Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver's Travels, and Of Boys and Men (Ep. 189)
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler.
大家好，欢迎回到《与泰勒对话》。
Today I am sitting here in Arlington, Virginia, with the great Jerusalem Demsas, formerly of Vox, currently at The Atlantic, read across the entire world.
今天，我坐在弗吉尼亚州阿灵顿，与伟大的耶路撒冷·德姆萨斯（Jerusalem Demsas）一起，他曾是 Vox 的成员，目前在《大西洋月刊》，阅读全世界的文章。
Today we’re going to do something different.
今天我们要做一些不同的事情。
This show is called Conversations with Tyler, but this time we’re actually going to have a conversation with Tyler.
这个节目叫做《与泰勒对话》，但这一次我们实际上要和泰勒对话。
Now we start.
现在我们开始。
Jerusalem, welcome.
耶路撒冷，欢迎。
Hi.
你好。
Thanks for having me.
谢谢你有我。
We agreed to go away and read and then talk about three books.
我们同意出去读三本书，然后谈论三本书。
Let’s start with Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed.
让我们从乌苏拉·勒吉恩《被剥夺者》开始。
The other books will be Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, and Richard V.
其他书籍包括《乔纳森·斯威夫特》、《格列佛游记》和《理查德五世》。
Reeves, Of Boys and Men.
里维斯，《男孩与男人》。
Ursula Le Guin — where do you want to start?
Ursula Le Guin — 你想从哪里开始？
On The Dispossessed
论被剥夺者
I first read this book — I think I must have been early high school.
我第一次读这本书 —— 我想我一定是在上高中。
I don’t know if this is what you were like when you were early high school, but I was very angry about a lot of things.
我不知道你高中时是不是这样，但我对很多事情都很生气。
It was hard to have conversations about anything to do with politics without getting very upset or angry.
谈论与政治有关的任何事情都很难不感到非常沮丧或愤怒。
That’s, I think, what a lot of my peers felt at the time.
我想，这就是我的很多同龄人当时的感受。
I think reading science fiction — it’s like a way of having conversations about politics without having to necessarily feel that.
我认为阅读科幻小说——就像一种谈论政治的方式，而不必一定有这种感觉。
It actually felt like a real entry point into how to start having discussions without all of that.
实际上，这感觉像是一个真正的切入点，让我们了解如何在没有所有这些的情况下开始讨论。
Not that the emotion itself was bad, but it made it hard sometimes to have productive conversations if you were overcome by the things you were feeling.
并不是说情绪本身不好，而是如果你被自己的感受所压倒，有时会很难进行富有成效的对话。
The Dispossessed is great.
被剥夺者很棒。
We can start, I suppose, with maybe a very basic plot summary.
我想，我们可以从一个非常基本的情节概要开始。
Do you want to do that or should I?
你想这样做还是我应该这样做？
Let me first say, I also read it early in high school.
首先说一下，我高中很早就读过这本书。
I was 13 or 14.
我当时13岁或14岁。
It was such a different reading this time around.
这次的阅读是如此不同。
The first time I read it, I didn’t really like it.
第一次读的时候，我不太喜欢它。
I quite liked Ursula Le Guin, but this one — it was somehow, at the time, too communal to me, too utopian.
我很喜欢乌苏拉·勒吉恩，但这个——在当时，对我来说太公共了，太乌托邦了。
Of course, I read it now, it seems almost the exact opposite of that.
当然，我现在读到的内容似乎与此几乎完全相反。
Do you want to start with a very brief plot summary?
你想从一个非常简短的情节概要开始吗？
Sure.
当然。
There are two planets that are relevant.
有两颗相关的行星。
They’re kind of close to each other.
他们彼此很接近。
One is home to an anarchist separatist cell that moved away from the original planet hundreds of years in the past.
其中一个是无政府主义分离主义组织的所在地，该组织在数百年前就离开了原来的星球。
Then, the original planet is supposed to be more like a capitalist planet.
那么，原来的星球应该更像是一个资本主义星球。
It looks a lot more like Earth.
它看起来更像地球。
Our main character is a physicist who travels between the two, trying to bridge the gap.
我们的主角是一位物理学家，他游走在两者之间，试图弥合差距。
I think that’s a broad summary.
我认为这是一个广泛的总结。
That makes sense to me.
这对我来说很有意义。
This was published, I think, in 1974.
我想这篇文章发表于 1974 年。
Reading it this time, it seemed to me to be the ultimate anti-utopian novel that, in fact, the collectivist society — you have to live together with other people who are strangers.
这次读起来，我觉得这是一部终极的反乌托邦小说，事实上，集体主义社会 ——你必须和其他陌生人一起生活。
You can’t rear your own children.
你无法抚养自己的孩子。
There is very little freedom of expression.
言论自由很少。
People only get to eat two meals a day.
人们一天只能吃两顿饭。
The way they talk about sex is not really very romantic, you might say, and it seems like a horror.
你可能会说，他们谈论性的方式并不是很浪漫，而且看起来很恐怖。
I can’t imagine — the first time I read it, I thought, “Le Guin is really on the side of the communal society.”
我无法想象——当我第一次读到这本书时，我想，“勒吉恩真的站在公共社会一边。”
The other thing that struck me on my later reading of the book is just how anthropological it is as a mode of presentation.
后来读这本书时令我印象深刻的另一件事是，它作为一种呈现方式是多么的人类学。
As you know, her father was a very famous anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber at Berkeley.
如你所知，她的父亲是伯克利分校的一位非常著名的人类学家阿尔弗雷德·克罗伯。
Le Guin’s mother was a well-known psychologist.
勒吉恩的母亲是一位著名的心理学家。
It’s almost not science fiction.
这几乎不是科幻小说。
It’s an anthropological investigation of two worlds that we call science fiction because we don’t know where else to put them.
这是对两个世界的人类学调查，我们称之为科幻小说，因为我们不知道还能把它们放在哪里。
Yes, I think it’s referred to as an ambiguous utopia.
是的，我认为它被称为一个模棱两可的乌托邦。
I think Le Guin is pretty clear that she prefers the anarchist world but doesn’t shy away from the problems with it, which I think is usually the issue with utopian writing.
我认为勒吉恩很清楚她更喜欢无政府主义世界，但并不回避其中的问题，我认为这通常是乌托邦写作的问题。
Did you disagree?
你不同意吗？
You don’t think that that’s clear?
你不认为这很清楚吗？
I don’t think she prefers the communal anarchist world.
我认为她不喜欢公共无政府主义世界。
Really?
真的吗？
I think she has greater hope for it, but she’s telling us, “Unless you come up with something new, this is what you’re going to get.” It’s quite horrible.
我认为她对此抱有更大的希望，但她告诉我们，“除非你想出新的东西，否则这就是你会得到的。”这太可怕了。
The Terran, I think, ambassador in the work — he praises the non-communal society, Urras, as the best of all the worlds that exist.
我认为，地球人是这部作品中的大使——他称赞非社群社会乌拉斯是现存世界中最好的。
Earth, or Terra, has also been destroyed, something that sounds a lot like climate change, so the only place that works at all is the one that’s a consumer society, has a lot of gender inequality, rampant income inequality, and a lot of war.
地球或泰拉也被摧毁了，这听起来很像气候变化，所以唯一有效的地方是消费社会，存在严重的性别不平等、严重的收入不平等和大量的战争。
I think part of Le Guin’s message, which was very 1974 — maybe more true than people realize today — is you only get a shot at the good parts of the non-communal society by tolerating this pretty high risk of war, that it keeps things dynamic in some way.
我认为勒吉恩传达的信息的一部分非常具有 1974 年的意义——“也许比人们今天意识到的更真实”——只有通过容忍这种相当高的战争风险，你才能接触到非公有社会的美好部分，它在某种程度上让事情保持动态。
I don’t know.
我不知道。
The fact that she gives .
她给予的事实。
.
。
.
。
The protagonist is from the anarchist world, and he is the one who has the major scientific breakthrough that everyone is trying to get their hands on.
主角来自无政府主义世界，他是拥有所有人都想得到的重大科学突破的人。
The fact that he hasn’t returned to his home planet at the end — we don’t know if he actually lands and is safe there — I think is a clearer message of how .
他最终没有返回自己的家乡星球这一事实 ——“我们不知道他是否真的着陆并在那里安全”—— 我认为这是一个更清楚的信息。
.
。
.
。
I feel like a lot of the words that she uses to describe the capitalist society are quite disdainful.
我觉得她用很多形容资本主义社会的词都很蔑视。
Not that she thinks somehow that her original world is perfect, but it’s pretty clear to me that she doesn’t think it’s worth it.
并不是说她认为她原来的世界是完美的，但我很清楚她认为这不值得。
She doesn’t think it’s worth it, the pain, the suffering, everything that’s hidden there.
她认为这不值得，痛苦、折磨，以及隐藏在那里的一切。
Even the property owner who becomes friends with our protagonist is pretty upset with his life there.
即使是与我们的主角成为朋友的业主也对他在那里的生活感到非常不安。
At the same time, there’s this larger point that she’s making, which is that you shouldn’t expect any society — even one that claims to be utopian, even one that has a lot of your shared ideals — to be satisfactory at any point.
与此同时，她提出了一个更重要的观点，那就是你不应该期望任何社会 ——即使是一个自称乌托邦的社会，即使是一个拥有很多共同理想的社会——在任何时候都令人满意。
I think it’s pretty clear that she has, as you said, greater hope for the anarchist planet.
我认为很明显，正如你所说，她对这个无政府主义星球抱有更大的希望。
I view Shevek, the protagonist, the scientist, as pretty selfish.
我认为谢维克，主角，科学家，非常自私。
He’s quite a bit like Gulliver.
他很像格列佛。
What he really wants to do is travel.
他真正想做的是旅行。
One theme of this novel is that there are some things you can only learn by traveling, and he learns those things.
这部小说的一个主题是，有些东西只有通过旅行才能学到，而他也学到了这些东西。
He wants to learn them.
他想学习它们。
He leaves his family.
他离开了家人。
The very last sentences of the novel make it clear he comes back empty-handed.
小说的最后几句话表明他空手而归。
For all the talk about the scientific breakthrough, I think he never has anything.
对于所有关于科学突破的谈论，我认为他什么也没有。
There’s never a part of the novel where it’s useful or even revealed or published.
小说中从来没有任何一个部分是有用的，甚至没有被揭示或出版过。
When you read throughout how the breakthrough is discussed, it sounds like nonsense.
当你阅读全文如何讨论这一突破时，你会发现这听起来像是无稽之谈。
I think there’s a bit of underlying, maybe satire.
我认为这里面有一些潜在的，也许是讽刺。
Does he have anything anyway?
他到底有什么东西吗？
Yes, chronologically, this is the first of a larger series of works that take place in the same universe, and his breakthrough ends up being extremely important later on for future communications, the ansible idea later on.
是的，按时间顺序，这是发生在同一个宇宙中的更大系列作品中的第一部，他的突破最终对于后来的通信、后来的 ansible 想法极其重要。
I do think it’s interesting that the thing that he takes back is that it’s important to have free flow of information.
我确实认为有趣的是，他收回了信息自由流动的重要性。
He’s obviously very frustrated by that throughout his time at university.
显然，他在大学期间对此感到非常沮丧。
Even back on the capitalist planet, there wasn’t free flow of information going on.
即使回到资本主义星球，信息也没有自由流动。
They describe all the newspapers as just lying and making things up.
他们形容所有报纸都在撒谎和捏造事实。
The other professor at the university can’t even really talk about.
大学的另一位教授甚至无法真正谈论。
He feels uncomfortable sharing that he’s dissatisfied with his home planet.
他对分享自己对家乡星球的不满感到不舒服。
I think there’s this current here which is trying to really undermine the idea that there are these ideals in the capitalist society that are actually .
我认为现在的潮流正试图真正破坏资本主义社会中确实存在这些理想的想法。
.
。
.
。
It’s his rival, Sabul, who more or less makes him leave because he can’t publish the idea on the communal planet, and they all think he’s a traitor for leaving.
是他的竞争对手萨布尔或多或少地让他离开，因为他无法在公共星球上发表这个想法，而且他们都认为他的离开是叛徒。
They throw rocks at him.
他们向他扔石头。
One of the rocks hurts his shoulder, even.
其中一块岩石甚至伤到了他的肩膀。
He wonders, when he’s coming back, if they’ll even let him back in or put him in prison or maybe even kill him.
他想知道，当他回来时，他们是否会让他回来或把他关进监狱，甚至可能杀了他。
It sounds quite fraught to me.
这对我来说听起来很令人担忧。
We’re hearing about that planet, or moon rather, from the vantage point of people who believe in it.
我们从相信它的人的角度听说了那个行星，或者更确切地说是月球。
But once you see through their descriptions, to me it sounds much worse than even the Soviet Union.
但一旦你看完他们的描述，对我来说，这听起来甚至比苏联还要糟糕。
In the Soviet Union, you could keep your kids, right?
在苏联，你可以保留你的孩子，对吗？
That was just understood.
这才刚刚明白。
I think there’s a comment made by a woman that Shevek, our protagonist, meets on his travels, where she says that it’s better to have the conflict outside of your head than to have the conflict within yourself.
我认为我们的主人公谢维克在旅行中遇到的一位女士曾说过这样的话，她说最好将冲突排除在外，而不是将冲突置于自己内部。
When you are forced — as they are in his home planet — to never be able to openly confront the political problems because the assumption is there is no hierarchy, there is no government, so there’s nothing to confront.
