issue142[AWER小组]作业

JasonDoveUID: 2322013

TOPIC: ISSUE142 - "The well-being of a society is enhanced when many of its people question authority."
WORDS: 572          TIME: 0:45:00          DATE: 2008-2-25


In this statement, the speaker claims that people’s questions of authority would enhance the well-being of a society. As far as I am concerned, I fundamentally agree to the speaker’s claim. What’s more, I insist that it is sensible for one to take his or her question’s justification and potential value into a deep consideration for reason that to solve ungrounded questions is, to some extent, a kind of waste of public resources.

One compelling argument in favor of questioning authority has to do with the fact that the improvement of well-being of a society as well as its development are both based on questions brought up by its people. People’s challenges and questions are motive force of society’s development. The problem of developing is not a single question, but a comprehensive one which is integrated by a myriad of smaller questions on every aspect. As we work out one of these questions, another more pressing and complex one follows, and the more we solve problems, the better we know ourselves and our world, and this is what we call development and progress. Thus to question authority is to provide a sort of resource on which our cognition of the world and ourselves based.

In addition, a society without any question of authority appears to be peaceful, but further reflection reveals that some fatal and pressing problems might exist in it.
That is, peaceful appearance does not represent stability of a society. The event of Iraq is a case in point. Before the war between Iraq and the United States, the supporting rate of Iraq president Saddam are one hundred percent, but when the war burst out his supporting rate sharply declined to zero. Conspicuously, this strange phenomenon cannot be caused only by the war, but also a long-time contradiction between Saddam and his people that is covered by the one hundred percent rate of supporting. From the foregoing analysis, we can conclude that superficial peace of a society cannot be representative for the stability of a society.

Although, the significance of questioning authority is obvious, one should never question authority as they like, a deep consideration about the question’s value is in need. Questioning authority is not as simple as asking questions. Before one brings up his or her view, he or she would have to think whether his or her standpoint is reasonable and grounded. If not, to work out this question might be useless and meaningless, and it is unquestionably a sort of waste of public resources. It might be tempting to think that unduly carefulness would cause the loss of best opportunities to prove one’s view. Yet, as for me, I suppose that extremely carefulness is what we need and what we lack. If one can prove his own view to be specious or even totally wrong, he or she gets progress as the society does. In short, to think about the value of one’s question before bringing it up is necessary.

In sum, I agree to the author’s claim that only by questioning authority can a society get real development, because a society need people’s question to reveal its problems. Moreover, I concede that one should take his or her question’s value into account before bringing it up in order to make it more meaningful and save public resources.