现在总算可以回过头来，看看衣冠之猿究竟与裸猿有何不同了。 首先，和其他生物一样，我们也是适应环境的结果，漫长的适应过程产生了大量适应器，它们相互配合，组成了一套完整的生存繁殖方案，叫作天性或本能，而其中人类所独有（且人类普遍拥有）的那些，则被称为人性；当然，人性并非永恒，自从智人物种确立，特别是其中一支走出非洲散布全球之后，又发生了许多适应和改变。 假如到此为止，那我们就仅仅是裸猿，但人类还获得了另一组适应器——诸如制造弓箭或渔网的方法——，它们并不存在于个体天性之中，表现为生理或心理特性（尽管它们依赖某些生理或心理机能），而是以口述传统或文字记载之类的形式，存在于群体文化之中，但和生理心理适应器一样，它们也是我们生存方案不可或缺的组成部分。 由于这些适应器存在于群体文化，个人必须成长于群体之中才能获得全套生存技能；但个人对群体和文化的依赖不止于此，尽管有些技能（比如制造弓箭）一旦习得便可离群单独使用，就像有些手机应用下载安装之后便可离线使用，但还有大量被称为社会性技能的应用——诸如沟通、欺骗、说服、恐吓、劝诫、引诱、煽动、组织、指挥、合谋、圈套……——不仅需要在线安装，也只能在线使用。 这是人之社会性的第一层含义，还有第二层：上面提到的那些适应器，尽管须从社会获得，也必须在社会中实现其功能，但总归是服务于个体利益的，是个体的适应器，但并非所有文化元素都是如此，文化自有其传播途径和变异方式，其复制变异兴衰存灭更多系于群体而非个人，因而许多文化元素——诸如伦理规范、部落认同、战士荣誉、集体纪律、民族主义——可能更多服务于群体利益，或干脆只服务于个别模因的利益。 群体与个体的利益虽多有重合，但并不一致，而文化是成套习得而非随意挑选组合的，于是个人便处于本能和文化两股力量的牵引之下；甚而，组成这两股力量的各种成份，其牵引方向也不尽相同，因为人类在不同进化阶段所获得的适应器，在当前条件下的适应程度各有不同，比如对糖的嗜好在当代富裕社会就有点过头，部落认同在现代城市社会也已过时。 更一般而言，许多适应器（无论是生物的还是文化的）正是通过对已有适应器进行抑制、修正和调控而起作用的；比如勇气是对恐惧和逃跑本能的抑制，拘谨是在社交场合抑制某些行为以免失态；还有对一阶抑制的二阶抑制：我们可以抑制拘谨而让自己“显得放松些”，或者“故作拘谨”以避免与人发展亲密关系，甚至“故作失态”以发出轻蔑或挑衅信号。 这样看来，个人的情感、价值、观念和行为，是我们在进化史上先后获得的种种本能，和在成长经历中依次习得的种种传统、习俗、知识和技能，所有这些力量共同牵引的结果，而所谓人性，便是所有这些元素的复合体。 如此描绘人性，难免会引来这样的质疑：难道我们只是被众多绳索拉扯的木偶？那我们的理性和自由意志又在哪里？ 对此我的回答是：我们确实拥有自由意志，但这不是说，在上面罗列的元素之外，还有一颗独立于它们的心灵，一个不受推动的推动者（unmoved mover），而是说，这些元素相互组合、共同起作用的方式，形成了一种有序结构，被称为“意识”，它赋予我们对世界（包括自我）进行表征和模拟、并据此而对不同选项的后果作出预测和评估的能力，所谓自由意志，即是指这种能力，当我们充分运用这一能力时，便体会到自己是自由的。 也就是说，自由并不意味着超脱于因果关系之外，影响我们行动的诸因素，并不是在竞相说服我们的心灵——根本不存在这样一个笛卡尔式心灵，相反，这些因素相互竞争和调控的方式，恰恰构成了我们的心灵；它让我们能够斟酌权衡面临的各种选项，但不是因为我们的抉择过程独立于各种影响，而是影响抉择的各股力量偏爱不同选项，它们之间的较量过程恰恰构成了我们的斟酌。 【意识、自由意志、理性，都是复杂而困难的主题，上面这样充满象征和跳跃的简短表述，恐怕会让注重逻辑连贯性的细心读者感到不满，而它们在我对人性的解读中又处于相当关键的位置，所以我决定在本书附录中用一篇稍长的文章来说明这组概念的确切含义，以及它们对人性意味着什么。】 尽管并无神秘之处，但自由意志在人性中的地位至关重要，堪称人性之王冠；预见后果并作出选择的能力，赋予我们承担道德责任的资格，让我们成为可以被赞美或谴责的对象（正因此，人类才被称为道德动物），离开这个前提，便谈不上善良、邪恶、荣誉或耻辱，许诺、希望、努力、成就、遗憾、懊悔等等词汇也将丧失其意义。 然而，自由意志的独特性和复杂难懂也造成了一种广泛流行的谬误，每当识别出一种元素（无论来自本能还是文化），它以某种因果链对行为产生影响，有人就会拒绝承认那是组成他的一部分，“那不是我的决定，那不是真正的我”，并声称他被本能控制了，被荷尔蒙操纵了，被传统或习俗奴役了，被时尚潮流裹挟了，被贫困状况或教育背景“锁定”了。 可是如此一来，最终他会发现，没有什么是真正属于自己的，用丹内特的话说，“只要你把自己变得足够小，你几乎可以外部化任何东西”；这一谬误在伦理上表现为道德退化主义：随着科学（特别是心理学）的发展，对人性认识的加深，行为影响因素被不断识别出来，于是越来越多的行为被解释为“不是他自己的选择，他不能对此负责”，道德责任也就一项项被撤销。 在生活态度上，该谬误表现为自寻烦恼式的自我排斥，即：对于自己身上任何被发现有着客观来源且并非自己有意识选择的元素，一概加以拒斥；诚然，适当的自我否定是有益的，排除某些元素可能会让剩下的更协调，但扫射式的自我攻击只能带来挫折和痛苦。 常听到这样的故事：某人按部就班随波逐流了几十年，突然有一天觉得不能这么浑浑噩噩度过一生，要做点自己想做的事情，来一次说走就走的旅行，去过自己真正想要的生活；假如他果真去做了，并且过的很开心，便体会到前所未有的自由，感觉自己掌握了命运，终于成为了“真正的自己”。 这当然很好。可是，首先，这样的念头不会凭空而来，或许他是被某部电影某篇文章某句歌词触动了，或许是一位亲友的离世让他意识到人生苦短，或者只是某次痛饮之后心理状态发生了微妙变化；其次，使得他能够被这些事件激发出如此念头的心理基础，也不是没有来由的；而且，这一念头之下，具体哪些事情会被他视为“真正想做的”，同样不是毫无缘由，就连说走就走的目的地——无非是西藏大理非洲塔希提之类——，往往也早被流行文化安排好了。 既然这些念头同样源自其意识控制以外的事件，念头的内容也同样由进化史、文化环境和个人经历所加之于他的种种特性和知识所决定（否则就很难解释，为何人们总是被极为相似的台词所打动，并作出极为相似的反应），那么，何以认为听从这些念头而生活才算是找回了真正的自我？为何这部分念头比其他念头更有资格代表“自我”？ 实际上，这些念头的内容及引出的行为，本身并无特别之处，比如有些人的经历看起来刚好相反：起初怀抱鸿鹄大志，意气昂扬要做番事业，经过一番折腾并作出反思之后，觉得还是听从本能与传统的指引，安享平静生活与天伦之乐更加合意；也有人在反思之后，并未改变生活轨道，只是消除了原先的自卑或焦虑，坦然接受自己向来的秉性和状态。 似乎没有理由认为，说走就走的那位就比他们更高明；真正重要的是，这些都证明了他们拥有被某些事件触发而对自我与生活进行审视和反思的能力，正是这一能力将人类和其他动物区分了开来，至于反思之后做了什么，倒在其次；而反思能力在人性中的地位之所以如此特殊，是因为它揭示了意识这一心理机能的独特与强大。 意识是一种基于语义表征的模拟系统，由于我们的语言原则上可以做到图灵完备，它可以用来表征任何东西，因而意识可以将其表征和模拟能力运用于任何对象，当它指向现实世界时，形成了世界图景（即波普第二世界），当它指向其本身（准确说是它的运行历史）时，形成了自我意识，当它指向其他个体的意识时，便产生了所谓的移情。 随着文化发展，知识系统不断积累膨胀，教育程度提高，意识的模拟能力也在不断增强和拓展[1]，同时也将我们的观念世界从早先的蒙昧状态变成文明时代的丰富开放头脑；特别是在文字出现之后，借助书面语的抽象与构造能力，意识的表征和模拟能力也大幅提升了，此后科学方法和形式化程度更高的人工语言，为意识提供了更强大的外部辅助。 这些构成第三世界的知识和表征手段，让个体意识就像配备了一套强大的感知增强系统（谷歌眼镜和战斗机仪表盘是很贴切的类比），正是这一整套装备，让我们登上了灵性之巅，从那里傲视众生，内观自我，谈论我们身处的宇宙和把我们带到这儿的历史；若文明有幸得以延续，我们的子孙会继续堆高这座山峰，令人性变得更丰厚，生命变得更精彩。 ------------------------------- [1]这部分体现为弗林效应（[[[Flynn effect]]），即智商测试的平均得分随社会发展和教育条件改善而提高的现象。

【2016-05-13】 @海德沙龙 《自由市场环保主义》 环境问题向来都被视为市场失灵的一种表现，许多经济学家也认为，市场本身无法处理像环境污染这样的“外部性”问题，良好环境是一种“公共品”，只能由政府提供（以管制或庇古税的方式），可实际上，无论是理论还是经验都告诉我们，自由市场能够处理环境问题 @whigzhou: 福利经济学作为一种思考问题的方式是有益的，像外部性、公共品、帕累托最优等概念，对不同税种之经济性质的分析，等等，但许多自以为是的福利经济学家总是得出一些可笑的结论，然后就被现实打耳光，比如他们总是认为收益未能内化的产品不可能由私人企业提供，或至少是供给不足的，需要政府补贴， @whigzhou: 可是谷歌服务的收益内化了百分之多少呢？开源社区呢？维基呢？所有这些产业需要多少政府补贴才算够？ @whigzhou: 还有，在书呆子福利经济学家看来，像基础研究这种不能带来短期利益即便带来了也不是一家独享的事情，私人企业是不可能去做的，事实上呢？贝尔实验室，IBM实验室，1960年代由石油企业引领的地质学革命，耳光piapia的～ @whigzhou: 更好笑的是，当私人企业在诸如此类看不到眼前利益的事情上表现过于热情时，另一批经济学家又会跳出来大叫：泡沫！泡沫！急杀太监了～  

生物学家道金斯为我们提供了看待文化的两种视角，从个体角度看，文化就像数量庞大的一组延伸表现型[1]，人类创造的服饰器具就像蚕茧和蛛网，建造的宫殿城堡就像蚁穴和蜂窝，农耕在地表留下的印迹就像河狸筑坝对河流的改造，驯养给动植物带来的改变，就像昆虫在宿主植物表面造成的瘿瘤，或者寄生虫对蚂蚁行为的操纵。 蜘蛛织网用来抓虫子，人类的各种创造物同样也是追求自身目标的手段，其成效同样影响我们生存繁衍的前景，因而同样接受自然选择的考验；不同的是，指导蜘蛛织网行为的指令，是以基因的形式编码在遗传物质中，而指导人类创造活动的指令，则多半以观念的形式编码在我们头脑中，因而可以在个体生命期中获得和改变。 指导人类活动的观念，有些是从个人的观察和试探过程中获得的，正确有效的做法，在得到可意结果因而获得神经奖励之后，便固化成为经验；但观念更多的是从别人特别是父母兄长那里学来的，通过观察模仿他人做法，或听从他人指导而尝试，或仅仅倾听他人的陈述解说，皆可习得新观念。 因为观念可以如此在个体间传播，群体内会形成一些观念上共性，群体间则表现出差异，即所谓文化特性；语言的出现极大促进了观念传播，也使得观念世界变得极为丰富，更重要的是，作为一个符号系统，语言分离了符号和意义，从而彻底改变了观念的表征和传播方式：基于语言的观念习得，仅靠一对一的示范模仿已不再可行，必须借助一个社会化过程。 当你观察他人如何编织渔网时，可直接加以模仿并在头脑中形成指导编织行为的观念，而当别人向你讲解如何织网时，你得到的只是一串语音符号，其意义（即，就影响你的行为而言，那意味着什么）只能从其他途径获得，当然，讲解者可以为你解释一些陌生词汇，甚至交给你一本词典，但终究需要你预先掌握一组基本词汇和句法。 可是，给词汇（特别是基本词汇）下定义是非常困难的，严格说来，一个词的定义就是它曾被用于其中的全部场景和上下文，包括使用者在这些场景中的动机和意向，以及他们希望在听者头脑中唤起的观念，同类场景的同类表达需要，经由协调博弈而汇聚到某个词汇或句式，这些显然无法被一对一的传递，学习者只有被反复置于类似场景中才能习得。 实际上，人类儿童学习语言时，既不依靠词典，也无须别人为他讲解基本词汇和句法，甚至根本没人意识到句法的存在，对他来说，每个词汇的含义，每个句型的用法，便是他在听到它们时头脑中所唤起的全部场景和意向，以及它们之间的关系。 当文化中越来越多的部分以语言为介质而被表征和传播时，语言便成了文化的主要载体，传播不再只是个体之间的点对点交流，文化逐渐变得更像是一个自我积累和扩散的系统：一个最初产生于个体的新观念，唯有经语言表征，并植入所在群体的口述传统，才可能长远流传，否则便当即挥发了，因为表征此一观念的语句，脱离该口述传统是没有意义的。 这样一个以语言为载体，独立于特定个体而自成体系、自我维系的知识系统，被卡尔·波普称为“第三世界”[2]；由于语义诞生于且始终关乎于现实场景，因而该知识系统总是具有某种客观性；文字的发明让第三世界变得越发非人格化，书面材料让知识可在极大的空间和时间跨度上传播，逻辑、数学、人工语言等形式系统的出现，也让第三世界变得更具客观性。 上述发展造就了人类一大独特性，假如我们将生命个体想象成机器人，指导其行为的是一组在受精卵形成之际被刷在遗传物质里的程序，那么对于像昆虫这样行为刻板的生物，这些代码终身不变，对行为较灵活的哺乳动物，部分代码会随个体经历而有所改变，而对人类，整套代码被分成了两部分：一部分仍刷在遗传物质里，另一部分则在成长过程中从文化系统中下载。 如此一来，（用信息业界的时髦术语）文化系统就像一项云服务，任何新生个体（就像新出厂的电脑裸机）只要插在上面，就会自动为自己下载一份操作系统和一组应用程序，并给自己装上；我们知道，电脑裸机是做不了多少事情的，同样，没安装任何文化的个人，算不上一个健全的人，表现不出人所应有的特性和行为，也无法在社会正常生活。 这项云服务是双向交互的，个人不仅从中获取特性与功能，也为其贡献内容，而且这一互动在个人整个生活史中始终持续着，个人之人格是否健全，禀赋是否优秀，生活是否成功，香火是否兴旺，皆有赖于其所安装的文化软件之功效；和电脑软件不同，文化软件的安装不是简单拷贝，更像是个体在一个特定序列的刺激之下自行编码的过程，其质量随天赋（即预装的那一半代码）和际遇而不同。 对于个人，这便是文化之意义所在；不过我们还可以从道金斯所提供的另一个角度看待文化：它是一种以人类头脑（或书面介质）为载体，通过口耳相传（或其他复制机制）而扩散的模因（meme）系统；模因就是寄生于人类头脑、参与行为调控过程的观念，就像基因参与生理过程一样。 头脑容纳某些模因，可能是因为它引出了有利行为，因而获得神经奖励而得以保存；但模因并非总是对容纳它的个体有利（请允许我暂且将个体利益等同于个体基因组的利益），因为基因组设计的神经奖励机制并非无懈可击，相反有许多可能被滥用的漏洞，正如有些药物可以让大脑错误的以为个体做成了某件好事（比如获得异性的亲睐），有些模因也可能让其宿主错误的以为自己获得了某种成就，赢得了赞许、社会支持，提升了社会地位和安全感。 所以，尽管文化对个人如此重要，让我们获得生命代码的另一半而成为完整健全的人，但并不能确保这一半代码的组成元素全部或总是忠实服务于个体利益；因为这些代码并不与基因组分享同一条复制通道，而平等共享复制通道乃复制因子之间团结一体精诚合作的前提，基因组正是在找到了确保这一点的适当细胞分裂机制之后，才实现了最终创造出我们的紧密合作。 可以想象，模因之间或许也可能达成某种合作并创造出类似于有机体的东西；假如一个孤立群体的文化元素之间密切配合而结成一体，跨越个体生死和世代更替而保持同质性（正如个体在细胞不断更替的同时保持同一），随群体分支裂变而增殖变异，或吞并其他群体而在文化上加以同化（就像动物个体吞食并消化其他个体），假如这样的文化有机体（即所谓第三世界）能够帮助其所寄生的群体增殖或征服其他群体，从而让自己（及其所包含的模因组）被更多的复制，那么它确实就有了一些有机体的特征，如此看待它或许可以让我们更好的理解文化。 像蚂蚁蜜蜂这样的真社会性动物，其巢群可以团结的像单一个体，便是因为除后虫之外都（至少暂时）失去了生育能力，因而整个巢群的基因复制通道只剩下一条；人类个体仍保有生育能力，基因复制通道仍在个体间分立，被集体化的，是模因复制通道，因而人类之社会性体现在文化层面上；于是个人有了双重角色：既是独立个体，又是社会细胞。 当然，模因和基因有着全然不同的复制、变异、交换和组织机制，因而上述有机体隐喻尽管能带来些启发，但也有其危险，在对模因的特性有更多了解之前，还不能走得太远。 ----------------------------------------- [1]延伸表现型（extended phenotype）是进化生物学家理查德·道金斯（Richard Dawkins）在1982年的《延伸表现型》（The Extended Phenotype）一书中提出的概念，指遗传编码不仅表达为个体性状和行为模式，也表达在个体之创造物和对环境之改造上，甚至表达在其他生物个体的性状和行为模式上；作为有机体生存繁衍策略的组成部分，后两种表达（即延伸表现型）与前一种有着同等地位，同样由遗传编码所操纵。 [2]哲学家卡尔·波普（Karl Popper）将现实物理世界称为第一世界，将个人头脑中的观念世界称为第二世界，将编码在语言和其他符号系统中、独立于个体头脑的知识系统称为第三世界。

【2016-05-10】 @whigzhou: 纽约市政府出了名的替市民健康操心，香烟税全美最高，可乐要征税，饭馆餐桌上不许放盐瓶（不知后来实行没），就这么个慈爱政府，最近出了条规定，禁止酒吧酒保拒绝向孕妇售酒，说是喝酒对孕妇和胎儿的健康风险应该留给个人自己判断，哈哈，这耳光打得漂亮！我快爱上女权主义了～ http://t.cn/Rq3ncOi @whigzhou: 【进步分子入门教程】当不同政治正确信条发生冲突时，请按如下原则决定哪个信条优先： 1）被指控性骚扰的男人必须有罪，但自称女人的男人进女厕所不是性骚扰， 2）被指控性骚扰的男人必须有罪，但穆斯林不会强奸白女人， 3）打死黑人的警察不可能无辜，除非他是另一个黑人，而被打死的是个福音派基督徒。 4）少数群体在某个行业表现不佳或比例偏低一定是系统性歧视的结果，而不是禀赋差异的结果，除非这是个自由派占绝对多数的行业，比如学术界和好莱坞， 5）歧视同性恋这种事情绝不可容忍，除非发生在伊斯兰国家， 6）离开政府管制，个人无法为自己做出最有利的选择，除非这一选择只关乎性取向或性别认同，或者只涉及妇女， 6.5）当选择只关乎性取向或性别认同时，连儿童都具有健全的心智和良好的判断力，感谢上帝 7）其他任何时候不得感谢上帝

【2016-05-08】 @吴军博士 发布了头条文章：里根可能是唯一一位能称得上是政治家的总统，1964年他在共和党大会上作了题为《抉择的时刻》，铿锵有力，掷地有声，从此一举成名。今天听起来，依然能够感受到一个保守主义者的卓实远见。全文如下： °里根1964年著名的讲演《抉择的时刻》 http://t.cn/Rqn1cnZ @whigzhou: 这篇演讲其他都很好，我唯一不同意的是开头有关赤字和债务的观点，幸好里根上台后抛弃了这个立场，实际上大规模财政赤字恰恰是里根经济政策的一大特色，在债务市场容许的限度内，减税加赤字是很好的组合 @whigzhou: 里根两届任期，国债规模扩大到了原先的3倍，联邦财政支出和税收占GDP比例分别降低了1.3个和1.5个百分点，美妙组合  

【2016-05-08】 @whigzhou: 现代邮政兴起之前，收信方付费是西欧私人通信中的普遍做法，有趣的是，这一惯例也是上流社会在他们和其他人之间建立无形屏障的一种手段，如果你不够有钱，就不敢混进他们的社交圈，因为连收信都收不起，在19世纪初的荷兰，一封信的收件费大约7stuivers（1[[stuiver]]=1/20盾），差不多是中下阶层一顿饭钱。 @whigzhou: 所以，若发信人预付了邮费，等于是在告诉收信人：我知道你没钱，所以替你把邮费付了。而假如收信人自认为是圈内peer，便会将此视为严重羞辱，所以当荷兰国家邮政最初推行邮票制度时，遭到很多人抵制。  

【2016-05-07】 @whigzhou: 从老弗里德曼那辈开始，libertarians总是宣称18/19世纪的英国和美国有多么自由放任，许多追随者也人云亦云，他们的用意很好，但说法是错的，实际上，即便西方世界中最自由的部分，（除了少数袖珍国之外）距离古典自由主义的理想制度始终很遥远，只不过那时候国家干预经济和私人生活的方式不同而已。 @whigzhou: 略举几点：1）自由贸易，古典自由主义时代推动自由贸易的主要方式是破除非关税壁垒，而关税始终很高，各国财政对关税的依赖也比现在高得多，关税大幅下降到个位数水平是二战后的事情，但这并不是说早期的贸易自由化不重要，因为当时关税再高，和运费比还是很低，所以只要拆除壁垒，效果仍很显著。 @whigzhou: 2）管制，随便翻翻经济史就知道，18/19世纪的管制同样多如牛毛，但给人的印象很不一样，我猜这是因为，早先的管制主要以准入限制和特许垄断的方式进行，而较少以行为管控的方式进行，大量限制法规，但较少执行官僚，所以看到国家之手四处挥舞的景象不多见，究其因，当时政府的组织执行力还不行。 @whigzhou: 3）19世纪的美国联邦政府管的事情确实非常少，但州政府和市政府管的可不少，看看产业史，哪个新产业不是从一大堆政府限制法规里挣扎出来的，那时候联邦政府站在自由一边，多数州政府站在另一边，联邦主义者的努力拆除了很多壁垒，由此也可见在此之前的市场并没有那么自由。 @whigzhou: 当然后来局面颠倒了，铁路和电报把北美大陆连接成单一大市场，州政府管的太过分就把人逼跑了，只好偏向自由化，但此时联邦政府开始伸手了 @whigzhou: 4）政府规模，从财政开支和雇员数量看，那时候的政府确实小得多，但政府对市场和私人生活的干预强度不能仅从其有形规模看，也要从它所维护的壁垒、限制性法规和垄断特权看 @whigzhou: 5）福利制度，这是老弗里德曼叙事中唯一完全成立的一点，那时候基本上没有福利制度，济贫法的影响规模不大 @王弼正: 依稀记得宪法中，国会只有针对州际贸易有立法权也许就是这么来的吧。不过沿海州的国际贸易很繁荣啊。 @whigzhou: 没说不繁荣啊，仅仅清除海盗和运费降低这两项即可将潜在贸易量提升两个数量级，何况还有新世界的人口急速增长 @whigzhou: 从现世的污浊泥潭中赢得一点差强人意的自由空间从来都是艰难而侥幸的，所以不要相信什么自由天国，也无须为此一时彼一时的跌宕沦陷而悲观发愁。  

【2016-05-06】 @小白：因为旧石器时代人类寿命之低，远远达不到食谱（慢性病）导致基因选择的程度。 @whigzhou: 1）旧石器时代人的寿命不是很短，许多狩猎采集社会的平均寿命可达45岁，明显比传统农业社会长 @whigzhou: 2）是否对慢性病构成选择压力，不能只看平均寿命，而要看活到较高年龄的人是否足够多，“平均寿命只有40岁”绝不意味着“活过40岁的人很少”，要考虑极高的婴儿和儿童死亡率，比如100个人，50个全部8岁前死掉，平均寿命4岁，另外50个平均寿命76岁，那么这100人的平均寿命是40岁。 @whigzhou: 3）所以慢性病是否构成选择压力，要看活到生开始得慢性病年龄（A）的人是否足够多，并且在年龄A时的预期寿命是否足够长，我认为是够的 @whigzhou: 4）食谱所影响的不只是慢性病，至少按某些支持者的理论，其健康影响从转换食谱那一刻就开始了，这样的话，选择压力的存在就无须长寿命为前提， @whigzhou: 这么说吧，若以寿命不足为由而认为旧石器食谱是扯蛋，那么祖母假说肯定也是扯蛋，因为祖母假说若要成立，相关的选择压力必须作用于停经后的女性，而旧石器时代女性平均最后一次生育年龄大约39岁，停经年龄40以上——事实是，许多人类学家都严肃对待祖母假说，并不认为是扯蛋。 @whigzhou: 前面几条只是为了回答一个理论质疑，至于对旧石器食谱的个人看法和态度，我能说的出来的，在去年的旧帖里都说过了，不再重复。  

历史上，城市曾扮演过许多角色；它首先是便于防卫的聚居地，而防卫是财富积累的前提，否则物质繁荣便受限于携带能力，所以当社会等级分化加深，巨额财富出现，生产和生活日益依赖昂贵设施与工具时，便有了对城市的需要；设防城邑也可为统治者提供一个可靠据点，据以控制周边领地，从中索取贡赋和搜罗物资。 另一方面，城市也是交通和贸易网络自发演化的结果，道路交汇的地方，自然会吸引更多商家来做生意，而商业繁荣反过来会强化其作为交通枢纽的地位；正因地处要冲，城市也往往成为军事争夺的目标，被选为军事和行政中心，从那里可方便的对贸易征税，调度本方的军队和物资，保护自己的供应通道，必要时切断对方的供应。 一旦安全性和枢纽地位吸引来众多居民，城市继而成为各种须以密集人口为前提的活动的聚集地：需要靠近消费者的制造业和服务业，需要众多观众的大型表演和比赛，面向大批听众的传教布道者，希望赢得众多追随者的革命家，无不被城市所吸引。 尽管有这许多功能，但古代城市的规模十分有限，主要限制是运输成本，以成本高昂的古代运输手段，多数商品在离开产地几百公里后价格已翻了几倍，只有极少数商品值得被长途转运，多数商品有效流通半径不出百里，此半径内的总人口最多只能支撑数千人的小城市，更大规模城市只能由比例极低的大跨度贸易支撑。 从供应面看，一座大城市的生活必需品，特别是粮食和能源，也须来自其有效流通半径内的剩余产出，该半径同样受限于运输成本，加上古代的劳动生产率水平下粮食生产自给之余的剩余率很低，因而城市规模很少能达到百万级，个别例外，都是借助强大的国家机器将流通成本强加于沿途民众而实现，所以这些古代超级都市一旦丧失首都地位，便迅速萎缩衰败。 在古代，只有百分之几或十几的人生活在城市，而今天，城市已成为多数人的家园，它越来越有资格作为社会的代名词，现代性之集大成者；城市化也是现代化的主要内容之一，现代之区别于传统的大部分方面，在城市比在乡村都表现的更鲜明。 上千万人口的现代都市所带来的消费多样性和个人发展机会是前所未有的，它吸引着世界各地的人们涌往城市，即便在现代化的其他方面不太成功的那些地区，城市扩张也毫不落伍，而在早已完成现代化的发达国家，城市化也仍在继续，从1980到2010年，美国城市化率又提高了7个百分点，前十大城市的总人口增长了18%。 驱动城市扩张的基本动力是密集人口带来的规模经济，它支撑了更精细的分工与专业化，和更复杂的合作、生产和组织形式；假如一种商品需要在十公里半径内存在一万消费者才可能被生产，那么在百万人口大城市里，只须1%的人需要它就够了，而即便在人口最密集的乡村，也要绝大多数人需要它才行。 规模经济也体现在配套优势上，在大城市，你更容易为一种生产凑齐全部材料，为组建一家企业而雇到全套专业人才，为涉及上万种零配件的复杂制造就近找齐所有配套和外包厂商，并在法律、公关、广告等事务上随时找到专业服务者，而且所有这些方面都存在众多相互竞争的供应方任你挑选。 城市也改变了我们的文化，在那里，你每天都可能遇到说不同语言，有着不同文化背景，信仰不同宗教，持有不同价值观和政治立场的人，有着你所难以理解或接受的喜好；成长于这样的环境，将减轻我们对陌生和差异的恐惧，对异己者变得更为宽容，也不再像乡村居民那样喜欢窥探他人生活，警惕和监视邻人的举动，这些变化，让人们享有了更多隐私和独立性。 但这也会带来问题，因为城市人更少关心和谈论邻人的观念和举止，相互间的道德压力和舆论约束大为削弱了，同时家族对其成员的自我约束也不复存在，因而失去了传统小社会赖以维持社会规范的主要力量，这就需要某种社区自治机制或者外部司法体系来确保社会秩序，但这两个条件都不是轻易能够满足的。 实际上往往满足不了，所以城市犯罪率普遍高于乡村，许多街区甚至被黑帮所控制；由于城市居民之间缺乏传统的关系纽带和组织资源，更不容易由下而上实现自治，因而更倾向于寻求外部秩序来源，也正因此，国家父爱主义和政府干预总是在大城市更受欢迎，在美国，大城市从来都是主张大政府和干预主义的左派政党的票仓。 这一点也是现代都市与古代城邦或中世纪商业城市的重要差别，在中古欧洲，城市是住民自治的典范，那时城市的流动性不像现在这么高，市民常世代居住在同一社区，保持家族纽带，从事与父辈相同的职业，每个行业都有自己的行会；众多行会为市民自治提供组织基础，香港代议机构的功能界别模式，便是行会自治的孑遗，如今已是日薄西山了。 现代人在享受城市之丰富与便利的同时，也为此付出了不少代价，拥挤、污染、忙碌、焦虑，尤其是高昂的房价和各种不可避免的基础性开支，就像一张高价门票，迫使你必须努力挣钱才能继续留在那里，况且城市还有那么多诱惑，诱使你为出人头地而奋斗，而即便你安于朝九晚五，通勤负担也会剥夺你的大部分闲暇。 或许正是高价门票和渴望成功所造成的压力，让都市人对生儿育女心存畏惧；城市向来都是人口黑洞，需要不断吸引移民才能维持其人口；在古代，这是因为密集居住令传染病死亡率在城市远高于乡村，而在现代，则是因为城市居民生育率远低于乡村，因而城市化过程总是伴随着生育模式的变迁和人口走势的逆转。 因为有这种种问题，并不是所有人都喜欢城市，总有些人把悠闲轻松、贴近自然、田园乐趣、邻里互助等等只有乡村才有的东西看得更重；上世纪正值欧美城市化高峰之际，一波波回归乡村的运动也连绵不绝，以新镇（new town）运动为代表，许多意趣相投者联合起来，按其理想中的社区环境和生活方式创建自治村镇。 这些新兴村镇，并非对传统乡村的简单回归，而是在对现代生活进行反思之后的主动建构，人们聚集到一起共同建设新家园，是基于对生活方式的共同偏好和对自治规范的认同，而不是因为恰好出生在那里，维系他们的纽带，不是血缘，而是共同兴趣、文化认同、社交倾向和自治组织，在城市中，通常也是这些因素将他们吸引到同一个沙龙、俱乐部和协会里。 随着交通工具的进步，互联网服务和网络购物的发展，乡村生活的潜力已大幅提升，对于那些偶尔才需要用到城市资源的人，如今身在乡村也可享受现代生活的大部分精彩；未来或许会有更多人前往城市，但乡村看来不会消失。

【2016-05-05】 @whigzhou: 任何一位对自己的前途还心怀一丝珍惜的艺术家/文学家，都不会大胆到悍然赞美一种竟然能让普通人的生活也稍许好过一点的东西，无论是大众媒体、大规模制造、迪斯尼、麦当劳、速溶咖啡、真维斯、宜家、易拉罐、塑料袋……那就太市侩了，太庸俗了，太不性感了，赞美它简直是审美声誉的自杀～ @Paul郑褚: 说的都对，但是为什么普通人也跟着装这个逼呢？ @whigzhou: 因为他们想让自己看上去不普通啊，而且尽管动机类似，实际做法还是很不一样 @whigzhou: 粗略说，装器大约分这样几种等级：1）炫耀器：直接告诉穷人你买不起，比如比手指粗的金项链，2）暗器：让新来的尴尬出丑露馅的东西，为用户创造鄙视俗人的机会，比如苹果鼠标，没右键多不方便啊，土了吧， @whigzhou: 3）仁波切器：号称唾弃浮华富贵，回归田园朴素，宣称我们这个才是普通人/穷人本来该用的东西，他们不用只是受了资本家蛊惑，但（除了最蠢的那些之外）其实心里明白，穷人才买不起这个呢，例：素色亚麻七分裤，有机蔬菜， @whigzhou: 4）第四种比较高级，不动声色，表现出对前面三类东西缺乏兴趣，而且绝不谈论，但仔细观察会发现，虽然看似漫不经心，但不知何故他们恰好都避开了让自己看起来庸俗的雷区，就好象在林子里随意漫步却从不湿鞋，‘随便翻翻’的一本书‘恰好’都是你从没听说过的欧洲小国作家 @whigzhou: 被戳到的朋友别着急，纯观察，没有批斗的意思，这是文明发展的几大线索之一，我看挺好，我只是提醒一下，当这些倾向影响到我们的伦理、法律、政策、市场制度时，对背后的心理/文化动力清醒一点，别被蒙到了，你们鄙视塑料袋大可接着鄙视，只要不试图剥夺我们继续用它的自由， @岑原2019: 简直是声誉的自杀说得太严重了，也不是非要装这个逼，主要是没有这个必要、乏味，人人都知的体验，也是省去废话的需要。厕所太方便了，你居然不赞美？ @岑原2019: 这恰恰是人类值得称颂的一种心理，拒绝平庸，亮亮自己的好东西，没什么不好啊 @whigzhou: 没说不好啊，好的狠

