The greatest achievement of humankind in its long evolution from ancient hominoid ancestors to its present status is the acquisition and accumulation of a vast body of knowledge about itself, the world, and the universe. The products of this knowledge are all those things that, in the aggregate, we call \"civilization,\" including language, science, literature, art, all the physical mechanisms, instruments, and structures we use, and the physical infrastructures on which society relies. Most of us assume that in modern society knowledge of all kinds is continually increasing and the aggregation of new information into the corpus of our social or collective knowledge is steadily reducing the area of ignorance about ourselves, the world, and the universe. But continuing reminders of the numerous areas of our present ignorance invite a critical analysis of this assumption.
In the popular view, intellectual evolution is similar to, although much more rapid than, somatic evolution. Biological evolution is often described by the statement that \"ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny\"--meaning that the individual embryo, in its development from a fertilized ovum into a human baby, passes through successive stages in which it resembles ancestral forms of the human species. The popular view is that humankind has progressed from a state of innocent ignorance, comparable to that of an infant, and gradually has acquired more and more knowledge, much as a child learns in passing through the several grades of the educational system. Implicit in this view is an assumption that phylogeny resembles ontogeny, so that there will ultimately be a stage in which the accumulation of knowledge is essentially complete, at least in specific fields, as if society had graduated with all the advanced degrees that signify mastery of important subjects.
Such views have, in fact, been expressed by some eminent scientists. In 14 the great American physicist Albert Michelson said in a talk at the University of Chicago: While it is never safe to affirm that the future of Physical Science has no marvels in store even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice .... The future truths of Physical Science ate to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.
In the century since Michelson's talk, scientists have discovered much more than the refinement of measurements in the sixth decimal place, and none is willing to make a similar statement today. However, many still cling to the notion that such a state of knowledge remains a possibility to be attained sooner or later. Stephen Hawking, the
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great English scientist, in his immensely popular book A Brief History of Time (1988), concludes with the speculation that we may \"discover a complete theory\" that \"would be the ultimate triumph of human reason--for then we would know the mind of God.\" Paul Davies, an Australian physicist, echoes that view by suggesting that the human mind may be able to grasp some of the secrets encompassed by the title of his book The Mind of God (1992). Other contemporary scientists write of \"theories of everything,\" meaning theories that explain all observable physical phenomena, and Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg, one of the founders of the current standard model of physical theory, writes of his Dreams of a Final Theory (1992).
Despite the eminence and obvious yearning of these and many other contemporary scientists, there is nothing in the history of science to suggest that any addition of data or theories to the body of scientific knowledge will ever provide answers to all questions in any field. On the contrary, the history of science indicates that increasing knowledge brings awareness of new areas of ignorance and of new questions to be answered.
Astronomy is the most ancient of the sciences, and its development is a model of other fields of knowledge. People have been observing the stars and other celestial bodies since the dawn of recorded history. As early as 3000 B.C. the Babylonians recognized a number of the constellations. In the sixth century B.C., Pythagoras proposed the notion of a spherical Earth and of a universe with objects in it chat moved in accordance with natural laws. Later Greek philosophers taught that the sky was a hollow globe surrounding the Earth, that it was supported on an axis running through the Earth, and chat stars were inlaid on its inner surface, which rotated westward daily. In the second century A.D., Ptolemy propounded a theory of a geocentric (Earth-centered) universe in which the sun, planets, and stars moved in circular orbits of cycles and epicycles around the Earth, although the Earth was not at the precise center of these orbits. While somewhat awkward, the Ptolemaic system could produce reasonably reliable predictions of planetary positions, which were, however, good for only a few years and which developed substantial discrepancies from actual observations over a long period of time. Nevertheless, since there was no evidence then apparent to astronomers that the Earth itself moves, the Ptolemaic system remained unchallenged for more than 13 centuries.
In the sixteenth century Nocolaus Copernicus, who is said to have mastered all the knowledge of his day in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and theology, became dissatisfied with the Ptolemaic system. He found that a heliocentric system was both mathematically possible and aesthetically more pleasing, and wrote a full exposition of his hypothesis, which was not published until 13, shortly after his death. Early in
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the seventeenth century, Johannes Kepler became imperial mathematician of the Holy Roman Empire upon the death of Tycho Brahe, and he acquired a collection of meticulous naked-eye observations of the positions of celestial bodies chat had been made by Brahe. On the basis of these data, Kepler calculated that both Ptolemy and Copernicus were in error in assuming chat planets traveled in circular orbits, and in 1609 he published a book demonstrating mathematically chat the planets travel around the sun in elliptical orbits. Kepler's laws of planetary motion are still regarded as basically valid.
In the first decade of the seventeenth century Galileo Galilei learned of the invention of the telescope and began to build such instruments, becoming the first person to use a telescope for astronomical observations, and thus discovering craters on the moon, phases of Venus, and the satellites of Jupiter. His observations convinced him of the validity of the Copernican system and resulted in the well-known conflict between Galileo and church authorities. In January 12 Galileo died, and in December of chat year Isaac Newton was born. Modern science derives largely from the work of these two men.
Newton's contributions to science are numerous. He laid the foundations for modem physical optics, formulated the basic laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation, and devised the infinitesimal calculus. Newton's laws of motion and gravitation are still used for calculations of such matters as trajectories of spacecraft and satellites and orbits of planets. In 1846, relying on such calculations as a guide to observation, astronomers discovered the planet Neptune.
While calculations based on Newton's laws are accurate, they are dismayingly complex when three or more bodies are involved. In 1915, Einstein announced his theory of general relativity, which led to a set of differential equations for planetary orbits identical to those based on Newtonian calculations, except for those relating to the planet Mercury. The elliptical orbit of Mercury rotates through the years, but so slowly that the change of position is less than one minute of arc each century. The equations of general relativity precisely accounted for this precession; Newtonian equations did not.
Einstein's equations also explained the red shift in the light from distant stars and the deflection of starlight as it passed near the sun. However, Einstein assumed chat the universe was static, and, in order to permit a meaningful solution to the equations of relativity, in 1917 he added another term, called a \"cosmological constant,\" to the equations. Although the existence and significance of a cosmological constant is still being debated, Einstein later declared chat this was a major mistake, as Edwin Hubble established in the 1920s chat the universe is expanding and galaxies are receding from
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one another at a speed proportionate to their distance.
Another important development in astronomy grew out of Newton's experimentation in optics, beginning with his demonstration chat sunlight could be broken up by a prism into a spectrum of different colors, which led to the science of spectroscopy. In the twentieth century, spectroscopy was applied to astronomy to gun information about the chemical and physical condition of celestial bodies chat was not disclosed by visual observation. In the 1920s, precise photographic photometry was introduced to astronomy and quantitative spectrochemical analysis became common. Also during the 1920s, scientists like Heisenberg, de Broglie, Schrodinger, and Dirac developed quantum mechanics, a branch of physics dealing with subatomic particles of matter and quanta of energy. Astronomers began to recognize that the properties of celestial bodies, including planets, could be well understood only in terms of physics, and the field began to be referred to as \"astrophysics.\"
These developments created an explosive expansion in our knowledge of astronomy. During the first five thousand years or more of observing the heavens, observation was confined to the narrow band of visible light. In the last half of this century astronomical observations have been made across the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, including radio waves, infrared, ultraviolet, X-rays, and gamma rays, and from satellites beyond the atmosphere. It is no exaggeration to say chat since the end of World War II more astronomical data have been gathered than during all of the thousands of years of preceding human history.
However, despite all improvements in instrumentation, increasing sophistication of analysis and calculation augmented by the massive power of computers, and the huge aggregation of data, or knowledge, we still cannot predict future movements of planets and other elements of even the solar system with a high degree of certainty. Ivars Peterson, a highly trained science writer and an editor of Science News, writes in his book Newton's Clock (1993) that a surprisingly subtle chaos pervades the solar system. He states:
In one way or another the problem of the solar system's stability has fascinated and tormented asrtonomers and mathematicians for more than 200 years. Somewhat to the embarrassment of contemporary experts, it remains one of the most perplexing, unsolved issues in celestial mechanics. Each step toward resolving this and related questions has only exposed additional uncertainties and even deeper mysteries. Similar problems pervade astronomy. The two major theories of cosmology, general relativity and quantum mechanics, cannot be stated in the same mathematical language, and thus are inconsistent with one another, as the Ptolemaic and Copernican
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theories were in the sixteenth century, although both contemporary theories continue to be used, but for different calculations. Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose, in The Emperors New Mind (19), contends that this inconsistency requires a change in quantum theory to provide a new theory he calls \"correct quantum gravity.\" Furthermore, the observations astronomers make with new technologies disclose a total mass in the universe that is less than about 10 percent of the total mass that mathematical calculations require the universe to contain on the basis of its observed rate of expansion. If the universe contains no more mass than we have been able to observe directly, then according to all current theories it should have expanded in the past, and be expanding now, much more rapidly than the rate actually observed. It is therefore believed that 90 percent or more of the mass in the universe is some sort of \"dark matter\" that has not yet been observed and the nature of which is unknown. Current theories favor either WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) or MACHOs (massive compact halo objects). Other similar mysteries abound and increase in number as our ability to observe improves.
The progress of biological and life sciences has been similar to that of the physical sciences, except that it has occurred several centuries later. The theory of biological evolution first came to the attention of scientists with the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. But Darwin lacked any explanation of the causes of variation and inheritance of characteristics. These were provided by Gregor Mendel, who laid the mathematical foundation of genetics with the publication of papers in 1865 and 1866.
Medicine, according to Lewis Thomas, is the youngest science, having become truly scientific only in the 1930s. Recent and ongoing research has created uncertainty about even such basic concepts as when and how life begins and when death occurs, and we are spending billions in an attempt to learn how much it may be possible to know about human genetics. Modern medicine has demonstrably improved both our life expectancies and our health, and further improvements continue to be made as research progresses. But new questions arise even more rapidly than our research resources grow, as the host of problems related to the Human Genome Project illustrates.
From even such an abbreviated and incomplete survey of science as this, it appears that increasing knowledge does not result in a commensurate decrease in ignorance, but, on the contrary, exposes new lacunae in our comprehension and confronts us with unforeseen questions disclosing areas of ignorance of which we were not previously aware.
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Thus the concept of science as an expanding body of knowledge that will eventually encompass or dispel all significant areas of ignorance is an illusion. Scientists and philosophers are now observing that it is naive to regard science as a process that begins with observations that are organized into theories and are then subsequently tested by experiments. The late Karl Popper, a leading philosopher of science, wrote in The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1960) chat science starts from problems, not from observations, and chat every worthwhile new theory raises new problems. Thus there is no danger that science will come to an end because it has completed its task, clanks to the \"infinity of our ignorance.\"
At least since Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), it has been generally recognized that observations are the result of theories (called paradigms by Kuhn and other philosophers), for without theories of relevance and irrelevance there would be no basis for determining what observations to make. Since no one can know everything, to be fully informed on any subject (a claim sometimes made by those in authority) is simply to reach a judgment that additional data are not important enough to be worth the trouble of securing or considering.
To carry the analysis another step, it must be recognized that theories are the result of questions and questions are the product of perceived ignorance. Thus it is chat ignorance gives rise to inquiry chat produces knowledge, which, in turn, discloses new areas of ignorance. This is the paradox of knowledge: As knowledge increases so does ignorance, and ignorance may increase more than its related knowledge. My own metaphor to illustrate the relationship of knowledge and ignorance is based on a line from Matthew Arnold: \"For we are here as on a darkling plain....\" The dark chat surrounds us, chat, indeed, envelops our world, is ignorance. Knowledge is the illumination shed by whatever candles (or more technologically advanced light sources) we can provide. As we light more and more figurative candles, the area of illumination enlarges; but the area beyond illumination increases geometrically. We know chat there is much we don't know; but we cannot know how much there is chat we don't know. Thus knowledge is finite, but ignorance is infinite, and the finite cannot ever encompass the infinite.
This is a revised version of an article originally published in COSMOS 1994. Copyright 1995 by Lee Loevinger.
Lee Loevinger is a Washington lawyer and former assistant attorney general of the United States who writes frequently for scientific c publications. He has participated for many years as a member, co-chair, or liaison with the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists, and he is a founder and former chair of the Science and
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Technology Section of the American Bar Association. Office address: Hogan and Hartson, 555 Thirteenth St. NW, Washington, DC 20004.
人类从古类人猿进化到当前的状态这个长久的进化过程中的最大成就是有关于人类自身、世界以及宇宙众多知识的获得和积聚。这些知识的产物就是那些我们总称为“文化”的所有的东西，包括语言、科学、文学、艺术、所有的物质机器、仪器、我们所用的结构以及社会所依赖的物质基础设施。我们之中大多数人认为现代社会中各种知识在不断增长，与此同时社会或群体对新知识的积累也在稳步减少我们对人类自身、世界及宇宙的未知。然而，现有的无垠的未知领域在不断提示着我们需要批判性地分析这个设想。
普遍的观点认为，智力的演变与身体的发育相似，虽然要快上许多。生物的进化经常被描述为“个体的进化重演物种的进化”，意思就是个体的胚胎在其从受精卵发展到人类胎儿的过程中经历了几个阶段，在这些阶段中个体胚胎类似人类物种的祖先形式。普遍的观点认为人类从天真无邪的状态进步的，这个状态可以比作婴儿，然后逐渐的获得越来越多的知识，就像一个小孩通过学习通过了教育体系的几个年级一样。这种观点中暗含着一种臆断，那就是种系发育类似个体发育，知识的积累最终能达到一个基本完整的阶段，至少在特定的领域中是如此，就好像社会已获得了所有的高等学位，这些学位表明它已经掌握了各个重要学科的知识。
实际上，一些杰出的科学家已经表达了这样的观点。14年伟大的物理学家Albert Michelson在芝加哥大学的一个演讲中讲到：虽然不能断言未来的物理学不会再取得比过去更惊人的成就，但很可能大多数的重要的基本原理都已经牢固的确立了，那么，进一步的发展将可能主要是如何将这些基本原理精确地应用到我们注意的现象上去。人们很难在物理学领域再作突破。
在迈克尔逊讲述上一段话之后的一个世纪，科学家们在物理学上的发现远远超出了对小数点第六位测量的改进，而今天没有人会再进行与Michelson相似的阐述。但是仍有许多人坚持认为知识有迟早达到穷尽的可能性。英国伟大的科学家斯蒂芬·霍金在他的非常流行的<<时间简史>>一书中, 推测得出以下结论, 我们可以“发现一种终极理论,那将是人类理性的最终胜利, 那时候我们将知道上帝在想什么”。澳大利亚物理学家保罗·戴维斯附和斯蒂芬·霍金的观点，在他的书名为《上帝的智慧》一书中提出人类才智能使人类掌握一些上帝的思想的一些秘密。其他一些同时代的科学家有提及“万物之理”，也就是解释所有可以观察到的物理现象的理论。物理理论的现代标准模型的构建者之一诺贝尔奖获得者斯蒂芬·温伯格则提到他的著作《终极理论之梦》。
尽管这些科学家和现代的其他科学家做出了卓越贡献并且对知识孜孜以求，但是在科学史上没有任何事情表明任何对于科学知识体系增加的数据和理论曾经给任何领域的所有问题提供答案。相反，科学史表明，增加的知识使人们认识到新的无知的领域并带来新的问题。
天文学是最古老的科学，它的发展是其他领域知识发展的模型。自从有史记
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载以来，人们一直在观察星星和天体。早在公元前3000年，巴比伦人认识了一定数量的星座。在第一个五千年或者更早一些的时间，天文学观察仅限于狭窄的可见光波长范围内。在过去的这半个世纪，天文学观察已经可以在电磁辐射波长（包括广播电波、红外、紫外、X射线、伽玛射线）范围内进行，还可以通过大气层外的卫星来观察。可以毫不夸张地说，自从第二次世界大战以来收集的天文学数据，比在人类持续的几千年历史中收集的数据还要多。
然而，虽然仪器的应用有了长足的改进，由于计算机以及大量数据和知识的积累，分析和计算的复杂程度有了大幅度的提高，但是我们仍然难以预测出行星未来的运动以及另一些原理甚至是太阳系中被高度确定的原理。一个训练有素的科普作家以及科学新闻的编辑Ivars Peterson，在他的书“牛顿的时钟”里提到一种奇妙的细微的混乱弥漫着太阳系中。他写到：
两百多年以来，太阳系的稳定性问题以一种或是另一种方式吸引着并且困扰着天文学家和数学家。而这仍然是天体力学中最为困扰并且未能解决的问题，当代的科学家们对此也感到很尴尬。每一步对于此问题以及与此相关的问题的解决都会产生而外的不确定的问题甚至是更深的奥秘。
相似的问题在天文学中中也很流行。关于宇宙的最主要的两个理论，广义相对论以及量子力学不能够用形同的数学语言来表达，因此两者是不一致的，就像16世纪时托勒密和哥白尼的理论一样，虽然当代的理论仍在被应用，但是所用的计算公式不同。牛津大学的数学家Roger Penrose在他的书“新思想的帝国”中提到由于量子论中存在不可调和的争论，因此他提出了一种名为“修正的量子重力“理论”。
生物和生命科学的发展过程与物理学的发展过程相似，只是它的发生晚了几个世纪。生物进化论第一次引起科学家的注意是在1859年达尔文的“物种起源“的出版。但是达尔文没有解释造成性状遗传和变异的原因。孟德尔在1865年和1866年发表的论文中运用了基于基因的数学理论解释了这些原因。
按照Lewis Thomas的观点，医学是最年轻的科学，二十世纪三十年代才成为真正的科学。正在进行的和将要进行的研究产生了很多不确定东西。有些是关于一些基本的概念，比如：生命是何时诞生的，是怎样诞生的，死亡会在什么时候发生；并且我们现在花费数十亿美元来设法了解我们对于人类的基因能够知道多少。现代医学显著的提高了我们的寿命和健康状况，而且随着研究过程的深入将来还会继续改善。但是新的问题的出现速度要比我们得到的研究成果的增长速度快得多，比如说在有关人类基因工程项目中所出现的大量的问题。
仅仅通过对科学如此粗略而浅显的认识来看，认识的增加并没有造成无知相称的减少，相反揭露了我们理解中的新的空缺，还使我们面临着意料之外的问题，这些问题揭开我们不可预料的未知领域。
因此，把科学作为能够包围和消除一切重要无知领域的不断扩充的知识的这种观念只不过是一种错觉。科学家和哲学家正在认识到，把科学简单的看成先观察，然后根据观察的结果总结成理论再被随后的实验验证的过程，这是很幼稚的。
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已故的科学哲学先驱Karl Popper，在他1960年的著作《科学知识的发展》中提到，科学起源于问题而非观察，每个有真实价值的新科学理论都引出新的问题。因此不用担心科学会因完成它的使命而走到尽头，这归功于无穷无尽的未知。
至少自从Thomas Kuhn在1962年出版了《科学史》一书以来，人们普遍认为观测只不过是科学理论的结果，这种观点常常被Kuhn和其他哲学家拿来作范例，这是由于如果没有恰当的和不恰当的理论，要做什么样观察就将没有决定基础。既然没有任何人能够知道一切，那么在某一领域获得全面的了解（有时是权威的观点）只不过达到一种判断（境界），即另外的信息都不重要了，不值得去费神求证和考虑了。
进一步分析，我们必须认识到理论是问题的产物而问题是已认知的未知的产物。因此，正是未知引起了探究，探究产生知识然后反过来揭开了新的未知领域。这就是知识的矛盾之处：未知随着知识的增长而增长且有可能比其相关知识增长的更多。
我对知识和未知两者关系的形容来自Matthew的一句话：“我们如同置身于一个黑暗笼罩的平原上……”，笼罩我们并包裹着我们的世界的这片黑暗，就是未知。知识是由我们能提供的所有“蜡烛”散发出来的光芒。光照的面积随着我们点亮越来越多的“蜡烛”而扩大，但是光照之外的面积也在几何增长。因此，知识是有限的，而未知是无限的，有限囊括无限永远是不可能的。
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第二课Modular Man by Alvin Toffler
Urbanism -- the city dweller's way of life – has preoccupied sociology since the turn of the century. Max Weber pointed out the obvious fact that people in cities cannot know all their neighbors as intimately as it was possible for them to do in small communities. Georg Simmel carried this idea one step further when he declared, rather quaintly, that if the urban individual reacted emotionally to each and every person with whom he came into contact, or cluttered his mind with information about them, he would be completely atomized internally and would fall into an unthinkable mental condition.
Louis Wirth, in turn, noted the fragmented nature of urban relationships. “Characteristically, urbanites meet one another in highly segmental roles ...” he wrote,“ Their dependence upon others is confined to a highly fractionalized aspect of the other's round of activity. ”Rather than becoming deeply involved with the total personality of every individual we meet, he explained, we necessarily maintain superficial and partial contact with some. We are interested only in the efficiency of the shoe salesman in meeting our needs; we couldn't care less that his wife is an alcoholic.