当你被迫——就像在他的家乡一样——永远无法公开面对政治问题，因为假设没有等级制度，没有政府，所以没有什么可以面对的。
Which makes it actually quite difficult to confront the very things that are causing distress, and they realize that the real problems are within all of their own collective minds about what are social norms or rules that are actually concerning them.
这使得他们实际上很难面对那些造成痛苦的事情，而且他们意识到真正的问题在于他们自己的集体头脑中，关于什么是真正与他们有关的社会规范或规则。
From my perspective, yes, there can be a lot of things around social norms and rules and things that are allowed to be spoken about that can stifle and reduce freedom.
从我的角度来看，是的，社会规范和规则以及允许谈论的事情可能有很多可能会扼杀和减少自由。
But nothing can be more stifling than the state itself creating violence against other people, which we see on the capitalist planet.
但没有什么比国家本身对他人制造暴力更令人窒息的了，正如我们在资本主义星球上看到的那样。
They’re having a proxy war.
他们正在进行一场代理人战争。
There’s an invasion of another country, which is meant to be an allegory to Vietnam, I suppose.
我想，这是对另一个国家的入侵，这是对越南的寓言。
There’s a real present threat of danger and violence, which Shevek has not really felt except in a brief fight that he has early on when he’s a youth on his home planet.
危险和暴力的威胁是真实存在的，谢维克并没有真正感受到这种威胁，除了他年轻时在家乡星球上经历过的一场短暂的战斗。
To me it’s just like, yes, there are serious problems, but it seems —
对我来说，这就像，是的，存在严重的问题，但似乎 -
They do shoot at the more radical syndicalists on the communal planet, right?
他们确实向公共星球上更激进的工团主义者开枪，对吗？
Then Shevek realizes, “Oh, this is what our army always was about.” There’s this pretense that there’s no government, but in fact, things are centrally planned by a computer à la Daron Acemoglu, I suppose, and a lot of it just doesn’t really seem to be as it’s advertised.
然后谢维克意识到，“哦，这就是我们军队一直以来的使命。”有人假装没有政府，但事实上，我想，一切都是由达龙·阿西莫格鲁那样的计算机集中计划的，而且很多事情似乎并不像宣传的那样。
Yes.
是的。
Do you think it’s a feminist novel?
你认为这是一本女权小说吗？
I very much thought that the first time I read it, and now I wonder.
第一次读的时候我很想，现在我想知道。
If you think about Shevek — when he goes to the more capitalist planet, his real self comes out, so I think it’s saying how men and women truly are with each other.
如果你想想谢维克——当他去到更加资本主义的星球时，他的真实自我就会显现出来，所以我认为这说明了男人和女人之间的真实关系。
It’s very hard to change that socially.
在社会上改变这一点非常困难。
There’s that woman he forces himself on.
他强迫自己爱上了那个女人。
You could even say he rapes her.
你甚至可以说他强奸了她。
It’s not a completed rape, but she’s saying no, no, no, and he keeps on doing it in a way that is really well past any boundary point.
这不是一次彻底的强奸，但她说不，不，不，而他继续以一种远远超出任何边界点的方式这样做。
It seems to me anti-Marxist and anti-blank slate, that this is what people are like, and it’s how you’re going to channel those impulses.
在我看来，这似乎是反马克思主义和反空白的，这就是人们的样子，这就是你如何引导这些冲动。
I think it’s ambivalent about feminism.
我认为女权主义是矛盾的。
What’s your take?
你怎么看？
Well, I think the message is .
嗯，我想传达的信息是。
.
。
.
。
First of all, he gets drunk on the planet for the first time, and then he sexually assaults this woman that he’s friends with.
首先，他第一次在这个星球上喝醉了，然后他性侵犯了这个他朋友的女人。
I don’t think it’s about blank slate.
我不认为这与白板有关。
It’s that he’s entering a society with different incentives and different rules, and in a society that’s been very clear is very non-egalitarian, where he has an entire conversation with someone where they’re very clear about the lower assumption about sexism.
而是他正在进入一个有着不同激励和不同规则的社会，在一个非常明显的非平等主义社会中，他与某人进行了完整的对话，他们非常清楚关于性别歧视的较低假设。
Within just weeks he’s able to understand, and he explains to his friend that women here are just ornaments.
短短几周内，他就明白了，并向他的朋友解释说，这里的女人只是装饰品。
They’re always below men.
她们永远低于男人。
She pushes back on this slightly, but at the end of the day, he’s being influenced by the society around him.
她稍微反驳了这一点，但最终，他受到了周围社会的影响。
I don’t think something like that would’ve happened on his home planet.
我认为类似的事情不会发生在他的家乡星球上。
He would’ve been constrained.
他会受到限制。
I think it’s hard to say one of these is blank slate or not.
我认为很难说其中之一是白板还是空白。
I think both of them are clearly products of the institutions that are pushing behaviors, especially —
我认为它们显然都是推动行为的机构的产物，尤其是 ——
But there’s nothing about growing up in that more sexually egalitarian alternative that inoculated him against those pressures.
但在性别更加平等的环境中长大并没有让他免受这些压力。
It’s not like, oh, he grew up in the nice communal planet.
这不像，哦，他是在美好的公共星球上长大的。
He learned to treat women like human beings with individual rights.
他学会了像对待拥有个人权利的人一样对待女性。
Then of course he can just carry that training with him, which we would expect from a normal human, even from a not-so-nice society.
当然，他可以随身携带这种训练，这是我们对正常人的期望，即使是在一个不太好的社会中。
Well, I don’t know.
好吧，我不知道。
I think that’s pretty clearly the case, that the incentives and how different people are viewed in a society matters.
我认为情况很明显，激励因素以及社会中如何看待不同的人很重要。
We’ll talk about Gulliver’s Travels pretty soon, but the behaviors that people engage in are going to be extremely contextual.
我们很快就会讨论《格列佛游记》，但人们的行为将与情境密切相关。
If there are no laws or if there are no rules or mores around treating women as inferior, then I think it’s going to open up a lot of things there.
如果没有法律，或者没有关于将女性视为低人一等的规则或道德，那么我认为这将会引发很多问题。
But also, I don’t really know if we should take Shevek to be some hero, as you said.
而且，我真的不知道我们是否应该像你所说的那样，把谢维克当作英雄。
There are a lot of problems with this character.
这个角色本身就有很多问题。
It’s not really clear to me that Le Guin is valorizing this man in many ways.
我不太清楚勒吉恩是否在很多方面都在评价这个人。
Oh, I think he looks worse and worse as the story proceeds.
哦，我觉得随着故事的进展，他看起来越来越糟糕。
As the story goes on, yes.
随着故事的发展，是的。
It’s hard because, obviously, Le Guin is a woman, and it’s interesting she chose to have her protagonist be a man.
这很难，因为显然勒吉恩是一名女性，有趣的是她选择让她的主角是一名男性。
That happens all the time, but all of the women are technically pretty side and supporting characters that seem to only — at least in Shevek’s mind — be pushing his own story arc forward, but at the same time, they are .
这种情况经常发生，但从技术上讲，所有女性都是漂亮的一面和配角，这些角色似乎只是“——至少在谢维克看来”——推动他自己的故事情节向前发展，但与此同时，她们确实如此。
.
。
.
。
Even the woman who he befriends and then later assaults — she describes her own agency as secretly being able to push men behind the scenes to do what she wants.
即使是他与他成为朋友，然后又对其进行攻击的那个女人——她形容自己的机构能够秘密地在幕后推动男人做她想做的事。
And that becomes revealed to be a farce in the society because she’s not able to stop him, obviously, from assaulting her.
这被揭露为社会上的一场闹剧，因为她显然无法阻止他袭击她。
That’s one of those things where I think Ursula was making a pretty clear comment that yes, there are problems on both planets, but here is a planet where even this woman who’s clearly very wealthy, very well connected, can’t stop this stranger from doing the very bare minimum of not hurting her.
我认为乌苏拉在其中一件事上做出了非常明确的评论，是的，两个星球上都存在问题，但在这个星球上，即使是这个显然非常富有、人脉广泛的女人，也无法阻止这个陌生人做最起码的不伤害她的事情。
I think that she’s making a critique of how feminism or women are treated under capitalism, how they’re commodified, and even the people who realize that commodification ends up hurting them.
我认为她正在批评女权主义或妇女在资本主义下如何受到对待，她们如何被商品化，甚至那些意识到商品化最终伤害了她们的人。
It’s the same day that he gives this whole speech about how women are treated terribly in the society that he ends up assaulting her.
就在同一天，他发表了关于女性在社会中如何受到可怕对待的整场演讲，最终他袭击了她。
None of that happens on his own planet, even though there are harms that women are facing all the time: being separated from their children, not being able to make choices similarly to men around their life and well-being.
这一切都没有发生在他自己的星球上，尽管女性一直面临着伤害：与孩子分离，无法像男性一样对自己的生活和福祉做出选择。
I think there’s a clear difference.
我认为有一个明显的区别。
I’m struck by the prison scene on Anarres, the communal society.
阿纳雷斯（Anarres）这个公共社会的监狱场景给我留下了深刻的印象。
It’s early in the book, and the children — he’s one of them then, he’s younger — they’re playing at prison, and just how rapidly they become tyrannical investigators and violent and abusive.
书的开头部分，孩子们——他是他们中的一员，他更年轻——他们在监狱里玩耍，他们很快就变成了残暴的调查员、暴力和虐待者。
Again, this idea that some vision of true human nature — it’s just right there underneath the surface.
再说一次，这种想法是对真实人性的某种看法——它就在表面之下。
There’s nothing about egalitarianism that really changes it.
平等主义并没有什么能够真正改变它。
Or is it about men?
或者是关于男人的？
Because they’re all boys.
因为他们都是男孩。
Yes, men also.
是的，男人也一样。
Of course.
当然。
But I wonder if that’s what she’s saying.
但我想知道她是不是这么说的。
It’s not about human nature; maybe she’s making a comment about male nature.
这与人性无关，而是与人性有关。也许她是在评论男性天性。
I think she is.
我想她是。
The Left Hand of Darkness, which I assume you know — the way you get peace is by having genders that only are capable of sex a small percentage of the time.
黑暗的左手，我想你知道——你获得和平的方式是拥有只在一小部分时间能够发生性行为的性别。
The implication is, that’s the one thing you have to do that will get you peace, and nothing else will work.
言外之意是，只有你必须做的一件事才能让你获得平静，其他任何事情都行不通。
Neither capitalism nor socialism nor anything in between.
既不是资本主义，也不是社会主义，也不是介于两者之间的任何制度。
I think it’s this 1960s Neo-Freudian, like Norman Brown direction, point of view that everything’s about sex and violence and conflict and how they fit together.
我认为这是 20 世纪 60 年代新弗洛伊德主义的观点，就像诺曼·布朗的方向一样，一切都与性、暴力、冲突以及它们如何结合在一起有关。
She’s, in a way, anti-utopian relative to the ’60s.
在某种程度上，相对于 60 年代，她是反乌托邦的。
That’s how I read her.
我就是这样读她的。
Yes.
是的。
One thing I thought about while reading this book was — I don’t know if you have an opinion on this, but I feel like people don’t really write utopian literature anymore.
我在读这本书时想到的一件事是 —— 我不知道你对此有何看法，但我觉得人们不再真正写乌托邦文学了。
Do you feel like that’s changed?
你觉得情况有变化吗？
Oh, there’s so much.
哦，有这么多。
I see a higher proportion of dystopias —
我看到反乌托邦的比例更高 ——
Yes.
是的。
— as Peter Thiel has argued, but the better things get, if you’re going to be interesting, you have to actually create a lot of destruction and conflict.
——正如彼得·泰尔（Peter Thiel）所说，但事情变得越美好，如果你想变得有趣，你就必须真正制造很多破坏和冲突。
Yes.
是的。
It’s hard because I see the value of utopia as trying to clarify what it is that you’re actually trying to get to.
这很难，因为我认为乌托邦的价值在于试图澄清你实际上想要达到的目标是什么。
It’s not meant to be, “We think that this form of society will necessarily come about because of my preferred policies or changes,” but if you can define what Eden is, then you can approximate it as close as you can get.
这并不是说，“我们认为这种社会形式必然会因为我偏好的政策或变化而出现”，但如果你能定义什么是伊甸园，那么你就可以尽可能接近它。
It seems sad to me that people don’t really do that anymore.
对我来说，人们不再真正这样做了，这似乎很遗憾。
Obviously, things have gotten better on various measures, but I don’t think anyone would describe our current world as a utopia, and you don’t really see that kind of engagement.
显然，从各种方面来看，情况已经变得更好，但我认为没有人会把我们当前的世界描述为乌托邦，而且你也看不到这种参与。
I think there’s a lack of cultural self-confidence that would be needed to do that, and in that respect, our world probably, or the Western world, is worse.
我认为要做到这一点需要缺乏文化自信，在这方面，我们的世界，或者西方世界，可能更糟。
What do you mean?
你是什么意思？
Well, you look at cartoons from the 1960s, The Jetsons — they have a flying car.
嗯，你看看 20 世纪 60 年代的动画片《杰森一家》——他们有一辆飞行汽车。
That’s where the expression comes from: “They promised us flying cars, and all we got was 140, now 280, characters on Twitter.”
这就是这句话的由来：“他们向我们承诺会飞行汽车，但我们在 Twitter 上得到的只有 140 个字符，现在是 280 个字符。”
That was not a joke.
那不是玩笑。
I watched that as a kid.
我小时候看过那个。
Everyone took it seriously.
大家都认真对待了。
“Okay, I’m going to get my flying car.
