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Paper abstract:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” –F. Scott Fitzgerald said that in 1936.

Youth moral development has been an important topic in multiple disciplines. Contemporary Tibetan teenagers are obligated to receive a uniform Marxist ideological education in the formal schools supervised by the Chinese central government. Yet Tibetan Buddhism is also passed on to them and ingrained in their families as their traditional belief system. This creates a conflict for Tibetan teenagers, who are confronted with an ideological tension between their theistic beliefs and their atheistic Marxist education. Directly asking them “which side do you stand with?” is not appropriate or feasible given government surveillance issues, and safety and honesty issues. By using ethnography and semi-structured interviews, this study finds that Tibetan teenagers do not typically feel the need to reconcile the apparent ideological conflict or choose between the two belief systems. Whether consciously or not, they incubate diverse functional strategies while holding two opposed ideologies, for example, utilizing tolerance to tolerate intolerance. We have studied the judgments of Tibetan teenagers in cultural-specific and context-rich moral dilemmas as a proxy to reveal to what extent they reason more like a Marxist or more like a Buddhist. The interview questions are designed based on ethnographic work in the light of anthropology, which is cultural-specific to avoid the dominant psychology universalism and western ethnocentrism. Moreover, the interviews were conducted semi-structurally with following-up contextualized questions to dig in underlying mentalities, which is a useful way to combine individualist particularity on the micro-level and group generalization on the macro-level. The adaptive coexistence strategies of Tibetan teenagers have broad implications for youth moral development in general, minority community-building and development in diverse cultural and belief contexts, as well as our increasingly multi-polar and multi-ideological global world.

（Note: This paper proposal is submitted to 2023 CESS conference. Please do not circulate it for other purposes without the authors’ permission.）