can we do? The answer can only be based on oneself – I think any “intellectual” who fantasizes about educating others on what to do because he “read a few more books” is also Berlin’s “lack of a sense of reality”. “typical. And lack of sense of reality, can only end in farce, not even the qualifications to become tragedy and comedy. Starting from ourselves, is to take back our right to think and cherish the freedom of thinking under the impetus of a sense of reality.
Of course, Berlin has his own context in the text. He focuses on the successful and failed social programs and the successful and failed thinkers and politicians in the social structural changes the world has experienced from the 19th to the 20th century. But if we read it carefully, we will find that in the 21st century, the “lack of reality” views criticized by Berlin continue to exist, and are infinitely fermented by the expansion of the Internet world. In the era we live in, the Internet is infinitely tempting people to give up their right to think. The Internet, which claims to be able to revolutionize the way of human thinking, is actually doing things to distract us and stir up our emotions. We think that we are hidden behind the screen, and we can browse and express our opinions as we want. Invisibly, our whole body and mind are restrained by the illusion created by the Internet. As the historian Timothy Snyder wrote in the preface to Sense of Reality, “The endless reliance on and immersion in the Internet poses a profound threat to liberty.”
Shouldn’t we just call for “turn off your phone, turn off your computer” because of choking? I don’t agree with this “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” practice. Moreover, it is a futile ideal to think that “the past was a golden age.” Whether it is to go back to the “traditions of the past” or believe in “technology brings a better life”, in my opinion, it is an escape, a way of escaping and transferring the possibility of having a good life to external forces , will eventually lead to profound disillusionment.
I think, not escaping, is a sense of reality. Really accept the environment I am in, and use this only physical body to perceive the feedback generated by the interaction between the environment and the self. If the problem can be solved, spare no effort to solve it. If the problem is too difficult or complicated, on the premise of maintaining a clear understanding of it, shelve it and wait for an opportunity. What matters is not whether the problem is finally resolved, what matters is that the problem is treated as a problem and nothing else. If I can do that, I don’t see any other magic weapon God will give me than the right to free thought that is always in my hands.
Movie “The Elephant Sitting on the Floor”
As if it were a bit of a stretch, our discussion started with the question of your emptiness, the doubts about yourself that come in from time to time, whether it’s about the value of your work or your view of the world. I remember being mean when I said you were a “hollow man” and you actually agreed with my meanness. Looking back now, I have corrected my opinion. I think it’s not just you, but many people of our generation. There may be a vacuum in our hearts, big or small. Doubt the necessity of many of your actions.
Mr. Li Tuo is in the United States and is over 80 years old, but his heart is strongly concerned with the young people here. He often sends many observation articles and a few words to you and me, always hoping to get fresh ideas from us to inspire he. But the results are often dumbfounding. You and I have found that after several rounds, Mr. Li is more like a 30-year-old young man, and you and I are like old-fashioned guys. He is always encouraging us to think, catalyzing us to “make more big moves”, and we often smile wryly to express exhaustion and confusion.
I often have a strong feeling that Mr. Li Tuo’s spirit has remained in the 1980s. Although the 1980s as a cultural phenomenon can no longer be traced back, although all kinds of discussions about “returning to the 1980s” are no longer noisy, although this spiritual nostalgia of the 1980s is also suspected of wearing various hats, but I I still often say to Teacher Li: I really envy you. The spirit of the 1980s is forever in your blood, and this may be the preservative for your spirit.
To put it bluntly, that is a good foundation. Just like a person, the body relies on exercise and nourishment in the early years to lay a solid foundation to resist many external attacks during aging. If a person is young and his soul is completely dissipated, when he is old, he can only rely on the continuous demolition of the east wall to make up the west wall to maintain the function of the body.
I say this because Mr. Li threw me an article a few days ago, “Don’t Think They’re All Emotional”: 5 Faces of China’s Younger Generation , and asked me, “Do you think the analysis of the article is correct? Can you summarize your generation of young people?” I read this article carefully, and on the basis of acknowledging the sufficiency of its content, I expressed my confusion to Teacher Li.
This article provides some analytical frameworks, mainly to investigate and analyze the social mentality of the “post-90s” group (I think the “post-85s” can also be barely included). The article defines this generation of young people as the “abundant generation”, but due to many social, political, economic and cultural reasons, they show conflicts, powerlessness and emptiness that are not in line with “abundance” in spirit. The author summarizes the five spiritual characteristics of contemporary Chinese youth: confronting power with “lying flat”, yearning for “35-year-old financial freedom”, calling for a new economic order, desire to integrate into a powerful country, and circle-based and pan-ideological survival.
The main body of the article will not be repeated, I believe you have read it. The main point I express to Mr. Li Tuo is: I think the overall analysis of this article is very representative, but I have some doubts about the thinking mode behind this analysis-a kind of blindness to the emotional structure and subjective initiative of contemporary Chinese youth mechanical perspective. It seems that the emergence of phenomena such as “lying flat”, “996.ICU”, and “both parents are a scourge” is entirely a stressful reaction of social viruses on young people.
It is true that the author has a self-consistent position to analyze the mentality of contemporary youth and its consequences from the strategic perspective of macroeconomic development. From this perspective, young people are inevitably reduced to the data and samples to be analyzed, and such samples can present a perception: these young people who survive and live under the current order are like “bread pie”. , constantly expanding, absorbing the nutrients and pressures of globalization and localization, it seems that it understands more things and has more things than its parents, but the flour cake is fluffy, full of empty holes, easy to squeeze Press the action, the dough cake will deflate. Like you said, I feel like I’m going crazy all the time.
Documentary “Sociology is a Martial Art”
I say that our generation is “the generation of making noodles and biscuits”, and the corresponding generation is Mr. Li Tuo’s generation, and I say that they are “the generation of compressed biscuits”. With goods in his stomach, Mount Tai collapsed in front of him without changing his face. Although compressed biscuits are not rich, they are more certain of their own destiny. I saw the dialogue between Zha Jianying and Li Tuo in “Interviews in the 1980s”, and I was envious. Why? This dialogue mainly talks about the “argument and friendship” of intellectuals in the 1980s. He talked about the important characteristics of intellectuals’ debates about ideas in the 1980s: first, they can speak out; second, they can defend their views to the death and quarrel with others My face is red; three, I believe that my friends will not mind this; four, I think this argument is meaningful. When the thoughts collided, everyone squatted on the curb to eat watermelon!
Most of Li Tuo’s intellectual friends have something to defend, and because they are determined, they can have a firmer stance and a more open mind. Every compressed cookie is not vegetarian. Does it sound touching? Compared to our current debate ecology? Therefore, the analysis of “Don’t Think They Are All Emotional”: 5 Faces of China’s Younger Generation” also annoys me – it seems to be concluded by a huge hand, as if we lack a stable core, which The inner core should act like a small motor, driving our life energy beyond this defined life. Is the “Bread Generation” equally eligible to have a sixth face?
Since we all love Austrian writer Peter Handke, do you know what he expects of himself? “Hasn’t our generation missed growing up during the Yugoslav war? Not growing up to be as many members of our father’s generation; self-righteous, exhausted, short-sighted, opinionless, sophisticated, and so narrow-minded, but Grow into, grow into why? Maybe something like this; firm and open, or receptive to things…”
Firm and open, isn’t that the secret to not being a “bread generation”? Maybe we still have a chance, as long as we don’t give up the right to think.
By the way, now everyone is always shouting “lie down”, which is really a helpless and sad move! But I often think, why is this necessary? I have a lot of time to lie down when I die, so I’m not in a hurry.
your comrade, berlin
May 9, 2022
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