“好吧，我要去买我的飞行汽车了。
I just have to grow up a bit.” The idea that you could just apply reason and technology to problems, and things in America would keep on getting better was a very common view.
我只是需要长大一点。”一种非常普遍的观点是，只要运用理性和技术来解决问题，美国的事情就会不断变得更好。
And if you wrote a novel in that direction, it eventually became boring, but people wouldn’t laugh.
如果你朝这个方向写一本小说，它最终会变得无聊，但人们不会笑。
Maybe there are other cultures who are writing utopias.
也许还有其他文化正在书写乌托邦。
I don’t know.
我不知道。
You are the one who reads internationally.
你是一个阅读国际化的人。
I don’t know of any, really.
我真的不知道。
Asimov’s I, Robot — it’s not utopia, but things work out like, oh, you elect the robot president, he’s a pretty good leader.
阿西莫夫的《我，机器人》——这不是乌托邦，但事情的结果就像，哦，你选举了机器人总统，他是一个非常好的领导者。
Different weird things happen, but you hold it all together, even though, at a micro scale, all the laws are violated.
不同的奇怪的事情发生了，但你把它们放在一起，即使在微观尺度上，所有的法律都被违反了。
Today, I consider it a kind of fictional story, Eliezer: well, the AGI is going to destroy us all is obviously beyond dystopia.
今天，我认为这是一个虚构的故事，埃利泽：嗯，通用人工智能将摧毁我们所有人，这显然超出了反乌托邦的范围。
This is the end of everything.
这是一切的终结。
The people are like la-di-da.
人们就像拉迪达。
There was some investment bank.
有一些投资银行。
I think they issued investment recommendations, and they said, “Oh, this stock will go up.
我认为他们发布了投资建议，他们说：“哦，这只股票会上涨。
This stock will go down.
这只股票将会下跌。
And by the way, there’s a 40 percent chance the world will end in 10 years.” Then they started talking about currencies without missing a beat, and our world, to me, seems like that.
顺便说一句，10 年后世界末日的可能性为 40%。”然后他们开始毫不犹豫地谈论货币，对我来说，我们的世界就是这样。
Yes.
是的。
I guess there have always been people preaching doom, even people amongst technologists.
我想一直有人宣扬末日，甚至是技术专家中的人。
Not just Luddites or people who are very religious or finding themselves in cults, but there’s usually .
不仅仅是卢德分子或非常虔诚的人或发现自己处于邪教中的人，但通常都有。
.
。
.
。
The bulk of my literary reading has been 20th-century literature, and so it’s something that is very interesting, when I read modern-day, to see that kind of a shift.
我读的大部分文学作品都是 20 世纪的文学作品，所以当我阅读现代文学时，看到这种转变是非常有趣的。
If you were to sum up what makes The Dispossessed, to you, an interesting novel — how would you put that?
如果您要总结一下《被剥夺者》对您来说是一部有趣的小说的原因——您会怎么说？
I think that the ambiguity, clearly, between you and I about what Le Guin is trying to tell us about these different systems is actually extremely valuable.
我认为，你我之间对于勒吉恩试图告诉我们的关于这些不同系统的内容的模糊性实际上是非常有价值的。
I find that what’s really good about science fiction today, if you’re reading Ted Chiang, or you’re reading, what is it, The Children of Time.
我发现今天的科幻小说真正的优点是什么，如果你正在读特德·蒋的书，或者你正在读的《时间之子》，它是什么？
Who wrote that book?
那本书是谁写的？
Oh, I know who you mean, but that’s a bit older, isn’t it?
哦，我知道你指的是谁，但那有点老了，不是吗？
As a book?
作为一本书？
Yes, Tchaikovsky.
是的，柴可夫斯基。
But just in the last couple of decades, they’re really, really, really good at world building and being very, very particular about making the world as realistic as possible and how they would get there.
但就在过去的几十年里，他们真的非常非常擅长世界建设，并且非常非常注重让世界尽可能现实以及他们如何实现这一目标。
Le Guin dispenses with a lot of that and just tries to get you to a point where you can actually engage with the ideas that she’s working on.
勒吉恩省去了很多这些，只是试图让你能够真正参与到她正在研究的想法中。
This I find very valuable with the science fiction that Le Guin writes.
我发现这对于勒吉恩写的科幻小说非常有价值。
It becomes very possible to actually engage with questions of right and wrong in such a different context, and she does bring Earth into the mix at the very end.
在如此不同的背景下真正讨论正确与错误的问题变得非常有可能，而且她确实在最后将地球带入其中。
I think that that’s what’s valuable about it.
我认为这就是它的可贵之处。
What about you?
你呢？
I like how it continually subverts my expectations, which a lot of science fiction doesn’t do, even if it’s conceptually strong.
我喜欢它不断颠覆我的期望，这是很多科幻小说所没有做到的，即使它在概念上很强大。
The societies are believable in some very real way.
这些社会在某种程度上是可信的。
Shevek, as a lead character, is quite interesting and strong and, ultimately, unlikeable in just the way I might want to look for.
谢维克作为主角，非常有趣和强大，但最终，不像我想要的那样。
The theme of parallel worlds has interested me for a long time, so it has all those things.
平行世界的主题让我感兴趣很长时间了，所以它有所有这些东西。
It’s well written.
写得很好。
It’s very much a novel of its time, but in an interesting way, and I partly identify with that time, nostalgically.
这在很大程度上是一部属于那个时代的小说，但以一种有趣的方式，我怀旧地部分认同那个时代。
To see how people frame the issues of gender and war and capitalism back then — I actually feel those traditions have been somewhat lost and forgotten, and this book is trying to pull us back to them.
看看当时人们如何看待性别、战争和资本主义问题 —— 实际上我觉得这些传统已经在某种程度上丢失和遗忘了，而这本书试图把我们拉回到它们身边。
Mm-hmm.
嗯嗯。
I think it’s also very interesting to see — we talked about them as parallel worlds, but the way the capitalist world views this off-planet as this declining mining outpost that sends them what they need — it’s almost like a mining colony, is how they think about it.
我认为看到这一点也很有趣——我们将它们视为平行世界，但资本主义世界将这个地外视为这个正在衰落的采矿前哨，为他们提供他们需要的东西——它几乎就像一个采矿殖民地，这就是他们的想法。
Oh, sure.
哦，当然。
And a prison, right?
还有监狱，对吧？
Yes, exactly.
是的，完全正确。
Obviously, we’re starting with his perspective of growing up there, but even that is challenged by Le Guin, too, at some point, where you’re like, oh, are these parallel worlds?
显然，我们是从他在那里长大的视角开始的，但即便如此，在某些时候，勒吉恩也对这一点提出了挑战，你会想，哦，这些是平行世界吗？
Are these even countries?
这些还是国家吗？
And what’s also interesting about it, too, is, it started me thinking of the travel book.
有趣的是，它让我开始思考旅行书。
I guess we’re talking about Gulliver’s Travels soon, but the travel book presumes a level of alien that is still left to be discovered.
我想我们很快就会谈论《格列佛游记》，但这本游记所假设的外星人水平仍有待发现。
What’s remarkable is that the two planets — they refer to each other as aliens all the time.
值得注意的是，这两颗行星 ——它们一直互相称对方为外星人。
There are some differences in physicality, even, as well, as they describe.
甚至正如他们所描述的那样，身体素质也存在一些差异。
But they’ve only been separated for a few hundred years, and they’ve been in trade with one another and in communication with each other the entire time.
但他们分开的时间只有几百年，他们一直在进行贸易、交流。
Obviously, there are some real barriers to engagement with one another, but the speed with which they view each other as alien and not human is very interesting, because if someone were to come to me from South Africa, I would not view them as a fully alien person.
显然，彼此交往存在一些真正的障碍，但他们将彼此视为外星人而不是人类的速度非常有趣，因为如果有人从南非来找我，我不会将他们视为完全的外星人。
To me that’s a very weird shift.
对我来说，这是一个非常奇怪的转变。
The notion that you never escape your prisons, prison being a recurring theme in the novel — no matter how hard you try to hold away the other, you never escape it; you’re always imprisoned, both by yourself, your own institutions, and by your relation to that other — I thought the novel was quite good on and ahead of its time.
你永远无法逃离监狱，监狱是小说中反复出现的主题——无论你多么努力地试图阻止对方，你都永远无法逃脱；你总是被自己、你自己的机构、以及你与他人的关系所囚禁——我认为这部小说相当优秀，而且超前于时代。
Yes.
是的。
The only walls on the anarchist planet are the ones that surround the space travel, the launching pad or whatever it is.
无政府主义星球上唯一的墙壁是围绕太空旅行、发射台或其他任何东西的墙壁。
That’s something that’s said very early on, but then you discover throughout the book how much there are all of these other “invisible walls” that he’s discovering.
这是很早就说过的话，但后来你会在整本书中发现他发现了多少其他“看不见的墙”。
That’s made very explicit at times, sometimes maybe too explicit.
有时这会变得非常明确，有时可能太明确了。
But I think it’s also a lesson in how much you have to have an other to compare yourself to in order to even understand yourself.
但我认为这也是一个教训，告诉你你必须与他人进行比较才能了解自己。
He’s alone for a really long time, and when he’s doing his studies at the beginning or in the middle of the book, and he can’t get these scientific breakthroughs that he inevitably does get to — it’s when he starts interacting with other people and rebuilding those bonds with other humans that you do actually get these breakthroughs.
他独自一人很长一段时间，当他在书的开头或中间进行研究时，他无法实现他不可避免地实现的这些科学突破——只有当他开始与其他人互动并重建与其他人的联系时，你才能真正实现这些突破。
I think that’s also another point in favor of Le Guin pointing out that communitarianism is important.
我认为这也是勒吉恩指出社群主义很重要的另一点。
On Gulliver’s Travels
论格列佛游记
We can jump around and come back, of course.
当然，我们可以跳来跳去然后再回来。
Tell me, on your first read, what struck you most about Gulliver’s Travels?
告诉我，当您第一次阅读《格列佛游记》时，给您印象最深的是什么？
It was very readable.
它非常具有可读性。
I did not expect that.
我没想到会这样。
I know that people talk about this.
我知道人们谈论这个。
I think it’s been billed as a children’s book sometimes.
我认为它有时被宣传为儿童读物。
I don’t think it’s a children’s book.
我不认为这是一本儿童读物。
I read it as a kid.
我小时候读过它。
How old were you?
你当时几岁？
I don’t remember.
我不记得了。
I would guess 10.
我猜是 10。
Oh, okay.
哦，好吧。
Very young.
很年轻。
It might have been an abridged edition.
它可能是一个删节版。
I don’t even know or remember anymore.
我什至不知道也不记得了。
It’s very readable.
它非常可读。
The actual sentence level, it’s not very difficult to understand what’s going on — it’s written in the 1700s — that’s pretty remarkable.
实际的句子水平，不难理解发生了什么事情 —— 这是1700年代写的 ——这是相当了不起的。
I can’t tell if I like satire or not after reading this because the book is Gulliver coming across these different people.
读完这本书后，我不知道我是否喜欢讽刺，因为这本书是格列佛遇到这些不同的人。
They’re all fantastical.
他们都很梦幻。
It’s fantasy in that way.
这就是幻想。
He’s satirizing the human condition.
他在讽刺人类的处境。
He’s also satirizing travel novels at the time, I suppose, as either being full of falsehoods or being fixed on really trivial matters or things that are just not that important, or observations that are not relevant to a reader back home.
我想，他也在讽刺当时的旅行小说，要么充满谎言，要么专注于真正琐碎的事情或不那么重要的事情，或者与家乡读者无关的观察。
I had trouble figuring out whether or not I find this writing that useful.
我很难弄清楚我是否觉得这篇文章有用。
I find modern satires to be very funny and interesting sometimes.
我发现现代讽刺作品有时非常有趣。
Obviously, I was a fan of Stephen Colbert when he was doing that bit.
显然，当斯蒂芬·科尔伯特（Stephen Colbert）做那件事时，我是他的粉丝。
But as a long-lasting tool for understanding other people and other times, I find it a barrier, because how are you going to understand fully the context?
但作为理解他人和其他时间的持久工具，我发现它是一个障碍，因为你将如何充分理解上下文？
I can get the very obvious points that he’s making about humanity and its drawbacks, but I think that you probably miss a ton.
我可以理解他关于人性及其缺点的非常明显的观点，但我认为你可能错过了很多。
I did some reading of the relevant contextual history, but even then, would it have been more useful to have Jonathan Swift just straightforwardly — he’s prevented from doing so at the time — say his views?
我读了一些相关的背景历史，但即便如此，让乔纳森·斯威夫特直接地 ——“他当时无法这样做”—— 说出他的观点会更有用吗？
Then, I also think it’s a question of length.
然后，我也认为这是一个长度问题。
Like “A Modest Proposal,” which is an essay, it’s a very satirical essay where he proposes people just eating babies as a solution to too many children who are in poverty.
就像一篇文章《一个温和的建议》一样，这是一篇非常讽刺的文章，他建议人们只吃婴儿来解决太多贫困儿童的问题。
That’s very clear and obvious what’s going on there.
那里发生的事情非常清楚和明显。
I think that in a novel of this length, I don’t find it super long-lasting.
我觉得这么长的小说，我觉得不是特别持久。
I read this as a novel of ideas, satirical in parts, but to me, it’s not fundamentally a satire.
我把这当作一部思想小说来读，其中有部分是讽刺的，但对我来说，它本质上并不是一部讽刺。
That dwindles away, and every time I read it, I have a different take on it.
