29/08/2020
Today, we were still staying at Chalky Beach for shelter, so I finished painting the dried wolf herring head, which looked gothic and wicked, but the texture was fascinating. My mum commented that why the fish head looked angry was because I ate its meat but complaining it had too many bones.
I finished the book “What is a wellbeing Life” (it’s not a self-help book but a morality philosophy discussion book) last night and benefited a lot, it felt like I was infused with a spirit of goodness. I would be more confident in speaking righteous words and doing justice things in the future, also I have a clearer vision of how to live a full-filled life by self-creation.
Professor Chen Jiaying is very good at reasoning. Many things I wanted to say but don’t know how to make sense when I was debating with others were clearly worded by him. One example is the question when China would be ready to implement democracy. He stated the importance of models : “We do not start our own practice from learning theories, but from imitating models.” “We learn democratic politics, not by studying theory, but by knowing how western politicians deal with political affairs, and how do people deal with daily public affairs around them.” There’s a program recently said that no country was fully prepared before implementing democracy, just like parents can’t be proficient in parenting before they have children. Isn’t citizen education and daily practice the best way to cultivate the soil for democracy? On the contrary, lacking democracy and freedom of speech will rotten the society and bring out the evil side of people to pursuit power, and we will fall into the horrible mire of censorship and self-censorship. Some people would say that democratic elections brought US populist politicians like Trump as an example of the crisis of democracy. But why do they need such a person good at ‘rally round the flag’? Wasn’t it because those socially accelerated centralized countries(Highly efficient developing at any cost) are creating panic for those inefficient democracy countries?
The book’s discussion on the eternal topic of ‘is human nature good or evil’ is great. He exemplifies Mencius and Xunzi’s theories from different dimensions. We can immediately point out which one is more reasonable and realise the importance of cultivation. Later he mentioned Zhuangzi’s “too much cultivation is against morality, and best morality is the same as the beginning of human nature” because in one’s life, the person is inevitably corrupted by a set of etiquette, and it takes a lot of efforts to refuse being sophisticated and smart. It is actually a hard work, a higher kind of cultivation.
This book should really become a must-read book for young people to help them finding universal values in this world of prevailing relativism and nihilism. They should be brave to believe, and follow the path as it goes.
Sea Journal 