Which one is more valuable?
1. Your friend sends you a birthday note because:
a) S/he remembers it, or
b) S/he has entered hundreds of names and their birth dates into a system, and set the system to alert the birthdays.
2. Your friend wishes you a happy new year by:
a) Calling you or writing you a letter/email, or
b) Sending you one of those fit-for-all Happy New Year emails.
3. A couple gets married because:
a) They simply love each other, or
b) They make a decision that is polluted with an unlimited list of desires, likes, and dislikes, which are shaped by ever-changing criteria.
4. A couple is separated and the son is living with his mother. The father pays for the son’s education because:
a) He cares about the future of his son, or
b) He’s obligated by the law to pay for his son’s education expenses.
5. A white guy hangs out with a black guy because:
a) The two guys are truly connecting as friends, or
b) It’s in rhythm with anti-racism culture and laws, which helps both sides to survive in the society.
And the list can continue for ever …
We benefit from a modern society by all its technology and law enforcement features; however, it also destroys many meaningful values and attitudes inhabiting in a traditional society, or replaces them with shallow or worthless ones.
So, once again, instead of the 2-way lousy solution of "either keep all the old values, or totally replace them with new ones", we need to get to know both sides thoroughly to find the third solution: Refine our values by keeping the good-old ones, and replace the bad-old with good-new ones.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
In this post, a modern society represents situations that people's motivations behind their actions are mainly powered by available technology or law enforcement mechanisms - not their hearts, which is the case in traditional societies where people are not distracted by or relied on modern features.
ReplyDeleteBut in a modern society, people can choose to do both. And actually, here you present a false kind of situation:
ReplyDelete4. A couple is separated and the son is living with his mother. The father pays for the son’s education because:
a) He cares about the future of his son, or
b) He’s obligated by the law to pay for his son’s education expenses.
What sometimes really happens, is:
4. A couple is separated and the son is living with his mother. The father
a) pays for the son’s education because he's obligated by the law to pay for his son’s education expenses.
b) does not pay for the son's education because he is still mad at his son's mother.
Or even:
4. A couple is separated and the son is living with his mother. The father
a) happily pays for the son’s education because he realizes it is important. Also, it's obligated by the law to pay for his son’s education expenses - and the father is perfectly ok with that.
The point is that in the old society, you could only hope that people were decent enough to do the right thing. If they did not, one or more innocent people suffered. In the new society, we as a society are forcing some (bad) people to do the right thing, because we (the society) decided that it was the right thing to do, and made it an obligation.
First, about your comment on example#4:
DeleteThere are potentially 100's of scenarios that can happen; but I'm only discussing the motivation behind the scenarios that the father "pays". Is it because he's a caring father, or he's enforced to do so?
Second, you're right: In old societies, we're relying on people decencies to create a good society, which I consider it more valuable than building a good society based on policing people - the difference of two approaches would be more clear when comparing what people did to the stores in Louisiana (an example of live-by-law society) after hurricane Katrina to the same situation in Japan (an example of live-by-morality society) after 2011 Tsunami.