终于把University Writing的第一份作业lens essay写完了

眼睛疲惫充血大脑却充满快感

这一个多月没有写过任何像样的blog，部分因为懒，部分因为我一段时间只能集中想一个大的idea

这才是我想要的大学academic life。花一个多月的时间让一个idea发芽成长到阶段性成果。

曾经在中大ldp也有这样的机会，可我总是到最后才匆匆下笔匆匆收尾。

UWri绝对是让我弥补了这份遗憾。

花上几个小时沉浸在思想的世界，理清逻辑，选好合适的语汇，把零碎的想法decently present出来。这是一种快乐，intrinsic happiness.

附上拙作。任何一个在中国长大的人都会明白我在写什么的。

The Audacity of Thinking Critically

“There are three things of which a gentleman stands in awe. He stands in awe of the ordinances of Heaven. He stands in awe of great men. He stands in awe of the words of sages.” -- Confucius

China is a place where the empire system was maintained for two thousand years, a place where the people were taught to obey the emperor for two thousand years, a place where thinking and challenging is not encouraged while remembering and accepting is the social norm as it has been for the past thousands of years.

With such a cultural setting, there is no wonder then for what happened between me and Young Pioneers of China, an organization run by the Communist Youth League, which is an organization of older youth that comes under the Communist Party of China (CPC). YPC is for the primary school students and its membership automatically expires when the student graduate from primary school (or is older than 14 years old). When I was in primary school, friends thought that it was glorious to become a Young Pioneer. Teachers told me a well-behaved child should be a Young Pioneer and that becoming “an heir of communism” (the title of the YPC song sung at the beginning of every YPC gathering) was honored and noble. Then without thinking too much, I just wrote my application to join the YPC and became a Young Pioneer as teachers and friends expected me to be.

However, I was not that willing to be this Young Pioneer, because I had totally no idea about communism, even if I did I might not necessarily agree with its proclamation. Then I asked teachers and parents about communism, yet they told me that I was too young to understand. I agree with them. How could such an abstract idealism be taught to primary school students like me? Yet the YPC constitution reads “YPC is the school for children to learn the socialism with Chinese characteristic and communism”. In contrast, I only recalled that we read and remembered from propaganda publications some basic political facts and history about China Communist Party. They seemed not convincing enough for me. I was not ready to claim that “I was prepared to struggle for the cause of communism” (YPC slogan) as a Young Pioneer should do.

Akeel Bilgrami’s essay Notes toward the Definition of “Identity” shed light on my fragmented thoughts. “Your subjective identity is what you conceive yourself to be, whereas your objective identity is how you might be viewed independently of how you see yourself” (Bilgrami 5). But in my case, I did not conceive myself to be a Young Pioneer while the teachers and classmates placed the identity on me. It turned out that the “subjective identity” was not the same as the “objective identity”-Young Pioneer- I was viewed by others.

This discord between subjective and objective identity was expected by Bilgrami. After distinguishing between the “subjective” and “objective” identity, he starts to analyze the relationship between these two identities with the finding that “…we need to have some kind of reflective endorsement of first-order states of mind before we can say we identify with them” (Bilgrami 7). For me, even though people around thought I was a Young Pioneer and I might behave as a Young Pioneer required, I was not willing to be a Young Pioneer or say “approve(d) of like the idea of being” (Bilgrami 7) a Young Pioneer. Just like the example raised by Bilgrami, if a Muslim disapproved of his/her Islamic tendencies, “then one would be alienated from one’s mental, moral, and political tendencies and would lack identity in the subjective sense” (Bilgrami 7).

It may appear that giving up the objective identity is a good way to solve the conflict, which, however, is usually not the case in reality. It was not that easy for me to give up the Young Pioneer identity. The “noble”, “glorious”, “honored” image of the identity had already been pervasive in students’ life, and it was “a source of dignity and self-respect” (Bilgrami 8). This is called by Bilgrami “the intrinsic value of an identity” (Bilgrami 8), as opposed to “the instrumental value of an identity” (Bilgrami 8). Because of the intrinsic value attached to the identity, though I did not subjectively approve of the objective identity I could not give up and had no way to resist the social norm of endowing the identity with certain values either. Then why does an identity need to be endowed with certain values? The answer lies in what I find beyond Bilgrami’s distinguishing between the intrinsic and the instrumental values: the intrinsic value can be manipulated to achieve certain instrumental values. Why were my teachers and classmates unaware of the fact that what they were doing was nothing but helping recruit and brainwash elite kids? Because the identity Young Pioneer had intrinsic value, which brought kids in YPC dignity and honor. People failed to recognize the instrumental value of the identity Young Pioneer as “from their own subjective point of view, the agents will simply think of these identities in intrinsic terms rather than as serving such function” (Bilgrami 8).

