December 28, 1999, Pokhara, Nepal, overnight at Fish Tail Lodge

A 200-kilometre mountain drive northwest from Kathmandu leads to the stunning city of Pokhara

a）。 It is said that many old people in the West are willing to live in this small place with high mountains and dangerous roads, and the young mountain that Ms. Han Suyin wrote about is also here.

The Himalayas shield it from the cold currents of the north and let the flowers and trees of the world shine in the sun on the southern slopes. But it can't be hot next to the snow-capped mountains, and the freshly melted snow makes the waterways here the upper reaches of all the great rivers in the south.

We crossed the clear, wide snowwater river on a kind of cable raft and stayed at a lodge at the foot of the mountain called Fish tail lodge. Attracted by the beautiful scenery, my friends separated, and I walked around the mountain house to continue to sort out my feelings along the way.

It's already a little cold here, and now I'm picking up my pen by the fire.

Yesterday outlined the reasons for the decline of several major civilizations, but there should always be some common laws, right? By finding out these common laws, we can actually find the reason for the long-term continuation of Chinese civilization, but the two are just opposites.

Almost every place we see as the birthplace of civilization is geographically coveted and surrounded by the wilderness. The great beginnings of civilization are all miracles, and miracles are always lonely. It is suddenly higher than the surrounding ecology, which is its strength and its vulnerability. Civilization makes the barbarian forces blush with its own prosperity, and inferiority the barbarian forces with its own elegance, so that the barbarians will sooner or later move against civilization, and once they do, civilization can easily be broken. So we see that any civilization has to build so many castles for itself.

When the power of civilization has learned too many lessons from blood and tears, it will also take the initiative to attack, at first trying to block barbarism by barbaric means, and over time, long-distance conquest has gradually become the habit of some civilizations. They became strong and majestic for a while, but history eventually noted that any military expedition was a cultural suicide. Because each culture has its own volume positioning, a culture without boundaries is like a body without skin, how can it survive? Not only Egypt and Persia had learned this lesson, but even the "pan-Hellenistic" expeditions did not bring benefits to Greek culture.

Once the conquest is won, it must be accompanied by cultural enslavement, which is a devastating destruction of the enslaved culture, as we have seen in Egypt, Jerusalem, Babylon, Iran, and India. But on the other hand, the culture of the victor is not necessarily victorious, because it suddenly becomes a weapon and a tool to enslave others, and it must be inflicted with a lot of uncivilized content, and in the end it can only be a lose-lose situation.

Once again, I was glad to come to this conclusion, because none of our ancient Chinese kings liked to go on expeditions to other countries. Of course, this has to do with the idea that they think they are the center of the world, but this idea could have been a reason to attack others. Chinese civilization advocates peace and self-defense from the root, and the poems of Du Fu, which we have recited since childhood, can very well summarize this concept passed down from generation to generation: "There is a limit to killing, and all countries have their own borders. From this, I also found an important reason why Chinese civilization has not fallen for thousands of years.

I have repeatedly thought about tens of thousands of miles of galloping: you see in the Shang Dynasty in China, Egypt has already made an expedition to West Asia; In the time of Confucius, Persia made expeditions to Babylon and Egypt; Even in Qu Yuan's time, Alexander of Greece was still on expeditions to Egypt and Babylon; And both Persia and Greece have reached India......

In short, in the vast land between Africa, Europe, and Asia that we visited this time, several major ancient civilizations have already fought in the dark, shuttling back and forth, and have not been left behind. It is said that there is a legacy, only we are China. China also fights, most of them are just internal power struggles, or sweeping away the surrounding Xiongnu and the like, and it is a thorough duty to compare with others. The first image of our nation is the Great Wall, which is just our own parapet. This time, there was a cassette tape in the jeep I was sitting in, which was played repeatedly for three months, and it was always a strange sentence, I don't know who was singing: "Meng Jiangnu, crying the Great Wall, who can bear to listen to the swan song of the ages?" ”

Every time I looked at the castles and trenches of the expeditionary forces, I laughed when I came back to the car, and thought to myself, when this trip is at the end, I will salute the Great Wall, because I finally understand that its basic meaning is peace and security. It is a great blessing for human civilization that such a large civilization has been adopting this posture.