渐渐地，我每次读到它时，都会有不同的看法。
I think on my fourth reading of it — this is past that — I thought, this is a Tory being anti-modern and skeptical of the science of his day.
我在第四次读到它时认为——“这已经过去了”——“我想，这是一个反现代的保守党，并对他那个时代的科学持怀疑态度。
That’s a pretty common reading.
这是一个很常见的读物。
It’s not my reading anymore.
这不再是我的阅读内容了。
On this reading — which is maybe my sixth or seventh, but across many years; like I said, first reading, I was 10 or so — I think it’s actually a novel about slavery.
关于这个阅读——这可能是我的第六次或第七次阅读，但已经跨越了很多年；就像我说的，第一次读时，我大约 10 岁——我认为这实际上是一本关于奴隶制的小说。
In some ways it’s pro-science.
从某些方面来说，这是有利于科学的。
The episode where he goes to Laputa and Lagado, he meets all the weird projects.
在他去拉普达和拉加多的这一集中，他遇到了所有奇怪的项目。
We would call them venture capitalists.
我们称他们为风险投资家。
The plot to live forever, have your brain hooked up to different devices, the form of artificial meat.
永生的情节，让你的大脑连接到不同的设备，以人造肉的形式。
You could take it as a satire on Silicon Valley today, and it’s ridiculous.
你可以把它当作对今天硅谷的讽刺，这很荒谬。
Clearly, it’s ridiculous in Swift’s eyes, even though some of it has happened or will happen.
显然，这在斯威夫特看来是荒谬的，尽管其中一些已经发生或即将发生。
The version we call now ChatGPT, the books that write themselves.
我们现在称之为 ChatGPT 的版本，是他们自己写的书。
But that scientific society — it’s the only one where there’s not slavery.
但那个科学社会 ——它是唯一一个不存在奴隶制的社会。
When he goes to the Lilliputians, they enslave him.
当他去小人国时，他们奴役了他。
When he’s the little figure in Brobdingnag, they enslave him.
当他是布罗丁纳格的小人物时，他们奴役了他。
They make him entertain them.
他们让他招待他们。
It’s on and on and on.
它一直在持续。
He gets tired of it.
他厌倦了。
He begins to hate it.
他开始讨厌它。
Then the Houyhnhnms enslave the Yahoos.
然后慧骃奴役了雅胡人。
At the end they tell Gulliver, who’s a stand-in for Swift, perhaps, “We’re either going to kill you or enslave you.
最后他们告诉格列佛（斯威夫特的替身），“我们要么杀了你，要么奴役你。
You have to get out of here because in a Planet of the Apes-like fashion, you could lead a revolt of the Yahoos against us.” That too is based on slavery and caste.
你必须离开这里，因为就像《猩球崛起》那样，你可能会领导雅虎人反抗我们。”这也是基于奴隶制和种姓。
It’s only the scientific society — where people are curious and wacky and nutty — where there’s no slavery at all.
只有科学社会 ——人们充满好奇、古怪、疯狂—— 那里根本没有奴隶制。
It appears the most ridiculous, the least well-ordered, the one most based on dreams and fantasy.
它似乎是最荒谬、最不有序、最基于梦想和幻想的一种。
Swift isn’t, in my reading, not quite endorsing that, but just saying, “Look, give this a break.
在我看来，斯威夫特并不完全赞同这一点，只是说，“听着，休息一下。
It’s not as crazy as it seems.
它并不像看起来那么疯狂。
At least these people are running off with some other set of projects and not just brutalizing each other.” That’s my seventh reading of the book, but that didn’t occur to me in any of the earlier readings, so I’m not sure how hard to push that.
至少这些人正在执行其他一些项目，而不仅仅是互相残杀。”这是我第七次阅读这本书，但在之前的任何阅读中我都没有想到这一点，所以我不确定推动这一点有多难。
It’s hard because if Gulliver is a stand-in for Swift, which I’m not sure about, he spends very little time there.
这很难，因为如果格列佛是斯威夫特的替身（我不确定），他在那里呆的时间很少。
He gets out pretty quickly.
他很快就出来了。
He finds it ridiculous.
他觉得这很荒谬。
He describes the endeavors straightforwardly but in a way that it is very clear that he does not find it a useful pursuit of time.
他直截了当地描述了这些努力，但他的方式很明显表明他并不认为这是对时间的有益追求。
It’s almost like these people have no grounding reason.
这些人几乎没有任何根基理由。
They’re just doing randomness.
他们只是在做随机的事情。
The way he describes the books that write themselves is literally just a bunch of random word plates being moved around and stamping in different directions.
他描述自己写的书的方式实际上只是一堆随机的字板，它们被移动并朝不同方向冲压。
There’s not even supporting thoughts behind it.
其背后甚至没有支持的想法。
You’re correct that that is the only one without explicit slavery in it.
你是对的，这是唯一一个没有明确奴役的地方。
At the same time, he spends so little time there relative to the other.
与此同时，相对于其他人来说，他在那里度过的时间很少。
The first edition of Gulliver’s Travels — there’s a frontispiece and a picture of Gulliver.
《格列佛游记》第一版——有卷首插画和格列佛的照片。
It’s typically interpreted as Gulliver looking a lot like Swift.
它通常被解释为格列佛看起来很像斯威夫特。
I don’t think that means, per se, he’s a stand-in, but you’re at least supposed to wonder that he is.
我认为这本身并不意味着他是一个替身，但你至少应该怀疑他是。
I view Gulliver as just a super curious person.
我认为格列佛只是一个超级好奇的人。
Every time he gets home, basically within two weeks — he seems to have a nice wife, has a family — he’s got to go off again.
每次他回家，基本上都是在两周之内——“他似乎有一个好妻子，有一个家庭”——他必须再次出发。
He’s learned it’s dangerous, but he can’t resist.
他知道这很危险，但他无法抗拒。
In that sense, he’s like Shevek.
从这个意义上说，他就像谢维克。
You read this, you identify with him, his troubles, but I think if you step back and ask, is he really a nice person?
你读到这篇文章，你认同他，认同他的烦恼，但我想如果你退后一步问，他真的是一个好人吗？
Not so obvious.
没那么明显。
No, he abandons his wife and children.
不，他抛弃了妻子和孩子。
At the end, he finds them disgusting because they’re not horse-like enough for him.
最后，他发现它们很恶心，因为它们对他来说不够像马。
With Gulliver, I had a hard time deciding whether or not he was smart because he would obviously be extremely self-possessed when he would come across a new — either the giant species or the very tiny people.
对于格列佛，我很难判断他是否聪明，因为当他遇到一个新的物种——无论是巨型物种还是非常微小的人类时，他显然会非常冷静。
You can say all their names really well, but I feel like I can’t.
你可以很好地说出他们所有的名字，但我觉得我不能。
None of us know how to say them properly.
我们谁都不知道如何正确地说出它们。
Is it Lilliputians, is it the small people?
是小人国，还是小人物？
When he comes across the small people, he wakes up, and he’s been bound by all of them.
当他遇到小人时，他就醒悟了，他已经被他们所有人束缚了。
He’s able to free one of his arms and then has this thought after they shoot some arrows at him, and it hurts.
他能够释放自己的一只手臂，然后在他们向他射了几支箭后产生了这个想法，而且很疼。
They’re around six inches tall each, but I guess it’s a good hypothetical — how many six-inch people would it take to subdue a person?
他们每人大约六英寸高，但我想这是一个很好的假设 —— 需要多少个六英寸的人才能制服一个人？
He has his wits about him enough to be like, “I should just not present myself as a threat.” Then again, when he comes across the other groups, he’s very quick not to present himself as a threat.
他的智慧足以让他说：“我不应该把自己表现为威胁。”然而，当他遇到其他群体时，他很快就不再将自己视为威胁。
Interestingly, the only people that he doesn’t do that with are the Yahoos at the end, where those are the humans of the planet, but he views them as beasts.
有趣的是，他唯一不这样做的人是最后的雅虎人，他们是地球上的人类，但他将他们视为野兽。
By this point, I suppose we’re supposed to expect that Gulliver has a very low position of humanity, and Swift has a very low estimation of people.
至此，我想我们应该认为格列佛的人性地位非常低，而斯威夫特对人的评价也非常低。
At the same time, he does the weirdest things, like he pees on the queen’s tower to put out the fire because he’s so much larger than the tower, but then it becomes completely unusable, because why would she want to live in this home that’s been urinated upon?
与此同时，他做了最奇怪的事情，比如他在女王的塔上撒尿来扑灭大火，因为他比塔大得多，但随后它就变得完全无法使用，因为为什么她想住在这个被撒尿的房子里？
It becomes a problem for him at the end.
这最终成为他的一个问题。
He keeps going back out there and making decisions that end up with him deserted.
他不断地回到那里，做出最终导致他被抛弃的决定。
I’m not sure what the rates of being lost at sea are at this point, but it just seems like —
我不确定目前在海上迷路的比率是多少，但看起来就像 -
One hundred percent.
百分之一百。
It’s kind of wild with him.
他有点疯狂。
Did you think he’s supposed to be smart?
你认为他应该很聪明吗？
I think he’s maybe a reflection of the human condition, that he is smart insofar as he’s deciding to do nothing or to exercise options or to wait.
我认为他可能反映了人类的状况，他很聪明，因为他决定什么都不做，或者行使选择权，或者等待。
Like, “I’m in this new society.
就像，“我在这个新社会。
I don’t know what’s going on.
我不知道发生了什么事。
I’m not going to try to take all the small Lilliputians and crush them.
我不会试图把所有的小人国都消灭掉。
That would be a mistake.” It turns out, in fact, there was probably some way they could have poisoned him or done him in.
那将是一个错误。”事实上，事实证明，他们可能有某种方式毒害了他或杀死了他。
All the times he just plays wait and see, it eventually works out okay.
他每次都只是等待观望，最终结果还是不错的。
Whenever he has impetus, he basically goes off into another misadventure and almost dies, tortured, enslaved, whatever.
每当他有动力时，他基本上就会陷入另一场不幸的冒险，差点死掉，遭受折磨，被奴役，等等。
I think it’s kind of a version of Pascal’s commentary on mankind, that the fundamental problem of the human condition is we just can’t sit still in a quiet room.
我认为这是帕斯卡对人类的评论的一个版本，人类状况的根本问题是我们无法安静地坐在安静的房间里。
That’s what Gulliver can’t do either.
这也是格列佛做不到的。
By the end, he is so enamored of the horse society, which he views as so full of reason and so full of goodness and does not even have, I think, words for lying, because why would you communicate to lie?
到最后，他如此迷恋马社会，他认为马社会充满理性，充满善良，我想，甚至没有说谎的词语，因为你为什么要表达谎言呢？
The whole point is to explain and get across ideas to one another.
重点是互相解释和交流想法。
He’s so disgusted by his own species that he faints when he’s told he has to go back.
他对自己的物种感到非常厌恶，以至于当他被告知必须回去时，他晕倒了。
I think he considers or he attempts suicide when he’s being taken home, even though the person who’s helping him is displaying all of the virtues that he’s just said he loves about the horses.
我认为当他被带回家时，他考虑或试图自杀，尽管帮助他的人表现出了他刚才所说的他喜欢马的所有美德。
They’re giving him their clothes off their back.
他们把背上的衣服脱下来给他。
They’re giving him money.
他们给他钱。
They’re transporting him all the way back to England.
他们正在把他一路送回英国。
He gets back to his wife, and she embraces him, and he faints again because he’s so disgusted by her.
他回到妻子身边，她拥抱了他，他又晕了过去，因为他对她太厌恶了。
Again, obviously, it’s satire; it’s extreme.
显然，这又是一部讽刺作品。这是极端的。
But even by the end, he’s meant to still retain this extreme disgust towards humanity because of this experience with the horses, but the horse society is not good.
但即使到了最后，他仍然因为这次与马的经历而保留着对人类的极度厌恶，但马的社会并不好。
They’re enslaving a bunch of people —
他们正在奴役一群人 ——
Yahoos, who are probably descendants from Europeans, right?
雅虎人，大概是欧洲人的后裔吧？
But I take Swift to be quite critical of the Houyhnhnms.
但我认为斯威夫特对慧骃颇有批评。
There he’s being satirical, and he’s so over the top in his praise that you just start thinking, “Come on.” It’s a bit like how the problems in the communal society in The Dispossessed are revealed more and more.
他在讽刺，而且他的赞扬是如此过分，以至于你开始想，“来吧。”这有点像《无产者》中公社社会的问题被越来越多地揭示出来。
The horses, it turns out, have this caste system, like how light or how dark a colored horse are you?
事实证明，马有这种种姓制度，就像你的马匹颜色有多浅或有多深？
Today, certainly in Swift’s time, obviously, you realize what he’s talking about, and they don’t make any progress, unlike the scientific societies, which at least try to make progress.
今天，当然在斯威夫特的时代，显然，你明白他在说什么，但他们没有取得任何进展，不像科学协会，至少试图取得进展。
All they’re good at is poetry.
他们所擅长的只是诗歌。
They’re entirely conformist.
他们完全墨守成规。
I think he’s just saying, this is how things would have to be for these supposed utopian visions to be realized.
我认为他只是说，要实现这些所谓的乌托邦愿景，事情就必须是这样的。
Maybe it’s a commentary on Thomas More and other such writers.
也许这是对托马斯·莫尔和其他此类作家的评论。
To get to a utopia, things would have to be like this, truly communal.
为了实现乌托邦，一切都必须是这样的，真正的公共。
That would be horrible because a communal society is wonderful at oppressing each other.