Postmodernism Unpeeled 后现代主义又被剥了皮 作者：David Thompson与Stephen Hicks @ 2009-3-22 译者：沈沉（@你在何地-sxy） 校对：Whig Zhou（@whigzhou） 来源：David Thompson 博客，http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2009/03/postmodernism-unpeeled.html A discussion with Stephen Hicks. 与Stephen Hicks讨论。 “In politicized forms, then, postmodernists will behave like the stereotypical unscrupulous lawyer trying to win the case: truth and justice aren’t the point; instead using any rhetorical tool or trick that works is the point. Sometimes contradictory lines of argument work. Sometimes your audience’s desire to belong to the in-group can be played upon. Sometimes appearing absolutely authoritative works to camouflage a weak case. Sometimes condescension works.” “因此，表现在政治形式上，后现代主义者的行为就像是典型的无良律师，一心想着打赢官司：真理和正义不是关键；相反，使用任何能够成功的修辞工具或策略才是关键。有时候相互矛盾的论证方式管用。有时候你的听众渴望自己属于某个小团体，这可以加以利用。有时候要表现得绝对权威，这有助于掩饰一个案子的虚弱。有时候则是纡尊降贵管用。” Dr Stephen Hicks is Professor of Philosophy and Executive Director of the Centre for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford College, Illinois. He is co-editor with David Kelley of Readings for Logical Analysis (W. W. Norton, 1998), and has published in academic journals as well as The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun, and Reader's Digest. His book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault was published in 2004 by Scholargy Publishing and is now in its eighth printing. He is the author and narrator of a DVD documentary entitled Nietzsche and the Nazis, which was published in 2006 by Ockham’s Razor Publishing. Stephen Hicks博士是伊利诺伊斯州罗克福德学院哲学教授、伦理学与企业家精神研究中心执行主任。他曾与David Kelly合作编辑有《逻辑分析读本》（1998），作品发表于众多学术期刊及《华尔街日报》《巴尔的摩太阳报》《读者文摘》等。其著作《解释后现代主义：从卢梭至福柯的怀疑主义与社会主义》于2004年由Scholargy出版社出版，如今已是第八次印刷。他还是题为《尼采与纳粹》的DVD纪录片的作者和解说，该纪录片于2006年由Ockham’s Razor出版社发行。 DT: In an exchange with Ophelia Benson, I mentioned Explaining Postmodernism and suggested one of the book’s main themes is that postmodernism marks a crisis of faith and a retreat from reality among the academic left. Is that a fair, if crude, summary? DT【译注：即David Thompson，下同】：“在与Ophelia Benson的一次交流中，我提到了《解释后现代主义》一书，并提到，此书的一个主题就是后现代主义标志着一场信仰危机以及学院左派对于现实的一种逃避。这种总结算得上公平吗？即使过于直白。 SH: It is striking that the major postmodernists - Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty - are of the far left politically. And it is striking that all four are Philosophy Ph.D.s who reached deeply skeptical conclusions about our ability to come to know reality. So one of my four theses about postmodernism is that it develops from a double crisis - a crisis within philosophy about knowledge and a crisis within left politics about socialism. SH【译注：即Stephen Hicks，下同】很令人震惊的是，主要的后现代主义者——米歇尔·福柯、雅克·德里达、让—弗朗索瓦·利奥塔、理查德·罗蒂——在政治上都是极左。同样令人震惊的是，这四个哲学博士都得出结论，极度怀疑我们认识实在的能力。所以，我所提出的关于后现代主义的四个主题之一是，它发源于一种双重危机——一面是哲学领域中的知识危机，一面是左派政治领域中的社会主义危机。 DT: It seems to me that in its broadest sense postmodernism is as much a rhetorical device as it is a set of theories and political stances. For instance, Slavoj Žižek can dismiss aspects of postmodern theorising while employing much the same manoeuvres in his own writing. Much of what he says is clever in a rhetorical sense, in terms of manoeuvring around a dubious and unproven premise, while being enormously tendentious or simply glib. DT：在我看来，最广义而言，后现代主义既是一种修辞工具，也是一套理论和政治立场。比如，斯拉沃热·齐泽克能够在拒绝后现代理论若干方面的同时将同样的操控策略用于自己的写作中。从操控暧昧不明、未经验证的前提这个角度来看，他所说的很多东西从修辞上看非常聪明，但其内容的倾向性却非常明显或干脆就是耍嘴皮子。 If you don’t accept the premise - say, a tarted-up rehash of “false consciousness” or an antipathy towards capitalism - then what follows is unpersuasive, even absurd. Geoffrey Galt Harpham pointed out that Žižek’s essays often disregard conventional argumentative structures in favour of stylistic effects and bald assertion: 如果你不接受其前提——比如，对“虚假意识”的一种改头换面式的打扮或者对资本主义的反感——那么随之推演而来的就不具说服力，甚至荒谬至极。Geoffrey Galt Harpham曾指出，齐泽克的文章经常无视传统的论证结构，喜欢追求文体效果和不加解释地提出断言： “[E]ven the earnest reader who begins at page one has the constant impression of having opened to a page somewhere in the middle. This sense of an endless middle is achieved by reducing the conventional middle to almost zero. The typical Žižekian unit of discourse - a wittily-titled passage of between five and fifteen pages - begins abruptly with the kind of confident assertion commonly associated with the conclusion; there is no phase of doubt, no pretence of unprejudiced inquiry, only a series of demonstrations, exemplifications, and restatements.” “即便是最为真诚的读者，刚刚打开第一页，也总是会有一种印象，像是自己翻到了该书中部的某一页一样。制造出这种无休止的中部感的，是他将传统上的中部几乎压缩为零的做法。齐泽克一篇典型论文——5到15页的一段文字，题目机智巧妙——开头总是突兀地提出那种充满自信的断言，通常还跟结论混同在一起；没有怀疑的段落，绝不假装自己要做无偏见的探讨，只有一系列展示、举例和重申。” Bold yet unsupported claims are pretty much a signature of Žižek’s output -and of postmodernist writing more generally -and this is tolerated, indeed championed, by his more cultish admirers. What seems to matter is a “provocative” conclusion, at least of a certain kind, not how that conclusion was arrived at or whether it can be justified. 大胆而没有支撑的断言，几乎就是齐泽克作品的标志——也是更一般的后现代主义者作品的标志——而这得到了他那些狂热崇拜者的宽容、实际上是支持。对于他们来说，重要的是“令人振奋的”结论，至少是某种类别的此种结论，而不是如何得出这一结论或它是否可靠。 For instance, we’re told that fundamentalist Islam constitutes a “site of resistance” from which “one can deploy critical doubts about today’s society.” Yet “today’s society” - i.e. Western, liberal, capitalist society – is questioned openly, at length, and as a matter of routine - more so, I’d guess, than any other society in history. However, the societies envisioned by enthusiasts of fundamentalist Islam don’t seem likely to foster similar reflection or dissent; nor do they seem likely to equip their inhabitants with the tools of such endeavours. Yet these basic considerations don’t delay Žižek in his rush to assert. 比如，我们被告知，伊斯兰原教旨主义构成了一个“反抗地”，从此出发“人们可以对今日社会加以批判性的怀疑”。然而，“今日社会”——即西方，自由资本主义社会——经常公开地、详尽地、司空见惯地遭到质疑——程度超过历史上的任何社会，我想。可是，伊斯兰原教旨主义的狂热分子所设想的社会不太可能鼓励类似的反思或异议；他们也不太可能赋予其居民以从事这种事业的工具。但是，这些基本的考虑并不会耽误齐泽克匆忙提出其断言。 SH: Pomo is rhetoric-heavy, yes. But rhetoric is a tool, so one can ask how it’s being used and why it’s being used that way. The postmodernists have rejected reason, and along with it concern for evidence and consistency. What then is the purpose of rhetoric? In pomo practice, there are a couple of possibilities. SH：是的，后现代确实修辞繁复。但修辞是个工具，所以人们可以追问，它是被怎样使用使用的，以及为什么要这样使用。后现代主义者已经拒斥理性，连带着也拒斥了对于证据和一致性的关心。那么，修辞的目的是什么？在后现代实践中，有多种可能的回答。 One is that rhetoric becomes a kind of subjectivist expressionism - you play around with language and hope that something interesting pops out. Derrida is often like this - I think of him as a performance artist of postmodernism. In its darker moods, this approach recalls a line from Kate Ellis, a sympathetic-to-postmodernism commentator, who noted “the characteristically apolitical pessimism of most postmodernism, by which creation is simply a form of defecation.” Whatever’s been processing and churning up inside you - you just let ‘er rip. 一是修辞成为一种主观主义的表现主义——你摆弄语词，期待有啥有意思的东西自己跳出来。德里达经常就像是这样——我把他看作是一个后现代主义的行为艺术家。如果这种路径的基调更为阴郁一些，那就会让人想起Kate Ellis说过的一句话，Ellis是一个同情后现代主义的评论家，她提到过“绝大多数后现代主义中典型的非政治的悲观主义，这种悲观主义认为创作只不过是排泄的一种形式”。不管你体内正在处理、正在搅拌的都是些什么——你只管有屁快放。 The other use of rhetoric is politically-charged persuasion. Pomo rhetoric becomes long on emotionalism, ad hominem, and so on, and it becomes short on logic and evidence. But the point of such rhetoric is effectiveness, not truth. 修辞的另外一种用法是作为一种充满政治意味的劝服。后现代主义修辞富于感情主义、以情动人等等，同时缺乏逻辑和证据。但这类修辞的关键是有效性，而非真实性。 You mention that much pomo political rhetoric is anti-capitalist and champions unlikely causes such as fundamentalist Islam. Here the pomo are taking a page out of Lenin’s and Marcuse’s playbooks. There’s a long-ish story here that I talk about in Chapter 5 of Explaining Postmodernism: Traditional Marxism said that capitalism would collapse from the inside (the exploited and alienated workers would rise); but when that didn’t happen, Marxists theorized that capitalism had exported its misery to the Third World (Lenin’s idea) or to outcast and marginalized subcultures (Marcuse’s idea). So the new strategy was to cultivate the anti-capitalist resistance in those places. 你提到，众多后现代的政治言说都反对资本主义且支持如伊斯兰原教旨主义之类的无望事业。这是后现代在利用列宁和马尔库塞的一部分剧本。这里有个略微有点长的故事，我在《解释后现代主义》第五章曾谈及：传统的马克思主义提出，资本主义将会从内部瓦解（遭到剥削和异化的工人会站起来）；但这事没有发生，于是马克思主义者就提出一个理论，认为资本主义已经将其不幸输出到了第三世界（列宁的观点）或者输出到了“被排斥者”和被边缘化的亚文化群体中（马尔库塞的观点）。所以，新的策略应是在这些地方培育反对资本主义的抵抗运动。 Like other pomo of this generation, Žižek is an evolving combination of the above. 跟这一代后现代的其他人一样，齐泽克是以上几种情形逐步发展出来的结合。 DT: You say, “The postmodernists have rejected reason, and along with it concern for evidence and consistency,” and I suspect some readers will find this hard to accept. It sounds outlandish. But, as you point out in the book, Lyotard explicitly rejected notions of truth and clarity as being synonymous with “prisons and prohibitions.” DT: 你提到，“后现代主义者已经拒斥理性，连带着也拒斥了对于证据和一致性的关心。”我怀疑有些读者可能觉得这种说法难以接受。听起来很稀奇。但是，正如你在书中指出的，利奥塔明确拒绝了真理和清晰这两个概念，认为它们与“监狱和禁令”是同义词。 Foucault shared these sentiments, claiming “reason is the ultimate language of madness,” suggesting that nothing should constrain our beliefs and political preferences, not even logic or evidence. Frank Lentricchia, another left-wing theorist, said the postmodern movement “seeks not to find the foundation and conditions of truth, but to exercise power for the purpose of social change.” 福柯也持有这种观点，宣称“理性就是疯癫的终极语言”，认为我们的信念和政治倾向不应该受到任何东西的拘束，即便是逻辑或证据的拘束也不行。弗兰克·伦特恰瓦，又一个左翼理论家，曾说后现代运动“并不打算找出真理的基础和条件，而是要通过行使权力来致力于社会改造。” And Stanley Fish, who rushed to defend Social Text after the Sokal hoax, had previously argued that theorising and deconstruction “relieves me of the obligation to be right … and demands only that I be interesting.” There is a pattern here. 而在“索卡尔恶作剧”【译注：物理学家Alan Sokal曾瞎写一篇充满后现代味道但胡话连篇的论文，成功发表在著名文化研究杂志《社会文本》上，然后将实情公开。】之后匆忙跳出来为《社会文本》杂志辩解的斯坦利·费什，之前则曾争辩说，建立理论和进行解构“将我从保持正确的义务中解放出来……只要求我是有趣的。”这里确实存在一种普遍模式。 SH:It is hard to accept the rejection of reason, especially if you’re outside of academic circles, but it’s no secret inside. You nicely quote some representative statements - it’s also worth noting that the leading pomo thinkers cite Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Existentialists as their forerunners, and the rejection of reason runs deep in those lines of thought too. SH：说他们拒斥理性，这种判断很难接受，特别是如果你身在学术圈以外，但在学术圈内这不是什么秘密。你引用的这几个有代表性的陈述就很精到——同样值得注意的是，后现代思想家中的领军人物经常引尼采、海德格尔和存在主义者为其先驱，在这类思想脉络中，对理性的拒斥也是根深蒂固的。 DT: A while ago, I quoted a chunk of Derrida prose that’s hilarious nonsense. I’ve defied several Derrida enthusiasts to explain what this particular passage means, or might mean if you squint and tilt your head, but so far no-one has managed to tell me. DT：不久前，我曾引用过德里达的一段文章，那就是一段可笑的胡说八道。我拿着它去挑衅过几个德里达粉，让他们解释这段话的意思，或者如果你作眯眼翘首状，那在你的理解中它可能是什么意思，但迄今为止还没有一个人能回答我。 And the essay from which the quote is taken has numerous, equally baffling, paragraphs which could be arranged in almost any order with no perceptible difference. Much of the essay is wilfully incomprehensible, like some Dadaist prank that no-one dares to mention. 而且我引用的这段话所在的文章中到处可见诸如此类的令人困惑的段落，把它们按任何一个次序排列，你都不会看出有什么差别。文章的大部分是刻意写得难以理解，就像是某种达达主义的玩笑，没人敢于提及。 And there seems to be a taboo against even entertaining the possibility that such a thing could happen, and happen quite often, with little if any protest from colleagues and students. It’s unthinkable that such a con could be perpetrated, and maybe that’s why it goes on happening. 似乎还存在一种禁忌，连设想这种事情会发生并会频繁发生且几乎不会遭到同行和学生的抗议都不行。人们根本不会相信这种欺诈竟然能发生，这可能就是它得以发生的原因。 More recently, in a piece about the art world’s reliance on postmodernist rhetoric – what’s often called “art bollocks” - I pointed out that the artist Aliza Shvarts was mouthing opaque gibberish while pretending to be profound. The text she’d written and presented as a key part of her art was clumsy, incoherent and often simply meaningless. It was a kind of verbal flailing and rhetorical camouflage. (It’s difficult to determine exactly how wrong an unintelligible analysis is.) 最近，在一篇讨论艺术界对后现代主义修辞——经常被成为“艺术扯淡”——的依赖的文章中，我指出，艺术家Aliza Shvarts所夸夸其谈的，都是些晦涩的胡扯，她还装作很深刻。她所写的、作为其艺术的关键组成部分的那些文本词不达意、文理不通并且多数全无意义。那就是一种词汇抽搐和修辞伪装。（我们很难确定一则莫名其妙的分析到底有多少错误。） One postmodernist commenter took exception to my criticism - first by accusing me of arguing things I clearly wasn’t arguing, then by saying I was holding “entrenched positions” in which “aesthetic values” (in scare quotes), “scientific reality/clarity” (again, in scare quotes) and my own “reliance on logical consistency” (ditto) were obstacles to comprehension. Specifically, they were obstacles to comprehending Shvarts’ alleged (but oddly unspecified) “arguments of power, control [and] dominance.” The tone was, of course, condescending and self-satisfied. I’m guessing the commenter in question didn’t pause to consider the possibility that one might find pomo bafflegab objectionable precisely because it represents the “power, control [and] dominance” of what amounts to a priestly caste. 有个后现代主义评论家对我的批评提出异议——首先是指责我所争辩的是我明显并未在争辩的事情，接着说我持有“根深蒂固的立场”，且其中的“美学价值”（此处加讽刺引号）、“科学实在/清晰”（再加讽刺引号）及我自己对“逻辑一致性的依赖”（同上符号）都是理解能力的阻碍。特别是，它们阻碍了我理解Shvarts那些据称（但奇怪的是并没有具体指出来）“充满力量、控制及支配力的论证”。这一批评的语调自然是高人一等、自鸣得意。我猜我所说的这个评论家可能都不曾想过，人们之所以觉得后现代黑话难以接受，有可能就是因为它代表了一个相当于祭祀阶级的群体的“权力、控制和支配力”。 SH: A lot of what you’re getting from your various commentators seems like third-raters playing the game, so it’s probably not worth focusing on them - instead of attending to the lessons they’re learning from the leading pomo strategists. SH: 你从针对你的各种不同评论家那里获得的，就像是一群三流玩家在玩游戏，所以他们可能并不值得去关注——不如去注意他们都在学习的那些最重要的后现代战略家的教义。 Another clue is that some postmodernists prefer “neo-pragmatist.” Rorty, Fish, and many of the legal postmodernists sometimes use that label. Pragmatism as a school of thought thinks of knowledge, truth, and certainty as chimerical quests and suggests that we focus our efforts on what works. 另外一条线索是，某些后现代主义者喜爱“新实用主义”。罗蒂、费什和许多法律后现代主义者有时会使用这个标签。实用主义这一思想学派认为知识、真理和确定性都是虚假问题，建议我们把自己的努力集中到真正起作用的东西上来。 In politicized forms, then, postmodernists will behave like the stereotypical unscrupulous lawyer trying to win the case: truth and justice aren’t the point; instead using any rhetorical tool or trick that works is the point. Sometimes contradictory lines of argument work. Sometimes your audience’s desire to belong to the in-group can be played upon. Sometimes appearing absolutely authoritative works to camouflage a weak case. Sometimes condescension works. And so on. 因此，表现在政治形式上，后现代主义者的行为就像是典型的无良律师，一心想着打赢官司：真理和正义不是关键；相反，使用任何能够成功的修辞工具或策略才是关键。有时候，相互矛盾的论证方式管用。有时候你的听众渴望自己属于某个小团体，这可以加以利用。有时候要表现得绝对权威，这有助于掩饰一个案子的虚弱。有时候则是纡尊降贵管用。如此等等。 DT: I suppose, then, “neo-pragmatism” is often a euphemism for “bad faith,” or “rhetorical authoritarianism”? DT: 因此，我想，“新实用主义”通常就是“毫无诚信”或“修辞独断”的委婉语吗？ SH: Not necessarily. Some neo-pragmatists take the milder position that truth is hard, our data always partial, and the world always evolving - and so rather than obsessing about truth we should be flexible and focus on working hypotheses and workable results. Susan Haack comes to mind here. That doesn’t have to be bad faith or authoritarianism. But other neo-pragmatists do push hard on the skepticism-about-truth button, as Rorty does, and that takes them into postmodernism. SH: 并不必然如此。某些新实用主义者采取更为温和的立场，认为真理很难，我们的资料总是不全，而且世界总在变化——所以我们不能执迷于真理，而应更加灵活，专注于可行的假说和可用的结果。这里，我想到的就是苏珊·哈克。这就不一定会是毫无诚信或独断主义。但其他新实用主义者，如罗蒂做的那样，确实会使劲地按住这个“对真理持怀疑主义”的按钮不放，而这就会令其陷入后现代主义。 DT: It’s interesting to contrast Explaining Postmodernism with some of the material you criticise. The writing is always clear, even when you’re dealing with quite detailed and knotty concepts or loaded obscurantism. I suppose some pomo theorists might consider your prose “unproblematic,” which is a pejorative, apparently. DT: 如果把《解释后现代主义》一书与你所批评的一些材料对比一下，就很有意思。你的写作总是清晰的，即便是在处理非常微妙且棘手的概念或者意味深长的玄虚隐晦时也是如此。我想，有些后现代理论家会认为你的文章“没有疑问”，而且显然用的是贬义。 Writing in Innovations of Antiquity, Ralph Hexter and Daniel Selden dismissed “transparent prose” as “the approved mode of expression for the society and values of the newly empowered middle class.” In the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Mas’ud Zavarzadeh denounced “unproblematic prose and clarity of presentation” as “the conceptual tools of conservatism.” 在《古代之创新》中，Ralph Hexter和Daniel Selden将“清晰的文章”拒斥为“得到社会以及刚刚获得权力的中产阶级的价值观批准的表达方式”。在《美学与艺术批评杂志》上，Mas’ud Zavarzadeh贬斥“没有疑问的文章和清晰的表述”，认为它们都是“保守主义的概念工具”。 The rejection of transparency as “conservative” is particularly odd, since transparency makes a claim amenable to broad critical enquiry, and thus public correction. Without transparency, what do we have? A private language shared only by likeminded peers, in which one is “free” to assert, largely unopposed? Is that really a marker of progress? 将清晰拒斥为“保守”，这一点特别怪异，因为清晰性使得一个断言能够经受广泛的批判性考察，因而能够得到公众的纠正。没有清晰性，我们还有什么？只有一种私人语言，由几个想法相近的同类来分享，人们可以“自由”断言，基本上说不会遭遇反驳？这真是进步的标志吗？ In the essay linked above, Keith Windschuttle names various academics and educational advisors who claim that truth and reality are “authoritarian weapons” and that disinterested scholarship is merely “an ideological position” favoured by “traditionalists and the political right.” 