Values

I remember, in the year of my undergraduate days, a Philosophy professor specializing in ethics recommended a new book that he had then just translated into Chinese. The theme of the book was on "values". At that time, coming from an academic perspective, I didn't think such a discussion was anywhere near fantastic. It's just a general judgment bias - after all, there are usually no fixed answers to most ethical questions, no? Something as intangible as values, how can anyone say anything inspiring about it?

Today, however, I began to see just how important this notion of "values" is. In the first place, I guess we've never questioned the complexity of this term, and the inter-relation among all the facades of meanings it entails.

The financial crisis made us open our eyes to what "values as wealth" could mean to us eventually. It made us gloat over the demise of "bloody money-suckers" who have, anyway, been always placed at the lowest level of the social class strata in ancient China (士、农、工、商）. Nonetheless, in today's world fraught with discourses stemming from globalisation - a notion stemming from economic integration, one wonders how this balance of smugness will tilt in future. After all, "cycles" is a jargon that the financial and business sectors often take comfort in. Trace it back 2000 years, when even Lao Tze concluded from his astronomical observations, “反者，道之动”. That's perhaps the way the world functions.

Yet, all humans seek stability in what they "value". Sufficient (or more than sufficient) cash, a happy family, stable job, humanity, happiness (a notion that has in itself ignited debate since the Roman times).. Perhaps, what we have overlooked is that one can never achieve totality in his completeness. Those who indulge in the pursuit of humanities and education often lament that financial flow is their greatest concern. Have we not seen composers and writers who die a poor soul? The relatively rich - relatively, because it really depends on who you benchmark yourself with - have a good life in terms of material needs, but why is it the Chinese have managed to coin this saying “富不过三代”？Apart from the possibility that these rich people are infertile, one guess would be that they never knew how to teach their children well. In their pursuit of wealth generation, some people simply forgot to ruminate on their human-ness along the way, so there is no "values" - except cash, assets and everything else material - that they can impart to their children. Others may have an idea of their own intangible values, but they simply lack the ability to pass them on to their descendants. Hasn't this been the way Western society has evolved, from a time when earning money was "bringing glory to God", to one which goes "God, please bless America" but is totally deprived of spirituality?

The fundamental of human nature is paradox, hence it is often not feasible to take pride in any argument that posits in either side of a binary. However, let us learn to come to terms with our incapabilities and fallacies. Let us acknowledge what it is that we cannot do or achieve well. It is then that perhaps we can further ascertain the roles we perceive we can play well. Then, just like "drinking tea is appreciating a cloud" in Buddhist Zen, realizing that the key of Life is in relationships between everything, let's synergize and combine a whole array of "values" that can be inherited by our children. Turning enmity into mutual support, blending the "soft" with the "hard", combining value generation and delivery, this is perhaps how a society can succeed. The same should be applicable to communities, and even among groups of individuals who base their affiliations not on friendship (another debatable and shaky notion in the history of Philosophy), but on mutual love. Some call this "capitalizing", but if we can remove the innate misconceptions and bias behind, it is nothing more than a term/ jargon, isn't it? Life is, after all, going beyond the surface and trying to grasp the depth of matters, even if we can only remain asymptotically close to "reality" - if there was ever one present there in the first place.