in the social humanities, economics seemed to have the most like “science”, the closest at least “scientific.” This discipline strives to align with science in terms of logic, mathematics, physics, and empiricalization. It has gone the farthest and performed the most prominently. It is supported by hard data such as statistics, polls, quantification, and experiments, and various mathematical constructions. The model is pretty cool, people who don’t understand advanced mathematics can’t mix in the circle at all, and ordinary liberal arts students can’t read their literature. However, it is a pity that this discipline has been insensitive to the global financial tsunami and economic earthquake that began on Wall Street in the United States in 2008, and whistleblowers who issued early warnings are extremely rare. The American great gods who have almost included all the Nobel Prizes in economics of this century, although group buying and wholesale are generally rich in gold, each has outstanding achievements, on the whole, they have never come up with effective countermeasures to treat the symptoms and root causes of the industry. Critical trends such as hollowing out, rising inequality, and climate change. The two Nobel Prize winners were hired to trade on Wall Street, and even made a big hit in the foreign exchange and stock markets.
Compared with the old-school philosophy, history, anthropology… Isn’t this subject that has been armed with mathematics more like a low-energy subject?
Politics has become more and more like science. It has always assumed a cold attitude, being objective, rigorous, neutral, and rejecting feelings and values. However, after the practitioners have consumed astronomical academic funds, they almost unanimously asserted in 2016: Special It’s impossible for Lamp to be elected! Later, they watched that things were just like that. They saw the “Qin King Army” violently attacked the Congress in early 2021. Their suffocated elite response only published an open letter jointly signed by more than 2,000 scholars, claiming that they “just ask for it.” Understand politics and not participate in politics”, called for the defense of democracy and the expulsion of the then president, and then the matter—yes, the matter. What did you “understand” such a painless half-paper chicken soup text? The result of understanding is nothing but a greasy and omnipotent “democracy” label. Can’t they speak more wisdom than street vendors or beggars?
Psychology is not much better. It has increasingly relied on pills, instruments, laboratories, databases, and fuzzy mathematics. Its theoretical frontiers have advanced to the depths of neurons, genes, human-machine systems, and brain maps. At the same time, when the World Health Organization announced that the number of severe depression worldwide has skyrocketed, it will become the second leading cause of death in ten to fifteen years (2019); when the French National Health Institute’s Desmurget (Michel Desmurget) The report, with data from more than a dozen countries, proves that the average human IQ has actually declined across generations for the first time (2020); where is the psychological “learning”? Can you tell us the countermeasure and the way out? With the industrialization of psychology, does the increasingly popular paid business of psychological diagnosis and treatment prove the success or failure of this discipline?
A lot of the status quo of social and humanistic “science” is like this.
This is not just the status quo of a country. The whole world seems to be facing the same dilemma with different degrees and characteristics, and facing the same elite crisis.
Perhaps, the research of Gong Gong Zhugong is not useless. Mosquitoes are also meat, and steel rods are also money. Numerous local discoveries and innovations accumulated in the long river of human civilization can be expected to help the growth of a new civilization. It’s just that, generally speaking, and in terms of actual results, the “scientization” of these disciplines, that is, the approach and imitation of science, is still far from the expected goal, at least not yet epoch-making in the fields of economics, political science, and psychology. Newton and Einstein did not effectively perform the duties of scientists to “collate facts, find laws, and draw conclusions” (Darwinian) in the face of major human difficulties and challenges.
Does the increasingly popular paid business of psychological diagnosis and treatment prove the success or failure of this discipline?
Where did they deviate, distanced, or even deviated from “science”?
Or, have we misunderstood “science” itself from the beginning?
A scientific trough
Science (Science), commonly known as “Mr. Sai” in China, refers to the modern natural sciences since the 17th century in the strict lower limit. Kazakh) [1] a series of knowledge results. Here, as Reichenbach pointed out: one is rationalism and the other is empiricism. The confluence of the two waves, namely the simultaneous development of mathematical tools and experimental tools, and the combination of deduction and induction, constitute the “scientific” Mature morphology and clear boundaries.
Einstein had a similar view. In 1953, he wrote to a man named JE Switzer, talking about “the development of Western science is based on two great achievements”: the first is “derived from ancient Greek Euclidean geometry”. Formal logic system”; the second is “relying on systematic experiments to discover the possibility of causality since the Renaissance”. He said that “human beings actually made such a discovery, (this) is amazing.” [2]
A manned spacecraft landed on the moon in 1969, but in the following half a century, human footprints could not be extended further
In this sense, as pointed out by many predecessors, science is a specific product since modern times, and is not equivalent to “knowledge” (otherwise all knowledge of traditional artists and philosophers can be counted as “science”, especially in TCM theory. ); Nor is it equal to “correct” (Ptolemy’s geocentric theory and Copernicus’s heliocentric theory will not be considered “correct” in future generations; thermodynamics, vitality, etc. will certainly be the same in the future). Science only means a new type of knowledge production mechanism and process that is not omnipotent and will not end. However, this is exciting enough. As the core of the European Enlightenment, this kind of science, that is, the twin engines of mathematics and experience (deduction and induction), generates power through fate and cultivation, and contributes to an unprecedented global explosion of knowledge and brings about the mode of production. The earth-shaking changes in life styles, especially the material changes, have sent mankind into modern civilization. Even today, too many people can’t help but equate “science” with “knowledge” and then with “correct”. One word is a collection of thousands of favors, unlimited offsides, unlimited upgrades, and they regard it as an artifact that can solve all problems. .
This is not incomprehensible.
——Even though this is similar to the attitude of theologians, that is, the attitude that many scientists have strongly opposed: thinking that the emperor (ke) (xue) can handle everything with arrogance.
Liberal arts are swarming with science, feeling that they don’t understand “mathematics” and feel guilty, so they have to “experiment” all the time. Such a trend of “scientization” happened under this circumstance. This may be fine. Mutual learning between arts and sciences is purely normal. In fact, this is also expected to overcome the common emptiness, illusion, fragmentation, ambiguity, preference, arbitrariness, and improperness in many liberal arts writings, as well as the cleverness or slickness that relies too much on metaphors-out of professional habits, scientists Most opposed to doing so.
