Issue208 [天道酬勤小组]感觉有点离题了，快来互拍

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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: 580          TIME: 00:42:00          DATE: 2007-7-24 下午 12:42:44

I do not completely agree with the speaker's broad assertion that the way people look, dress and act can be regarded as the sensitive and sufficient reflection of people's attitudes and their society's values. Although we can infer some facets of people's viewpoints and preference by observing their appearance and behavior, such superficial phenomenon is far more away from adequate to evaluate the overall inner world of the individual and thus may lead to the partial and uncompleted understanding of the complicated social ideas and values.

First of all, we have to concede that the appearance and behavior can somehow reveals some aspects of people's attitudes and interests. For people's actions are often controlled by their belief and viewpoints in many cases. For instance, the Moslem in Islamic countries always act according to Alcoran, the religious law, in their daily lives which indicates their loyal religious belief. For another, the pop stars prefer to dress themselves in abnormal way, which may be regarded as ridiculous by average people, expressing their desire for extreme freedom without any limitation and predomination. For the above cases we can deduce that people's behavior or their appearance can, in certain extent, reflect some facets of their minds.

However, the appearance and behaviors alone is not sufficient for us to judge the whole attitude and value of the individuals. It is entirely possible that some people concentrate too much on other fields that they may ignore their external outlooks. Citing the famous scientist Einstein for example, he paid less attention to his appearance and always appeared in slipshod and untidy clothes. However, we can not view him as a lazy and careless man when taking into account his prominent achievement to establish the great theory of relativity. On other circumstance, people's deeds are resulted from the extreme depression of live which forces them to act beyond their own wills. Van Gogh's case is good in point. He had once cut of his right ear and finally committed suicide by shooting himself. However we can not afford to neglect his great passion for live and art which kept him as the milestone in the art history. What he did was driven by his poverty and loneliness. Simply up, it is presumptuous for us to evaluate the all-round attitude and ideas of individuals merely depend on their external appearance and behaviors.

In addition, even if we take it as validity that the appearance and behavior can actually reflect the genuine attitude and interests of people, we can not lose sight to admitting that such appearance and behaviors are sufficient for us to judge the complex and various value systems of a society. As we all know the over-all ideas of a society are far more complicate than that of individuals, since the values of a society lie in various aspects thus the limited observation of certain group of people in society is inadequate to infer the whole values. For instance, the behaviors of Germans in World War Two, which have been viewed as the brutal in invading other countries and slaughtering huge amount of innocent people, would lead us to the false image of Germans as aggressive and cool-blooded. However, the majority of average Germans are in favor of peace. Just like the well known German Schindler, he offered his factory as a refuge to protect thousands of Jewish people away from being killed. Thus it may lead to partial and superficial prejudice towards the ideas and values of the society by investigating certain group of people inside the society.

In conclusion, we have to keep the objective mind to recognize that people's appearance and behaviors could tell something about their attitudes and interesting. However, they can not enable us to infer the outline conception of the individual, let alone the impartial and all-round values of a society.