What this means is that we form limited involvement relationships with most of the people around us. Consciously or not we define our relationships with most people in functional terms. So long as we do not become involved with the shoe salesman's problems at home, or his more general hopes, dreams and frustrations, he is, for us, fully interchangeable with any other salesman of equal competence. In effect, we have applied the modular principle to human relationships. We have created the disposable person: Modular Man.
Rather than entangling ourselves with the whole man, we plug into a module of his personality. Each personality can be imagined as a unique configuration of thousands of such modules. Thus no whole person is interchangeable with any other. But certain modules are. Since we are seeking only to buy a pair of shoes, and not the friendship, love or hate of the salesman, it is not necessary for us to tap into or engage with all the other modules that form his personality. Our relationship is safely limited. There is limited liability on both sides. The relationship entails certain accepted forms of behavior and communication. Both sides understand, consciously or otherwise, the limitations and laws. Difficulties arise only when one or another party oversteps the tacitly understood limits, when he attempts to connect up with some module not relevant to the function at hand.
Today a vast sociological and psychological literature is devoted to the alienation presumed to flow from this fragmentation of relationships. Much of the rhetoric of existentialism and the student revolt decries this fragmentation. It is said that we are
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not sufficiently “involved” with our fellow man. Millions of young people go about seeking “total involvement.”
Before leaping to the popular conclusion that modularization is all bad, however, it might be well to look more closely at the matter. Theologian Harvey Cox, echoing Simmel, has pointed out that in an urban environment the attempt to “involve” oneself fully with everyone can lead only to self-destruction and emotional emptiness. Urban man, he writes, “must have more or less impersonal relationships with most of the people with whom he comes in contact precisely in order to choose certain friendships to nourish and cultivate. His life represents a point touched by dozens of systems and hundreds of people. His capacity to know some of them better necessitates his minimizing the depth of his relationship to many others. Listening to the postman gossip becomes for the urban man an act of sheer graciousness, since he probably has no interest in the people the postman wants to talk about.
Moreover, before lamenting modularization, it is necessary to ask ourselves whether we really would prefer to return to the traditional condition of man in which each individual presumably related to the whole personality of a few people rather than to the personality modules of many. Traditional man has been so sentimentalized, so cloyingly romanticized, that we frequently overlook the consequences of such a return. The very same writers who lament fragmentation also demand freedom -- yet overlook the un-freedom of people bound together in totalistic relationships. For any relationship implies mutual demands and expectations. The more intimately involved a relationship, the greater the pressure the parties exert on one another to fulfill these expectations. The tighter and more totalistic the relationship, the more modules, so to speak, are brought into play, and the more numerous are the demands we make.
In a modular relationship, the demands are strictly bounded. So long as the shoe salesman performs his rather limited service for us, thereby fulfilling our rather limited expectations, we do not insist that he believe in our God, or that he be tidy at home, or share our political values, or enjoy the same kind of food or music that we do. We leave him free in all other matters as he leaves us free to be atheist or Jew, heterosexual or homosexual, John Bircher orCommunist. This is not true of the total relationship and cannot be. To a certain point, fragmentation and freedom go together.
All of us seem to need some totalistic relationships in our lives. But to decry the fact that we cannot have only such relationships is nonsense. And to prefer a society in which the individual has holistic relationships with a few, rather than modular relationships with many, is to wish for a return to the imprisonment of the past -- a past when individuals may have been more tightly bound to one another, but when they were also more tightly regimented by social conventions, sexual mores, political and religious restrictions.
This is not to say that modular relationships entail no risks or that this is the best
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of all possible worlds. There are, in fact, profound risks in the situation. Until now, however, the entire public and professional discussion of these issues has been badly out of focus.
城市居民的生活方式，已经成为社会学家在世纪之交研究的重点。马克思.韦伯指出这样一个明显的事实：因为住在城市里的人交流范围的缩窄，使得他们并不能与所有的邻居保持一种亲密的关系。GXX进一步阐述了这样一种观点，他更巧妙的指出：如果单个城市居民与他周围所有人都保持情感交流，或者他满脑子都被周围这些人的信息所包围，那么他会陷入“精神”，以及难以想象的精神状况中。
LXX，进一步指出，城市居民关系的不完整特性：“这很典型，现在城市居民只与其他人中的很少一部分人保持联系”，他写道：“他们与其周围人的相互依赖，被局限在高度分割的一些方面里。”他解释道，我们并不是将遇到的每一个个体都去深度涉及他的完全个性。我们只需要与他们保持一种表面的、部分的关系就可以了。我们只关心卖鞋人的工作效率，我们并不需要关心他的老婆是不是一名酒鬼。
这个论点的意思是：我们与周围大多数人形成一种关系。自不自觉中，我们以功能来定义我们与周围人的关系。只要我们不被牵涉进卖鞋人的家庭问题、或者他自己的希望、梦想和挫折中，那么他对于我们来讲，在能力上他与其他卖鞋人就是可以完全互换的了。实际上，我们将模块化原理应用到了人际关系中。我们创造了一种可以随意处理的人：模块化的人。
我们将他的个性进行模块化，而不是将我们自己卷入到他的整个人性里。这样，我们可以想象每一种个性都具有独特的特性，它是由成千上万的模块组合而成的。因此，没有一个人是可以与其他人进行互换的。但是，特定的模块可以。只要我们的目的只是为了买鞋，而不是为了交朋友，无论对这位卖鞋人或爱或恨，我们都不必卷入或者与构成他个性的所有模块建立联系。我们的友谊是安全有的。这种依靠双方。人际关系必须只承担行为和交流的特定方面。双方都必须有意识的建立这种理解，或者通过其他手段，例如禁令或者法律。当你或者对方部分的逾越了这种心照不宣的，即当他试图与他自己并无关联的功能模块进行接触时，一种功能上的困境就会随之发生。
今天，大量的社会学和心理学文献认为异化的发生是来源于这种人际关系的破碎。很多存在主义者和学生用斥责的言词反对这种破碎。他们声称我们并不是与我们的同伴保持“肤浅”的关系。成千上万的青年人正在寻找一种“全面的参与”。
在立即做出模块化都是不好的这一流行结论前，我们应该更加深入的看待这一问题。神学家XX，回应XX时指出：在城市环境中，那些试图将自己完全“融入”到其他人当中，只会导致他的自我毁灭和精神空虚。他写到：城市人，“必需与大多数人保持一种或多或少的非个人的关系，他与这些人保持这种关系目的是为了有选择的培养特定的交友对象…在与众多系统和众多人的接触中，他的生活
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方式代表了一种点式接触。他有能力认识到与周围中的一些人保持良好的关系，会迫使他缩短与其他人关系的深度。从邮递员那里听到绯闻已经成为城市人寒暄的一种方式，即使这些邮递员讲的故事我们其实并不关心。”
此外，在哀悼模块化的关系之前，我们必须扪心自问，我们是不是真的喜欢回归传统人际关系当中，即假定每个个体只与一部分人的全部关系，而不是与大多数人的个性模块发生关系。当我们审视这种回归的时候，会发现传统关系中人们是那么的多愁伤感，那么的厌烦，那么的被浪漫化了。那些哀悼破碎关系的人同样也在要求自由，他们忽视了那些没有自由的人，是被束缚在集权主义的关系中。对于任何一种关系，这里都具有这样一种含义，即关系的双方都具有共同的渴望和期待。随着双方关系变的更加亲密，那么施加在双方那种实现他们共同期望的压力就会增大。也就是说，随着关系变的更加紧密，以及包含的内容更多，那么更多模块就会发挥作用，随之而来就是我们会产生更多的期望。
在模块化的关系中，期望是被严格的。只要卖鞋人自己只是提供我们卖鞋的服务，从而满足我们买鞋的有限期望，那么我们也并不需要坚持让他信仰我们的上帝，或者让他把家里打扫干净，或者与我们分享政治信仰，或者与我们一样喜欢相同的食物或音乐。我们让他在卖鞋以外的其他方面享有充分的自由，正如他对与我们是不是无神论或者犹太人，同性恋或者异性恋，XX和主义一样，在这些方面也享有自由。对于那种完全的关系，这不是也不可能是真实的。在一定程度上，破碎与自由是相互结合的。
我们所有人似乎在生活中需要一些完全的关系。但是诋毁我们不能拥有单一的人际关系这个事实是没有道理的。而且，对于喜欢那种将个体与少数人建立完全的人际关系，而不是与大多数人建立模块化关系的社会的人来说，这是希望回归到过去那种个体与其他人被紧密束缚的牢笼中，但是，同时他们也是处在被社会习俗，性观念、政治和宗教禁忌严密的过去。
这并不意味着模块化关系不需要承担任何风险，这种关系就是对于全世界最好的选择。事实上，这里还是有一些具有深刻风险的情况的……然而直到现在，无论是在整个公共社会或者专业领域对于这个问题的讨论，还远没有抓住问题的关键。
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第3课 西方是特例，不是常例 The West Unique, Not Universal
In recent years Westerners have reassured themselves and irritated others by expounding the notion that the culture of the West is and ought to be the culture of the world. This conceit takes two forms. One is the Coca-colonization thesis. Its proponents claim that Western, and more specifically American, popular culture is enveloping the world: American food, clothing, pop music, movies, and consumer goods are more and more enthusiastically embraced by people on every continent. The other has to do with modernization. It claims not only that the West has led the world to modern society, but that as people in other civilizations modernize they also westernize, abandoning their traditional values, institutions, and customs and adopting those that prevail in the West. Both theses project the image of an emerging homogeneous, universally Western world--and both are to varying degrees misguided, arrogant, false, and dangerous.
Advocates of the Coca-colonization thesis identify culture with the consumption of material goods. The heart of a culture, however, involves language, religion, values, traditions, and customs. Drinking Coca-Cola does not make Russians think like Americans any more than eating sushi makes Americans think like Japanese. Throughout human history, fads and material goods have spread from one society to another without significantly altering the basic culture of the recipient society. Enthusiasms for various items of Chinese, Hindu, and other cultures have periodically swept the Western world, with no discernible lasting spillover. The argument that the spread of pop culture and consumer goods around the world represents the triumph of Western civilization depreciates the strength of other cultures while trivializing Western culture by identifying it with fatty foods, faded pants, and fizzy drinks. The essence of Western culture is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac.
The modernization argument is intellectually more serious than the Coca-colonization thesis, but equally flawed. The tremendous expansion of scientific and engineering knowledge that occurred in the nineteenth century allowed humans to control and shape their environment in unprecedented ways. Modernization involves industrialization; urbanization; increasing levels of literacy, education, wealth, and social mobilization; and more complex and diverse occupational structures. It is a revolutionary process comparable to the shift from primitive to civilized societies that began in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, and the Indus about 5000 B.C. The attitudes, values, knowledge, and culture of people in a modern society differ greatly from those in a traditional society. As the first civilization to modernize, the West is the first to have fully acquired the culture of modernity. As other societies take on similar patterns of education, work, wealth, and class structure, the modernization argument runs, this Western culture will become the universal culture
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of the world.
That there are significant differences between modern and traditional cultures is beyond dispute. A world in which some societies are highly modern and others still traditional will obviously be less homogeneous than a world in which all societies are comparably modern. It does not necessarily follow, however, that societies with modern cultures should be any more similar than are societies with traditional cultures. Only a few hundred years ago all societies were traditional. Was that world any less homogeneous than a future world of universal modernity is likely to be? Probably not. \"Ming China . . . was assuredly closer to the France of the Valois,\" Fernand Braudel observes, \"than the China of Mao Tse-tung is to the France of the Fifth Republic.''Modern societies have much in common, but they do not necessarily merge into homogeneity. The argument that they do rests on the assumption that modern society must approximate a single type, the Western type; that modern civilization is Western civilization, and Western civilization is modern civilization. This, however, is a false identification. Virtually all scholars of civilization agree that Western civilization emerged in the eighth and ninth centuries and developed its distinctive characteristics in the centuries that followed. It did not begin to modernize until the eighteenth century. The West, in short, was Western long before it was modern.
To Modernize, must non-Western societies abandon their own cultures and adopt the core elements of Western culture? From time to time leaders of such societies have thought it necessary. Peter the Great and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk were determined to modernize their countries and convinced that doing so meant adopting Western culture, even to the point of replacing traditional headgear with its Western equivalent. In the process, they created \"torn\" countries, unsure of their cultural identity. Nor did Western cultural imports significantly help them in their pursuit of modernization. More often, leaders of non-Western societies have pursued modernization and rejected westernization. Their goal is summed up in the phrases ti-yong (Chinese learning for the fundamental principles, Western learning for practical use) and woken, yosei (Japanese spirit, Western technique), articulated by Chinese and Japanese reformers of a century ago, and in Saudi Arabia's Prince Bandar bin Sultan's comment in 1994 that \"'foreign imports' are nice as shiny or high-tech 'things.' But intangible social and political institutions imported from elsewhere can be deadly -- ask the Shah of Iran . . . Islam is for us not just a religion but a way of life. We Saudis want to modernize but not necessarily westernize.\" Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, and, to a lesser degree, Iran have become modern societies without becoming Western societies. China is clearly modernizing, but certainly not westernizing.
Interaction and borrowing between civilizations have always taken place, and
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with modern means of transportation and communication they are much more extensive. Most of the world's great civilizations, however, have existed for at least one millennium and in some cases for several. These civilizations have a demonstrated record of borrowing from other civilizations in ways that enhance their own chances of survival. China's absorption of Buddhism from India, scholars agree, failed to produce the \"Indianization\" of China; it instead caused the Sinification of Buddhism. The Chinese adapted Buddhism to their purposes and needs. The Chinese have to date consistently defeated intense Western efforts to Christianize them. If at some point they do import Christianity, it is more than likely that it will be absorbed and adapted in such a manner as to strengthen the continuing core of Chinese culture.
Similarly, in past centuries Muslim Arabs received, valued, and used their \"Hellenic inheritance for essentially utilitarian reasons. Being mostly interested in borrowing certain external forms or technical aspects, they knew how to disregard all elements in the Greek body of thought that would conflict with 'the truth' as established in their fundamental Koranic norms and precepts.\" Japan followed the same pattern. In the seventh century Japan imported Chinese culture and made the \"transformation on its own initiative, free from economic and military pressures,\" to high civilization. \"During the centuries that followed, periods of relative isolation from continental influences during which previous borrowings were sorted out and the useful ones assimilated would alternate with periods of renewed contact and cultural borrowing.\" In similar fashion, Japan and other non-Western societies today are absorbing selected elements of Western culture and using them to strengthen their own cultural identity. It would, as Braudel argues, almost \"be childish\" to think that the \"triumph of civilization in the singular\" would lead to the end of the plurality of cultures embodied for centuries in the world's great civilizations.
Modernization and economic development neither require nor produce cultural westernization. To the contrary, they promote a resurgence of, and renewed commitment to, indigenous cultures. At the individual level, the movement of people into unfamiliar cities, social settings, and occupations breaks their traditional local bonds, generates feelings of alienation and anomie, and creates crises of identity to which religion frequently provides an answer. At the societal level, modernization enhances the economic wealth and military power of the country as a whole and encourages people to have confidence in their heritage and to become culturally assertive. As a result, many non-Western societies have seen a return to indigenous cultures. It often takes a religious form, and the global revival of religion is a direct consequence of modernization. In non-Western societies this revival almost necessarily assumes an anti-Western cast, in some cases rejecting Western culture because it is Christian and subversive, in others because it is secular and degenerate. The return to the indigenous is most marked in Muslim and Asian societies. The
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Islamic Resurgence has manifested itself in every Muslim country; in almost all it has become a major social, cultural, and intellectual movement, and in most it has had a deep impact on politics. In 1996 virtually every Muslim country except Iran was more Islamic and more Islamist in its outlook, practices, and institutions than it was 15 years earlier. In the countries where Islamist political forces do not shape the government, they invariably dominate and often monopolize the opposition to the government. Throughout the Muslim world people are reacting against the \"Westoxification\" of their societies.
East Asian societies have gone through a parallel rediscovery of indigenous values and have increasingly drawn unflattering comparisons between their culture and Western culture. For several centuries they, along with other non-Western peoples, envied the economic prosperity, technological sophistication, military power, and political cohesion of Western societies. They sought the secret of this success in Western practices and customs, and when they identified what they thought might be the key they attempted to apply it in their own societies. Now, however, a fundamental change has occurred. Today East Asians attribute their dramatic economic development not to their import of Western culture but to their adherence to their own culture. They have succeeded, they argue, not because they became like the West, but because they have remained different from the West. In somewhat similar fashion, when non-Western societies felt weak in relation to the West, many of their leaders invoked Western values of self-determination, liberalism, democracy, and freedom to justify their opposition to Western global domination. Now that they are no longer weak but instead increasingly powerful, they denounce as \"human rights imperialism\" the same values they previously invoked to promote their interests. As Western power recedes, so too does the appeal of Western values and culture, and the West faces the need to accommodate itself to its declining ability to impose its values on non-Western societies. In fundamental ways, much of the world is becoming more modern and less Western.
(Adda B. Bozeman, \"Civilizations under Stress,\" Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter , p. 7; William E. Naff, \"Reflections on the Question of' 'East and West' from the Point of View of Japan,\" Comparative Civilizations Review, Fall 1985-Spring 1986, p. 222; Braudel, On History, pp. 212-213.