However, it is not so easy to really understand a little science, really learn the spirit and methods of science, and use it to enhance rather than weaken the strengths of the liberal arts itself. It is not so easy to overcome rather than pack the weaknesses of the liberal arts itself. For example, the not-so-good news is that the sciences that liberal arts students are passionately pursuing—especially basic sciences—have unfortunately stagnated in the 20th century. Interested people have discovered that in 1970, the first Boeing 747 took eight hours to fly from New York to London, and fifty years later, the time for similar flights has not been shortened. In 1969, a manned spacecraft landed on the moon, but in the next half a century, human footprints could not be stretched farther, and space probes were also in qualitatively updated. For example, rockets still rely on fossil fuels. In 1927, the Lexington aircraft carrier had a top speed of 33 knots. However, the nuclear-powered Charles de Gaulle, which was put into active service more than 70 years later, reduced its weight and had a speed of only 27 knots. In the 1960s, many people believed that interstellar travel could be achieved in their lifetime, but now even their grandchildren can only use game consoles to go to Mars. In the 1950s, the professor told the students that mankind would achieve controllable nuclear fusion within 50 years. Clean energy, artificial suns, submarine cities, and car flying to the sky were not dreams, but now the students told the students, wait another 50 years. , Maybe, maybe, probably, it was aliens who remotely locked our brains (netizens’ words)…the
list is endless and confusing. Looking back at 1915 (the general theory of relativity was proposed), 1927 (the completion of quantum mechanics), and 1928 (the publication of “The Theory of Genes”), the most important cornerstones of modern science came together in a short period of nearly two decades. The peaks rose one after another, and it was like cutting melons and vegetables—what a glorious era of hurricanes, what happened to the later humans? The school system is getting longer and longer, the funds are increasing, the team is getting bigger and the papers are getting thicker, but a hundred years later, the scientific community is still living in the shadow of the predecessor giants, even with some branches and leaves. Many people have spent their entire lives trying to win the millimeter level on the track.
On April 27, 1900, a physics master announced to European scientists at a report meeting at the Royal Institute that physics has come to an end. “Dark clouds”-this still refers to the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, and refers to the split stalemate formed by the two. In 2011, American economist Taylor Cowen asserted in his book “The Great Stagnation” that people had already picked up “all the low-hanging fruits” of science. In 2013, “Nature” published a more pessimistic article: “After Einstein, Scientific Geniuses Extinct”. American quantum physicist Christopher Search believes: “Theoretical particle physics is definitely a dead subject.” “There has been no fundamental new development in our understanding of physics for decades.” One of the evidence is: “The textbooks used by postgraduates today are exactly the same as I used when I was a graduate student… If a fundamental breakthrough is made in a certain field, don’t you think that textbooks will be outdated and must be replaced by new ones?” [3] So
easy, The first opportunity finally appeared. In 2011, the European “superluminal neutrino” experimental team (Oprah) was overjoyed and announced that they had captured this particle twice, breaking Einstein’s thesis that the speed of light is the limit speed. The global scientific community is shocked: Obviously, this subversion of science will be beyond imagination, and it almost means the collapse of the law of cause and effect, and the time machine, time tunnel, etc. are within reach. But then, scientists from all walks of life gathered on the snow-capped Gran Sasso Mountain in Italy. More than 100,000 people watched the experimental site day and night through video. In the end, they only waited for a dumbfounding oolong: the two French and Swiss nationals. The team leader took the blame and resigned because the “super speed of light” had not been achieved. The two previous false successes of the team were nothing but a drop in the chain-“the optical cable between the GPS receiver and the computer was loose.” As a result, an Italian colleague laughed at himself: That’s right, we can’t break a basic law of nature-in Italy, nothing is punctual. [4]
It seems that the textbooks of graduate students still cannot be updated.
Is this the momentary silence before the birth of new science, or is it hopeless that science has escaped from the two iron plates of micro and macro? Nobody knows. Of course, the general closure of basic science does not hinder the rapid development of applied science and applied technology in recent decades, and even rapid development and blossom everywhere. After all, people have ushered in antibiotics, televisions, computers, the Internet, nuclear power, space telescopes, artificial intelligence… All of these are dazzling in the media, and they are fully defining new formats and lives-but call it “science” “Revolution” makes people hesitate. It is obviously more appropriate to use terms such as “technical revolution” and “technological prosperity”. Isn’t it? Technology benefits from science—especially its basic and core principles. It is always a beat slower than the latter. It is just the conduction, application, derivation, materialization and release of potential of science. It is late on the big tree of science. Come and bear fruit.
When people enjoy the fruit, they hope to ensure the vigorous vitality of the root system of the fruit tree, and to ensure the germination of the next round of seedlings, probably will not be an unnecessary concern.
Rational tools are not as good as before
Where does human knowledge come from?
A Chinese person might answer like this: Seeking truth from facts, seeking fame from the truth, learning from things, combining knowledge and action, and being able to catch mice is a good cat. Practice is the only criterion for testing truth… But this set of practice in the Chinese tradition is close to that of the West. “Empiricalism” was basically unworkable in the mainstream academic circles of ancient Greece.
On the contrary, although ancient Greek scholars did not reject practice, they did not think that practice was a big deal—perhaps those religious elites and aristocratic elites were not good at things like going out to work and sweat. In their eyes, “true” (true) is higher than “fact”. It is the inherent logic of the world and an abstract system based on mathematics. Human beings do not rely on observation, but on insight to step into that universal, absolute, and sacred axiomatic mystery—for this reason, it doesn’t matter if you work behind closed doors all day long.
