Reminiscing about the past in my seventies, Part 0: The Beginning

Li Yousheng (November 2017)

Reflecting on my ordinary yet tumultuous life in my seventies, I realize that my emergence into the groundbreaking sociological theory of a two-tiered society during a period of despair in my later years was not accidental, but rather deeply intertwined with my life experiences. My earliest memory is a description of my father reading *Dream of the Red Chamber* to local farmers; the literary imagery evoked in those few words is a crystallization of emotional aesthetics, demonstrating my own innate sensitivity to it. If the history of human civilization is the destruction of the natural, primordial emotional aesthetics by man-made two-tiered societies, then my personal life story is a living example of this destruction.

Therefore, I also have a social responsibility to record my life. With the experience and vicissitudes of my seventies, I recall my childhood and youth, and analyze their meaning and causes from different perspectives. This may be of interest to contemporary people living in different worlds, and may help them develop a new understanding of life.

I spent my childhood in a rural area of Hebei, which was still in the early stages of society. My university years coincided with the left-leaning era before and after the Cultural Revolution. As a young man, I tried my best to emulate the workers, peasants, and soldiers. Like 600 million Chinese people, I spent the ten years of the Cultural Revolution chanting slogans. Amidst all the helplessness, all that increased was the tolerance of human hearts. To some extent, this was also the original intention of Mao Zedong’s utopian thought, which came from a peasant family, only without his violent promotion.

Having endured numerous hardships in Canada, reflecting on the first half of my life feels like stepping into a vast new world, giving rise to many different understandings and thoughts. Just as a nation’s civilization progresses at a secondary social level, an individual’s life is also limited by environment and material conditions, yet simultaneously offers a vast range of possible choices. In short, a person’s life, like a civilization, is a self-narrated novel. The various fantastical thoughts that emerge in my later years, much like the discussions surrounding *Dream of the Red Chamber* in Chinese intellectual circles over the past century, are constantly being renewed, broadening horizons, and presenting themselves to readers of different ages in contemporary times.

In ancient China, scholars had two main paths: entering the bureaucratic class through the imperial examinations, or becoming teachers at various levels, including writing books for scholars and intellectuals, and even passing on their knowledge to the next generation as well as to their relatives and friends. Today, scholars face a variety of professional choices, such as becoming engineers.

I started primary school in early 1950, but in my county, urban university graduates weren’t assigned to teach until the Great Leap Forward in 1958. Before that, rural primary and secondary schools were still run by local traditional scholars, including a few Qing Dynasty scholars. So, even though our textbooks were new, the teachers would still frequently try to sell us their traditional Chinese cultural ideas.

The phrase “The wedding night and the day of passing the imperial examination” is one example, but this line places the latter, representing a secondary societal achievement, after the former, representing romantic love, indicating that romantic love is the foundation and origin of human activity. This also reflects the lack of broad vision among traditional literati compared to their Western counterparts, making them prone to self-indulgent boasting. Phrases like “Going to the countryside in the morning, attending court in the afternoon” and “The best literature in the world comes from the Three Rivers region, the best literature from the Three Rivers region comes from my hometown, the best literature from my hometown comes from my younger brother, and my younger brother asks me to revise his writings” further exemplify this mentality.

If the “wedding night” powerfully represents humanity’s pursuit of happiness, then this saying also encapsulates the emotional and aesthetic essence of human existence: the combination of emotional love and aesthetic pleasure. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” illustrates that emotion comes first, followed by aesthetic appreciation; it is the persistence of emotion that allows one to see the beauty before them. From a biological survival perspective, love involves procreation and the propagation of offspring, making it a crucial and paramount matter. It is genetic biology that endows love with such a high degree of desire and supreme aesthetic appreciation.

Similarly, the growth of the next generation is crucial for the propagation of the species, so emotions and beauty are concentrated in human infants and toddlers. The round, smiling faces of infants and toddlers always contain an endearing charm, which is why Mencius famously said, “When people suddenly see a child about to fall into a well, they all feel a sense of alarm and compassion.”

By extension, we can understand the deliciousness of food that sustains life in the same way. Not only is the taste of food a kind of beauty, but the fruits and vegetables we like also have visual beauty. At least no food looks ugly or unbearable.

In short, the biological creator has molded our lives into the expression and pursuit of emotional aesthetics, which is the four cardinal virtues of Mencius: “The heart of compassion is the beginning of benevolence; the heart of shame and aversion is the beginning of righteousness; the heart of deference and yielding is the beginning of propriety; the heart of right and wrong is the beginning of wisdom.” (Mencius, Gongsun Chou I)

Zoologists tell us that young mammals, including humans, have a habit of playing. When we see children playing, who could bear to interrupt them? It’s their nature; they are enjoying life. But this play, a way for young mammals to enjoy life, actually has a biological significance: they are preparing for adulthood.

Among mammals, only humans retain this childhood play habit throughout their lives, including various sports, artistic activities, and even casual conversation. According to the polarization theory, this lifelong play is preparation for future secondary social life. Five thousand years of human civilization have transformed human play into a reality of secondary society. If we observe this, no other young mammal would dare to make its play a part in the realities of adult life. Five thousand years of human civilization is like a false start in a race—starting before the starting gun has even fired. Humans, of course, have suffered hardship and torment in this five-thousand-year history of premature development; they have at least transformed human play into monotonous labor and work.

We can also view the five-thousand-year history of human civilization as a history of escalating wars of self-destruction. The pressure to survive in the face of war led to the increasing complexity of human language and the rapid advancement of human knowledge and technology, creating conditions for a future ideal secondary society. No one would consider this five-thousand-year history of escalating wars of self-destruction as a deliberate human endeavor; it is an arrangement of God, an arrangement of the biological creator, an inherent aspect of the development of language and thought—that the uniquely human capacity for language and thought has the inherent potential to lead to self-destruction and accelerate cultural evolution.

The five thousand years of human civilization is precisely the kind of unmanageable nature of the secondary society that Lao Tzu worried about, and the result is that the secondary society fatally destroys the original society.

As readers will see from this book, my life’s twists and turns constantly demonstrate how secondary society has destroyed primary society, that is, how the current secondary society has destroyed the remaining values of primary society, destroyed the emotional aesthetics that humans are born with, and destroyed the benevolence advocated by Confucius.

Like my grandmother and father, I may have a talent for literature and painting, and I also possess an innate character with a deep sense of compassion, which drives me to be thoughtful. In social life, I can see the underlying colors and rhythms in the scenes and people around me.