KINIC's

 

    時間的確過得很快,白駒過隙.在這擁亂的情況下,每天忙這忙那,目前的確不能有太多的時間來梳理自己的過往.我只是在用今天的時間來換取遠久的將來,僅此而已.人要有長遠的打算,目光必須及早獨到,善於發現事物內在的價值.這就是為什麽Sail總是語重心長地勸告小姑娘們,把你們的未來如果押到我身上來的話,沒錯!哈哈.

    今天在冼為堅堂見到了著名的楊振寧,八十多歲了,身體依然硬朗健談.他批判了國內的所謂傳記文學作者,認為國內的這些作者們在其作品中主觀噫斷的成分太高,常常誤導讀者.其實國內不僅僅作者群畸形發展,任何東西搬到了中國,總會有一番中國特色的改造.他回國這麽久,不應該如此見怪.接著談到他的物理科學,目前的物理研究前沿冷原子,又比較了中國原子能之父鄧稼先及美國原子能之父奧本海默的特點,並得出一個結論,如果他們互換國家,都不可能製造出原子彈.性格決定了他們只能在這樣的國家從事這樣的行業才能有這樣的成就.

    環境很重要,這是不言而喻的.可是建國幾十年過去,建國时代的大師們如今即便不已化做塵土亦是耋耋老年了,中國人却非得在外國才能拿諾貝爾獎,才能幹出一番事業,不亦奇乎?我懂得將自己置身於這個古老文化傳承的民族之外來看這個問題犯了很大的禁忌,與論的口誅筆伐甚猛於虎.可是只要看一下目前學術圈--我覺得自己這樣表述似乎污辱了學術,因為據觀察中國應該沒有學術,只有娛樂圈--則可見一斑.中國培養的不是人才,而是服從領導,服從統治的奴才.所謂的培育四有新人,不就是愚人政策披上了冠冕堂皇外衣嗎？如此則在視灌輸特定思想教育為犯罪的罪惡資本主義國家的外國人必定是無禮之徒,成長於蠻夷之地.連學術亦要谄媚諂媚,所謂未來又談何希望?

    說遠了,如今國家發展一日千裏是事實,可是年輕人能否真正的以實幹的奮鬥來換取中國的未來,未來國家要被引領往何處發展,還是讓人憂心;事業與體制若如楊振寧與夫人那樣"十指緊扣",則社稷幸甚,民族幸甚.

 

    Custom has not commonly been regarded as a subject of any great oment. The inner workings of our own brains we feel to be uniquely worthy of investigation, but custom, we have a way of thinking, is behaviour at its most commonplace. As a matter of fact, it is the other way around. Traditional custom, taken the world over, is a mass of detailed behaviour more astonishing than what any one person can ever evolve in individual actions, no matter how abrrant. Yet that is a rather trivial aspect of the matter. The fact of first-rate importance is the predominant role that custom plays in experience and in belief, and the very great varieties it may manifest.

    No man ever looks at the world with pristine eyes. He sees it edited by a definite set of customs and institutions and ways of thinking. Even in his philosophical probings he cannot go behind these stereotypes; his very concepts of the true and the false will still have reference to his particular traditional customs. John Dewey has said in all seriousness that the part played by custom in shaping the behaviour of the individual, as against any way in which he can affect traditional custom, is as the proportion of the total vocabulary of his mother tongue against those words of his own baby talk that are taken up into the vernacular of his family. When one serously studies the social orders that have had the opportunity to develop autonomously, the figure becomes no more than an exact and matter-of-fact observation. The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment of his birth, the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behaviour. By the time he can talk, he is the little creature of his culture, and by the time he is grown and able to take part in its activities, its habits are his habits, its beliefs his beliefs, its impossibilities his impossibilities. Every child that is born into his group will share them with hime, and no child born into one on the opposite side of the globe can ever achieve the thousandth part. There is no social problem it is more incumbent upon us to understand than this of the role of custom. Until we are intelligent as to its laws and varieties, the main complicating facts of human life must remain unintelligible.

    The study of custom can be profitable only after certain preliminary propositions have been accepted, and some of these propositions have been violently opposed. In the first place, any scientific study requires that there be no preferential weighting of one or another of the items in the series it selects for its consideration. In all the less controversial fields, like the study of cacti or termites or the nature of nebulae, the necessary method of study is to group the relevant material and to take note of all possible variant forms and conditions. In this way, we have learned all that we know of the laws of astronomy, or of the habits of the social insects, let us say. It is only in the study of man himself that the major social sciences have substitued the study of one local variation, that of Western civilization.

