A Perspective Of Filial Ethics On The Suicide Of The Elderly In China's Rural Areas During The Social Transformation

Under the current fast marketization and urbanization process,the Chinese society is experiencing an unprecedented structural change and transformation.Modernity is continuously dispelling traditions,forming a comprehensive breakage with tradition.The countryside is the birthplace of Chinese ethical culture.As the location of natural ethics,rural society is experiencing strong modernity erosion.Traditional ethics is also facing the impact and subversion of economic rationality.Individualization and rationalization are digesting the function and value of the traditional family ethics of the rural local society.The dissolution of the public nature of the rural society has led to the alienation of the traditional family ethics and the general decline of morality.The continuous deepening of marketization has made the old people lose their traditional ethical support system.and the status and power of the sons have also risen rapidly.All this greatly overturned the ethical authority of the elderly,and the traditional filial piety lost its original spiritual significance and ethical value.At the same time,the fierce competition of class competition and the differentiation of village hierarchy made filial piety degeneration from secularization to rationalization to eventual alienation.The old people are involved in the intergenerational division of labor and intergenerational exploitation in the family,and the alienated ethics of filial piety has forced the old people to continue to create the surplus value in exchange for offspring support by the reciprocal exchange of market logic.And those elderly people who have lost their ability to work will be ruthlessly abandoned by egotistical children.The village field correspondingly constructs the symbolic violence of suicide for the elderly—suicide fatalism.This ideology legalizes,publicizes,and fatatizes the logic of the old people's suicide,and the old people trapped in the village are disciplined and punished by the modernity in the village field.The suicide of the elderly has become the price and victim of the conflict between modernity and traditional ethics,and it is a silent conspiracy of modernity and the village.This shows that China's traditional family is suffering from the disenchantment and deconstruction of modernity.The alienation of traditional filial piety is urgently needed to seek the return of the spiritual home for the family.