近年来，西方人通过阐述西方文化是并且理应是世界文化这种观念来使自己获得自信，但使其他人感到厌烦。这种观念分为两种，一种是可口可乐殖民理论，这种理论的支持者宣称西方，特别是美国流行文化正在全世界发展，如美国食品、衣服、流行音乐、电影和消费品正越来越被各洲人所热爱。另一种理论与现代化有关，该理论宣称不仅西方领导了全球现代化，并且由于其他现代化进程中的人也被西方化，他们抛弃了自己的传统价值观、制度、风俗，但吸收了那些西方流
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行的东西。这些都影射出正显现同化和全球西方人不同程度上的误导、傲慢、错误和危险。
可口可乐殖民主义理论的支持者把文化等同于物质产品的消费。然而文化的核心包括了语言、宗教、价值观、传统和风俗。喝可口可乐没有使鄂罗斯人像美国人那样思考，就像吃寿司也没有使美国人像日本人那样思考一样。统观整个人类历史，时尚和物质商品从一个社会扩散到另一个社会但并没有明显改善那些易接受改变的社会的基本文化。对中国、印度和其他国家各种文化的热衷已经长期的席卷整个西方世界，这种情况没有明显的长时间的影响。全球流行文化和物质消费的扩展代表了西方文明的胜利的这种争论低估了其他国家的力量，他们把西方文化定义为发胖食品、退色的牛仔裤和冒泡的饮料。西方文化的本质是大宪章而不是Magna Cac。
尽管有关现代化的讨论从理论上看比古柯殖民化命题更知性，但它同样有缺陷。发生在19世纪的科学和工程知识的极度扩展使得人们可以以空前的方法来控制和创造他们的环境。现代化涉及了诸如工业化；都市话；人们文化水平，教育，财富和社会动员的增加与提高；及更复杂更变化多样的职业结构。与大约5000年前发生在底格里斯河，幼发拉底河，尼罗河，印度河村庄的从原始状态进入到人类文明社会的的转变比较，现代化是一个的过程。现代社会的人们和一传统社会的人们在看法，价值观念，知识和文化上都有很大差异。作为第一个进入现代化的文明社会，西方第一个完整的获得了现在文化。在现代化争论继续的同时，其他社会接受了类似与教育，工作，财富，阶层结构等诸多方面，从而西方文化将成为世界上最普遍的文化。
现代化和传统文化时间存在显著的差异是不用争论的了。一个有些社会高度现代话，而有些社会仍然保持传统的世界明显比一个相对都是现代化社会的世界更没有共同性。仅仅在几百年前所有社会都是传统的，这样的一个世界有可能成为一个比一个普遍现代化的未来世界更没有共同性的世界吗？显然是不可能的。“中国明朝与法国的瓦卢瓦王朝肯定比中国时代与法国第五共和国亲近”。现代社会具有许多共同点，但他们不必须进入同一种社会。他们依据这样的假设认为：现代化社会必须近似一单的西方形态，现代文明就是西方文明，西方文明就是现代文明。然而这是一个假的论断。事实上所有研究文明的学者都认为西方文明出现在八，九世纪而在随后几世纪里发展成其独有特性，直到19世纪才成为现代文明，而不是一开始就是现代的。简单的说，西方在其成为现代化很久以前都只是西方的。
对于现代化来说，非西方社会必须放弃他们的自有文化并且采用西方文化的核心元素吗？长久以来，这些社会的领导人认为这是必要的。Peter the Great（彼德大帝）和Mustafa Kemal Ataturk（穆斯塔法．凱莫尔．阿塔土耳克）曾经决定将他们的国家进行现代化并且相信这样做意味着采用西方文化，甚至到了要将他们的传统头饰替换为西方的等价物的地步。在这个过程中，他们发明了具有穆斯林习俗但是西方式现代化的国家，这处国家的文化单一性模糊。西方文化的输入
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在追求现化代的道路上并没有显著地帮到他们。非西方社会的领导人更多地追求现化代但是抵制西方化。他们的目标集中体现在“体用”（中学为体，西学为用）和“woken, yosei”（日本精神，西方技术），这是在一个世纪以前的中国和日本改革者明确地提出的，同时Saudi Arabia（沙特阿拉伯）的Prince Bandar（班达王子）在1994年评论说“‘外国进口’的炫丽的或高技术的东西很好，但是从别国进口的无形的社会和政治制度是致命的—告诉伊朗国王。。。对我们不仅仅是宗教而且是一种生活方式。我们沙特人希望现代化但是不希望不必要的西方化。”日本，新加坡，，沙特阿拉伯以及程度没那么深地伊朗已经在没有变成西方社会的情况下变成了现化代国家。中国显然正在进行现代化，但是当然没有正在西方化。
文明间的交叉以及相互借鉴已经是经常发生，进行现代化意思是进行更加广泛的迁移和交流。但是，世界上大多数伟大的文明已经至少存在了一千年，很多已经是好几千年。这些文明已经通过增加自身的生存机会的方式拥有了从其它文明借鉴的示范纪录。学者们同意，中国从印度吸收了佛教，但是没有对中国产生“印度化”；它反而产生了佛教的中国化。中国人依自身的目的和需要对佛教进行了改变。中国人必须持续地战胜西方将中国教化的努力。如果在某些时刻他们确实输入了教，它将会被吸收和改造以强化中国文化持久的核心。
类似的，在过去的几个世纪里，信奉穆斯林的阿拉伯人出于实用的目的，接收、评价并利用了他们的古希腊文化遗产。他们对于借用一些外界东西或技术方面的东西是最感兴趣的，同时他们知道怎样去忽视所有希腊思想中那些与“真理”相冲突的元素，这些“真理”是在他们最根本的古兰经规范和教规中建立的。
日本也跟着这么做了，在七世纪，日本引入了中国文化，并在没有经济和军事压力的情况下自己首创性的对中国文化做出了走上更高文明的改变。接下来的几个世纪里，两种时期开始更替，一个时期是与影响隔离，在这期间，先前引入的东西得以整理，有用的东西得以同化，另一个时期则是重建接触和文化引入。同样的方式下，现在的日本和其他非西方社会正在吸收选择过的西方元素，并利用它们来加强自身的文化特征。正如布罗代尔所说的，认为单一文化的胜利会导致世界伟大文明中蕴藏了几个世纪的文化多样性的消亡是幼稚的。
现代化和经济发展既不会需求也不会产生文化上的西方化。相反，它们促进了本土文化的复兴，并且是对本土文化的再次承诺。个人层次上，人们迁移到陌生的城市、社会环境和工作破坏了他们传统的地方关系，产生了疏远和不确定的感觉，并且产生了身份危机，而这些常常可以从宗教得到答案。在社会层面上，现代化加强了国家整体的经济财富和军事力量，并鼓励人们在获得对于自己遗产的信心和文化上更自信。结果，很多非西方社会已经回归到本土文化。它经常以宗教的形式出现，并且全球性的宗教复兴正是现代化的直接结果。在非西方社会，这种复兴几乎必须是反西化的形式，一些情况下，拒绝西方文化是因为它是的是具有性的，另一些情况是因为它是世俗的和堕落的。本土化的回归在穆斯林和亚洲社会最显著。教的复兴在每一个穆斯林国家得到了证明；几乎
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所以都体现在社会、文化和知识分子运动，并且大部分对政治有深刻的影响。实际上，1996年，除了伊朗的每个穆斯林国家都在看法上、实践上和制度上比15年前更加化。在政治力量没能组建的国家，他们一定支配并经常垄断反对派。所以穆斯林世界的人都正在反对他们社会的西方化。
东亚社会都经历了一个同样的重新发现本土价值观的过程并日益引起了本土文化和西方文化平等的比较。几百年来，他们以及其他非西方国家的人民，羡慕西方社会的经济繁荣，技术先进，军事强大和政治凝聚。他们寻求这一在西方实践和习俗中成功的秘密，当他们认为他们想到的可能是答案时，他们便试图将其运用到自己的社会中。然而，现在这一情形已经从根本上发生了改变。今天，东亚没有将其惊人的经济发展归因于输入西方文化，而是归因于坚持他们自己的文化。他们成功了，他们认为，这并不是因为他们变得像西方国家，而是因为他们一直不同于西方。有点相似地是，当非西方社会认为弱于西方时，他们的许多领导人援引西方价值观的自决，自由主义，民主，和自由来证明他们反对西方统治全球是正当的。现在，他们不再是弱者，而是越来越强大，他们谴责作为“帝国主义”所有相同的价值观，他们曾经援引来以促进他们的利益。由于西方力量消退，西方价值观和文化的吸引力也同样消退，西方国家面临着需要调整其自身能力的下降来适应将其价值观强加在非西方社会上。在根本的习俗上，世界许多地方正变得越来越现代化和较少西方化。
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第四课 科学的事实：如何与徒的信仰协调？ Scientific Facts: Compatible with Christian Faith?
One would think the battle between science and Christianity had been resolved long ago. Recent statements by both scientists and theologians belie that thought, however. For instance, Richard Dawkins, an outspoken anti-Christian biologist, wrote, \"Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.\" On the theological side, the Institute of Creation Research (ICR), a fundamentalist Christian organization, continues to publish anti-evolutionary material such as: \". . . the notion that a reptile gradually evolved into a mammal is scientifically unacceptable.\" As flawed as some of the scientific statements of ICR have been, though, they seem to be more informed in science than the anti-Christian scientists have been in theology.
The causes of the science vs. Christianity battle may be traced to three errors. First, the proponents on both sides often neglect to define the term \"evolution.\" Second, both sides have failed to see science as a product of a Christian worldview. Third, both sides confuse the realms (limits) of science and theology.
The American Scientific Affiliation has published an excellent book, Teaching Science in a Climate of Controversy, for high school science teachers. In it, they list a variety of definitions of \"evolution.\" Micro evolution (breeding programs that have produced hybrids and species adapting to changing environments in minor ways) is the most obvious. No educated person would argue with that. Macro evolution (the hypothesis that homo sapiens evolved from a single cell or even from inorganic compounds) is not obvious and is much more debatable. Finally, evolution sometimes is used as a religiously value-laden tenet of naturalistic faith that man is the result of a purposeless and natural process. Few, if any, would disagree that minor changes are seen over time in the plant and animal kingdoms. Conversely, few would agree that homo sapiens, along with the rest of the universe, are a product of chance or random events.
When some biologists refer to the macro evolutionary hypothesis as a \"fact,\" they distort the evidence and cloud the issue. There is considerable debate among biologists and paleontologists about the mechanism and possibility of macro evolution. Consequently, overstating the case for macro evolution raises a large target for some Christian fundamentalists. This results in attacks on evolutionary biology, which distracts biologists from a critical study of their own hypotheses and causes them to band together against a common enemy.
Extending scientific hypotheses into a theological (metaphysical) worldview under the guise of being scientific is completely unwarranted. Whatever hypotheses evolutionary biologists espouse (as long as they are limited to biology) say nothing about who started and sustains the process. Likewise, theologians who read the Bible
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as a scientific text engage in faulty analyses. It has been argued convincingly that a correct interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative says nothing about the scientific mechanism God used to create the universe. The origin of modern science
It surprises many to discover that modern science basically is a product of a Christian worldview. The well-known Cambridge University historian, Herbert Butterfield, in his book, The Origins of Modern Science, convincingly argues that what happened in the 16th century and following was not so much a result of new data, but of changed minds. While other cultures have given great discoveries to the human race, such as the introduction of zero from the Hindus and algebra from the Muslims, the Christian West had the unique set of assumptions required by science: the universe (world) is orderly; this orderly universe can be known; and there is a motive to discover the order.
The Greek and Roman cultures had none of these assumptions. The gods were fickle and unpredictable; who could know their intentions? Math and philosophy were ends in themselves and not means to discover a rational universe. The traditional Hindu culture saw the universe as cyclical, again with the gods being capricious. Who could know the mind of Kali or Shiva? There was no incentive to show that they ruled over an orderly system.
Islam would adapt the Judeo-Christian concept of a creator God and, therefore, conceive of an orderly universe, but Allah is so transcendent that he could not be known in the Christian sense, nor could his universe. There was, then, little incentive to argue for the order of his universe.
Classical atheism must hold to strict metaphysical naturalism in which everything occurs by chance or random events. To many, such a world view takes more \"faith\" than belief in a Creator. At any rate, such a view in the 16th Century would hardly bespeak an orderly universe. If the world is illogical, how can one understand it? If all is a result of chance, what incentive would there be to discover order? Of course, we know that understanding science and technology greatly improves our quality of life, but this is insight after the fact and really borrows from the presuppositions of a Christian culture.
Only a Christian world view seems to fit the three criteria. The created universe is logical as can be seen from numerous Biblical references such as Jeremiah 31:35, \"...the Lord, who gives the sun for light by day and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night...\" This universe can be known because the Creator can be known as Paul in Romans 1:19-20 declares, \"For what can be known about God is plain ...his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.\" Finally, the incentive exists in the direct command in Genesis where God says to \"...fill the earth and subdue it...\" Thus mankind is to be not only a steward but
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to master God’s creation.
What surprises some is that many of the founders of modern science were not only Christians, but they were scientists in order to demonstrate that we lived in an orderly universe. They believed that such a demonstration would be powerful evidence that such a universe was created by an orderly God who could be known.
For example Copernicus (1463-13), one of the first to question Aristotlean cosmology and the geo-centric solar system, was a devout Christian and tolerant toward the reformation. Bacon (1561-1626), another outspoken Christian, formulated the \"scientific method\" and brought a more quantitative approach to science.
The conflict between the Roman Catholic Church and Galileo (15-12) has been used to support the anti-scientific bias of Christianity towards science, but for one who knows the history (see Hummel’s book, The Galileo Connection), Galileo had many high ranking Catholics on his side, among whom was Cardinal Baronius who wrote \"[The Bible teaches] how one goes to Heaven, not how the heavens go.\" Galileo, no paragon of tact, delighted in alienating his fellow professors, who were Aristotelians and believed in a geo-centric solar system. It was mainly they who caused the Pope to condemn Galileo’s teachings, but Galileo’s other Catholic supporters helped broker the final plea bargain. Unfortunately, professors have a history of irrational actions which continues to the present.
Kepler (1571-1630) upon whose discoveries our space program rests, wanted to be a minister of the Gospel, but was persuaded to pursue his talents in math and astronomy. In his writings, he frequently quotes psalms and explicitly relates the order of his discoveries to God’s rational creation.
Pascal (1625-1662) is certainly one of the greatest minds in this line of founders. He is credited with being the father of probability theory, hydrostatics, mass transit, modern French prose, computers, and Christian Apologetics. His Pensees (notes defending the Christian faith) is a classic work.
Newton (12-1662) considered his theological writings more important than this scientific. Harvey (1578-1657), Boyle (1627-1691), Faraday (1791-1867), and Maxwell (1831-1879) to name a few, were all devout Christians. Boyle, the first to show the difference between compounds and elements, was a lay preacher. Faraday, the discover of electro-magnetic induction, once only read from the Bible for a sermon saying his words could add nothing to God’s. Maxwell, who discovered magnetic flux, wrote: Lord, it belongs not to my care whether I die or live To love and serve Thee is my share and that Thy guard must give.
It is an interesting historical question as to why, science, conceived in a Christian culture by many Christians, was turned against Christianity and why Christians allowed this to happen. I give the Huxleys, starting with Thomas (1825-15), considerable credit along with others who saw science, and especially biology, as
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answers to questions that had previously been attributed directly to God. Christians, instead of realizing that their own creation was being used against them, \"threw the baby out with the bath water\" and considered science the problem rather than the misuse of science.
There has (and continues to be) a confusion between primary causes and secondary causes. The study of natural science deals with secondary causes while theology studies primary causes. For example, we may explain rain by saying that moisture in the air is cooled below the dew point causing water molecules to condense around dust particles thereby generating precipitation. This is a secondary cause. The primary cause is simply, \"God made it rain.\" In other words, God, who created the physical system, is the cause behind the observable cause.
Some people attempt to explain unknown causes in nature by God’s direct intervention. This has been called, \"the God of the gaps.\" While God could certainly intervene in the natural process (called a miracle), to make God responsible for common natural phenomena means that as each scientific discovery finds a natural explanation of what was previously attributed to God, the direct intervention of God becomes unnecessary. That is, as the gaps in knowledge become smaller, the God of these gaps becomes correspondingly smaller. People with this mentality see science as a threat to their faith. Obviously, were such a view held by the founders of modern science, there would have been no incentive to find answers to the natural phenomena. Understanding these natural phenomena as secondary causes, places God above them where increased ability to explain how they occur not only does not \"decrease\" God, but adds wonder to His creation.
WHAT ARE THE REALMS OF SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY?
Having discussed the historical rise of modern science and some of the conflicts, the present day battles can be solved by understanding the limits of both science and theology. The following table illustrates the almost complete separation of the realm of theology from that of science. They do not conflict, they complement each other. Notice that the only intersection of the two almost disjoint sets (columns) is nature. So those who see theology and science as completely unconnected miss the point. Historically, this intersection of nature has lead to what is called the \"Teleological Argument,\" that is, the order of the universe points to an orderly creator, the same point made by many of the founders of modern science. Scientists may study this mechanistic universe and be impressed by it, but in order to understand anything about the Creator, they have to go outside of the four dimensional time-space continuum which limits their studies. Theologians may study the Creator who made this order, but they are bound by His revelations (the Bible) and cannot extrapolate these to make scientific pronouncements.
The order of the universe is all the more amazing when we understand that order
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contains information and, according to the more general Second Law of Thermodynamics, nature destroys order (information). That is, just as water runs downhill, the energy in the universe is \"running down\" and, baring some intervention, the sun and all the stars will burn out and all that will be left is low level radiation.
Robert Gange, in his book, Origins and Destiny, points out that the amount of information in the simplest bacterium is 7 million bits (not the computer bit, but information bits). Think of this number as an exponent. The question then becomes, if the information (order) in the universe is being destroyed, where did the original information come from? Moreover, the universe seems to have been designed to support life. The laws of the universe are so finely tuned to this end, that some scientists have called this order \"The Anthropic Principle.\" For example, if the difference in expansion rate of the universe were different by 10-14 [1.0E-14], the universe would either collapse or no stars could form. It seems that more theoretical physicists than biologists are impressed with this order. The book by physicist Paul Davies’, The Mind of God give compelling evidence for a Creator. CONCLUSIONS
Two quotations on the limits of science are instructive.\"Science proves nothing absolutely. On the most vital questions, it does not even produce evidence.\" Vannevar Bush, past Chairman of the Board of MIT \"It has become increasingly evident our century that science is uncertain in its very nature.... Indeed one thing of which scientists can be quite certain is that they will not achieve a complete solution of any worthwhile problem.\" George Gaylord Simpson, Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology, Harvard.
Two quotations on the limits of theology comes from an unlikely source. It was St. Augustine, who wrote in the 5th Century:\"We must be on guard against giving interpretations of Scripture that are far-fetched or opposed to science, and so exposing the Word of God to ridicule of unbelievers.\" He also wrote:\"The Spirit of God who spoke through them [authors of the Bible] did not choose to teach about the heavens to men, as it was of no use for salvation.\"
Notice that it was scientists who understood the limitations of their field and it was a theologian who understood the limits of theology. The final word is for both scientists and theologians to understand and use the \"two book\" model that goes back at least to Cardinal Baronius of Galileo’s time which says that the Bible reveals God’s words while nature reveals God’s works.
In other words: The Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go. Science and theology are meant to be complements, not combatants. Science gives theology perspective while theology gives science meaning. It is time for a truce.
