An excerpt from the original text of Liang Xiaosheng's "About Good Guys and Bad Guys"
One of the very bad things in our Chinese moral evaluation is that we must divide people into good people and bad people, good and evil. In fact, gentlemen and villains are in the middle of the road. What are the two ends? He is a saint, and the rank of a saint is higher than that of a gentleman. At the lowest end are the wicked. A large number of them are ordinary people and ordinary people in the middle zone. ——Yi Zhongtian
There was a Mr. Xie Zhengzhong who published an article in the magazine "Bookhouse" pointing out that Mr. Yi Zhongtian's words were contradictory--there should be no ambiguity among saints, the best of the good, and the worst of the bad. Thinking that there are saints and evil people, but not acknowledging that there is a distinction between good people and bad people, cannot justify themselves.
Xie Zhengzhong further believes that the distinction between good and bad and good is an evaluation of people, and the same is true for foreign countries, not only In Chinese culture, so it can be said to be universal. If such an evaluation distinction is "very bad", it is equivalent to saying that the culture of the whole world is "very bad" at this point.
I completely agree with the above two points of view.
According to Mr. Yi Zhongtian's division, my classmates and I are all people in the middle zone, that is, ordinary people and ordinary people. If, in our opinion, people on both ends actually don't matter whether they are good or bad, the saints are not good, and the wicked are not bad, then most of us still deserve to be called human? Is Mr. Yi's so-called gentleman and saint worthy of being a gentleman and a saint for a human society that distinguishes between good and bad, good and evil?
In this way, didn't Mr. Yi Zhongtian say something that should have been pointed out by a thousand people? I don't think so.
If we understand Mr. Yi Zhongtian's words not just literally, but in their original sense, then I think there is some truth to his words.
The original meaning of his words as I understand it should be that there are many people in history and in real life, and it is difficult to simply classify good and bad as good and evil. In literature, drama, and film, it is especially difficult to distinguish between good and bad, good and evil.
For example, Cao Cao, under the condition of confusion of judgment, accidentally killed Lü Bohao's family; he did not stop doing two things, and even killed Lü Bohao's old man who returned from selling wine. This was a very sinful act, but it could not be simply determined that Cao Cao was a bad person and an evil person, because his killing intentions did not arise from the "bad" that he had always had in his heart.
The same Cao Cao, when the army marched and the horse stepped on the field, didn't he also sympathize with the hardships of the peasants and order the soldiers to take a detour?
Yu Lian in "The Red and the Black", good people? Bad guys? Roundnack in '93, the commander of the royalist camp during the French Revolution, a figure with a sharp mouth and claws. He suppressed the revolutionaries and their families, as cold as a killing machine, but he returned to the ambush circle in defiance of his personal safety in order to save three stray children trapped in the fire house, only to be captured by the soldiers of the commune's coalition army...
Is he a good guy or a bad guy?
The commune's allied commander was guo wen, and he thought he could not order the execution of a man who had just saved the lives of three homeless children, even though the other was the commune's number one sworn enemy. He let rundenak away, and as a result he himself was sentenced to death by the commune's military court...
Is he right or wrong?
See, sometimes it is difficult to simply classify people by good and bad, good and evil, but it is even difficult to draw conclusions about the right and wrong of their actions.
Mr. Yi Zhongtian's words also inspire us to further think about the following points:
The poor may become rich, the rich may become poor, the ordinary may become unusual, and the ordinary may become ordinary; in the same way, the good people who were once good may commit the most heinous crimes because of the difference in thoughts; there are many examples of once bad people who have suddenly changed their human nature and put down the butcher's knife to become a Buddha.
Therefore, there is a saying in China that "the coffin is conclusive". And this sentence just proves that there is something very good in Chinese culture in terms of moral evaluation of people. Therefore, even Tao Yuanming sighed: "Long live the thousand autumns, who knows the glory and humiliation." ”
This means that although the coffin has been covered, there is no conclusion.
Before the founding of the People's Republic of China, there were few good years. In that case, the hegemonic, the homeland, the class, the political group, the individual pursuits and propositions, and the various external factors often promote, influence, and even force people to make such and such non-subjective choices, so it is easy to make low-level mistakes if people are simply classified by good or bad, good or evil.
For example, in the past, it was a very bad practice to divide people into "red five categories" and "black five categories". Among the "black five categories", there is a category of "bad elements". After the Cultural Revolution, the vast majority were rehabilitated, and they were not bad people at all, if not good people.
A good era is by no means an era in which good people and bad people are not distinguished, but an era that defines bad people more strictly. For example, in the former China, if a person was sentenced, from that day on, he was undoubtedly a bad person. It is not right for us to think so now. Because a person has been sentenced to a prison sentence, it only proves that he has broken the law, and he still has a chance to repent and rehabilitate.
But evil people do exist, such as the kind of people mentioned in Xie Zhengzhong's text - bandits, pirates, drug lords, leaders of criminal and evil forces, gangster gang thugs, people who seek wealth and kill people, murderers and arsonists, etc., even if they have the possibility of repentance and self-renewal, but before that, treating them as bad people is by no means equivalent to being poisoned by the "very bad things" in Chinese culture...
However, comparing Chinese and Western cultures, there is indeed a phenomenon that Westerners generally rarely directly use the word "bad" to evaluate people. For Westerners, the more often saying is, "That guy is scum." "The man is a hypocrite." "It's fierce." "Dangerous." "A man who needs to be wary." "A man who hates society." "A man who does not hesitate to exchange someone else's life for a drink." ......
Why do they rarely use the word "bad" directly? The habitual distinction of ideographic thinking is just that.
"Bad" is unspecific and therefore ambiguous. It was as if the words had been spoken at home, but it sounded like nothing had been said. Usually, Westerners' ideographic habits are more explicit, and that's it. Therefore, it can never be understood that Western society is a society without good people and bad people.
Such a country, throughout the ages, has never existed in the world...
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