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Values and Youth Values
Values are what Marx called “the relationships that exist for us to survive,”(1)
that is, relationships are the objects that satisfy a subject’s needs. Subjects start with their own needs and interests and form their value systems through discovering how the real world (meaning objects) is significant to subjective needs. Because our subjective needs and our interests are different, we might find that the same object has a different significance for different subjects: that is why our conceptions of value are different. This, though, does not mean that our conception of value is indeterminable: that is because whether objects interact beneficially is not altered by whether a subject is good or bad. The fundamental character of value means that the conception of value starts with “me”; the reason that the real world has never developed as wished is because “our value systems are at root a kind of pragmatism… and precisely because they are pragmatic, they only serve pragmatic ends.”(2)
The process of discovering values and forming a conception of value can “become logical and regular in our minds”(3) because of our endless encounters with one another. In this way a conception of values based on subjective experience gradually becomes our moral outlook. Our moral outlook is the fundamental value relationship between different subjects and, compared with our conception of value, it is more abstract in terms of content, more stable in terms of form and tougher in terms of structure. Our moral outlook is part of our deeper consciousness and forms our notion of subjective good and evil, love and hate, and other emotions. It thereby provides us with a moral compass.
Everyone has a moral outlook, as do all communities. In a society there always exist many different conceptions of value, which give us diverse social values. The diversity of social values is normal and homogeny is abnormal. For a society’s stability and development, though, diverse social values must be orderly. We require an authoritative social moral outlook to direct diverse social values.
Subjects undertake all sorts of activities and fulfil all sorts of roles in their social lives. One person could, for example, be the father of a household, the boss of a company and a player on a baseball team. We can understand these roles as the subject assuming social relationships in each area of activity, and social relationships are fundamentally value relationships. Faced with different values in different spheres of activity, it is necessary for a subject, who fulfils all these roles, to have a different moral outlook for all these spheres of activity. The subject’s many different moral outlooks, then, come to form the subject’s moral network. The richness of the subject’s activities determines the richness of his moral network. The various moral outlooks may contradict one another, but the richness of a subject’s activities always follow the direction of the subject’s life and development. This insures that the richness of a subject’s moral network does not go astray, always follows the direction of a subject’s life and development.
A subject always has a unified moral network blended from many moral networks and this encapsulates the subject’s “fundamental opinions and views pertaining to value relationships between subjects.”(4) This is what people usually call ‘their values’. All real subjects have values, even though their consciousnesses are very different. The moral world is always the world people live in; as long as there are people, these people will have their philosophies. Their philosophy is “the summation of their views about other people”.(5)
All adults have values and it is an important part of growing up that young people have different values from middle-aged and old people. Generally speaking youth values have the following features:
First, youth values are immature. The reason youth values are not fully mature has to do with the stage young people are at in their physical and mental development and the fact they are psychologically, socially and spiritually unsettled. The immaturity of youth values explains why young people are impressionable. That is not to say that they will just believe anything before their values are developed, but they are open-minded to choose and absorb all sorts of values and have more potential for development.
Second, in youth values, idealism and reality come into conflict. Adolescence symbolises entering into a human world full of vitality and being full of idealism towards one’s fellow man; but reality is concrete and in the real world people run into all sorts of difficulties and often feel a sense of failure. Because of this they do not know how to reconcile their idealised self with their real self. They try through their own hard work to get a grip on themselves, but in reality wish for others’ sympathy and help; they hope that society will need them, but also want vociferously to boast of their own individuality. “This contradiction causes youth values to divide into the metaphysical and the physical. On a metaphysical level, youth values are greatly idealised; on a physical level, they are strongly realistic.”(6)
Third, youth values are transcendental. The immaturity of youth values offers young people the possibility of transcending the self, and the contradictions in their thought give strength to this transcendentalism. This transcendentalism is not entirely a result of competitiveness, but is rather a result of their susceptibility to react to new moral phenomena and of their pioneering nature. Young people are dissatisfied with the status quo, long for the future and are susceptible to social changes. They are the least conservative and most ready to accept new things. Because of this, young people are most ready to reject social values and most ready to revaluate their own values and so either reaffirm or reject them. Young people’s introspection when it comes to value means that the human condition and search for value is a form of transcendentalism. The process of trying to bring to fruition the transcendentalism of youth values symbolises youth values reconciling with society and coming to maturity.
Social Transformation and the Evolution of Chinese Youth Values
Marx took people’s environment to be central and divided human society into three main social stages: the first stage is people’s dependencies; “the second stage is when the interdependency of things is fundamental to independence”; “the third stage is when, based on a each person’s overall development and their common social productive power, we can determine a person’s social wealth—this is fundamental to free individualism.”(7)
A “dependency” society is a society based on the natural economy; an “independent” society is a society based on a commodity-driven economy; “free individualism” is a society based on the industry-driven economy. Chinese society is currently changing from a planned economy to a market economy, but in fact what is taking place is a change from a society with a natural economy to a society with a commodity-driven economy. Social transformation necessarily entrains all sorts of change and has a great effect on people’s consciousness.
In a natural economy society, people form families, tribes and other communities through blood and regional ties; these communities control everything that concerns the individual. In a planned economy, there is no fundamental difference as everyone is arranged into work units and everyone has to obey the organisation of this group...
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1. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels: Complete Works, The People’s Press,
1960, Vol. 6, p. 34.
2. Li Deshun & Ma Junfeng, The Tenets of Moral Debate, Shaanxi People’s Press, 2002, p. 198.
3. Lie Ning, Philosophical Notes, The People’s Press, 1974, p. 233.
4. Chen Xinhan, An Introduction to Values, Shanghai Social Science Press, 1995, p. 393.
5. Li Deshun & Ma Junfeng, 2002, p. 469.
6. Liao Xiaoping & Chen Jianyue, “The Basic Features of Youth values”, The Chinese School of Youth Politics Journal, 2006, Vol. 4.
7. Marx & Engels, Vol. 46, p. 104.
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