Can Traditional Culture Solve the Spiritual Predicament of Modern People?
Because social change is too rapid and of too great an amplitude, most modern people cannot adapt to the fast-paced life of modern society and develop various psychological problems to varying degrees; in severe cases they fall into spiritual predicament. There is now a view that traditional culture can solve the spiritual predicament modern people encounter. My personal view is that traditional culture, such as Chinese national learning, can indeed moderately moderate the various anxieties and restlessness modern people encounter, but its effect is limited.
A culture is adapted to a specific social environment, and traditional culture arose against a particular historical background. The entire social foundation of modern society is now very different from the past, so some people who cling to seeking spiritual liberation in traditional culture easily fall from one kind of bigotry into another, indulging in traditional culture and developing all manner of new spiritual problems from which it is hard to extricate themselves.
To date, human evolution has seen several major turning points, each of which is hard to reverse. Humans emerged from primitive society and gradually developed into cooperating hunting apes, then from hunting and gathering—a society dependent on heaven for food—turned to agricultural society, and then from agricultural society turned to an industry-and-commerce society centered on towns. In this evolutionary process, much of human nature has been bound and transformed; this binding and transformation is a process contrary to human nature, so it is not strange that people often long for the old human way of life. We today admire the thought of Laozi, but when Laozi was alive, what he admired was the even more ancient "high antiquity."
The development of human society objectively necessarily produces the consequence of devastation to human nature, but the reality is that we cannot reverse back to the distant past. Humans went from the jungle to the village, and from the village to the city, and cities grow ever larger. If humans are to survive in this society, they must cooperate with others. The more developed the society, the finer the division of labor, the more people we need to cooperate with, and the more complex the interpersonal relations we face become; this objectively causes our modern brains to be filled every day with all manner of cluttered information that is hard to classify, and we easily become lost in such complex life.
Laozi's described ideal state of a "small state with a sparse population" may be the place best suited to resting the human spirit—and it may not be. For anyone who has lived in a village knows that village life likewise has many problems. Strictly speaking, from the moment human desire arose, the human heart has never had a moment of complete quiet. Today's humans cannot completely detach from society and isolate the self absolutely. Even monks and Daoists who cultivate in deep mountains and old forests are no exception. They too need to engage in material exchange with the outside world, and even need to solicit support from outside to maintain the basic needs of their flesh. Today, the way a considerable number of religious people solicit support has come to closely resemble the means by which swindlers swindle. My great disaster is only that I have this body. As long as this flesh has not died, we must wage a lifelong struggle with its various desires.
But it cannot be denied that traditional culture does have a certain referential value in moderating psychological problems and solving human spiritual predicament. The core content of traditional cultures around the world, summed up, is actually only two words: restraining desire. Whether it is China's Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, or the West's Christianity, or Islam—however they speak, however they wind around, their purpose, in the final analysis, is to exhort humanity to restrain desire.
The desires deep within one's own heart are humanity's common enemy. From antiquity to the present, humanity has been tormented by desire; on this point, traditional culture indeed has its eternal meaning and existence value. All the rules and regulations of human society—laws, morals, public order and good customs, religious precepts, and so on—point toward the same direction of restraining desire. Desire not only causes mental illness but also causes bodily damage; excessive indulgence in wine-and-sex establishments has caused many people to die suddenly of illness, and many chronic diseases are also caused by excessive indulgence.
Loneliness lets humanity fall into desolation through being too closed off, while communal life makes body and mind uneasy because desire is stimulated. For the human spirit to truly find liberation, perhaps one can only rely on developing an outstanding ability to balance—maintaining both an appropriate amount of social contact and a certain degree of loneliness, living on the path of the mean by compromising between the two.