There is a story with root number 2. Pythagoras was a great geometer in ancient Greece. He first proved that in a right-angled triangle, “the sum of the squares of two right-angled sides is equal to the square of the hypotenuse”. This is called the “Pythagoras theorem”, also known as the “Pythagoras theorem” or the “Hundred Bull Theorem”-because his team once slaughtered a hundred cows to celebrate the birth of this great theorem. Unexpectedly, his student Sibos discovered a suspicious point: if a square has a side length of 1, then according to the theorem, the length of its diagonal can only be the root of 2. However, this is neither an integer nor a ratio of integers. In the year when the concept of irrational numbers had not yet come into being, it was completely a monster. Pythagoras was also puzzled by this, guarding a tangible line, faced with a logical loophole, horrified and desperate to live. In order to prevent the entire axiom system from collapsing, he became angry, issued a ban, and severely punished the school’s “rebellious”, he did not hesitate to send a group of thugs out to chase, tied the guy who fled in a hurry, and threw it into the sea to feed the fish. This means that if the problem cannot be solved, the person who raised the problem will be solved; if the facts contradict the axioms, then the facts will be killed!
What are the facts? Can facts apply everywhere? In their view, observation and experience have repeatedly deceived us. Think about it, folding sticks in the water, mirages, etc., are all phantoms of fact that almost deceive people’s eyes like this. Then the root number 2 must be too!
The Pythagoras school is with this theoretical fierceness, a kind of obsession and a tendon, no matter what, it is straightforward, but it is special in deduction-this is the other side of the matter. From “All things are number” (Pythagoras), to “Mathematics is the highest form of all knowledge” (Plato), to “The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics” (Galileo), to “All science can finally be transformed into mathematics” (Leibniz), to “Mathematics is the queen of science” (Gaussian)… European mathematics fanatics emerge in endlessly, creating ancient civilizations such as Egypt, India, and China. An ideal and type of knowledge that has never existed before. Influenced by the habit, Aristotle explores the various essential attributes in Metaphysics: human beings are human, cats are cats, trees are trees, fires are fire, triangles are triangles, even universal and concrete. Each has its own “sex”, and nature and ideals have their own “sex”. These “sex”, or these “beings” (Being), are very strange to Chinese people, they are very twisty, and they are too brain-burning to translate accurately into Chinese. [5] In fact, the author just wants to compile a book of mathematical axioms, sweeping away the abstract essence of the world, and letting them emerge from the imperfect “fact” appearance.
I have to admit that this kind of quasi-theologian stubbornness has made a powerful mathematical tool a long history. When the practitioners in the East had arithmetic, they were generally enough to deal with such common tasks as spring planting and autumn harvest, and the management of the country and the people. However, the rationalists in Europe gained mathematics—including Euclidean geometry, irrational numbers, and logarithms. Law, imaginary numbers, calculus, etc., provide an important foundation for the flourishing of “science”.
Once it merges with the empiricism that originated in Britain and relies on each other, it will become even more powerful. It will only be a matter of time before the eruption of the Newtonian era emerges. People either collect knowledge by experiment and organize it by mathematics; or predict knowledge by mathematics and then use experiments to confirm it. It seems that everything goes smoothly, whichever leg is in front will do. Even looking at a certain node in isolation, sometimes knowledge can skip practice, leaving practice behind, and happening “a priori” in the scholar’s secret room in the way of prophecy—that’s how God did it? The story of Neptune is like this: Someone first calculated its position in space. When the astronomer set up a telescope and pointed it at that position in the night sky, he found a small white spot, which was almost the same as the estimated position. The story of the periodic table of chemical elements is also like this: Mendeleev arranged and deduced the elements according to the size of the atomic mass, and found some blank grids with prior data but no evidence, and these elements (gallium, scandium) that were not yet discovered at that time , Ge, etc.), the incident was discovered as a result, and the practitioners were arrested one by one.
Sometimes knowledge can skip practice and leave practice behind. This is the story of the periodic table of chemical elements.
For this reason, Einstein talked about the standard of truth in his book “Self-report” in his later years. In addition to “external verification”, that is, the practical test supported by the empiricist, he also added another “inner completeness”, including logic. The simplicity and beauty of (such as the E=mc? he can’t put it down)-this is actually a continuation of the rationalist tradition, and deeply miss the rigor and purity that the deductive method always requires.
”God doesn’t roll dice.” Another famous quote from him shows that he believes in the law of causality and believes that the world is the kind of precision clock in Descartes’s mind.
This is mentioned because the good luck of rationalism in the Newtonian era did not last long. Once encountering the impact of modern science, the metaphor of “clocks and watches” gradually becomes outdated.
May wish to review it patiently. Originating from ancient Greek rationalism, a universal, absolute, and sacred world causal order, it first collided with dialectics in Hegel and others, and fell into a puzzle of proposition, antithesis, and combination. Formal logic gave way to dialectics. Logic, “self-contradiction” has since gained legitimacy. Then, it collided with the theory of probability in Bayes et al., inevitable logic gave way to probable logic, and almost all equal signs became abbreviated equal signs, and “almost” and “probably yes” have since been legitimate. Later, it hit the “law of incompleteness” in Godel and others, and found that the consistency and completeness of the axioms cannot be achieved at the same time, and the self-consistent and corresponding proofs of mathematics cannot be achieved at the same time. The seemingly perfect logical system has always been Being in a sick state can’t help but wake people up and frustrate. In the end, it was blown up by the split between Euclidean geometry and non-Euclidean geometry. It was discovered that in Gauss, Riemann and others, the truth is public and reasonable, and the mother-in-law is reasonable. This truth and the other truth are actually incompatible with each other. The variant of unified logic is multiple logic. It has also been dragged into a quagmire by quantum mechanics in Planck, Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrödinger and others, and discovered that the microcosm at the subatomic level is different from the conventional world. Almost everything is “unpredictable.” A is also B, whether there is or not. What is the random conclusion depends only on the observation methods and observation tools people use. Therefore, the objectivity of causal cognition is drawn from the bottom.
