网帖翻译

Engines of Creation

创造力的发动机

Some experts claim Chinese culture had lost its dynamism by the 19th century, having been very impressive in the past. But they can’t agree when this great transformation occurred. Was the Tang Dynasty the last time China was dynamic? But the subsequent Sung dynasty produced the key breakthrough of gunpowder. Did Chinese creativeness freeze up after the Sung were overrun by the Mongols? The Ming Dynasty was dynamic enough to sail to East Africa in ships superior to anything Europe had at the time.

一些专家称，到19世纪时，中国文化已经失去了活力，过去的文化给人留下了深刻的印象。但他们不知道这个巨大的转变是何时发生的。唐朝是中国最后一次充满活力的时期吗? 但后来的宋朝出现了火药的关键突破。宋朝被蒙古人征服后，中国人的创造力停止了吗? 明朝非常有活力，可以用比当时欧洲先进得多的船只航行到东非。

Had the Ming Chinese discovered the New World and its gold-rich cultures, world history might have gone differently. But Zheng He’s fleet did not strike out into the open ocean seeking unknown lands, as Columbus did. They stuck to coasts and known places. They might have sailed Due East has they been as interested in making contact with Europe as Europe was interested in making contact with them. But 15th century Europe would have appeared to China as a cold and impoverished fringe beyond the Islamic World. Even if some bold captain had set out, they might have travelled a thousand miles further than Columbus did without finding more than a few small islands, or perhaps nothing at all.

如果明朝的中国人发现了新大陆和它丰富的黄金文化，世界历史可能会有不同的发展。但是郑和的船队并没有像哥伦布那样驶向广袤的海洋去寻找未知的土地。他们坚持在海岸和已知的地方穿梭。如果他们对与欧洲的联系感兴趣就像欧洲对与他们的联系感兴趣一样，他们可能会向东航行。但在中国看来，15世纪的欧洲是伊斯兰世界之外的一个寒冷而贫穷的边缘地区。即使有一个勇敢的船长出发了，他们也可能比哥伦布航行得更远，但只能发现几座小岛，或者什么也没有发现。

(I am aware of claims that the Chinese did indeed discover the New World and then did nothing about it, as made in a book called 1421. I don’t find this credible. Gold-fever in China was less intense than in Europe, but I can’t believe that extensive empires with tons of gold ornaments and no horses or iron swords would have been ignored or forgotten about by Chinese voyagers. It is remotely possible that their ships encountered impoverished tribal areas on the Pacific coast of North America or else beyond Africa in what is now Brazil and Argentina. These would have seemed less interesting than similar people much closer to home.)

我知道在一本叫做《1421》的书中有这样的说法:中国人确实发现了新大陆，但却没有采取任何行动。我觉得这不可信。中国的淘金热没有欧洲那么强烈，但我不相信拥有大量黄金饰品、又无人看管的地方会被中国的旅行者忽视或遗忘。他们的船只在北美太平洋海岸或非洲以外现在的巴西和阿根廷遇到贫困部落地区的可能性很小。与离家近的人群相比，这些人似乎没有那么有趣。

China wasn’t static when Europe cracked it open with the Opium Wars and other invasions. China’s ‘Yellow Empire’ showed continuous slow creativity from first to last. How far it might have got without Europe’s interruption is speculative. With just a scattering of inventions per century, it might have taken millennia to get as far as modern science and industry. Or perhaps it never could have managed that without a painful process of being broken apart and wholly remoulded, something that it would have resisted fiercely.

当欧洲通过鸦片战争和其他侵略打开中国的大门时，中国这几千年来并不是一成不变的。中华帝国从始至终表现出持续缓慢的创造力。如果没有欧洲的干扰，它能走多远还有待推测。每一个世纪都有一些发明，可能要花上几千年才能发展到现代科学和工业。或者，如果没有一个痛苦的分裂和彻底重塑的过程，它可能永远也做不到这一点，因为这类变化会遭到强烈抵制。
Some obxtive measure of creativity is needed to compare what the different civilisations did at different times. I’ve only seen one detailed attempt to do it, Charles Murray’s book Human Accomplishment.锚点[T].
为了比较不同文明在不同时期的所作所为，需要对创造力进行一些客观的衡量。我只看过查尔斯·默里(Charles Murray)的《人类的成就》(Human achievement)一书详细地尝试过这样做。

To get a real idea of ‘Human Accomplishments’, Murray’s work needs to be re-done with the errors corrected. By all means use a cross-section of reference works to average out different views of what is significant. But where the actual origin is probable or confirmed, then that origin is a fact regardless of who doesn’t know about it. I’m confident that non-European civilisations would then be seen as major centres of creativity, while a lot of what we think of as Greek would turn out to be a derivative of West Asian culture. Including the alphabet, of course, but the whole pattern of trading cities with republican constitutions was found among the Semitic Phoenicians before the Greeks adopted it. Some vital advances would be Hindu or Muslim, but a lot more would be Chinese.

