Always Think of Yourself as Young: Be Spirited and Diligent Without Slack

Today is Youth Day, also the centenary of the May Fourth Movement.

One hundred years ago, our nation was in calamity. A band of hot-blooded youth shed their blood and laid down their lives to save the country and its people, sacrificing themselves to relieve the national crisis. Overthrowing the feudal dynasty, driving out the invaders, guarding the homeland—their deeds were moving beyond words.

Without the May Fourth spirit, where would today's China be? Though today's China still has all kinds of problems, it is far better than that era when the people's lives were as precarious as a pile of eggs and no one felt secure from one day to the next.

The May Fourth era may have been the most brilliant period in Chinese history comparable to the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. Though it faced national ruin and a crumbling people, thought opened as never before, idealism reigned, and out of the great social upheaval emerged a host of national backbones.

But human base instincts run deep. Once peace returns, in just a generation or two, realism and secularism become mainstream again, and neighbor-abandoning egoism runs rampant, eroding every corner of society.

Mr. Lin Yutang said China's traditional spirit is a "slippery old-timer" spirit. My understanding is that this is a worldly, smooth (to put it harshly, cunning and treacherous) spirit. At its core it is refined egoism.

The smooth old-timer always lives with an "it's none of my business" posture while deceiving himself in the style of Ah Q.

We over-revere the strolling sage. We do not realize that this seemingly transcendent, actually frail sage is spiritually disabled—they shun social responsibility and contribute almost nothing to social progress. So once the Opium War broke out, the fragility of our people was exposed.

A host of "noble" or "aloof" weak literati who could only chant of wind, flowers, snow, and moon neither advanced science nor improved social institutions. For over two thousand years, countless intellectuals mostly picked apart phrases and waited to die while eating—pathetic! Today, multitudes of such ghosts still wander the land of China, calling themselves revivalists.

Mr. Feng Youlan also summarized Eastern philosophy as a mature philosophy of old age, holding it to be higher than Western philosophy. If Western philosophy is the philosophy of negation, Feng held, then Eastern philosophy is the philosophy of the negation of negation.

This summary has its point. We Chinese young people also like to be praised as "mature beyond our years," and we more or less look down on the fidgety Westerner or the slightly reckless young person.

But this is precisely the root disease of our culture. For millennia we have suppressed creativity; every innovation was scorned as a frivolous trick. Only the dry words of the sages were repeatedly reheated and served.

So people raised in such a cultural atmosphere almost only have childhood and old age; most people's youth is as short as a rabbit's tail.

In truth, spirited young people are a society's greatest hope. For youth are energetic innovators, vigorous creators, a new generation full of courage and drive.

If a person, once grown, could keep this enterprising youthfulness all their life, how happy that would be! Such a person never loses vitality and keeps creating value, rather than living world-wearily, smoothly, and bored to death.

Mr. Liang Shuming once sighed that Chinese society has two great oddities, one being the feudal system that endured for over two thousand years unchanged. At root this relates to how excessively old and stodgy Chinese culture became. If Chinese people had always been spirited, our civilization would surely have evolved to a very advanced level long ago.

Without the shock of the May Fourth Movement, we might still be living feudal, conservative lives, reciting the Four Books and Five Classics every day, trapped in the dogmas laid down by the "sages," with little selfhood.

Li Zhi, the late-Ming thinker, loathed this conservatism that invoked the sages at every turn and fiercely attacked the way stale social traditions bound human nature. His ideas resonated with many; as soon as his works appeared they were adored, and for a time paper in Luoyang grew expensive.

Unfortunately, original thinkers like Li Zhi are hard for moral guardians to tolerate, so his whole life was besieged by the conservatives. Many of his ideas were ahead of their time four hundred years ago and remain avant-garde today.

But Li Zhi's life ended in tragedy. The moral guardians threw him in prison, where he ended his life with a razor, leaving the words, "What does a seventy-year-old seek?" This Chinese Voltaire lost his struggle against the rationalist moralists. China's Renaissance, just sprouting, was strangled.

I find it truly hard to understand those willing to shackle their souls in the dogmas of the sages—to be fair, these are not people born without judgment, but they live in an environment that stifles independence and lack training in independent thought, so they grew used early on to letting others capture their souls. Once successfully brainwashed themselves, they then successfully brainwashed many others.

I do not deny the greatness of sages like Confucius and the Buddha, but I firmly refuse to become a disciple of any sage. I occasionally quote them only because I resonate with a certain view, but to be captured by these people and become a slave to their thought is absolutely out of the question. Because I know they also said plenty of nonsense. And their disciples, who take their moral guardianship as noble, are in my view arrogant, ignorant, and utterly ridiculous.

I think that in this life of mine, even if one day my sinews age and my hair grays, my mind will always remain in its youth. I wish to live spiritedly all my life, to study diligently without slack, and constantly update my understanding of the world. I will neither worship authority nor admire my own reflection.

When Mr. Zhang Wuchang was in his eighties, he visited his hundred-year-old teacher Coase, who told him, "You are still young; you still have much to do." I like this attitude of old Coase's: even past a hundred, he was still seriously pursuing scholarship.

As far as I know, our country's academic world has such a centenarian: Mr. Zhou Youguang, who lived to 113. Mr. Zhou, the father of modern Chinese pinyin, was an encyclopedic scholar who lived past a hundred and still wrote diligently, publishing a new book every year.

At 107, he is said to have told a seven-year-old girl, "Little sister, I am only about a hundred years older than you." Such open-minded humor is exactly what I like. Such an elder, though over a hundred, is still young at heart.

Mr. Zhou Youguang was also a scholar who deeply disliked authoritarianism. He once said, "There are no miracles, only regularities." All truth in the world is actually common sense that can be understood. Whatever has been sanctified is suspect.

Loving doubt is a young person's trait; the world advances in the questioning of the young. Of course, many young people age before their time, grown used to compliance and having given up questioning the world. Though they have young bodies, they have become Dead Souls like those in Gogol. No matter how many virtues such people possess, I would rather not be close to them; I do not want my own soul corroded until I too become a dead soul.

May each of us keep a youthful state all our lives—living resoundingly, colorfully, and with relish—so that we may not have lived this life in vain!