On Weibo, people often bring up the percentage of users with an undergraduate degree. I’ve seen people put it at 4%, others at 10%, and so on. They usually cite the number to explain unpleasant encounters online. The implication is that there are so many loud, impulsive, and downright unreasonable voices online because users generally have too little education.
I see it a little differently.
Education plays a part, but I think it’s a secondary factor. The biggest reason is that many people online lack firsthand experience of what life can be like.
Take the latest episode of Thirteen Invitations, in which Xu Zhiyuan interviews Professor Qian Liqun. On camera, Qian recalls a particularly painful episode from his life.
His father, Qian Tianhe, had served as an official under the Republic of China. This made Qian Liqun’s family background a political liability. When he was assigned to work in Guizhou, he secretly took a photo of his father with him, hoping it would keep him company when he felt lonely. Someone searched his things and found it. This was treated as a serious offense, and Qian suffered for it. Later, when he was politically rehabilitated, the photo was returned to him. He burned it straight away. His students couldn’t understand why and questioned him about it. Qian said later that he regretted it too, but at the time he acted decisively, with scarcely a moment’s hesitation.
Qian Liqun is a renowned scholar. In Beijing and in Guizhou, his students were undoubtedly better educated than most people around them, yet they still couldn’t understand what their teacher had done. Why? They hadn’t lived through it. They had never felt the years of tension, fear, and suffocating pressure that Qian had endured. How could they understand what those feelings drove him to do? Imagine someone posting an exposé online saying, “Professor X at such-and-such university was so ashamed of his father’s background and so worried about his career that he burned his own father’s photo with his own hands.” The damaging allegation would have ironclad proof, and you can imagine what the comments would look like. There are plenty of things people do that you can’t understand simply by reading about them.
Once, I was eating at a shopping mall food court. I was looking down at my meal when I noticed two young people who looked like students making faces at something nearby. I followed their gaze and saw a stooped old woman pushing a little cart piled with scraps like plastic bags and paper sacks. She was trembling as she looked for leftovers other diners had left behind.
It hurt to see her. I went back to the counter and ordered another bowl of braised noodles with green beans. The middle-aged man running the stall thought I wanted it to go. I waved my hand and pointed to the woman behind me. He pressed his lips together, nodded, and said, “I’ll charge you half for this bowl. Let’s say it’s from both of us.”
I set the fresh bowl on the table, laid out the chopsticks, and left.
The man at the stall probably hadn’t had as much schooling as the two students near me. But he had a much deeper, more concrete understanding of how hard life can be and what other people are up against. As for me, I only came to appreciate the weight of the words “getting by” after I went out into the world and life slapped me hard from both sides.
To show real tolerance for others, or even to understand words and actions that seem absurd or downright unreasonable, you need to experience life fully. When people disagree online today, they often tell each other, “Go read a few more books.”
But that often misses the point. When arguments get heated, what people ought to tell each other is, “Spend a few more years getting to know life.”
Via Hesenbao