……为了对“人类成就”有一个真正的了解，默里的工作需要重新进行并修正错误。尽一切办法采用参考的典型来综合得出各种重要的不同视角。如果真正的起源是可能的或被证实的，那么这个起源就是一个事实。我相信，届时非欧洲文明将被视为主要的创造力中心，而我们所认为的许多希腊文明将被证明是西亚文化的衍生品。当然也包括字母表、以及带有共和制的贸易城市模式，都是在闪米特腓尼基人中发现的，在希腊人采用它之前。印度教徒或穆斯林会取得一些重要的进步，但中国人取得的进步更多些。

On the other hand, I’m also pretty sure you’d also find Europe breaking all previous norms for creativity in the 18th century, maybe also in the 17th century. And then you’d find it going higher again in the 19th century, with the United States also playing a role.

另一方面，我很确定你也会发现欧洲在18世纪打破了所有之前的创造力规范，也许在17世纪也是。然后你会发现在19世纪，它又在此上升了，美国也发挥了作用。

The 20th century saw a considerable narrowing of the creativity gap, but the difference remains and there seems to be an enigmatic cultural ‘engine of creation’ centred in Old Europe. Murray avoids listing inventions or significant individual achievers per million of population, except in the case of the Jews, whose creativity per million is indeed quite remarkable. But I’m pretty certain that we in Old Europe produce many more high achievers per million than are produced by similar peoples settled in the USA. The WASP mainstream in the USA are good at business and at turning other people’s inventions into cheap consumer goods. But there is much less originality: automobiles, computers and space travel were all European ideas. When there is an original US contribution, it is mostly from people settled in the USA but not born or raised there.

20世纪，创造力的差距明显缩小，但差异依然存在，似乎有一个神秘的文化——以古欧洲为中心“创造力发动机”。默里没有列出每百万人口中的发明或重要的个人成就，除了犹太人，他们每百万人口中的创造力确实相当惊人。但我非常确定，我们老欧洲每百万人中产生的成就要比美国类似民族产生的成就多得多。美国的主流善于做生意，善于把别人的发明变成廉价消费品。但它的创意少得多:汽车、电脑和太空旅行都是欧洲人的想法。当有美国原创的贡献时，大部分是来自定居在美国但不是在那里出生或长大的人。
(Consider aircraft, mostly regarded as having been pioneered by the Wright Brothers. They are officially credited just with the “first recorded controlled, powered, sustained heavier than air flight”.锚点[V] John Stringfellow in England achieved the first powered flight in 1848, using an unmanned aircraft with a ten-foot wingspan. Several French inventors managed short powered flights later in the 19th century, though without much control. Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont made the first public flights of an aircraft, and there was some controversy before the Wright Brothers were officially classified as first. They were developers of an idea that had been around for decades and would definitely have been realised without them.)
以飞机为例，大部分被认为是由莱特兄弟开创的。他们被正式认定为“首次有记录的、有控制、有动力、持续地空中飞行”。 但1848年，英国的约翰·斯特林费罗(John Stringfellow)利用翼展10英尺的无人驾驶飞机实现了第一次动力飞行。几个法国发明家在19世纪后期发明了短途动力飞行，尽管没有太多的控制。巴西人阿尔贝托·桑托斯·杜蒙(Alberto Santos-Dumont)首次进行了飞机的公开飞行，在莱特兄弟被正式列为第一架飞机之前，尽管这还存在一些争议。他们（莱特兄弟）是一个想法的开发者，这个想法在此之前已经存在了几十年，即便没有他们肯定也会实现。

The USA depends on outsiders or its own minorities for most of its achievements. Most of the good music is Afro-American, while most of the good science, literature, drama and other artistic achievement in the 20th century is Jewish. A lot of the rest is from first-generation immigrants: there is something mind-numbing about the values that the USA’s WASP mainstream has chosen for itself. Values that it would like to impose on the rest of the world, but that project has fortunately failed for now.