Even Einstein, a firm believer in the law of causality—if not at the empirical level, at least at the hypothetical level, also poses a potential threat to himself. The so-called cause and effect can only be the cause and effect, and it only makes sense on the time axis. However, precisely according to his theory of relativity, time and space are inseparable and all change in motion. The moving ruler is relatively shorter; the moving clock is relatively slow, and when the speed of light is reached, time disappears. This is equivalent to saying that all causal chains will collapse at that time, and will be upside down when the speed of light exceeds the speed of light. An old man in the country might be terrified by this: In this way, wouldn’t people die first and then get sick? Grandson will be born before his son?
Obviously, to appease the old man, I am convinced that this kind of horror is unnecessary. There is only one thing: declaring that the time machine is boring science fiction, declaring that Einstein is the end of physics, and the judgment that the speed of light is the limit speed will never be shaken. All latecomers have to give up as soon as possible, not like the “Oprah” team, and then go to the speed of light idea.
People will agree with this?
Many people cannot falsify this. Everything is still full of doubts, which constitutes a major difficulty in knowledge production at the moment. In other words, as one of the twin engines of scientific voyages, rationalism seems to have been overdrawn and cooled, and the limited boundaries of mathematical tools are becoming more obvious, and the role of guiding and supporting experimental tools is far less than yesterday, even if—as mentioned earlier— —The waste heat of the mathematical revolution is still hot on the other side of the applied technology, including becoming a new fashion in some liberal arts research fields, including the “digital economy” initiating a wave of innovation, “big data” and “cloud computing” surging, algorithm engineers and unicorns Animal enterprises have taken away the most lucrative annual salary or profit in the industry.
Practice has changed in many ways
Einstein’s subsequent scientific development seems to rely mainly on empirical routes and empirical methods. Biology, which is expected to become the newest protagonist of science, is said to be so. Cutting-edge research on black holes, dark matter, and Higgs particles is mostly based on massive observations and experiments, relying on scientists to work hard, rub their heels on top, find needles in a haystack, and gather sand into towers—the kind of prophet who discovered Neptune The miracle is very rare.
This is actually a great appetite for Chinese intellectual traditions. The Chinese ancients paid attention to learning first, and they invented the “Four Great Inventions” only by relying on arithmetic, and they also invented the results of Chinese medicine with weaker arithmetic factors. The Chinese have won few Nobel Prizes in science, but the world’s largest number of science and engineering university graduates, the largest number of technology patent applications, the largest number of scientific and technological papers published, and the fastest-growing scale of new technology industries… are all surging. The Chinese people’s pragmatic style of emphasizing application and evidence, in some people’s eyes, is just a continuum of “practical rationality” (Li Zehou’s words) or “pragmatism” (an Lezhe language) in the Confucian tradition. In a sense, China’s intellectual culture is far from European, but close to Britain and the United States. The British Bacon praised the “Three (Four) Great Inventions.” ). When the rationalists stepped down from the altar, the British and American empirical schools were more willing to emphasize that the geometry of Pythagoras actually originated from the construction sites of ancient Egypt where water conservancy and pyramids were built. cover. The Chinese are most likely to applaud this statement.
There is nothing wrong with it. Practice is indeed the mother of truth, even in Einstein’s case, it is also one of the “only two” standards for testing truth. Just as another engine in the scientific voyage, since entering modern times, practice has also faced new failures.
Can at least pay attention to the following three points:
1. The practice blind
so to speak, previous observations and experiments are relatively simple, easy to operate, cost less, but also more personal. Archimedes can discover the principle of buoyancy with a basin of bath water. Newton could conceive the theory of gravity by relying on an apple that fell from a branch. Gassanti was on a sailing ship and dropped a stone from the top of the mast to test the authenticity of the geocentric theory… At that time, scientists were like grass-roots “minke”, mostly single-handedly, doing it in a small amount of trouble. Asking outside the university, opening up territory everywhere in the wasteland of knowledge.
In contrast, as the daily environment and scientific discoveries at the routine level are close to saturation, the easy-to-bite bones have been gnawed away, and scientific research no longer takes meters as units, grams as units, and seconds as units, but points towards Asia. The atomic level of the micro, the other end points to the deep space interstellar macro. At this time, the cost of observation and experimentation has risen sharply, the “Minke” style will no longer work, and the vast majority of smart people and institutions are excluded from opportunities. Only one or two countries can do the large-scale spherical radio “Sky Eye”. A high-energy particle collider has an investment of tens of billions or even hundreds of billions of dollars at every turn. Even the United States and Japan can’t afford it. Who can play it? Therefore, Yang Zhenning suggested that China should not do it at all. When supporting conditions such as high budgets, high equipment, high salaries, high-tech industries, and high-quality education are absent, many innovations in developing countries are almost impossible to talk about, and they are almost “limited by poverty”. The science universities in many countries are almost luxury goods, so they emphasize literature over science, and even abandon literature to join the military. It is really a helpless choice for students. You don’t have to think about the Nobel Prize too early.
In an era of market economy, without extensive and reasonable regulation by public power, many practices always lack support. For the purpose of profit, investors will only favor applied science and applied technologies that have short cycles, quick results, and purchasing power. They would rather spend a lot of money on KitKat’s prosperous technology than invest in desertification, farmland soil restoration, and endemic diseases in Africa. ;I would rather “cottage”, “take soup” and “do downstream” and pick up some corner business everywhere, rather than take a look at the long-term cold bench of basic science and possible investment black holes. The “military-industrial complex” usually becomes the priority input sector for the strategic dividend. According to the same logic of interest, as early as 1976, half of the medical expenditure in the United States was used to care for the last 60 days of the patient’s life, plus another large chunk was used for impotence and hair loss. The related research and development was obviously not for large-scale poverty. Prepared by the country and the poor. [6] The world’s R&D income for pets, cosmetics, and luxury goods, as long as one percent is spent, saves a little bit between the teeth, and it is more than enough to train more than 40 poverty-stricken countries in poverty alleviation skills.
If things go on like this, knowledge is tied to benefits. A part of knowledge production, that is, zero profit or uncertain profit, may be urgently needed by humans, and even the vital part of the entire knowledge ecology may be squeezed by the market and withdraw from people’s interests. Vision.
