【kaleidoscope】小组第八次作业issue208 byAtticus

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The speaker asserts that people's appearance and behavior reveal their attitudes and interests, and in some way, reflect a society's ideas and values. As far as I am concerned, to some extent we can evaluate a society's ideas and values according to its people, yet sometimes these are not sufficient to understand this society and some other aspects such as culture and history should also be required.

Absolutely, people's appearance and behavior reveal their own attitudes as well as social values. The preference of T-shirts and jeans evinces the easy going lifestyle of Americans, while suits and ties infer the British's tradition and carefulness. Veils of Arab women reflect the low social position of women in mid-east, whereas the open and hot girls in South America show their vitality and passion. Needless to say, all these various appearances tell much about individuals' interests and reveal the society's ideas.

Moreover, we can also distinguish the differences of values from people's behaviors. For example, Americans and Chinese share different opinions of the attitude toward money. American people's fond of credit cards reveals their premature consumption idea while the Chinese are more likely to put their money in the bank for long term plan. From this we can see Americans purchase the contemporary comfortable life and Chinese prefer a quite and stable one, which also reveals the different values of the west and east hold as for money.

However, is it always true that individuals' attitudes and interests stand for the whole society's values? Probably not. For example, people all over the world drink Coco Cola, dress in Lee jeans and eat in KFCs, but can we tell all of them share the same attitudes and ideas? or all these represent similar social values of different nations? As a result of globalization, different cultures merge together and it is hard to for us to judge simply according to people's looks and behaviors. Say, for example, maybe an American’s favor of jeans is because of their good quality and easy to clean, while in many Asian’s eyes, dressing in jeans means some sort of fashion. Consequently,
if we stay at the ostensible phenomenon without seeing through the facts, we may not reach the deep values behind them.

There are different ways to evaluate a society's values and meaning besides observing the appearance and behavior of its people. Through reading the history of a nation, we are able to get a fully understanding of its past and present, from which the future might be predicted. Deep down to the cultural aspect, a nation's religion belief always tells the souls and desires of its people. For example, the Daoism has prevailed for thousands of years in China, but its disciples act and appear no difference as common people do, what's more, there is no special ceremonies related to this religion, thus the best way to know Daoism is to read the scriptures. In addition, the art works reflect social values in some extent as well. In the USSR period, the dominant art works in Russia expressed a strong desire of absolute equality, which was embodied by a political color of Communism. Consequently, from these different angles rather than people’s behavior and dressing, we may have a complete evaluation of a social's ideas.

As the saying goes, seeing is believing. In some sense, people's appearance and behaviors provide us with information to know what they think and what the society looks like. Yet, we may never commit the mistake of judging a man only by his looks, there are some other accessible ways helping us go deeper for the truth.