有人会认为，科学与教之间不必要的争斗已在很久之前完满结束。然而，
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科学家及神学家近年的言论显示他们并 不认同这看法。例如， Richard Dawkins ——一位敢言的无神论者——认为「达尔文使成为知性上完满的无神论者变得可能」。在神学界方面，一个基要派的徒组织 Institute of Creation Research (ICR) 不断出版反进化论的刊物，其中提及「……爬虫类动物进化成哺乳类动物，是科学上不能接纳的主张」。有趣的是，正如 ICR 过去的出版物都有瑕疵一样，这些言论在科学界比起反教的科学家在神学界更广为人知。
科学与教争斗的原因可追溯至三个错误。首先，双方的支持者都无法介定「进化」一词。此外，双方都不能接受科学是徒世界观的一种产物。最后，双方对科学与神学的都产生混淆。
甚么是进化？
The American Scientific Affiliation 出版了一本超卓的著作，名为 Teaching Science in a Climate of Controversy ， 对象是任教高中科学的老师。书中对「进化」有五个解释。微观进化 ( 即在繁殖项目中产生杂交品种，或因适应环境而产生轻微变化的品种 ) 经常发生。宏观进化 ( 即假设人类从单细胞或无机混合物进化而来 ) 的学说并不明显，争议性亦较高。最后，「进化」有时被视为自然主义者的富宗教色彩的信念，认为「人类是无目的及自然过程中的产物」。只有少数人 ( 如果有的话 ) 会否认，随着时间的过去，植物界及动物界会有轻微的变化。相反地，只有少数人会认为人类 ( 以及宇宙中其余的生物 ) 只是随机而来的产物。
当一些生物学家把宏观进化论的假设指为「事实」时，他们会歪曲证据或掩饰事情的。生物学家与古生物学家之 间，正掀起有关宏观进化论的机制及可能性的辩论。结果是，过份强调宏观进化论反倒成为基要派徒群起反对的目标。基于这群徒对生物进化学的攻击，生 物学家不能专注其理性的研究，反而联盟起来以应付共同敌人。
正如接着下来会讨论的一样，在科学化的伪装下，把科学的假设延伸至神学 ( 形而上学 ) 的世界观是亳无理由的。不论生物进化学家主张甚么假设，只要是在生物学范围以内的，都不会说是谁开始或延续生物过程。同样地，视圣经为科学化文章的神学家 正处于错误的诠释之内。现时已有论据指出在创世记创造宇宙的描述中，丝毫没有提及上帝以甚么机制创造宇宙。
现代科学的起源
很多人或会惊讶现代科学其实基本上是徒世界观的产物。 Herbert Betterfield 是剑桥著名的的历史学家，他在其著作 The Origins of Modern Science 中有力地指出， 16 世纪及之后产生的科学，大都不是新发现，而是思维的转变。正当其它文化对人类历史作出贡献，如印度教引入「零」，以及教教引入「代数」的概念，西方的教为科学提供了一套独特的假设。
现代科学的三个假设为： 宇宙 ( 世界 ) 是有秩序的； 有秩序的宇宙可以为人所知；
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[ 科学 ] 有发掘这个秩序的动机。
希腊及罗马文化没有这些假设。它们的神都是无常的，而且无法预测。谁会知道他们的意图？数学及哲学本身就是终 结，并不是发掘充满理性的宇宙的方法。传统的印度文化视宇宙为周期性的，它们的神也是反复无常的。谁会知道 Kali 及 Shiva 的脑海中想着甚么？因此，人们没有意欲证明这些神正掌管着整个有秩序的宇宙。
教采纳犹太教有关创造主的概念，因此，它相信世界是井然有序的。然而，亚拉超越得徒无法明白，甚至世界上无人能知。在这情况下，人们亦难有意欲证明宇宙的秩序。
经典的无神论主义必须坚持严格的形而上的自由主义。在这个主义中，所有事情的发生都是随机的。对很多人来说， 这世界观要求人对创造主有「信心」多于信念。不管怎样，这观念在 16 世纪都难以表明一个井然有序的宇宙。如果世界不合逻辑，我们怎能明白它？如果所有事情都是随机发生的话，人们还有甚么动机发掘秩序？当然，我们知道科学及 技术的理解大大改善我们生活的质素，但这是发现事实之后的启发，亦实在是从徒文化的前设而来的。
只有徒的世界观乎合三个要求。被造宇宙的逻辑性可从无数的中引证，例如「……那使太阳白日发光，使星 月有定例，黑夜发光……」 ( 杰里迈亚书 31 章 35 节中 ) 。宇宙可被知道，因为创造主亦向我们启示祂自己，正如保罗在罗马书 1 章 19 至 20 中宣称：「神的事……原显明在人心里……神的永能和神性……借着所造之物就可以晓得……」。最后的一个动机在创世纪中神的一个命令可见，祂说「……要创造 世界」。因此，人类不单管理，更是掌管神的创造。
使人感到惊奇的是，很多现代科学的创始人都不单是徒，更是致力证明我们生存在井然有序的宇宙的科学家。他们相信，这个证明将提供有力的证据，表明宇宙是由有秩序，而且可被认识的神创造。
举例说， Copernicus (1463—13 年 ) 是其中一位最先质疑亚里士多德的宇宙论以及地心论的科学家。他是虔诚的徒，对改革持宽容的态度。 Bacon (1561—1626 年 ) ，另一位敢言的徒，创立了「科学的方法」，为科学带来更量化的方法。
罗马天主教教会与 Galileo (15—12 年 ) 的冲突，曾被用作支持徒反科学的偏见。然而，任何一个懂历史的人都知道 ( 见 Hummel 的著作： The Galileo Connection ) ， Galileo 的支持者中也有很多位高权重的天主教徒，其中包括 Cardinal Baronius ，其名句为「 [ 圣经教导 ] 人如何上天堂，不是天堂如何运作」。 Galileo 不算得上是机智的典范，他宁愿与其身旁的教授保持疏远的距离，因为他们都是亚里士多德派学者，相信太阳系以地球为中心。就是他们使教宗谴责 Galileo 的教导，但 Galileo 其它的天主教支持者都有协助抗辩。不幸地，教授们至今都有不理性行为的记录。
基于 Kepler (1571—1630 年 ) 的发现，我们才有今天的太空计划。他希望
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成为传道人，却被别人说服发展其数学及天文的才能。在他的写作中，经常引用诗篇，将其发现的次序与神合理的创造拉上关系。
Pascal (1625—1662 年 ) 无疑是与他同期的 ( 科学 ) 奠基者中最出色的一位。他有概率论、 hydrostatics 、 mass transit 、现代法国散文、计算机以及教护教学之父的美誉。 Pensees ( 说明如何捍卫徒信心的笔记 ) 是其经典之作。
Newton (12—1662 年 ) 视其神学著作比科学著作更重要。 Harvey (1578—1657 年 ) 、 Boyle (1627—1691 年 ) 、 Faraday (1791—1867 年 ) 以及 Maxwell (1831—1879 年 ) ，虽是冰山一角，但全都是虔诚的教徒。 Boyle ，首位分辨混合物与元素的科学家，同时是一位布道家。 Faraday 发明电磁感应，有一次他阅毕圣经的其中一篇讲章，感叹自己的说话不能像神的话一般完满。 Maxwell ，发现 magnetic flux 者，写道：
「主啊！生与死不是我所关心的。 我只知道爱你、事奉你是我的福份， 你的保护亦常与我同在。」 有趣的历史问题是：为何科学融合于教文化中，却渐渐成为教的敌人，而徒又容许它发生？我需要对以 Thomas (1825—15) 为首的 Huxleys 表示欣赏。他们与很多人一样，视科学，特别是生物学，为直接解答与神有关的问题。徒非但不以为科学的发明正与他们对峙，更进一步视科学本身，而不是科 学的误用为问题所在。
主因及次因之间曾经 ( 及一直 ) 存在混淆。自然科学关乎次因，而神学则研究主因。举例说，要解释雨的形成，我们可以说是空气中的水份因冷却，导致其分子与尘的粒子一同凝固，于是从天上降 下来。这是次因，主因很简单：「神创造雨水」。换言之，创造整个物质系统的神，是可观察的原因背后的原因。
有些人尝试将自然界中未知的原因解释为神的直接干预，将神称为「鸿沟的神」。虽然神绝对有能力干预自然的过程 ( 称为神迹 ) ，但将所有自然现象都与神扯上关系，只代表在科学发明能解释自然现象的情况下，神的干预已不再成立。当知识之间的鸿沟愈来愈少，鸿沟的神亦愈来愈少。抱持 这种观念的人视科学为他们信心的威胁。显然地，若现代科学的创始人都持这种观念，人们便再没有动力为自然现象寻找答案。把这些自然现象理解为次因，并将神 放在它们之上，以更大的力量解释它们如何发生，非但不会「亏缺」神的荣耀，反使其创造更显奇妙。
科学与神学的领域是甚么？
讨论过现代科学及一些冲突的历史起源后，现今的战场可从对科学及神学范围的理解而得到解决。下表显示神学领域与科学领域的不同：两者不但没有冲突，反而互相补足。
要留意的是， 大自然 是两个 差不多 完 全无关的栏目的唯一交汇点。因此，视科学及神学完全没有关系的人会遗忘了这点。历史上，本质的交汇导致「目
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的论」的产生。换言之，宇宙的秩序指向一位井然 有序的神。这与很多现代科学的创始人的论点相同。科学家或可研究这个机械性的宇宙，陶醉其中，但要明白这位创造者，就必须走出时间与空间的四维，否则只会 阻碍他们的研究。神学家或会研究创造秩序的创造主，但他们受衪的启示 ( 圣经 ) 所，不能由此推断出科学性的公告。
科学与神学的领域 项目 神学 假设 神是主因，连同耶稣及圣经 然 来源 圣经、圣灵 目的 谁，以及形而上的为何 语言 质量的、主观的 自然宇宙、事件 怎样，以及实时的为何 数量的、客观的 科学 有秩序的宇宙、因果等等 主题 神、人类、灵界、绝对真理、 大自大自然 、力量、物质的宇宙 方法 圣经研究、讲求经验、研究人员有观察、研究人员保持抽离态度 个人投入 结果 应该的、知道神 验证 圣经的原则、个人经验 没有解释「如何」 甚么是 内在的一致、以实际经验为依据的测试 没有解释「谁」以及形而上的「为何」
当我们知道秩序包含信息，而根据热力学的第二定律，大自然摧毁秩序 ( 信
息 ) ，我们便不难发现宇宙的奇妙。换言之，当水从山上流下来的时候，宇宙的能量亦下降。加上某些干预，太阳与星宿的能量会耗尽，剩下来的只是低水平的幅射。
Robert Gange 在其书 Origins and Destiny 指出，一个 最简单的细菌细胞的信息量是七兆位 ( 不是计算机的位，是信息的位 ) 。 试把这数字想象为一个指数，问题便成为，假若宇宙中的信息都被破坏，最初的信息来自哪里？而且，宇宙好像是为支持生命而设计的，其定律与这目的很配合，有 科学家更称这定律为「人择原理」。例如，若宇宙扩张率的分别大于 10-14 ，它将会崩溃，或再无星宿。这秩序似乎影响理论物理学家多于生物学家。理论物理学家 Paul Davies 的著作 The Mind of God 便为宇宙的创造者提供有力的证据。
结论
以下两则带启发性的引文关乎科学的。 Board of MIT 的前 Vannevar Bush 写道：
「科学不能绝对证明甚么。在最重要的问题上，它甚至不能提供任何证据。」 「在我们身处的年代，科学的本质愈来愈不明朗……其实科学家反而可以肯定的是，他们不能为任何有价值的问题找到完满的解决方法。」 ( 哈佛大学脊椎
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动物化 石学 教授 George Gaylord Simpson )
以下两则关乎神学的引文来自不大可能写出如此文字之手。 St. Augustine 在公元五世纪写道：
「解释圣经时，若过份以科学左证，或与科学对抗，我们都要提高警觉。面对非信徒的嘲讽，我们更应如是。」
他亦写道：
「圣灵透过他们 ( 圣经的作者 ) 说话的时候，并不是向人类解释有关天堂的事，因为这与拯救毫无关系。」
必须注意的是，科学家明白科学的，而神学家则明白神学的局限。最后，科学家及神学家 应采用「两书」模式，返回 Galileo 时代的 Cardinal Baronius ，它指出圣经显明神的话，而大自然显明神的工作。换言之，圣经告诉我们如何到天堂，而不是天堂是甚么一回事。科学及神学互相补足，而不是互相对抗。科学给 神学发展的层面，而神学使科学有涵义。双方是时候停战了。
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第5课 科学、谎言和终极真理 Science, Lies and the Ultimate Truth
If there is any specimen lower than a fornicating preacher, it must be a shady scientist. The dissolute evangelist betrays his one revealed Truth, but the scientist who rushes half-cocked into print or, worse yet, falsifies the data subverts the whole idea of truth. Cold fusion in a teacup? Or, as biologists (then at M.I.T.) David Baltimore and Thereza Imanishi-Kari claimed in a controversial 1986 article that the National Institutes of Health has now judged to be fraudulent, genes from one mouse mysteriously \"imitating\" those from another? Sure, and parallel lines might as well meet somewhere or apples leap back up onto trees.
Baltimore, the Nobel laureate and since 1990 president of Rockefeller University, has apologized, after a fashion, for his role in the alleged fraud, and many feel that the matter should be left to rest. He didn't, after all, falsify the data himself; he merely signed on as senior scientist to Imanishi-Kari's now discredited findings. But when a young postdoctoral fellow named Margot O'Toole tried to blow the whistle, Baltimore pooh-poohed O'Toole's evidence and stood by while she lost her job. Then, as the feds closed in, he launched a bold, misguided defense of the sanctity of science.
What does one more lie matter anyway? Politicians \"misspeak\" and are forgiven by their followers. Pop singers have been known to dub in better voices. Literary deconstructionists say there's no truth anyway, just ideologies and points of view. Lies, you might say, are the great lubricant of our way of life. They sell products, flatter the powerful, appease the electorate and save vast sums from the IRS. Imanishi-Kari's lie didn't even hurt anyone: no bridges fell, no patients died.
But science is different, and the difference does define a kind of sanctity. Although we think of it as the most secular of human enterprises, there is a little-known spiritual side to science, with its own stern ethical implications. Through research, we seek to know that ultimate Other, which could be called Nature if the term didn't sound so tame and beaten, or God if the word weren't loaded with so much human hope and superstition. Think of it more neutrally as the nameless Subject of so much that happens, like the It in \"It is raining\": something \"out there\" and vastly different from ourselves, but not so alien that we cannot hope to know Its ways.
When I was a graduate student in biology -- at Rockefeller, where Baltimore also earned his Ph.D. -- I would have winced at all this metaphysics. The ethos of the acolyte was humility and patience. If the experiment didn't succeed, you did it again and then scratched your head and tried a new approach. There were mistakes, but mistakes could be corrected, which is why you reported exactly how you did things,
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step by step, so others could prove you right or wrong. There were even, sometimes, corners cut: a little rounding off, an anomalous finding overlooked.
But falsifying data lay outside our moral universe. The least you could do as a scientist was record exactly what you observed (in ink, in notebooks that never left the lab). The most you could do was arrange the experimental circumstances so as to entrap the elusive It and squeeze out some small confession: This is how the enzyme works, or the protein folds, or the gene makes known its message. But always, and no matter what, you let It do the talking. And when It spoke, which wasn't often, your reward, as one of my professors used to say, was \"to wake up screaming in the night\" -- at the cunning of Its logic and the elegance of Its design.
This was the ideal, anyway. But Big Science costs big bucks and breeds a more mundane and calculating kind of outlook. It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to run a modern biological laboratory, with its electron microscopes, ultracentrifuges, amino-acid analyzers, Ph.D.s and technicians. The big bucks tend to go to big shots, like Baltimore, whose machines and underlings must grind out \"results\" in massive volume. In the past two decades, as federal funding for basic research has ebbed, the pressure to produce has risen to dangerous levels. At the same time, the worldly rewards of success have expanded to include fat paychecks (from patents and sidelines in the biotech business) as well as power and celebrity status. And these are the circumstances that invite deception.
Imanishi-Kari succumbed, apparently, to the desire to make a name for $ herself and hence, no doubt, expand her capacity for honest research. But Baltimore is a more disturbing case. He already had the name, the resources and the power that younger scientists covet. What he forgot is that although humans may respect these things, the truth does not. What he lost sight of, in the smugness of success, is that truth is no respecter of hierarchy or fame. It can come out of the mouths of mere underlings, like the valiant O'Toole.
And if no one was physically hurt, still there was damage done. Scientists worldwide briefly believed the bogus \"findings\" and altered their views accordingly or wasted time trying to follow the false lead in their labs. Then there is the inevitable damage from the exposure of the lie: millions of people, reading of the scandal, must have felt their deepest cynicism confirmed. If a Nobel laureate in science could sink to the moral level of Milli Vanilli or a White House spin doctor, then maybe the deconstructionists are right and there is no truth anywhere, only self-interest masked as objective fact.
Baltimore should issue a fuller apology, accounting for his alleged cover-up of the initial fraud. Then he should reflect for a week or two and consider stepping down from his position as president of Rockefeller Universityand de facto science statesman. Give him a modest lab to work in, maybe one in the old Rockefeller buildings where
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the microbe hunters toiled decades ago. I picture something with a river view, where it is impossible to forget that Manhattan is an island, that the earth is a planet, and that there is something out there much larger, and possibly even cleverer, than ourselves.
如果有比一位通奸的传教士品质还低的人，那一定是一位可疑科学家。放荡传教士只是背叛了上帝，但是科学家把不成熟的成果发表，伪造数据把整个真理推翻了。在茶杯里面能进行核聚变？然而作为生物学家的DAVID Baltimore和Thereza Imanishi-Kari1986年在一个有争议的文章声称，老鼠的基因能神奇的“模仿”其他老鼠的基因。这个发现已经被美国国立卫生研究院认定是造假。如果那样的结论成立，那平行线就有可能在某处相交，或者说掉地上的苹果可以跳回树上。
Baltimore是一位诺贝尔奖获得者，并且从1990开始担任洛克菲勒大学的校长。他已经勉强为他涉嫌参与造假道歉，很多人认为此事就到此为止吧。Baltimore 自己毕竟没有伪造数据，只是在Imanishi-Kari不光彩的“发现”上署一个高级科学家的名字。但是当年轻的博士后Margot试图进行反驳时，Baltimore对Margot的证据嗤之以鼻，直到让她丢掉工作。随后，当官方介入时，他又进行了关于的大胆，误导科学神圣的辩护。
一个谎言又有什么呢？政治家会失言，然后被他的支持者原谅。流行歌手为获得更好的音效进行假唱已经是公开秘密了。文学解构学家认为世上没有任何真理，只有一时形态和观念。你可能说谎言是我们生活的润滑剂。谎言可以让增加产品销售，可以阿谀权贵，安抚选民和逃避税收。Imanishi-Kari的谎言并没有没有伤害到任何人。没有一座桥因此倒塌，没有一个病人因此死亡。
然而科学是不一样的，这种不一样就是科学的神圣。尽管科学被认为是人类最普遍精神。但是科学在精神方面却很少为人了解，科学是有其严格的道德含义。我们通过研究去认识对象。为了听起来不是那么乏味和沮丧称这种对象为自然吧，或者让人感觉没有承载过多的期望和迷信称之为上帝。更中立的观点把科学看作是如此多难以形容的运动着的东西，就如“它（天气）在下雨 ”中的“它”一样。某种外在的东西，和我们自身存在非常大差别，但差别又不是大到让我们无法知道到“它”的行为方式
当我还是洛克菲勒大学的生物学研究生的时候，我曾因为那些形而上学的观点有过退缩的想法。研究者的精神非常谦逊和有耐心。假如实验没有成功，你就必须重复做，摸摸自己的脑袋，想办法尝试新的方法。错误是存在的，但是错误可以不断的得到更正。这就是为什么你必须如实报道你一步一步如何做的，那样其他人就可以证明你的是对的还是错误的。有时候只是因为取整，一个异常的发现就会被忽略。
伪造数据却是超出了人类的基本道德。作为一个科学家至少要做到严格记录吓所观察到的东西（用钢笔记录再实验室的固定记录本上）。科学家最多能所做的就是安排好实验环境诱使那个难以琢磨的“它”并让“它”表现出来:这就是酶，和
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蛋白质折叠， 基因表现其信息的作用原理。但是常常是不管对“它“做什么，“它”却很少表现，当“它”表现出的时候就是你的收获的时候了。正如我的一个教授经常说的:为“它”逻辑的巧妙和和设计的完美而“夜晚醒来尖叫”。
不管怎么样，这是一种理想的情况。但是，重大的科学研究需要大量的金钱，并产生出更为世俗的，可计算的前途。运行一个配有电子显微镜、超高速离心机和氨基酸分析仪等高级设备，拥有许多博士和技师的现代生物实验室，每年都需要几十上百万美元的经费。而这样的大的经费只有象Baltimore这样能够大量产出科研成果的的大人物才能得到。过去20年来，国家用于基础研究的经费已经减少所造成的压力和拿到世界大奖就可以拿到大量的奖金并拥有巨大的权威和名声的诱惑都成为欺骗产生的潜在原因。
Imanishi-Kari为了名利在研究中造假，这一点是不容置疑的。然而更令人不思其解的是Baltimore也造假。Baltimore他已经拥有年轻科学家梦寐以求的名声、资源和权力。他恰恰忘记了人们尊重名声、资源和权力，而真理却不是这样。在这个造假的胜利中，他没看到的是，真理是不会尊重等级和名声的，它只会出自于勇敢、坚毅的O’Toole勇士口中。
就算没人因此（Baltimore学术造假）受到物质上的伤害，但是它还是带来了很大的破坏。全球的科学家简单地相信他们这个伪造的“发现”并为此改变他们的观点，跟随这个错误的引导去做研究，从而浪费了大量的时间和金钱。此外，还有谎言暴露时所造成的不可避免的损失。当人们读到这样的丑闻时，都会感到深深的讽刺。如果一个Nobel科学奖得主在道德上堕落到象Milli Vanili和白宫的游医那样，那么也许结构分解主义者所说的这个世界上本来就没有真理，有的只是被客观事实包围的自我利益这一观点是正确的。
Baltimore必须为此事发表完整的道歉，并为他的所谓的首次欺骗负责。然后他必须好好地反思一到两个星期，并考虑辞去Rockefeller大学校长职位和学术权威桂冠。给他一个简陋的实验室工作，也许可以安排他到Rocefeller大学旧大楼那个很多微生物研究者辛勤工作了几十年的实验室。我用河流的观点描绘事物，在那里人们不会忘记Manhattan是一个岛屿，地球是一颗行星，在此之外还有比我们更强大，甚至更聪明的人存在。
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第六课 如何判断自己能否搞科学研究？
How Can I Tell If I Am Cut out to Be a Research Worker?
People who believe themselves cut out for a scientific life are sometimes dismayed and depressed by, in Sir Francis Bacon’s words, “The subtilty of nature, the secret recesses of truth, the obscurity of things, the difficulty of experiment, the implication of causes and the infirmity of man’s discerning power, being men no longer excited, either out of desire or hope, to penetrate farther.”
There is no certain way of telling in advance if the daydreams of a life dedicated to the pursuit of truth will carry a novice through the corroborate dearly loved hypotheses that later proved to be groundless; times such as these are hard for scientists – days of leaden gray skies bring with them a miserable sense of oppression and inadequacy. It is my recollection of these bad times that accounts for the earnestness of my advice to young scientists that they should have more than one string to their bow and should be willing to take no for an answer if the evidence points that way.
It is especially important that no novice should be fooled by old-fashioned misrepresentations about what a scientific life is like. Whatever it may have been alleged to be, it is in reality exciting, rather passionate and – in terms of hours of work – a very demanding and sometimes exhausting occupation. It is also likely to be tough on a wife or husband and children who have to live with an obsession without the compensation of being possessed by it themselves.
A novice must stick it out until he discovers whether the rewards and compensations of a scientific life are for him commensurate with the disappointments and the toil; but if once a scientist experiences the exhilaration of discovery and the satisfaction of carrying through a really tricky experiment – once he has felt that deeper and more expansive feeling Freud has called the “oceanic feeling” that is the reward for any real advancement of the understanding – then he is hooked and no other kind of life will do. MOTIVES
What about the motives for becoming a scientist in the first place? This is the kind of subject upon which psychologists might be expected to make some pronouncement. Love of finicky detail was said by Lou Andreas Salome to be one of the outward manifestations of – uh – “anal erotism,” but scientists in general are not finicking, nor, luckily, do they often have to be. Conventional wisdom has always had it that curiosity is the mainspring of a scientist’s work. This has always seemed an inadequate motive to me; curiosity is a nursery word. “Curiosity killed the cat” is an old nanny’s saying, through it may have been that same curiosity which found a remedy for the cat on what might otherwise have been its deathbed.
Most able scientists I know have something for which “exploratory impulsion” is
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not too grand a description. Immanuel Kant spoke of a “restless endeavor” to get at the truth of things, though in the context of the not wholly convincing argument that nature would hardly have implanted such as ambition in our breasts if it had not been possible to gratify it. A strong sense of unease and dissatisfaction always goes with the lack of comprehension. Laymen feel it, too; how otherwise can we account for the relief they feel when they learn that some odd and disturbing phenomenon can be explained? It cannot be the explanation itself that brings relief, for it may easily be too technical to be widely understood. It is not the knowledge itself, but the satisfaction of knowing that something is known. The writings of Francis Bacon and of Jan Amos Comenius – two of the philosophic founders of modern science whose writing I shall often refer to – are suffused by the imagery of light. Perhaps the restless unease I am writing of is an adult equivalent of that childish fear of the dark that can be dispelled, Bacon said, only by kindling light in nature.
