Rural Culture Must Not Fall into Marginalization and Desertification

Cultural products must carry values and emotions that suit farmers' tastes in order to touch farmers' hearts.

At present, with changes in rural social relations and structures, the phenomenon of cultural marginalization has appeared in rural areas. Rural cultural development has been placed by some officials in a subordinate position to economic development, unhealthy social trends have spread wantonly into rural areas, excellent traditional culture has been abandoned and lost, vulgar culture has resurfaced, and the self-governing, courteous, and warm rural life of several thousand years has disappeared. The fertile soil that nurtured Chinese civilization is tending toward dryness. Although in recent years the central and local governments have allocated large amounts of special cultural funds for building public cultural facilities, the results are not encouraging. Many grassroots cultural facilities have become mere decorations, and cultural activities organized by officials are not enthusiastically received by the masses because they fall short of the people's actual needs. Against this background, it is not surprising that vulgar phenomena such as striptease at funerals and unattended rural reading rooms have appeared.

In fact, farmers are not averse to public cultural activities that go beyond the scope of the individual, the family, and the village. This can be confirmed by the flourishing scenes of rural temple fairs in various places. For this reason, it is necessary to increase investment, strengthen the building of cultural positions, support rural public cultural organizations and carry out collective cultural activities, thereby avoiding the emergence of an anarchic state in rural cultural activities. For example, the practice of rural Confucianism has achieved good results, bringing about notable changes in family traditions and village atmosphere and curbing the problems of a rural value vacuum and the continued loss of bottom lines. Another example is square dancing and fitness activities, which have already developed vigorously in many rural areas. Their facilities do not require much investment, and grassroots governments can fully give them strong support.

Values are the core of culture. In other words, belief culture plays a decisive role in the entire cultural development, and farmers' belief culture is the foundation of all rural cultural development. This is because belief is both a matter of the private sphere and a public social issue. Only when a society has established a common identity and obtained a common spiritual bond will that society maintain stability and development under the connection of this belief. At present, traditional rural ethics are under fierce impact and are being shaken. The pluralization and secularization of the cultural field have caused farmers to experience ethical confusion and value disorientation. Their spiritual lives are extremely empty, and their beliefs are increasingly fragmented. Some individual farmers have turned their beliefs to religion, and problems such as "pornography, gambling, and drugs" also show a tendency to rise in rural areas.

Traditional culture, with Confucianism as its main body, still has a certain vitality in rural areas and plays an important role in promoting rural cultural development. In other words, rural cultural development is not simply about destroying the old and establishing the new. Cultural development has strong local differences. Cultural development requires not only government action, but also farmers' self-governance. In this regard, pressure-based cultural development assessment models that waste manpower and money should be abolished. The dissemination of culture must be built on the basis of farmers' active participation and inner identification. It must be understood that cultural products must carry values and emotions that suit farmers' tastes in order to touch farmers' hearts. It is necessary to promote the harmonious coexistence and shared prosperity of mainstream culture and local culture; correctly understand the value and role of traditional rural culture; fully tap the essence contained in traditional rural folk culture; and stimulate the internal vitality of rural culture. For example, village memory and genealogies play an immeasurable role in rural cultural development. Grassroots governments therefore need to fully tap the geographical and kinship culture left behind in villages, carefully distinguish among traditional folk cultural resources, and transform and innovate them, thereby enriching farmers' spiritual lives.

Unlike science, culture has norms. In rural areas, what plays a normative role in farmers' behavior includes not only formal norms represented by law, but also informal norms represented by customs, ethics and morality, traditions, values, village rules and conventions, and so on. It is worth noting that in China's traditional rural areas, because rural culture is a system of experience, village sages enjoyed very high prestige and power; because legal resources were relatively scarce, informal norms in fact played a major role in rural areas. At present, because the supply of rural public services is insufficient, farmers' anomie has begun to appear faintly, the situation of village sages governing villages has basically ceased to exist, and the younger generation of farmers has begun to dismiss many ethics of agricultural society. In this regard, informal norms also cannot quickly form and restore normal social order, because informal norms are established by convention and cannot take shape and play an effective role without a relatively long time.

The scholar Postman, in his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," argued that there are two ways to make the cultural spirit wither: one is to make culture a prison, and the other is to turn culture into a stage of entertainment unto death. In other words, if the government turns a blind eye to the chaos in rural culture and does not solve the problem of the systematic absence of normative culture, then rural culture will go astray. Therefore, efforts to crack down on ugly culture should be increased, the objective fact of the existence of informal norms should be recognized, arbitrary cultural supply should be avoided, newly emerging cultural forms in rural areas should be viewed with a more flexible and pragmatic attitude, and support should be given according to local conditions for rural areas to establish rural morality and public opinion consistent with core values.