The annual Nobel Prize has passed quietly. Apart from the incredible act of awarding the Peace Prize to the Japan Nuclear Bomb Victims Association, compared to previous years, the results of this Nobel Prize have not attracted as much attention in our country.
Once upon a time, the Nobel Prize, especially the natural science awards, was the “holy grail of science” in the minds of many Chinese people and held a supreme position. Every time no Chinese won the prize, a variety of reflection activities followed.
Among various criticisms, there is an interesting viewpoint that says: the reason why China rarely awards Nobel Prizes is because mainstream culture is too secularist and lacks some kind of transcendent faith, which leads to domestic research placing too much emphasis on technology that can bring practical benefits and lacking a scientific spirit that pursues truth exploration as the highest pursuit.
In fact, this view is an extension of another classic question, that is, why do Chinese people have no religious beliefs?

Of course, there are various religious organizations in Chinese society, and there are many more. A more accurate statement would be, why hasn’t China’s mainstream society been dominated by any particular religion?
More than a hundred years ago, when this question was first raised, it was accompanied by some reflection and criticism. It implies a viewpoint that it is precisely due to the lack of some kind of transcendent faith in the Chinese mainstream society that has led to the comprehensive backwardness in modern times.
Of course, this statement cannot explain why India, which has never lacked religion, declined at the same time, and India does not seem to have gained any advantage from religion in the process of modernization.
Time has passed, and the achievements of New China in various fields are enough to debunk this viewpoint. However, historically speaking, among the world’s major civilization systems that have been passed down to this day, Chinese civilization is indeed the most secularized. Nowadays, most of the indigenous civilizations in other regions of the world have disappeared into the long river of history, and have been basically occupied by religious cultures such as Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.
With the emergence of a new world order, this unique feature of Chinese civilization has also taken on new meanings. It is not an exaggeration to say that its future is related to the future of secularism, and even the fate of the entire human world.

1. Secular civilization
   In the early stages of human social development, families formed by blood ties were the natural starting point for all forms of organization. However, blood relations are highly closed and not open to the outside world. The highest level of organizational form it can develop into is a tribe or tribal alliance.
   To develop into a more complex community, humanity needs a tool that is more inclusive than ‘blood ties’.
   In the pre modern historical stage, there were two relatively successful solutions for human society: one was to appeal to various religions such as mysticism and the belief in revelation; Another type is the blood kinship clan legal system society constructed by traditional Chinese society using the principle of homogeneity between family and state.
   Religion utilizes a “god human” relationship to shape an authority that is higher than blood kinship, breaking the closed nature of kinship society and organizing people into a more complex community.
   Christianity and Islam, which have a universal color, have defeated many indigenous religions in various regions with their strong narrative dissemination ability, ability to attract new members, and resistance to assimilation.
   So, the barbarian tribes in Europe gradually formed states under Christianization, becoming the predecessors of modern European countries; Under the influence of Islam, numerous tribes of the Arab nation have also left behind glorious Muslim empires in history.

In contrast, traditional Chinese society has provided a secularist solution of “family state narrative”, which expands the family ethics based on blood relatives to the state. The state is an expanded version of the family, and the monarch is the “father” of the state. The monarch mainly cares for his subjects like he cares for his children, and the subjects should serve the monarch like they serve their fathers. Loyalty to the monarch is essentially filial piety, which is why successive dynasties have advocated “governing the world with filial piety”.
Religious narratives and national narratives have their own advantages and disadvantages.
For example, religious narratives have a strong ability to spread and assimilate; However, their biggest concern is the loss of their “right to interpret scriptures”, so the religious community is extremely wary of heretics, even more so than hatred towards them. It is also for this reason that there are constant conflicts and incompatibility between different religions and religious branches, resulting in hatred and disputes that continue to this day.
The disadvantage of secularism’s narrative of family and state is its weak anti-interference ability, and its members are easily attracted to mysticism and Apocalypse beliefs. During the Northern and Southern Dynasties, Buddhist ideas from India spread eastward, attracting countless intellectuals to bow down and almost leading to the severance of traditional Chinese culture.
However, due to the fact that Chinese civilization occupied the most developed and concentrated region of agricultural productivity in East Asia, and the organizational structure of the family state narrative was very suitable for farming activities based on families and clans. Therefore, for thousands of years, the advantage of productivity has become the most powerful weapon for Chinese civilization to resist the invasion of foreign ideas, and has also maintained the cultural foundation of secularism in our country.
However, precisely because secularist culture heavily relies on the advantage of productivity, Chinese civilization has encountered a major crisis in modern times that has not been seen in a thousand years: for a long time, the productivity advantage that Chinese civilization has been proud of has completely collapsed in the face of industrial society.

