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In conversation, as in his writings, Fukuyama is cool and understated. His sentences unspool slowly, the words carefully considered. This equanimity is shaken, albeit briefly, when I mention the idea for which he is most famous. "I've been trying to move beyond The End of History ever since I wrote the book," Fukuyama says with weary patience. "But no matter what I write, everyone wants to ask me about it.".
在交谈中,就像在他的作品中一样,福山是一个冷静而言辞谨慎的人。他说地很慢,每个字都仔细斟酌。尽管言辞简短,我仍震惊于他的镇静和安详,当提到使他成名的那些思想时,他颇有些不耐烦地说:“从我写作这部书时起,我就一直试图超越《历史的终结》,但是不论我写了什么,每个人都向我提起它。”
And no wonder—few of the myriad efforts to interpret the post-cold-war world have so endured, and none has attracted as much attention. When the essay was published, a Washington news vendor reported that the journal in which it appeared was "outselling everything, even the pornography." Frequently described as a rock star, Fukuyama continues to draw large audiences around the world. His thesis, however, has never sat well in certain quarters. Margaret Thatcher supposedly quipped: "End of history? The beginning of nonsense!" More serious was the critique of the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, who countered with his own vision of a future soaked in conflict between the world's major cultural groups—The Clash of Civilizations.
毫不奇怪的是,尽管有极多的人在做解释后冷战世界的努力,但它们极少能够流传下来,没有一个能够获得如此多的关注。当这篇论文出版的时候,一个华盛顿的新闻贩子报道说,登载它的杂志“卖的比什么都好,甚至超过了色情作品。”他也因此经常被形容为巨星人物,并在全世界各地不断获得大量读者和听众。然而,在某些地方,他的观点从未得到过认同。据说玛格丽特·撒切尔曾开玩笑地说:“历史的终结?废话的开始!”更为严重的挑战来自于政治科学大师塞缪尔·P·亨廷顿的批判作品——《文明的冲突》,在这部书中,亨氏构建了一幅正好相反的未来画面:世界主要文化群落之间充满了冲突。
In the eyes of some, September 11, 2001, vindicated Huntington and exposed Fukuyama's declaration as, at best, premature. (In fact, Fukuyama never suggested that the "end of history" entailed the cessation of extreme violence or cataclysmic events.) Nevertheless, those familiar with Fukuyama and Huntington only as rivals might do a double take when they open The Origins of Political Order and find that it is dedicated to Huntington, who died in 2008. Turns out that the book took shape when Fukuyama, a former student of Huntington's at Harvard, was asked to write the introduction to a reprint of Huntington's 1968 classic, Political Order in Changing Societies, a book that Fukuyama regards as one of the most important in 20th-century international relations. But when he returned to the text, he says, it felt dated. For starters, there was hardly any mention of religion.
在有些人看来,2001年的9·11事件证实了亨廷顿的观点,同时也暴露了福山观点的幼稚。(事实上,福山从未指出过“历史的终结”意味着极端暴力和灾难性事件的终止。)不过,当人们打开《政治秩序的起源》并发现这本书是献给亨廷顿(死于2008年)的时候,那些经常把他俩视为对手的人,也许会产生新的看法。作为亨廷顿以前在哈佛大学的学生,福山受邀为其老师在1968年版的经典之作《变动社会的政治秩序》的再次出版,写了一篇序言,这样的举动产生了很大的效应。福山曾把这本书当做20世纪国际关系方面最为重要的著作之一,但是当他重览书的文本之后,他说,感觉有些过时了。作为开拓性的著作,里面几乎没有提到宗教。
"We've seen a revival of religion in the world," Fukuyama says, noting that religion has ,played a central role in the historical development of political institutions as well. Early human sociability was limited to face-to-face interactions within close-knit kin groups, and trust didn't extend beyond a few dozen relatives. Large-scale cooperation didn't become possible until the development of religious beliefs, which allowed trust to transcend kin. And that paved the way for the big faith communities—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism—capable of uniting tens of millions of people in collective action.
“我们已经看到了宗教在世界范围内的复兴,”福山说,并指出,宗教同样在政治制度的历史发展中扮演了核心角色。早期人类社会仅仅限于亲缘关系群体之内在面对面情境中的互动,而且信用关系不会超出几十个亲戚的范围。直到允许信用超出亲缘关系的宗教信仰得到发展以后,人与人之间的大规模的合作才成为可能。基督教、犹太教、伊斯兰教和印度教,这些为大的信仰社群的出现铺了平道路的宗教组织,能够团结数以千万计的人民加入到集体行动之中。
Case in point: the Prophet Muhammad. At the time of his birth, around 570, the Arabian Peninsula had been inhabited by tribal peoples for centuries. Muhammad preached his vision of a single ummah—gaining adherents, conquering others, and eventually uniting central Arabia into a single polity. "There is no clearer illustration of the importance of ideas to politics than the emergence of an Arab state under the Prophet Muhammad," Fukuyama writes. "The Arab tribes played an utterly marginal role in world history until that point; it was only Muhammad's charismatic authority that allowed them to unify and project their power throughout the Middle East and North Africa."