    Anthropology was by definition impossible, as long as these distinctions between ourselves and the primitive, ourselves and the barbarian, ourselves and the pagan, held swy over people's minds. It was necessary first to arrive at the degree of sophistication where we no longer set our own belief against our neighbour's superstition. It was necessary to recognize that these institutions which are based on the same premises, let us say the supernatural, must be considered together, our own among the rest.

 

 

    Education is one of the key words of our time. A man without an education, many oof us believe, is an unfortunate victim of adverse circumstances, deprived of one of the greatest twentieth-century opportunities. Conviced of the importance of education, modern states "invest" in institutions of learning to get back "interest" in the form of a large group of enlightened young men and women who are potential leaders. Education, with its cycles of instruction so carefully worked out, punctuated by textbooks---those purchasable wells of wisdom---what would civilization be like without its benefits?

    So much is certain: that we would have doctors and preachers, lawyers and defendants, marriages and births---but our spiritual outlook would be different. We would lay less stress on "facts and figures" and more on a good memory, on applied psychology, and on the capacity of a man to get along with his fellow-citizens. If our educational system were fashioned after its bookless past we would have the most democratic form of "college" imaginable. Among tribal people all knowledge inherited by tradition is shared by all; it is taught to every member of the tribe so that in this respect everybody is equally equipped for life.

    It is the ideal condition of the "equal start" which only our most progressive forms of modern education try to regain. In primitive cultures the obligation to seek and to receive the traditional instruction is binding to all. There are no "illiterates" --- if the term can be applied to peoples without a script --- while our own compulsory school attendance became law in Germany in 1642, in France in 1806, and in England in 1876, and is still non-existent in a number of "civilized" nations. This shows how long it was before we deemed it necessary to make sure that all our children could share in the knowledge accumulated by the "happy few" during the past centuries.

   Education in the wilderness is not a matter of monetary means. All are entitled to an equal start. There is none of the hurry which, in our society, often hampers the full development of a growing personality. There, a child grows up under the ever-present attention of his parents; therefore the jungles and the savannahs know of no "juvenile delinquency". No necessity of making a living away from home results in neglect of children, and no father is confronted with his inability to "buy" an education for his child.

 

 

    In the organization of industrial life the influence of the factory upon the physiological and mental state of the workers has been completely neglected. Modern industry is based on the conception of the maximum production at lowest cost, in dorder that an individual or a group of individuals may earn as much money as possible. It has expanded without any idea of the true nature of the human beings who run the machines, and without giving any consideration to the effects produced on the individuals and on their descendants by the artificial mode of existence imposed by the factory. The great cities have been built with no regard for us. The shape and dimensions of the skyscrapers depend entirely on the necessity of obtaining the maximum income per square foot of ground, and of offering to the tenants offices and apartments that please them. This caused the construction of gigantic buildings where too large masses of human beings are crowded together. Civilized men like such a way of living. While they enjoy the comfort and banal luxury of their dwelling, they do not realize that they are deprived of the necessities of life. The modern city consists of monstrous difices and of dark, narrow streets full of petrol fumes and toxic gases, torn by the noise of the taxicabs, lorries and buses, and thronged ceaselessly by great crowds. Obviously, it has not been planned for the good of its inhabitants.

 

 

    People are always talking about "the problem of youth". If there is one---which I take leave to doubt---then it is older people who create it, not the young themselves. Let us get down to fundamentals and agree that the young are after all human beings---people just like their elders. There is only one difference between an old man and a young one: the young man has a glorious future before him and the old one has a splendid future behind him: and maybe that is where the rub is.

    When I was a teenager, I felt that I was just young and uncertain---that I was a new boy in a huge school, and I would have been very pleased to be regarded as something so interestig as a problem. For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain identity, and that is one of the thing the young are busily engaged in seeking.

    I find oung people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things. It's as if they were, in some sense, cosmic beings in violent and lovely contrast with us suburban creatures. All that is in my mind when I meet a young person. He may be conceited, ill-mannered, presumptuous of fatuous, but I don not turn for protection to dreary cliches about respect for elders---as if mere age were a reason for respect. I accept that we are equals, and I will argue with hime, as an equal, if I think he is wrong.