Human Prison and Human Hell

Yusheng (July 18, 2011)

China has a long-standing saying about “prisons on earth,” a concept similar in meaning to the Western concept of “hell on earth,” a view contrasting with paradise on earth, describing human suffering as hellish. Because Chinese religious faith is not as devout as that of the West, and their understanding of hell is less profound, they use the real-life prison to depict human suffering. I remember reading Lu Xun’s works when I was young, where he said that Chinese prisons were places where prisoners suffered, intended to be like Western hell. If Chinese prisons were like Western prisons, where prisoners had inalienable rights to frequently go on hunger strikes to protest and fight for better living conditions, then every Chinese person would have to apply to move into prison. Therefore, the transformation of prisons into hellish conditions is inevitable. (Postscript to *Quasi-Fengyue Tan*)

Western prisons are places that restrict personal freedom. Using this restriction as punishment is also a form of isolation from society. Lu Xun satirized the government officials of his time, who were bound by Chinese cultural traditions and lacked understanding of the Western concept of freedom. Did ancient Chinese people have a different view of freedom? Could the freedom of traditional Chinese thought not be taken away by modern prisons? The answer is yes. The author has written extensively about the Daoist view of freedom, saying, “To abandon foolishness and return to one’s true nature is the freedom pursued by Daoism.” This means abandoning worldly pursuits, returning to simplicity, and pursuing the natural way. Like Zhuangzi’s advocacy of sitting in oblivion, or the Buddhist practice of facing a wall for nine years, one would then see Western prisons as paradise.

So what is the so-called freedom in the West? I divide human society into two levels: the genetically encoded primordial society and the artificial secondary society. Unlike other social and cultural classifications, these are two societies at different levels, which can only be seen within the broader context of cosmic development. This is like the difference between molecules, objects, planets, galaxies, and the universe, or the difference between Chinese characters and written text. This illustrates the fundamental difference between these two types of social life: 1) Primitive society: aesthetics, pleasure, instinct, intuition, harmony, unity of man and nature, the original world of humanity; 2) Secondary society: utilitarianism, struggle, rationality, directionality, contradictions and conflicts, the separation of man and nature, the world of God not yet grasped by humans. If Chinese culture pursues the freedom of the primordial society, the West pursues the freedom of the secondary society. The secondary society is also what Marxism calls class society, a society that has its own purpose and humanizes the natural environment according to its own goals. In this case, the natural environment becomes the object of human labor to achieve those goals. These goals are obviously countless, and contradictions and conflicts are inevitable, resulting in a society where capital enslaves society, and the exploiting class turns workers into slaves. The author argues that there is an insurmountable aspect between the original society and the secondary society, and that the secondary society is uncontrollable. Because it is uncontrollable, and given that we are currently in the early stages of the historical development of the secondary society, the freedom of individuals in the secondary society to pursue their personal goals inevitably degenerates into a form of imprisonment.

“The French existentialist philosopher and writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), who refused to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature, believed that humans are completely different from animals. Animals have their natural instincts to guide them, while humans have lost the backing of their natural instincts and have faced life directly, becoming free people. That is to say, humans have the freedom to go against their nature, do whatever they want, and do whatever they want. This is a unique freedom of civilized humans, the only freedom that exists in the world, and it is the privilege of civilized people. Sartre also believed that this is the judgment of (secondary) society, and humans have no right to refuse this freedom.”[1]

Sartre’s last sentence in the original English is, “We are condemned to be free.” The verb in this sentence means a court declaring a sentence of punishment. Therefore, Sartre’s actual meaning is: humanity is sentenced to life imprisonment, but the place of execution is a prison called “freedom.” Marxism argues that primitive humans were controlled by nature and lacked freedom; civilized humans, having gained freedom, are controlled by society and become slaves to their own creations. Marx proposed the theory of communism, believing that the ideal future society would return to prehistoric communist society, but with an abundance of material wealth. Recent advances in anthropological research have revealed that the Qunsan people of South Africa lived in a state of extreme material abundance. They had vast lands and sparse populations, food was readily available, and they spent most of their time wandering, visiting each other, and chatting. They were well-nourished and healthy. Much evidence suggests that this was the lifestyle of prehistoric hunter-gatherer humans: 30,000 years ago, the average height of adult males was 177 cm and females 165 cm; while in 1960, the average height of American men was 175 cm and women 153 cm. Numerous pieces of evidence suggest that humans 30,000 years ago knew how to control reproduction. [2] The conclusion is that prehistoric humans were not subject to nature and they also had freedom.