在上面链接的文章中【译注：大概是指前面提到的Ralph Hexter和Daniel Selden的文章，标题是Truth and Tribalism，不过链接已失效】，Keith Windschuttle列举了许多学术界和教育顾问，他们声称真理和实在都是“专断工具”，而不偏不倚的学术研究则仅仅是“传统主义者和政治右派”所喜爱的“一种意识形态立场”。 This presents a rather handy excuse to dismiss political dissent without having to engage with inconvenient arguments. Presumably, if you prefer arguments that are comprehensible and open to scrutiny, this signals some reactionary tendency and deep moral failing. 这就给人提供了一个顺手的借口，无需通过麻烦的论证，就可以无视政治上的异议。他们假定，如果你偏爱那些能为人所理解、允许人审查的论证，这就标志着某种反动的倾向和深层的道德过失。 On the other hand, if you sneer at such bourgeois trifles, you’re radical, clever and very, very sexy. (Though I wonder what mathematicians and structural engineers would make of this claim. Is there such a thing as a rightwing calculation, or a rightwing bridge - I mean a bridge that’s rightwing because it doesn’t promptly collapse?) 另一方面，如果你会嘲弄这类资产阶级的细枝末节，那你就是激进的、聪明的，而且特别特别性感。（尽管我很想知道数学家和结构工程师会如何看待这一断言。是否存在一种叫做右翼计算的东西？或者是否存在右翼桥梁——我指的是那种因为不会立即倒塌而成其为右翼的桥梁？） SH: There’s that line from Nietzsche about obscurantists - they muddy the waters to make them appear deep. SH: 这里有尼采论故弄玄虚者的一句话——他们把水搅浑，以使自己看上去深沉。 But there is a deeper point about form following function, or in this case rhetorical style matching the content of one’s beliefs. The function of language is to express one’s thoughts. If you think truth is possible, then you work hard to understand the world clearly and completely. 但是，形式服从功能——或者在我们当前讨论的问题中即修辞风格对应个人信念内容——还有一层更深的意思。语言的功能就是表达人的思想。如果你认为真理是可能的，那你就会努力争取去清晰、完整地理解世界。 But if you doubt that truth is possible, that has psycho-epistemological consequences: you come to believe that the world is at best fuzzy and your mind incapable of grasping it - you come to believe deep down that all is fractured and disjointed - and your writing will tend to the fuzzy, the fractured, and the disjointed. And in consequence you will come to be suspicious of clarity in others. Clarity, from this perspective, must be an over-simplifying. 但如果你怀疑真理的可能性，那就会引发一些心理-认识论上的后果：你会开始相信，世界最多就是朦胧模糊的，而你的心智无力理解它——你内心深处会相信一切都是破碎的、脱节的——而你的写作就会倾向于模糊、破碎、脱节。结果就是你会开始怀疑他人写作的清晰性。在这种视角看来，清晰必然就是一种过分简化。 And there is a cheap rhetorical variant as well: if the data and the arguments, when presented clearly, are going against you, muddying the waters gives you some breathing room, so to speak. 当然，也存在一种粗劣的修辞形式：如果清晰表述的资料和论证都与你的观点相左，这时把水搅浑一些，可以说，就能给你留点可以呼吸的空间。 DT: How was the book received by defenders of the faith? Was there any serious attempt at refutation by those whose views you criticise? DT: 这种信仰的捍卫者们是如何看待你的书的？在其观点被你批评过的人中，是否有人真诚地尝试过反驳你？ SH: It’s been well received and reviewed by realist liberals, conservatives, and libertarian intellectuals. From postmodernists, I have received only a few email denunciations. SH：在现实主义的自由派、保守派和自由意志论知识分子那里，我的书都得到了很好的反响和评论。至于后现代主义者，我只收到过几封谴责性的电邮。 DT: One of the recurrent themes here is the self-inflicted disrepute of large parts of academia. Whether it’s the spread of political lockstep and the consequent intolerance and extremism, or hucksterism and incompetence (and those who champion it), or student “activists” who regurgitate postmodernist clichés while enacting their dreary psychodramas. It seems to me that many of these things are related to the subject of your book. Whether viewed as a set of claims, as a political movement or as a rhetorical device, how would you describe the general fallout of postmodernism? DT：此处，一个反复出现的论题就是学术界很大一部分人自己给自己造成的声名狼藉。这既表现为政治上的因循守旧及随之而来的不宽容与极端主义，也包括自吹自擂与颟顸无能，还有拾人牙慧的学生“活动分子”，在出演那些做梦一样的心理剧时总是重复后现代主义的陈词滥调。在我看来，许多此类事情都跟你书中的主题有关。不管后现代主义被看做一套主张，还是一种政治运动，还是一种修辞工具，请问你会如何描述其一般后果？ SH: In the shorter term, postmodernism has caused an impoverishment of much of the academic humanities, both in the quality of the work being done and the civility of the debates.The sciences have been less affected and are relatively healthy. The social sciences are mixed. SH: 短期来看，后现代主义已经导致了众多人文学科的贫乏，不管是说既有成果的质量，还是说学术讨论的礼节。自然科学受影响较小，相对来说更加健康。社会科学居中。 I am optimistic, though, for a couple of reasons. One is that pomo was able to entrench itself in the second half of the twentieth century in large part because first-rate intellectuals were mostly dismissive of it and focused on their own projects. But over the last ten years, after pomo’s excesses became blatant, there has been a vigorous counter-attack and pomo is now on the defensive. 不过，我还是个乐观主义者，理由有好几个。首先是，后现代之所以能在20世纪下半叶变得根深蒂固，很大一部分原因在于一流的知识分子大多不屑于理它，而是专注于他们自己的工作。但过去十年间，在后现代过分猖獗之后，已经出现了一轮强有力的反击，现在后现代已处于守势。 Another reason for optimism is that, as a species of skepticism, pomo is ultimately empty and becomes boring. Eventually intellectually-alert individuals get tired of the same old lines and move on. It is one thing, as the pomo can do well, to critique other theories and tear them down. But that merely clears the field for the next new and intriguing theory and for the next generation of energetic young intellectuals. 另一个保持乐观的原因是，作为怀疑主义的一个类别，后现代最终来说空洞无聊。最终来看，对于智识非常敏感的个体将会厌烦一模一样的陈旧言辞，就会另寻出路。批评其他理论并把他们推翻，这方面后现代可以做得很好，但这只是事情的一个方面。它做到的仅仅是清理了场面，留待下一个新的、有意思的理论出现，留待下一代充满活力的年轻知识分子。 So while the postmodernism has had its generation or two, I think we’re ready for the next new thing - a strong, fresh, and positive approach to the big issues, one that of course takes into account the critical weapons the pomo have used well over the last while. 所以，尽管后现代主义占据了一代或两代人，我想我们已为下一个新事物做好了准备——一种探讨宏大问题的强劲、新鲜、积极的路径，这种路径当然会将后现代在上一阶段中充分使用过的批判武器考虑在内。 It’s a big and interesting world out there. Let the best arguments prevail. 前面是一个无比广阔而有趣的天地。让最好的论证遍布其中吧。 Update: Over at The Augean Stables, Richard Landes has some interesting commentary on the above. Well worth reading. 更新：在The Augean Stables上，Richard Landes对上述内容提出了一些有趣评论，值得一读。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Testing ancient human hearing via fossilized ear bones 利用耳骨化石测量古人听力 作者：Rolf Quam @ 2015-9-26 译者：沈沉（@你在何地-sxy） 校对：Whig Zhou（@whigzhou） 来源：The Conversation，https://theconversation.com/testing-ancient-human-hearing-via-fossilized-ear-bones-47973 How did the world sound to our ancient human relatives two million years ago? 整个世界在我们200万年前的人族亲戚听来是个什么样子？ While we obviously don’t have any sound recordings or written records from anywhere near that long ago, we do have one clue: the fossilized bones from inside their ears. The internal anatomy of the ear influences its hearing abilities. 显然，我们并没有那么久以前留下来的录音资料或书面记录，但我们确实拥有一条线索：古人耳内的骨头化石。耳朵的内部构造能够影响其听觉能力。 Using CT scans and careful virtual reconstructions, my international colleagues and I think we’ve demonstrated how our very ancient ancestors heard the world. And this isn’t just an academic enterprise; hearing abilities are closely tied with verbal communication. 经CT扫描并精心进行虚拟重构之后，我和一些国际同僚认为，我们已经展示出了远古先人是如何听到这个世界的。这可不仅仅是一项学术事业，因为听觉能力与口头交流是密切相关的。 By figuring out when certain hearing capacities emerged during our evolutionary history, we might be able to shed some light on when spoken language started to evolve. That’s one of the most hotly debated questions in paleoanthropology, since many researchers consider the capacity for spoken language a defining human feature. 通过估计特定听觉能力在人类进化史上何时出现，我们就可能对口头语言何时开始进化有所了解。这是古人类学目前争论最为火热的问题之一，因为许多研究者认为口语能力是一项用来定义人类的特征。 Human hearing is unique among primates 人类听觉在灵长类中非常独特 We modern human beings have better hearing across a wider range of frequencies than most other primates, including chimpanzees, our closest living relative. Generally, we’re able to hear sounds very well between 1.0-6.0 kHz, a range that includes many of the sounds emitted during spoken language. Most of the vowels fall below about 2.0 kHz, while the higher frequencies mainly contain consonants. 与绝大多数灵长动物（包括与我们血缘最近的近亲黑猩猩）相比，现代人在一个更大的频率区间内拥有更好的听力。一般来说，我们能够很好地听清1.0-6.0千赫之间的声音，口语交流时发出的许多声音就处于这一区间内。绝大多数元音大概落在2.0千赫以下，更高的频率则主要包含辅音。 Thanks to testing of their hearing in the lab, we know that chimpanzees and most other primates aren’t as sensitive in that same range. Chimpanzee hearing – like most other primates who also live in Africa, including baboons – shows a loss in sensitivity between 1.0-4.0 kHz. In contrast, human beings maintain good hearing throughout this frequency range. 基于实验室的听力测量，我们知道黑猩猩和绝大多数其他灵长动物对于上述频率区间并没有这么敏感。黑猩猩的听力在1.0-4.0千赫区间内丧失了敏感性，其他绝大多数生活于非洲的灵长动物也是如此，包括狒狒。人类与之不同，在这一频率区间内仍然能有很好的听力。 We’re interested in finding out when this human hearing pattern first emerged during our evolutionary history. In particular, if we could find a similar pattern of good hearing between 1.0-6.0 kHz in a fossil human species, then we could make an argument that language was present. 我们的兴趣是想要找出人类的这种听觉模式在进化史上最早出现于何时。特别是，如果我们能从某个人类化石上面找到在1.0-6.0千赫之间拥有良好听力这种类似模式，那么我们就可以论证说语言已经存在。 Testing the hearing of a long-gone individual 测量远古人类的听力 To study hearing using fossils, we measure a large number of dimensions of the ancient ears – including the length of the ear canal, the size of the ear drum and so on – using virtual reconstructions of the fragile skulls on the computer. Then we input all these data into a computer model. 使用化石来测量听力，我们需要在电脑上对易碎的头骨进行虚拟重构，然后测量古人耳朵的许许多多指标，包括耳道长度、耳膜大小等等。然后我们将所有这些数据都输入一个电脑模型之中。 Published previously in the bioengineering literature, the model predicts how a person hears based on his ear anatomy. It studies the capacity of the ear as a receiver of a signal, similar to an antenna. The results tell us how efficiently the ear transmits sound energy from the environment to the brain. 这个模型此前已经在生物工程文献中发表，能够根据一个人的耳朵构造预测其听力。它研究了耳朵作为与天线类似的信号接收器的能力，其结果能告诉我们耳朵将周围环境中的声能传输到大脑的效率。 We first tested the model on chimpanzee skulls, and got results similar to those of researchers who tested chimpanzee hearing in the lab. Since we know the model accurately predicts how humans hear and how chimpanzees hear, it should provide reliable results for our fossil human ancestors as well. 我们在黑猩猩头骨上面检验了这个模型，得到的结果与研究人员在实验室得到的黑猩猩听力相似。因此，我们知道这个模型能够准确预测人类听力和黑猩猩听力，所以将它应用于古人化石上面，也应该能够为我们提供可靠的结论。 What do the fossils tell us? 化石告诉了我们什么？ Previously, we studied the hearing abilities in several fossil hominin individuals from the site of the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of the Bones) in northern Spain. These fossils are about 430,000 years old, and anthropologists consider them to represent ancestors of the later Neanderthals. Based on ear bone measurements we took, the computer model calculated that hearing abilities in the Sima hominins were nearly identical to living humans in showing a broad region of good hearing. 此前，我们已经研究过西班牙北部“胡瑟裂谷”（西班牙语意为“骨坑”）遗址的几个古人类化石的听觉能力。这些化石大概是43万年前的，人类学家认为他们代表了晚期尼安德特人的祖先。基于我们所进行的耳骨测量，电脑模型计算出“裂谷”古人类的听觉能力与现存人类的几近相同，都在很大范围内表现出良好听力。 In our current study published in Science Advances, we worked with much earlier hominin individuals, representing the species Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus. These fossils were excavated at the sites of Sterkfontein and Swartkrans in South Africa, and likely date to around two million years ago. 在发表于《科学进展》上的最新研究中，我们研究了更为远古的古人类，即非洲南猿和傍人粗壮种。这些化石是在南非的斯特克方藤和斯沃特兰斯遗址发掘出来的，很可能存活于约200万年以前。 Auditory sensitivity between 0.5-5.0 kHz for chimpanzees, humans and the early hominins. Points higher on the curve indicate greater auditory sensitivity. (A) Region of maximum sensitivity. The early hominins are shifted toward slightly higher frequencies compared with chimpanzees. (B) Hearing results. The early hominins are more sensitive than either chimpanzees or humans up to around 3 kHz. Above around 3.5 kHz, the early hominins resemble chimpanzees more closely in showing a drop-off in sensitivity. 黑猩猩、人类和早期古人类在0.5-5.0千赫之间的听觉敏感度。曲线中更高的点代表更高的听觉敏感度。（A）代表敏感度最高区间。与黑猩猩相比，早期古人类的对应区间向更高频率略有偏移。（B）代表听力结果。在约3千赫之前，早期古人类的敏感度既高于黑猩猩，也高于人类。在高于3.5千赫的区间，早期古人类更接近黑猩猩，表现出敏感度的下降。 When we measured their ear structures and modeled their hearing, we found they had a hearing pattern that was more similar to a chimpanzee – but slightly modified in the human direction. In fact, these early hominins showed better hearing than either chimpanzees or modern humans from about 1.0-3.0 kHz, and the region of best hearing was shifted toward slightly higher frequencies compared with chimpanzees. 在测量了他们的耳朵构造并用模型计算了其听力以后，我们发现他们的听觉模式更接近于黑猩猩，但朝人类的方向略有修正。事实上，在1.0-3.0千赫区间，这些早期古人类的听力比黑猩猩或现代人的都要好。而且与黑猩猩相比，他们的最佳听力区间向高频率方向略有偏移。 It turns out this auditory pattern may have been a particular advantage for living on the savanna. We know A. africanus and and P. robustus regularly occupied the savanna, since as much as half of their diet was made up of resources found in open environments, based on measurements of isotopes in their teeth. 原来，对于稀树大草原上的生活而言，这种听力模式可能别有优势。我们知道，非洲南猿和傍人粗壮种经常会生活在稀树大草原上，因为他们的食谱有一半来自于开阔环境中才能找到的资源，而这是对他们牙齿中的同位素进行测量后发现的。 In more open environments, sound waves don’t travel as far as they do in the rain forest canopy. Sound signals tends to fade out sooner, and short-range communication is favored on the savanna. The hearing pattern of these early hominins – greater sensitivity than humans or chimpanzees to frequencies between 1.0-3.0 kHz and maximum sensitivity at slightly higher frequencies than in chimps – that would work well in these conditions. 在更为开阔的环境中，声波传播不到热带雨林密林中那么远。声音信号消逝更快，因此在稀树大草原上短程交流更受喜爱。在这种环境中，这些早期古人类的听觉模式（在1.0-3.0千赫的频率区间中比黑猩猩或现代人更敏感，且敏感度最高区间的对应频率比黑猩猩要稍高一些）相当适用。 From hearing to talking 从听到说 A. africanus and P. robustus had hearing abilities similar to a chimpanzee, but with some slight differences in the direction of humans. 非洲南猿和傍人粗壮种的听觉能力与黑猩猩近似，同时向人类的方向略有偏差。 There is a general consensus among anthropologists that the small brain size and ape-like cranial anatomy and vocal tract in these early hominins indicates they likely did not have the capacity for language. 人类学家中存在一个普遍共识：这些早期古人类的大脑尺寸较小、颅骨构造和声道更像猿，表明他们很可能并不具备语言能力。 My colleagues and I aren’t arguing that these early hominins had language, with its implications of symbolic content. They certainly could communicate vocally, though. All primates do, and many species regularly emit a variety of vocalizations including grunts, screams, howls and so on. 我和同僚并不是争论说这些早期古人类拥有语言，因为语言包含有符号性内容这层意思。但是，他们肯定能够进行口头交流。所有灵长动物都能做到这一点，而且许多物种还能经常性地发出各种不同的声音，包括咕噜、尖叫、咆哮等等。 But these South African fossils have given us another hearing data point as we try to puzzle out the emergence of language. Two million years ago, it looks like they didn’t have language. But 430,000 years ago, it looks like the Sima de los Huesos hominins did. We suspect that sometime between these early South African forms and the later more human-like forms from the Sima, language emerged. Now we just need to narrow that window. 但在我们尝试解答语言起源的难题时，南非的这些化石给我们提供了另外一组听力数据论点。200万年前，他们似乎还没有语言。但43万年前，似乎“胡瑟裂谷”的古人类已经拥有语言了。我们估计，大概在这些早期南非种和更晚的更像人类的“裂谷”种之间的某个时候，语言就出现了。现在，我们只需要把这个窗口期进一步缩短。 We hope to continue this kind of work on hearing patterns in different groups of ancient hominins from various places and time periods. The discovery of a new hominin species, Homo naledi, announced just a couple of weeks ago from a different site in South Africa, underscores how much there is left to uncover. 我们希望把这项工作继续做下去，研究来自不同地区和时期的不同古人类群体的听觉模式。仅在数周之前，南非另外一个遗址又宣布发现了一种新的古人类物种，即纳勒迪人。这一发现凸显了我们还有多少事情需要去发现。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Lenin’s Ghost: How Did Marxist Professors Create a New Wave of Political Leaders? 列宁的幽灵：马克思主义学者是如何培养出新一拨政治领袖的？ 