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45m到时后有点儿“意犹未尽”,又花了15分钟写了最后一段
TOPIC: ISSUE208 - "The way people look, dress, and act reveals their attitudes and interests. You can tell much about a society's ideas and values by observing the appearance and behavior of its people."
WORDS: 638 TIME: 00:60:00 DATE: 2010-7-28 19:05:12
Lots of people tend to judge others' character by their first impression, and many believe that this is a quick and useful way to know one another. By contrast, it sounds naiive and absurd to judge a whole society by the appearance and behavior of citizens, because a society is far more complicated than a person to study, but at the same time, we have far more resources to learn a society.
To begin with, the surface appearance of citizens can hardly tell the deep nature of a society. Although someone may refute me with example that, by looking at the clothing of women both on the streets in Arabian counties and in the US, it can be easily concluded that American women enjor a higher degree of freedom, at least physically, because Arabian women are inhibited to expose vitually any part of their body. Examples of this sort, in my opinion, are quite extreme, limited and even misleading. Many Arabian women wear scarfs and long dresses simply for pragmatic reasons-- to get rid of the sunshine and hot air frequently encountered in Arabian areas. Also, in my hometown, the temperature varies dramatically in winters and summers, so that you may oberve absolutely different appearces of people in these two seasons: walkers wear heavy coats, walking hastily in the cold winter winds; but t-shirts and ice-creams everywhere in the summer sunshine. However, who will claim that the social value has altered with the change in citizens' appearances from winter to summer? Therfore, a blind judgement of the society based solely on people's appearance is both unjustified and irresponsible.
It is also not necessary for people to collect evidence from citizens' appearance in order to study a society, because we do have access to a large variety of reliable resources to gain deep knowledge of the social value system. One of the best ways is to visit the local museum, where the history and honors of the town is shown to visitors in a systemetic and interesting manner. Alternatively, a cooperative and comprehensive talk with the local people will help a visitor a gain insightful understandings of the society's fundamental beliefs, which may probably not be reflected by the superficial appearance of the people in that society. My own experience as a volunteering teacher in a remote island in the South China Sea reminds me that, what one see in a new society on the first sight may only reveal a tiny part of the society's inner heart. The island I visited, has a beatiful, paradise-like scenery, villagers walked on the street with peaceful lookings and behaved in good manners. But I soon discovered that the island village is heavily infected by gambling, with too many idle villagers having no work to do as a result of the great erosion of argricultural land by sea waves. I learnt from that experience that even a society as tiny as a small island can be too complicated to judge from the first sight of a stranger.
Influential social theories generall regard society as a complicated and constantly-changing institute. For instance, Karl Max believe that the root value system of a society is determined by its social economic and political structure, which is in turn based on the relations of production among difference social class; and John Lock advocate that the basis of a society is a collection of contractions among people, in other words, some universally agreed laws, traditions and values intervines the society as a whole. While most of us have the experience of being cheated by a single person's appearance, we shall bear in mind that society, consisting of millions of various people, may as well depict an obscue picture to cheat those who are satisfied with a novel judgement depended only on surface appearances and behaviors of citizens. |
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