All things have their own designated roles to play. When properly played, they give a structure to nature, and provide a purpose to the society. This purpose is what sustains our existence, allowing the miracle to unfold that is the human experience.
In the last 200 years, our striving for harmonious coexistence has changed into promotion of competition. Instead of self-suppression based on cultural norms, mutual oppression become the rule of the game, aiming to return the human species back into the food chain. Granted, competition is good for economic progress. But how much does our existence depends on progress. For one thing, nature itself is suffocating under human progress.
A society requires self-suppression of all her members to achieve
harmonious balance. Examples of self suppression includes the Muslim
tradition of women
covering themselves up and men praying a lot. And during
Ching Dynasty, women shrank their feet and men wore long braids.
The custom in a marriage for a wife to be subordinate to the husband is
a ploy to trap men into supporting a family. But
the most notable form of self suppression is a person's
submission to his own conscience.
In the modern competitive society, in order to stay on top of the heap, self suppression is considered counterproductive. Instead, the oppressors have to devise new social systems, such as religion, politics, laws and economics, to replace the old cultural traditions based on conscience. New social concepts have been introduced to provide the oppressed a sense of contentment. Among the most effective of these concepts is equality.
But equality is just as effective in disrupting the old harmonious society. Let me compare the old Chinese society with the modern society of today to illustrate my point.
In the Chinese vocabuary, there is a word for all the
relatives in an extended family hierarchy. But today,
these words are useless since the relationships they describe
have lost their meanings. Equality is erasing the different ranks of
authority among the relatives. The result is that
the social structure crumbles when each member become ill
qualified to perform his roles. This is most pronounced with
respect to the institution
of marriage. Equality becomes a license for a man to free himself
from his
financial obligations to a family.
Married couples lose incentive to have kids when they lose the required authority to assure they can mold the kids into something better than they are. Uncles and aunts,and nephews and nieces lose the instinctive intimacies when the respects and diciplines are gone. Students wont learn and teachers cant teach -- just go visit any American high school. And the lesbians and gays are proud of the fact that they dont play their most important roles in life. Their behaviors may not directly harm the social structure, but their exppressed pride goes a long way in loosening the screws.
Preferrencial treatments for people of different racial and
financial background do introduce ill qualifications. But this
is the least of our concern since it is fully justifiable on
justice grounds. But such equality has been used as justifications for
the blank equality covering the entire
social structure. When push comes to shove, the self-suppression
consideration for a harmonious society
requires us to sacrifice this kind of equality.
How about the equality-before-the-law guarantee for everybody?
But by the time laws are used to replace self-suppression in keeping
society in good order, we are already heading back to the animal
kingdom.
But the deepest cut of them all is gender equity. It's a
frontal assault on the foundation of Chinese culture, the
family. Now, who has the main responsibility for
the kids? Who is financially responsible for the family? How are we
going
to solve the financial and emotional plights of single-mother families,
who are the fastest growing emerging poors? How many women and
children have to suffer for the a few strong feminists to
to prove they can compete in the men's world?
Gender equity is becoming gender indistinquishibility. Now for a
man, why should he support someone who'll never match
his earning power? And for a woman, why does she always have to be the
one to have babies?
Now equality takes away women's privilege to show their femine
sensitivity and men's
testosteronal behaviors. There seems to be someone out there who
knows what best for us. Who or what the heck is he, she or
it? Maybe we are letting a "it" controlling our lives. It's
a politician.
Today, the fashionable debate in the context of economic progress is gender rivalry. This "it" could very well be economic progress. Maybe the answers to the above questions lie in the answer to the question: Is the convenience of a modern toilet worth flushing down all our cultural values?