作者：Mihail Neamtu @ 2016-1-12 译者：小册子（@昵称被抢的小册子） 校对：慕白（@李凤阳他说） 来源：Law & Liberty，http://www.libertylawsite.org/2016/01/22/lenins-ghost-how-did-marxist-professors-create-a-new-wave-of-political-leaders/ Europe has by no means recovered from its crisis. The new wave of migrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East has worsened the economic forecast. The economies of the Eurozone, with a collective growth rate of under 1.5 percent in 2015, are almost stagnant. Gone are the days of the German economic miracle. Nowadays, nearly 4.5 million young persons under 25 are unemployed in the EU-28 — a staggering figure, to which Chancellor Merkel just added an extra million refugees. Particularly in the Mediterranean countries, youth unemployment is at very high levels: 47.9 percent in Greece, 47.7 percent in Spain and 39.8 percent in Italy. 欧洲还远未从危机中恢复过来，来自非洲、亚洲和中东的新一波移民令经济预测更加悲观。欧元区的经济发展几近停滞，其2015年整体增长率不足1.5%。德国创造经济奇迹的时期早已远去，如今欧盟28国25岁以下年轻人的失业人数接近4500万，令人瞠目结舌，而德国总理默克尔还刚刚再往上面增加了100万难民。年轻人的失业率在地中海沿岸国家尤其居高不下：希腊为47.9%，西班牙为47.7%，意大利则为39.8%。 Confronted with this bleak picture, politicians, journalists, religious leaders, and public intellectuals all search for an explanation. Why is the European dream failing so many young people? How long will the economic recovery last? Will the EU be able to cope with another massive crash of the financial international system? 面对这般凄惨景况，政治家、记者、宗教领袖以及公共知识分子都在寻找个中原因。为什么欧洲梦会让如此多的年轻人无法企及？经济复苏还能维持多久？欧盟有没有能力应对另一次国际金融系统崩溃的巨大冲击？ While experts ponder such questions, legions of university students face the grim, day-to-day reality. Still in their thirties, they cannot leave their parents’ homes. It would be hard to find university graduates from Thessalonica or Malaga with bank savings or with enough funds to allow them to establish a family of their own. Many rely directly on social benefits, while switching from one low-paid job to another. In the public square, the notion of individual responsibility has become unfashionable. Angry crowds demonstrating in Athens, Madrid, or Bucharest call for ever new governmental solutions. 专家们在思考这些问题，而众多大学生则日复一复地面对残酷现实。他们已经三十多岁，但仍未能脱离父母独立生活。在萨洛尼卡和马拉加的大学毕业生当中，极少人有存款或其他财务来源足以让他们组建自己的家庭。他们当中很多人不停地辗转于不同的低薪工作，转工期间仅能依靠社会救济过活。“个人责任”的观念在社会上不再那么时髦了，雅典、马德里和布加勒斯特都有愤怒的群众游行示威，要求政府提供更新的解决方案。 In this atmosphere, both far Right parties and far Left political platforms have been mounting radical proposals. Populism is on the rise, in the form of nationalism, or revolutionary Marxism, or in some cases a strange mix of the two—as can be seen in the “Red-Brown-White” coalition that constitutes Vladimir Putin’s motley political base. Odd as it may seem, the two extremes can, as with the far-Left Syriza and the Independent Greeks (ANEL), a new Rightwing party, march together shoulder to shoulder. 在这种氛围下，无论极右政党还是极左政治联盟都不停地提出激进的建议。民粹主义正在升温，表现形式有民族主义，有宣扬革命的马克思主义，也有两者的奇特组合——例如普京混杂政权基础中的“红-棕-白”政治联盟【译注：在俄罗斯的政治语境中，红色代表社会主义和共产主义，棕色代表极端民族主义，白色代表君主政体】。虽然看起来很古怪，但是位处两个对立极端的势力（正如希腊的激进左翼联盟(Syriza)和新右翼政党独立希腊人(ANEL)那样）却可以并肩前行。 The present essay will examine the Left side of the ledger to see what intellectual and cultural forces account for the resurgence of Left radicalism in various European countries. My claim is that old-school Marxists in Western academia have managed to produce a new class of revolutionary politicians, who are currently challenging the foundations of the Western capitalist order. 本文将研究政治光谱中的左翼，以寻找极左激进思潮在欧洲各国重新抬头背后的思想与文化推力。我的看法是，西方学术界中老派的马克思主义者已经培养出了新一批的革命政客，而这些政客正在对西方资本主义秩序的根基提出挑战。 We have, for example, the British Labor Party’s new leader Jeremy Corbyn, an anti-NATO politician and welfare devotee. He has called for a friendlier approach to Putin’s Russia. (In accord with the above-noted trend, this puts him in line with Rightwing populists in his country, of the UKIP Party, and Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France.) 例如，英国工党的新党魁科尔宾就是一个反北约的政客，也是福利主义的狂热信徒。他还呼吁以友善的态度对待普京治下的俄罗斯（在前文所述的趋势之下，科尔宾凭着他的这一主张，与英国独立党的右翼民粹主义者，以及法国民族阵线的马琳•勒庞，成为同道中人）。 In Spain, there has emerged Podemos, a Leftwing movement that ran candidates for the general elections under the motto Libertad, igualdad, y fraternidad, and that late last year won 20.65 percent of the national vote, vaulting to the position of third largest political organization in the country.A 37-year-old political science professor named Pablo Manuel Iglesias Turrión is the leader of Podemos, which means “We Can”—an echo of Barack Obama’s “Yes, We Can.” 而西班牙则冒出了一个叫“我们可以”的左翼团体，他们派出代表以“自由、平等、博爱”的口号参加大选，并在去年年底赢得全国20.65%的选票，一跃成为全国第三大政治组织。“我们可以”的领袖，是一个名叫伊格莱西亚斯的37岁政治学教授。“我们可以”这个名字，呼应了奥巴马的竞选口号“是的，我们可以”。 Iglesias, an admirer of the Bolshevik Revolution, was a member of the Spanish Communist Party until 1999. In 2014, Comrade Iglesias was elected to the European Parliament as a member of his new party. Its growth in the last election came after it gathered in representatives of Izquierda Anticapitalista, an organization that includes some Trotskyites and Gramscians. (Sample press release from that group: “Toward a Democratic Disruption and an End to Austerity”). 伊格莱西亚斯对布尔什维克革命心怀敬佩，他自己在1999年之前也是西班牙共产党员。2014年，伊格莱西亚斯同志以其新政党【译注：即“我们可以”】成员的身份，成为欧洲议会的议员。在去年的大选中冒升之前，“我们可以”吸收了政治组织“左翼反资本主义”的代表，而该组织网罗的是一些托派和葛兰西学派的人。（该组织对外发表的范文之一：“迈向民主之崩溃与紧缩政策之终结”。） Podemos takes pride in presenting youthful faces to the Spanish electorate, and advocates of liberation theology (in the person of Teresa Forcades, “the radical Catalan nun on a mission,” as London’s Guardian newspaper called her). In the land of Don Quixote, Pope Francis’ sympathy for the Bolivarian economic model did make a lasting impression. “我们可以”让年轻人更多地参与政治，让他们成为解放神学倡导者（例如被伦敦《卫报》称之为“肩负使命的加泰罗尼亚激进修女”的特蕾莎•福加德斯），并以此为傲。在这片诞生了堂吉诃德的土地上，教宗方济各对玻利维亚经济模式的同情的确令人经久不忘。 In fact among former leaders of Podemos, one counts Juan Carlos Monedero, an advisor to the late Hugo Chávez. Incidentally, Hugo Chávez and his successor in Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, have sponsored Spain’s Leftwing parties and associations in the same explicit manner that President Putin has channeled Russian rubles toward his political puppets from Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. 实际上，“我们可以”的前领袖之一胡安•卡洛斯•莫内德罗就在委内瑞拉总统查韦斯执政后期担任其顾问。顺便说一句，查韦斯和他的继任人尼古拉斯•马杜罗都毫不掩饰地为西班牙左翼的政党和组织提供资助，与普京总统向他在乌克兰、摩尔多瓦和格鲁吉亚的傀儡政权输送卢布同出一辙。 The European Left, in short, is very much alive and kicking. From Britain, Greece, and Spain to the Die Linke party in Germany, the heirs of Marx show a remarkable efflorescence, resembling the Greek mythological Hydra endowed with multiple serpentine heads, despite its one and only reptilian body. We may ask ourselves who the future Heracles will be, slaying the beast with the humor of Winston Churchill and the manly determination of Mrs. Thatcher… 简而言之，欧洲的左翼势力仍生机勃勃。从英国、希腊、西班牙，到德国的左翼党，马克思的继承人向世人展现了他们的欣欣向荣，一如希腊神话中的九头蛇，尽管只有一副羸弱的身躯，却生出许多个蛇头。我们也许可以问问自己，谁将成为未来的赫拉克勒斯，以丘吉尔的幽默和撒切尔夫人的铁腕，手刃这头怪兽。 Why are the ghosts of Marxism haunting the political life of Europe? Mainly because neither the structural evils of communist ideology nor its perpetrators in the former Soviet bloc have  experienced a proper Nurnberg-style scrutiny. After the Second World War, the dismantling of the Nazi network in Germany created the proper context for the carrying out of the Marshall Plan. 为何马克思主义在欧洲政坛阴魂不散？这主要是因为，无论是共产主义意识形态在体制上的恶性，还是前苏维埃统治集团中的恶徒，都没有经历过一场纽伦堡审判式的彻底清算。二战之后，纳粹主义机体在德国土崩瓦解，为实行马歇尔计划提供了适当条件。 After 1989, the EU’s expansion toward former Socialist republics did not require a similar political lustration. To this day, most of the societal and economic disasters produced by the communist experiment remain largely unknown to the general public from the Western European countries, particularly those not yet born at the time of the 1989 revolutions or who were young at the time 1989年之后，欧盟向前社会主义国家扩张，却并没有要求在政治体制上进行类似的清理。时至今日，共产主义实验在社会制度和经济上所造成的重大灾难，大多仍不为西欧普通民众所知，尤其是那些在1989年还没出生——或当时还很年轻——的民众。 It was widely expected that these revolutions would put Leftist academics, or at least most of them, out of business. Their voices were certainly muted for a time, but that time has expired. Rejecting the notion of public penance, old Marxist professors have resumed their project, and carried on with their negation of historical facts. By spinning their simplistic understanding of the relationship between labor and capital, Marxist ideologues in the North-Atlantic hemisphere have hatched a new generation—one that seeks, and in many cases finds, electoral validation. 人们曾普遍预期，在经历了那些革命之后，就算不是全部，起码绝大部分的左翼学者不会再有市场。他们的确销声匿迹了一段时间，然而这段时间已经过去了。那些老派马克思主义学者又开始重操旧业，他们仍然拒绝接受公开忏悔的理念，继续否定历史事实。基于对劳动力与资本两者间关系的粗浅理解，北大西洋区的马克思主义追随者们牵强附会地虚构编造，孵化出了新一代——他们寻求通过参选得到承认，有好些已经获得成功。 Just as the young Barack Obama absorbed Frank Marshall Davis’ worldview in the 1970s, so too have European elites imbibed the vapors of the Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou in Paris, the late historian Eric Hobsbawm in London, cultural critic Slavoj Žižek in Ljubljana, or the Hungarian writer G.M. Tamás in Budapest. Such Marxist professors are responsible, indeed, for the birth of a new generation of historically ignorant opinion-makers in Europe. 和巴拉克•奥巴马年轻时吸收了1970年代弗兰克•马歇尔•戴维斯的世界观一样，欧洲精英阶层也受到了马克思主义学者影响，当中有巴黎的毛主义哲学家阿兰•巴迪欧，伦敦的当代历史学家艾瑞克•霍布斯鮑姆，卢布尔雅那的文化评论家斯拉沃热•齐泽克，以及布达佩斯的匈牙利作家贾斯伯•米克罗斯•塔马斯。欧洲出现了对历史愚昧无知的新一代意见领袖，这些马克思主义学者对此难辞其咎。 The economic crisis of late 2008 proved to be a good moment for high-brow academics and social justice street activists. They came together with the dream of rekindling the May 1968 movement against the bourgeois, middle-class establishment in France. Alienated youth flooded social media with Marxist jingles about American imperialism, the existence of banks and mortgages, the privatization of state assets, and the hierarchical structures of traditional family (depicted as sexist and homophobic). 2008年末爆发的经济危机，成了撮合高高在上的学术界和追求社会公义的街头行动家的大好时机。他们梦想着重燃法国1968年5月反资产阶级风暴之火，走到了一起。离群索居的年轻人在社交媒体大肆张贴马克思主义的宣传短曲，攻击美帝国主义，反对银行与抵押贷款、国有资产私有化以及传统家庭等级制度（认为这是性别歧视和恐同的表现）。 Day and night during—and since—the Great Recession, on television and radio programs, at public rallies, and throughout academic colloquia, utopians recycle the mantras of “equality,” “identity politics,” “prejudice,” and “discrimination.” At times, the fresh young European Marxists may speak more eloquently than the worn-out Bernie Sanders does in the Democratic Party’s primaries. However, this lyrical exaltation of Marxism brings nothing new in terms of understanding economic cycles or the way out of poverty. 自2008年经济大衰退开始，不切实际的空想家们无论在电视和电台节目、公众集会，还是学术界的研讨会上，都日以继夜地把“平等”“身份政治”“偏见”和“ 歧视”等概念像咒语一样翻来覆去地念诵。有时候，年轻的欧洲马克思主义者说起话来，比疲惫的桑德斯在民主党党内初选的演说还要滔滔不绝。然而，无论听起来多么激动人心，马克思主义仍然不能为研究经济规律和摆脱贫穷带来任何新东西。 Podemos and Syriza won their respective elections by vaguely promising the voters another future—a distant reality in which decisions about individual happiness would be made through a Rousseau-styled “collective deliberation.” How would poverty be eliminated? Through cooperatives, we are told, which would be less profit-driven than the “neoliberal enterprises” but which would benefit from a state-controlled redistribution of wealth. “我们可以”和激进左翼联盟通过含糊其辞地承诺选民“另一个”未来，赢得了西班牙和希腊的大选。而在这个遥远的未来中，有关个人幸福的问题则需要通过卢梭式的“集体研究”来决定。该怎样消灭贫穷呢？据说可以通过合作社，因为合作社不像“新自由主义企业”那样唯利是图，还可以从国家控制下的财富再分配中获益。 The call to ideological warfare from Podemos (be it in the form of political correctness, student strikes, militias on campuses, or voluntary sit-ins) flirts with the image of a cosmic deliverance from the “hegemonic powers” of capitalism. The relationship between the individual and the crowd is construed erotically. Comrade Iglesias’ speeches set the stage for a quasi-spiritual, if not mystical, interpretation of the revolutionary endeavor. “我们可以”所宣扬的意识形态斗争（无论是以讲求政治正确、学生罢课、校园民兵组织，还是自愿静坐的形式）引发了全球摆脱资本主义霸权这一遐想。个人与集体的关系被描绘得很诱人。伊格莱西亚斯同志的演讲令人容易对革命行动产生类似宗教般的，甚至神秘的理解。 The Leftist revolutionaries accuse “the agents of laissez-faire capitalism” of having created a new class of underpaid employees. They depict students, workers, and trade unionists as innocent victims of a vast conspiracy set up by the owners of multinational companies. In response to the selfish individualism of the Right, the new Marxists celebrate the collectivist frenzy of anti-bourgeois demonstrators. By singing the litany of “fairness,” they forget the importance of moral virtue, human character, and individual responsibility. They avoid addressing the psychological dimension of behavioral traits such as laziness, low-esteem, or procrastination. 左翼革命家们谴责“自由放任的资本主义代理人”制造了新的受剥削阶层，他们认为跨国公司股东之间互相勾结，而学生、工人、工会会员则是这一巨大阴谋的无辜受害者。针对右翼利己的个人主义，新马克思主义者为反资产阶级示威者的集体主义狂热唱赞歌。在喋喋不休地歌颂“公正”的时候，他们忘却了道德伦理、人类本性与个人责任的重要性，而且对诸如懒惰、缺乏自尊和拖延等行为特征的心理因素避而不谈。 Professor Claude Karnoouh (who taught Marxist sociology at a prominent university in the central Romanian region of Transylvania) argues that free markets produce social disasters by destroying neighborhoods and towns. He nowhere takes into account the creative nature of capitalist disruptions, so powerfully defended by Joseph Schumpeter and strikingly visible in the recent replacement of old postal offices by email (or in the mass-production of electronic tablets and the rapid decline of desktop computers). 在位于罗马尼亚中部特兰西瓦尼亚地区某知名大学教授马克思主义社会学的克劳德•卡努教授认为，自由市场摧毁了社区和小城镇，制造了社会灾难。但他完全没有考虑到资本主义式破坏的创造性本质，而这一点已经得到了约瑟夫•熊彼特强有力的论证，并且在近年来电子邮件取代传统邮局（或者平板电脑盛行和桌面电脑式微）的范例中得到清晰的体现。 The Marxist revolutionaries of 21st century Europe ignore the subtle contrivances of human motivation and organizational behavior, which typically make people leave behind the poor conditions of their ancestors, acquire new skills, and transcend the national barriers in search for a better life. 那些针对人类动机和组织行为的微妙设置，能够驱使人们挣脱先辈的困境，学习新的技能，超越国家壁垒，以求改善生活，而二十一世纪欧洲的马克思主义革命家忽略了这一点。 Also based on false assumptions is Podemos’ rhetoric against corruption. It underestimates the welfare state’s role in diminishing individual freedom and economic opportunity for young Spaniards and young people everywhere. In search of the heroic proletariat, Professor Iglesias is still obsessed with the class struggle and the victory of workers through larger trade unions and more frequent strikes. He ignores that every individual is paid for the skills, and for the needs, that he or she brings to the marketplace. “我们可以”针对贪污腐败的激烈言辞，也建基于错误假设之上，他们低估了福利制度对西班牙乃至世界各地的年轻人的个体自由和经济发展的抑制作用。怀着对英雄无产阶级的向往，伊格莱西亚斯教授仍然沉迷于阶级斗争，渴望工人阶级通过更大规模的工会和更频繁的示威来获得胜利。每个人的薪水都是由其在市场上展现出来的技能和对这种技能的需求决定的，但他完全无视这一点。 The leaders of Podemos and Syriza are blind to the differences between an Anglo American approach to economic competition (as a cure to favoritism) and a South American (but of course not uniquely South American) support for state monopoly. Rampant corruption stems not only from the ills of human nature (“the greed of the Wall Street party,” as Iglesias puts it). Corruption is the result of poor institutional arrangements: volatile property rights, overregulation, laws preventing the free association of individuals, rigged contracts pushed by central governments, as well as high taxes for small businesses. It is corruption that kills the natural instinct for entrepreneurship, individual freedom, personal growth, and economic development. 英语美洲鼓励经济竞争（以避免偏袒徇私），南美洲（当然也不仅限于南美洲）支持国家垄断，但“我们可以”和激进左翼联盟的领袖对两者间的差异却视而不见。猖獗的贪污腐败行为不仅仅源于人性中之恶（伊格莱西亚斯谓之为“华尔街派对中的贪婪”），也源于糟糕的制度安排：产权缺乏保障、过度监管、法律限制自由结社、中央政府非法操纵合同，以及对小企业高额征税。正是贪污腐败扼杀了与生俱来的创业精神、个体自由、个人成长与经济发展。 