尝试了解自己和身处的世界
尝试了解自己和身处的世界 21 Lessons for the 21st Century 5/3/2019
Yuval Noah Harari这本书点出当下人类的前所未有之危机:“Humankind is facing unprecedented revolutions, all our old stories are crumbling, and no new story has so far emerged to replace them.” 旧的故事体系包括宗教和西方社会的民主自由,颠覆性的力量是大数据、AI、bioengineering以及宗教冲突和恐怖主义,新的故事体系还不明朗。他描述了问题,探讨了问题的若干方面,最后有一个弱弱的结尾——通过冥想、关注自己的身体和思维、从而了解自我。
因为着眼时政,聚焦当下世界,这本书绝对没有《人类简史》读起来那么振聋发聩,鲜有完全独特的理论,但深刻的、新鲜的举例分析和观点论述还是星罗棋布。一本不算很长的书要讲二十一个方面,有些部分确实读起来显得不够深刻、至少合上书似乎印象深刻的take-away没有很多。
他对于个人信息被大公司收集利用,人脑的自主独立性被不断侵蚀,描述在不远的将来技术可以达到比你还了解你从而让你主动交出控制权的场景,是一个蛮警世的预言。
他讲当下的移民问题,把各种言论纷争梳理成4个条件/问题:(1) The host country allows the immigrants in, (2) In return, the immigrants imbrace core values of the host country even if they have to give up some of their own, (3) If they assimilate to a sufficient degree, they become equal and full members of the host country: "they" become "us". (4) Fulfilment of each of the three terms. 这种把问题先分割再讨论的严谨性值得学习。
他把宗教等同于fake news,区别只在于fake news传播一两个月,宗教持续几个世纪。不论是狮子王的Circle of Life,还是印度宗教中的dharma——每个人在世有自己独特的修行路径,这些说法的横行,相同的是舆论操纵者“需要”这样的故事,而人们也乐于去听这样的故事强化已有的傲慢和偏见。
结尾有点弱弱的,但单就meditation来说,花时间去了解自己的大脑和思维,学习和锻炼专注的能力,我能appreciate他强调这两点的用意和益处。
书摘:
In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.
Since the corporations and entrepreneurs who lead the technological revolution naturally tend to sing the praises of their creations, it falls to sociologists, philosophers and historians like myself to sound the alarm and explain all the ways things can go terribly wrong.
Liberty is not worth much unless it is coupled with some kind of social safety net.
Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’.
Referendums and elections are always about human feelings, not about human rationality. ... for better or worse, elections and referendums are not about what we think. They are about what we feel. And when it comes to feelings, Einstein and Dawkins are no better than anyone else. Democracy assumes that human feelings reflect a mysterious and profound ‘free will’, that this ‘free will’ is the ultimate source of authority, and that while some people are more intelligent than others, all humans are equally free.
At present, people are happy to give away their most valuable asset – their personal data – in exchange for free email services and funny cat videos. It is a bit like African and Native American tribes who unwittingly sold entire countries to European imperialists in exchange for colourful beads and cheap trinkets. 有趣的类比的警示...有这么严重吗?
Though in the twenty-first century humans might be upgraded into gods, as of 2018 we are still Stone Age animals. In order to flourish we still need to ground ourselves in intimate communities. For millions of years, humans have been adapted to living in small bands of no more than a few dozen people. Even today most of us find it impossible to really know more than 150 individuals, irrespective of how many Facebook friends we boast. Without these groups, humans feel lonely and alienated.
Zuckerberg says that Facebook is committed ‘to continue improving our tools to give you the power to share your experience’ with others. Yet what people might really need are the tools to connect to their own experiences. In the name of ‘sharing experiences’, people are encouraged to understand what happens to them in terms of how others see it.
In truth, European civilisation is anything Europeans make of it, just as Christianity is anything Christians make of it, Islam is anything Muslims make of it, and Judaism is anything Jews make of it. And they have made of it remarkably different things over the centuries. 就像现在的民主、共和党不再是当年的民主、共和党
People often refuse to see these changes, especially when it comes to core political and religious values. We insist that our values are a precious legacy from ancient ancestors. Yet the only thing that allows us to say this, is that our ancestors are long dead, and cannot speak for themselves.