美国的大部分成就都依赖于外人或自己的少数族裔。20世纪大多数优秀的科学、文学、戏剧和其他艺术成就都是犹太人的。剩下的很多人来自第一代移民。美国主流白人为自己选择的价值观令人头脑发麻，它想要强加给世界其他国家价值观，但幸运的是，这个项目目前已经失败了。

Breaking and Remaking China

对中国的打破和重塑

In the first half of the 20th century, China needed to learn a radically new way of thinking. It so happened that only the Chinese Communists were able to successfully blend this with existing Chinese culture. Part of the trouble may have been that a lot of Chinese were looking to the USA as the best model – the USA was sympathetic to non-white cultures having their own sovereign states, whereas most European countries up until the 1950s wanted to keep them as colonies. But the USA was synthesised from immigrants, people who arrived in a new land with values and outlooks drummed into them by centuries of development in Old Europe. Most US citizens assumed that these hard-won insights and social habits were ‘natural’ and could be easily transmitted – as indeed they were to individuals of alien origin who were willing to dissolve themselves into the existing social structures. Transmitting something like the US system to a foreign country is quite another matter, and the US has no idea how to do it. Rather, various US ‘experts’ have a whole host of notions: but none of them actually work, as was shown in Iraq after 2003.

在20世纪上半叶，中国需要学习一种全新的思维方式。巧合的是，只有中国共产党才能成功地将这种文化与现有的中国文化相融合。问题的部分原因可能是很多中国人把美国视为最好的榜样——美国同情非白人文化拥有自己的主权国家，而大多数欧洲国家直到20世纪50年代都希望把它们作为殖民地。但美国是由移民组成的，这些移民来到新大陆，带着旧欧洲几百年的发展灌输给他们的价值观和观点。大多数美国公民认为，这些来之不易的见解和社会习惯是“天然的”，可以很容易地传播——而它们也确实是给那些愿意融入现有社会结构的外来个体准备的。把类似美国体制的东西传递到其他国家是另一回事，美国不知道怎么做。相反，各种各样的美国“专家”有一大堆概念:但没有一个真正有用，就像2003年之后的伊拉克战争所显示的那样。

The USA prides itself on having successfully sowed the seeds of multi-party democracy in Western Europe after World War Two. Actually it was doing no more than giving a fresh chance and a major boost to old-growth democracy and parliamentarianism that had been developing nicely in Europe before World War One. Multi-party democracy had also begun in Japan before 1914 and continued into the 1920s, which made it much easier for it to flourish again after 1945.

二战后，美国在西欧成功地播下了多党民主的种子，对此美国引以为豪。实际上，它只是给了旧的民主和议会主义一个新的机会和一次重要的推动，这些在第一次世界大战之前在欧洲发展得很好。多党制民主在1914年之前在日本也生根发芽了，一直延续到20年代，这使得多党制民主在1945年之后更容易再次在日本繁荣起来。

Non-communist writers have generally been willing to credit Communists with the ability to transform backward societies, which was the opposite of what was expected from the original Marxist plan of history. As far as I know, all of them were content to ‘score a point’ about this odd fact and not ponder it further. Myself, I’m confident that it is because Marxism is the one creed that can give some general idea of how Western societies actually works to people who have not grow up as part of Western culture. Marxist analysis often gets things wrong, but most of it is written on the assumption that Western forms are not natural at all: that they are highly artificial and the product of centuries of social struggle. And that something wholly new had emerged in Western Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, by a series of painful rebellions by the middle class against an older order that had tried to stifle them. This seems to me to be a basic truth, regardless of what you think about possible ‘next stages’ beyond the current social systems.

非共产主义作家普遍认为共产党人有改造落后社会的能力，这与马克思主义最初的历史计划所期望的是相反的。据我所知，他们都满足于对这个奇怪的事实，而不去进一步思考它。就我个人而言，我确信这是因为马克思主义是一种信条，它可以给那些没有在西方文化中长大的人提供一些关于西方社会如何运作的大致概念。马克思主义的分析经常出错，但大部分是基于这样的假设:西方的形式根本就不是自然的:它们是高度人工的，是几个世纪社会斗争的产物。18世纪和19世纪，西欧出现了一种全新的东西，这是由中产阶级对试图压制他们的旧秩序进行的一系列痛苦的反抗造成的。在我看来，这似乎是一个普遍的真理，不管你认为当前社会体制之外可能的“下一个阶段”是什么。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

Yellow China was not at all like Europe. The Chinese Empire had social classes that had the same economic role as the European ‘bourgeois’ or middle class, but those people had a completely different set of social aspirations. Their minds were focused on a set of traditional values with roots going back thousands of years. Values which some European and US visitors came to admire. Values which the Chinese did not want to let go of.