I am often asked, “What made you become a scientist?” But I can’t stand far enough away from myself to give a really satisfactory answer, for I cannot distinctly remember a time when I did not think that a scientist was the most exciting possible thing to be. Certainly I had been stirred and persuaded by the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and also by the not necessarily posh encyclopedias that can come the way of lucky children who read incessantly and who are forever poring over books. Works of popular science helped, too: six penny – in effect, dime – books on stars, atoms, the earth, the oceans, and suchlike. I was literally afraid of dark, too – and if my conjecture in the paragraph above is right, that may also have helped. AM I BRAINY ENOUGH TO BE A SCIENTIST?
An anxiety that may trouble some novices, and perhaps particularly some women because of the socially engendered habit – not often enough corrected – of self-depreciation, is whether they have brains enough to do well in science. It is an anxiety they could well spare themselves, for one does not need to be terrifically brainy to be a good scientist. An antipathy or a total indifference to the life of the mind and an impatience of abstract ideas can be taken as contraindications, to be sure, but there is nothing in experimental science that calls for great feats of ratiocination or a preternatural gift for deductive reasoning. Common sense one cannot do without, and one would be the better for owning some of those old-fashioned virtues that seem unaccountably to have fallen into disrepute. I mean application, diligence, a sense of purpose, the power to concentrate, to persevere and not to be cast down by adversity – by finding out after long and weary inquiry, for example, that a dearly loved hypothesis is in large measure mistaken. An Intelligence Test
For full measure I interpolate an intelligence test, the performance of which will differentiate between common sense and the dizzily higher intellections that scientists
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are sometimes thought to be capable of or to need. To many eyes, some of the figures (particularly the holy ones) of El Greco’s paintings seem unnaturally tall and thin. An ophthalmologist who shall be nameless surmised that they were drawn so because El Greco suffered a defect of vision that made him see people that way, and as he saw them, so he would necessarily draw them.
Can such an interpretation be valid? When putting this question, sometimes to quite large academic audiences, I have added, “Anyone who can see instantly that this explanation is nonsense and is nonsense for philosophic rather aesthetic reasons is undoubtedly bright. On the other hand, anyone who still can’t see it is nonsense even when its nonsensicality is explained must be rather dull.” The explanation is epistemological – that is, it has to do with the theory of knowledge.
Suppose a painter’s defect of vision was, as it might easily have been, diplopia – in effect, seeing everything double. If the ophthalmologist’s explanation were right, then such a painter would paint his figures double; but if he did so, then when he came to inspect his handiwork, would he not see all the figures fourfold and maybe suspect that something was amiss？ If a defect of vision is in question, the only figures that could seem natural (that is, representational) to the painter must seem natural to us also, even if we ourselves suffer defects of vision; if some of El Greco’s figures seem unnaturally tall and thin, they appear so because this was El Greco’s intention.
I do not wish to undervalue the importance of intellectual skills in science, but I would rather undervalue them than overrate them to a degree that might frighten recruits away. Different branches of science call for rather different abilities, anyway, but after deriding the idea that there is any such thing as the scientist, I must not speak of “science” as if it were a single species of activity. To collect and classify beetles requires abilities, talents and incentives quite different from, I do not say inferior to, those that enter into theoretical physics or statistical epidemiology. The pecking order within science – a most complicated snobismus – certainly rates theoretical physics above the taxonomy of beetles the order of nature is thought to spare us any great feat of judgement or intellection: is not there a slot waiting for each beetle to fit into?
Any such supposition is merely inductive mythology, however, and an experienced taxonomist or paleobiologist will assure a beginner that taxonomy well done requires great deliberation, considerable powers of judgement and a flair for the discernment of affinities that can come only with experience and the will to acquire it.
At all events scientists do not often think of themselves as brilliantly brainy people – and some, at least, like to avow themselves rather stupid. This is a transparent affectation, though – unless some uneasy recognition of the truth tempts them to fish for reassurance. Certainly very many scientists are not intellectuals. I myself do not happen to know any who are Philistines unless – in a very special sense
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– it is being a Philistine to be so overawed by the judgments of literary and aesthetic critics as to take far more seriously than they deserve.
Because so many experimental sciences call for the use of manipulative skills, it is part of conventional wisdom to declare that a predilection for or proficiency at mechanical or constructive play portends a special aptitude for experimental science. A taste for Baconian experimentation is often thought significant, too – for example, an interest inner impulsion to find out what happens when several ounces of a mixture of sulfur, saltpeter and finely powdered charcoal is ignited. We cannot tell if the successful prosecution of such an experiment genuinely portends a successful research career because only they become scientists who don’t find out. To devise some means of ascertaining whether or not these conventional beliefs hold water is work for sociologists of science. I do not feel, though, that a novice need be turned away from science by clumsiness or an inability to mend radio sets or bikes. These skills are not instinctual; they can be learned, as dexterity can be. A trait surely incompatible with a scientific career is to regard manual work as undignified or inferior, or to believe that a scientist has achieved success only when he packs away test tubes and culture dishes, turns off the Bunsen burner, and sits at a desk dressed in collar and tie. Another scientifically disabling belief is to expect to be to carry out experimental research by issuing instructions to lesser mortals who scurry hither and thither to do one’s bidding. What is disabling about this belief is the failure to realize that experimentation is a form of thinking as well as a practical expression of thought. Opting Out
The novice who tries his hand at research and finds himself indifferent to or bored by it should leave science without any sense of self-reproach or misdirection.
This is easy enough to say, but in practice qualifications required of scientists are so specialized and time-consuming that they do not qualify him to take up any other occupation; this is especially a fault of the current English scheme of education and does not apply with the same force in America, whose experience of general university education is so much greater than our own.
A scientist who pulls out may regret it all his life or he may feel liberated; if the latter, he probably did well to quit, but any regret he felt would be well-founded, for several scientists have told me with an air of delighted wonderment how very satisfactory it is that they should be paid – perhaps even adequately paid – for work that is so absorbing and deeply pleasurable as scientific research.
有些人认定自已是搞科学研究的材料。不过，他们有时会因此而沮丧。其原因正如培根所说的那样，是因为“大自然是如此扑朔迷离，真理是如此深藏不露，事实是如此模棱两可，实验是如此煞费苦心，原因是如此闪烁不明，精力是如此难以持久，皆可使因失望而不复振奋者返巡不前。”
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梦寐以求地向往献身于对真理的追求，这是否就能使初出茅庐者受得住目睹自己实验失败时的烦恼，经得起发现自己痴迷的观点竟成无稽之谈时的懊丧呢？这很难预料。
在我的生涯中，曾有两次为了给自己一心宠爱的假说寻找支点而搞得身心交瘁，结果只是无端地耗费了两年时光，到头来却发现这些假说原来是不着边际的东西，于科学上一无所获。对科学家来说，这种日子真是不好过，就像终日生活在灰蒙蒙的天空下，总是感到一种阴惨惨的沮丧和不适。正是因为难以忘怀这样的悲惨时光，我才真心诚意地向青年科学家进言，希望他们不要单打一，不要一条胡同走到黑，而要能在有否定证据出现时，接受一个“错”字。
还有一点对新手是尤其重要的，就是切不要为那些陈旧而失实的有关科学生涯的描述所蒙蔽。无论它可能被煞有介事地说成什么样子，事实上大家要记住的是：科学生涯是一种振奋人心的、充满激情的体验；就其占去的时间而言，它还是十分拖累人的，有时简直是累死人的活动。对于科学家的家属来说，还可以说从事科学研究是个狠心的生涯。科学家的家属不得不和中了魔的人一起生活，但自己却不能享受到一起人迷的补偿。（参见第五章中“科学家的家庭会不会不美满？”一节。）
新手都要这样熬上一段时间，直至看出科学生涯给他带来的酬报和补偿是否抵得上它所造成的失望和辛苦为止。不过，一旦科学家体验到了做出某个发现的欣喜，领略到了巧妙地实现某个实验的满足；这就是说，一旦他感受到了弗洛伊德称之为“海洋般的情感”这一更为深切、更为辽阔的激情——这是一切为真知的真正发展做出贡献的人所能得到的报偿。就会与之结下不解之缘，其它的一切都会黯然失色。
动 机
首先要提出的一个问题是：当科学家的动机是什么？这个问题或许应该由心理学家来回答。世俗之见多半认为，好奇心乃是科学家身上最有力的发条。我一向认为，这并不是正常的动机。““好奇”是针对娃娃们说的。有句老掉牙的俗话说：“因为好奇，死了猫咪”——其实，好奇这个东西，有时固然会要命，但有时也能救命哩。
在我所知道的有才能的科学家中，大多数都具备这样一种品质，把这种品质称之为“进行探究的冲动”也许并不过分。康德也提到过一种“追求真理的不懈努力”。当然，他的论证却不那么令人信服。他认为，大自然既然已将这种雄心壮志放入人类的灵魂之中，人类当然就能实现自己的这一抱负。知道存在着知识上的欠缺，就会产生强烈的不安与不满足。就连门外汉也都是如此。当他们听到别人提起，某个奇特而搅扰人心的现象已能得到解释时，心里也会生出一种如释重负之感。对这一现象，恐怕只有用上述理由才能说得通。具体的解释未必会使他们释然——这一过程太容易使人陷入专业细节，因而难于达到为人普遍理解的水
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平。所以，使他们满意的倒不是知识本身，而是得知知识已被人们获得这一事实。在培根和夸美纽斯这两位现代科学哲学奠基人的大作中——下面我常要援引他们的大作——有关光的比喻比比皆是。我提到的人们对存在着未知事物的无休止的不安，正相当于孩子对黑暗的惧怕。而培根就说过，驱走黑暗的办法只有一个，就是点燃起思想上的火炬。
时常有人问我：“是什么原因使你决定要当个科学家呢？”可惜我不能旁观者清地给出真正能令人满意的回答。我似乎始终认为，当科学家是最最令人激动的职业。少年时代里，凡尔纳和威尔斯的作品使我怦然心动，我有幸一睹的百科全书这一堂皇巨著使我心驰神往。（诚然，对于酷爱读书、锲而不舍的少年来说，能有百科全书可看，自然是很幸运的。但并不是非得拜读不可。）科普作品也对我起过很大作用。那种化上几枚硬币就能买来的小册子，对我谈星星，讲原子，说地球， 道海洋，真是海阔天空。再有一点就是——如果我在前面一段话中提到的内容称得上正确的话——我这个人也“怕黑”。
要当科学家，我的脑子够用吗？
有些新人，特别是一部分女性，或许会怀有一种妄自菲薄的心理。这就是担心自己的头脑不能胜任科学研究工作。这是一种相当普遍的社会现象，目前尚未得到充分纠正。请放心。莫忧虑。当一名好科学家，不一定非得有出类拔萃的头脑不可。诚然，对能使大脑有所活动的工作毫无兴趣，甚至十分憎恶，认为抽象概念简直不能容忍，这当然不能说是有利于科学工作的因素。不过，实验科学并不要求什么高深的三段论论证，也无须什么令人叹为观止的演绎过程。当然，基本的识见是不可缺少的。另外，最好还能具备若干种老派的品行——它们目前的名声似乎已经不那么响亮了。这几种品行是：用功、勤勉、有目的感、全神贯注、坚持不懈，以及逆境难挫。这里所说的逆境，是指进行了长期而艰苦的劳动后，到头来却发现自已心爱的假说原来竟是一错到底的。 一项智力测验
为了充分说明间题，我这里给出一个智力测验题目。由于这个题目可以区分出基本识见和有些人心目中的唯科学家才具有或应该具有的“高等脑力”：在很多人看来，格列科画笔下的许多人物（特别是宗教人物）都被画成又高又瘦的古怪相。据一位眼科医生——这里且不披露他的姓名——的解释，这些人物被画成这副样子，是因为格列科本人有视觉缺陷，因此。看到的就是这种模样的人。看到的既然是这样，画出来自然便也如此了。
这一解释说得通吗？我在向别人——有时是向做学问的人——提出这个测验时，又加上这样一句话：“谁能一下子看出这种解释纯属胡扯，而且是属于科学上的而非美学上的胡扯，他就是个聪明人；另一方面，如果有谁听了说这种解
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释纯属胡扯的理由之后，仍然闹不清子午卯酉，就该算是不开窍的了。”这里给出的解释与认识论有关。
设想某个画家，有一种常见的视觉缺陷——复视，即看到的东西都是双影的。如果那位眼科医生的理由是真的，这个画家就应该把画画成双影的。但是，一旦这样画出来以后，他在审视自己的作品时，岂不该看出四重影来，从而意识到一定是在什么地方有些不对头吗？即使视觉缺陷确实存在，在画家看来是正常的（即没有走样的）形象，我们——即使我们自己也有视觉缺陷——看来也一定是正常的。格列科的人物看起来高瘦得出奇，完全是因为格列科本人正有意要画成这个样子。
我无意低估智力在科学中的作用。不过，与其将它抬得太高而吓跑新人，倒不如低估些为好。而且，科学中有不同的分支，它们要求的能力各不相同。我在前面反对了称某个人代表科学家的提法，这里，我再反对一下将科学作为单纯一类活动的观点。采集昆虫并加以分类，这需要本领、才能和动机，但它们又和搞理论物理学或流行病统计学所需要的本领、才能和动机不同——只是表现不同，而不是水平不同。当然，用科学界内部的一种十分复杂的青白眼标准来衡量，理论物理学要排在昆虫分类学的前面。这大概是有人认为，凡有一种昆虫，就该有个分类学空档属于它，因此不需要太高的智力水平罢！
然而，诸如此类的看法纯系想当然。有经验的分类学家或古生物学家．会斩钉截铁地告诉初学者说，要干好他们这一行，需要有远大的目标、出色的判断力和明察秋毫的眼力。这只有靠经验和意志力才能获得。
无论如何，科学家未必常常认为自己是什么大脑出色的人物，倒是有些人愿意把自己说成笨伯。当然，这纯属故作谦虚之态，要不然就是在发现自己工作中出了错误时这样说说，好让别人给自己打气。
许多实验科学都需要有动手能力的人参加，因此，一般都认为，喜好并擅长摆弄仪器设备的人，是特别适合投身实验科学的。是否看重培根型的实验（参见第九章）——比如，是否愿意不懈地探知诸如点燃硫、硝、木炭粉会有什么结果——也常被当作一个重要标准。其实，能进行实验，并不等于能做出发现。因此，我们无法断言，只要能成功地进行这样的试验，就是好的研究人员。至于订出几条标准来，好据以判断这类众见是否站得住脚，这是科学社会学家的任务。不过，我个人并不认为，一个人要是不会修自行车，或是不能装收音机，就跟科学没有缘分。其实这些技术并不是天赋的本领，而是可以学会的，也是可以熟能生巧的。当然，那种觉得自己动手干活不够体面、低人一等的想法，那种认为科学家可以将试管、培养皿、本生灯等设备束之高间，只消自己正襟危坐在书桌后面，就可以作出发现的观点，也是与科学事业不相容的。还有人以为，科学实验可以由第二流角色按照“名角”的吩咐一板一眼地搞出来。这对于科学事业也是有损无益的。因为持这一看法的人未能认识到，实验也是思维活动的一种形式，是思想活动的具体反映。
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抽身退步
新手如果在试过一两项研究工作而未能萌生出对它的感情，甚至还生出厌倦之心来，那便应该就此止步，而无须自责和惘然。
这句话说起来容易做起来难，实际上，对于科学家的种种资格上的要求是如此消耗时力，以至使改弦易辙往往成为不现实的幻想。英国当前的教育制度尤其反映出了这个缺陷。美国的教育制度便不那么糟糕——它的大学通才教育要比英国出色得多。 抽身退步者也许会终身怅悔，也许会如释重负。如果属于后者，便说明他的抉择或许是明智的；如果属于前者，也是很有道理的——一有的科学家便对我惊喜有加地说过，他们所从事的工作是那样有趣，那样能带来深切的欢愉，竟然还能为此而得到报酬，而且通常还是不低的报酬，这个职业是太令人满意了！
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第7课 饮毒和摄取营养物质
Drinking Hemlock and Other Nutritional Matters
在一个阴冷的早晨，我早早地起来之后心想（诚然一项情愿地）应该适时打开电视与外界交流一下。令我大吃一惊的是，电视上有位几年前著名的影星正在讲述糖的害处。这位前好莱坞偶像强烈地谴责这种乙醣二聚体， 特别是它的纯化的晶体形态。她斥之为“非天然食品”，这种称呼极大地损坏了进行光合作用的甘蔗和甜菜的形象。给人的感觉就像一位庄严的法官永久地宣判一种“反常行为”一样。我马上就被这位伟大的女士的讨伐行动吸引住了，并且心里一直在嘀咕“讨厌蔗糖”，同时调好一种非天然的咖啡豆提取物并且往里面扔了一片高度合成的糖精。
过了一会儿，当睡意消去时，对原因的怀疑取代了情绪的自信，我开始纳闷，多年来我的同事们一直在生化营养物方面迷惑不解，我的电影女主角在这方面那么有把握，她的自信从何得来？或许所有这些脏乱的实验工作，如碾磨和提炼组织以及其他类似无聊的实验室里的工作，都不是获取“真理”的最便捷的途径。也许我们这群穿着白大褂的人忽略了一条通往真理的神秘通道，在这里一些人靠令人无法理解的洞察力来发现有关营养学的“真正的”知识，这些知识改变了其信奉者的生活。
所有这一切都使唤起了生物医学家们一次次频繁痛苦的经历，这种经历就像反复出现的噩梦一样时刻萦绕在心头。某一回是在鸡尾酒会或者别的社交聚会上，有人出现在人群中，然后就对“好营养”问题开始慷慨陈词。所阐述的“事实”与众所周知的代谢途径、细胞组织生理学、酶学和常识经常不一致。如果有听众斗胆提出疑问，“你是怎么知道的？”迎接他或她的眼神就像当年哥伦布问“你怎么知道，世界是平的”时所受的那样。
营养学似乎很像政治，对此人人都是专家。于是，百姓大众就以为，一个人不管他熟知一门复杂学科的多少事实和理论，他多年受到的教育，与不费吹灰之力就可获取的知识相比，仍显得苍白而无用。
所描述的情况绝非仅限于食物的选择，当然我觉得还没有准备好要去介入蔗糖辩论。然而，营养学领域是许多领域中的一个好例子，在这些领域里我们经常会受到许多教条式言论的影响，这些言论或真，或假，还有许多是不确定的。应对所有这些论断应当质疑，“你怎么知道你说的话确实是实话？”在这方面，我认为我们的教育已经彻底失败。
我们如何获取知识的学问属于哲学的认识论学科（关于知识的理论）的一部分，这种学问通常只在高年级或者研究生的哲学课程里传授，因而仅限于一小群大学生。但是，对于教育而言，还有比这更基本的学习吗？难道不是每个高中毕业生都应该准备好应付每天所遇到的种种不正确的和误导的说法吗？表面上看来奇怪的是，掌握判断各种说法的正确性的技能却不是学校课程的一个核心要
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素。
教育，现在看来，很大程度上是将学科内容从老师传递给学生的问题，而对于那些没有把握的东西则通过求助于专家、教师、教科书，或百科全书来解决。关于知识是怎样获得的方法性问题却很少涉及。因而，一个受教育者本应该拥有的最重要的分析工具之一却被忽视了。这并不是说要反对信息的传递，而是要说明，在现实世界里有着形形色色的政客、骗子和贩子，他们为所欲为就是因为几乎没有人提出合适的疑问，在这样一个世界里知识传递本身提供不了足够的保护。
在分清真伪这个问题上，博士们并不比中小学生聪明多少。同样，许多学术学科将精力花在了无根据的论证上，如果用认识论的标准来衡量的话，这些论点都应被抛弃。这使得我们暂时又回到了营养话题，在这里由于方法问题使得很难获得甚至真实有效的信息。当我们不知道形成平均数的分布函数时，我们就在人口平均的基础上做出结论。由于不可能在人群中进行大规模的实验，因此需要在动物中进行推断或在小规模人群中测定，在其测定范围内所采用的推断程序的正确与否未知。因此，营养学受到脱离认识论本质的困扰，直到这些问题得到解决，认真的科学家们才不会受制于非常有限的言论。教条式的说法仍将属于鸡尾酒会上演说家的天地。
认识论为什么不在学校里传授， 这个问题比较容易明白。毕竟，认识论是一门危险的学科。如果我们开始怀疑各种说法的正确性的话，那么教师本身也会受到怀疑。所有关于教育、既定的宗教形式、和社会习俗的说法也都要根据它们怎么知道是真的理由来证实。对于没有经历过如何求真的父母和老师们来说，不断地被孩子们追问知识的根源会令他们沮丧不安。调查，对于接受事物的来说确实是一种挑战。
为了意识到我们所讨论的分析类型中发现的既成方式的危险性，我们需要回到古雅典，在那里哲学家苏格拉底教他年轻的追随者们怀疑一切及寻求答案的技巧。正如Will Durant写道：“苏格拉底从事窥探人类的灵魂，揭露假说和怀疑必然的工作”。这已经被称为苏格拉底方法。古希腊城邦的公民们用毒芹处死了这位爱寻根究底的老师，对他最严厉的指控之一就是“腐蚀青年人”。认识论始祖的命运也许充当了某种警示，使得这门学科被拒于学校体系之外。
有人仍然反对向年轻人传授探究真理的艺术和科学，认为这样做很危险。而我认为不这样做更危险，因为这会使年轻人易于受到江湖骗子和冒牌货的伤害，这些骗子们正将大众传媒纳入他们行骗的范围内。如果我们认为理性会导致问题的解决的话，那么我们一开始就应该使辨别真伪成为大家思维的一部分。如果不服权威的年轻人令人讨厌的话，试想：如果年轻人都步调一致地前行并且从不问他们要去哪里，这会有多危险！
解决办法似乎显然。当我们将教育回归为阅读、写作和算术等基本训练时，我们还应该加上第四个“R”，即“”。从小学一年级开始直到研究生教育阶段，我们必须看到学生对所说的含义以及意识到有效的知识是如何建立起来的很敏感。
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如果这看起来激进的话，那它确实如此。相对于轻信电视上每天播出的一些胡言乱语而言，喝毒药可就没那么痛苦了。
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第八课 抱负的美德 The Virtues of Ambition
Joseph Epstein (1937-), noted essayist, short story author and novelist, was born in Chicago and grew up in Rogers Park. He then attended the University of Chicago and is now a prominent member of the literature faculty at Northwestern University. He won the 1998 Harold Washington Literary Award for the most prominent men or women of letters in Chicago.