Speaking of poverty and wealth, the Jacobins haven’t managed to create a single socialist success story. No one in contemporary Cuba, Laos, or North Korea goes to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner.” Except for the privileged nomenklatura and the party apparatchiks, ordinary people from socialist countries have never experienced the coexistence of these leisurely activities. 说到贫穷与财富，雅各宾派并没能创造出社会主义的成功案例，一个都没有。在当代的古巴、老挝或者朝鲜，都没有人能够“上午打猎，下午捕鱼，晚上喂牛，晚饭后搞批判”【编注：语出马克思《德意志意识形态》（1845）第9页】。除了拥有特权的某些阶层和党员，社会主义国家的平民百姓从未过上这种悠闲生活。 Why should we believe that Syriza or Podemos will unchain millions of unemployed people through the shameless rescue of Lenin? In recent times, countries run by radical socialist governments have made no significant contribution to the flourishing of scientific research or to the groundbreaking technological innovations which have spread across the world. 我们为什么要相信，“我们可以”和激进左翼联盟搬出列宁的那一套，就能解救数以百万计的失业人口呢？在近代社会，科学研究百花齐放，科技创新突破惠及全球，但激进社会主义政权领导的国家从未对此做出过任何重大贡献。 Neither Communist China nor authoritarian Russia can boast impressive advances in the field of medical science. Such achievements still crown the healthcare systems of the free world. From its very first political application in real time and real history, Marxist ideology has been a painful failure of astonishing proportions. 无论是共产主义中国，还是威权主义俄国，都没能在医学研究领域取得引以为豪的突破进展。那些令人瞩目的成就，仍然出自自由国度的医疗系统。从其历史上第一次付诸政治实践开始，马克思主义意识形态带来的从来都是极其惨痛的失败。 What about the scientific claims made by Karl Marx (1818–1883)? As Dr. Paul Aligică from George Mason University once put it, Marxist economists currently employ epistemic tools that resemble the phlogiston theory used by the 17th century physicists. Das Kapital can explain the wealth and the poverty of nations with the same measure of clarity that Johann Joachim Becher’s (1635–1682) alchemist views of combustion help us understand a Ferrari engine. 那么马克思在科学方面的论断又是否有过什么贡献呢？正如乔治梅森大学的保罗•阿里吉卡博士曾经说的那样，马克思主义经济学家如今使用的认知工具，类似于17世纪物理学家使用的燃素理论。用《资本论》来解释国家的财富和贫穷，和以约翰•约钦姆•贝歇尔（1635-1682年）炼金术的燃烧理论来研究法拉利引擎，效度不相伯仲。 A century and half since the Communist Manifesto was published, the entire scientific scaffolding of Marxism has fallen to pieces. Marx got it all wrong when he spoke about the future developments of the Western society. As a reductionist theory, Marxism today cannot account for the economic transformation of the West. 自《共产党宣言》发表一个半世纪以来，马克思主义的整个科学理论框架已经分崩离析，支离破碎。马克思对西方社会的未来展望，无一应验。作为一种还原主义理论，如今马克思主义完全无法解释西方国家的经济转型。 Let us compare the income and lifestyle of a 19th century worker from a steel factory in Manchester, England with the monthly salary and the spare time enjoyed by a Google employee at the dawn of the third millennium. Would a ship worker from Gdansk in the early 1980s have dreamt of possessing a satellite home television or a mobile phone in his pocket? What is, then, left of all Marxist “prophecies”? 我们不妨将19世纪英国曼彻斯特钢铁厂工人的月薪和生活方式，和21世纪初谷歌员工的月薪与闲暇时间进行对比。1980年代初格但斯克的船坞工人能想象家里装上卫星电视，兜里揣着手机吗？那马克思主义的“预言”还剩下些什么？ Since Marxist doctrine has no scientific grounding, it would seem to follow that its popularity ought to be examined from the perspective of rhetoric, theology, or literary studies. Decades ago, Robert C. Tucker convincingly argued that myth is a central category in the writings of the young Marx. 马克思主义学说没有科学基础，因此要分析它为何盛行，似乎应该从修辞艺术、宗教信仰和文学研究角度入手。数十年前，罗伯特•塔克就已经很有力地论述过，神话是马克思年轻时写作的中心主题。 From time immemorial, people cherished the eschatological promise of a savior (rebranded by Marx as “the proletariat” and by Stalin under the name of “the Party leader”). Since Marxism is neither a serious economic theory nor a rigorous social science, we would understand it better as the secular religion of modernity, which uses a redemptive language for the alienated masses. 自古以来，人们就对承诺拯救万民于水火的救世主心怀向往（马克思将其包装为“无产阶级”，而斯大林则称其为“党的领袖”）。鉴于马克思主义既不是严肃的经济理论，也不是严谨的社会科学，因此要更好地理解这一理论，我们应该将其视作追求现代性的世俗宗教，它运用救赎的语言来面对异化了的普罗大众。 Alain Besançon identified the presence of Gnostic themes in the Marxist narrative of class warfare, while the University of Chicago’s Mircea Eliade has shown the extent to which the historicist myth of a classless society projects the image of a Golden Age into modern times. 阿兰•贝桑松指出，马克思主义对于阶级斗争的叙述中包含了诺斯替派的主张，而芝加哥大学的米尔恰•伊利亚德则指出，消除社会阶级乃历史必然这一迷思，其实很大程度上只是一厢情愿地将希腊的黄金时代投射到现代社会之中。 Traditional societies had foundational stories about charismatic, heroic individuals who fought against an evil enemy and promised a radical, not an incremental, improvement of the human condition. Marxists revolutionaries have taken up this apocalyptic imagery. The new small “c” catholic church is the international socialist movement, which brings to the afflicted world a message of a redeemed humanity. 传统社会总流传着一些英雄故事，这些英雄魅力非凡，勇于对抗恶势力，他们许诺的不是渐进的改良，而是一夜之间改善人们的生活现状。马克思主义革命家宣扬的就是这种末日天启般的景象。这一新的全人类的教会就是国际社会主义运动，他们宣称，要为这个受尽磨难的世界带来人性救赎的福音。 Prime Minister Tsipras (known as the Greek “Che Guevara”) said that “the communist regime . . . at least had humanity at the center of their thinking.” Young and radical politicians such as he do not feel the need to explain the criminal deeds of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. 被称为“希腊的切•格瓦拉”的希腊总理齐普拉斯说，“共产主义政权……起码以人道主义作为核心考量。”像他那样年轻激进的政客们，似乎从不觉得有必要解释1917年布尔什维克革命所犯下的罪行。 Instead of looking at the horrors of the Gulag, the leaders of Syriza and Podemos offer their audience the same toxic and yet mesmerizing incantations that make people forget about the Ukrainian Holodomor or about the Stalinist labor camps of Perm, Volga Canal, and Pitești (the latter experiment being described by Vladimir Tismăneanu in his 2014 book on The Devil in History). 激进左翼联盟和“我们可以”的领袖们也无视古拉格的丑陋和残酷，他们拿催眠咒语来荼毒信众，让他们忘记乌克兰大饥荒，忘记设在彼尔姆、伏尔加运河与皮特什蒂的斯大林式劳改营（弗拉迪米尔•蒂斯马尼努在他2014年出版的《历史中的魔鬼》中对皮特什蒂的实验项目也有所描述）。 When a freely elected leader of a European nation can say that “humanity” was “at the center” of the communist experiment, we must pause and ask ourselves: How can Europe regain the vast amount of moral clarity it has lost since the 1989-1991 period? Will perhaps the foe of the former evil empire make a Reaganite comeback to help Europe find its way? Might we believe that a future President of the United States will call out the new Jacobins? May we hope that future leaders of democratic parties will stop indulging in a shameless nostalgia for Marx and Lenin? 连一个欧洲国家自由选举产生的领导人，都能说出“人道主义”处于共产主义实践的“核心位置”这样的话来，我们必须停下来问问自己：欧洲如何能重新厘清自1989-1991年巨变以来就已经变得模糊的道德观念？过往邪恶帝国的敌人会不会以一个里根式的王者归来，帮助欧洲重回正轨？我们会不会相信美国未来的总统会请新雅各宾派重出江湖？我们可不可以希望未来民主政党的领导人不要再不知廉耻地缅怀马克思和列宁？ It is a matter of historical record that, like the victims of the Shoah, the prisoners of communism underwent unimaginable physical degradation and psychological torture. Who will educate the Prime Minister of Greece and tell him of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s long-lasting witness? Who will enlighten Pablo Iglesias Turrión about the black mass which, in the name of humanity, the KGB proxies organized at Pitești Prison during the late 1950s? Students of theology living under communism were forced to denounce God, to mock Christ, and to blaspheme the name of the Virgin Mary under the burden of extreme beatings and despicable sufferings. 就如同电影《浩劫》中的受害人那样，共产主义的囚徒经受了无法想象的身体摧残和心理折磨，这是铁一般的历史事实。难道没有人教育一下希腊总理，告诉他索尔仁尼琴长期以来所目睹的那些惨况？难道没有人告诉伊格莱西亚斯，1950年代末克格勃特工以人道主义的名义在皮特什蒂监狱组织的黑色弥撒是什么？生活在共产主义国家的神学学生，在酷刑的胁迫之下，要被迫批判上帝，嘲笑耶稣基督，亵渎中伤圣母玛利亚。 Such was the “love” for “humanity” that millions of people witnessed during the 20th century. Such are the untruths that vote-seeking, parliament-leading Marxist revolutionaries want to pour into the minds of ordinary men and women, who may begin their adult life by searching for a better job, but might end their pursuit of happiness by embracing an obsolete and evil ideology. 这些就是数以百万计的民众在20世纪所亲眼目睹的“人道主义”之“爱”，这些也是唯选票是图的马克思主义革命家们想对普通民众灌输的颠倒黑白的谎言。人们原本不过是想在成年后找一份好点的工作，但却可能只因向一种过时而邪恶的意识形态张开怀抱，而令追求幸福的梦想彻底破灭。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Strangled by Roots 根之牵绊 作者：Steven Pinker @ 2007-8-6 译者：沈沉（@你在何地-sxy） 校对：Drunkplane(@Drunkplane-zny) 来源：New Republic，http://www.newrepublic.com/article/77729/strangled-roots The genealogy craze in America. 美国的家谱热。 New technologies often have unforeseeable consequences. Michael Faraday could not have anticipated the rise of the electric guitar and its effects on our culture, nor did the inventors of the laser realize they had laid the ground for a thriving industry of tattoo removal. And it is safe to say that Watson and Crick could not have foreseen a day when an analysis of Oprah Winfrey's DNA would tell her that she was descended from the Kpelle people of the Liberian rainforest. "I feel empowered by this," she said upon hearing the news, overcoming her disappointment that her ancestors were not Zulu warriors. 新科技通常会带来一些意料之外的后果。迈克尔·法拉第不可能会预料到电吉他的兴起及其对我们文化的影响，激光的发明者也不会想到他们会为纹身消除业的繁荣打下基础。可以肯定地说，沃森和克里克【译注：DNA双螺旋结构的发现者。】不可能预见到会有这么一天：对奥普拉·温弗里【译注：美国脱口秀女王。】做个DNA分析，就能告诉她，她是利比里亚热带雨林中的Kpelle人的后代。“我感觉因此而充满力量”，听到这个消息后，她如是说，克服了此前因祖先不是祖鲁战士而产生的失望感。 A fascination with ancestry has long been part of the human condition, from the "begat's" of the Bible to the Roots miniseries and the restoration of Ellis Island. But with the advent of the Internet and genomic technology, genealogy has entered a new age. The past year has served up a series of high-profile revelations. 对家世的痴迷长久以来就是人类状态的一部分，从《圣经》中的“某某生某某”到电视连续剧《根》，再到埃利斯岛的重建【译注：埃利斯岛为纽约一小岛，曾长期用作移民检查站】，皆是其表现。但随着互联网和基因组技术的到来，家系学已经迈入了新的时代。去年就涌现了一系列热度很高的现象。 The news that Barack Obama's ancestors owned slaves was a bit more surprising than the news that Strom Thurmond's did, but it was more surprising still to be told that among the Thurmond family's slaves were the ancestors of Al Sharpton. 比起Strom Thurmond【译注：前美国参议员，支持种族隔离政策】的祖先曾经蓄奴这一消息来说，巴拉克·奥巴马的祖先也曾蓄奴更令人惊讶，但尤为令人惊讶的是，我们得知，Thurmond家族的奴隶中包括有Al Sharpton的祖先。 And Henry Louis Gates Jr., the host of the fascinating PBS series African American Lives, which explored the family trees of six prominent African Americans, was astounded to learn that half of his own ancestry was European, including Irish kinsmen on his father's side and two Jewish women on his mother's. PBS有个非常好看的系列栏目《非裔美国人的生活》，曾探寻过六位杰出非裔美国人的家族树，其主持人Henry Louis Gates Jr.惊讶地发现，他的祖先中有一半是欧洲人，父系这边有爱尔兰亲戚，而母系那边则有两位犹太女性。 Few of us can expect that a search for ancestors will bring us an inheritance, a title, or a coat of arms: the rewards of genealogy are mostly psychological. As Winfrey put it, "Knowing your family history is knowing your worth." The sentiment, though, is dubious--not just on moral grounds but on biological ones. 极少有人会期待通过追寻祖先而获得一份遗产、一个头衔或者一枚盾徽。家谱学的回报主要在于心理方面。正如Winfrey所说的那样，“认识自己的家族史就是认识自己的价值。”然而，这种心理感情很难站住脚——不仅仅从道德层面看是如此，从生物层面看也是如此。 A closer look at the human drive to know one's family tree uncovers a number of tensions between our intuitions of kinship and the facts of kinship. Some of those facts show that the findings of the new genealogy should not have been surprising at all. And others, tacitly appreciated for millennia, have recently been neglected to our peril. 更加仔细地分析一下人类认识自己家族树的冲动，我们就能得知，在我们对于亲缘关系的直觉与事实上的亲缘关系之间存在诸多张力。其中部分事实表明，新家谱学的发现根本不应当令人感到惊奇。而历经千年被人心照不宣地领会的另一些事实，其最近遭遇的忽视则会陷我们于危险之中。 For all its fascination, kinship is a surprisingly neglected topic in the behavioral sciences. A Martian reading a textbook in psychology would get no inkling that human beings treated their relatives any differently from strangers. Many social scientists have gone so far as to claim that kinship is a social construction with no connection to biology. 尽管人们对它痴迷如狂，但令人惊讶的是，亲缘关系在行为科学中一直是个不受关注的题目。如果有个火星人来读读我们的心理学教科书，关于人类对待自己的亲属与对待陌生人会有何不同，他完全不会得到任何线索。许多社会科学家走得如此之远，乃至宣称亲缘关系是一种社会建构，与生物学没有任何关系。 But assuming the creationists are wrong and humans are products of evolution, it would be surprising if our species entirely escaped the powerful forces that shape organisms' behavior toward their kin. Genetics and evolutionary theory predict that the biology of kinship should have biased our thoughts and emotions about relatives in several ways. 但是，假设创世主义者是错的，人类是进化的产物，那么，要说我们这个物种彻底逃脱了那一塑造了有机体对待自己亲属的行为的强大力量，那会很让人意外的。遗传学和进化理论预言，亲缘关系的生物学应当会通过多种方式使得我们对亲属的想法和情感发生偏移。 The first is the simple fact that blood relatives are likely to share genes. To the extent that minds are shaped by genomes, relatives are likely to be of like minds. Close relatives, whether raised together or apart, have been found to be correlated in intelligence, personality, tastes, and vices. The discovery of an ancestor is thus felt to reflect on the descendant, who may feel he has an explanation for the kind of person he is, and who can claim to have a dose of the ancestor's praiseworthy traits. 首先就有一个简单的事实：血亲之间很可能共享基因。就心智由基因组塑造而言，亲属有可能具有相似的心智。我们已经发现，近亲属，无论是一起还是分开成长，会在智力、个性、品味和缺点方面相互关联。因此对祖先的观察，似乎就会反映在其后裔身上，其子孙可能会觉得他找到了他成为某种类型人物的理由，并且也可声称自己具有其祖先身上部分值得赞扬的特征。 A promotional spot for Coca-Cola in African American Lives juxtaposes footage of African Americans with images of traditional Africans and says, "She has her great-great-great-grandmother's eye for adornment. He is fit and agile, like his forefathers." 《非裔美国人的生活》插播过一个可口可乐的促销广告，里面把非裔美国人的镜头和传统非洲人的画面放在一块，说“她和她的曾曾曾祖母对装扮的品味一致。他健壮灵敏，跟他的祖先一样。” The similarities among blood relatives mean that they are likely to share values, and shared values can lead to easy solidarity because of what ecologists call mutualism and economists call positive externalities. A pair of associates with the same interests can benefit each other just by being selfish--always the most painless route to altruism. If two roommates have similar tastes in music, each will benefit the other every time she brings home a new CD, and each has a reason to value the other's well-being. To identify a blood relative, then, is to identify a potential soul mate. Adoptees who track down their biological parents and siblings often report an instant solidarity as they quickly discover shared quirks and passions. 血亲之间的相似性意味着他们有可能共享价值观，而共享价值观使得相互团结更为容易，原因则在于生态学家所说的“互惠共生”和经济学家所称的“正外部性”。一对伙伴，如果利益相同，那么只需做到行为自利就能有益于彼此——而这总是实现利他的最不费力的办法。如果两位室友音乐品味相同，那么任何时候其中任何一位带回一张新CD，都会使另外一位受益，并且每个人都有理由珍视另外一个人的福祉。因此，确定血亲就是确定一位潜在的灵魂伴侣。被收养的人在搜寻到自己的生父生母和兄弟姐妹后，通常会提到一种立即出现的休戚与共之感，因为他们很快就会发觉彼此的癖好和喜爱相似。 A more direct tug of shared genes on family emotions comes from the phenomenon that biologists call inclusive fitness, kin selection, and nepotistic altruism. The overlap of genes among relatives does more than make them similar; it alters the dynamics of natural selection. Over evolutionary time, any gene that predisposed a person to be nice to a relative would have had some chance of helping out a copy of itself inside that relative, and the gene would have been favored by natural selection and entrenched in the genome (as long as the average benefit to the relative, discounted by the probability that the gene is shared, exceeds the average cost to the favor-doer). 共享基因对家族情感的更直接作用来自生物学家所称的“内含适应性”、“亲缘选择”和“亲缘利他”现象。亲属之间基因的重叠不仅仅使得他们相似，而且改变了自然选择的动力机制。在进化过程中，任何基因，如果它会使得一个人倾向于善待亲属，它就有可能帮助到那个亲属身上该基因的复制品，于是这个基因就会受到自然选择的偏爱，使自己在基因组中盘踞下来（只要该亲属的平均得益乘以两人共享该基因的概率后仍高于施以援手者的平均成本）。 A sharing of genes at the genetic level sets the evolutionary stage for feelings of solidarity and affection at the emotional level, and that in turn shapes much of human life. In traditional societies, genetic relatives are more likely to live together, work together, protect each other, and adopt each other's orphaned children, and are less likely to attack, feud with, and kill each other. Even in modern societies, which tend to weaken ties of kinship, studies have shown that the more closely two people are genetically related, the more inclined they are to come to each other's aid, especially in life-or-death situations. 