当时的中国一点也不像欧洲。中华帝国的社会阶层与欧洲的“资产阶级”或中产阶级有着相同的经济角色，但这些人有着完全不同的社会抱负。他们的思想集中在一套可以追溯到几千年前的传统价值观上——一些欧洲和美国游客开始欣赏的价值观，也是中国人不想放弃的价值观。

Were these values compatible with modern technology? Some Chinese nationalists say that China’s dynamic was lost under the Quin, the final ruling dynasty that was created by the invading Manchus. But China under the Quin was still growing and changing. The New World crops that Europeans had found were taken up by Chinese peasants and led to a big growth in population. Rich Chinese also imported window glass from Europe: glass had never been much used in China, but when it was easily available it was incorporated into the existing way of life.

这些价值观与现代技术兼容吗?一些中国民族主义者说，在满族人创建的最后一个统治王朝——清王朝统治下，中国失去了活力。但在清的领导下，中国仍在不断发展和变化。欧洲人在新大陆发现的农作物被中国农民种植，导致了人口的大幅增长。富裕的中国人还从欧洲进口窗玻璃:玻璃在中国从未被广泛使用过，但当它很容易获得时，它就被纳入了现有的生活方式。

Europe’s core values could not be incorporated into the existing way of life, and so were ignored for as long as possible. Europe from the 16th century had produced a network of scientists who freely communicated with each other, publishing their results in Latin and initially accepting the Latin-Christian frxwork of thought. Other cultures had had brilliant inventors and some individual scientists with grand insights, but no such social network.

欧洲的核心价值观无法融入到（中国）的生活方式中，因此被尽可能长时间地忽视。从16世纪开始，欧洲形成了一个由科学家组成的网络，他们可以自由地相互交流，用拉丁语发表他们的成果，并从一开始就接受了拉丁-基督教的思想框架。其他文化中有杰出的发明家和一些有深刻见解的科学家，但没有这样的社会网络。

Other cultures also had a belief in esoteric knowledge and in the merits of hiding away your secrets among the ‘inner cirlce, rather than such systems being confined mostly to cranks and charlatans as happened in Europe. Belief in Wonderful Secrets fits human nature rather better than the odd stilted style of science, where communications are depersonalised and where fierce jealousies are mostly hidden under a show of common purpose and the primacy of truth.

其他文化也相信深奥的知识，不过它们相信在“内部圈子”中隐藏自己的秘密是有好处的，而不是像欧洲那样，在这里大多数人都局限于怪人和江湖骗子。“相信奇妙的秘密”更符合人类的本性，而不是科学中那种古怪的、做作的风格。在科学中，交流是没有人情化的，强烈的嫉妒大多要为共同目的和真理至上让位。
Individual genius was not enough, even in Europe, prior to the rise of a network of freely communicating scientists. Leonardo was just as gifted as an engineer and inventor as he was as a painter, but he used mirror-writing to conceal his interesting observations and ideas. People realised the importance of his non-artistic work only after others had rediscovered the same things.锚点[W] Had he not been an astonishingly skilled artist, someone whose seemingly trivial doodles remained valuable, most likely all of his manuscxts would have perished. Perhaps other secretive researchers existed whose work did indeed perish without a trace.
天才的个体是不够的，即使是在欧洲，在自由交流的科学家网络出现之前。列奥纳多是一位天才的工程师和发明家，就像他是一位画家一样，但他使用镜像书写来隐藏他有趣的观察和想法。如果他不是一个技艺惊人的艺术家，很可能他所有的手稿都会消失。也许还有其他秘密研究人员存在，但他们的成果都消失得无影无踪。

The culture of scientific discovery was hard to devise. It remains a very difficult culture to acquire even as an individual student immersed in a well-established scientific subculture. To import it as a living system into a different sort of society is harder again.

