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昨晚为学生们草就的一篇英文评论：
Stepping over someone else means challenging the authority?
Mr. Zhang’s request for his students to step over his body is based on following assumptions:
1. Encourage young students to challenge the authority. Since teachers in the classroom represent some kind of "authority", stepping over a teacher's lying body is a behavior that breaks the power of authority. The best outcome will be having someone to throw eggs or shoes at high powerful people like Obama, as the Americans do.
2. Encourage innovations. To be armed with “science spirit” to challenge authority will bring innovation, which China lacks due to many constraints of old tradition.
The action of Mr. Zhang is not a total surprise, giving his view of China and West cultures, in which of course China always represents the backward and stupid, while the West always the advanced and vigorous.
If Mr. Zhang’s action is only for self-entertainment, there will be probably no need for arguments as the following. But since he claims that his action is meant to encourage to promote high values as “bravery” and “innovation”, we as rational human beings have to step up to voice our opinions, not to let such irrational behaviors cause more confusion in an already confusing world.
Indeed there are a great number of things we Chinese have to learn from the West, in the past, at present, and in the future. But challenging authority through stepping over someone’s body is not one of them, I am afraid. Stepping over someone’s lying physical body is violating someone’s basic human rights, not his authority. Regardless of the West or the East, today people have respect to their privacy, which includes both mental and physical perspectives. Getting close to someone’s body, in a condescending way, even with this person’s own permission, simply violates generally accepted social norm, and is at least considered rude, inadequate, even insulting. If there are ever some so-called “universal values” of human being, this is definitely one of them. So this matter is not about authority, but about human decency.
Mr. Zhang also has a paradox for his students: if stepping over him means a success in challenging “authority”, the very act of obeying his order means following the authority’s instruction; on the other hand, refusing to step over him, exactly means challenging the teacher’s order so that not stepping over him is “challenging the authority”. Mr. Zhang is playing the role of authority while his orchestrated act of “challenging the authority” defies his own purpose. So we are really confused, whether Mr. Zhang has thought it through and really understood what he tried to express.
However, the message from Mr. Zhang is clear: Chinese as a nation should follow the West; even in a face-value, all the Westerners should be highly respected. I am afraid that this confuses rationality with blind superstition. The West as an advanced civilization started from the Industrial Revolution. But the ruthless, blind, and mindless pursuit of technology, comfort, and wealth has brought the world today to such a dismal edge: we don’t know how and whether the current civilization can survive as long as the older civilizations did. There is one consensus: we can no longer live as in the past century, in particular as in the last decades, because the human beings consume much more than the Earth can sustain. And the West should bear a part of the responsibilities of this situation.
By the way, except a few radicals, the Westerners usually do not throw eggs at their presidents. The democracy means to voice your opinion and at the same time to listen to other’s opinion. This does not include “challenging” others by violence. Violence will be checked, registered, recorded, and if serious enough, charged with felony.
[此贴子已经被作者于2015-5-15 20:52:00编辑过]
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发表于 2015-5-8 11:31:00