The Khun people of South Africa live in groups of an average of thirty-one people, each governed by a powerless chief. When Richard, an anthropologist who was investigating them, asked them if there were powerful figures like chiefs or governors in their society, their immediate answers showed that they already had such concepts in mind.

“Of course we have governors!” they said. “In fact, we are all governors. Each of us is his own governor.” This is the best illustration of the meaning of freedom in primitive society.

Today I was reading a book titled “Self and Society,” and I happened to come across a passage that could serve as a footnote to the word “worry.” Worry, taken to its extreme, often takes on a humorous quality, and this passage, too, has a touch of humor. I’ve transcribed it below, hoping it might serve as material for your after-dinner conversation. If it brings a smile to your face, I’ll be more than satisfied:

“If a language is a prison, then we are its prisoners. This prison defines the size and boundaries of our world, shapes our worldview, and provides us with everything within it. Our lives as prisoners consist of endlessly building, and building ever stronger walls and bars, (ensuring that neither we nor our descendants have any hope of escape).”

The parenthetical remarks in the above quote are my additions to make the whole passage more complete. Language that can function like a prison is a highly developed language, semantically clear, capable of depicting a world entirely of illusion, making us slaves to our own creations. The aesthetic and emotional communication I discussed in my previous post requires concise and succinct language, like classical Chinese poetry. If a language is too developed and subtle, a few words will convey too many concepts and information, overwhelming the human brain and preventing the stirring of emotions and aesthetic feelings. This is precisely why human poetry and singing are characterized by slowness and repetition, and should never be crammed with too much information.

In short, nothing in the world is perfect; a mix of good and bad is the norm. This is exactly what Zheng Banqiao meant when he said, “It’s rare to be muddleheaded; one shouldn’t take things too seriously.”

A fundamental difference between primitive society and secondary society lies in the function of language. In the former, language serves as a vehicle for psychological and emotional communication, while in the latter, it is a vehicle for information exchange; the former is aesthetic, the latter rational. Chinese civilization began in primitive society, while Western civilization began in secondary society. Consistent with the situation in the Chinese language, secondary society was historically underdeveloped in China, and its understanding and development were insufficient. Secondary society is unrelated to human nature; people cannot be trusted. It requires the introduction of external concepts and idols as a platform for social interaction: such as fairness, justice, and respect for the rights and freedoms of others.

I wholeheartedly agree with the calls from some scholars: the Chinese language urgently needs development, but this need is rarely felt within the Chinese academic community, and the general public is even unaware of its existence. Recently, I met a friend who studied science and engineering and works as an engineer. He asked me if it was true that he had heard Chinese was an underdeveloped and simple language. He works in English and hasn’t even noticed the differences between Chinese and other language families; how much more so would ordinary people?

I have studied Russian and English, and briefly taught myself Japanese. Compared to Chinese, their grammar is more complex. The complex declensions restrict each word to the mutual constraints of sentences, leaving little room for semantic ambiguity; compared to Chinese, they also have a large number of loanwords.

Modern psychologists and sociologists tend to believe that human consciousness is a cultural construct based on language, and that modern humans are a product of our own making. A key characteristic of modern humans is the constant internal monologue, with thought and social communication based entirely on language; even dreams are inseparable from language. The French existentialist Sartre pointed out long ago that modern humans have transcended the constraints of human nature, becoming free individuals whose lives are the result of continuous free choices, largely unrelated to innate genetic traits. In other words, human thought, and even commonly referred to qualities, are all related to language. In short: different languages cultivate different people, we just haven’t realized it yet.

It is said that the Taiwanese scholar Bo Yang once said: “Every Chinese person is a dragon, but when they come together, they become a worm; every foreigner is a worm, but when they come together, they become a dragon.” When people in rural areas were just learning to do business, my aunt described her impression like this: “One person can’t do business alone with little money. Several people partner up, and it’s okay at first, but after making some money, they start arguing and fighting, either stopping work or breaking up.” Foreigners, on the other hand, would go to court, arguing word for word, and then respect the court’s judgment to continue their cooperation. This habit of arguing word for word among foreigners dates back to ancient Greece, so their advanced language skills are not something that developed overnight. A friend of mine who worked in a department at a Beijing medical school for many years and went abroad in the 1980s told me, “We fight all the time, while they only have a big fight once a year when they divide the profits, and then everyone goes their own way.” There are many wealthy Chinese people in the world, but it is said that none of the giant corporations with branches all over the world are owned by Chinese. This is related to the development of secondary social culture and language.