In addition to war, the second cause of decline is social disorder.

The destruction of civilization by war begins with the destruction of order. This destruction also includes the militarization of their own civilization by the aggressor in the mobilization and organization of war. Even without war, civilization itself cannot resist disorderly tendencies. Most cultural behaviors are unable to coordinate their relationship with other cultural behaviors when they are self-extended, resulting in a large number of high-intelligence disputes, and sometimes low-intelligence forces are required to mediate rudely, which can be said to abound in the history of the world. The more general problem is the separation of civilization and power, so that neither side can establish its own system of order, and sooner or later it will lose its order. The higher the civilization, the stronger the resistance, and the more serious the consequences of disorder. This is why the birthplace of most ancient civilizations in the world is far inferior to other regions in terms of social order.

To be sure, I didn't feel much about this in the past, I just felt that order was a natural existence, and the difference was between the old order and the new order. Our generation has been battling the old order of all kinds, and has accumulated a lot of discourse on this. In fact, the discussion of the length of this system and the shortness of that system has always stayed in a similar grammatical system, otherwise how could it be discussed? However, what impressed us the most during this expedition was the relatively thorough phenomenon of social disorder.

A thousand kilometers, a thousand kilometers away, there are always so many poor people who have nothing to do standing on the mountains of garbage. Getting these poor people to bend down and get rid of the garbage, and then pay a little from a reasonable tax, that's social management, which is easy to say, but very little can be done. It is shocking that it is not in the slums, nor in the refugee camps, nor in the aftermath of the earthquake, or in the aftermath of the floods, but in the past, the basic state of life in many countries.

Over the generations, many poor people have lost their working habits, and the fertile fields are not cultivated. A very small number of people get rich and live in the city, and a few of them play politics. Some of the personable politicians I've seen on TV before have been accused of big embezzlement by their opponents, but their opponents are not much different. What's even more terrifying is that no matter how you elect or vote, you can't escape from these circles and families. The land is thousands of miles away, and the hungry people are everywhere, and it has nothing to do with them. As a result, not only are the roads dilapidated, the sanitation is poor, and the people are bombed completely unattended, but there are also so many large areas that are not under the control of the government's military and police, and in some areas the government can only control some major highways, and the vast land on the roadside is completely uninformed.

I have repeatedly stood on such a land and wondered, what kind of social reform can solve the problem? In the face of everything in front of me, I can understand even the strong measures that I felt should not be taken before. Think about it, how can you make this dense layer of unkempt and glazed people a positive force for social progress, and then let them send their children to education? This is the starting point of civilization, and until the end of the twentieth century, there were still so many places in the world that were not entered, and many places were still the birthplace of ancient civilizations.

The destruction of civilization by disorder is more serious than any other force, even more than war. There's some sad logic here, that some of the disorder is brought about by civilization itself. For example, civilization will attract barbarism, civilization will promote hegemony, civilization will breed boredom, civilization will provide excuses for disputes, the basis for conflicts, and the logic of attack, and civilization will nurture sharp swords, gloomy schemes, and angry tongues, etc., but in the end, it is civilization that will damage the most. Therefore, for a long-standing civilization, the only way to avoid the damage of disorder is to form a system that has both the functions of civilization and the power of management. In ancient China, the method of establishing a civil service system through the imperial examination was practiced for more than 1,300 years, effectively maintaining the order of Chinese civilization. This order has both positive and negative aspects, and I have systematically analyzed it in the article "One Hundred Thousand Jinshi", but this time I have taken a look at the birthplace of several other civilizations, and I understand that it is indeed a genius work of our ancestors. Those civil officials, who seldom received effective management instructions from higher government departments, were familiar with the moral norms and political ideals of Confucian culture, and took the initiative to consciously exercise power, and this power had a clear cultural orientation. It is such a tight network that ensures the continuation of Chinese civilization. Although he was sick, he never collapsed.