Daily Inspiration Quote by Hu Shih

Hu Shih is arguing for a kind of cultural eyesight: you don’t really know what your traditions are doing until you set them beside someone else’s. The line carries the quiet force of a reformer who thinks culture is too often treated like inheritance jewelry - admired, protected, rarely appraised. “Contact and comparison” aren’t just academic methods here; they’re moral and political tools. Exposure becomes a solvent. It dissolves the illusion that any one civilization’s habits are self-evidently “natural,” and it pressures every custom to justify itself.

The phrasing is tellingly blunt: not just “value” but “worthlessness.” Hu isn’t interested in polite multiculturalism where everything gets a participation trophy. He wants evaluation, triage, renovation. That bluntness makes sense in his context: a major voice in China’s early 20th-century intellectual upheavals, he pushed vernacular language and pragmatic, empirical thinking while the country confronted imperial pressure, internal crisis, and the perceived failures of old orthodoxies. Comparison with the West wasn’t fandom; it was diagnosis.

Subtextually, the sentence rebukes cultural nativism and complacent patriotism. If you refuse contact, you’re not protecting purity; you’re protecting unexamined power - the institutions and elites who benefit when “tradition” is treated as an argument-ending word. Hu’s modernity is less about importing foreign ideas wholesale than installing a standard: cultural elements should compete under scrutiny. The wager is that identity survives not by sealing itself off, but by submitting to the humiliating, clarifying discipline of being compared.