issue36 小木互改小组

cuilei_1985UID: 2121020

Issue36:
The greatness of individuals can be decided only by those who live after them, not by their contemporaries.

Many people’s great achievements are not recognized by their contemporary people. But there are still a lot of people who received the deserved evaluation. As long as one can make contributions on either the contemporary or the future, he is qualified to be regarded as a great person. So it is unfair to believe the greatness of individuals can be decided only by those who live after them. It should be decided by both the future generations and the contemporaries. In another word, it should be decided by whether he brings benefits to the whole human beings.

There are many people who have received a fair judgment such as Einstein, Newton, Roosevelt and Bill Gates in their life time. Their contribution has been recognized by the mass because their work has brought people some benefits such as convenience, self-confidence, enjoyment in either physical or psychological aspect. Their value can surly be decided by the contemporaries. In such a period as the modern society has made such a swift progress accompanied with the explosion of information and the development of the mass media, the rights of individuals have been utterly respected. There are more and more people who can get an objective evaluation by the contemporaries.

However, many judgments by the dominators or tyrants can not be an objective judgment. There are complicated reasons. It is very adverse and dangerous to deny the judgments made by tyrants. Take Galileo (an Italian physicist and astronomer several hundred ago) for example. He believes that the earth is moving around the sun but this is opposite to the Bible which may intimidate the dominance of the tyrants. So he is judged as a heretic, and unfairly spends the rest of his life in prison, not no one can dare to deny the dominators because of the absolute power. In such a case, we can not depend on the contemporary judgment because people who evaluate him have not been in a scientific, rational stance. So it is unequal and unbelievable. So the future generations have recognized this and make a revaluation.

There are other circumstances that people’s achievements have not been decided by the contemporaries because these people’s work has transcended the times. So the contemporaries can not detect the value they have made. A classical instance is Van Gogh, one impressionism artist. His pictures has been regarded as awkward in his life time, but his famous works has made great influence in the future generation. His works accords with the perspective of the future generation. Since he made contribution to the humans, so undoubtedly, we respect his great achievements. There are other people whose achievement is first neglected but after a long period, a coincident chance has give the achievement a rebirth. So these achievements need the future generation’s revaluation in order to repay the ignorance of the contemporaries.

In sum, what a person’s achievement deserves is not determined by which generation give the judgment but by the practical benefits it has brought to people. So we must evaluate a person in a macro, scientific perspective with a historical, rational view to decide individuals.