那将是可怕的，因为公共社会非常擅长互相压迫。
I think the best you can do for now Swift, and even Gulliver, is actually the family unit.
我认为斯威夫特，甚至格列佛，现在能做的最好的事情实际上是家庭单位。
Is Gulliver happiest in the family unit?
格列佛在家庭中最幸福吗？
He’s not, but that’s maybe the best you can do.
他不是，但这也许是你能做的最好的事情。
He’s so restless at the end of the novel.
小说的结尾他是如此焦躁不安。
We’re never told, does he feel a need to go off again?
我们从来没有被告知，他是否觉得有必要再次离开？
He did it a bunch of times with always bad results, and you don’t get any feeling that he’s been cured of his wanderlust.
他这样做了很多次，但结果总是很糟糕，而且你感觉不到他已经治愈了他的流浪癖。
Obviously, the novel ends, and we don’t know if Gulliver has any more travels or anything like that.
显然，小说结束了，我们不知道格列佛是否还有更多的旅行或类似的事情。
But at the same time, I don’t know if Swift is making a commentary on the only way for these .
但同时，我不知道 Swift 是否正在对这些唯一的方法进行评论。
.
。
.
。
He’s actually largely not that imaginative about the structures of society from place to place.
事实上，他对各地的社会结构基本上没有那么有想象力。
There’s always some sort of oppressive king.
总有某种压迫性的国王。
Except for the final society, usually, there’s just very weird, bizarre punishments that are being meted out.
除了最后的社会之外，通常都会有非常奇怪的惩罚。
Obviously, there he’s satirizing just how ridiculous many of our own customs may look like.
显然，他是在讽刺我们自己的许多习俗看起来是多么荒谬。
That’s the “you can’t escape your prisons” point that I think is in Le Guin very well and in Swift very well.
我认为这就是“你无法逃脱监狱”的观点，勒吉恩和斯威夫特都很好地体现了这一点。
Again, I did not find the time with the scientists or the universities to be as .
再说一遍，我没有时间与科学家或大学相处。
.
。
.
。
I honestly set that aside quite quickly because it was such a small part of the book to me.
老实说，我很快就把它放在一边，因为这对我来说只是这本书的一小部分。
When I look at the rest of them, you have this king that’s threatening to just drop an island upon his subjects if they disobey.
当我看看其他人时，你会发现这位国王威胁说，如果他的臣民不服从，他就会向他们扔一座岛屿。
You have other bizarre articles of impeachment that are laid against him because someone in the court doesn’t like him, or something like that.
你还有其他奇怪的弹劾条款针对他，因为法庭上有人不喜欢他，或者类似的事情。
Most of it seems like a rebuke of royalism and courts, which, of course, Swift had his own —
其中大部分似乎是对保皇主义和宫廷的谴责，当然，斯威夫特也有他自己的——
That faction is inevitable is a striking perspective from a 2023 vantage point.
从 2023 年的角度来看，这一派别是不可避免的。
The whole notion of cancel culture, and that’s in Swift — there are the people who open their eggs on the side of the big end or the little end, and they’re willing to go to war with each other.
取消文化的整个概念，就在斯威夫特 中—— 有人在大端或小端打开鸡蛋，他们愿意互相开战。
That, to me, is very 2023, or at least 2021.
对我来说，那是 2023 年，或者至少是 2021 年。
Or is that just a rebuke of the idea of cancel culture, since it’s just the same thing we’ve always been doing?
或者这只是对取消文化理念的谴责，因为这与我们一直在做的事情是一样的？
I think it’s a rebuke of the idea of cancel culture.
我认为这是对取消文化理念的谴责。
It’s always been with us.
它一直和我们在一起。
Faction is inevitable, which I take to be one of Swift’s main points, all the more clear when you read his directly descriptive writings, like his actual policy pamphlets.
派系是不可避免的，我认为这是斯威夫特的主要观点之一，当你阅读他直接描述性的著作（例如他的实际政策小册子）时，这一点会更加清楚。
He’s obsessed with faction.
他沉迷于派系。
It’s a common theme in early 18th century writings.
这是 18 世纪早期著作中的常见主题。
“Oh, Britain, Ireland — it’s all full of faction, and this is our fundamental problem.”
“哦，英国、爱尔兰——都充满了派系，这是我们的根本问题。”
The other eternal verity in Swift, I think, is war, and you see that in the different travels.
我认为斯威夫特的另一个永恒的真理是战争，你可以在不同的旅行中看到这一点。
In his own time, there’s basically a war every few years.
在他那个时代，基本上每隔几年就会发生一场战争。
The Dutch, the Spanish, the French, something.
荷兰人、西班牙人、法国人等等。
None of it, to us now, makes any sense.
现在对我们来说，这些都没有任何意义。
I think one of the things Swift is showing us with these very odd societies — their wars, to us, make no sense — he’s saying the wars of his own time, from any future vantage point, won’t make any more sense either.
我认为斯威夫特向我们展示了这些非常奇怪的社会的一件事——“他们的战争对我们来说毫无意义”——他说，从任何未来的角度来看，他那个时代的战争也不再有意义。
That, I thought he did very effectively.
我认为他做得非常有效。
He’s a pacifist in real life, so clearly, that’s where he’s going with this.
他在现实生活中是一个和平主义者，很明显，这就是他的目的。
I was really interested, I couldn’t tell whether he viewed women as better companions than men in this book, because in his own life — it’s unknown, I think, whether or not they were actually romantically involved, but he has a female companion that he at least has a friendship with for a long time.
我真的很感兴趣，我无法判断他在这本书中是否认为女性比男性更好，因为在他自己的生活中——我想，我不知道他们是否真的有恋爱关系，但他有一个至少和他有很长一段时间友谊的女性伴侣。
In the book, the person who treats him kindly in basically each place is a woman.
书中，基本上每个地方善待他的人都是女人。
There’s this little girl that takes care of him when he’s tiny compared to the giant people, and she makes sure that he’s safely being carried around.
当他与巨人相比还很小的时候，有一个小女孩在照顾他，她确保他被安全地抱着。
She actually cries when she knows he’s going to be taken away.
当她知道他要被带走时，她真的哭了。
This happens again and again, but at the same time, he describes women as grotesque, and very bizarre things happen with him in the giant land.
这种情况一次又一次地发生，但与此同时，他将女性描述为怪诞的，在这片广阔的土地上，他身上也发生了非常奇怪的事情。
I don’t know, what did you think?
不知道你觉得怎么样？
I’ve read quite a few of his letters to Stella, who’s the woman you’re talking about.
我读过很多他写给斯特拉的信，她就是你所说的那个女人。
They seem really quite affectionate, not at all misogynistic.
他们看起来真的很深情，一点也不厌恶女性。
I do definitely think they had sex.
我确实认为他们发生过性行为。
They use the word coffee.
他们使用咖啡这个词。
Maybe they were just drinking a lot of coffee, but they use it in such artificial ways, I think that’s their stand-in word for doing it.
也许他们只是喝了很多咖啡，但他们以如此人为的方式使用它，我认为这就是他们这样做的代名词。
And he views men as the warmakers and the troublemakers.
他将男人视为战争制造者和麻烦制造者。
But he didn’t love Queen Anne, either.
但他也不爱安妮女王。
He writes that satirical pamphlet that, in Straussian fashion, is a criticism .
他写的那本讽刺小册子，以施特劳斯的方式，是一种批评。
Maybe it’s about incentives there, too.
也许这也与激励措施有关。
Men are in the positions to make trouble.
男人处于制造麻烦的位置。
What’s interesting about this book is that he’s writing it as a letter to a reader.
这本书的有趣之处在于他将其作为写给读者的一封信来写。
He addresses the reader multiple times in it.
他在其中多次向读者讲话。
How do you think that he views the reader?
你认为他如何看待读者？
A bit of wearied resignation, fear that the reader is as trapped up in the silly factions of the time as the reader probably was, but actually with some sense of hope.
有点疲惫的听天由命，担心读者像读者一样被困在当时的愚蠢派系中，但实际上带着一些希望。
I read Swift as a great humanitarian who is extremely skeptical about moral progress, and he thinks to evaluate all these other institutions, you need to understand the skepticism about moral progress.
我把斯威夫特视为一位伟大的人道主义者，他对道德进步极为怀疑，他认为要评估所有其他机构，你需要理解对道德进步的怀疑。
Keep in mind, he’s from Ireland, and the richest, “most advanced” society of his time is Britain, and Britain is treating Ireland very badly.
请记住，他来自爱尔兰，而他那个时代最富有、“最先进”的社会是英国，而英国对待爱尔兰的态度非常恶劣。
He frequently refers to that as slavery.
他经常将其称为奴隶制。
He calls it slavery, and he always wants to be giving the Irish a better deal.
他称之为奴隶制，他总是想给爱尔兰人更好的待遇。
I don’t think he’s entirely pessimistic, but he doesn’t see the progress in front of him.
我不认为他完全悲观，但他看不到眼前的进展。
At a very surface level with the reader, it’s interesting because he’ll say things like, “Obviously this will bore you.” But then he’ll just tell it to you in extreme detail.
从表面上看，这很有趣，因为他会说“显然这会让你感到无聊”之类的话。但随后他会非常详细地告诉你。
Things about what he’s eating or very bizarre anecdotes always about his bowel movements which I can’t —
关于他吃什么的事情，或者总是关于他排便的非常奇怪的轶事，我不能 ——
He’s obsessed with that in many of his works.
他在许多作品中都对此着迷。
DEMSAS: Oh, really?
德姆萨斯：哦，真的吗？
What is behind that?
这背后是什么？
Psychologists have speculated it was an actual psychological syndrome of some kind, but of course, we don’t know.
心理学家推测这是某种实际的心理综合症，但我们当然不知道。
I’ve not read travel novels of this time, and it’s clear that there’s some form to the genre that he’s making fun of at some points in the book, where he’s just like, “readers of these kind of novels.” He’ll say that, and then he’ll juxtapose that with a “Dear Reader,” as if you’re supposed to be different, but then he’ll provide you with the exact same things, as if he doesn’t actually have that high of an opinion of you as a reader.
我还没有读过这个时期的旅行小说，很明显，他在书中的某些地方取笑了这种类型的某种形式，他就像是“这类小说的读者”。他会这么说，然后将其与“亲爱的读者”并列，就好像你应该与众不同，但随后他会给你提供完全相同的东西，就好像他实际上对你作为读者并没有那么高的评价一样。
All the talk about excrement, piss, and all that — it’s definitely a Swift thing, and you see it all over.
所有关于排泄物、小便和所有这些的讨论——这绝对是 Swift 的东西，你可以看到这一切。
Just how he was.
他就是这样。
Even beyond that, there’s this one passage where he goes into detail about the types of food that he was eating, and then he goes, “Well, no one’s interested in that.” You’ve written this as a letter, so you didn’t have to include that.
除此之外，还有一段话，他详细介绍了他吃的食物类型，然后他说，“好吧，没人对此感兴趣。”您已将其写为一封信，因此不必包含该内容。
That indicates to me this level of derision for the reader, that he feels like this reader is going to be interested in these mundane details that aren’t actually important to the broader story or moral or message of the book.
在我看来，这表明了对读者的这种程度的嘲笑，他觉得这位读者会对这些平凡的细节感兴趣，而这些细节对于本书的更广泛的故事、道德或信息实际上并不重要。
Swift himself was abandoned by his mother in his early childhood for a while.
斯威夫特本人在童年时期曾一度被母亲抛弃。
She went off to England, probably to work, and we don’t really know what happened to him during those years.
她去了英国，可能是去工作，我们真的不知道那些年里他发生了什么。
But Shevek also — he’s upset throughout his life that he felt, and indeed was, partially abandoned by his parents for a lot of his early years.
但谢维克也——他一生都感到不安，因为他在早年的很多年里都感到，而且确实是被父母部分抛弃了。
This sense of alienation in both cases, this obsession with the question, who are the “we”?
在这两种情况下，这种疏离感，这种对“我们”是谁的问题的痴迷？
For Shevek, “Is it both worlds?
对于谢维克来说，“这是两个世界吗？
Is it just my world?
这只是我的世界吗？
Do I really belong in the other world?” For Swift, “How much should I identify with these strange beings, creatures, societies that are enslaving me?
我真的属于另一个世界吗？”对于斯威夫特来说，“我应该在多大程度上认同这些奴役我的奇怪存在、生物和社会？
With whom should I identify?” He’s alienated from his family, for sure.
我应该认同谁？毫无疑问，他与家人疏远了。
He keeps on leaving them.
他不断地离开他们。
But where exactly does he find his people?
但他究竟在哪里找到他的人民呢？
It’s pretty clear that he never does.
很明显他从来没有这样做过。
I think maybe part of it is, in both of these novels, these men would not be happy anywhere in any context.
我想也许部分原因是，在这两部小说中，这些人在任何情况下都不会快乐。
Maybe that’s part of what’s going on here, is that there’s not a society that would make Shevek happy.
也许这就是这里发生的事情的一部分，那就是没有一个社会能让谢维克感到高兴。
When he’s amongst the communitarians, he’s frustrated by the strictures they put upon him, but also, he’s frustrated when his friend critiques them, and he’s angry at him, and they get into a big fight over it.
当他身处社群主义者之中时，他会因他们对他的限制而感到沮丧，而且，当他的朋友批评他们时，他也会感到沮丧，他对他很生气，他们会为此大吵一架。
Then Gulliver — everywhere he goes, he has some critique.
