From: lix@thames.bu.edu (Xiaowen Li)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china,soc.culture.taiwan,soc.culture.hongkong
Subject: FWD for Mr. H. Anonymous - Gen. Ma Yuan (2)
Date: 20 Nov 92 21:59:20 GMT
Followup-To: soc.culture.china
Organization: Boston University

This is a forwarding.

==============================================================
  Re: General Ma Yuan (II)  

Let's continue our humble comments on Sanyee's noble words:

>I no longer admire [Ma's] glory in the civil war, in the wars with the
>west and south minorities, and in his conquest of Vietnam.  But his wish

I must admit what is obvious.  As a bad pupil with a "black" family 
background (just like Good Ole Lix :-)), I have been lagging far behind 
Sanyee in trying to master this noble skill of understanding history a la 
CCP (Drop me your standard "self-criticism" so I can copy, Lix :-)).  Even 
with the most sublime and latest liberalism, humanism, and humanitarianism 
hastily stuffed into the place once forcefully occupied by communism, the 
unenlightened me still could not tell how much the modern human being 
has really improved on morality in comparison with those ancient "bad 
guys", if not the Neanderthals.  They are still killing each other, using 
means either traditional or modern, whichever is more readily available 
or cost-effective, in pursuit of things like "building one's own nation-
state" according to some sacred cow or holy creed of "self-determination", 
despite the fact that those on the opposite side may be in fact speaking 
practically the same native tongue (tell that to the ancient Chinese!).  

Even in this reputedly most wonderful Western democracy and/or Judeo-
Christian world we are now living in, there is no way one can fail to 
notice the pervasive criminal callousness toward the most horrendous 
famine in East Africa, not to mention manifestation of other ugly traits 
of the human nature that both our sages AND Judeo-Christian saints had 
criticized thousands of years ago.

Therefore it is my humble conclusion that: no, we are not any more 
"righteous", more "moral" or even more "humane" than our ancestors, 
though we may have accessories like penicillin, United Nations, self-
determination, etc., and for all the knowledge we may have about names 
and terms like Nietzsche, Kafka, nihilism, Samuel Huntington (all of 
which our ancestors did not have the faintest idea about), we hardly
behave any better than they did.

Consequently, unlike Sanyee, the unenlightened and often confused me 
could only try to read history as it is, to understand the ancient 
people's human emotions (or Xi3Nu4Ai1Le4), their senses of fame or 
shame, glory or gloom as were felt and acted on by the ancients in 
their own way subject to their own contemporary social and moral 
judgement.  At the same time,  I would try to put myself in the same 
frame of moral and social reference, admiring or abhoring them as their 
contemporary observer would have.  My modest goal is hopefully to draw 
some conclusions which may be helpful in our future.  

However, I would not second-guess, much less pass shallow moral 
judgement or, as the Gospels say, "cast" the stone, based on some
modern yard-stick, be it "dialectical materialism" or "idiolectic 
historicism" or "eclectic cosmopolitanism" or any latest fad of 
"humanism" or "humanitarianism."  I have humbly learned that, no matter 
how smart or "moral" or "noble" you think you are (with the probable 
exception of Sanyee's "authority" Guo Moruo :-)), as our great 
calligrapher Wang Xizhi pointed out in the year 353:

Isn't it sad that the way we see the past will not be much different 
than the way future generations would see us?

(To be continued with some real Ma Yuan stories)
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Newsgroups: soc.culture.china