Chapter 96 Crusade and Disorder

Walking 200 kilometers northwest from Kathmandu, you will arrive at the beautiful Pokhara (Pokhara).It is said that many old people in the West are willing to spend the rest of their lives in this small place with high mountains and dangerous roads. The young mountain that Ms. Han Suyin wrote about is also here. The Himalayas block the cold current in the north for it, and let the flowers and trees all over the world shine brightly in the sunshine on the southern slope.However, it is impossible to be hot because it is surrounded by snow-capped mountains. The freshly melted snow makes the waterway here the upper reaches of all the big rivers in the south.

We took a cable raft across the clear and wide snow river, and stayed at a hotel called Fishtail Mountain House at the foot of the mountain.The partners were attracted by the beautiful scenery here and separated, while I strolled near the mountain house and continued to sort out my feelings along the way. It's getting a bit chilly here, and now I take up my pen by the fire. Yesterday outlined the reasons for the decline of several major civilizations, but there should be some common laws, right?Finding out these common laws will actually find out the reason for the long-term continuation of Chinese civilization, but the two are exactly the opposite.

Every birthplace of civilization we have seen is almost geographically coveted and surrounded by wasteland.The great beginnings of civilization are miracles, and miracles are always alone.It is suddenly higher than the surrounding ecology, which is its strength and its fragility.Civilization envies the barbaric forces with its prosperity, and makes the barbaric forces feel inferior with its elegance. Therefore, sooner or later, barbarism will attack civilization, and once it does, civilization will be easily broken.So we see that any civilization has to build so many castles for itself. When the power of civilization has learned too many lessons of blood and tears, it will take the initiative to attack. At first, it wants to use barbaric means to stop barbarism. As time goes by, long-distance warfare has gradually become a hobby of some civilizations.They became strong and majestic for a while, but history finally recorded a conclusion: any military expedition is cultural suicide.

This is because each culture has its own volume positioning. A culture without boundaries is like a body without skin. How can it survive?In this regard, not only Egypt and Persia have learned lessons, but even the pan-Hellenistic expedition did not bring benefits to Greek culture. Once the victory of the war is bound to be accompanied by cultural enslavement, it is a kind of devastating damage to the enslaved culture, as we have seen in Egypt, Jerusalem, Babylon, Iran, and India.But on the other hand, the victor's culture may not necessarily win, because it suddenly becomes a weapon and tool to enslave others, and it must be filled with a lot of uncivilized content. In the end, both sides can only suffer.

I was delighted once again after reaching this conclusion, because none of our ancient Chinese kings liked to go on expeditions to other countries.Of course, this has something to do with their self-righteous notion that the world is the center of the world, but this kind of notion may have become a reason to attack others. The root of Chinese civilization advocates peace and self-defense. The few lines of Du Fu’s poems that we have memorized since we were young can sum up this concept passed down from generation to generation: There is a limit to killing people. Killing more.From this, I also found an important reason why the Chinese civilization has not collapsed for thousands of years.

I used to think over and over during the tens of thousands of miles of galloping: You see, in the Shang Dynasty of China, Egypt had already conquered West Asia; in the Confucius era, Persia had conquered Babylon and then Egypt; Egypt and Babylon; and both Persia and Greece have reached India In short, in the vast land between Africa, Europe, and Asia that we visited this time, several ancient civilizations have already been beaten into darkness, shuttled back and forth, and nothing was left behind.It is said that there is a legacy, only we are China.China also fights, most of which are just internal struggles for power, or sweeping up the surrounding Huns and the like, and it is a complete duty to compare with others.

The Chinese ancestors may have chosen this posture unconsciously.Because in terms of geographical orientation, the western and northern edges of Chinese civilization are the vast Gobi, and the southwestern edge is the roof of the world, which objectively prevents expeditionary troops from entering and leaving; in terms of civilization type, the main body of Chinese civilization is farming civilization, not nautical civilization. Unlike nomadic civilization, the basic ecology of farming civilization is to live together as a group, plant in spring and harvest in autumn, men farm and women weave, and do not seek territorial rule thousands of miles away by nature.

