Emotions and Social Relations
A society has more than its own objective structure and development level; it also has its own ethos and psychological make-up.
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Emotions and Social Relations Boqing Cheng
A society has more than its own objective structure and development level; it also has its own ethos and psychological make-up. Of course, we have no intention of sentimentalizing or personifying society, but it is true that we can feel the “rhythm of sentiment” of an era (Pareto 1968). Not only this, we can analyze the current state of human culture from the angle of emotion. Samuel Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations which astonished the world, and ten years later, Dominique Moïsi wrote The Geopolitics of Emotion which suggested that the West was permeated with the culture of fear, the Islamic world the culture of humiliation, and Asia the culture of hope (Moïsi 2007). In reality, what worried Moïsi was that the confrontation between fear and humiliation would benefit the Asians, in particular the Chinese. This novel and interesting view no doubt explained certain questions, but the future-looking Chinese have already opened their Pandora’s box. Hope hovers close but stirs up emotions. Emotion is a profound and discerning yardstick for measuring social change. It reflects the collective atmosphere and has its source in social relations which are at once the stitches holding the society together and the force shaping the structures of feelings. The changes in emotion can be an index of social change even if they are hard to quantify. We will attempt to map the changes in emotion from the general conditions and discuss the state of social relations and their changes in order to analyze whether a new sociality is possible in the era of individualization.
B. Cheng (&) Department of Sociology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. and Social Sciences Academic Press 2017 X. Zhou (ed.), Inner Experience of the Chinese People, Research Series on the Chinese Dream and China’s Development Path, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-4986-6_6
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1 From Passion to Self-interest: Changes in Collective Emotion The traditional Chinese culture values gentleness, respect, frugality, and altruism. Passion has nothing to do with these qualities, but the Chinese culture also emphasizes a sentimental education. On a bamboo slip unearthed at Guodian in Hubei Province were inscribed the words “Dao comes from love”, while Doctrine of the Mean admonishes for moderation in joy, anger, sadness, and happiness. But China, originator of the love-based Dao, became paradoxically a people of weak sentiments. In his article “Vernacular Literature and Psychological Reform” written during the May Fourth Movement, Fu Sinian wrote I prefer the more inclusive term “psychological reform” to “revolution in thinking”, for there is emotion besides thinking, and we must develop sentiments in addition to changing thoughts… Thinking can no doubt be creative, but not more so than sentiments which reign over thoughts and decide on the course of action. Sentiments create intentions and drive them and therefore have influence over everything; this is something that th
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