【推荐1】How the Elderly Are Treated Around the World

How cultures view and treat their elderly is closely linked to their most prized values and qualities.     1    

In the US and UK, Protestantism (新教) is at play. Western cultures tend to be youth-centric, stressing qualities like independence.     2     It ties a person’s value to his or her ability to work – something that becomes weaker in old age. As their health becomes worse, the elderly in these cultures often move to old people’s homes and nursing homes.

In France, parents are protected by law. It is difficult to imagine an Elderly Rights Law being a focus in the laws of many Western cultures. France did, however, pass a similar law in 2004.     3     One was a group of official statistics showing France had the highest rate of pensioner suicides in Europe, and the other was the aftermath of a heat wave that killed 15,000 people, most of whom were elderly and had been dead for weeks before they were found.

    4     Native American cultures traditionally accept death as a fact of life. In many Native American areas, elders are respected for their wisdom and life experiences. Within Native American families, it’s common for the elders to be expected to pass down their learning to younger members of the family.

The way to care for Chinese elders is changing. Chinese families traditionally view respect for one’s elders as the highest virtue, according to the Confucian tradition. Adult children are generally expected to care for their parents in their old age.     5     Nursing homes are beginning to become a more socially acceptable option for elderly care.

【推荐2】The English have a difficult and, generally speaking, dysfunctional (怪异的) relationship with clothes. Their main problem is that they have a desperate need for rules, and are unable to get along without them. This helps to explain why they have an international reputation for dressing in general very badly, but with specific areas of excellence, such as high-class men’s suits, ceremonial costumes, and innovative (革新的) street fashion. In other words, we English dress best when we are “in uniform”.

You may be surprised that I am including “innovative street fashion” in the category of the uniform. Surely the parrot-haired punks (朋克摇滚乐迷) or the Victorian vampire goths are being original, not following rules? It’s true that they all look different and eccentric (古怪的) but in fact they all look eccentric exactly in the same way. They are wearing a uniform. The only truly eccentric dresser in this country is the Queen, who pays no attention to fashion and continues to wear what she likes, a kind of 1950s fashion, with no regard for anyone else’s opinion. However, it is true that the styles invented by young English people are much more eccentric than any other nation’s street fashion. We may not be individually eccentric, apart from the Queen, but we have a sort of collective eccentricity, and \ye appreciate originality in dress even if we do not individually have it.

Another “rule” of behavior I had discovered was that it is very important for the English not to take themselves too seriously, to be able to laugh at themselves. However, it is well known that most teenagers tend to take themselves a bit too seriously.

The goths, in their scary black costumes, certainly look as if they are taking themselves seriously. But when I got into conversation with them, I discovered that they too had a sense of humor. I was once chatting to a goth in the full vampire costume—with a white face, deep purple lipstick, and black parrot-hair. I saw he was also wearing a T-shirt with “Goth”. “Why are you wearing that?” I asked. “In case you don’t realize I’m a goth.” he answered, pretending to be serious. We both burst out laughing.

【推荐3】Americans wear black for mourning. Chinese wear white. Westerners think of dragons as monsters. Chinese honor them as symbols of God. Chinese civilization has often shown such polarities (极性) with the West，as though each stands at extreme ends of a global string. Now in the University of California，Berkeley，a psychologist has discovered deeper polarities between Chinese and American cultures—polarities that go to the heart of how we reason and discover truth.

His findings go far toward explaining why American cultures seem so contentious and Chinese cultures so passive，when compared to each other. More importantly，the research opens the way for the peoples of the East and the West to learn from each other in fundamental ways. The Chinese could learn much from Western methods for determining scientific truth，said Kaiping Peng，a former Beijing scholar，who is now a UC Berkeley assistant professor of psychology. And Americans could profit enormously from the Chinese tolerance for accepting contradictions (矛盾) in social and personal life，he said.

“Americans have a terrible need to find out who is right in an argument，” said Peng. “The problem is that at the interpersonal level，you really don’t need to find the truth，or maybe there isn’t any. ”Chinese people，said Peng，are far more content to think that both sides have flaws (缺陷) and virtues，because they have a holistic awareness that life is full of contradictions. They do far less blaming of the individual than do Americans，he added.

In studies of interpersonal argument，for example，when subjects were asked to deal with contradictory information stemming from conflict between a mother and a daughter or a student and a school，Peng found that Americans were “noncompromising，blaming one side—usually the mother—for the causes of the problems，demanding changes from one side to attain a solution and offering no compromise”in dealing with the conflict. Compared to this angry，blaming American stance，the Chinese were paragons (模范) of compromise，finding fault on both sides and looking for solutions that moved both sides to the middle.