1. Ambition is one of those Rorschach words: define it and you instantly reveal a great deal about yourself. Even that most neutral of works, Webster's, in its seventh New Collegiate Edition, gives itself away, defining ambition first and foremost as \" an ardent desire for rank, fame, or power.\" Ardent immediately assumes a heat incommensurate with good sense and stability, and rank, fame, and power have come under fairly heavy attack for at least a century. One can, after all, be ambitious for the public good, for the alleviation of suffering, for the enlightenment of mankind, though there are some who say that these are precisely the ambitious people most to be distrusted.
2. Surely ambition is behind dreams of glory, of wealth, of love, of distinction, of accomplishment, of pleasure, of goodness. What life does with our dreams and expectations cannot, of course, be predicted. Some dreams, begun in selflessness, end in rancor; other dreams, begun in selfishness, end in large-heartedness. The unpredictability of the outcome of dreams is no reason to cease dreaming.
3. To be sure, ambition, the sheer thing unalloyed by some larger purpose than merely clambering up, is never a pretty prospect to ponder. As drunks have done to alcohol, the single-minded have done to ambition--given it a bad name. Like a taste for alcohol, too, ambition does not always allow for easy satiation. Some people cannot handle it; it has brought grief to others, and not merely the ambitious alone. Still, none of this seems a sufficient cause for driving ambition under the counter.
4.
What is the worst that can be said---that has been said--about ambition? Here is a
(surely) partial list: To begin with, it, ambition, is often antisocial, and indeed is now outmoded, belonging to an age when individualism was more valued and useful than it is today. The person strongly imbued with ambition ignores the collectivity; socially detached, he is on his own and out for his own. Individuality and ambition are firmly linked. The ambitious individual, far from identifying himself and his fortunes with the group, wishes to rise above it. The ambitious man or woman sees the world as a battle; rivalrousness is his or her principal emotion: the world has limited prizes to offer, and he or she is determined to get his or hers. Ambition is, moreover, jesuitical; it can argue those possessed by it into believing that what they want for themselves is good for everyone --that the satisfaction of their own desires is best for the commonwe
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al. The truly ambitious believe that it is a dog-eat-dog world, and they are distinguished by wanting to be the dogs that do the eating.
5. From here it is but a short hop to believe that those who have achieved the common goals of ambition--money, fame, power--have achieved them through corruption of a greater or lesser degree, mostly a greater. Thus all politicians in high places, thought to be ambitious, are understood to be, ipso facto, without moral scruples. How could they have such scruples--a weighty burden in a high climb--and still have risen as they have?
6.
If ambition is to be well regarded, the rewards of ambition--wealth, distinction,
control over one's destiny--must be considered worthy of the sacrifices made on ambition's behalf. If the tradition of ambition is to have vitality, it must be widely shared; and it especially must be esteemed by people who are themselves admired, the educated not least among them. The educated not least because, nowadays more than ever before, it is they who have usurped the platforms of public discussion and wield the power of the spoken and written word in newspapers, in magazines, on television. In an odd way, it is the educated who have claimed to have given up on ambition as an ideal. What is odd is that they have perhaps most benefited from ambition--if not always their own then that of their parents and grandparents. There is a heavy note of hypocrisy in this; a case of closing the barn door after the horses have escaped--with the educated themselves astride them.
7. Certainly people do not seem less interested in success and its accoutrements now than formerly. Summer homes, European travel, BMWs--the locations place names and name brands may change, but such items do not seem less in demand today than a decade or two years ago. What has happened is that people cannot own up to their dreams, as easily and openly as once they could, lest they be thought pushing, acquisitive, vulgar. Instead we are treated to fine pharisaical spectacles, which now more than ever seem in ample supply: The revolutionary lawyer quartered in the $250,000 Manhattan luxurious apartment; the critic of American materialism with a Southampton summer home; the publisher of radical books who takes his meals in three-star restaurants; the journalist advocating participatory democracy in all phases of life, whose own children are enrolled in private schools. For such people and many more perhaps not so egregious, the proper formulation is, \"Succeed at all costs but refrain from appearing ambitious.\"
8. The attacks on ambition are many and come from various angles; its public defenders are few and unimpressive, where they are not extremely unattractive. As a result, the support for ambition as a healthy impulse, a quality to be admired and inculcated in the young, is probably lower than it has ever been in the United States. This does not mean that ambition is at an end, that people no longer feel its stirrings an
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d prompting, but only that, no longer openly honored, it is less often openly professed. Consequences follow from this, of course, some of which are that ambition is driven underground, or made sly, or perverse. It can also be forced into vulgarity, as witness the blatant pratings of its contemporary promoters. Such, then, is the way things stand: on the left angry critics, on the right obtuse supporters, and in the middle, as usual, the majority of earnest people trying to get on in life.
9. Many people are naturally distrustful of ambition, feeling that it represents something intractable in human nature. Thus John Dean entitled his book about his involvement in the Watergate affair during the Nixon administration blind Ambition as if ambition were to blame for his ignoble actions, and not the constellation of qualities that make up his rather shabby character. Ambition, it must once again be underscored, is morally a two-sided street. Place next to John Dean Andrew Carnegie, who, among other philanthropic acts, bought the library of Lord Acton, at a time when Acton was in financial distress, and assigned its custodianship to Acton, who never was told who his benefactor was. Need much more be said on the subject than that, important though ambition is, there are some things that one must not sacrifice to it?
10. But going at things the other way, sacrificing ambition so as to guard against its
potential excesses, is to go at things wrongly. To discourage ambition is to discourage dreams of grandeur and greatness. All men and women are born, live, suffer, and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether
they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about.
11. It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is the linchpin of society, holding many of its disparate elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much. Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart. Ambition, as opposed to mere fantasizing about desires, implies work and discipline to achieve goals, personal and social, of a kind society cannot survive without. Ambition is intimately connected with family, for men and women not only work partly for their families; husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other, but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for their children. Yet to have a family nowadays--with birth control readily available, and inflation a good economic argument against having children--is nearly an expression of ambition in itself. Finally, though ambition was once the domain chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats, it has, in more recent times, increasingly become the domain of the middle classes. Ambition and futurity--a sense of building for tomorrow--are inextricable. Working, saving, planning--these, the daily aspects of ambition--have always been the distinguishing marks of a rising middle class. The attack against ambition is not incidentally an attack on the middle class and what it stands for. Like it or not, the middle class has done much of society's work in America; and
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it, the middle class, has from the beginning run on ambition.
12. It is not difficult to imagine a world shorn of ambition. It would probably be a
kinder world: without demands, without abrasions, without disappointments. People would have time for reflection. Such work as they did would not be for themselves but for the collectivity. Competition would never enter in. Conflict would be eliminated, tension become a thing of the past. The stress of creation would be at an end. Art would no longer be troubling, but purely celebratory in its functions. The family would become superfluous as a social unit with all its
former power for bringing about neurosis drained away. Longevity would be increased, for fewer people would die of heart attack or stroke caused by tumultuous endeavor. Anxiety would be extinct. Time would stretch on and on, with ambition long departed from the human heart.
13. Ah, how unrelievedly boring life would be! 抱负也是具有罗夏墨迹检验功能的一个词：你对其下的定义会立刻会揭示你自己的很多情况。对此，目口使最中立的著作《韦伯斯特词典》也不例外，在其新的大学版第七版中将抱负首先定义为“一种追求地位、名誉或权力的强烈的愿望”。“强烈的”这个词很快就呈现出与高雅的品味和稳定的情绪极不相称的过于热衷的色彩，而地位、名誉和权力受到相当猛烈的抨击至少长达一个世纪。毕竟，一个人可以立志于促进公益事业，减轻人们的痛苦，或是启蒙人类，尽管有些人说，正是这些使有抱负的人最不可信。
可以肯定抱负含有对荣耀、财富、爱情、声望、成就、快乐和美德的梦想。当然，人们无法预料生活是如何改变梦想与希望的。一些梦想源于自私，终于怨恨；另一些梦想源于自私，终于慷慨。梦想结果的不可预料性决不是停止梦想的理由。
当然，抱负是纯洁的，不仅仅是向上爬，而是有某个更远大的目标使它是纯粹的，难以想象抱负实际上有多么美好。就像醉鬼败坏酒的名声一样，那些唯利是图的人给抱负强加了恶名．也像对酒的喜爱一样，抱负并不总是把容易得到的心满意足考虑在内．一些人不能很好地对待抱负；它不是单单给有抱负的人，也给其他人带来悲伤。看起来仍然没有什么充分的原因使抱负变成秘密．
关于抱负所能谈论的——已经谈论的，最糟的是什么?这里(当然)是一个不全面的清单：首先，抱负经常违惯例，与今天相比，它属于个人主义更加重要及有用的年代，确实抱负如今已经过时了。抱负强烈者忽视集体，脱离社会，我行我素，不顾他人。个性与抱负是紧密相连的，有抱负的个人不会把自己及命运与其群体等同起来，他希望出入头地。有抱负的男男女女把这个世界看作是一个战场；竞争是他或她的主要情感：世界提供的值得竞争的东西有限，他或她决心得到自己的那份。此外，抱负是伪善的；抱负能说服对抱负着迷的人相信他们自己所想要的对大家都是有好处的--他们自己愿望的满足对公共福利是最有好
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处的。真正有抱负的人认为这是一个相互倾轧的世界，而且他们由于想做占上风者而与众不同。
这里我们很快就会相信那些已经实现抱负一般目标——金钱、名誉、权利的人，或多或少是通过来实现目标的，大多数是较大程度的。可是，所有被认为是很有抱负的身居高位的政客，都被认为是没有道德约束的人，这是以事实为根据的。他们怎么可能有这些顾虑---向上爬的过程中的沉重负担——又能升到他们己有的地位呢?
如果从好的方面看待抱负，抱负带来的好处---财富、声望、对自己命运的控制---那么，为抱负做出的种种牺牲应被认为是值得的。如果要使抱负的传统做法具有活力，这个抱负一定被大家共享；它也受到那些被人羡慕者的尊重，尤其是受教育者，现在比以前更是如此，这是因为正是他们霸占了公众讨论的讲台，控制了在报纸、杂志、电视上言论与著述的权利。是这些受到教育者以某种奇怪的方式声称把放弃抱负作为理想。奇怪的是也许从抱负中受益最多者正是他们，如果不总是他们自己的抱负，那么就是他们的父母或祖父母的抱负，这里有很大的虚假成分，就像马逃跑之后关上马棚的门——而且是受过教育者自己在跃马飞奔．
当然，现在人们看起来对成功及其带来的荣耀的兴趣并不是比以前减少了。避暑别墅、欧洲旅游、宝马车---场所、地名、品牌名称等或许有些变化，但是对以上这些东西的追求今天看起来并不比十年前或两年前有所减少。实际情况是，人们不能像以前那么容易地、公开地承认自己的梦想，以免会被认为有野心、贪婪、粗俗。所以展示在我们面前的反而是伪善的场景，现在看起来这种情况比以前任何时候都多：律师住的是位于曼哈顿的25万美元的豪宅；批评美国物质主义的人拥有南安普敦避暑别墅；激进书籍的出版商在三星级饭店用餐；鼓吹在人生所有阶段参与分享民主权益的记者将自己的孩子送到昂贵的私立学校就读，对这些人以及更多的或许并不是那么显眼的人来说，正确的公式是“不惜一切代价取得成功但不要显得那么野心勃勃。”
对抱负的攻击有许多并来自不同角度；它公开的辩护者很少且不令人信服，他们也不是完全没有吸引力。结果，在美国，把抱负作为一个健康的动力，一种令人羡慕并向年轻人反复灌输的品质，其支持率也许比以前更低。但这并不意味着抱负已经穷途末路，人们不再感到它振奋人心和促人向上，而是意味着抱负不再得到公开的推崇，不那么经常得到公开承认。当然，由此产生了种种后果，其中有些后果是抱负被迫转入地下，或演变成狡诈或变态。它也可能被迫变成不良行为，印证了同时代的支持者们的喧嚣与鼓噪。那么，这种格局就是：左边是愤怒的批评者，右边是迟钝的支持者，和往常一样，在中间的是绝大多数在生活中渴望成功的人们。
自然，许多人不相信抱负，感到抱负代表人类本性中难以控制的东西。因此，约翰·迪恩
给他的书命名为《盲目的抱负》，这本书是关于尼克松执政期间他牵涉进去的水
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门事件。好像对其可耻的行为负责而应该受到谴责的是抱负，而不是构成他非常卑鄙性格的品质集合。必须再次强调的是，在道德上讲抱负是把“双刃剑”。与约翰·迎恩相对的有安德鲁·卡内基，卡内基除了其他的慈善活动，还购买了阿克顿勋爵的图书馆，当时阿克顿一度处于财政危机，他还任命阿克顿为图书馆的保管，一直没有人告诉阿克顿谁是他的恩人。抱负尽管重要，但有些事情不能为了它而牺牲，关于这个主题还需要多说吗?
但是，为了预防可能的无度行为而牺牲抱负，努力以另一种方式做事的话，方法就不对。妨碍抱负就是妨碍壮丽与伟大的梦想。所有的男男女女都经历出生、生活、承受痛苦和死亡；把我们一个人与另一个人区分开的是我们的梦想，无论其是否尘世间的梦想及为了实现梦想我们所做的一切。
说抱负把许多根本不同的元素结合在一起，是社会的纽带，这似乎有点夸张。但这种夸张不算过分。如果没有抱负，社会的基本元素似乎会分崩离析。与对愿望单纯的幻想不同的
是，抱负暗含着为了达到某种个人及社会目标的工作和纪律，没有这些目标，社会就不可能生存。抱负与家庭紧密联系在一起，因为，在某种程度上，男男女女不仅仅为家庭工作。夫妻为了彼此通常都有抱负，但是为了他们的孩子却心怀一些最强烈的抱负。因为计划生育容易做到，通货膨胀也是反对生育孩子的有力的经济论证，所以今天拥有一个家庭这事本身几乎就是抱负的表现。最终，尽管抱负一度主要是君主和贵族的思维范围，在最近的年代里，它越来越多地变成中产阶级的思维范围。抱负和未来——一种创造明天的使命感一是不可分割的。工作、储蓄、计划——这些是日常的抱负——一直部是正在崛起的中产阶级的重要标志．对于抱负的抨击不是偶然地对于中产阶级及其代表的事物的抨击。不管你是否喜欢，在美国中产阶级为社会做了大量的工作；中产阶级从一开始就为抱负努力奋斗。
不难想象一个完全失去抱负的世界很可能是一个更加友善的世界：没有强求，没有冲突，没有失望。人们会有时间去思考．他们所做的工作不是为了自己，而是为了集体。竞争永远不会介入，冲突将被消除，紧张将成为过去．创造的压力将结束，艺术也将不再令人烦恼，纯粹只用于庆典。随着过去让人心神疲惫之力的逐渐消逝，作为一个社会单位，家庭将变得多余。由于很少有人会因需要做出极大的努力而患心脏病或中风从而导致死亡，长寿者将增加，焦虑也将消失。时间会向前延伸，人们心中的抱负也随之消失殆尽．
唉，生活会变得多么沉闷而枯燥啊！
There is a strong view that holds that success is a myth, and ambition therefore a sham. Does this mean that success does not really exist? That achievement is at bottom empty?
有一种盛行的观点认为，成功是一种神话，因此抱负亦属虚幻。这是不是说实际上并不存在成功？成就本身就是一场空？
But even the most cynical secretly admit that success exists; that achievement counts for a great deal; and that the true myth is that the actions of men and women
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are useless. To believe otherwise is to take on a point of view that is likely to be deranging. It is, in its implications, to remove all motives for competence, interest in attainment, and regard for posterity.
但即使是最为愤世嫉俗的人暗地里也承认，成功确实存在，成就的意义举足轻重，而把世上男男女女的所作所为说成是徒劳无功才是真正的无稽之谈。认为成功不存在的观点很可能造成混乱。这种观点本意是让所有提高能力的动机一笔勾销，求取业绩的兴趣和对子孙后代的关注。
We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death.
我们无法选择出生，无法选择父母，无法选择出生的历史时期与国家，或是成长的周遭环境。我们大多数人都无法选择死亡，无法选择死亡的时间或条件。 But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live: courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or in drift. We decide what is important and what is trivial in life. We decide that what makes us significant is either what we do or what we refuse to do. 但是在这些无法选择之中，我们的确可以选择自己的生活方式：是勇敢无畏还是胆小怯懦，是光明磊落还是厚颜无耻，是目标坚定还是随波逐流。我们决定生活中哪些至关重要，哪些微不足道。我们决定，用以显示我们自身重要性的，不是我们做了什么，就是我们拒绝做些什么。
But no matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. And as we decide and choose, so are our lives formed. In the end, forming our own destiny is what ambition is about.
但是不论世界对我们所做的选择和决定有多么漠不关心，这些选择和决定终究是我们自己做出的。我们决定，我们选择。而当我们决定和选择时，我们的生活便得以形成。最终构筑我们命运的就是抱负之所在。
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第9课 长期活着的习惯
The Long Habit Lewis Thomas
We continue to share with our remotest ancestors the most tangled and evasive attitudes about death, despite the great distance we have come in understanding some of the profound aspects of biology. We have as much distaste for talking about personal death as for thinking about it; it is an indelicacy, like talking in mixed company about venereal disease or abortion in the old days. Death on a grand scale does not bother us in the same special way: we can sit around a dinner table and discuss war, involving 60 million volatilized human deaths, as though we were talking about bad weather; we can watch abrupt bloody death every day, in color, on films and television, without blinking back a tear. It is when the numbers of dead are very small, and very close, that we begin to think in scurrying circles. At the very center of the problem is the naked cold deadness of one’s own self, the only reality in nature of which we can have absolute certainty, and it is unmentionable, unthinkable. We may be even less willing to face the issue at first hand than our predecessors because of a secret new hope that maybe it will go away. We like to think, hiding the thought, that with all the marvelous ways in which we seem now to lead nature around by the nose, perhaps we can avoid the central problem if we just become, next year, say, a bit smarter.
“The long habit of living,” said Thomas Browne, “indisposeth us to dying.” These days, the habit has become an addiction: we are hooked on living; the tenacity of its grip on us, and ours on it, grows in intensity. We cannot think of giving it up, even when living loses its zest—even when we have lost the zest for zest.
We have come a long way in our technologic capacity to put death off, and it is imaginable that we might learn to stall it for even longer periods, perhaps matching the life-spans of the Abkhasian Russians, who are said to go on, springily, for a century and a half. If we can rid ourselves of some of our chronic, degenerative diseases, and cancer, strokes, and coronaries, we might go on and on. It sounds attractive and reasonable, but it is no certainty. If we became free of disease, we would make a much better run of it for the last decade or so, but might still terminate on about the same schedule as now. We may be like the genetically different lines of mice, or like Hayflick’s different tissue-culture lines, programmed to die after a pre-determined number of days， clocked by their genomes. If this is the way it is, some of us will continue to wear out and come unhinged in the sixth decade, and some much later, depending on genetic timetables.
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If we ever do achieve freedom from most of today’s diseases, or even complete freedom from disease, we will perhaps terminate by drying out and blowing away on a light breeze, but we will still die.
