China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture

5. The Contemporary Significance of Theological Ethics: The True Problems Elicited by Auschwitz and the Cultural Revolution

61 CHAPTER FIVE the ConteMporary signifiCanCe of theologiCal ethiCs The True Problems Elicited by Auschwitz and the Cultural Revolution In the memories of twentieth-century humankind, Auschwitz and the Cultural Revolution probably represent all the most profound sufferings . In whatever sense later generations look back on or describe these two already symbolic tragic events, they will lie across the path of spiritual progress and subject humankind’s existence, creations, rationality, faiths, and values to fundamental questioning. For contemporary people , reflections pertaining to such scrutiny can be taken as the nature of human studies. It is true that many differences exist between the Cultural Revolution and Auschwitz, but in at least two dimensions they link together the experiences of horror and survival in both East and West, which entailed (1) the fantasies and fanaticism of collective unconsciousness, and the uncontrollability of the two combined; and (2) the frailty of humankind’s existing values, order, and standards. It is precisely for this reason that the cultural problems faced by contemporary Chinese are increasingly similar to those of people in the West. The associable parts of these two incidents are the basis of ideological dialogue, from the same point of departure, between East and West. Reflections on Auschwitz have, in fact, merged into all aspects of Western human research. The Auschwitz issue has constantly cropped 62 China, Christianity, and the Question of Culture up in the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, Tzvetan Todorov, Paul Ricoeur, and Hannah Arendt, all the way up to the new writings of Peter Haas and Darrell J. Fasching since the 1990s,1 and all of them have, from different angles, directed their inquiries at some of the basic concerns of human studies. The doubts expressed by these concerns with regard to the “discursive forms” of the past would seem to compel all of humankind’s spiritual activities to take on the nature of a remaking of ethical choices. Hence, pure ethical topics will probably depart more from the application level and turn toward their intrinsic basis. In China the Cultural Revolution has indeed been “thoroughly negated” long ago. Ever since the 1980s, attempts have been made in literary works, memoirs, and theoretical probes to criticize and sum it up. And in more recent years, a group of women writers overseas have written autobiographical novels that have elicited strong reactions in the West to individual experiences of the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution.2 Up to this day, however, these written revelations have merely negated previously existing “conclusions of the truth,” and have even fostered the narcissistic myth that “all persons in the world are drunk and only I am sober”;3 they have rarely touched on the “discursive forms” themselves—those that result in “conclusions of the truth.” By remaining within the original discursive form and adhering to the original method of logic and discursive system, it is, in fact, hardly possible for any thorough negation of conclusions of the truth to produce the desired result. Hence, the point of departure of such criticism dooms it to the loss of any critical intention. Even more notable is the fact that whether in China or in the West, an attenuating force of considerable strength is latent in the criteria and the inertia of secular theory—one that can, at any time, draw issues that people have already become aware of into pitfalls where they are attenuated and reduced to nothingness. An example of such criteria and inertia in secular theory is the “code” described by Maurice Bloch. Once one accepts this code, one accepts the limitations it contains, because “the code adopted by the speaker contains within itself a set pattern of speech for the other party.”4 Based on such considerations, I maintain that the precondition to any dialogue on this matter in ideological circles in both the East and West should be to establish and share a common “problem perception,” or, in other words, what, in the final analysis, are the fundamental issues The Contemporary Significance of Theological Ethics 63 brought up by Auschwitz and the Cultural Revolution? What are the ideological latitudes they have left for later generations? In what sense are our inquiries and discussions effective? One Sort of Conclusion Drawn on the Auschwitz Issue by Western Scholars Among the many studies carried out by Western scholars on the Auschwitz issue, a paper by Didier Pollefeyt at...