然后格列佛——无论他走到哪里，他都会受到一些批评。
At one place he doesn’t is a place where he’s treated terribly, and it’s unsustainable for him to stay there, and you can’t actually imagine him providing anything of use to that world.
在一个他不喜欢的地方，他受到了可怕的对待，他呆在那里是不可持续的，你实际上无法想象他能为那个世界提供任何有用的东西。
He’s literally just an oddity that gets pushed out every once in a while, like at these dinner parties.
他实际上只是一个偶尔被推出去的怪人，就像在这些晚宴上一样。
To me, it’s an indictment of this sort of traveling in order to find yourself or find something important or true because in many ways, Gulliver does not end up more enlightened by the end of the book.
对我来说，这是对这种为了寻找自己或寻找重要或真实的东西而旅行的控诉，因为在很多方面，格列佛并没有在书的结尾得到更多的启发。
Shevek ends up right back where he was.
谢维克最终回到了原来的位置。
His entire goals when he was moving there seemed naive in hindsight.
事后看来，他搬到那里时的整个目标似乎都很天真。
I think that’s maybe slightly a little bit too much in The Dispossessed world because we know later on that his connections end up being the foundation for a really important technology that connects space, different planets.
我认为这在被剥夺的世界中可能有点太多了，因为我们后来知道他的联系最终成为连接太空和不同星球的真正重要技术的基础。
But at the same time, what was the point?
但与此同时，这有什么意义呢？
COWEN: Still, Shevek and Gulliver — they’re the two people who know things that no one else knows.
考恩：不过，谢维克和格列佛——他们是知道别人不知道的事情的两个人。
Even reading about it, you can’t really understand what it was like, and it’s raising the question: The ancient Greeks on “knowledge is everything” — how true is that really?
即使读到它，你也无法真正理解它是什么样的，这提出了一个问题：古希腊人的“知识就是一切” – 这到底有多真实？
What does it get you?
它能给你带来什么？
What does it get anyone else?
它给别人带来什么？
What does it get your spouse?
它会给你的配偶带来什么？
Both come home empty-handed, as I think I mentioned before, and neither seems happy at the end.
正如我之前提到的，两人都空手而归，最后似乎都不开心。
But they had to do it, perhaps.
但也许他们不得不这么做。
I question whether they needed to travel to get the knowledge, because Shevek is really pushed out of his framework of viewing his own society as utopian by a friend who has this realization, never travels, is within that community the entire time.
我怀疑他们是否需要旅行来获取知识，因为谢维克确实被一位朋友从他将自己的社会视为乌托邦的框架中推出了，而这位朋友意识到，他从不旅行，一直在那个社区中。
He just witnesses his own inability to get his own research done.
他只是目睹了自己无法完成自己的研究。
He witnesses a childhood friend of theirs get sent to an insane asylum because he’s ridiculed after he does a subversive musical performance or theater performance.
他目睹了他们儿时的一个朋友因为在进行颠覆性的音乐表演或戏剧表演后受到嘲笑而被送进疯人院。
To me, that knowledge was there.
对我来说，这些知识就在那里。
You’re obviously a big proponent of travel but —
您显然是旅行的大力支持者，但是 -
I don’t think it makes people happier, at the same time.
我认为它不会同时让人们更快乐。
You don’t think it makes people happier?
你不认为这会让人们更快乐吗？
Not on average.
不是平均而言。
Some people, it clearly makes happier.
有些人，这显然让人更快乐。
There’s a desire to do it, and you’re unhappy if you don’t satisfy that desire.
你有一个去做这件事的愿望，如果你不能满足这个愿望，你就会不高兴。
But on average, people are happier at home.
但平均而言，人们在家更快乐。
I strongly believe this.
我坚信这一点。
Is it because you think they travel badly?
是因为你觉得他们旅行很糟糕吗？
No, it’s in the nature of travel.
不，这是旅行的本质。
We’re creatures of comfort whether we like to admit it or not, and that’s also partly a theme in Gulliver’s Travels.
无论我们是否愿意承认，我们都是追求舒适的生物，这也是《格列佛游记》的部分主题。
When you’re traveling, you’re discovering all these new, exciting things.
当您旅行时，您会发现所有这些令人兴奋的新事物。
But say if I went to Eritrea, I would, in fact, be quite uncomfortable.
但如果我去厄立特里亚，事实上我会感到很不舒服。
There’d be a much higher level of background stress.
背景压力会更高。
Maybe two-thirds of the value is both the anticipation and the memories afterwards, and it’s still worth doing.
也许三分之二的价值既是期待，也是事后的回忆，还是值得做的。
I want to go to Eritrea, but no, I won’t be happier when I’m there.
我想去厄立特里亚，但是不，在那里我不会更开心。
Or even when you’re back?
或者甚至当你回来的时候？
I will be glad that I went, but that’s partly investing in the memory and the experience.
我很高兴我去了，但这在一定程度上是对记忆和经验的投资。
I wonder then, to me, I’ve always had this opinion.
我想知道，对我来说，我一直有这个观点。
I think a lot of people don’t travel well for what they want to do.
我认为很多人并没有为了自己想做的事情而好好旅行。
Oh, I agree with that.
哦，我同意这一点。
They end up getting sucked into doing things that would not actually make them happy, and there are things in many destinations that would’ve possibly made them happy.
他们最终会陷入做一些实际上不会让他们快乐的事情，而在许多目的地都有一些可能会让他们快乐的事情。
That’s endogenous, but go on.
这是内生的，但继续吧。
Yes, sure.
是的，当然。
The other thing is, there is, I feel like, a large cultural message that you’re not going to understand yourself if you don’t go travel in some way, and because of the ubiquity of that message, especially in the US and in other Western societies.
另一件事是，我觉得有一个很大的文化信息，如果你不以某种方式去旅行，你就不会理解自己，因为这种信息无处不在，特别是在美国和其他西方社会。
I have friends who have gone to study in Europe.
我有朋友去欧洲留学。
It’s very pushed as an idea there.
这是一个非常受欢迎的想法。
Part of me wonders if you actually are happier because you can at least say that you have fulfilled that cultural norm.
我的一部分想知道你是否真的更快乐，因为你至少可以说你已经实现了这种文化规范。
You don’t get embarrassed by saying, “I don’t have a passport,” or “I’ve never been out of the country.”
你不会因为说“我没有护照”或“我从未出过国”而感到尴尬。
Maybe it’s harder to understand yourself if you travel a lot in a good way, perhaps, but you might rather have more questions than answers.
如果你以良好的方式经常旅行，也许会更难了解自己，但你可能宁愿有更多的问题而不是答案。
Understanding yourself is a kind of answer, and if you just think, “I want the life where I have all these open questions that bug me,” I would say go travel a lot.
了解自己是一种答案，如果你只是想，“我想要这样的生活，里面有所有这些困扰我的开放性问题”，我会说多去旅行。
Then why do you tell everyone to travel?
那为什么还要告诉大家去旅行呢？
I want them to have the kinds of lives with a lot of open questions that bug them.
我希望他们的生活充满了许多困扰他们的悬而未决的问题。
But if they’re unhappier, don’t you think that might make them biased against the openness that you —
但如果他们不高兴，你不认为这可能会让他们对你的开放性产生偏见吗？
There’s plenty of inertia keeping them from traveling, so I don’t feel I’m misleading them.
有很多惯性阻止他们旅行，所以我不觉得我误导了他们。
The behavioral bias is not to travel.
行为偏差不是去旅行。
If I nudge them, I feel it’s a better world even though it’s maybe not a happier world.
如果我推动他们，我会觉得这是一个更好的世界，尽管这可能不是一个更快乐的世界。
I think that if you were to buy the idea that .
我认为如果你相信这个想法的话。
.
。
.
。
Happier is just a hard metric.
更快乐只是一个硬指标。
Am I happier if I’m more satisfied or more well-rounded?
如果我更满足或更全面，我会更快乐吗？
I’m not really sure.
我不太确定。
It depends on how that actually takes root.
这取决于它如何真正扎根。
At the same time, it’s just like many of the things that I’ve gotten from really productive travel experiences that have also been analogous to experiences when I read very, very good books or I hear a very, very smart argument or something like that.
与此同时，这就像我从真正富有成效的旅行经历中获得的许多东西，也类似于我读到非常非常好的书籍或听到非常非常聪明的论点或类似的东西时的经历。
Those are much lower-cost things to attain, and there are millions of those.
这些都是成本低得多的事情，而且有数以百万计。
It’s obviously costly.
这显然是昂贵的。
I think in part we travel to read better.
我认为我们旅行的部分原因是为了更好地阅读。
If you’ve been to a lot of places, there are many more things you can read, and they make sense to you.
如果你去过很多地方，你可以读到更多的东西，而且它们对你来说很有意义。
If you’ve hardly been anywhere, so much stuff .
如果你几乎没去过任何地方，那就太多了。
.
。
.
。
I went to Kiev in 2019 — coincidence, but now, when I read about what’s happening there, it really does make more sense to me.
我在 2019 年去了基辅——巧合，但现在，当我读到那里发生的事情时，它确实对我来说更有意义。
I don’t pretend I figured it out at all, but I would have very little idea without that trip.
我并不假装我完全明白了，但如果没有那次旅行，我就一无所知。
What particularly did you learn?
你具体学到了什么？
Like visually understanding what the city looks like?
喜欢直观地了解这座城市的样子吗？
Partly that, but when I read, say, “The Ukrainians have been quite fierce in defending their country,” I have an emotionally vivid image that matches up with what I felt when I was there, like how people talked about what they did in 2014, and so on.
部分原因是这样，但是当我读到“乌克兰人在保卫自己的国家时相当激烈”时，我有一个情感上生动的形象，与我在那里时的感受相符，比如人们如何谈论他们在 2014 年所做的事情等等。
Just a lot of it makes sense.
其中很多都是有道理的。
The geography makes sense.
地理是有道理的。
Its religious importance to some of the Russians makes sense.
它对一些俄罗斯人的宗教重要性是有道理的。
Many things.
很多事情。
I feel like this is a particular way about how you travel.
我觉得这是一种特殊的旅行方式。
I think many people, when they travel, end up staying within very similar social groups or even only with Americans or the people they’re traveling with, and have very little interaction with people and learning about their lives in any meaningful way.
我认为很多人在旅行时，最终都会呆在非常相似的社会群体中，甚至只与美国人或与他们一起旅行的人在一起，与人们的互动很少，也很少以任何有意义的方式了解他们的生活。
I did hang out with an economist there, so maybe I’m not that different.
我确实和那里的一位经济学家一起出去玩过，所以也许我并没有那么不同。
On Of Boys and Men
关于男孩和男人
Now, you mentioned this idea of men who just can’t be happy no matter what.
现在，你提到了男人无论如何都无法快乐的想法。
And that brings us — we can circle back to the other books as well — but our final book: Richard V.
这给我们带来了 ——“我们也可以回到其他书”—— 但我们的最后一本书：理查德五世。
Reeves, Of Boys and Men.
里维斯，《男孩与男人》。
You should do an overview of what this book’s about.
您应该对本书的内容有一个概述。
I’m very bad at overviews.
我很不擅长概述。
As a reader, I’m so selective and focused.
作为一名读者，我非常有选择性和专注。
To me, the main point of this book — and to be clear, listeners, this is not an overview — but it’s simply that for men, a lot of elasticities are zero.
对我来说，这本书的要点是 ——听众们，这不是概述 —— 只是简单地说，对于男性来说，很多弹性都是零。
There’s that anecdote about the free college program in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
有一个关于密歇根州卡拉马祖免费大学项目的轶事。
A lot more women go.
去的女人多了很多。
No more men go, just zero.
不再有人去，只有零。
At least for some public policies, the gender split on who responds to it is going to be immense, and I vaguely knew that before, but this book made that clear and vivid to me.
至少对于某些公共政策来说，谁对其做出回应的性别分歧将是巨大的，我以前隐约知道这一点，但这本书让我清楚而生动地认识到了这一点。
That’s a big contribution.
这是一个很大的贡献。
There’s good evidence for that.
有充分的证据证明这一点。
There’s a lot of other different things in the book, but that’s my key takeaway.
书中还有很多其他不同的内容，但这是我的主要收获。
What’s yours?
你的是什么？
The book starts off with this presentation of an idea where people have worried in recent decades about the plight of women, and now we need to also add to that the plight of men in modern economies.
这本书首先提出了一个想法，近几十年来人们一直担心女性的困境，现在我们还需要考虑现代经济中男性的困境。
It relays a bunch of statistics around college completion rates or how well male students do in academia, but also even earlier, in kindergarten or throughout their education.
它传达了一系列有关大学毕业率或男学生在学术界、甚至更早、在幼儿园或整个教育过程中的表现的统计数据。
Then it provides a few prescriptions.
然后它提供了一些处方。
There are a couple ones that are pretty well known by this point, whether it’s paid leave for fathers or it’s hiring more male teachers.
到目前为止，有几个问题是众所周知的，无论是父亲的带薪休假还是雇用更多的男教师。
But the one that’s different is redshirting the boys, which is basically having a presumption of starting boys one year later than girls in kindergarten.
但不同的是，男孩们会被红衫军，这基本上是假设男孩比女孩晚一年进入幼儿园。
I found the book .
我找到了这本书。
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it’s hard because I was saying this to you before we started this, but most of the book is trying to convince you that the idea is a very heterodox idea, that we should care about men as well.
这很难，因为在我们开始之前我就已经对你说过了，但这本书的大部分内容都是试图让你相信这个想法是一个非常异端的想法，我们也应该关心男人。
Richard Reeves — he’s at Brookings, so a lot of his audience is obviously going to be at least center-left liberal.