The first image of the Chinese nation is the Great Wall, which is just its own fence and parapet.At the beginning of the construction, it was just for prevention, but after living in it for thousands of years, it gradually developed the group self-care.Negative is too closed, positive is not expeditionary. After seeing so many castles and trenches of expeditionary forces from different eras and countries along the road this time, I thought, when this trip reaches the end, I will salute to the Great Wall, because I finally understand that its basic meaning is to keep one’s place.It is a great blessing for human civilization that such a huge civilization has always adopted this posture.

Besides war, the second cause of decline is social disorder. The destruction of civilization by war begins with the destruction of order.This destruction also includes the aggressors' militarization of their own civilization when they mobilize and organize wars. Even without war, civilization itself cannot resist the tendency towards disorder.When most cultural behaviors develop themselves, they are often unable to coordinate the relationship between themselves and other cultural behaviors, resulting in a large number of high-intelligence disputes.Sometimes, these high-intelligence disputes require rude mediation by low-intelligence forces. This kind of ridiculous phenomenon can be said to be everywhere in the history of the world, which fully proves a terrible fact that civilization can also directly lead to disorder .

So what would happen if we allowed civilization to have power?Many prosperous ages have emerged from this, but civilization and power are two order systems after all, at least in ancient times, no way to coordinate has been found, so sooner or later there will be conflicts between the two.The stronger the two forces are, the more serious the conflict will be, and the result of serious conflict will inevitably be serious disorder.This is why the birthplaces of most ancient civilizations in the world are far inferior to other regions in terms of social order. In all fairness, I didn't feel deeply about this in the past. I only thought that order was a natural existence, and the difference was whether we wanted the old order or the new order.Our generation has been struggling with all sorts of old orders and trying to create new ones in all areas, but it has never seriously considered what would happen if there were no order at all, neither the old order nor the new order?

Thinking about it this way, our usual confrontation between ideas is actually still on the same platform.The discussion of one system being long and another system being short actually stays in a similar grammatical system, otherwise how can it be discussed?This investigation allows us to see the situation after the platform is removed and the grammar is lost, a kind of unimaginable disorder. Looking at the past a thousand kilometers and a thousand kilometers, there are always so many idle poor people standing on mountains of garbage.Let these poor people bend down to remove the rubbish, and then give them a little reward. The reward comes from reasonable taxation. This is social management. It is easy to say, but there are very few places where it can be done. From generation to generation, many poor people have lost the habit of working, and the fertile fields are rarely cultivated.A handful of people got rich and lived in the city, and a few of them played politics.Some of the dashing politicians I've seen on TV before have been accused of being big corruption by their opponents, but the opponents are pretty much the same.What's even more frightening is that no matter how you vote, no matter how you vote, you can't escape these circles and these families.There are thousands of miles of red land, and hungry people are everywhere, and it has nothing to do with them.As a result, not only are the roads dilapidated, sanitation poor, and the population explosion completely left alone, but there are still such a large area that is not under the control of the government military and police.In some areas, the government can only control some major highways, and the vast land beside the roads is completely incomprehensible. Standing on such a land, I have repeatedly wondered, what kind of social reform can solve the problem?Facing everything in front of me, I can even understand the strong measures that I thought should not be taken before.Think about it, how can we make this dense crowd of unkempt and dull-eyed people a positive force for social progress, and then let them send their children to receive education?This is the starting point of civilization, but until the end of the 20th century, there are still so many places in the world that have not been entered, and many places are still the birthplace of ancient civilizations. For a long-standing civilization, in order to avoid the damage of disorder, it is more feasible to try to form a flexible system with both civilized functions and management power.This is to fight for time for order before civilization and power have serious conflicts. In ancient China, the method of establishing a civil service system through imperial examinations was implemented for more than 1,300 years, effectively maintaining the order of Chinese civilization.This order has both positive and negative aspects. I have made a systematic analysis in the article "One Hundred Thousand Scholars", and this time I visited several other birthplaces of civilization, and I understand that it is really a genius creation of our ancestors. The criteria for selecting these civil servants is Confucian culture.Confucian culture just focuses on governing the country and the world, not empty talk, so it can indeed manage local affairs.Continuous selection and examinations have enabled Confucian culture to have a large number of students and practitioners, and it has continued alive.The fact that Chinese culture neither collapsed in disorder nor dried up in ineffectiveness has something to do with it. December 28, 1999, Pokhara, Nepal, overnight at Fish Tail Lodge