At this point, there is no need for any debate or argumentation, and our cultural confidence immediately collapses. This is the drawback of secularist culture, which heavily relies on the high material level brought by the advantage of productivity to provide cultural confidence.
On the contrary, religious narratives, due to their mystical beliefs and the innate confidence brought about by the Apocalypse, also known as mystical confidence, can maintain their original social organization even at a very low material level, without collapsing.
This is the reason why Indian society has been able to break through for a long time without being defeated, and why Islam, after immigrating to Europe, has been able to maintain its faith and social organization, and has become an important force influencing Western politics. Chinese immigrants, no matter how high their status was in China before, once they find that their material level is not as good as abroad, they will quickly be impressed by the foreign culture after going abroad.

It can be said that the loss of productivity advantages in modern times has truly touched the foundation of Chinese civilization that has lasted for thousands of years. In the face of this most profound crisis, a theory with the development of productive forces as the core and the feelings of universalism has injected strong faith and spiritual power into the Chinese people. The introduction and localization of this system swept away all the old systems and cultures on this continent, ushering in a new era for Chinese civilization.

2. Rebirth of Civilization
   What is modernization and why is modern society stronger? From the perspective of productivity, this is because modern society has extracted various social resources, including people, from pre modern social organizations such as religion and clans, and formed modern organizations such as enterprises, factories, hospitals, and armies in a more efficient way.
   From a historical perspective, in the process of modernization, Western countries have mainly faced enormous resistance from traditional religious forces. The experience of Western countries moving towards modernization is synchronous with their establishment of the principle of separation of church and state, and their transformation into a “secularist” society.
   Unlike the West, China has traditionally been a secular society, and what we need to overcome is mainly the resistance from clan culture.
   The traditional idea of “family state homogeneity” actually has a big loophole: when there is a conflict between family interests and national interests, how should a person choose? This is the classic problem of ‘loyalty and filial piety cannot be achieved simultaneously’.
   Although Confucian literati may prioritize “loyalty” in public and refer to loyalty to the country as the “greatest of filial piety,” in reality, the family, as the entity in which a person lives their entire life, is often the ultimate choice for people. Traditional Chinese society should essentially be seen as a collection of families. Moreover, there are conflicts among various families.
   This loose collective lacks competitiveness in both military and economic aspects in the face of the highly organized Western modern society that has already completed industrialization.
   Therefore, in order to revitalize this ancient civilization, it is necessary to go beyond traditional clan culture. At that time, the main means of production relied on by China’s clan power was arable land. That is why only by completing the land revolution in the vast rural areas can the powerful forces contained in Chinese society be unleashed.
   Once this power was unleashed, it created a military miracle, using the unprecedented peak of light infantry in human history to save the Chinese nation from the crisis of national and ethnic extinction.
   However, for a civilization based on secularism to ultimately achieve revival, it still cannot escape a characteristic: it relies heavily on the high material level brought by the advantage of productivity to provide cultural confidence.
   So, this power created another economic miracle, passing through the two industrial revolutions that took the Western world two hundred years to complete in just 20 years.
   However, our society is still filled with ‘productivity anxiety’. The most prominent manifestation is that, in the eyes of many people, there are only two countries in this world: China and foreign countries. If foreign countries have it, China must have it, and it must lead, otherwise it proves that the path of modernization is not yet completed.
   In other words, our country needs to compare with the sum of other countries in the world. Moreover, even if 99 out of 100 industrial pearls are plucked, the remaining one will still cause anxiety in the whole society. It seems that not catching up quickly is a major event that affects the rise of the nation and the success or failure of civilization.
   Even the Chinese who have already benefited from it accept this logic. They will take some foreign leading technology or product, such as ASML’s lithography machine or Musk’s starship, back to the Jane China Internet to demonstrate why the West is still great and why China is a failed country. It seems that China must surpass the western world as a whole in all aspects to prove itself.