理查德·里夫斯——他在布鲁金斯学会，所以他的很多听众显然至少是中左翼自由派。
Most of the time, he’s addressing them and excoriating progressives for having this large blind spot of men.
大多数时候，他都是在向他们讲话，并谴责进步人士有这么大的男性盲点。
It just feels like this is actually not engaging with a lot of work that’s been done to talk about how men suffer under patriarchy.
只是感觉这实际上并没有涉及到谈论男性在父权制下如何遭受苦难的大量工作。
One of a very, very old feminist critique of patriarchy is that men are going to be harmed, not just as much, but are going to be harmed even though patriarchy is going to privilege men in many ways.
女权主义者对父权制的一种非常非常古老的批评是，男性会受到伤害，而且不仅会受到伤害，而且会受到伤害，尽管父权制会在很多方面赋予男性特权。
It talks about the fact that men are alienated as fathers.
它讲述了男人作为父亲被疏远的事实。
They don’t get to have that caring persona.
他们没有那种关心他人的形象。
They’re castigated for showing emotions, and these things are going to have real harsh effects on them.
他们因表达情绪而受到严厉批评，这些事情将对他们产生真正的严酷影响。
Of course, feminism is primarily concerned with the plight of women, but I think that the equivalence there is .
当然，女权主义主要关注的是女性的困境，但我认为两者是对等的。
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not that he’s saying that they’re the same level of harm, but that the harm is of similar type, feels incorrect.
并不是说他说它们的伤害程度相同，而是说伤害类型相似，感觉不正确。
The things that were happening with the women’s movement are things where there are legal barriers or physical barriers barring them from accessing academia or accessing the job market or voting, or from even being free and walking around in society.
妇女运动中发生的事情是存在法律障碍或物质障碍的事情，阻止她们进入学术界、进入就业市场或投票，甚至阻止她们自由地在社会上行走。
The things that he’s identifying that are barring men are not .
他所指出的那些阻碍男性的事物却并非如此。
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There are no laws saying men can’t go to college.
没有法律规定男性不能上大学。
There’s no admissions .
没有招生。
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Actually, there’s affirmative action for men, trying to push men into college because otherwise all colleges in the US and much of the West would be female dominated, more so than they are already.
事实上，针对男性采取了平权行动，试图推动男性进入大学，否则美国和西方大部分地区的所有大学都将由女性主导，而且比现在的情况更严重。
Part of me is saying, okay, if we’ve identified that these two things are actually quite different in kind, then the question is, these responses have to actually engage with the cultural pushes, not just the institutional pushes.
我的一部分想法是，好吧，如果我们已经确定这两件事实际上在本质上有很大不同，那么问题是，这些应对措施必须真正与文化推动力相结合，而不仅仅是制度推动力。
He has this one line very early on, which I find pretty bizarre, where he says, conservatives say men should be more like the old-school fathers, and progressives just say you should be more like your sisters, and both of these are wrong.
他很早就说过这样一句话，我觉得很奇怪，他说，保守派说男人应该更像守旧派的父亲，而进步派只是说你应该更像你的姐妹，而这两者都是错误的。
But we tell women all the time — and some of these are good lessons — “You should try to salary negotiate; men do it all the time.” And that’s a very productive lesson that a lot of women learn and have transmitted amongst themselves.
但我们一直告诉女性 — 其中一些是很好的教训 — “你应该尝试进行薪资谈判；男人总是这样做。”这是一个非常富有成效的教训，很多女性都在学习并相互传播。
We tell them, “Be more assertive in conversation, and don’t let people interrupt you.”
我们告诉他们，“在谈话中要更加自信，不要让别人打断你。”
These are all very important cultural lessons.
这些都是非常重要的文化课程。
These are norms that have been expressed and have allowed women to do well in the workplace.
这些规范已被明确表达，并让女性能够在工作场所表现出色。
Even Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg — there’s an entire book of this.
甚至谢丽尔·桑德伯格 (Sheryl Sandberg) 的《向前一步》(Lean In)——都有一整本书。
But in this book, there’s no question about, should men be given lessons as well?
但在这本书中，毫无疑问，男人也应该接受教训吗？
Like, hey, the reason why you’re doing better in school at a younger age if you’re a girl is usually because you’re more willing to sit still.
就像，嘿，如果你是女孩，你在年轻时在学校表现更好的原因通常是因为你更愿意坐着不动。
You’re able to sit around and do the work.
您可以坐下来完成工作。
Reading is the big place where there’s a divergence.
阅读是一个存在分歧的大地方。
He talks about English scores a lot, and there’s nothing stopping men from reading.
他经常谈论英语成绩，没有什么可以阻止人们阅读。
It’s one of those things where I feel there’s a complete abdication of any kind of idea that there should be some kind of cultural shifts around what you should be telling young boys to do.
这是我觉得应该完全放弃任何一种想法的事情之一，即应该围绕你应该告诉年轻男孩做的事情进行某种文化转变。
I don’t know Richard Reeves at all.
我根本不认识理查德·里夫斯。
I’m not saying these are his views, but when I read a book like this, I can tell you where my mind runs.
我并不是说这些是他的观点，但是当我读这样的书时，我可以告诉你我的想法在哪里。
Maybe there is even some chance he can’t say everything he might think.
也许他甚至有可能无法说出他可能想到的一切。
The core message as I read it — again, not saying it’s his intent — but just, men and women are more different than we had thought.
我读到的核心信息是 ——再次强调，并不是说这是他的意图 ——只是，男人和女人比我们想象的更不同。
I was already someone who thought men and women were pretty different, so if I pick up that message, he’s really saying men and women are pretty different, more at the margin than I had thought.
我本来就认为男人和女人有很大不同，所以如果我收到这条信息，他实际上是在说男人和女人有很大不同，比我想象的要大得多。
The policy recommendations — what everyone thinks of them — they’re sufficiently predictable and anodyne that there’s an alternative reading where, even if you think they’re fine ideas, you dismiss them a bit, and you wonder if he’s not just saying there’s not actually a way to solve that problem.
政策建议 ——“每个人对它们的看法”—— 它们具有足够的可预测性和镇痛作用，因此有另一种解读，即使你认为它们是好主意，你也会稍微忽略它们，你想知道他是否只是说实际上没有办法解决这个问题。
To circle back to the other books, especially Ursula Le Guin on the capitalist society of Urras, men are clearly in charge and dominant, and only men are scientists.
回到其他书，尤其是乌苏拉·勒吉恩（Ursula Le Guin）关于乌拉斯资本主义社会的书，男性显然处于主导地位，并且只有男性才是科学家。
It’s a society based perpetually on war somewhere on the globe.
这是一个在全球某个地方永远以战争为基础的社会。
The notion that men do well in societies in relative terms when there’s a lot of war, and it’s better to get rid of war, but when you get rid of war, a lot of men won’t do that well because they’re not well-suited to that kind of society.
这种观念认为，当战争频繁时，男性在社会中的表现相对较好，最好摆脱战争，但当你摆脱战争时，很多男性就不会做得那么好，因为他们不太适合那种社会。
That’s the alternative reading.
这就是另类阅读。
That to me is more on the table than arguing about the small, “Do we start the men a year later?” which I’m not opposed to.
对我来说，这比争论小问题更重要，“我们要在一年后开始招募球员吗？”我并不反对。
I don’t know, but maybe we’re just better off shifting into a society where a lot more men do worse and suck it up and take the net gain of less war.
我不知道，但也许我们最好还是转入一个社会，那里有更多的人做得更糟，他们忍气吞声，从减少战争中获得净收益。
I actually think this is incorrect for a couple of reasons.
事实上，我认为这是不正确的，原因有几个。
One is that he makes a comment that I think is meant to fly under the radar very early in the book, which is that he’s only talking about cis, heterosexual men.
其中之一是他在书的一开始就发表了一条评论，我认为这是为了避开雷达，他只谈论顺性的异性恋男性。
Obviously, most studies are only going to focus on that because you don’t have high enough numbers.
显然，大多数研究只会关注这一点，因为没有足够多的数字。
But what’s interesting is that there is some research showing that these gaps disappear with gay men and that on educational fronts, they’re doing as well as women.
但有趣的是，有一些研究表明，这些差距对于男同性恋者来说消失了，而且在教育方面，他们的表现和女性一样好。
Obviously, there are questions about heritability and the genetics of it, but at the same time, this idea that men just cannot succeed in this society is also not true, given that even within the world that we live in, from country to country, men are able to be less violent in certain contexts and are more violent in other contexts.
显然，存在着关于遗传性及其遗传学的问题，但与此同时，这种认为男性无法在这个社会中取得成功的想法也是不正确的，因为即使在我们生活的世界中，从一个国家到另一个国家，男性在某些情况下能够减少暴力，而在其他情况下则更加暴力。
Institutions matter, clearly.
显然，制度很重要。
Incentives matter.
激励措施很重要。
Some classes of men — there’s a distribution.
某些类别的男人 —— 有一个分布。
Some need some form of war; others become Mark Zuckerberg, obviously do incredibly well.
有些需要某种形式的战争；有些则需要某种形式的战争。其他人成为马克·扎克伯格，显然做得非常好。
There’s a sublimation or re-channeling, where certain male instincts get put in other directions, and these people just have incredible lives.
这是一种升华或重新引导，某些男性本能被转移到其他方向，而这些人却过着令人难以置信的生活。
But in terms of the whole distribution, wherever gay men may fall in that, maybe it’s the case 20–25 percent of men in a society where there aren’t that many manufacturing jobs, very few active wars that you might go fight in, and gang warfare is not a thing.
但就整个分布而言，无论男同性恋者属于哪种情况，在一个没有那么多制造业工作岗位、很少有战争可以参加、帮派战争也不存在的社会中，可能有 20-25% 的男性属于这种情况。
I’m not saying that’s good for men.
我并不是说这对男人有好处。
It’s clearly more destructive than just sitting at home and watching porn or smoking weed, but nonetheless, there’s some cultural vigor from the subset of men that is just sapped, and we’re not getting back.
这显然比坐在家里看色情片或吸大麻更具破坏性，但尽管如此，这部分男性的一些文化活力刚刚被削弱，而且我们不会恢复。
And one’s wondering, how much do we need to write that off?
人们想知道，我们需要注销多少资金？
Obviously, there are always going to be outliers.
显然，总会有异常值。
But as Reeves mentions multiple times in his book, even though, on average, men may experience X or Y or Z traits, whenever there’s remarkable overlap of the genders, there are tons of women who are “more aggressive” than other men, or are above the mean or median for male aggressiveness, or things like that.
但正如里夫斯在他的书中多次提到的那样，尽管平均而言，男性可能会经历 X 或 Y 或 Z 特征，但每当性别显着重叠时，就会有大量女性比其他男性“更具攻击性”，或者高于男性攻击性的平均值或中位数，等等。
My question is, yes, maybe there are tail risks going on, but at the same time, incentives matter a lot.
我的问题是，是的，也许存在尾部风险，但与此同时，激励措施也很重要。
The fact that there are a lot of men who are wealthy and white who are able to escape this “masculinity trap” just indicates that there are institutional things that you could do to affect large portions of the population.
事实上，有很多富有的白人男性能够摆脱这种“男子气概陷阱”，这一事实表明，你可以采取一些制度性的措施来影响大部分人口。
Largely, I found his prescriptions for what to do at the end pretty anodyne, but I found redshirting the boys to be not very well thought through in many perspectives.
很大程度上，我发现他对最后要做的事情的规定相当镇痛，但我发现红衫军在很多方面都没有经过深思熟虑。
I don’t think he devotes any time to what it would look like to have a class full of 14-year-old boys and 13-year-old girls, or what kind of dynamics that would create, or how that would affect women’s educational outcomes.
我认为他没有花太多时间讨论如果班级里全是 14 岁的男孩和 13 岁的女孩会是什么样子，或者会产生什么样的动力，或者这会如何影响女性的教育成果。
Again, maybe you’re right, and because he doesn’t spend much time on that, he’s actually more making a larger cultural message.
再说一次，也许你是对的，因为他没有花太多时间在这上面，所以他实际上更多的是在传达更大的文化信息。
But I think that we’re entering a time — and maybe the through point of all these books, as you mentioned, is just this question of what is base instinct, and what can be actually mediated by political or economic institutions?
但我认为我们正在进入一个时代——正如你提到的，也许所有这些书的贯穿点就是这个问题：什么是基本本能，以及政治或经济制度实际上可以调节什么？
We’re entering a time now where people are spending a lot of time talking about the heritability of traits and what that means.
我们现在正进入一个人们花大量时间讨论性状的遗传性及其含义的时代。
I feel, to become that fatalistic about people would require a lot more action on very low-hanging fruit that we know we haven’t done on policy matters, but —
我觉得，要对人们变得如此宿命论，就需要对非常容易实现的目标采取更多行动，而我们知道我们在政策问题上还没有这样做，但是 -
In Gulliver’s Travels, of course, we neutralize the destructive tendencies of men by having them do science, even if it’s silly, and having them build these dream worlds where you can supposedly — maybe you’re actually visiting them, but it’s at least the fantasy that you’re visiting these dead ancestors and talking with them.
当然，在《格列佛游记》中，我们通过让人们做科学（即使是愚蠢的）来中和人类的破坏性倾向，并让他们建造这些梦想世界，在那里你可以想象——也许你实际上正在拜访他们，但至少你在拜访这些死去的祖先并与他们交谈是一种幻想。
Which is also, in a weird way, a little bit like some of the ChatGPT models and their offshoots.
