My dear wife, Mr. Davies will tell you what’s happening here tonight. He’s a good man and has done everything he can for me. I suppose there are some other good men here, too, only they don’t seem to realize what they’re doing. They’re the ones I feel sorry for. `cause it’ll be over for me in a little while, but they’ll have to go on remembering for the rest of their lives. A man just naturally can’t take the law into his own hands and hang people without hurtin` everybody in the world, `cause then he’s just not breaking one law but all laws. Law is a lot more than words you put in a book, or judges or lawyers or sheriffs you hire to carry it out. It’s everything people ever have found out about justice and what’s right and wrong. It’s the very conscience of humanity. There can’t be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience? And what is anybody’s conscience except a little piece of the conscience of all men that ever lived? I guess that’s all I’ve got to say except kiss the babies for me and God bless you. Your husband, Donald.
If civilization is built upon conscience, what is conscience then? Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) said: “Now this original intellectual and (as a conception of duty) moral capacity, called conscience, has this peculiarity in it, that although its business is a business of man with himself, yet he finds himself compelled by his reason to transact it as if at the command of another person. For the transaction here is the conduct of a trial (causa) before a tribunal. But that he who is accused by his conscience should be conceived as one and the same person with the judge is an absurd conception of a judicial court; for then the complainant would always lose his case. Therefore in all duties the conscience of the man must regard another than himself as the judge of his actions, if it is to avoid self-contradiction.” Kant gave the double personality of a man to explain that conscience should be the accuser (the noumenal) and the judge, not the accused (the phenomenal) to be the judge. Otherwise, the accused would always win the cases.
The Chinese people have a very different concept of conscience. Basically the Chinese don’t believe there is conscience; one Chinese saying is “if man had conscience, dog would lose its nature”. The Chinese generally regard conscience to be gratitude: if a man showed his gratitude (phenomenon), they would say he had a conscience (noumenon). The Chinese people, especially the Chinese rulers, are used to being the judges by themselves when they feel uneasy internally, so the winners are always themselves. The consequence is they have failed to grasp what consciences mean to themselves for long history; and this has profoundly influenced the Chinese culture. Almost every Chinese knows Liang Qichao’s (1873 – 1929) Four Great Ancient Civilizations and is proud of China among them. But the Chinese sense their civilization is more or less astray, so they are struggling in constructing a new civilization. Of course, that won’t be easy while the Chinese keep ignoring the calls of their consciences; but it must be done since a civilization without conscience means its future is obsolete.
The Chinese Communist is so used to being the judge that it will make consciences lose all cases. The Chinese elites are so used to wagging their tails that they hardly have their consciences in their whole lives. The Chinese soldiers are so used to being conscienceless that they helped the Chinese Communist to commit the June Fourth Massacre in 1989, etc. The Chinese people are so used to being oppressed that they don’t know how to protect their rights in right ways; some of them ended their tragedies in extreme ways, such as, Chinese school attacks and Chinese factory suicides in 2010. In truth, it is a societal tragedy in China when conscience could not be aroused massively. When the Chinese tries to build a new civilization, they ought to arouse their long lost consciences first. So answer the door when a conscience is knocking on it.
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