People care far more about their enemies than about their trade partners.
Yet Marx exaggerated when he dismissed religion as a mere superstructure hiding powerful technological and economic forces. Even if Islam, Hinduism or Christianity may be colourful decorations over a modern economic structure, people often identify with the decor, and people’s identities are a crucial historical force. Human power depends on mass cooperation, mass cooperation depends on manufacturing mass identities – and all mass identities are based on fictional stories, not on scientific facts or even on economic necessities... Religions, rites and rituals will remain important as long as the power of humankind rests on mass cooperation and as long as mass cooperation rests on belief in shared fictions. 虽然有硬件条件的全球范围的统一化和提升,但软件的人群归属感依旧subscribe to宗教、人种等这样古老的分类
Both these cases may seem to smack of racism. But in fact, they are not racist. They are ‘culturist’. People continue to conduct a heroic struggle against traditional racism without noticing that the battlefront has shifted. Traditional racism is waning, but the world is now full of ‘culturists’.
So how does a fly destroy a china shop? It finds a bull, gets inside its ear, and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened after 9/11, as Islamic fundamentalists incited the American bull to destroy the Middle Eastern china shop. 有意思的比喻
Most people tend to believe they are the centre of the world, and their culture is the linchpin of human history. Many Greeks believe that history began with Homer, Sophocles and Plato, and that all important ideas and inventions were born in Athens, Sparta, Alexandria or Constantinople. Chinese nationalists retort that history really began with the Yellow Emperor and the Xia and Shang dynasties, and that whatever Westerners, Muslims or Indians achieved is but a pale copy of original Chinese breakthroughs. Hindu nativists dismiss these Chinese boasts, and argue that even airplanes and nuclear bombs were invented by ancient sages in the Indian subcontinent long before Confucius or Plato, not to mention Einstein and the Wright brothers. Did you know, for example, that it was Maharishi Bhardwaj who invented rockets and aeroplanes, that Vishwamitra not only invented but also used missiles, that Acharya Kanad was the father of atomic theory, and that the Mahabharata accurately describes nuclear weapons?1 Pious Muslims regard all history prior to the Prophet Muhammad as largely irrelevant, and they consider all history after the revelation of the Quran to revolve around the Muslim ummah. The main exceptions are Turkish, Iranian and Egyptian nationalists, who argue that even prior to Muhammad their particular nation was the fountainhead of all that was good about humanity, and that even after the revelation of the Quran, it was mainly their people who preserved the purity of Islam and spread its glory. Needless to say that British, French, German, American, Russian, Japanese and countless other groups are similarly convinced that humankind would have lived in barbarous and immoral ignorance if it wasn’t for the spectacular achievements of their nation. Some people in history went so far as to imagine that their political institutions and religious practices were essential to the very laws of physics. Thus the Aztecs firmly believed that without the sacrifices they performed each year, the sun would not rise and the entire universe would disintegrate... like the idea of descending not from brutal world-conquerors, but from insignificant people who seldom poked their noses into other people’s business. Many religions praise the value of humility – but then imagine themselves to be the most important thing in the universe. They mix calls for personal meekness with blatant collective arrogance. Humans of all creeds would do well to take humility more seriously.这段的例子说明民族自豪感可能是有注水的
In fact, modern history has demonstrated that a society of courageous people willing to admit ignorance and raise difficult questions is usually not just more prosperous but also more peaceful than societies in which everyone must unquestioningly accept a single answer.
Every religion, ideology and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed you follow you should acknowledge your shadow and avoid the naïve reassurance that ‘it cannot happen to us’.
Most of our views are shaped by communal groupthink rather than individual rationality, and we hold on to these views out of group loyalty. Bombarding people with facts and exposing their individual ignorance is likely to backfire. Most people don’t like too many facts, and they certainly don’t like to feel stupid. Don’t be so sure that you can convince Tea Party supporters of the truth of global warming by presenting them with sheets of statistical data.
Most political chiefs and business moguls are forever on the run. Yet if you want to go deeply into any subject, you need a lot of time, and in particular you need the privilege of wasting time. You need to experiment with unproductive paths, to explore dead ends, to make space for doubts and boredom, and to allow little seeds of insight to slowly grow and blossom. If you cannot afford to waste time – you will never find the truth.