遗传层面上共享基因，为情感层面上的团结感和偏爱感设定了进化平台，而这些情感现象又进一步塑造了人类生活的很大一部分。在传统社会中，血亲更有可能生活、工作在一起，保护彼此，收养彼此的孤儿，相互之间发生攻击、仇争、杀害的可能性更小。即便是在倾向于削弱亲缘关系的现代社会，也有研究表明，两个人在遗传上的关系更为接近，他们就更有可能帮助彼此，特别是在生死存亡之际。 Solidarity between pairs of relatives is further amplified by the fact that they have other relatives in common. My brother and I are close not just because each of us has copies of genes in the other, but because we share a mother, a father, a sister, and nieces and nephews, so our genetic interests are yoked together. 一对亲属之间的团结还会进一步被他们共同拥有其他亲戚这一事实放大。我和我哥哥亲近，这不仅仅是因为我们身上具有彼此部分基因的复制品，而且因为我们共同拥有一个母亲、一个父亲、一个妹妹，还有其他侄子侄女，所以我们的遗传利益是套在一起的。 This triangular altruism also explains why non-blood relatives can feel various degrees of affinity--most dramatically in the case of a husband and wife, whose long-term genetic interests are fused in their children, and to a lesser extent in the case of stepsiblings and in-laws, as long as they are not in zero-sum competition for the common relative's affections or resources. 这种三角利他也能解释为何非血亲也能感受到不同程度的亲和——特别突出表现在夫妻关系这一例子中，其长期遗传利益融于他们的子女身上，相对不那么明显的例子则是继亲和姻亲，只要他们并非处于一种争夺共有亲戚的喜爱或资源的零和竞争之中。 But now comes a crucial bit of arithmetic. In sexually reproducing species, every organism has two parents, and every organism makes up half the parentage of each of its offspring. The result is that as people are separated by more generations, they are related to an exponentially greater number of people, and their genetic relatedness to any of them plummets, also exponentially. 但现在要来点关键性的算术了。在有性繁殖生物中，每一个有机体都有一对父母，且每一个有机体都构成其任一后代之父母中的一半。结果就是，人们之间的代际隔离越远，他们之间存在亲属关系的人口数量以指数方式增加，而与其中任何一个的遗传相关性也以指数方式减少。 Going upward, you have two parents, with whom you share half your genes apiece; four grandparents, with whom you share one-quarter; eight great-grandparents; sixteen great-great-grandparents; and so on. Going downward, if you and your descendants have two children apiece, then you'll have four grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, and so on. And going sideways, you share half your genes with your sibling, one-eighth with each of your first cousins, one-thirty-second with each of your second cousins, and so on. 向上，你有一对父母，你与之各自分享一半基因；4个祖父母，你与之分享1/4；8个曾祖父母；16个曾曾祖父母；如此等等。向下，如果你和你的后代各自都生两个小孩，你就会有4个孙儿女，8个曾孙儿女，如此等等。向两边，你和你的兄弟姐妹分享一半基因，与每个第一代堂表亲分享1/8基因，与每个第二代堂表亲分享1/32，如此等等。 Exponential functions quickly explode to unimaginable magnitudes or peter out to infinitesimal ones, and the inability of our intuition to keep track of them leads to many paradoxes of kinship. In an old Smothers Brothers routine, Tommy explained why the population explosion is a myth. We have two parents, he noted, and four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on. The further back you go, the more ancestors you have. So, he concluded, "The population isn't growing--it's tapering off!" 指数函数很快就会使量级得到不可想象的爆发，或者使之快速减少为无限之小，我们的直觉将无力掌握，而这会引发关于亲缘关系的许多悖论。在“斯马瑟兄弟”的一个保留老节目中，Tommy解释了为啥人口爆炸只是一个神话。他说，我们有一对父母，4个祖父母，8个曾祖父母，16个曾曾祖父母，如此等等。越往回数，你的祖先就越多。所以，他的结论是，“人口并没有增加，而是在逐渐减少！” Like many of their jokes, this one depends on a subtle truth. If you assume twenty-five years per generation, you can calculate that you had around three billion ancestors at the time of the signing of the Magna Carta, one hundred billion during the Norman invasion, two quintillion at the fall of the Roman Empire, and around 1,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 at the birth of Jesus. Needless to say, the Earth did not contain a fraction of that many people in those eras. 跟他们讲的许多笑话一样，这个笑话底下也有一个微妙的真理。如果假定25年为一代，你就能算出，在《大宪章》签署的时候，你的祖先大概有30亿个，在诺曼征服的时候大概有1000亿，而在罗马帝国灭亡时大概有2万亿，而在耶稣诞生时有大概有1,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000个。不用说，在那些年代，地球人口还达不到这些数量中的一小部分。 The paradox is resolved by the realization that our ancestors must have married their cousins of various distances and removes, so that vast numbers of the slots in one's family tree are filled by the same individuals. Imagine, in an extreme case, that your parents were first cousins. Then two of your great-grandparents on your mother's side would also be your great-grandparents on your father's side--you would have six great-grandparents instead of eight. 解决这一悖论，需要我们认识到，我们的祖先必定与其各类远房表亲结了婚，使得某人的家庭树上的许多空位是由同一人占据的。想象一个极端的例子，假定你的父母是第一代堂表亲。那么你在你母亲那边的两位曾祖同时也会是你在你父亲这边的曾祖——你的曾祖将是6个而非8个。 Genealogists call this "pedigree collapse": the necessity that as you trace your family tree backward, it will fan out for a number of generations until it begins to encompass most of the people in the available population, whereupon it falls back on itself, coinciding with the original growth of that population. The rate of collapse depends on the size of the pool of potential mates and the average rate and closeness of cousin marriages. 家谱学家称之为“谱系崩塌”，即存在一种必然：随着你向前追溯家庭树，它在数代人之间将呈扇形展开，直到它开始包括整个可及群体的绝大部分，这时它就不再展开，只与那一群体的增长保持一致。崩塌的速度取决于潜在配偶的可用规模以及堂表亲结婚的平均比例和亲缘度。 But the fact that our ancestors never covered the surface of the Earth ten deep shows that medium-distant-cousin marriages must have been the rule rather than the exception over most of human history. This chronic incest, by the way, did not turn our ancestors into the cast of Deliverance. The degree of relatedness, and hence the risk that a harmful recessive gene will meet a copy of itself in a child, falls off a cliff as you move from siblings to first cousins to more distant cousins. 但我们的祖先从未将整个地球表面满满铺上十层这一事实表明，中等亲缘度的堂表亲间婚姻必定曾是人类历史绝大部分时期中的常态而非例外。顺便要说，这种惯常性乱伦并未将我们的祖先变成电影《生死狂澜》中的角色【译注：电影中的四个角色在广袤平和的大自然面前将人性中最丑陋的一面赤裸裸地暴露了出来】。随着通婚对象从兄弟姐妹到第一代堂表亲到更远距离的堂表亲，亲缘程度急剧下降，从而有害的隐形基因能在孩子身上碰到其复制品的风险也随之下降。 The same arithmetic that makes an individual's pedigree collapse onto itself also makes everyone's pedigree collapse into everyone else's. We are all related--not just in the obvious sense that we are all descended from the same population of the first humans, but also because everyone's ancestors mated with everyone else's at many points since that dawn of humanity. There aren't enough ancestors to go around for everyone to have a family tree of his or her own. 使得某个人的谱系崩塌的算术，同样也会使得其他每个人的谱系崩塌到别人的谱系上。我们都是亲戚——这不仅仅是因为，在很显白的意义上，我们都源自于同一初民种群，而且是因为，自人类出现以来的许多不同时点上，每个人的祖先都曾与另一个人的祖先结成配偶。世上就不存在那么多祖先，不足以让每个人都拥有只属于他/她自己的家族树。 So it is a mathematical necessity, not a surprise, that genealogy will turn up strange bedfellows. George W. Bush is a distant cousin of his electoral opponents Al Gore and John Kerry (as well as of Richard Nixon, Ernest Hemingway, Queen Elizabeth, and, through her, every European monarch). Gore, for his part, is a descendant of Charlemagne, and Kerry is a descendant of Mary, Queen of Scots--and presumably also (thanks to his recently-discovered-to-be-Jewish paternal grandfather) of rabbis, cantors, and medieval moneylenders. 所以家谱学会发现许多令人奇怪的关系，这是一种数学必然，而非意外。乔治·W·布什是其竞选对手阿尔·戈尔和约翰·克里（此外还有理查德·尼克松、欧内斯特·海明威、伊丽莎白女王，以及通过女王延伸到每一位欧洲君主）的远房堂表亲。而戈尔自己，则是查理曼大帝的后代，克里则是苏格兰玛丽女王的后代——同时可能还是犹太拉比、唱诗班领唱人和中世纪放债人的后代（因为我们新近发现他的祖先是犹太人）。 This brings up another corollary of the mathematics of kinship: a single mating between people from two ethnic groups results in all their descendants being related to both groups in perpetuity. So even occasional couplings across racial and ethnic lines can entangle family trees, explaining why humans, that peripatetic and sexually omnivorous species, are genetically fairly homogeneous, despite our worldwide distribution. 这就引出了亲缘关系数学的一个必然推论：两个种族群体之间的某一次联姻，就会导致他们的所有后代都永远与两个群体均有亲戚关系。所以，即使跨人种和跨种族边界的配对只是偶然出现，也能将各自的家族树缠到一块，从而能够解释，为什么人类这种四处迁徙、性开放的物种尽管遍布全球，但在基因上则大体上是同质的。 The genealogical ties connecting American presidents and European royalty are not a sign of some vast transatlantic ruling caste. Every noteworthy person is related to other noteworthy people (together, of course, with countless not-so-noteworthy people). One genealogist with too much time on his hands showed that the late Senator Alan Cranston was related to Emily Dickinson, George Plimpton, Margaret Mead, the actress Julie Harris, the Dow family of chemical fame, and Queen Geraldine of Albania. 美国总统与欧洲皇室之间的家谱关系并不表明存在某种庞大的跨大西洋统治阶级。每个名人都跟其他名人有亲戚关系（当然，也都跟无数的非名人有亲戚关系）。某位时间特别充裕的家谱学家曾表明，已故参议员Alan Cranston跟艾米丽·迪金森、George Plimpton、玛格丽特·米德、女演员Julie Harris、化学领域极富盛名的陶氏家族、阿尔巴尼亚的Geraldine王后都有亲戚关系。 Another discovered that Tom Hanks, the star of The Da Vinci Code, has blood ties with many of the historical figures mentioned in the film, including William the Conqueror, Shakespeare, and Henry VIII. Also recently revealed is the fact that Paris Hilton is related to fellow celebrity jailbirds Zsa Zsa Gabor and G. Gordon Liddy. Finding kinship ties among famous people is shooting ducks in a barrel. 另一个则发现，电影《达芬奇密码》的主演汤姆·汉克斯跟影片中提及的许多历史人物都有血缘联系，包括征服者威廉、莎士比亚、亨利八世等。另外，最近有人发现了另一个事实，帕里斯·希尔顿跟另外两位明星囚犯Zsa Zsa Gabor和G. Gordon Liddy有亲戚关系。在名人之间寻找亲缘关系就像是在橡木桶里面射鸭子一样容易。 And before you brag about the talent or courage you share with some illustrious kinsman, remember that the exponential mathematics of relatedness successively halves the number of genes shared by relatives with every link separating them. You share only 3 percent of your genes with your second cousin, and the same proportion with your great-great-great-grandmother. 在夸耀自己分享有某个著名族人的天赋或勇气之前，你最好能记住，亲戚之间每隔开一层关系，亲缘关系数学上的指数关系就会将他们的共有基因数量减半一次。你与你的第二堂表亲只共享3%的基因，跟你的曾曾曾祖母也是如此。 It is important to remember that psychological traits are nowhere near completely heritable in the first place, so the chances that you got your eye for adornment from that ancestor in the gorgeous dashiki are rather small. Do not expect genetically inspired largesse from the rich relative uncovered by your genealogy service, either. A gift from a second cousin would have to result in a thirty-two-fold increase in the number of your surviving descendants compared to his for a desire to bestow it upon you to have evolved. 记住这一条很重要：首先，心理特征是很难完全继承的，因此你得到你那穿着黑人花褂子的祖先所拥有的那种对于装扮的眼光，这样的几率相当小。也不要奢望通过家谱搜寻服务找到的那些富裕亲戚会因为受遗传关系激励而对你慷慨解囊。要使你的一位隔代表亲产生出馈赠于你的欲望，那将要求，送与你的礼物会让你增加的存活后代数目32倍于同一礼物用在他自己身上的效果。 The relentless decimation of resources (both genetic and financial) across generations is the rationale behind the feudal practice of primogeniture, in which all the family estate was bequeathed to the eldest son. And it is why in modern times family fortunes can dissipate so quickly--"three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves," as Nicholas Murray Butler put it. 资源（无论是遗传的还是财务的）在代际之间的持续分解正是长子继承制这种封建做法的背后道理所在，通过长子继承制，家族的财产被遗留给最年长的儿子。这也是为何现代家庭的财产会消散得如此之快——正如Nicholas Murray Butler所说，“富不过三代”。 The geometric decay of relatedness also takes some of the fun out of two of the main tools used by genetic-ancestry services: the analysis of mitochondrial DNA (which is passed from mother to daughter) and of Y-chromosomes (which are passed from father to son). Since they trace ancestry only through the all-female or all-male branch of your family tree, they can identify only one tendril, which diminishes exponentially the further back you go. 亲缘关系的几何衰减也会使得基因血统搜寻服务主要采用的两大工具——即线粒体DNA（从母亲传递给女儿）分析和Y染色体（从父亲传递给儿子）分析——不再那么好玩。因为这两种工具在你的家族树上搜寻血统时，要么是沿纯母系进行，要么是沿纯父系进行，因此它们找到的只是其中一脉，且会随着往回追溯以指数方式削减。 Winfrey's mitochondrial DNA does not show that she is a Kpelle, but rather that she is one-sixty-fourth (or perhaps even 1/128th or 1/256th) Kpelle. Many African Americans who seek their paternal ancestor, and therefore a sense of their African roots, via Y-chromosome analysis discover to their dismay that this root lies in Germany or Scotland. Winfrey的线粒体DNA并没能说明她是Kpelle人，而只能说明她是1/64（或者甚至可能是1/128或1/256）个Kpelle人。许多非裔美国人通过Y染色体分析来寻找他们的父系祖先，从而想获得一种寻根非洲的感觉，但却失望地发现这一根脉位于德国或苏格兰。 If family ties are so biologically tenuous, why does kinship loom so large in the human psyche? One reason is that our intuitions about kinship evolved when we lived in villages and bands whose small size and limited mobility ensured that most marriages were between closer cousins, and hence the genetic overlap between relatives was close enough to be biologically significant. Today we project these feelings of affinity onto relatives who are far more distant--indeed, arbitrarily distant, thanks to the wonders of Internet and DNA genealogy. 如果家族纽带在生物学上如此单薄，为什么亲缘关系会如此巍然地耸立于人类心灵之中？一个原因在于，我们对于亲缘关系的直觉已在村庄和游团生活阶段得以进化，那种群体规模很小且流动性受限，使得多数婚姻都发生于较亲近的表亲之间，从而使得亲戚之间的基因重叠足够稠密，因而在生物学上很显著。今天，我们将这类亲密感投射到与我们血缘距离远得多的亲戚身上——实际上，由于神奇的互联网和DNA家系分析，这种距离可以无限远。 But the other reason is that our sense of kinship is triggered not by relatedness itself, but by the perception of relatedness. After all, when we encounter a possible relative, we generally do not demand a cheek swab and analyze its DNA. Instead we rely on cues that in the evolutionary past tended to correlate with relatedness. 但另一个原因在于，我们的亲缘感并不由亲缘关系本身引发，而是由对亲缘关系的感知引发。别忘了，如果我们碰到一个可能的亲戚，我们通常并不会要求做一个口腔拭子采集【编注：即用棉签刮擦口腔内膜，这是采集个人DNA样本的常用简易方法】并分析其DNA。相反，我们依赖的是在过去的进化过程中指向亲缘关系的线索。 Recent experiments by Debra Lieberman, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides have shown that two kinds of life experience are crucial in triggering family feelings toward siblings (such as doing them favors and being willing to donate a kidney to them). One consists of observing the sibling being cared for by one's mother when it was an infant. The other is having grown up in the same household as the sibling. Debra Lieberman, John Tooby和Leda Cosmides最近所做的实验已经表明，在引发对于兄弟姐妹的家庭感情方面（比如给他们帮忙或者愿意捐赠一个肾给他们之类），有两类生活经历非常关键。一是观察到兄弟姐妹在婴儿时期被自己的母亲照顾。二是与该兄弟姐妹共同成长于同一个家庭。 That is why children adopted at birth can be emotionally close to their parents and siblings despite the lack of genetic overlap: the early close association sets off everyone's kinship detectors, a kind of benign illusion. And because these experiences also trigger repugnance at the thought of having sex with the relative, incest avoidance is not perfectly correlated with biological relatedness. 这就是为何出生时即被收养的儿童，尽管在基因上不存在重叠，但仍能与其父母及兄弟姐妹情感上很亲近的原因所在：早期的亲密关系触发了人们的亲缘关系探测器，这是一种良性的幻觉。并且由于这种经历也同样会引发对于与亲戚发生性关系的念头的恶心感，因此乱伦回避并不与生物亲缘关系完全对应。 Unrelated children who are brought up together (like nursery-mates in kibbutzim) tend to shun each other as sexual partners in adulthood, as if they were siblings. And children who meet a parent or sibling for the first time in adulthood can find him or her sexually attractive, as the novelist Kathryn Harrison recounted in The Kiss, her memoir of a four-year affair with her father. 没有亲缘关系的儿童，如果一起长大（如以色列集体农场中的托儿所同伴），长大后在选择性伴侣时也倾向于避开彼此，好像他们就是兄弟姐妹一样。而假如孩子们长大后才第一次看到父母或兄弟姐妹时，也可能觉得他或她具有性吸引力，这一点小说作家Kathryn Harrison在《罪之吻》这本关于她与其父4年私通经历的回忆录中有所叙述。 When it comes to individual people, then, kinship is in the mind of the beholder. That creates an opening through which manipulators can flood people's kinship sense with cues that mimic the signals of biological relatedness. This kind of mind control is a strong temptation to anyone who wants to foster cohesion among people who are not closely related. 论到个体，那么亲缘关系便取决于观察者的心思。这就为操控者使用模拟生物性亲属信号的线索来淹没冲击人们的亲属感提供了机会。这类精神控制，对于任何想要在并非近缘亲戚的人们之间塑造团结的人来说，是种巨大的诱惑。 Contrary to a shibboleth of the American right, family values do not uphold religion and country; they subvert them. An extended family is a rival coalition to any other group, held together not by an ideology or social contract or common purpose but by brute genetic relatedness. And it is a coalition with an unfair advantage: relatives care for one another more than comrades do. 