An imbalance of knowledge is not easy to remedy.
The observations and experiments of predecessors are relatively simple, such as Archimedes discovered the principle of buoyancy
2. Practice narrow path
a senior observe the moment of life, perhaps too modern people will feel incompetent in the finer points of the more modern system of the division of labor, can only work hard in a small node production chain, can only be partial only, They can only be human-shaped parts. Putting them in adjacent processes is a waste of talent. For example, the doctor of stomach in the hospital cannot replace the doctor of the intestine. This is far worse than before: most doctors are general practitioners, and most teachers are “general” teachers (such as integrating literature, history, philosophy, or mathematics, physics and chemistry), and even a farmer may be a “general” farmer (farming, forestry, animal husbandry, fishery, etc.) Get it right), and so on.
Modern people may be even more stupid when they return home. Even white-collar workers with a high degree of education may not be able to cook a bowl of noodles, wash a piece of clothing, and do not know how to repair tables or go out to dig herbs. They were spoiled by various “dumb” household automatic devices and developed e-commerce delivery services, and became “giant babies”. Their bottoms often took root on the sofa, and they used travel, gossip, and emoticons to spend their leisure time. I thought I knew how to take pictures by manipulating a point-and-shoot camera.
Since the post-industrial era, knowledge
Professional segmentation is an inevitable trend of knowledge growth, which is conducive to improving labor efficiency. Isn’t that the way it should be? What’s more, the life is better. The rich don’t need to do everything by themselves. If you lose a lot of outdated knowledge and abilities, you can lose it. However, if their practical scope is too narrow and the “partialized” professional state is superimposed on the “atomized” mental state-some kind of individualistic narcissism and autism, they are likely to lose the ability to step out of themselves and lose their right The interest and understanding of parents, relatives, neighbors, friends, servants, collaborators, and the general public have lost their experience in hardship, anxiety, affection, betrayal, despair, struggle, hypocrisy, sacrifice, and lack of being indispensable as a group life Social experience. If this is the case, the “giant babies” will really not grow up.
If there is not enough experience, there must be degeneration and desensitization of sensory functions. Just as equatorial residents have no sense of the word “ice and snow”, even if they can read it through a dictionary, they still have no sense of skin, nerves, or emotions. At this point, any excellent culture and ideas will not easily integrate with their minds, let alone resonance. The sub-cultural trend of “TittyTainment” (TittyTainment) will emerge as the times require. Instead, find the most suitable growth soil and find the capital to attract money. Entertainment is king, excitement is king, funny is everything. Because of blindly accommodating the audience’s shallow understanding, various “magic dramas” can become hot dramas, and “dog blood” and “chicken soup” are the easiest to make headlines. Even if historical and political topics are occasionally involved, a few popular labels are enough. They slapped their mouths down. Those who believe will always believe, those who do not believe will never believe; those who remember will always remember, those who don’t want to remember will never remember. When you encounter unpleasant opinions, you must step on them when you have the conditions, and you must step on the conditions when you don’t have the conditions-things are as simple as that!
This talks about literature and art and current theory, and it comes back to the knowledge of liberal arts. It is said that “Nipple Fun” is based on the conspiracy of Cold War opponents, deliberately creating snacks for entertainment, intended to fill the minds of the weak and eliminate the will and ability of those who resist vested interests. In fact, even if there is no external input, even if it is not as worrying as some other people, it can blame parents, schools, and society for the “indulgence” and “overprotection”. For deeper reasons, as long as the aforementioned conditions and trends remain unchanged, as long as People’s estrangement, insulation, and ignorance of social practice are increasing. It may be difficult for these people to leave the cultural nipple—there are both knowledge imbalance (mostly manifested in science) and knowledge distortion (mostly manifested in liberal arts).
The most common phenomenon is that some college students are actually fooled by small rascals, some masters or doctors are taken by campus loans, high consumption, fake online dating, dreams of going abroad, success studies, cult organizations needlessly devour their lives, and tragedies are seen in the news. Their high academic scores and their long Internet age are not enough to get rid of the ancient curse of “failing and stunned,” and they are not enough to exchange the basic judgment that even the ancients do not lack, and they are unable to improve their mature and normal personality.
3. Practice floating shadow
continuation of the previous topic, which refers to the modern light lines are particularly vulnerable to heavy know to know to act, to make their practice more and more superficial, knowledge production “off the real to the imaginary.”
That is to say, the times of Newton and Einstein were normal. Capitalism stimulated productivity and knowledge mostly served industry. However, since the post-industrial era, just as finance has played an internal cycle, knowledge has begun to serve itself. The two major industries of finance (speculation) and knowledge (self-fertilization) have constituted the double “virtuality” of new capitalism.
At least that is the case.
Reading is of course a good thing. Especially in ancient times, transportation and communication tools were underdeveloped, people’s activity radius was small, and knowledge was mostly personal and direct knowledge. If you want to know the taste of pears, you must eat a bite yourself. The amount of knowledge generated from this is obviously not enough, very inadequate. People urgently need to supplement indirect knowledge with books, and they cannot but envy “the talents do not go out and know everything about the world.” Although Zhuangzi did not particularly trust books, he warned in “Autumn Water”: “Those who can speak, the roughness of things; those who can be conspicuous, the essence of things”; Lu You has always been wary of books, and in “Winter Night Reading Show” “Zi Yu” sighed: “It is only on paper that I will feel shallow, knowing this matter must be practiced”; but after all, indirect knowledge was extremely scarce at that time, and scholars were all treasures. The battalion commander, there is a clerical officer who can read and read commands and maps. It is quite rare and important.