Most of my friends do not like this way of looking at it. They prefer to take it for granted that we only die because we get sick, with one lethal ailment or another, and if we did not have our diseases we might go on indefinitely. Even biologists choose to think this about themselves, despite the evidences of the absolute inevitability of death that surround their professional lives. Everything dies, all around, trees, plankton, lichens, mice, whales, flies, mitochondria. In the simplest creatures it is sometimes difficult to see it as death, since the strands of replicating DNA they leave behind are more conspicuously the living parts of themselves than with us (not that it is fundamentally any different, but it seems so). Flies do not develop a ward round of diseases that carry them off, one by one. They simply age, and die, like flies. We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time. Something will surely have to be found to take the place of sitting on the porch re-examining one’s watch. Perhaps we would not be so anxious to prolong life if we did not detest so much the sickness of withdrawal. It is astonishing how little information we have about this universal process, with all the other dazzling advances in biology. It is almost as though we wanted not to know about it. Even if we could imagine the act of death in isolation, without any preliminary stage of being struck down by disease, we would be fearful of it.
There are signs that medicine may be taking a new interest in the process, partly from curiosity, partly from an embarrassed realization that we have not been handling this aspect of disease with as much skill as physicians once displayed, back in the days before they became convinced that disease was their solitary and sometimes defeatable enemy. It used to be the hardest and most important of all the services of a good doctor to be on hand at the time of death and to provide comfort, usually in the home. Now it is done in hospitals, in secrecy (one of the reasons for the increased fear of death these days may be that so many people are totally unfamiliar with it; they never actually see it happen in real life). Some of our technology permits us to deny its existence, and we maintain flickers of life for long stretches in one community of cells or another, as though wewere keeping a flag flying. Death is not a sudden-all-at-once affair; cells go down in sequence, one by one, You can, if you like,
recover great numbers of them many hours after the lights have gone out, and grow them out in cultures. It takes hours, even days, before the irreversible word finally gets around to all the provinces.
We may be about to rediscover that dying is not such a bad thing to do after all. Sir William Osler took this view: he disapproved of people who spoke of the agony of death, maintaining that there was no such thing.
In a nineteenth-century memoir on an expedition in Africa, there is a story by David Livingston about his own experience of near-death. He was caught by a lion, crushed across the chest in the animal’s great jaws, and saved in the instant by a lucky shot from a friend. Later, he remembered the episode in clear detail. He was so amazed by the extraordinary sense of peace, calm, and total painlessness associated with being killed that he constructed a theory that all creatures are provided with a protective physiologic mechanism, switched on at the verge of death, carrying them through in a haze of tranquillity.
I have seen agony in death only once, in a patient with rabies; he remained acutely aware of every stage in the process of his own disintegration over a twenty-four-hour period, right up to his final moment. It was as though, in the special neuropathology of rabies, the switch had been prevented from turning.
We will be having new opportunities to learn more about the physiology of death at first hand, from the increasing numbers of cardiac patients who have been through the whole process and then back again. Judging from what has been found out thus far, from the first generation of people resuscitated from cardiac standstill (already termed the Lazarus syndrome), Osler seems to have been right. Those who remember parts or all of their episodes do not recall any fear, or anguish. Several people who remained conscious throughout, while appearing to have been quite dead, could only describe a remarkable sensation of detachment. One man underwent coronary occlusion with cessation of the heart and dropped for all practical purposes dead, in front of a hospital; within a few minutes his heart had been restarted by electrodes and he breathed his way back into life. According to his account, the strangest thing was that there were so many people around him, moving so urgently, handling his body with such excitement, while all his awareness was of quietude.
In a recent study of the reaction to dying in patients with obstructive disease of the lungs, it was concluded that the process was considerably more shattering for the professional observers than the observed. Most of the patients appeared to be preparing themselves with equanimity for death, as though intuitively familiar with
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the business. One elderly woman reported that the only painful and distressing part of the process was in being interrupted; on several occasions she was provided with conventional therapeutic measures to maintain oxygenation or restore fluids and electrolytes, and each time she found the experience of coming back harrowing; she deeply resented the interference with her dying.
I find myself surprised by the thought that dying is an all-right thing to do, but perhaps it should not surprise. It is, after all, the most ancient and fundamental of biologic functions, with its mechanisms worked out with the same attention to detail, the same provision for the advantage of the organism, the same abundance of genetic information for guidance through the stages, that we have long since become accustomed to finding in all the crucial acts of living.
Very well. But even so, if the transformation is a coordinated, integrated physiologic process in its initial, local stages, there is still that permanent vanishing of consciousness to be accounted for. Are we to be stuck forever with this problem? Whereon earth does it go? Is it simply stopped dead in. its tracks, lost in humus, wasted? Considering the tendency of nature to find uses for complex and intricate mechanisms, this seems to me unnatural. I prefer to think of it as somehow separated off at the filaments of its attachment, and then drawn like an easy breath back into the membrane of its origin, a fresh memory for a biospherical nervous system, but I have no data on the matter.
This is for another science, another day. It may turn out, as some scientists suggest, that we are forever precluded from investigating consciousness by a sort of indeterminacy principle that stipulates that the very act of looking will make it twitch and blur out of sight. If this is true, we will never learn. I envy some of my friends who are convinced about telepathy; oddly enough, it is my European scientist acquaintances who believe it most freely and take it most lightly. All their aunts have received Communications, and there they sit, with proof of the motility of consciousness at their fingertips, and the making of a new science. It is discouraging to have had the wrong aunts, and never the ghost of a message.
我们将继续同我们的远古的祖先一样，对死亡更多的是复杂的和说不清的态度，尽管我们对生物学深奥的问题的理解已经经历了漫长的历程。我们对于谈论和想起个人死亡都是非常厌恶的；谈论个人死亡是粗俗的，就像过去在有男女混合的公司里谈论性病或堕胎一样。在同样的特殊情况下，大规模的死亡不会烦扰我们：我们可能坐在餐桌边，讨论有六千万人死亡的战争，就好像我们正在谈论一个坏的天气一样；我们可能每天都能在彩色电视和电影里看到突然血腥的死亡
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而不会流一点点眼泪。当死亡的数目非常小和非常集中时，我们开始变得焦虑。我们自己赤裸裸的冰冷的死亡是这个问题的重点，我们绝对会死是大自然中永恒的事实，它是说不出口的、不能想象的。我们甚至比我们的祖先还不愿意直接面对这个问题，因为暗含着我们可能不会死的希望。我们可能以令人惊讶的方式暗自思索，我们现在好像能驾驭自然，如果我们能变得更聪明一点，或许就在明年，可能我们能避免面对这个重要问题。
托马斯.布朗说：“长期活着的习惯”，“使我们对死亡产生厌误，”当今，这种习惯已经变成瘾了，我们沉迷于活着，活着的想法禁锢我们的顽固度，与我们紧握活着想法的顽固度，是同等增长的。甚至当生活已经丢失了动力的时候——甚至我们已经丢失追求激情的激情，我们也不可能想着放弃生命。
在推迟死亡的技术方面，我们已经历了漫长的历程，难以想象的是我们学者去推迟死亡，甚至能活更长，或许能达到像俄罗斯的阿布哈西亚人的寿命，据说他们可以充满活力的活到150岁。如果我们能使自己摆脱一些慢性病，衰退疾病，癌症，中风，及心血管疾病，我们可能一直活下去。它好像是有诱惑力的和合理的，但是它不符合事实。如果我们不再染病，我们就可以在生命的后几十年生活的更好。但是我们也会在同样的年龄死去。我们可能会像基因不同的老鼠，或类似的海弗里克的不同的组织培养流程一样，在由它们的基因组所预定的天数后，注定死去。如果这是死亡的方式，我们中一些人将继续耗干，并在六十年后崩溃，而另一些人则由于基因所决定的时间表而更晚些死亡。
如果我们确实可以摆脱大多数现今的疾病，或者甚至完全摆脱它们，我们最终仍将被耗干，被一阵微风吹散，我们仍然回死去。
我的大多数朋友不喜欢这种方式来看待它。他们宁愿理所当然的认为我们死只是因为我们生病了，患有一个致命的或其他的疾病，如果没有生病，我们可能会无限期地生活下去。甚至生物学家自己也倾向于这样认为，尽管，绝对不可避免的死亡的证据在他们的职业生活中到处可见。周围的万物皆有一死，比如树木，浮游生物，地衣，老鼠，鲸鱼，苍蝇，线粒体。对于最简单的生物，有时很难看到它的死亡，因为它们的活着的部分所留下的链DNA的复制比我们的更为明显（这不是根本上的什么不同，但看上去如此）。苍蝇在医院里面无法存活，那里它们会被走，一个接一个。它们只是简单的衰老、死亡，像苍蝇一样。
我们渴望继续生活，即使面临无力的证据表明，很长，很长的生命在我们迄今已安排的社会不一定是愉快的。如果我们可以推迟寻找新的技术一会儿，直到发现一些可以在空闲时间做的令人满意的事情，我们将是幸运的。一定要找到一些事来取代坐在门廊重新检查自己的手表（消极的等待死亡）。
如果我们没有这么讨厌死亡，也许我们不会如此急于延长生命。令人惊异的是与生物学中所有其他耀眼的尖端进步一样，我们对这一普遍的过程掌握的信息很少。几乎就像我们不想知道它。即使我们可以单独的想象死亡的行为，如果没有任何被疾病所影响的初期阶段，我们将会恐惧疾病。
有迹象表明，药物在死亡的过程中发挥了新的作用，部分来自其本身的影响，
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部分来自我们尴尬地认识到，我们还没有采用如同外科医生层间展示的那样处理这方面的疾病，早在数天之前，他们相信这种疾病是他们唯一的有时可以战胜的敌人。过去，是最难的和最重要的是在临死之际有一个很好的医生在身旁服务，并提供安慰，这通常在家里。现在这些都是在医院，在保密的情况下（近来对死亡恐惧的增加的原因之一也许是，如此多的人是对死亡完全陌生的；他们从未真正看到死亡发生在现实生活中）。有些医疗技术可使我们不再相信死亡的存在，于是（在死亡降临时，）我们（还）在身体的这一部位或那一部位极力长时间地延续生命的火花，就仿佛是在高举战旗奋斗到最后一息。死亡并非是一种突发行为，细胞是一个一个顺序死去的。 只要你愿意，在生命之火熄灭多时之后，仍可使大量细胞复活，并培育在营养液里。几小时，甚至几天之后，不可逆转的死亡指令才会传至所有的部位。
我们可能将重新发现，死亡并非一件坏事。威廉.奥斯勒爵士持有这一观点，他不赞成将死亡说成一种极大的痛苦的人，并维护说有没有这回事。
在19世纪的一本有个在非洲远征的论文集中，有一个有关探险者的故事，他被一个狮子抓住，整个胸部被狮子硕大的嘴巴咬穿了，而最终一瞬被一个朋友射来的幸运的一所救。之后，他清晰的回想了整个过程的细节。他感到如此惊奇，因为他当时感觉非常的安宁与平静，并且完全没有痛苦。结合他这种部分的经验，他创立了一个理论，即所有的动物提供保护的生理机制，在濒临死亡边缘时启动，来室他们在宁静的朦胧状态中度过（死亡）。
我似乎对于死亡的痛苦只有一次，就是一个得狂犬病的病人，在仍清楚地意识到他自己的衰退的每一个过程的情况下度过了24小时，一直到他临终的那一刻。这就仿佛在狂犬病这样特殊的神经病理学的病，启动的开关已无法转动。
从越来越多的经历了整个死亡过程而有复活的心脏病患者，我们将有新的机会直接的更多地了解生理死亡。从迄今所发现的来判断，从第一代人从心脏停顿中复苏（已称为拉撒路综合征），奥斯勒似乎是正确的。这些记得他们部分或全部的死亡过程的人回忆不到任何恐惧，或痛苦。有一些在整个过程中保持清醒，虽然看上去已经是死了的人，只能描述一个显著的超然的感觉。一名在医院门口经历了心肌梗塞而心脏停止倒下，实际上死亡的男子，在几分钟之内他的心脏接受电击而重新跳动，他又重新活过来开始呼吸，而他自己觉得，最为奇怪事情是，有如此多的人在他周围，如此紧急，很激动的处理着他的身体，而他所有的意识是宁静。
在最近进行的一次对死亡过程反应的研究中，对患有阻碍性的肺病病人进行了调查。这次调查的结论表明：死亡的过程会使职业观察者更为心碎，而被观察者则不会。大多数病人似乎都带着一种镇定的心态在准备着死去，好像本能的熟悉死的过程。有一位上了年纪的女人报告说，在整个过程中唯一让她感到痛苦的事情就是死亡的过程被中断。好几次别人给她提供了传统的治疗手段来维持她的吸氧，或重建其体液和电解质水平。每次她都发现活过来的这种经历极其痛苦，她非常憎恨别人介入她的死亡过程。
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死亡实际上是一件我们可以去做得好的事情，想到这一点我会感到惊奇。但是这或许不应该是一件感到惊奇的事情。毕竟，死亡是最古老、最基本的生物机能，其机理是我们在所有生命发展转折关头早就司空见惯的，同所有生命机理一样，它同样注意到了每一个细节，同样是为了有益于机体的发展，同样以大量的遗传信息引导机体一步步从出生走向死亡。
但即使这样，如果这个转变在它最初的局部的阶段是一种协调的不可分割的生理过程的话，仍然有一个需要说明的问题，即意识的永久性的消失的问题。我们是否一直都无法解决这个问题呢？意识究竟去了哪里？是不是在它的轨道上遇死而停止了？消失在腐殖质中腐烂了？考虑到上帝（大自然）一般都会为一些复杂而精巧的机制找到用途，我认为这是不太可能的。我倒愿意以为，意识脱离了与身体维系的细丝，仿佛一缕清气，被召回至冥冥起源，作为人类神经系统的最新信息被储存了起来。然而，我并没有证据。 （意识去了哪里）那是另外一门科学另外一个时代去研究的内容。正如一些科学家所说的那样，将来会有证据证明我们将会永远被排除在对意识的调查之外。由于有一种不确定性的原则规定了要调查意识的行为本身就会使意识变得更加模糊，更加难以了解。如果真是如此，我们将永远无法了解意识去了哪里。我羡慕我的一些朋友，他们对通灵深信不疑。奇怪的是，正是我的熟知的欧洲科学家，他们对巫术更加轻信。他们的巫师都已经收到了死去的人传来的信息，那些科学家们就只要坐在那里，他们手头上就有了表明意识流的这种数据，也有了构成新学科的材料。让我感到泄气的是我没有这样的巫师，也永远收不到神灵传来的信息。
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LESSON 10两种文化 THE TWO CULTURES
It is about three years since I made a sketch in print of a problem which had been on my mind for some time. It was a problem I could not avoid just because of the circumstances of my life. The only credentials I had to ruminate on the subject at all came through those circumstances, through nothing more than a set of chances. Anyone with similar experience would have seen much the same things and I think made very much the same comments about them. It just happened to be an unusual experience. By training I was a scientist: by vocation I was a writer. That was all. It was a piece of luck, if you like, that arose through coming from a poor home.
But my personal history isn't the point now. All that I need say is that I came to Cambridge and did a bit of research here at a time of major scientific activity. I was privileged to have a ringside view of one of the most wonderful creative periods in all physics. And it happened through the flukes of war— including meeting W. L. Bragg in the buffet on Kettering station on a very cold morning in 1939, which had a determining influence on my practical life—that I was able, and indeed morally forced, to keep that ringside view ever since. So for thirty years I have had to be in touch with scientists not only out of curiosity, but as part of a working existence. During the same thirty years I was trying to shape the books I wanted to write, which in due course took me among writers.
There have been plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with scientists and then gone off at night with some literary colleagues. I mean that literally. I have had, of course, intimate friends among both scientists and writers. It was through living among these groups and much more, I think, through moving regularly from one to the other and back again that I got occupied with the problem of what, long before I put it on paper, I christened to myself as the 'two cultures'. For constantly I felt I was moving among two groups—comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington House or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean. In fact, one had travelled much further than across an ocean—because after a few thousand Atlantic miles, one found Greenwich Village talking precisely the same language as Chelsea, and both having about as much communication with M.I.T. as though the scientists spoke nothing but an. For this is not just our problem; owing to some of our educational and social idiosyncrasies, it is slightly exaggerated here, owing to another English social peculiarity it is slightly minimised; by and large this is a problem of the entire West.
By this I intend something serious. I am not thinking of the pleasant story of how
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one of the more convivial Oxford great dons—I have heard the story attributed to A. L. Smith—came over to Cambridge to dine. The date is perhaps the 10s. I think it must have been at St. John's, or possibly Trinity. Anyway, Smith was sitting at the right hand of the President—or Vice-Master—and he was a man who liked to include all round him in the conversation, although he was not immediately encouraged by the expressions of his neighbours. He addressed some cheerful Oxonian chit-chat at the one opposite to him, and got a grunt. He then tried the man on his own right hand and got another grunt. Then, rather to his surprise, one looked at the other and said, \"Do you know what he's talking about?\" \"I haven't the least idea.\" At this, even Smith was getting out of his depth. But the President, acting as a social emollient, put him at his ease by saying, \"Oh, those are mathematicians! We never talk to them.\" No, I intend something serious.
I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups. When I say the intellectual life, I mean to include also a large part of our practical life, because I should be the last person to suggest the two can at the deepest level be distinguished. I shall come back to the practical life a little later. Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, who incidentally while no one was looking took to referring to themselves as 'intellectuals' as though there were no others. I remember G. H. Hardy once remarking to me in mild puzzlement, some time in the 1930s: \"Have you noticed how the word 'intellectual' is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn't include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac or Adrian or me. It does seem rather odd, don't y'know?\".
Literary intellectuals at one pole—at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension—sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can't find much common ground. Non-scientists tend to think of scientists as brash and boastful. They hear Mr. T. S. Eliot, who just for these illustrations we can take as an archetypal figure, saying about his attempts to revive verse-drama that we can hope for very little, but that he would feel content if he and his co-workers could prepare the ground for a new Kyd or a new Greene. That is the tone, restricted and constrained, with which literary intellectuals are at home: it is the subdued voice of their culture. Then they hear a much louder voice, that of another archetypal figure, Rutherford, trumpeting:\"This is the heroic age of science! This is the Elizabethan age!\" Many of us heard that, and a good many other statements beside which that was mild; and we weren't left in any doubt whom Rutherford was casting for the role of Shakespeare. What is hard for the literary intellectuals to understand, imaginatively or intellectually,
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is that he was absolutely right.
And compare \"this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper—incidentally, one of the least likely scientific prophecies ever made—compare that with Rutherford's famous repartee, \"Lucky fellow, Rutherford, always on the crest of the wave.\" \"Well, I made the wave, didn't I?\"
The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man's condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential moment. And so on. Anyone with a mild talent for invective could produce plenty of this kind of subterranean back-chat. On each side there is some of it which is not entirely baseless. It is all destructive. Much of it rests on misinterpretations which are dangerous. I should like to deal with two of the most profound of these now, one on each side.
First, about the scientists' optimism. This is an accusation which has been made so often that it has become a platitude. It has been made by some of the acutest non-scientific minds of the day. But it depends upon a confusion between the individual experience and the social experience, between the individual condition of man and his social condition. Most of the scientists I have known well have felt—just as deeply as the non-scientists I have known well—that the individual condition of each of us is tragic. Each of us is alone:
sometimes we escape from solitariness, through love or affection or perhaps creative moments, but those triumphs of life are pools of light we make for ourselves while the edge of the road is black: each of us dies alone. Some scientists I have known have had faith in revealed religion. Perhaps with them the sense of the tragic condition is not so strong. I don't know. With most people of deep feeling, however high-spirited and happy they are, sometimes most with those who are happiest and most high-spirited, it seems to be right in the fibres, part of the weight of lift. That is as true of the scientists I have known best as of anyone at all.
But nearly all of them—and this is where the colour of hope genuinely comes in—would see no reason why, just because the individual condition is tragic, so must the social condition he. Each of us is solitary: each of us dies alone: all right, that's a fate against which we can't struggle—but there is plenty in our condition which is not fate and against which we are less than human unless we do struggle.
Most of our fellow human beings, for instance, are underfed and die before their time. In the crudest terms, that is the social condition. There is a moral trap which comes through the insight into man's loneliness: it tempts one to sit back, complacent in one's unique tragedy, and let the others go without a meal.
As a group, the scientists fall into that trap less than others. They are inclined to
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be impatient to see if something can be done: and inclined to think that it can be done, until it's proved otherwise. That is their real optimism, and it's an optimism that the rest of us badly need.
In reverse, the same spirit, tough and good and determined to fight it out at the side of their brother men, has made scientists regard the other culture's social attitudes as contemptible. That is too facile: some of them are, but they are a temporary phase and not to be taken as representative.