与美国右派的某一陈腐观念相左，家庭价值观并不支撑宗教和国家；相反，它们起的是破坏作用。一个大家庭，通过直接的遗传相关性而非意识形态或社会契约或共同目标联合在一起，作为一种联合体，就是任何其他团体的竞争者。并且这种联合体具有一种难以平衡的优势：亲戚比同志更加关心彼此。 Religions and political movements thus have to undermine family loyalties. Marxist collectivization and Moonie programming are obvious recent examples, but millennia before them Jesus momentously declared, "A man's foes shall be they of his own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." 因此，宗教和政治运动必须破坏家庭忠诚。马克思主义的集体化和文鲜明统一教的计划都是近期的显例，但数千年前耶稣就郑重宣布过：“人的仇敌，就是自己家里的人。爱父母过于爱我的，不配作我的门徒；爱儿女过于爱我的，不配作我的门徒。” Successful coalitions often try to co-opt family feelings by tricking the brain into perceiving the coalition as kin. Though the most potent technique--forcing people to grow up in a single household--is impractical, other kinds of kinship illusion have repeatedly been invented. 成功的联合体通常会尝试吸纳家庭感，方法是哄骗大脑将这种联合体认知为家族。尽管最为有效的技术——即强迫人们在单一家庭中长大——不具备可操作性，但其他许多种类的家族幻觉已被反复发明。 The anthropologist Alan Fiske notes that communal meals are one of the most common bonding rituals the world over, partly because they simulate family experiences, partly because people believe that you are what you eat, and so if you eat the same stuff you are the same stuff. 人类学家Alan Fiske提到，共餐是世界范围内最为常见的团结仪式之一，部分是因为它们能够模拟家庭经历，部分是因为人们相信“你是你所食”，所以如果你们吃的是同样的东西，那么你们就是同样的东西。 Many tribes and coalitions (such as the Mafia) cut their fingers and rub them together to allow their blood to mingle, hence the expression "blood brothers." People also disfigure their bodies--by scarring, tattooing, piercing, hairstyling, and circumcision and other forms of genital mutilation--as if to make the group look like a separate race or species, biologically distinct from other human groups. 许多部落和联合体（如黑手党）的成员会切破手指、相互摩擦以使血液混合，从而产生“歃血兄弟”这种表述。人们也会损毁自己的身体——如制造伤疤、纹身、穿刺、装扮发型、割包皮及以其他形式损毁生殖器，似乎以此来使得该群体看似一个单独的种族或物种，与其他人群具有生物学上的差别。 Language provides another way to co-opt the warm and fuzzy feelings people have toward their relatives. One common trick is the use of kinship metaphors: brethren, brotherhood, fraternity, sisterhood, sorority, the fatherland, the mother country, the family of man, and so on. 对于人们对其亲戚所具有的这种温暖而朦胧的感情，语言提供了另一种吸纳方式。常见的一种花招是使用亲戚暗喻：同胞、手足、兄弟会、姐妹感情、姐妹会、祖国、母国、人类大家庭等等。 These tactics are provably effective: experiments have shown that people are more convinced by a political speech if the speaker engages them with the language of kinship. Myths and ideologies are also commonly put to use. People are told that they are descended from a patriarch or a primeval couple, or that they are connected to a natal land, or that they came into being in the same act of creation, or that they are related to the same totemic animal. 这些策略经证明是有效的：实验已经表明，如果政治演说的演讲者用亲缘关系的语言来吸引听众，人们就会更为信服。神话和意识形态也经常被采用。人们被告知，他们都源自同一个族长或同一对原始夫妻，或者他们都与同一个出生地相联系，或者他们之存在是源于同一个创世行为，或者他们与同一个图腾动物相关。 In large part, the institutions of modernity depend on a dissolution of family ties. It is hard to run an effective organization if you cannot fire the knucklehead brother-in-law forced on you by your wife's family, nor can civil society function if the instruments of government are treated as the spoils of the most powerful local clan. 很大程度上，现代性的制度依赖于家庭纽带的瓦解。如果你没法开除由你老婆的娘家塞给你的笨蛋小舅子，那你就没法有效运营一个组织，或者，如果政府的诸多手段都被视为某个地方强势氏族的战利品，那么政治社会就没法运转。 Public safety is more effectively guaranteed by a disinterested police and court system than by a threat that your male relatives will avenge your murder, and national defense above all depends on the willingness of citizens to neglect the bonds of kinship. 比起血仇威胁（即你的男性亲戚会报复杀害你的凶手）来，一个无私的警察和法院体制能更为有效地保证公共安全，而国防则尤其依赖于公民们忽略亲缘关系纽带的意愿。 In The Godfather: Part II, Sonny Corleone upbraids Michael for his sympathy with the men who enlisted after Pearl Harbor: "They're saps because they risk their lives for strangers. Your country ain't your blood. Remember that." 在《教父2》中，麦克同情珍珠港事件爆发后从军的某人，杉尼·科里昂因而对其加以斥责。“他们都是蠢货，因为他们用自己的生命去冒险，为的却是些陌生人。你的国家不是你的血。记住这个。” In the struggle between society and family, the exponential mathematics of kinship ordinarily works to the advantage of society. As time passes or groups get larger, family trees intertwine, dynasties dissipate, and nepotistic emotions get diluted. 在社会与家庭的厮打中，亲缘关系的指数衰减特性通常有利于社会。随着时间推移或群体扩大，家族树之间会相互缠扰，世家会烟消云散，而裙带感情会逐渐稀释。 But families can defend themselves with a potent tactic: they can graft the twig tips of the family tree together by cousin marriage. If you force your daughter to marry her first cousin, then your son-in-law is your nephew, her father-in-law is your brother, your parents' estate will be worth twice as much per grandchild, and the couple will never have to bicker about which side of the family to visit on holidays. 但家庭可以用一种强大的策略来捍卫自身：他们能够通过堂表亲婚姻来嫁接家族树上的小小树梢。如果你强迫你的女儿嫁给她的第一代堂表亲，那么你的女婿就是你的侄子，她的公公就是你的兄弟，且你父母相对于每个孙子而言的财产价值会翻倍，且这对夫妇永远无需为了假日应该回哪方家里而斗嘴。 For these reasons, clans and dynasties in many cultures encourage first-or second-cousin marriage, tolerating the slightly elevated risk of genetic disease. Not only does cousin marriage amplify the average degree of relatedness among members of the clan, but it enmeshes them in a network of triangular relationships, with kinsmen valuing each other because of their many mutual kin as well as their own relatedness. 出于这些理由，许多文化中的氏族和世家会鼓励第一代或第二代堂表亲婚姻，并容忍遗传病风险的些许提高。堂表亲婚姻不但会放大氏族成员之间的平均亲缘程度，而且还会将氏族成员网罗进一个三角亲戚关系的网络之中，其中的同族会因为他们之间的众多共同亲戚及自己的亲缘关系而彼此关心。 As a result, the extended family, clan, or tribe can emerge as a powerfully cohesive bloc--and one with little common cause with other families, clans, or tribes in the larger polity that comprises them. The anthropologist Nancy Thornhill has shown that the prohibitions against incestuous marriages in most societies are not public-health measures aimed at reducing birth defects but the society's way of fighting back against extended families. 结果，大型的家族、氏族或部落有可能以一种强大的凝聚集团的形式出现——与它们所属的更大政治体中的其他家族、氏族或部落没有什么共同目标。人类学家Nancy Thornhill已经向我们展示，绝大部分社会中的血亲结婚禁令并不是旨在减少生育缺陷的公共健康措施，而是用以压制大型家族的一种方式。 In January 2003, during the buildup to the war in Iraq, the journalist and blogger Steven Sailer published an article in The American Conservative in which he warned readers about a feature of that country that had been ignored in the ongoing debate. As in many traditional Middle Eastern societies, Iraqis tend to marry their cousins. About half of all marriages are consanguineous (including that of Saddam Hussein, who filled many government positions with his relatives from Tikrit). 2003年1月，在为伊拉克战争造势时期，新闻记者和博客作者Steven Sailer在《美国保守派》杂志上发表了一篇文章，提醒读者注意在当时的社会讨论中遭到忽视的一个伊拉克的特征。跟许多传统的中东社会一样，伊拉克人倾向于和堂表亲结婚。大约半数婚姻属于血亲结婚（包括萨达姆·侯赛因的婚姻，他在许多政府职位上塞进了他那些来自提克里特市的亲戚）。 The connection between Iraqis' strong family ties and their tribalism, corruption, and lack of commitment to an overarching nation had long been noted by those familiar with the country. In 1931, King Faisal described his subjects as "devoid of any patriotic idea … connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil; prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever." Sailer presciently suggested that Iraqi family structure and its mismatch with the sensibilities of civil society would frustrate any attempt at democratic nation-building. 熟悉这个国家的人久已注意到，在伊拉克人的强大家庭纽带与他们的部落意识、腐败及他们对涵盖一切的国家缺乏忠诚等现象之间存在关联。1931年，费萨尔国王【译注：即费萨尔一世，哈希姆家族成员，1921-1933年间任伊拉克国王】称其臣民“缺乏任何爱国观念……彼此之间没有共同纽带，响应邪恶；倾向无政府，永远准备着起来反对任何政府。”Sailer预见性地指出，伊拉克的家庭结构及其与公民社会情感不相匹配的现状，将会挫败任何构建民主国家的企图。 Outside a small family circle, the links of kinship are biologically trifling, vulnerable to manipulation, and inimical to modernity. For all that, the almost mystical bond that we feel with those whom we perceive as kin continues to be a potent force in human affairs. It is no small irony that in an age in which technology allows us to indulge these emotions as never before, our political culture systematically misunderstands them. 在小家庭圈子以外，亲缘关系的联系在生物学上极为微弱，易于被操控，并与现代性相抵触。尽管如此，我们对那些我们认为是亲戚的人的感情几乎是一种神秘主义的亲和，它将继续是人类事务中的一种强大力量。在技术已经允许我们旷古未有地纵情于这类感情的时代，我们的政治文化却系统性地对它们存有误会，这真是个相当大的反讽。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Your Ancestors, Your Fate 你的祖先，你的命运 作者：Gregory Clark @ 2014-2-21 翻译：Drunkplane（@Drunkplane-zny） 校对：慕白（@李凤阳他说） 来源：The New York Times，http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/21/your-fate-thank-your-ancestors/?_r=0 Inequality of income and wealth has risen in America since the 1970s, yet a large-scale research study recently found that social mobility hadn’t changed much during that time. How can that be? 美国社会的收入和财富不平等自1970年代就一直在攀升，然而近期一项大规模调查研究发现，社会的流动性在这段时间内并没有发生大的变化。怎么回事呢？ The study, by researchers at Harvard and Berkeley, tells only part of the story. It may be true that mobility hasn’t slowed — but, more to the point, mobility has always been slow. 这项由哈佛和伯克利大学进行的研究其实只讲述了整个故事的一个方面。是的，流动性也许并没有变得更低，但更关键的是，流动性一直就很低。 When you look across centuries, and at social status broadly measured — not just income and wealth, but also occupation, education and longevity — social mobility is much slower than many of us believe, or want to believe. This is true in Sweden, a social welfare state; England, where industrial capitalism was born; the United States, one of the most heterogeneous societies in history; and India, a fairly new democracy hobbled by the legacy of caste. 当你的目光扫过几个世纪，从更广义的度量标准审视社会地位这个概念——不仅仅是收入和财富，还包括职业、教育水平和寿命——你会发现社会流动性比我们许多人相信的，或希望的要低得多。在许多国家，比如瑞典（一个社会福利国家）、英国（工业资本主义诞生之地）、美国（历史上多样性最丰富的社会之一）、印度（一个受种姓制度拖累的年轻的民主国家），情况皆是如此。 Capitalism has not led to pervasive, rapid mobility. Nor have democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution. 资本主义并没有导致广泛的、快速的社会流动。民主化同样没有，大众教育、裙带主义的衰退、以重新分配财富为目的的税收、妇女解放、甚至社会主义改革（比如中国），这些全都没有导致广泛的、快速的社会流动。 To a striking extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from your great-great-great-grandparents’. The recent study suggests that 10 percent of variation in income can be predicted based on your parents’ earnings. In contrast, my colleagues and I estimate that 50 to 60 percent of variation in overall status is determined by your lineage. 你整体的人生际遇不仅仅能从你父母的社会地位，也能从你的曾-曾-曾祖父母的社会地位预测出来，准确程度足以令人吃惊。最新的研究表明，收入差异【编注：即偏离基准值的幅度】中，10%可以从你父母的收入得到预测。而我的同事和我估计，就广义的社会地位来讲，其差异幅度的50-60%都由你的血统决定了。 The fortunes of high-status families inexorably fall, and those of low-status families rise, toward the average — what social scientists call “regression to the mean” — but the process can take 10 to 15 generations (300 to 450 years), much longer than most social scientists have estimated in the past. 高门注定跌落，而寒门势必崛起，两者向均值趋同——即社会学家所谓的“均值回归”——这个过程会发生，但需要10至15代人的时间（300至450年），比过去大多数社会学家估计的都要长得多。 We came to these conclusions after examining reams of data on surnames, a surprisingly strong indicator of social status, in eight countries — Chile, China, England, India, Japan, South Korea, Sweden and the United States — going back centuries. Across all of them, rare or distinctive surnames associated with elite families many generations ago are still disproportionately represented among today’s elites. 让人始料未及的是，姓氏是社会地位的一个有力指标，我们对其相关数据做了海量的分析，最终得到上述结论。这些数据来自八个国家：智利、中国、英国、印度、日本、韩国、瑞典和美国，并向上追溯了数个世纪。在所有国家中，来自精英家族的罕见或特别的姓氏在许多代之后在精英阶层的名单中仍占有很高比例。 Does this imply that individuals have no control over their life outcomes? No. In modern meritocratic societies, success still depends on individual effort. Our findings suggest, however, that the compulsion to strive, the talent to prosper and the ability to overcome failure are strongly inherited. 这是不是意味着个人对自己的命运毫无掌控之力？不。在现代精英统治的社会里，成功依然依赖个人奋斗。我们的发现只是表明，出人头地的欲望、发家致富的天赋和战胜失败的能力都有很大一部分来自遗传。 We can’t know for certain what the mechanism of that inheritance is, though we know that genetics plays a surprisingly strong role. Alternative explanations that are in vogue — cultural traits, family economic resources, social networks — don’t hold up to scrutiny. 我们无法确切知晓这种遗传的机制是什么，但是我们知道基因在此出人意料地扮演了一个重要角色。其他流行的解释——文化特质、家庭经济资源、人脉——则经不起推敲。 Because our findings run against the intuition that modernity, and in particular capitalism, has eroded the impact of ancestry on a person’s life chances, I need to explain how we arrived at them. 因为我们的发现与这样一种直觉相悖，那就是：现代化，尤其是资本主义，已经弱化了血统对一个人生活际遇的影响。所以我有必要解释下我们是怎么得到这些发现的。 Let’s start with Sweden, which — like Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway — is one of the world’s most equal societies in terms of income. To our surprise, we found that social mobility in Sweden today was no greater than in Britain or the United States today — or even Sweden in the 18th century. 让我们从瑞典开始。同丹麦、芬兰、冰岛和挪威一样，瑞典是世界上收入最平等的国家之一。让我们吃惊的是，我们发现当今瑞典的社会流动性并不比当今英国或是美国更高，甚至也不高于18世纪的瑞典。 Sweden still has a nobility. Those nobles no longer hold de facto political power, but their family records are stored by the Riddarhuset (House of Nobility), a society created in 1626. We estimate that about 56,000 Swedes hold rare surnames associated with the three historic tiers of nobles. (Variations on the names of the unfortunate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of “Hamlet” are on the list.) 瑞典仍然存在贵族。这些贵族不再享有实际的政治权力，但他们的家族记录则被贵族院（Riddarhuset）——这一创立于1626年的机构存档。据我们估计，大约有56,000位瑞典人的姓氏同历史上的三阶贵族有联系。【译注：瑞典的贵族分为三个等级，领主（lord）、骑士（knight）和士绅（esquire）。】（比如《哈姆雷特》一剧中两个不幸人物的姓氏Rosencrantz和Guildenstern就在其中。） Another elite group are Swedes whose ancestors — a rising educated class of clerics, scholars, merchants — Latinized their surnames in the 17th and 18th centuries (like the father of the botanist Carolus Linnaeus). Adopting elite names was limited by law in Sweden in 1901, so a vast majority of people holding them are descended from prominent families. 另一个精英群体的先辈则是崛起的教士、学者或商人，他们受过教育并于17世纪到18世纪之间把自己的姓氏拉丁化，比如植物学家林奈（Carolus Linnaeus）的父亲。1901年瑞典立法限制采用精英姓氏的行为，所以今天拥有这些姓氏的人大多出身于名门望族。 Given the egalitarian nature of Swedish society, one would expect that people with these elite surnames should be no better off than other Swedes. That isn’t so. In a sample of six Stockholm-area municipalities in 2008, rich and poor, we found that the average taxable income of people with noble names was 44 percent higher than that of people with the common surname Andersson. Those with Latinized names had average taxable incomes 27 percent higher than those named Andersson. 考虑到瑞典社会的平等主义性质，可以预计拥有这些精英姓氏的人不会比其他瑞典人要混得好。事实并非如此。2008年我們所做的一項研究对斯德哥尔摩地区六个贫富不一的自治市进行了取样，研究发现拥有贵族姓氏的人，其应税所得（taxable income）要比拥有Andersson这一普通姓氏的人高44%。那些拥有拉丁化名字的人，其平均应税所得要比Andersson们高27%。 Surnames of titled nobles (counts and barons) are represented in the register of the Swedish Bar Association at six times the rate they occur in the general population (three times the rate, for untitled-noble and Latinized surnames). The same goes for Swedish doctors. 有封号贵族（伯爵或男爵）的姓氏出现在瑞典律师协会登记名单中的比例是他们在全体国民中比例的六倍（对无封号贵族以及拉丁化姓氏，则是3倍）。在瑞典的医生群体当中，情况也是如此。 Among those who completed master’s theses at Uppsala University from 2000 to 2012, Swedes with elite surnames were overrepresented by 60 to 80 percent compared with those with the common surname prefixes Lund- and Berg-. 2000年至2012年，在乌普萨拉大学完成硕士论文的学生中，拥有精英姓氏的瑞典学生的代表率要比有着普通姓名前缀Lund-、Berg-的学生高60%到80%。【译注：文中多次用到“代表率”这个指标，是指被考察群体在某特征人群中的占比除以其在全国人口中的占比，若得数远大于1，则是过度代表（overrepresented），若得数小于1，则是代表不足（underrepresented）。】 Over centuries, there is movement toward the mean, but it is slow. In three of the Royal Academies of Sweden, half of the members from 1740 to 1769 held one of the elite surnames in our sample; by 2010, only 4 percent did — but these surnames were held by just 0.7 percent of all Swedes, so they were still strongly overrepresented. In short, nearly 100 years of social democratic policies in Sweden, while creating a very egalitarian society, have failed to accelerate social mobility. 