Saving Oneself, Saving Others, Saving the World
The heart of compassion is common to all people.
— Mencius
The British economist Alfred Marshall said that the motive force of an economic man comes first from egoism, but that in the end this egoism more or less consciously develops into altruism. This process from egoism to altruism is probably one that most people in a normal society go through. As Mencius said elsewhere: "When in straitened circumstances, cultivate your own character alone; when successful, extend that goodness to the whole world." The compassion innate in human nature leads most people, when their material circumstances are comfortable, to want to help those who deserve pity.
If a person goes one step further, he moves from saving others to saving the world. Nothing in humanity is more moving than the salvation-minded ideal; it is a beautiful feeling. Many concepts we speak of today—humanitarian spirit, humanistic care, religious care, social responsibility, and so on—are essentially, in their core, the salvation-minded ideal.
This salvation-minded ideal is the supremely good part of the human spirit. The anthropologist Morris believed that this beautiful human feeling developed from the mutual aid of tribal people in primitive hunting societies. An individual alone cannot overcome the challenges of nature or easily survive in the wild; only when people unite and help one another can they obtain food from nature and resist wild beasts. This spirit even exists widely in the animal kingdom. That is, human beings can only survive through cooperation with others, and in cooperation, mutual aid is vital.
Objectively speaking, before a person has saved himself, his first task is to save himself, not others or the world. Even a savior like the Buddha first had to resolve his own spiritual perplexities before he could come out and guide his disciples. And material giving, too, must rest on having something to give. As the Buddha himself said: "It is hard for the poor to give." A penniless person cannot help others materially; every lofty act of charity rests on the giver having something to give.
Self-salvation is certainly important, but in today's finely divided society, without the spirit of saving others and saving the world, a person would find it very hard to save himself. For the finer the social division of labor, the more mutual-aid relationships a person must build with others just to survive. In a world of mutual aid, the selfish are eliminated by society. This is why, in Western countries with advanced educational ideas, parents teach their children from childhood to help others.
Marshall also said something else: the two most important things in human society are economic development and religious belief; and between the two, economic development is less important than religious belief. Marshall said this in a nation with a broad foundation of religious faith, and in an age when religious faith was still relatively simple. Times have changed; even in countries with a long religious tradition, religion's hold on the new generation is far weaker than before.
As for China—a country, as Mr. Liang Shuming put it, with two extremely strange phenomena, "one, a feudal social system unchanged for thousands of years; two, a life without religious faith"—the role religion can play is even weaker. Not to mention another deep-rooted flaw of the Chinese world, as Mr. Yan Fu put it: "The decline of Chinese customs begins in falseness and ends in shamelessness." In a cultural soil like ours, believers' faith often ends up as a tool for cheating people out of money, which further lowers religion's role in relieving the human heart.
Religious faith, fundamentally, is a spiritual philosophy whose chief value is saving the world. Today, the spread of universal values has gradually replaced the old religious faith. But because they lack the rigorous discipline of traditional religious training, many who take so-called universal values as their personal faith usually show a gap between word and deed; under the temptation of profit, they easily abandon their beliefs.
Traditional religious faith has its downside: it overly shackles human nature. The religious liberation movements humanity has painstakingly carried out over the last few centuries have aimed to strip from religious faith the parts that shackle human nature. The rise of existentialist and humanist philosophy was precisely meant to solve this ill produced by religious faith. But it has itself produced other ills: sexual permissiveness, weakened family bonds, crime, drug abuse, decadence, and other extremes growing ever more common. This is why human society keeps swinging and struggling between new ideas and old traditions.
Pascal said that human beings are creatures who prove they are sane by proving that their neighbors are mad. It is always hard to enter another's inner world; every act of another that we cannot understand we instinctively take for madness. This is a deep flaw in us humans. To an extreme egoist, those with a salvation-minded ideal are either putting on airs or having a fit.
And our Chinese brand of smooth, worldly, egoism-centered rationality is absolutely one of the wonders of the world. Lacking religious nurture from childhood, we are born liking to "sweep only the snow before our own door and not care about the frost on others' roofs," and quick to assume the worst of others. Altruists like Confucius and Mozi have always been mocked by many "highly insightful" "worldly sages."
So the overall moral level of our society is a sad thing. We see collective decline, stratum by stratum, until every stratum has fallen. We remain stuck at the low stage of self-salvation, and find it hard to rise to the higher stages of saving others and saving the world; toward lofty feeling, we are either skeptical or mocking.
Our hospitals squeeze patients for all they are worth; our patients hunt down doctors; our helpers are often falsely accused or even framed by those they helped; we celebrate so-called "unpretentious" rogue culture. Chilling social phenomena of every kind go on and on.
We should strive to reform this society, moving it from so low a stage to one a little higher; we should educate our children to have more of the idealism of saving others and the world, less selfishness, more goodness, less ugliness. Let ourselves and our children live with a little more dignity, and let our society become a little better. I personally believe this goal is the mission of us intellectuals. As we work for our mission, however much the worldly society mocks us, we should persevere—and this is the conduct we intellectuals ought to uphold.