有关科学发现的文化是很难设计的。把它作为一个有生命的体制引进到一个不同类型的社会中变得非常困难。

This difficulty applied even to those closest to the Latin-Christian tradition. The highly intelligent culture of European Judaism found it quite easy to adapt to modern business – but this wasn’t hugely different from traditional trading and crafts, things that Jews had been doing long before anyone in Europe got beyond gift-exchange. But Judaism produced no significant scientists from within itself. From the 19th century, large numbers of individual Jews got drawn into the new world of thought that had been born out of the Latin-Christian tradition. Mostly this meant leaving a lot of their own background behind: almost all of the important Jewish scientists and social thinkers were non-believers, skeptics or deists, which is much less true of Jewish business people or politicians.

这种困难甚至适用于那些最接近拉丁基督教传统的人。高智商的欧洲犹太教文化发现它很容易适应现代商业——这与传统的贸易和手工艺并没有太大的区别，在欧洲任何人进行货物贸易之前，犹太人就已经在做这些事情了。但是犹太教本身并没有产生重要的科学家。从19世纪开始，大量犹太人被拉进了拉丁-基督教传统产生的新的思想世界。这在很大程度上意味着他们将自己的许多背景抛诸脑后:几乎所有重要的犹太科学家和社会思想家都是非信徒、怀疑论者或自然神论者，而这在犹太商人或政客身上就不是这么回事了。

Economist David Ricardo was one of the earliest exiles from traditional Judaism: he had rejected the orthodox Jewish beliefs of his family and eloped with a Quaker lady at the age of 21. Spinoza was disowned as a heretic by his community. Karl Marx came from a Jewish family that had converted to Lutheranism. Einstein sometimes spoke of God, but thought about the matter in a quite different way from any religious Jew.
As a creed, Judaism is much saner and less malignant than Christianity. But it didn’t produce science, though it did cherish a strong academic tradition that was easily translated into other modes of thought. A frxwork that gave some Jews a startlingly originally outlook, able to notice gaps in concepts that had been accepted as solid common-sense to people from a Latin-Christian background.

经济学家大卫·李嘉图(David Ricardo)是最早被传统犹太教放逐的人之一:他拒绝了家庭的正统犹太信仰，在21岁时与一位贵格会(Quaker)女士私奔。斯宾诺莎被他的社团认定为异教徒。卡尔·马克思来自一个已经皈依路德教的犹太家庭。爱因斯坦有时谈到上帝，但他思考这个问题的方式与任何有宗教信仰的犹太人完全不同。作为一种信条，犹太教比基督教要理智得多，也没有那么恶毒。但它并没有产生科学，尽管它确实珍视一种可以轻易转化为其他思维模式的强大的学术传统。这个框架赋予了一些犹太人一种令人吃惊的原始观点，能够注意到那些被拉丁基督教背景的人视为坚实常识的概念之间的差距。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处

The Latin-Christian tradition was created by Germanic barbarians swarming into the decaying Western Roman Empire. And it had some very interesting features that bore fruit in the long run. Its early stages don’t really deserve the name ‘Dark Ages’: they are dark to historians because there were few written records. Civilisation collapsed and there was a break in tradition, but this may have been a blessing in disguise. Perhaps one should say ‘sometimes the light killeth and sometimes the darkness giveth life‘. The burden of past glories oppressed most thinkers in China, and probably even more in Hindu and Islamic cultures. The Latin-Christian tradition was sufficiently raw and new to be willing to go its own way. Brash enough to be confident in its own merits while doing things that no one had done before.

拉丁-基督教传统是由日耳曼人涌入衰败的西罗马帝国创造的。它有一些非常有趣的特征，从长远来看会结出果实。它的早期阶段并不真正配得上“黑暗时代”的名号:历史学家认为这是黑暗的，因为当时很少有书面记录。文明崩溃了，传统也被打破了，但这可能是因祸得福。也许我们应该说“有时光明会杀戮，有时黑暗会赐予生命”。在中国，过去荣耀的负担压迫着大多数思想家，在印度教和伊斯兰文化中可能更甚。拉丁基督教的传统足够原始和新颖，愿意走自己的路。在做前人没有做过的事情的时候，对自己的优点足够自信。

Along with its well-known defects, the things that Professor Dawkins rants about in the name of Reason, the Latin-Christian tradition had merits based on three key ideas:
All knowledge should be available to anyone who could read.
There is dignity in manual work.
Theology allows for novelties.