数世纪以来，均值回归化的趋势一直存在，但速度缓慢。在三所瑞典皇家学院，我们调查的样本人群中有一半在1740年至1769年间拥有一个精英姓氏；到2010年，这个比例仅为4%——但是全体瑞典人中只有0.7%的人拥有这些精英姓氏，所以精英姓氏的高代表率仍显得非常突出。简而言之，瑞典近100年的社会民主化政策虽然创造了一个平等主义的社会，却没能加速社会流动性。 What if we go back even further in time — to medieval England? 如果我们在时间上回溯得更远——到中世纪的英格兰，又会怎样呢？ We estimate that one-tenth of all surnames in contemporary England can be traced to the occupation of a medieval ancestor — names like Smith (the most common surname in the United States, England and Australia), Baker, Butler, Carter, Chamberlain, Cook, Shepherd, Stewart and Wright. Tax records suggest that most surnames became heritable by 1300. 我们估计十分之一的当今英格兰姓氏可以同其中世纪的祖先的职业联系起来——比如Smith（美国、英格兰和澳大利亚最常见的姓氏）、Baker、Butler、Carter、Chamberlain、Cook、Shepherd、Stewart and Wright。【译注：从Smith到Wright，这些姓氏分别对应着铁匠、烤面包师、管家、马车司机、封建领主的大管家、厨师、牧羊人、事务官、修船工。】税赋记录显示，大多数姓氏从1300年前后开始变成了可继承姓氏。 We compared the frequency of these common surnames in the population as a whole against elite groups, as drawn from several sources, including membership rolls at Oxford and Cambridge, dating as far back as 1170, and probate records from 1384 onward. 我们对比了人群中这些普通姓氏和精英姓氏出现的频率，数据来源有几个，包括最早追溯至1170年的牛津与剑桥录取名单，和1384年以来的遗嘱记录。 We found that late medieval England was no less mobile than modern England — contrary to the common assumption of a static feudal order. It took just seven generations for the successful descendants of illiterate village artisans of 1300 to be incorporated fully into the educated elite of 1500 — that is, the frequency of their names in the Oxbridge rolls reached the level around where it is today. By 1620, according to probate records, people with names like Butcher and Baker had nearly as much wealth as people with high-status surnames like Rochester and Radcliffe. 我们发现，中世纪晚期英格兰的社会流动性不比现代英国差——这和静止的封建秩序这一通常印象恰恰相反。公元1300年一个目不识丁的村夫的后代仅仅需要7代便可在1500年成为彻头彻尾的受过良好教育的精英分子——也就是说，他们的姓氏出现在牛津剑桥录取名单上的频率已经和今天差不多了。到1620年，根据遗嘱记录，有着像Butcher和Baker这样平民姓氏的人已经和有着诸如Rochester 和Radcliffe这种高贵姓氏的人一样富有了。 Take Chaucer. A commoner by birth — his name probably comes from the French word for shoemaker — he became a courtier, a diplomat and a member of Parliament, and his great-great-grandson was even briefly considered heir to the throne during the reign of Richard III. 比如著名的英国诗人乔叟（Chaucer），他出生在一个平凡的家庭——他的姓氏可能来自法语，意思是鞋匠——却成为了朝臣、外交家和国会议员。他的曾-曾孙甚至在理查三世时期被短暂地视作王位的继承人。 Of course, mobility, in medieval times as now, worked both ways. Just as Chaucer’s progeny prospered, other previously well-off families declined. The medieval noble surname Cholmondeley was, by the 19th century, held by a good number of farm laborers. 当然，不管是在中世纪还是当代，社会流动性都是双向的。当乔叟的后代们飞黄腾达时，其他曾经辉煌的家族也在衰落。中世纪时的贵族姓氏Cholmondeley到了19世纪，已为许多农民拥有。 In any generation, happy accidents (including extraordinary talent) will produce new high-status families. It is impossible to predict which particular families are likely to experience such boosts. What is predictable is what the path to elite status will look like, and the path back to the mean. Both happen at a very slow pace. 在任何时代，天上掉下的馅饼（包括超凡的天才）都可以成就新的上层家族。预测具体哪些家庭会碰上这样的运气是不可能的。可以预测的是通向精英阶层的道路和重回平民阶级的道路。两个方向的流动都非常缓慢。 For all the creative destruction unleashed by capitalism, the industrial revolution did not accelerate mobility. Looking at 181 rare surnames held by the wealthiest 15 percent of English and Welsh people in the mid-19th century — to be clear, these were not the same elite surnames as in the medieval era — we found that people with these surnames who died between 1999 and 2012 were more than three times as wealthy as the average person. 虽然资本主义带来了种种创造性破坏，但工业革命并没有加速社会流动。举例来说，19世纪中期英格兰和威尔士最富有的15%的人当中，有181个贵族姓氏（当然，这些姓氏与中世纪的精英姓氏已有不同），我们发现，在1999年到2012年间死亡的拥有这些姓氏的人士的财富是普通人的三倍还多。 If your surname is rare, and someone with that surname attended Oxford or Cambridge around 1800, your odds of being enrolled at those universities are nearly four times greater than the average person. This slowness of mobility has persisted despite a vast expansion in public financing for secondary and university education, and the adoption of much more open and meritocratic admissions at both schools. 如果你的姓氏很少见，而且拥有你的姓氏的人在1800年进入了牛津或剑桥，那么你被这两所大学录取的几率就比普通人高三倍。尽管对中学和大学教育的公共开支大幅增加，而且两所大学的录取条件也已变得更加公开、更加以实力为考量，但社会流动缓慢状况仍在继续。 What about America, the self-proclaimed land of opportunity? 那么美国，这个自诩“机会的国度”，其情况又如何呢? We selected a sampling of high- and low-status American surnames. The elite ones were held by descendants of Ivy League alumni who graduated by 1850, exceptionally wealthy people with rare surnames in 1923-24 (when public inspection of income-tax payments was legal) and Ashkenazi Jews. The low-status names were associated with black Americans whose ancestors most likely arrived as slaves, and the descendants of French colonists in North America before 1763. 我们挑选了一些代表社会上层和下层的姓氏作为样本。上层姓氏的拥有者们一部分是1850年毕业的常青藤校友的后代，他们是绝对的富人，在1923-24年拥有少见的姓氏（那时对个人所得税支付情况进行公开检查仍是合法的），另一部分则是阿什肯纳兹犹太人。下层姓氏的拥有者则是美国黑人和1763年前在北美的法国殖民者的后裔，前者的祖先大多以奴隶的身份来到美国。 We chose only surnames closely correlated with these subgroups — for example, Rabinowitz for American Jews, and Washington for black Americans. 我们只选择与上述背景紧密相关的姓氏——比如，Rabinowitz代表了美国犹太人，而Washington则是典型的美国黑人。 We used two indicators of social status: the American Medical Association’s directory of physicians and registries of licensed attorneys, along with their dates of registration, in 25 states, covering 74 percent of the population. 我们采纳了两个衡量社会地位的指标：美国医学协会的内科医生名录和执业律师注册名单，以及注册时间，调查覆盖25个州，涵盖了此类人口的74%。 In the early to mid-20th century we found the expected regression toward the mean for all of these groups, except for Jews and blacks — which reflects the reality of quotas that had barred Jews from many elite schools, and of racial segregation, which was not fully outlawed until the 1960s. 我们发现，在20世纪初期至中叶，所有这些群体都如预想那样出现了均值回归的情形，只有犹太人和黑人除外——这反应了当时的现实状况：一是配额制限制了犹太人进入许多精英学校的机会，二是种族隔离，直到1960年代种族隔离才被全面视作非法。 Starting in the 1970s, Jews began, over all, a decline in social status, while blacks began a corresponding rise, at least as measured by the doctors’ directory. But both trends are very slow. At the current rate, for example, it will be 300 years before Ashkenazi Jews cease to be overrepresented among American doctors, and even 200 years from now the descendants of enslaved African-Americans will still be underrepresented. 从1970年代起，整体而言犹太人的社会地位开始下降，而黑人的社会地位则相应地开始上升，至少医生名录反映出的状况如此。但这两种趋势都十分缓慢。比方说，按现在的速度，得过300年后，阿什肯纳兹犹太人在美国医生群体中的过度代表情形才会消失，甚至200年后，曾为奴隶的非洲裔美国人的后代在医生群体中仍将存在代表不足的情形。 Family names tell you, for better or worse, a lot: The average life span of an American with the typically Jewish surname Katz is 80.2 years, compared with 64.6 years for those with the surname Begay (or Begaye), which is strongly associated with Native Americans. Heberts, whites of New France descent, live on average three years less than Dohertys, whites of Irish descent. 不管是好是坏，姓氏总是包含有大量信息：拥有典型的犹太姓氏Katz的美国人，其平均寿命是80.2岁，与此相对的则是拥有Begay（或是Begaye）这一与美洲土著紧密相关的姓氏的人，他们平均寿命只有64.6岁。新法兰西殖民地的白人后代比爱尔兰白人后代平均少活3年，前者的典型姓名是Hebert，而后者往往姓Doherty。 But to be clear, we found no evidence that certain racial groups innately did better than others. Very high-status groups in America include Ashkenazi Jews, Egyptian Copts, Iranian Muslims, Indian Hindus and Christians, and West Africans. The descendants of French Canadian settlers don’t suffer racial discrimination, but their upward mobility, like that of blacks, has been slow. 不过要澄清的是，我们发现并没有证据显示某些种族天生就比其他种族过得好。在美国拥有非常高社会地位的族群包括阿什肯纳兹犹太人、埃及科普特人、伊朗穆斯林、来自印度的印度教徒和基督徒，以及西非移民。法裔加拿大移民的后裔并没有种族歧视的烦恼，但同黑人一样，他们向社会上层的流动一直很缓慢。 Chen (a common Chinese surname) is of higher status than Churchill. Appiah (a Ghanaian surname) is higher than Olson (or Olsen), a common white surname of average status. Very little information about status can be surmised by the most common American surnames — the top five are Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown and Jones, which all originated in England — because they are held by a mix of whites and blacks. 姓Chen（常见的华裔姓氏）的比姓Churchill的社会地位高。姓Appiah（常见加纳姓氏）的比姓Olson（或Olsen）的社会地位高，后者是常见的普通白人的姓氏。从美国最常见的姓氏中很难得出关于社会地位的信息（前五位的姓氏是Smith、Johnson、Williams、Brown和Jones，他们都源自英格兰），因为这些人中有白人也有黑人。 Our findings were replicated in Chile, India, Japan, South Korea and, surprisingly, China, which stands out as a demonstration of the resilience of status — even after a Communist revolution nearly unparalleled in its ferocity, class hatred and mass displacement. 我们的发现在智利、印度、日本、韩国和中国都得到了印证。在中国的惊人发现向我们清晰地展示了社会地位的难以撼动，即便是在一场共产主义革命之后（其残暴程度、阶级仇恨的强度和人口迁移规模前所未有），情形仍是如此。 Hundreds of thousands of relatively prosperous mainland Chinese fled to Taiwan with the Nationalists in the late 1940s. Under Communist agrarian reform, as much as 43 percent of all land was seized and redistributed. The Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 saw purges of scholars and other former elites and “class enemies.” 1940年代末期，数百万大陆居民随国民党逃到台湾，他们都是相对富裕的中国人。中共的土地革命夺取了43%的土地并将其重新分配。1966年至1976年的文化大革命对学者、其他前社会精英分子以及“阶级敌人”进行了大清洗。 In China, there are only about 4,000 surnames; the 100 most common are held by nearly 85 percent of the population. Yet we were able to identify 13 rare surnames that were exceptionally overrepresented among successful candidates in imperial examinations in the 19th century. Remarkably, holders of these 13 surnames are disproportionately found now among professors and students at elite universities, government officials, and heads of corporate boards. Social mobility in the Communist era has accelerated, but by very little. Mao failed. 在中国，总共只有大约4,000种姓氏，其中最常见的100个占了85%的人口。不过我们仍选出了13种罕见姓氏，拥有这些姓氏的人在19世纪的科举考试成功者中的过度代表情形十分突出。在今天，这13个姓氏的拥有者在教授、名牌大学的学生、政府官员和公司高管中的占比也较高。在共产主义的时代，中国的社会流动性曾得到提升，但十分微弱。毛泽东的努力失败了。 These findings may surprise two groups that are often politically opposed: those who believe that certain “cultures” are higher-achieving than others and those who attribute success to family resources and social networks. 这些发现可能会让两种人吃惊，而这两种人通常在政见上互相对立：一是那些相信某些“文化”能比其他文化取得更大成就的人，二是那些将成功归因为家族资源和社会关系的人。 Culture is a nebulous category and it can’t explain the constant regression of family status — from the top and the bottom. High-status social groups in America are astonishingly diverse. There are representatives from nearly every major religious and ethnic group in the world — except for the group that led to the argument for culture as the foundation of social success: white European Protestants. Muslims are low-status in much of India and Europe, but Iranian Muslims are among the most elite of all groups in America. 文化这个范畴太过含糊不清，并不能解释家族地位的均值回归——不管是从高处回归还是从低处回归。美国上层社会群体是非常多元化的，这一点相当令人吃惊。在这些拥有较高社会地位的人中，你可以找到全世界几乎所有主要宗教和种族的代表——但没有来自欧洲的白人新教徒，这一群体往往被拿来佐证文化是取得社会成功的基础。穆斯林在印度和欧洲的大部分地区都处在社会底层，但是伊朗穆斯林却是美国最精英的群体之一。 Family resources and social networks are not irrelevant. Evidence has been found that programs from early childhood education to socioeconomic and racial classroom integration can yield lasting benefits for poor children. But the potential of such programs to alter the overall rate of social mobility in any major way is low. The societies that invest the most in helping disadvantaged children, like the Nordic countries, have produced absolute, commendable benefits for these children, but they have not changed their relative social position. 家族资源和人脉并不是无关的。有证据显示，从早期的儿童教育到社会经济和种族的一体化教育，这样的项目能够为贫穷家庭的孩子带来持续的好处。但是此类项目提高社会流动性的潜力都是很低的。那些煞费苦心帮助条件不利儿童的社会，比如北欧的国家，已经取得了明显的、可圈可点的益处，但都没能改变这些儿童的相对社会地位。 The notion of genetic transmission of “social competence” — some mysterious mix of drive and ability — may unsettle us. But studies of adoption, in some ways the most dramatic of social interventions, support this view. “社会竞争力”——某种神秘的内驱力和能力的混合体——能够通过基因遗传，这一想法也许会让我们感到不安。但是对领养（在某些方面这可谓是最激烈的社会干预行为了）的研究却支持这一观点。 A number of studies of adopted children in the United States and Nordic countries show convincingly that their life chances are more strongly predicted from their biological parents than their adoptive families. In America, for example, the I.Q. of adopted children correlates with their adoptive parents’ when they are young, but the correlation is close to zero by adulthood. There is a low correlation between the incomes and educational attainment of adopted children and those of their adoptive parents. 对美国和北欧被领养小孩的一些调查研究极有说服力地表明，从这些小孩的生物学父母——而非他们的养父母身上——的情况更能预测出他们的生活境遇。比如在美国，被领养小孩的智商在他们还小时同他们的养父母相关，但是当他们成年了，这种相关性就接近于0了。被领养孩子的收入和受教育程度同他们养父母的相关性不大。 These studies, along with studies of correlations across various types of siblings (identical twins, fraternal twins, half siblings) suggest that genetics is the main carrier of social status. 上述研究，加上对不同类型的兄弟姐妹（同卵双胞胎、异卵双胞胎、同母异父或同父异母）之间相关性的研究，都表明基因是决定社会地位的主要因素。 If we are right that nature predominates over nurture, and explains the low rate of social mobility, is that inherently a tragedy? It depends on your point of view. 如果真是大自然主导了出人头地的机会，并且是低社会流动性的罪魁祸首，那岂不是说，从根本上而言，这就是一个悲剧？这要看你怎么想。 The idea that low-status ancestors might keep someone down many generations later runs against most people’s notions of fairness. But at the same time, the large investments made by the super-elite in their kids — like those of the Manhattan hedge-funders who spend a fortune on preschool — are of no avail in preventing long-run downward mobility. 来自社会底层的祖先会让某人在时隔许多代以后仍然处在社会底层，这样的观点与大多数人对公平的理解相抵触。但同时，上层精英对孩子们的大量投资——比如对学前教育一掷千金的曼哈顿对冲基金经理们——并不能阻止子孙们在长久的时间跨度中社会地位的衰落。 Our findings do suggest that intermarriage among people of different strata will raise mobility over time. India, we found, has exceptionally low mobility in part because religion and caste have barred intermarriage. As long as mating is assortative — partners are of similar social status, regardless of ethnic, national or religious background — social mobility will remain low. 我们的发现确实表明不同社会地位的人通婚会在长期内增加社会流动性。我们发现印度的社会流动性异常之低，部分原因便是宗教和种姓制度阻碍了这种通婚。只要婚姻奉行“非同类不婚”原则——拥有相似的社会地位，不管其种族、国籍或是宗教背景如何——社会流动性就会一直处在低水平。 As the political theorist John Rawls suggested in his landmark work “A Theory of Justice” (1971), innate differences in talent and drive mean that, to create a fair society, the disadvantages of low social status should be limited. We are not suggesting that the fact of slow mobility means that policies to lift up the lives of the disadvantaged are for naught — quite the opposite. Sweden is, for the less well off, a better place to live than the United States, and that is a good thing. And opportunities for people to flourish to the best of their abilities are essential. 政治理论家罗尔斯在他里程碑式著作《正义论》（1971年）中提出，才干和内驱力的先天差异意味着，要创造一个公平的社会，卑微出身带来的不利需要予以限制。我们不是暗示社会流动性低这一事实意味着那些帮助处于不利地位的人的政策就是徒劳的——恰恰相反。瑞典，对生活并不宽裕的人来说，是个比美国更好的选择，而这是好事。让人们有机会最大限度地发挥他们的能力是至关重要的。 Large-scale, rapid social mobility is impossible to legislate. What governments can do is ameliorate the effects of life’s inherent unfairness. Where we will fall within the social spectrum is largely fated at birth. Given that fact, we have to decide how much reward, or punishment, should be attached to what is ultimately fickle and arbitrary, the lottery of your lineage. 大范围的、快速的社会流动是无法通过立法来实现的。政府能做的是削弱先天不公平所带来的后果。我们会处在阶层光谱的哪个位置，基本上在我们出生时就已经决定了。基于这一事实，我们必须决定的是，由“族谱彩票”这一终归是无情而武断的因素所决定的赏罚额该有多大。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

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