A year ago, “liberal studies” was in vogue in Hong Kong, and my friend’s son, who was studying in a prestigious school in Hong Kong, excelled in arts and read extracurricular books, especially Western history, but wanted to go to England to study in the so-called philosophy department.
I asked his son a general knowledge question: In Chinese history, there was the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States, and then the Tang and Song Dynasties; in the West, there was Ancient Greece and then the Roman Empire.
Children throw a bunch of book bag nouns and names of people. I said: these I have heard, not much interest. I just want to simply know youprefer Greece, or Rome?
The child listened to a stunned. I said: Greece is the cradle of Western philosophy, there are Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, grain of superstar. The only philosophers in Rome were Seneca and Cicero, who were thinkers and celebrities, or KOLs as they are known today, and Seneca and Cicero were more practical and easier to read than Socrates and influenced the later Italian Machiavelli. You know why?
After all, the child is young. I said: very simple, because compared to Greece, the elite of Rome does not focus on clear talk, they are out of experts, focus on practical, will brain on the construction of waterways, building roads, building public toilets above the improvement of life, even if the amphitheater, the so-called amphitheater, used for theater, animal fights, rather than Athenians used for civilian forum.
Why? Rome both conquered Athens, had a strong military and a rapidly expanding territory, and did not have time for intellectuals to explore so many metaphysical talks about life, death and the existence of time. The Romans were materially rich and more hedonistic than the Greeks. Comparing by the source of Western civilization, Hong Kong is more like Rome and less like Greece.
The parents of the children nodded their heads a lot. I said: a Taipei, a Hong Kong. Taipei literary youth learned the same Paris-Tokyo pursuit of connotation, like the theory, from Shat Kamu to the twilight of the wild pigeon, and by Tsai English to Western feminism, the very Cheng Pin bookstore. Hong Kong people also revered the West to learn English, only know Biffett speculative insights, Soros financial theory, Hong Kong people to read university to read engineering and medicine, heard to read philosophy and theology is afraid, this is the British to Roman imperial wisdom to govern the Far East colonial influence. Therefore, Taipei is a small Greece, Hong Kong is a small Rome. This little idea, which I registered for copyright, is called general knowledge.
The kid was so happy and enlightened that he later went to London University to study economics instead and joined the University Debating Society. I congratulate his BNO parents: your son will be fed in the future and can be a KOL.
And Hong Kong is not Taipei, Hong Kong does not focus on liberal arts and yet is full of successful KOL, and indeed found another British colonial Roman style cistern. This club time and space apart from the edge.
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