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Are we living in the new Dark Ages?

我们生活在新的黑暗时代吗？

Despite vast technological advances, our societies are increasingly looking like those that preceded the advent of literacy.

尽管技术取得了巨大进步，我们的社会却越来越像识字出现之前的社会。

So argues journalist James Marriott , who sees in our abandonment of reading a threat to democracy and a reversal of many of the Enlightenment's gains.

记者詹姆斯·马里奥特如此认为，他认为我们放弃阅读是对民主的威胁，也是对启蒙运动许多成果的逆转。

He and EconTalk's Russ Roberts trace literacy from its fragile first days in ancient Mesopotamia through to the printing press and the "Reading Revolution" of the mid-to-late 18th century, exploring how--and whether--its spread shaped major historical events.

他和 EconTalk 的拉斯·罗伯茨 (Russ Roberts) 追溯了读写能力从古代美索不达米亚脆弱的最初时期一直到印刷机和 18 世纪中后期的“阅读革命”，探索读写能力的传播如何以及是否影响了重大历史事件。

They analyze Marriott's claim that reading grounds politics in rationality, consider the role of the Republic of Letters in driving Europe's Industrial Revolution, and debate whether a book or a movie is better at conveying complexity.

他们分析了马里奥特关于阅读将政治建立在理性之上的主张，考虑了文学共和国在推动欧洲工业革命中的作用，并争论了一本书还是一部电影是否更能传达复杂性。

Marriott ends with a consolation: Just as fast food gave rise to the gym, informational junk food may give rise to reading as an intentional discipline.

万豪最后给出了一个安慰：正如快餐催生了健身房一样，信息垃圾食品可能会催生阅读作为一种有意识的纪律。

Great episode.

很棒的一集。

I am assigning this to all of my undergraduate classes at the beginning of the term as a clear indicator that I want them to read the readings and not just have Claude summarize them.

我在学期开始时将其分配给我所有的本科生班级，作为一个明确的指标，表明我希望他们阅读阅读材料，而不仅仅是让克劳德总结它们。

At about the midpoint of the interview, Marriott made a great case that reading the text brings out more context and narrative than any summary (or movie) could provide.

在采访的中间，万豪提出了一个很好的案例，即阅读文本可以比任何摘要（或电影）提供更多的背景和叙述。

Bravo.

太棒了。

1.

1.

Even though I strongly agree with the value of widespread literacy and with promoting the love of books, I must admit that I think this discussion stole some bases here and there.

尽管我强烈同意广泛识字的价值和促进对书籍的热爱，但我必须承认，我认为这种讨论到处窃取了一些基础。

Throughout there seemed to be an assumption that the benefits we can get from books (e.g. the special way we see into the mind of another person) are only accessible to those with literacy.

自始至终，似乎有一种假设，即我们可以从书籍中获得的好处（例如，我们了解他人思想的特殊方式）只有那些识字的人才能获得。

That isn’t true.

那不是真的。

Consider audiobooks.

考虑有声读物。

Every insight from reading a written book is also contained at least as well (possibly better) in hearing a well-done reading of that book — even if one cannot read.

阅读一本书面书籍的每一个洞察力至少也包含在听这本书的良好阅读中（可能更好）——即使一个人不会阅读。

The best way to impart a love of books is through reading good books aloud to your children — whether they can read or not.

培养对书籍的热爱的最好方法是向孩子大声朗读好书——无论他们是否识字。

Long before we had the internet and YouTube videos, we had Captain Kangaroo and audiovisual renditions of Stone Soup , Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel , and many more.

早在互联网和 YouTube 视频出现之前，我们就已经有了《袋鼠船长》和《石头汤》、《迈克·穆里根和他的蒸汽铲》等的视听版本。

The benefits that can come from a written book are not exclusive to reading the book yourself.

书面书籍所带来的好处并不仅仅限于您自己阅读这本书。

Many adults find great value in well-done audiobooks, even if they could have read it themselves.

许多成年人发现精心制作的有声读物具有巨大的价值，即使他们可以自己阅读。

Also, the problem with the brevity of TikTok is not inherent to audiovisual format.

此外，TikTok 的简洁问题并不是视听格式所固有的。

A great movie can keep one captivated for as much as 3 hours.

一部精彩的电影可以让人着迷长达三个小时。

On the other hand, a badly written book may lack benefit and even become impenetrable.

另一方面，一本写得不好的书可能缺乏益处，甚至变得难以理解。

The issue isn’t the medium, but rather the skill and quality of the content.

问题不在于媒介，而在于内容的技巧和质量。

While storytelling can be done badly (e.g. to promote enraging falsehoods for the sake of social media audience attention), that flaw is not inherent to the format of listening to a storyteller.

虽然讲故事可能会做得很糟糕（例如，为了吸引社交媒体观众的注意力而宣扬令人愤怒的谎言），但这种缺陷并不是听讲故事的方式所固有的。

Nor is it exclusive.

它也不是排他性的。

Bad or misleading ideas can be written persuasively.