一个典型的例证:先知穆罕默德。约公元570年,在他出生的时候,部落族群就已经在阿拉伯半岛上定居了好多个世纪。穆罕默德传布他的世界上只存在一个乌玛的观点,并获得了大量的支持者,征服了其他部落,最终把中央阿拉伯地区统一为单一的政治实体。“再也没有比在先知穆罕默德领导下的阿拉伯政权的崛起更能清楚的展示思想对于政治的重要性了,”福山写道,“在此之前,阿拉伯部落在世界历史上只扮演了微不足道的角色,是穆罕默德的超凡的权威促使了他们团结起来并使他们的权力伸展到中东和北非。”
Fukuyama's portrayal of religion as a unifying force in history will irk some atheists, for whom religion is at all times a source of intolerance, conflict, and violence. He does concede, however, that religion's role in the contemporary world is more problematic. Pluralistic societies require religions to coexist in proximity. As a result, he says, "integration today has to be based on shared political values, not deep, religiously rooted cultural beliefs."
福山有关宗教作为历史上的一种统一力量的描绘将触怒一些无神论者,因为对于他们来说,宗教一直都是不宽容、冲突和暴力的来源。然而,福山也的确承认,宗教在当今世界所扮演的角色存在更多的问题。多元化的社会要求诸种宗教的共同存在。因此,他说:“今天的全球一体化,必须以共享的政治价值为基础,而不是深奥的根源于宗教的文化信仰。”
The core of The Origins of Political Order consists of detailed studies of how China, India, the Muslim world, and Europe made the transition from kinship networks and tribes to states. Periodically, however, Fukuyama turns his attention to contemporary America, and the picture he paints isn't pretty. Noting historical instances of societal collapse—the Mameluke Sultanate in Egypt, the Ming Dynasty in China—he cautions that America might face a similar fate. "Political decay occurs when political systems fail to adjust to changing circumstances," he writes, adding that American institutions "may well be headed for a major test of their adaptability."
《政治秩序的起源》的核心部分对中国、印度、伊斯兰世界和欧洲如何从亲缘网络和部落转换到国家政权的问题进行了精细研究。然而,有时候,福山也会把注意力转移到当下的美国,不过在这方面,他所描绘的前景并不让人喜欢。在提到历史上一些社会崩溃的例子,如马穆鲁克阶层统治下的埃及和中国的明朝,他担心美国也许会面临同样的命运。“当政治体制不能很好的适应改变了环境之后,政治窳败就会出现。”他写道,进而指出美国的政治制度“也许会恰好遇到一场对其适应性的重大检测。”
The problem is gridlock. Extreme polarization between conservatives and liberals, the growth of entrenched interest groups, and rising inequality all threaten to undermine the effectiveness and legitimacy of the American political system, which has been slow to adjust to changing circumstances. "We Americans pride ourselves on our pragmatism, but right now we're more ideological than the Chinese, who are willing to try all sorts of public policies," Fukuyama tells me. Most significantly, he says, the Chinese experiment with a market economy. "It worked, so they stuck with it."
堵塞是一个问题。保守派和自由派之间的极端对立、继续增加的牢不可动的既得利益群体和不断增长的不平等,所有这一切都威胁到早已不能快速适应变化了的环境的美国政治体制的有效性和合法性。福山告诉我:“我们美国人对我们自己的实用主义感到骄傲,但是现在我们要比中国人更加意识形态化,而他们则非常乐意尝试各种公共政策。”他指出,更为重要的是,中国人正在尝试市场经济。“它确实管用,因此他们就坚持了下来。”
In a way, Fukuyama remarks, we've become victims of our own success: "Successful institutions are most vulnerable to rigidity because their earlier success makes people complacent." This tendency had the evolutionary value of stabilizing societies. "We're programmed to believe that tradition is good," but that also means we're vulnerable to the sort of institutional inertia that undid great societies in the past.
福山指出,在某种程度上,我们已经成为自身成功的受害者,“成功的制度更容易僵化,因为人们会满足于它早期的成功,而不想改变。”这种趋势具有稳定社会的进化价值。“我们习惯的认为传统是好的,”但是这同样也意味着我们更容易受到那种在历史上曾经毁坏掉许多伟大社会的制度惰性的侵害。
"The danger," Fukuyama warns, is that America's "situation will continue to worsen over time in the absence of some powerful force that will knock the system off its dysfunctional institutional equilibrium." The assessment is grim, but the famously optimistic Fukuyama is careful to end on an upbeat note: "As the situation gets worse, people will face up to it, and the system will correct itself."
福山警告道,“危险”的是美国的处境“在缺乏强力介入剔除功能失灵的制度平衡之前,将继续恶化一段时间。”这个评价是非常残酷的,但是作为著名的乐观主义者,福山也谨慎地以一条积极向上的暗示结束本次采访,“随着情况变得越来越糟,人们会勇敢地正视它,体制也会进行自我纠错。” |
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