The imposing of instrumental value would be unfolded more as Bilgrami continued to analyze the relationship between subjective and objective identity. He talks about the objectivists’ view of identity. A “strong claim” held by them is that “identity does not even require that something in the subject’s behavior reveal the identity” (Bilgrami 12). My eyes were suddenly caught by the words and his following argument. Thereafter, he gives an instance of the strong objectivist version of identity, a class identity called proletarian, raised by Marx. According to his quotation from Marx, this class “need not amount to any kind of self-identification with the working class, … , not even require any behavior that suggests certain unacknowledged or unendorsed allegiances to that class” (Bilgrami 12). That is to say, an identity can be imposed onto a person without one’s subjective acknowledgement. In Bilgrami’s words, under objectivist’ view “…identity is being attributed without any basis or manifestation required in the conscious or unconscious behavior of the selves or agents concerned” (Bilgrami 12).

We should never underestimate its implication, especially in a society where critical thinking is not encouraged, from as early as in primary school. My teachers and classmates simply took what had been entitled to the identity Young Pioneer and unconsciously and unintentionally imposed the identity on other students they view eligible. I was stamped on an identity called “Young Pioneer” and had to learn things a Young Pioneer should learn, without my subjective endorsement. People seemed like some numb gears in a big machine, which was the YPC recruiting the elite kids and folding them with some facts, which I had not realize distorted until ten years later, in the propaganda publications. The goal of the machine, namely the ultimate instrumental value of this identity, was “in order to mobilize oneself and others similar to you toward certain ends-” (Bilgrami 8) the rule of CPC.

In the recent decades, because of an important historical figure Deng Xiaoping, CPC has been reforming and the rule of CPC has changed in many ways with the passage of time. Things used to be totally different. People could simply call you “Mao’ Rebel” and motivated you to be revolutionary; furthermore they need little effort to impose the identity on you because you need not even accept the identity. That was what happened in China forty years ago, when the Cultural Revolution was taking place.

During that “Red fever” times, Mao was the god in China. With the power of propaganda, and with people’s lack of critical thinking ability, Mao could impose any identity he wants on people. For example, Mao imposed “the Stinky Ninth” (an identity used in ancient China to refer to the people in the lowest strata of the society) on all the intellectuals simply because he pointed out “the objective fact of (intellectuals) having a certain place and function in the relations of production” (Bilgrami 12) by his words that the intellectuals were “the hairs attached to the body of exploiting class (capitalists)” (Selected Works of Mao pg.452). I guess no intellectuals would ever agree subjectively with this identity. It was an identity “attributed without any basis or manifestation required in the conscious or unconscious behavior” (Bilgrami 12), but it was imposed on intellectuals because that was their “objective identity”. In contrast, the peasants and workers, the base of Communist Party, were regarded the most esteemed groups of people. A simple fact revealing the success of building these identities was that, just as many women want to marry the rich today, women wanted to marry peasants and worker at that time.

After Mao imposed such an identity on intellectuals, almost all the universities were dismissed and the intellectuals in university were forced to live in countryside and factories to learn practical skills from peasants and workers. It is no wonder then that my uncle, a high school graduate at that time, went to work in a village and stay away from the identity of “Stinky Ninth” and away from formal university education with his excellent talent in science. (There is nothing against peasants here; it is just that a normal society should allocate people to the place where their talent are maximized.) Millions of young people like my uncle lost their opportunities of higher education. A generation suffered from lack of formal advanced education, because intellectuals were despised in the society.

In the Cultural Revolution, all the identities were created and manipulated, assigned on different political attributes and imposed on people, who had no consciousness of thinking before accepting. According to objectivists, “all an objective identity requires is simply the objective fact of having a certain place and function in the relations of production” (Bilgrami 12). But in the Cultural Revolution, Chinese de facto interpret the “the objective fact” as having the most authoritative person claim that someone has the identity. The ultimate rights of giving an identity to ourselves should maintain in our hands, which means a critically subjective endorsement should be indispensible for an establishment of an identity, rather than the objectivists’ view that “a(n) … identity need not amount to any kind of self-identification”(Bilgrami 12).

In my view, a fundamental reason for the Cultural Revolution is the lack of consciousness of critical thinking of most Chinese people. Like what I wrote at the beginning they get used to accepting and dare not to challenge. But there are people with critically thinking ability in China, yet their voice cannot be heard because of media censorship. I am sure that if the mass is continued to be isolated from critically thinking, the tragedy like Cultural Revolution will repeat itself in future. Meanwhile, the society of China asks for more people who dare to break the confinement from rulers’ pressure and break the habit from the culture. The first step is thinking critically on what we receive, thinking differently from authoritative ideas, and thinking freely from orthodoxies. The audacity of thinking critically.

Akeel Bilgrami, Notes toward the Definition of “Identity”, Daedalus, Fall 2006, 135.4, Research Library