糟糕或误导性的想法可以写得有说服力。

Is every best-selling book true?

每一本畅销书都是真实的吗？

Also, when a well-done video adds appropriate visuals to spoken words, that can sometimes convey certain kinds of complexity better than a thousand written words on their own.

此外，当一个制作精良的视频为口头语言添加适当的视觉效果时，有时可以比一千个书面文字更好地传达某些复杂性。

The discussion tended to inappropriately assume that certain benefits are available only through reading material yourself and that certain liabilities are inherent and exclusive to mediums other than reading.

讨论倾向于不恰当地假设某些好处只能通过自己阅读材料才能获得，而某些责任是阅读以外的媒介所固有的和专有的。

2.

2.

If I could have requested an extension to the conversation, I would have liked to hear a discussion of the eloquence found in some diaries and letters of ordinary soldiers as was illustrated by the classic Ken Burns series on The Civil War .

如果我可以要求延长谈话时间，我希望听到对普通士兵的一些日记和信件中的口才的讨论，正如经典的肯伯恩斯内战系列所说明的那样。

During that time, such beauty and quality of written expression seemed to not be limited to the domain of the letters of elites of the republic.

在那个时代，如此美丽和高品质的文字表达似乎并不局限于共和国精英的书信领域。

Few people today could match it.

今天很少有人能与之匹敌。

(And notice that one doesn’t need to be able to read to appreciate and benefit from that film series.)

（请注意，人们并不需要能够阅读才能欣赏该系列电影并从中受益。）

I too love A History of Rock in 500 Songs.

我也很喜欢《500首歌的摇滚史》。

It’s so thoughtful and such an incredible commitment.

这是如此周到和令人难以置信的承诺。

It must be a true labor of love.

这一定是真正的爱的劳动。

I cast my vote to have Andrew Hickey as an EconTalk guest.

我投票选择安德鲁·希基 (Andrew Hickey) 作为 EconTalk 的嘉宾。

I’ve invited him.

我邀请了他。

Don’t know if he ever saw the invitation.

不知道他有没有看到邀请函。

His podcast is an extraordinary achievement of research, analysis, and narrative.

他的播客是研究、分析和叙述的非凡成就。

Really enjoyed this episode on the idea of what the written word provides that a visual medium cannot.

真的很喜欢这一集，它讲述了书面文字提供了视觉媒体无法提供的东西。

Ideas such as the internal feelings of a character and the impact of an environmental cue that simply cannot be expressed using a visual medium as it lacks the detail.

角色的内心感受和环境线索的影响等想法根本无法使用视觉媒体来表达，因为它缺乏细节。

One thing that particularly intrigued me is the comparison to modern visual media to traditional storytelling.

让我特别感兴趣的一件事是现代视觉媒体与传统讲故事的比较。

I could not help but contemplate analysis of “The Odyssey” being a movie, based on a book, based on an oral history.

我忍不住思考对《奥德赛》作为一部基于一本书、基于口述历史的电影的分析。

I think there can be little doubt all are an “inaccurate” portrayal of Greek history, yet I am not sure that the book conveys concepts such as “belonging” or “honor” better than the movie does or the original story did.

我认为毫无疑问，所有这些都是对希腊历史的“不准确”描述，但我不确定这本书是否比电影或原始故事更好地传达了“归属感”或“荣誉”等概念。

It does portray them differently.

它确实以不同的方式描绘了它们。

I do think you both gave the visual medium a short shrift.

我确实认为你们都对视觉媒体不屑一顾。

It is not that the visual medium provides less information or is less able to communicate factual information (which seemed to be the expressed view of the podcast), I would contend that film, TV, and yes, even TikTok videos provide not a lesser, but a different type of impact.

这并不是说视觉媒体提供的信息较少或传达事实信息的能力较差（这似乎是播客所表达的观点），我认为电影、电视，是的，甚至 TikTok 视频提供的影响不是较小，而是不同类型的影响。

While a book can allow you to get “inside the head” of a character and imbue them with some of your own feelings (internal), a film allows you to directly experience through your most powerful senses (sight and sound) what occurs to another (external).

虽然一本书可以让你进入角色的“头脑”，并向他们注入你自己的一些感受（内部），但电影可以让你通过你最强大的感官（视觉和声音）直接体验另一个人（外部）发生的事情。

Empathy is a good word, but does not accurately portray the concept.

同理心是个好词，但并不能准确地描述这个概念。

As a simple example, I am not sure a novelization can as accurately portray the visceral horror of Normandy in the same way the opening scenes of “Saving Private Ryan” do.

举个简单的例子，我不确定小说能否像《拯救大兵瑞恩》的开场场景一样准确地描绘诺曼底的内心恐怖。

Those scenes are not to allow to experience your own internal conflict or fear (via a character there) from being injured or killed, but to present what it is like to be present for such an event as an observer (who is a participant, if a passive one) and evaluate your feelings from that.