I remember being cross-examined by a scientist of distinction. \"Why do most writers take on social opinions which would have been thought distinctly uncivilised and démodé at the time of the Plantagenets? Wasn't that true of most of the famous twentieth-century writers? Yeats, Pound, Wyndham Lewis, nine out of ten of those who have dominated literary sensibility in our time—weren't they not only politically silly, but politically wicked? Didn't the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?\" I thought at the time, and I still think. that the correct answer was not to defend the indefensible. It was no use saying that Yeats, according to friends whose judgment I trust, was a man of singular magnanimity of character, as well as a great poet. It was no use denying the facts, which are broadly true. The honest answer was that there is, in fact, a connection, which literary persons were culpably slow to see, between some kinds of early twentieth-century art and the most imbecile expressions of anti-social feeling.3 That was one reason, among many, why some of us turned our backs on the art and tried to hack out a new or different way for ourselves.4 But though many of those writers dominated literary sensibility for a generation, that is no longer so, or at least to nothing like the same extent.
Literature changes more slowly than science. It hasn't the same automatic corrective, and so its misguided periods are longer. But it is ill-considered of scientists to judge writers on the evidence of the period 1914-30. Those are two of the misunderstandings between the two cultures. I should say, since I began to talk about them—the two cultures, that is—I have had some criticism. Most of my scientific acquaintances think that there is something in it, and so do most of the practising artists I know. But I have been argued with by non-scientists of strong down-to-earth interests. Their view is that it is an over-simplification, and that if one is going to talk in these terms there ought to be at least three cultures. They argue that, though they are not scientists themselves, they would share a good deal of the scientific feeling.
They would have as little use—perhaps, since they knew more about it, even less use—for the recent literary culture as the scientists themselves. J. H. Plumb, Alan Bullock and some of my American sociological friends have said that they vigorously refuse to be corralled in a cultural box with people they wouldn't be seen dead with, or to be regarded as helping to produce a climate which would not permit of social hope.
I respect those arguments.
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The number 2 is a very dangerous number: that is why the dialectic is a dangerous process. Attempts to divide anything into two ought to be regarded with much suspicion. I have thought a long time about going in for further refinements: but in the end I have decided against. I was searching for something a little more than a dashing metaphor, a good deal less than a cultural map: and for those purposes the two cultures is about right, and subtilising any more would bring more disadvantages than it's worth.
At one pole, the scientific culture really is a culture, not only in an intellectual but also in an anthropological sense. That is, its members need not, and of course often do not, always completely understand each other; biologists more often than not will have a pretty hazy idea of contemporary physics; but there are common attitudes, common standards and patterns of behaviour, common approaches and assumptions. This goes surprisingly wide and deep. It cuts across other mental patterns, such as those of religion or politics or class.
Statistically, I suppose slightly more scientists are in religious terms unbelievers, compared with the rest of the intellectual world—though there are plenty who are religious, and that seems to be increasingly so among the young. Statistically also, slightly more scientists are on the Left in open politics though again, plenty always have called themselves conservativres; and that also seems to be more common among the young. Compared with the rest of the intellectual world, considerably more scientists in this country and probably in the U.S. come from poor families.5 Yet over a whole range of thought and behaviour, none of that matters very much. In their working, and in much of their emotional life, their attitudes are closer to other scientists than to non-scientists who in religion or politics or class have the same labels as themselves. If I were to risk a piece of shorthand, I should say that naturally they had the future in their bones.
They may or may not like it, but they have it. That was as true of the conservatives J.J. Thomson and Lindemann as of the radicals Einstein or Blackett: as true of the Christian A. H. Compton as of the materialist Bernal: of the aristocrats de Broglie or Russell as of the proletarian Faradav: of those born rich, like Thomas Merton or Victor Rothschild, as of Rutherford, who was the son of an odd-job handyman. Without thinking about it, they respond alike.
That is what culture means.
At the other pole, the spread of attitudes is wider. It is obvious that between the two, as one moves through intellectual society from the physicists to the literary intellectuals, there are all kinds of tones of feeling on the way. But I believe the pole of total incomprehension of science radiates its influence on all the rest. That total incomprehension gives, much more pervasively than we realise, living in it, an unscientific flavour to the whole 'traditional' culture, and that unscientific flavour is
often, much more than we admit, on the point of turning anti-scientific. The feelings of one pole become the anti-feelings of the other. If the scientists have the future in their bones, then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist.6 It is the traditional culture, to an extent remarkably little diminished by the emergence of the scientific one, which manages the western world.
This polarisation is sheer loss to us all. To us as people, and to our society. It is at the same time practical and intellectual and creative loss, and I repeat that it is false to imagine that those three considerations are clearly separable.
But for a moment I want to concentrate on the intellectual loss.
The degree of incomprehension on both sides is the kind of joke which has gone sour. There are about fifty thousand working scientists in the country and about eighty thousand professional engineers or applied scientists. During the war and in the years since, my colleagues and I have had to interview somewhere between thirty to forty thousand of these—that is, about 25 percent.
The number is large enough to give us a fair sample, though of the men we talked to most would still be under forty. We were able to find out a certain amount of what they read and thought about. I confess that even I, who am fond of them and respect them, was a bit shaken. We hadn't quite expected that the links with the traditional culture should be so tenuous, nothing more than a formal touch of the cap.
As one would expect, some of the very best scientists had and have plenty of energy and interest to spare, and we came across several who had read everything that literary people talk about. But that's very rare. Most of the rest, when one tried to probe for what books they had read, would modestly confess, \"Well, I've tried a bit of Dickens\rather as though Dickens were an extraordinarily esoteric, tangled and dubiously rewarding writer, something like Rainer Maria Rilke. In fact that is exactly how they do regard him: we thought that discovery, that Dickens had been transformed into the type-specimen of literary incomprehensibility, was one of the oddest results of the whole exercise.
But of course, in reading him, in reading almost any writer whom we should value, they are just touching their caps to the traditional culture. They have their own culture, intensive, rigorous, and constantly in action. This culture contains a great deal of argument, usually much more rigorous, and almost always at a higher conceptual level, than literary persons' arguments— even though the scientists do cheerfully use words in senses which literary persons don't recognise, the senses are exact ones, and when they talk about 'subjective', 'objective', 'philosophy' or 'progressive',7 they know what they mean, even though it isn't what one is accustomed to expect.
Remember, these are very intelligent men. Their culture is in many ways an exacting and admirable one. It doesn't contain much art, with the exception, an important exception, of music. Verbal exchange, insistent argument. Longplaying
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records. Colour-photography. The ear, to some extent the eye. Books, very little, though perhaps not many would go so far as one hero, who perhaps I should admit was further down the scientific ladder than the people I've been talking about—who, when asked what books he read, replied firmly and confidently: \"Books? I prefer to use my books as tools.\" It was very hard not to let the mind wander—what sort of tool would a book make? Perhaps a hammer? A primitive digging instrument?
Of books, though, very little. And of the books which to most literary persons are bread and butter, novels, history, poetry, plays, almost nothing at all. It isn't that they're not interested in the psychological or moral or social life.
In the social life, they certainly are, more than most of us. In the moral, they are by and large the soundest group of intellectuals we have: there is a moral component right in the grain of science itself, and almost all scientists form their own judgments of the moral life. In the psychological they have as much interest as most of us, though occasionally I fancy they come to it rather late. It isn't that they lack the interests. It is much more that the whole literature of the traditional culture doesn't seem to them relevant to those interests. They are, of course, dead wrong. As a result. their imaginative understanding is less than it could be. They are self-impoverished.
But what about the other side? They are impoverished too—perhaps more seriously, because they are vainer about it. They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of 'culture', as though the natural order didn't exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all. Even if they want to have it, they can't. It is rather as though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tone-deaf. Except that this tone-deafness doesn't come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training.
As with the tone-deaf, they don't know what they miss. They give a pitying chuckle at the news of scientists who have never read a major work of English literature. They dismiss them as ignorant specialists. Yet their own ignorance and their own specialisation is just as startling. A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of Have you read a work of Shakespare's?
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I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, What do you niean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read?—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
Just one more of those questions, that my non-scientific friends regard as being in the worst of taste. Cambridge is a university where scientists and nonscientists meet every night at dinner.8 About two years ago, one of the most astonishing discoveries in the whole history of science was brought off. I don't mean the sputnik—that was admirable for quite different reasons, as a feat of organisation and a triumphant use of existing knowledge. No, I mean the discovery at Columbia by Yang and Lee. It is a piece of work of the greatest beauty and originality, but the result is so startling that one forgets how beautiful the thinking is. It makes us think again about some of the fundamentals of the physical world. Intuition, common sense—they are neatly stood on their heads. The result is usually known as the non-conservation of parity. If there were any serious communication between the two cultures, this experiment would have been talked about at every High Table in Cambridge.
Was it? I wasn't here: but I should like to ask the question.
There seems then to be no place where the cultures meet. I am not going to waste time saying that this is a pity. It is much worse than that. Soon I shall come to some practical consequences. But at the heart of thought and creation we are letting some of our best chances go by default. The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures—of two galaxies, so far as that goes— ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the break-throughs came. The chances are there now. But they are there, as it were, in a vacuum, because those in the two cultures can't talk to each other. It is bizarre how very little of twentieth-century science has been assimilated into twentieth-century art. Now and then one used to find poets conscientiously using scientific expressions, and getting them wrong—there was a time when 'refraction' kept cropping up in verse in a mystifying fashion, and when 'polarised light' was used as though writers were under the illusion that it was a specially admirable kind of light.
Of course, that isn't the way that science could be any good to art. It has got to be assimilated along with, and as part and parcel of, the whole of our mental experience, and used as naturally as the rest.
大约三年前，我发表了一篇文章.谈了我对一个思考了多年的问题的粗略看法。由于我自身的经历，我不能回避这一问题。正是这些可能只是偶然的情况造成的经历，使我觉得有资格研究这一课题。其他有类似经历的概也会持
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有与我很接近的想法，并做出几乎相同的评论。这恰好是一个不同寻常的经历。按照学历，我是一个科学家，按照职业，我是一个作家。这就是我的全部。对我这么一个出身贫寒的人可以说是一件幸事。
但是，我的个人简历不是现在要讨论的。我要说的是，在科学太发展的时期，我来到了剑桥，并且在这里做了点研究工作。我很有幸在物理学发展史中最具创新的时期之一能身临其境亲眼目睹。战争期间的一些偶然幸事，其中包括1939年一个寒冷的早晨，与W·L·布拉格在凯特灵车站餐厅的相遇—这一相遇对我此后的人生有决定性的影响，使我从那以后能够并且在道义上站在物理学的前沿。
30年来，我一直与科学家保持联系。这不只是出于好奇，而是我工作经历的一部分。在这30年中，我一直试图勾划出我要写的书，因此不知不觉中它使我走人作家群中。
在很长一段日子里，我是白天与科学家在一起工作，晚上则与一些文学同事在一起。事实就是这样。当然，在科学家与作家当中，我都有知心朋友。正是由于我生活在这两种群休之中，或者更进一步说，经常与这两种群体打交道，使我在写文章之前的很长一段时间里，能一直思考这一我称之为“两种文化”的问题。我总觉得我在这两个群体之间游移，他们的才智接近、种族相同、社会出身差别不大、收入相差不多，但却几乎没什么沟通。他们在学术、道德和
不，我指的是严重的事情。我相信整个西方社会的知识生活日益被分化成两极群体，，我所说的知识生活也包括我们现实生活的一大部分，我将在稍后讨论现实生话。在这两极群体中一极是文学知识分子，值得一提的是，他们趁别人不注意时，就将自己称为“知识分子”，好像没有其他人可称为“知识分子”似的。我记得早在1930年。G.H.哈代就曾对我表达了他的一个不大不小的疑惑:“你是否注意到了如今“知识分子”一词是怎么用的吗?它似乎有一个新的定义，而这显然不包括卢瑟福。艾丁顿、狄拉克、阿德里安或我。这看起来相当奇怪，你不知道吗?”
文学知识分子在一极，而在另一极是科学家，其中最具代表性的是数学家和物理学家。在这两极之间是一条充满互不理解的鸿沟，有时(特别是在年轻人中)是敌意和不喜欢，但大多数是由于缺乏了解。他们互相对对方存有偏见。他们的态度是如此的不同，以至于即使在情感层面上也找不到共同之处。非科学家大都认为科学家傲慢和爱吹牛。
T·S·艾略特可作为文学知识分子的一个典型人物，人们常听到他谈起想要复兴诗剧，尽管人们对此并不抱什么希望，但他认为如果他和他的同事能为新的吉德(英国戏剧家)和新的格林(英国戏剧家)的再现而做点工作的话，他会感到欣慰。正是这种拘谨和压抑的格调使文学知识分子感到很自在。然而，相对文学知识分子，人们听到的却是以卢瑟福为典型的科学家的高亢声音:“这是科学的英雄时代! 这是伊丽莎白时代!”我们经常能听到这两句话，以及其他一些不太婉转的话。我们毫不怀疑卢瑟福正在扮演扑莎士比亚的那个角色。但是文学知识
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分子无论在想象上还是在理性上所难以理解的是，为什么卢瑟福绝对是正确的。
再来将“世界不是在一声巨响中结束，而是在哭泣中死亡”这样一句迄今为止最不像科学预言的话和卢瑟福著名的机智对答相比较吧。问曰:“幸运的卢瑟福，为什么你总是处在浪尖上?”答曰:“是的，因为是我创造了那浪尖，不是吗?”非科学家有一种根深蒂固的印象，那就是科学家是肤浅的乐观主义者，他们不知道人类的状况。而在另一方面，科学家认为文学知识分子完全缺乏远见。尤其是不关心他们的同胞，在深层次上是反知识的，并且极力想把艺术和思想在有限的时空，如此等等。任何一个稍会咒骂的人都会在背后说出对方的一大堆坏话。虽然双方所说的话中有一些并不是没有根据，但这些话却是具有破坏力的。绝大多数想法是源于相互的不了解，而这是很危险的。我将讨论其中最具深远影响的两个问题，一方一个。
我尊重看法。数字“二”是个非常危险的数字:这就是为什么辩证法是一个危险的方法的原因所在。把任何事情一分为二的企图多少都让人有所怀疑。很长时间以来我一直在想作进一步的完善，但最终我还是决定不这样做。
我一直在寻拢一种表达方式，它稍微超出某种有力的隐喻，但又远远小于某种文化结构图。两种文化的表达正好符合上述两个要求，而过分精细的分类将有助于体现其真实价值。
在这一极，不仅是在智力的意义上，而且还在人类学的意义上。科学文化确实是一种文化。这就是说，其成员不需要，当然也不是经常地完全地互相理解，生物学家往往对现代物理学的理解非常模糊，但他们有共同的态度、共同的行为标准和行为模式、共同的研究方法和假设。这种共同性是十分深远和广泛的，它能穿越其他精神模式，像宗教、政治或阶级模式。
从统计学上看，与知识界的其他人相比，我估计不相信宗教的科学家可能稍多一些，虽然也有很多信教的，而且看起来在年轻人中越来越多。同样据统计，科学家在政治上倾向于左派的也要稍做多一些，不过同样有很多人自称他们是保守派，而且同样是在年轻人中这一点看起来似乎更普遍。与知识界的其他人相比，在英国和美国的科学家中，很多人是来自平民家庭，不过，在他们整体的思想和行为方面，这一点并不太重要，在他们的工作中，在他们情感生活的大部分时间里，他们的态度比属于同一宗教、政治或阶级的非科学家更接近于其他科学家。如果我冒险作一点速记的话，我将写他们的骨子里注定充满前途。
在另一极，态度的范围更广泛。显然在这两极之间，当一个人从物理学家的知识圈子里走到文学知识分子当中时，会有各种各样的不同层次的感觉。但我相信，对科学的完全不理解这一极会将其影响扩散到其他方面。这种完全不理解使整个“传统”文化有一种非科学的味道，而且这种 非科学的味道经常会变成反科学。对一极的感情变成了对另一极的反感。如果科学家与生俱来充满希望，那么传统文化的反应是但愿这种希望报本不存在。正是这种基本上未被科学文化所削弱的传统文化在支配着西方世界。
这样的两极分化对我们大家来说只能造成损失，对人民、对社会也是一样。
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与此同时，这也是实践、智力和创造力的损失，而且我认为把这三者完全分开是错误的。现在，我想先集中谈智力损失问题。
正如你所科想的那样一些非常优秀的科学家有足够的精力和广泛的兴趣，我们也碰到过有那么几个人读过文学界所谈论的任何一部作品，但这是非常罕见的。当我们想了解其他的大多数人读过些什么书时，他们会谦虚地承认，“我试着读了一点狄更斯”，好像狄更斯是一位极其神秘、复杂和不知是否值得一读的作家，就像雷纳·玛利亚·瑞尔克。事实上，这正是他们所认为的狄更斯，我们认为这一发现，即狄更斯被转化成文学不可理解性的典型代表，是整个调查活动中最奇怪的结果之一。
当然，在读狄更斯和几乎任何一位我们应该尊重的作家的作品时，他们只是对传统文化给予礼节性的关注。他们有自己的文化，强烈、严格并且一直在起作用，他们文化中所包含的论点一般要比文学界的论点要更严格，而且几乎在更高的概念层次上。尽管科学家乐意使用那些其含义文学人士并不认可的词，但其含义还是确定的。当他们谈论“主观的”、“客观的”、“哲学”或“进步”时，他们知道他们所指的是什么，即使它并不是一般人所习惯认为的意思。
请记住，他们是智力发达的人。他们的文化根基在很多方面是严格的和令人敬佩的，但不包含太多的艺术，除了音乐，这是一个很重要的例外。口头交流，坚持不懈的争论。胶木唱片，彩色摄影。耳朵，在某种程度上就是眼睛。
他们很少读书，但还不至于像下面那位老兄那样。我不得不承认这位老兄也许比刚才谈到的那些人处在更低的科学台阶上。有一次我问他最近读了什么书，他坚定而自信地答道:“书?我宁愿把书作为工具使用。”此时的你不得不想一想:书能成为什么样的工具?是一把锤子?还是一个原始的挖掘工具?
即使读书，种类也很少。那些对大多数文学人士来说犹如是必不可少的面包和黄油的小说、历史、诗歌、戏剧等，对他们来说什么都不是，这并不是因为他们对心理、道德或杜会生活不感兴趣。对社会生活，他们当然比我们中的大多数人更感兴趣。在道德生活方面，他们是知识分子中最健全的群体，因为科学本身就有道德成分，并且几乎所有的科学家都有他们自己对道德生活的判断。在心理生活方面，他们同我们中的大多数人都有一样的兴趣，虽然我偶尔会认为他们很晚才意识到这一点。这不是因为他们缺乏兴趣，主要是因为传统文化的所有文学看上去与他们的兴趣没什么关系。当然，他们是大错特错了。其结果是他们的想象力比应该具有的水平要低，他们的贫乏是自己造成的。
那么另一边的情形又如何?他们也很贫乏，并且可能更严重，因为他们更空虚。他们仍喜欢声称传统文化是“文化”的全部。在他们看来，似乎自然秩序根本不存在，似乎对自然秩序探索的本身或结果与他们根本无关，似乎物理世界的科学大厦在其智力深度、复杂性和表达上，均不是人类智慧的最优美和最神奇的集体创造。实际上，大多数非科学家对这座大厦根本没有一点概念。即使他们想有，也不可能。这就好像相对于极其广泛的知识经验而言，整个群体却是一群五音不全的音盲。这种音有不是天生的，而是因为缺少训练而产生的。
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既然是音盲，他们也就不知道自己错过了什么。他们对科学家从不读英国文学名著嗤之以鼻，并把他们当作无知的专家，而他们自己的无知和专业化同样令人震惊。好多次我曾同这些按照传统文化的标准衡是受过良好教育的人在一起，他们对科学家不屑一顾。有一两次，我问他们有多少人能形容一下“热力学第二定律”。反应是冷淡的，也是消极的，而这只不过是一个相当于问科学家“你读过莎士比亚的作品吗”的问题。
我现在相信，如果我问一个更简单的问题，比如你知道质量或加速度是什么意思—这相当于问科学家“你读得懂书吗”，那么十个受过良好教育的人中有九个会觉得我和他们说的不是一种共同语言。现代物理学的大厦已经建立起来，而西方世界的大多数最聪明的人对它的认识和他们的新石器时期的祖先相差无几。
那时看起来两种文化无法共处，我将不浪费时间去对此表示遗撼，实际情况要比这严重得多，我很快就要谈到其现实后果。但是在思维和创造的关键时刻，我们却因缺乏对手而放走了一些宝贵的机会。两种主题、两种学科、两种文化—或者更广泛地说两种星系的冲突应该能产生创造性的机会。在人类思维活动的历史上一些突破正是来源于这种冲突。现在这种机会又来了，但是它们却好像处于真空中，因为两种文化中的人不能互相交流。20世纪的科学很少有被吸收进20世纪的艺术中的，这是令人不解的。
我们过去常常会看到诗人有意识地使用科学术语，不过却用错了。曾经有一段时间“折射”一词经常以神秘的形式出现在诗中，“极光”也经常被使用，好像作家们幻想这是一种特别令人崇敬的光。
当然，科学并不是以这种方式给艺术带来好处的，它必须作为整个思维经验的一部分被吸收进去，并且被自然地使用。
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