The turning point of change came soon. The illiteracy rate in China has dropped from 80% 70 years ago to 4%, and the gross enrollment rate of colleges and universities is close to 50%. This means that printing presses and network servers have become hot, and indirect knowledge called “information” has grown wildly. And explosions, in turn, squeeze and replace direct knowledge on a large scale. For many people, “knowledge” is equivalent to book knowledge, “good education” is equivalent to complete academic qualifications, and “knowledge is power” is no different from diplomas that are worth and right to speak. One hundred books produce one hundred and one books, and one thousand books produce one thousand and one books. The chain of self-reproduction and secondary and regeneration of knowledge is unstoppable. The branches of knowledge are also extremely complex, so that the two doctors of the same department may be deaf to each other, and they cannot understand each other’s concepts because of the different branches. From pre-kindergarten to post-doctorate, from snot-baby to white-occurrence, many people have been studying for half or most of their lives. If they enter colleges or the media, they are more likely to become lifelong “bookworms”-this situation is particularly common in the liberal arts. It is also particularly worrying.
Is there anything wrong with the book? Therefore, being able to be knowledgeable, draw insights, brainstorm, and fully absorb the achievements of predecessors and others is not the greatest advantage of human IQ improvement and civilization prosperity?
This is true. However, in the American movie “Mind Catcher” (1997), a talented scholar, a rebellious son of heaven, was shocked by a passage from his teacher:
You never left Boston, did you? So when you talk about art, you only know a lot about Michelangelo, about his political ambitions, about his story with the Pope, about his sexual orientation and all of his works. right? But you don’t know the smell of the Sistine Chapel, and you have never stood there for a long time gazing at the beautiful ceiling.
If I talked about war, you would say Shakespeare’s words: Go to the battlefield together, dear friend, and so on. But you have never been close to war, never put your friend’s head on your knees, watch him exhale one last breath, and call you desperately for help.
If you talk about women, you will probably say the fallacy of personal preference. How many times have you been in bed, and so on, but you can’t tell the happiness of waking up next to a woman. You may quote a sonnet, but you have never seen the fragility of a woman, nor have you seen her knocking down your eyes, making you feel that the angels of God come for you and take you out of hell Rescued. You also don’t understand true loss, because only those who love others more than themselves can appreciate it. Maybe you dare not love that way?
…If you
don’t know how short the book is, there will be the book-students in the above-mentioned movie, and there will be “the greatest enemy of knowledge-not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge” (Hawking).
The biggest difference between these large numbers of “knowing molecules” (netizens’ words) and real intellectuals is that the former lacks on-site feelings and experience, and lacks practical gravity and activity. Interviews, seminars, visits, inspections, internships…Of course, they are also practice, which is better than nothing, but if you do not do it enough and in depth, it will not be enough to activate, digest, modify, and supplement indirect knowledge—not to mention development. The perpetual motion theory of empty heads seems to be meticulous, even in line with the law of conservation of energy. It is useless to do it. That’s how it came about. In the liberal arts, the “learning of the tongue” instead of the “learning of the mind and body” (Wang Yangming) also came from this way. The author once said in an article: a person who has never done any business is teaching economics, a person who has never participated in any actual combat is teaching warfare, and a person who has never been a reporter or editor actually gave a lecture. Journalism, a person who has neither been an official nor rebellious actually controls politics, and a guy with a bad personal character may publish ethics papers again and again… Do you believe that? If they continue to learn and copy their knowledge, people will feel so relieved?
Reading is half-education at best. The current global education system, which has been suffering from ever-increasing abuses, has lasted for hundreds of years, and it has become more entrenched by the shaping and upgrading of new capitalism, requiring a major physical examination and a major surgery. This includes designing and launching a new system that regards seniority and education as equally important, and encourages both teachers and students to accumulate seniority in difficult positions, seniority in research and development, and seniority in multiple positions, so as to rebuild the talent evaluation standard system and greatly enhance the status of practice. Fundamentally get rid of the absurd closed loop composed of exam-oriented education and essay career. And so on, maybe it is the more fundamental reform in all social reform agendas—at least one of them. The problem is that various vested interest groups cannot accept this. Diploma factories, thesis business, etc. have fed them enough to make a good life, and the hierarchization and monopoly of knowledge interests have to be strengthened. Even if “spending money to buy a page” is seen in many places nowadays, it is not surprising and shameless, even if the “SCI database”, “JCR report” and “impact factor” are full of tricks, it is just the business experience of a private company, and many people in the industry know it. Ming, but it will still be regarded as the super baton of the international scientific research evaluation system. [7] A large number of educators, academic businessmen, media businessmen, and knowledge bureaucrats parasitizing the existing system are no longer accustomed to letting practitioners, especially those at the bottom, break into their exclusive halls with sweat and hands.
Whether it’s “walking thousands of miles” or “life is education” (Tao Xingzhiyu), these kinds of words will also be spoken by them, and they will appear in some speeches. However, its meaning is likely to be understood as a travel bill, or a look at a documentary on a tablet computer. If it can become an image project for social welfare, it will be even more commendable if it is embellished in twos and threes on the resume.
In this way, many enterprises and institutions often feel that no one is available, but more and more college students are afraid of the society, unwilling to graduate from a safe campus, and unwilling to end the days of “homeboys” and “hometown girls”. The rift between education and society has widened, and the creditworthiness of knowledge has been declining. “I like people who have no education!” Trump’s slogan catered to the wariness and anger of a considerable part of the lower class towards the elite, and helped him reap the halo of the second-highest voted politician in history. American scholar Nicholas Carnes conducted statistics and comparisons with 228 countries and regions around the world, and found that among politicians, those with higher average academic qualifications have worse governance performance than those with lower academic qualifications. [8] Even for McKinsey, the world’s largest human resources consulting and management company, the boss’s employment standards are firstly hungry, that is, never rich second-generation or official second-generation; second, street smart: That is to say, you must be a nerd with a high degree of education. [9]
Such signs are usually flashed past by the mainstream media. Needless to say, the subject of practice means the subject of the people and the value of serving the people, which will seriously offend some hidden political motives and ethical prohibitions. Many people in the media are tacitly aware of this and will not venture to take risks.