Great power thus acts like a black hole that warps the very space around it. The closer you get, the more twisted everything becomes. Each word is made extra heavy upon entering your orbit, and each person you see tries to flatter you, appease you, or get something from you. They know you cannot spare them more than a minute a two, and they are fearful of saying something improper or muddled, so they end up saying either empty slogans or the greatest clichés of all. 从这个角度审视自己面对大领导时的惶恐和紧张...
It is easy to look back with absolute moral certainty at Nazi Germany of the 1930s – because we know where the chain of causes and effects led. But without the benefit of hindsight, moral certainty might be beyond our reach. The bitter truth is that the world has simply become too complicated for our hunter-gatherer brains.
For each group and subgroup faces a different maze of glass ceilings, double standards, coded insults and institutional discrimination. 学习这几个表达... I'm certainly facing all these
you cannot organise masses of people effectively without relying on some mythology. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you... If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power. You will have to admit things – for example about the sources of your own power – that will anger allies, dishearten followers or undermine social harmony. 领导者不会百分之百讲实话
People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don’t realise that they are already trapped inside a box – their brain – which is locked within a bigger box – human society with its myriad fictions. When you escape the matrix the only thing you discover is a bigger matrix.
Most science-fiction movies really tell a very old story: the victory of mind over matter. Thirty thousand years ago, the story went: ‘Mind imagines a stone knife – hand creates a knife – human kills mammoth.’ But the truth is that humans gained control of the world not so much by inventing knives and killing mammoths as much as by manipulating human minds. The mind is not the subject that freely shapes historical actions and biological realities – the mind is an object that is being shaped by history and biology. Even our most cherished ideals – freedom, love, creativity – are like a stone knife that somebody else shaped in order to kill some mammoth. According to the best scientific theories and the most up-to-date technological tools, the mind is never free of manipulation. There is no authentic self waiting to be liberated from the manipulative shell. 我们以为是自己一部分的,其实也是出于社会力量潜移默化的雕琢和给予
if you think you can press some delete button and wipe out all trace of Hollywood from your subconscious and your limbic system, you are deluding yourself.
Technology isn’t bad. If you know what you want in life, technology can help you get it. But if you don’t know what you want in life, it will be all too easy for technology to shape your aims for you and take control of your life.
When you inflict suffering on yourself in the name of some story, it gives you a choice: ‘Either the story is true, or I am a gullible fool.’ When you inflict suffering on others, you are also given a choice: ‘Either the story is true, or I am a cruel villain.’ And just as we don’t want to admit we are fools, we also don’t want to admit we are villains, so we prefer to believe that the story is true.
Unable to live up to the ideal, people turn to sacrifice as a solution.
All the stories and gods in which people today believe – be they Yahweh, Mammon, the Nation, or the Revolution – are incomplete, full of holes, and riddled with contradictions. Therefore people rarely put their entire faith in a single story. Instead, they keep a portfolio of several stories and several identities, switching from one to the other as the need arises. Such cognitive dissonances are inherent in almost all societies and movements.
The problem with evil is that in real life, it is not necessarily ugly. It can look very beautiful. Christianity knew this better than Hollywood, which is why traditional Christian art tended to depict Satan as a gorgeous hunk.
A single rod is very weak, and you can easily snap it in two. However, once you bundle many rods together into a fascis, it becomes almost impossible to break them. This implies that the individual is a thing of no consequence, but as long as the collective sticks together, it is very powerful. Fascists therefore believe in privileging the interests of the collective over those of any individual, and demand that no single rod ever dare break the unity of the bundle. 法西斯主义Fascism的拉丁语由来的解释
According to liberal mythology, if you stand long enough in that big supermarket, sooner or later you will experience the liberal epiphany, and you will realise the true meaning of life. All the stories on the supermarket shelves are fakes. The meaning of life isn’t a ready-made product. There is no divine script, and nothing outside me can give meaning to my life. It is I who imbue everything with meaning through my free choices and through my own feelings... We hope to find meaning by fitting ourselves into some ready-made story about the universe, but according to the liberal interpretation of the world, the truth is exactly the opposite. The universe does not give me meaning. I give meaning to the universe.