除了道金斯教授以理性的名义大肆宣扬的那些众所周知的缺陷，拉丁基督教传统还有其优点，这些优点基于三个关键:1. 所有的知识都应该提供给任何识字的人。2. 体力劳动有尊严。3. 神学允许新奇的事物。

China had the first of these – anyone who could afford it was allowed to learn scholarly culture and sit the exams for entry into the ruling civil service. But the prejudice against manual labour was extremely strong: in a future article I will quote how Mao describes his own freeing of himself from this ancient burden.
(Interestingly, I don’t know of another Chinese thinker besides Mao who ever paid serious attention to the matter. I’d have thought it much the most obvious blockage to China’s 20th century desire to get beyond its old frxwork, but it gets overlooked.)

中国拥有其中第一条——任何有经济能力的人都被允许学习学术文化，并参加考试以进入执政的公务员队伍。但对体力劳动的偏见是极强的:在将来的一篇文章中,我将引用毛的描述，它是如何让自己从这一古老的负担中解脱出来的。有趣的是，除了毛，我不知道还有哪个中国思想家认真关注过这个问题。我本以为这是阻碍中国在20世纪超越旧框架的最明显障碍，但它被忽视了。

What seems obvious to someone raised in Western Europe may be very nearly unthinkable to someone whose mind was formed by a different set of values.
China had most of what were considered the take-off conditions for Europe’s Industrial Capitalism, but showed fantastic resistance to it. My view is that the missing elements were those that are mostly not mentioned:

对于一个在西欧长大的人来说，看似显而易见的事情，对于一个思想由一套不同的价值观形成的人来说，可能几乎是不可想象的。中国具备大多数被认为是欧洲工业资本主义起飞的条件，但却表现出了不可思议的阻力。我的观点是，其中缺失的元素大多没有被提及:

A scientific community favouring logic, proof and open debate.
A disturbed and disturbing ideology undermining the confidence of intellectuals in the existing social order.
The willingness of most of the educated to ‘get their hands dirty’.
The marginalisation of slavery in the home territories (even though it was flourishing and even expanding overseas).

1. 一个支持逻辑、证明和公开辩论的科学界。2. 一种令人不安的意识形态，破坏了知识分子对现有社会秩序的信心。3. 大多数受过教育的人愿意“弄脏自己的手的意愿”。4. 奴隶制在本土的边缘化(尽管它在海外蓬勃发展甚至扩张)。
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Slavery was almost universal in era when European science developed. And most slaves came from the same cultural and ethnic group as the slave-owners, though Islam preferred to use ‘unbelievers’. Judaism was exceptional in having seen slavery itself as doubtful, and also insisting that their own ancestors had been through a period of slavery in Egypt. This singular viewpoint was carried over into Christianity, in part as a reaction to the extreme development of slavery in the Greek and Roman world. But it did not prevent serfdom for most European peasants or cruel plantation-slavery in overseas territories.

在欧洲科学发展的时代，奴隶制几乎是普遍存在的。大多数奴隶和奴隶主来自同一文化和种族群体，尽管伊斯兰教倾向于使用“异教徒”。 犹太教例外，他们认为奴隶制本身是可疑的，并且坚持认为他们自己的祖先在埃及经历过一段奴隶制时期。这种独特的观点在一定程度上是对希腊和罗马世界奴隶制极端发展的一种反应，并且这一反应被带入了基督教。但它并没有阻止大多数欧洲的农奴制度，也没有阻止在海外领土上实行残酷的种植园奴隶制。
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Slavery fuelled by cash crops sold to by Europe was very demoralising for both owners and owned. The US South still shows the damage for it many generations after being compelled to abolish it. The US South is a violent, ill-educated and uncreative society compared to the other overseas English settlements, though it does produce some excellent soldiers. But almost any sort of society can produce soldiers: producing scientists and analytical thinkers is a rare trick.

欧洲出售的经济作物助长了奴隶制，这让奴隶主和被奴隶者都非常沮丧。在被强制废除后，美国南部仍显示出其对许多代人的负面影响。与其他海外英国殖民地相比，美国南部是一个暴力、教育程度低、缺乏创造力的社会，尽管它确实培养了一些优秀的士兵。但几乎任何一个社会都能培养士兵，而培养科学家和分析思想家则是一种罕见的技巧。

The distancing of slavery from the core of the society in Europe and its offshoots was probably a helpful factor. Most of Western Europe had abolished serfdom and slavery in their homelands by the 15th century, when science began to get going.