The bottom must be grounded, and the top must be connected to the sky
The United States in 2020 is startling every step of the way. Some people who came to China’s “Cultural Revolution” may still be familiar with it. Many cities are smashing statues and signboards (breaking the “four olds”), demonstrations continue to attack the government and parliament (cannonball headquarters), burning cars, robbing shops, and shooting violence are just as they say (文攻武卫) ), the old accounts of racial oppression and the current investigation of secret communication with Russia (drilling into class enemies), family members are politically opposed and publicly reported (different from relatives, routes), and even basic epidemic prevention measures are regarded as political traps ( I would rather capitalist disease than socialist medical treatment)…The angry man almost replayed a historical drama in another place.
Comparing the two, a Chinese girl wearing a floral dress was accused of being a legacy of the bourgeoisie, and an old Western woman wearing a mask was accused of betraying liberal beliefs. In China, there was no polarization between the rich and the poor, there was no immigrant group, there was no specific conflict of interest, and it was so fierce that it seemed hard to understand. When this kind of out-of-control appears in places where the economy and education are highly developed, in the “country on the top of the mountain” and “God’s chosen people”, it is also a misunderstanding. It can be seen that, whether in the East or the West, in poor or rich countries, the results of human rational enlightenment should not be overestimated. The dogmatization and extreme out-of-control of ideology can crush people’s IQ and gentleness at any time, and collective fainting is a long-lasting hidden danger.
In fact, ideology is a normal tool for ideological competition, which is mostly the case in its early stages; once it enters a state of dogmatization and extremeization, it will slide into irrationality, usually manifested as fanaticism, rigid thinking, divorced from reality, ignoring facts, and asking for help. Fake news has become a kind of God Lord who can’t help but say and can’t offend.
The dogmatization and extreme out-of-control of ideology can crush people’s IQ and gentleness at any time
Deng Xiaoping put forward “no arguing” in the early stage of reform and opening up. It was not because there was no thinking about doctrine, but because scholars quarreled and made mistakes. spirit. As soon as the god master enters the battle, he can only smash to the end, he can only lift the table, smash the place, and the white knives enter the red knives out. Then, to seal the password is not a solution, a pragmatic expediency.
In principle, Marx also refused to give in, but he declared at least five times that he was “not a Marxist”. See “The Complete Works of Marx and Engels” Chinese Edition, Vol. 35, p. 385, Vol. 21, p. 541, Addendum, Vol. 37, p. 432 , Volume 37, page 446, Volume 22, page 81. This is nothing more than his worry that his own doctrine has also entered a dogmatic and extreme understanding, losing its liveliness, tolerance and openness. His self-confidence is shown by repeatedly encouraging others to question himself.
This seems to be the case. People only need to go deep into reality, come to the scene, and face specific problems. Since all parties are familiar with the ins and outs of the problem and the full communication and sharing of information, reaching a consensus is a high probability event. If you want to drain the waterlogging, you can drain the waterlogging, if you want to repair a car, you can repair the car, if you want to contract production, you can contract production, and if you want to fight corruption, you can fight against corruption…Who will have trouble with your own eyes and money? Unless an idiot, few people are unreasonable. Therefore, it is a common situation that the more you go to workers, farmers, businessmen, grass-roots officials, and scientific and technological personnel, the less ideological war of words will be heard. On the contrary, once they are far away from the concrete scene and replaced one brain fact with a brain theory, people live elegantly and deeply, shining with the sacred aura of this or that kind of “political correctness”, and things will fall into danger, even “flower skirts”. And “masks” can also become flammable and explosive in an instant through “Shanggang Online”. At that time, the book left is against the book right, the book is radical against the book conservative, and the book efficiency is against the book fair… In the crisis of book knowledge, no matter how good the truth is, there is no way to say.
This is not to say that “the more you read, the more reactionary you are”, nor that the old man has a natural advantage. In fact, regardless of the level of education, people are prone to collapse when talking about “ism”, and it is not difficult to break in when talking about “problems”, and it has nothing to do with whether they wear straw sandals or not. This is not to say that books are bound to cause trouble, but that all knowledge in this world will eventually need to be implemented. Only practice can sober up all “perpetual motion machine”-style theoretical utopias, and only practice can reduce fever, desensitize, invigorate blood, and detoxify God’s knowledge. It is the prerequisite for knowledge to regain its explanatory power and leadingness, and it is the living soul of all great theories.
Mao Zedong wrote “On Practice” in 1937. An extremely poor, extremely weak, and extremely chaotic country had few precedents for its development at the time. Various foreign dogmas made the people of the country misunderstood and lost their way again and again. Without the awakening of “Theory of Practice”, there would be no large-scale knowledge production. Self-liberation, the continuous cohesion and enhancement of the action of the whole society is simply impossible to imagine-it is a not-so-distant vivid story that can be used as a reference for today’s people.
This is the meaning of “being grounded”.
If the knowledge of gods is not desirable, the fragmented knowledge is also a headache, which is another major disaster for the seekers of knowledge nowadays. The background of this is that the contemporary knowledge production capacity is too strong, and the future knowledge is more likely to be daunting. Strictly speaking, every stone can be arched, and every person can write a biography, and every star in the sky is worth setting up N research institutes to explore… But do we need so much knowledge? Too much information makes the computer crash, and too much knowledge makes people overwhelmed. Will there be a risk of death in many ways, making people not more adept at acting, but more difficult to act?
Perhaps, a screening and optimization mechanism is needed to help people go to battle with light at the right time and eliminate a large amount of knowledge that is not urgently needed, unnecessary, and unreliable. There is also a need for a mechanism for activating the organization, so that the thousands of knowledge are in their place and each has its own place, forming hands, feet, limbs, and internal organs, sharing a unified soul. It must be mentioned that with the popularity of postmodern philosophy such as deconstructionism, the old dogmatism has been liquidated all over the place, and it is just a slick that overturns all the “big narratives” and regards all concepts as “signifiers” and “myths.” Layers of falsehoods are exposed in the text symbols, layers of counterfeiting are cracked down, and the rebellion is carried through to the end. It is a joy, but there is also the danger of nihilism-does it constitute a new type of dogmatism in itself to criminalize all “concealment”? One can at least ask this sentence first.