This’ productivity anxiety ‘is a characteristic that secularist civilization finds difficult to shake off. Due to a certain degree of secularization, Western countries may also experience a certain degree of ‘productivity anxiety’. In the last century, the Soviet Union was the first to achieve satellite launches, which brought a sense of urgency to the United States.
However, after all, Western countries have emerged from Christian societies and still retain a lot of their original confidence with mystical colors. Even if economic competition fails, they can still maintain cultural confidence in a sense of relaxation. Even if they encounter a major blow, they can return to religious society and maintain social organization through their belief in the Apocalypse.
We can’t. For thousands of years, we have been based on secularist culture and relied on our advantages in productivity to resist wave after wave of the impact of the Apocalypse culture, which has continued to this day.
The assimilation ability of civilization that we take pride in is essentially derived from the high material level brought by high productivity, which enables the “secular world” to overcome the “other shore” and allows many religions to put aside their grievances and live together harmoniously in a society.
From the perspective of all humanity, whether this high productivity is in the hands of secularist civilization will profoundly affect the fate of human civilization.

3. The future of humanity
   In September 2018, two huge boxes weighing 150 tons departed from Texas, USA and were transported thousands of miles away to New Zealand. They are underground shelters produced by an American company called ‘Rising S’, known as’ Underground Arks’.

After arriving in New Zealand, they will be placed several hundred meters underground. Once there are signs of the end of the world, such as nuclear war, major epidemics, grassroots riots, etc., wealthy Americans who purchase them can take private planes to New Zealand and hide in this long prepared “doomsday shelter”.
These ‘luxury shelters’ have ample energy and resources, and even come with indoor swimming pools and artificial sunlight to support them for years in isolation.
Nowadays, Queenstown, located on the South Island of New Zealand, has become a doomsday sanctuary for American billionaires such as Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel and hedge fund tycoon Julian Robertson.
This group of the world’s richest and most powerful elites do not intend to spend energy creating a future where everyone will be better, but instead are trapped in a ‘doomsday complex’.
Although Western societies have achieved a certain degree of secularization, people there are still exposed to religious culture from a young age, including concepts such as “Judgment Day” and “Noah’s Ark”. This has led to a widespread “Apocalyptic complex” among elites in Western society. This description of God’s judgment at the end of the day exists in the Book of Revelation, which literally translates to the ‘Revelation complex’.

It implies the idea that crossing the end of the world means becoming “God’s chosen people”, overcoming some weakness of human nature, possessing divinity, and thus being the highest pursuit of humanity.
Similar Christian ways of thinking are filled with Western cultural works. For example, even in the most technologically advanced science fiction works, the protagonist often carries some kind of prophecy, overcoming numerous difficulties to become a savior, or simply the theme is to search for a creator, an alien version of God.
However, the characteristic of religious culture is that they have their own systems and cannot be compatible with other religions. Due to the competition for the right to interpret scriptures, there is no room for compromise in logic between different religious systems and even different factions within the same religion. The religious conflicts arising from this remain an important source of conflict in human society to this day.
The Western world, which emerged from Christian culture, has dominated the world order for hundreds of years. Religious conflicts have not been effectively resolved, but have instead escalated, causing tragedies around the world.
This is because Western society still retains a strong Christian cultural color. A large number of Western intellectuals and politicians still have a strong Crusade sentiment and view other civilizations with a missionary mentality towards heresy and paganism, thus frequently interfering in other countries’ domestic affairs and even provoking wars.

Until today, there are still ongoing conflicts between the Christian world and Islamic countries; Russia, dominated by Eastern Orthodoxy, has always been regarded as heretical by the Western world and has difficulty gaining the trust of Western society.
With more and more countries possessing weapons of mass destruction, this conflict poses an increasingly serious and uncontrollable threat to human civilization as a whole.
The most ideal solution is to curb the risks brought by religious conflicts and violence that have existed for thousands of years, and ensure that the highest productivity of the human world is in the hands of a secular state that does not favor any religion.
The sustained development of social economy and the continuous improvement of people’s living standards are the greatest common divisors of all countries. No matter which country pursues a goal below or above this greatest common divisor, no matter how sacred this goal may sound, it will be a disaster for humanity as a whole.
Only when the highest productive forces are in the hands of secularist civilization can we ensure that various civilizations that have accepted different types of “revelations” put aside their differences, seek common ground while reserving differences, and jointly maintain a community of shared future for mankind that focuses on the “present world”.
From the history of various countries, this mission can only be undertaken by China.
On the scale of the universe, the Earth where humans live is just a drop in the ocean. There are still many unknown worlds worth exploring in the distance of the starry sky. Human civilization should not be destroyed on this small planet due to infighting before it even sets off, and it should be for those vague and unknown reasons.
The universe is already vast and magnificent enough, and humanity does not need an illusory shore. Because that vast universe is the other shore.