奇怪的是，这也有点像一些 ChatGPT 模型及其分支。
I feel like this is a very low opinion of men that is being described.
我觉得这是对所描述的男性的非常低的评价。
If you think that’s what all these authors are getting at and it’s intractable, it’s…
如果你认为这就是所有这些作者所要解决的问题并且很棘手，那么……
Do you agree with Swift about the difficulty of moral progress?
你同意斯威夫特关于道德进步的困难的观点吗？
That it’s difficult?
那很难吗？
I agree that it’s difficult.
我同意这很困难。
I think he’s much more pessimistic about it than I am, given how quick the gains have been in my own lifetime around moral progress.
我认为他对此比我悲观得多，因为我一生中道德进步的进展是如此之快。
So, you’re with Steven Pinker, more or less?
那么，你或多或少是和史蒂文·平克在一起的？
I don’t know.
我不知道。
I think there have been obviously a lot of economic gains that have been made over the last century.
我认为上个世纪显然取得了很多经济成果。
I think that ideas are very, very powerful, and in general, over time, it really matters if those ideas are true or can be persuasive.
我认为这些想法非常非常强大，而且总的来说，随着时间的推移，这些想法是否真实或是否具有说服力真的很重要。
As a classical liberal, it’s true that there’s a quality across people.
作为一名古典自由主义者，人确实具有某种品质。
I think that those ideas end up winning out time and again because they’re just unsustainable when you set up societies that don’t work that way.
我认为这些想法最终会一次又一次地获胜，因为当你建立的社会不以这种方式运作时，它们就是不可持续的。
They’ll be beaten by other societies that are more egalitarian and that can take advantage of other people.
他们将被其他更加平等、可以利用他人的社会击败。
I think moral progress goes along with the economic progress.
我认为道德进步伴随着经济进步。
Those are inextricably linked, and so you end up beating out other countries.
这些是密不可分的，所以你最终会击败其他国家。
Maybe moral progress is just feminization of you that Mill flirted with, but once we give women, if not quite an equal share of influence, a much greater share, they’re less inclined to want to fight.
也许道德进步只是穆勒调情的女性化，但一旦我们给予女性更大的影响力，即使不是同等的影响力，她们也不太愿意战斗。
That’s a good thing.
这是一件好事。
Maybe more risk-averse on average.
平均而言，可能更厌恶风险。
Given the destructiveness of war, that’s a good thing, but perhaps it’s the same process to some extent.
考虑到战争的破坏性，这是一件好事，但在某种程度上也许是相同的过程。
Now, with birth control, it appears permanent, this higher influence of women.
现在，随着节育，女性的这种更高的影响力似乎是永久性的。
There’s no simple change that’s going to reverse it any time soon.
没有任何简单的改变可以很快扭转局面。
I think it’s hard because moral progress and feminism were inextricably linked at a time when there was even tons more gender-based violence or things happening in the United States.
我认为这很难，因为在美国发生更多基于性别的暴力或事件的时候，道德进步和女权主义有着千丝万缕的联系。
Of course, moral progress had to point in the direction towards more liberation of women.
当然，道德进步必须指向女性更多解放的方向。
The idea that that would be totalizing seems incorrect.
认为这将是总计的想法似乎是不正确的。
It really depends on the structures that are then set up once women are freer.
这实际上取决于女性更加自由后建立的结构。
But you can’t get around biological sexism in some ways.
但在某些方面你无法回避生物性别歧视。
The fact that women have these .
事实上，女性拥有这些。
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The costs of the wage gap are largely explained by the cost of having children and what happens after you have kids.
工资差距的成本很大程度上是由生孩子的成本以及生孩子后发生的事情来解释的。
People are having fewer and fewer children, but I also think there’s counter-cultural reactions to that, and then people, I could see, having more and more children in response.
人们的孩子越来越少，但我也认为对此存在反文化反应，然后我可以看到，人们生了越来越多的孩子作为回应。
I think it really does depend on what happens with technology around increased freedom from that work.
我认为这确实取决于技术在增加工作自由度方面所发生的情况。
The idea that we’d have artificial wombs seemed so far outside of my current technological horizon.
我们拥有人造子宫的想法似乎远远超出了我目前的技术视野。
But at some level, being pulled out of the workforce and, in many ways, potentially having your healthcare disabled long-term seem like things that are such permanent facts about being a woman right now.
但在某种程度上，退出劳动力市场，以及在很多方面，可能导致你的医疗保健长期瘫痪，似乎是目前作为一名女性的永久事实。
If you end up having kids, it seems hard to get to a level of moral progress where you have equality of the genders there.
如果你最终有了孩子，似乎很难达到性别平等的道德进步水平。
Does that summing-up across all three books — if you think, what did we actually learn by reading these, thinking about them, talking about them — how would you put that?
这对所有三本书的总结是否 —— 如果你认为，我们通过阅读这些书、思考它们、谈论它们实际上学到了什么 —— 你会怎么说？
Or maybe we don’t know yet?
或者也许我们还不知道？
I think it’s interesting to me.
我觉得这对我来说很有趣。
I think you suggested Gulliver’s Travels, and I suggested Le Guin.
我想你推荐了《格列佛游记》，我推荐了勒吉恩。
Then you suggested Reeves.
然后你推荐了里维斯。
Yes, and I had not thought about these three as having very many connections before I sat down and started reading them again.
是的，在我坐下来重新开始阅读之前，我并没有想到这三本书之间有很多联系。
One of the things that’s very interesting to me all the time is, we’re having the same conversations in so many different contexts over decades, over centuries and in ways that, if you’re in a good mood, can feel very unifying.
我一直非常感兴趣的一件事是，几十年来、几个世纪以来，我们在许多不同的背景下进行相同的对话，如果你心情好，你会感到非常团结。
You’re like, “Wow, I’m just like every other person that’s out there.
你会说，“哇，我就像外面的每个人一样。
I’m like Jonathan Swift.
我就像乔纳森·斯威夫特。
We’re all wrestling with the same questions.
我们都在努力解决同样的问题。
Le Guin, all these people, Reeves.”
勒吉恩，所有这些人，里夫斯。”
Maybe it’s a knock against moral progress that the same questions are being debated over centuries.
也许几个世纪以来人们一直在争论同样的问题，这对道德进步是一种阻碍。
It doesn’t matter the format, it doesn’t matter the style, it doesn’t matter the background of the interlocutor.
格式无关，风格无关，对话者的背景无关。
It’s like we’re just forcing this one circular human condition.
就好像我们只是在强迫这种循环的人类状况。
I was surprised by the amount of overlap in themes, honestly.
老实说，我对主题的重叠程度感到惊讶。
Along those lines, one of my key lessons would be, everything is much more connected with other things than you think at first.
沿着这些思路，我的一个重要教训是，一切事物与其他事物的联系比你一开始想象的要紧密得多。
Even now, I keep on revising that upwards as I read more things.
即使现在，随着我阅读更多的东西，我仍在继续向上修改。
The same is true of travel.
旅行也是如此。
Going to a lot of different places, you appreciate each one more.
去了很多不同的地方，你就会更加欣赏每一个地方。
You learn something about it by virtue of the fact that you’ve been to other places.
你通过去过其他地方来了解一些东西。
Even if it doesn’t make you happy, you get this neat form of knowledge.
即使它不会让你快乐，你也会获得这种简洁的知识。
Travel as a form of knowledge, as a key theme in Le Guin and Swift, comes through to me all the more on these readings.
旅行作为一种知识形式，作为勒吉恩和斯威夫特的一个关键主题，在这些阅读中对我来说更加重要。
I feel the lack of that a bit in Reeves.
我觉得里维斯有点缺乏这一点。
I get that he’s writing for — which press?
我知道他正在为 ——哪个出版社撰稿？
For Brookings.
对于布鲁金斯学会来说。
He works at Brookings.
他在布鲁金斯学会工作。
I don’t expect him to go off to some distant country and start doing fieldwork, but that’s what feels, to me, is missing.
我不希望他去某个遥远的国家并开始进行实地考察，但这对我来说就是缺失的感觉。
The kind of thing that Alice Evans is doing in her writings on gender, which is going everywhere, trying to learn things in a pretty speculative way that is not exactly a randomized control trial.
爱丽丝·埃文斯（Alice Evans）在她关于性别的著作中所做的事情无处不在，试图以一种相当推测的方式来学习事物，这并不完全是随机对照试验。
I think she’s maybe more likely to get somewhere than these smaller investigations.
我认为她可能比这些较小的调查更有可能取得进展。
Travel as a mode of knowing has gone up in my eyes, and it’s something I think we should talk about, think about, read about, travel about all the more often.
旅行作为一种认知方式已经在我眼中得到提升，我认为我们应该更频繁地谈论、思考、阅读和旅行。
I think it’s interesting because I agree there are nontangibles that you learn from the speculative fiction, on one hand, and also the travel that we’re talking about here.
我认为这很有趣，因为我同意你一方面可以从推理小说中学到一些无形的东西，另一方面也可以从我们在这里谈论的旅行中学到一些无形的东西。
But at the same time, if you’re trying to affect things in concrete terms — in my opinion, Reeves is.
但与此同时，如果你想以具体的方式影响事情——在我看来，里夫斯就是。
He wrote an article for The Atlantic where the excerpt was just about the one policy prescription of keeping boys back one year.
他为《大西洋月刊》写了一篇文章，其中摘录的内容是关于让男孩留校一年的政策规定。
To me, it depends what your theory of change is.
对我来说，这取决于你的变革理论是什么。
Is your theory of change that whatever you can do to illuminate these broader ideas or truths that you think you’ve discovered about the world, and however you can make those things entertaining and accessible to as many people as possible, is how you actually effect long-term change?
你的变革理论是否是，无论你能做什么来阐明你认为你已经发现的关于世界的更广泛的想法或真理，无论你如何使这些事情变得有趣并让尽可能多的人接触到，你实际上是如何实现长期变革的？
Or is it a very succinct argument about how we can actually change a very clear policy problem that I currently have a problem with?
或者这是一个非常简洁的论点，说明我们如何才能真正改变我目前遇到的一个非常明确的政策问题？
Obviously, we want both of those things existing in a society at the same time, but I think it’s a very unsettled question about which one of those things gets you further.
显然，我们希望这两种东西同时存在于一个社会中，但我认为这是一个非常悬而未决的问题，即哪一种东西能让你走得更远。
I agree.
我同意。
It is striking to me, if I go to Singapore or New Zealand and I talk with policy people, usually the first question they ask is, “What do other countries do?” If you’re in America, that question might come up, but in policy circles, it’s not usually the first question.
令我惊讶的是，如果我去新加坡或新西兰与政策人士交谈，他们通常问的第一个问题是：“其他国家是做什么的？”如果你在美国，这个问题可能会出现，但在政策圈子里，这通常不是第一个问题。
Certainly, at the electoral level, it might be a negative.
当然，在选举层面，这可能是负面的。
So, I’d like to see that be a bigger question.
所以，我希望这是一个更大的问题。
I wonder sometimes if it’s just that America’s so big.
有时我想知道是否只是因为美国太大了。
We have two neighbors — that’s bizarre.
我们有两个邻居 ——这很奇怪。
Most countries have so many neighbors and are much smaller, and so the proximity to them is so much larger that you’re used to that spread.
大多数国家都有很多邻国，而且面积要小得多，因此与它们的距离要大得多，以至于你已经习惯了这种分布。
Our states function like this.
我们的国家就是这样运作的。
It’s one of the most interesting things that I’ve realized.
这是我意识到的最有趣的事情之一。
I do a lot of reporting at the state level and at the local level.
我在州一级和地方一级做了很多报道。
The amount to which one state taking an action increases the likelihood of its neighbors engaging with that question is just remarkable to me.
一个国家采取的行动增加了其邻国参与该问题的可能性，这对我来说是惊人的。
If California does something, that’s much less impactful to New York than if New Jersey does something, or if Massachusetts does something.
如果加州采取行动，对纽约的影响远小于新泽西州或马萨诸塞州采取行动的影响。
Similarly, I think that’s the part of the problem with the US engaging with other countries.
同样，我认为这就是美国与其他国家交往的问题所在。
At the same time, I’ve done some infrastructure reporting on the researcher Alon Levy at the American Institute.
与此同时，我对美国研究所的研究员阿隆·利维（Alon Levy）做了一些基础设施报告。
He very much complains often about how transit authorities don’t pay attention to how other countries are building infrastructure much more cheaply than we are, especially rapid rail.
他经常抱怨运输当局不关注其他国家如何比我们便宜得多的基础设施建设，尤其是快速铁路。
It’s a problem across sectors.
这是跨部门的问题。
The US doesn’t look at anyone.
美国不看任何人。
If you look at the UK, they don’t look at Spain and Italy, even though they have lower transportation infrastructure costs, because why would you look at Southern Europe?
如果你看英国，他们不会看西班牙和意大利，尽管它们的交通基础设施成本较低，因为你为什么要看南欧呢？
It’s absurd.
这是荒谬的。
You get to Southern Europe and other areas — they don’t look at East Asia as a model, even though those places are often much better at building these infrastructures.
你去南欧和其他地区——他们并不将东亚视为典范，尽管这些地方通常在建设这些基础设施方面要好得多。
It doesn’t seem like a uniquely American problem.
这似乎并不是美国独有的问题。
It just seems like we have fewer neighbors to look at.
看来我们可看的邻居越来越少了。
Jerusalem Demsas, thank you very much.
耶路撒冷德姆萨斯，非常感谢你。
Thank you, glad to be here.
谢谢你，很高兴来到这里。