奴隶制度远离欧洲社会核心及其分支可能是一个有益的因素。到15世纪，当科学开始发展的时候，大多数西欧国家已经在他们的家乡废除了农奴制和奴隶制。

Europe offered a new version of human existence. But there were sound reasons for traditional China not to ‘take a leap in the dark’ and abandoned a proven system that had maintained a high level of civilisation for so long. Until Europe developed industrial capitalism, China’s system was the world leader in the eyes of most foreign visitors. China’s scholar-gentry system was very efficient and very stable. It allowed for gradual technological improvement while keeping the cultural basics. The ruling scholar-gentry were recruited for cleverness and education: it was easier for the rich to get their children educated, but they also had to be able to learn. It was not a closed system: Chinese-Belgian writer Han Suyin tells of how a whole village might club together to support one clever child who had a chance of passing the official exams. (The sort of respect for learning that also helps explains the great success of Chinese immigrants in the Western world.)

欧洲提供了人类生存的新版本。但是，传统的中国有充分的理由不去“冒险”——一套长期保持高度文明的已被证明行之有效的制度。在欧洲发展工业资本主义之前，在大多数外国游客眼中，中国的体制是世界领先的。中国的士绅制度非常高效和稳定。它在保留文化基础的同时，允许技术的逐步改进。统治阶层的士绅们被招募来是为了他们的聪明和受过教育:富人让他们的孩子受教育更容易，但他们也必须能够学习。这不是一个封闭的体制:比利时华裔作家韩素音（Han Suyin）讲述了整个村庄如何团结起来支持一个有机会通过官方考试的聪明孩子。这种对学习的尊重也有助于解释中国移民在西方世界取得的巨大成功。

The system run by the scholar-gentry was an administrative machine based on merit rather than ancestry, what’s sometimes called a bureaucratic system. I’d sooner keep the term ‘bureaucratic’ for abuses of such a system and describe it just as a machine composed of very clever men (no women, unfortunately). Rants about ‘bureaucracy’ are part of the standard beliefs of Britain’s former ruling class: but this class failed and was discarded during the 20th century, which is the main reason why they find so many things to complain about.

由士绅管理的体制是一套基于功绩而不是血统的行政机器，有时被称为官僚体制。我乐于用“官僚主义”这个词来形容对这种体制的滥用，把它描述成由非常聪明的男人组成的机器(不幸的是，没有女人)。对“官僚主义”的咆哮是英国前统治阶级标准信仰的一部分:但这个阶级在20世纪失败了，被抛弃了，这也是他们大量抱怨的主要原因。

All round the world, experience shows that some sort of administrative machine is necessary for modern life. And the richer or more civilised the society, the bigger and more expensive the administrative machinery needs to be. Those who feel burdened fail to consider that the income they have after paying all their taxes is much bigger than their ancestors got in the days when the state was smaller and cheaper and taxes lighter.

世界各地的经验表明，某种管理机器对于现代生活是必要的。社会越富裕、越文明，行政机构就需要更大、更昂贵。那些感到负担沉重的人没有考虑到，他们交税后的收益，比他们的祖先在国家更小、更便宜、税收更轻的时候得到的要多得多。

China’s traditional system of government was small for the number of people it ruled. The central authority chose officials at provincial and county level: the administrative machine stopped there and encouraged people to be self-governing as far as was possible.

中国传统的政府体制相对于其统治的人数来说规模较小。中央当局主导对省级和县级官员的选择，但仅此而已，再下一级，则鼓励人们尽可能地自治。

Some sort of state is necessary for any kind of life above tribalism. The oldest known systems are aristocratic – people are born to power. There was usually also a system of scribes where talent must have counted for something, but their role was secondary. China improved on this by creating a ruling administrative machine or bureaucracy. Within it, individuals had power on the basis of their positions, not birth or wealth or skills giving anyone an automatic right.

国家形式对于超越部落主义的任何一种生活都是必要的。已知的最古老的制度是贵族制度——人们生来就有权有势。通常也有一个抄写员的制度，在这套制度中，才能肯定是有价值的，但他们的角色是次要的。中国通过创建一套执政的行政机器或官僚机构来改善这一点。在它里面，每个人的权力都是基于他们的地位，而不是出身、财富或技能。
（未完待续）