Chinese pictographic characters make it very difficult, almost impossible, to directly absorb foreign words. For example, the word “economy,” introduced from Japanese, seems like a neologism coined by the Chinese themselves; the word “motorcycle” is also a hybrid of Chinese and English, and words like “motorcycle” are rare in Chinese. Even so, the two characters “motorcycle” are easily understood by Chinese speakers based on their literal meaning. In contrast, it’s much harder for English speakers to break down their foreign words into their constituent Chinese characters and understand them literally. For instance, the disease name “leukemia” is easily understood by even illiterate elderly people in rural China, who know it refers to a disease involving white blood cells. However, most English speakers have no intuitive understanding of “leukemia”; they remember it as a whole, only learning it’s a disease name and not some object after a doctor’s explanation, thus associating it with a specific illness. And “leukemia” is a foreign word in both Chinese and English.

Here’s a wild guess: Perhaps we could consider having students and newspapers start adding English words directly to Chinese articles, initially providing the corresponding Chinese translation in parentheses after the English word. I wonder if it’s worth a try? Of course, this is just a guess; if you disagree, feel free to ignore it.

To save you the trouble of taking it too seriously, here’s a joke: An American learning Chinese exclaimed in amazement, “Chinese is amazing! If you say the Chinese team beat the American team by a large margin, it means the American team lost. If you say the Chinese team
utterly defeated the American team, it still means the American team lost.” With such a magical Chinese language, we really don’t need to take it so seriously.

Many years ago, a foreign friend, upon hearing me speak simplistic and unclear Chinese, asked in surprise, “Then how do you Chinese litigate?” I replied, “Precisely because of this, we Chinese rarely litigate.” During the Qing Dynasty, with a population of 400 million, there were only 20,000 officials; the government only extended to the county level, and disputes were resolved according to the principles of natural life. That is to say, historically, the Chinese not only pursued a primitive form of freedom, but the vast majority also lived in rural areas resembling primitive societies, where the government was a distant, unreachable realm.

What would it be like if these hundreds of millions of peasants, living in a near-primitive society, suddenly entered a secondary society? They lack the precise language of a secondary society, as well as its legal knowledge and discipline. Worse still, they stubbornly view secondary society through the lens of their primitive society, demanding a utopian, egalitarian framework. In short, they would never accept a human prison like Westerners do—accepting restrictions on freedom while simultaneously emphasizing their own rights. They would form a massive, unruly mob, unwilling to readily accept any order based on bargaining.

Unfortunately, due to years of famine and war, history has occasionally pushed hundreds of millions of farmers into a secondary society, forming a mob of hundreds of millions of people.

A blood research institute in China moved to Sichuan during the Cultural Revolution to investigate the blood types of local residents. They discovered that the locals had migrated from the Hunan region. This fact seemed to be unknown to most. So when did they migrate there? Researching historical records revealed that the chaos and massacres during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties over two hundred years ago nearly wiped out the population. At that time, the area was deserted for thousands of miles, making it impossible for Qing troops to establish a foothold. Historians estimate that the population plummeted from over three million to tens of thousands, with more than 95% dying within a short period. The dynastic cycles in Chinese history often led to large-scale massacres.

Large-scale wars and famines after the Qin and Han dynasties often led to a sudden drop in population. For example, historical records show that the population was halved during the reigns of Emperor Wu of Han and Empress Wu Zetian. According to Chen Ping, such devastation with more than half the population dying occurred at least ten times in China over two thousand years, while it only happened once in Europe. The population of the Western Han Dynasty was 60 million, but by the beginning of the Three Kingdoms period, only 2% remained. [4]

This is the price of China’s historically underdeveloped secondary society, the price of an underdeveloped language and inaccurate thinking, and the price of clinging to original social ideals without accepting the reality of secondary society. Due to their long-term experience with secondary society, Westerners are more pragmatic and have accepted the idea of a “human prison,” negotiating their way out of prison to improve their living conditions. Historically, the Chinese lacked experience and understanding of secondary society, always viewing it through the lens of human nature, thus inevitably accepting the reality of a “human hell.” If the human world is hell, how can we expect our prisons not to be? We can’t entirely blame the Nanjing prison bureaucrats mentioned by Lu Xun. It is the Westerners who accept the reality of a “human prison,” only entering a real prison after committing a crime.

literature

[1] Li Yousheng (2009): Looking at life and the world from a different perspective: Chinese Taoism in the 21st century. Beijing: Thread-bound Book Bureau. pp. 154-156.

[2] Marvin Harris (1977): Cannibals and Kings. New York: Random House. p4-25.

[3] You Sheng (2011): On Confucius’s idea of aestheticizing human social life (revised July 2011). http://taoism21cen.com/Chinesechat/wenzhang24.html.

[4] Chen Ping (1979): The single small-scale peasant economy is the root cause of my country’s long-term turmoil and poverty. Guangming Daily, November 16, 1979, page 3.