issue147, 处女作,用时无数...欢迎评点, 我也积极评点别人

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Tradition and modernization are incompatible. One must choose between them.
上班时候写的, 老是被打断, 不知道用了多少个45分钟, 字数 630+, 感想: 佩服那种写800字的, 有必要写那么长么??

Based on the literal meaning, tradition and modernization seem to be two mutually exclusive concepts. Tradition talks about the "old" things while modernization refers to the trend of making things "new". However, I would say that the two are not rejecting each other and, most of time, modernization is actually rooted in tradition.

When we talk about tradition, the first idea that jumps out in our mind could be something about traditional culture, like the Chinese opera. Do traditions like Chinese opera resist changes brought by modernization? Of course no. Actually, the modernized Chinese opera is able to serve audiences so much better than it did before. With the deployment of recent technologies like DVD, internet streaming, opera fans can easily enjoy their favorite episode anywhere, anytime. And internet gives the opportunity for people all around the world to meet and fall in love with the traditional arts. Chinese opera did not die due the fact that people have much more entertainment choices nowadays. In contrast, it attracts the real fans through all modern technologies.

Another example could be the traditional martial arts, like Chinese Kung Fu and Japanese Karate. After guns and cannons are brought in by modernization, martial arts are no longer needed as killing skills. But Kung Fu and Karate, instead of effaced by modernization, they are granted new meanings by modernization. Kung Fu stars like Jacky Cheng and Jet Li have shown the world the essence of modern Kung Fu in their Hollywood movies. Many Kung Fu / Karate schools have been set up all over the world to teach people how to use martial arts for leisurely exercise and as self defense skill. Similarly, many other traditional stuffs have found their roles in the modernized society, though may not necessarily to be the same as before.

As shown above, tradition does not reject modernization. And, in many cases, it evolves with modernization and finds its new value. One may consider the problem again in the opposite way, does modernization reject tradition?

For example, science, especially biomedical science, could be the field in which modernization is most emphasized. Every year, thousands of new findings are published with many new technologies invented and applied. Do all the new findings imply an exclusion to tradition? Definitely no again. Recently, several leading biomedical journals, including Cell and PNAS, have published some research work on applying arsenic trioxide on leukemia (blood cancer). These researches are originally inspired by some ancient Chinese medical records which shows that white arsenic can mitigate certain blood-cancer-like symptoms. The Chinese medical theory, probably one of the world's oldest traditions, has been greatly criticized for its lack of scientific explanations and systematicness. But this does not cumber the modernized analysis and use of traditional Chinese medicines. In fact, the application of arsenic trioxide is considered one of the greatest advances in blood cancer research in the past decade.

Admittedly, some traditions are lost in the process of modernization. For instance, in Tibet, fewer and fewer children could speak their mother tongue. People do not domesticate and graze animals. Instead, they earn money from tourists. Though their tradition is largely lost, one can not reason that tradition and modernization are incompatible solely based on this. There are more cases where tradition and modernization can be incorporated as mentioned in previous examples. And in fact, I highly doubt whether Tibetan's choice is provident. Many other places in China used to pursue so-called "modernization" by giving up all traditions relentlessly. However, many have realized that the traditions they abandoned are valuable and they now spend large amount of money to recover and incorporate tradition into their modernization plan. Sometimes, the loss of tradition is irreversible. If possible, we all should learn from the instances. To achieve modernization, we do not necessarily need to give up tradition.

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[ 本帖最后由 y10k 于 2007-9-5 10:19 编辑 ]