This matter will be omitted for the time being, and I might as well talk about it later. The physicist Hawking said: “The 21st century is the century of complex science.” He refers to science. If the science with objects as the cognitive object is still the case, then the liberal arts (and medicine) with the vastly different and ever-changing people as the cognitive object, of course, is even more complicated-nihilism may be a timely broken mirror. As the literacy rate is getting higher and higher, due to the full capacity of knowledge production, due to various fields, levels, sects, branches, various methods and styles, various interest backgrounds and practical details, all of them are rich in knowledge, and then build ” The “big narrative” is indeed difficult. So people are accustomed to talking differently, talking to themselves, for headaches (or even only the hair), and feet (or even the skin of the feet). It is understandable that the Guoxue faction cannot agree with the Industrial Party, and the pluralists cannot agree with the Legal Party. The anti-nuclear circle can’t talk to the labor circle, and the feminist can’t talk to the liberals, so it’s a bit puzzling. What is even more strange is that the same animal protectionists, the pet faction and the wild endangered faction may not be at the same time; the same way as the aboriginal rights defenders, the road repairers and the road rejectionists may not share the same sky; both are protesting against super multinational companies. With the globalization of capital, New Leftists, homosexuals, nationalists, hackers, vegetarians, and nudists may have become a group themselves, and even have a…The controversy about Sweden’s “green girls” is just the latest episode.
Don’t you want a hundred schools of thought to contend? It may be good to fight. Since there are all justifications and evidence, then anyone has the right to speak up. But if people use tweeters to make their voices desperately, they want others to open their ears to listen well, but they lack the patience, interest, and time to listen to others, and lose the ability to understand and tolerate others, which is probably not normal. Even if the levers are kept out of the door, they all hold up their academic shelves, show a gentleman’s demeanor, and hold elegant high-end seminars. However, as long as the route of small topics remains supreme, it is not normal for those who shield each other to take photos and clink glasses. In the author’s memory, two literary friends once saw each other in three or five sentences, and immediately left me and other mediocre people, and chose another room for intimate and in-depth discussions. But within a few minutes, about seven or eight sentences, the two broke the door and went to each other, one cursed “liar”, and the other asserted “that guy doesn’t understand the fart!”.
It must be pointed out that, as a product of the aforementioned blind spots of practice, narrow paths of practice, and floating shadows of practice, this kind of fragmented knowledge comes mostly from white-collar workers and often has little experience. It is not appropriate to wear the old-style “empirical” hat. Maybe it is more like a kind of petit dogmatism, or it is some raw rice cooked by little dogma and little experience. The empirical anemia of the new capitalist era also appears here.
If things go on like this, there will be noisy voices, and no one can hear them clearly. Without the great truth that governs the little truth, the truth gives way to the truth of all kinds of “I”. In other words, the “grand narrative” collapsed, and the unexpected cost was the absence or ambiguity of the “three outlooks” (world outlook, values, and cognitive outlook), which shattered the impetuous and inefficient mind and made fragmented knowledge unavailable. A knowledge method and the bonding and organization of knowledge ethics have become farther and farther away from operability; this situation may be closer and closer to the ugly appearance of competing for resources.
As a normal reaction to intellectual disability, the entry of populism and anti-intellectualism is inevitable. When many people are helpless, they are the easiest to pin their hopes of solving chaotic problems on some strong people, those suspicious saviors who do not need knowledge, are unreasonable, and have a rude and strong style-such as counting on one or two political heroes to beat the doubts. “Globalization” is stigmatizing. “Liu Xiang didn’t read books originally” (Mao Zedong’s poems), which means that history once again put knowledge aside and refrigerated, the stick once again became the most effective language, and the intellectuals temporarily retreated from the situation in a dumbfounded look.
This is the origin of “go up to the sky”.
The historian of science, Kuhn, said, “In times of recognized crisis, scientists often turn to philosophical analysis…an effective way to provide a foundation for the new tradition”, including the use of “intuition”, “consciousness” and “unconsciousness” to share in a revolutionary manner. To co-build a new “knowledge paradigm”, [10] to create a new platform for mutual benefit in thinking. This is almost to say that between different majors, you can also smell a kind of knowledge about knowledge by sniffing, ascending the dimension, seeking harmony between the points, and ending the respective paintings as a prison, and ending the possible deadness and insecurity of the respective majors. .
This kind of philosophical vision requires a large-scale restoration of human practice, and requires wisdom from the forefront of practice, which not only runs through their professional self-confidence, but also embodies the timely professional self-doubt, and always maintains self-doubt as a realistic and innovative person. One of the necessary abilities to promote new thinking is ready to go. This kind of philosophical vision also requires personality and mind. Kant was a part-time mathematician who lived in a remote town for life and lived a life of poverty. However, his tombstone was engraved with this sentence: “There are two things. The deeper and longer my thinking about them, the more they evoke in my heart. The surprise and awe of the world will become more and more time-honored. One is the vast and splendid starry sky above our heads, and the other is the noble moral law in our hearts.” This epitaph reflects the style and appearance of many knowledge seekers in a great era. It has accumulated the majestic ambition that made knowledge become power. At that time, people didn’t speak every word in reason, but how vast the world and soul were! People have two tools: empirical methods and mathematical methods, which are almost the same as the science version of “grounding” and “receiving the sky”, and they can truly hold the whole world in their chests.
The predecessors are far away, and future generations take over. At this time, global modernization is facing a new crossroads. Various small patterns of knowledge are broken and broken. Can we rebuild the “three outlooks”, rebuild the metaphysical, and open up the two lines of knowledge and supervision, and find that all kinds of knowledge can both game and collide with each other. , The growth mechanism that can negotiate, digest, nourish, and stimulate each other? Can we transcend the many insights of our predecessors, but regain our predecessors’ aspirations, seek for differences in techniques, to benefit from learning, to do things differently, to communicate with Tao, so that the achievements of all mankind’s civilization can once again converge into a common forward force ? This is another open question approaching every seeker.