这些场景并不是让你体验自己因受伤或死亡而产生的内心冲突或恐惧（通过那里的角色），而是呈现作为观察者（如果是被动的，那么他就是参与者）出现在这样的事件中的感觉，并从中评估你的感受。

Compare the feelings evoked by watching those scenes against the written words of “The Illiad” or “Red Badge of Courage” or another book describing injury or death in combat, and I contend it does not provide a lesser experience, simply a different, equally interesting, one.

将观看这些场景所唤起的感受与《伊利亚特》或《红色勇气勋章》或另一本描述战斗中受伤或死亡的书的文字进行比较，我认为它并没有提供较少的体验，而只是一种不同的、同样有趣的体验。

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了解您的评论数据是如何处理的。

Additional ideas and people mentioned in this podcast episode:

本播客节目中提到的其他想法和人物：

A few more readings and background resources:

更多阅读材料和背景资源：

More related EconTalk podcast episodes, by Category:

更多相关的 EconTalk 播客剧集，按类别：

* As an Amazon Associate, Econlib earns from qualifying purchases.

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Intro.

简介。

[Recording date: August 16, 2026.]

[记录日期：2026年8月16日。]

Russ Roberts: Today is August 16th, 2026, and my guest is author James Marriott of the Times of London , where he is a columnist.

拉斯·罗伯茨：今天是 2026 年 8 月 16 日，我的嘉宾是伦敦《泰晤士报》的作家詹姆斯·马里奥特，他是该报的专栏作家。

His Substack is Cultural Capital.

他的子堆栈是文化资本。

He was first here in July of 2025, talking about reading.

他于 2025 年 7 月首次来到这里，谈论阅读。

Today, we're going to talk about his new book, The New Dark Ages: The Death of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society .

今天，我们要谈谈他的新书《新黑暗时代：阅读的死亡与后文学社会的黎明》。

James, welcome back to EconTalk.

詹姆斯，欢迎回到 EconTalk。

James Marriott: Thanks so much for having me.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：非常感谢您邀请我。

It's actually, amazingly, I talked to you last in the middle of a sweltering London heatwave, and I'm in the middle of another sweltering London heatwave, although it's less hot.

事实上，令人惊讶的是，我上次和你谈话是在伦敦闷热的热浪中，而我正处于另一场闷热的伦敦热浪中，尽管它不那么热。

When I looked back at that video, I'm completely pink in the last time I talked to you.

当我回头看那个视频时，我上次和你说话时整个人都粉红了。

Russ Roberts: Well, we'll have to do this more often.

拉斯·罗伯茨：嗯，我们必须更频繁地这样做。

Or it's a tradition.

或者说这是一个传统。

Russ Roberts: It's pretty dark to call a book The New Dark Ages .

拉斯·罗伯茨：将一本书称为《新黑暗时代》是相当黑暗的。

Is the situation really that bleak?

情况真的有那么惨淡吗？

James Marriott: Yeah, it's a funny one.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：是的，这很有趣。

It's a title that--my publisher said, 'What are you calling this book?' And, you know, something just springs into your mind, and you say it before you thought about it, and I just said, 'Well, The New Dark Ages .' And then, it got attached to the project.

我的出版商说，“你给这本书起什么名字？”而且，你知道，有些东西突然出现在你的脑海中，你在思考之前就说出来了，我只是说，“好吧，新黑暗时代。”然后，它就附加到了该项目中。

And then, people have asked me, 'Well, do you think we're literally returning to the dark ages?

然后，人们问我，‘好吧，你认为我们真的回到了黑暗时代吗？

Is it really true that a society with self-driving cars and world-beating research universities is remotely comparable to the situation of Europe in the fifth or sixth century or whatever?' That's not the argument of the book.

一个拥有自动驾驶汽车和世界一流研究型大学的社会真的可以与五六世纪欧洲的情况相媲美吗？这不是本书的论点。

I mean, the other objection people make is: aren't you caricaturing the dark ages, which is, historians now tell us, were a time of great technological innovation, which I think is a bit overdone at the moment.

我的意思是，人们提出的另一个反对意见是：你不是在讽刺黑暗时代吗？历史学家现在告诉我们，这是一个伟大的技术创新时代，我认为目前这有点过头了。

But no, that's not what I'm doing either.

但不，这也不是我正在做的事情。

I guess the thought behind the title comes from a fairly common idea among the kinds of media theorists who've written about the implications of moving from a society based on literacy and reading to one that abandons literacy and reading and begins to look a little bit more, in some ways, like the kinds of societies that preceded the advent of literacy.

我想这个标题背后的想法来自于媒体理论家中一个相当普遍的想法，他们写过从一个基于识字和阅读的社会转变为一个放弃识字和阅读的社会的影响，并开始在某些方面看起来更像识字出现之前的那种社会。

We owe Marshall McLuhan this idea that a post-literate society will resemble, in some ways, a pre-literate society.

我们欠马歇尔·麦克卢汉这样的想法：后识字社会在某些方面将类似于前识字社会。

The things I sort of say in my book and the things people like Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong would say is more mystical, more emotional, more face-to-face interaction, not mediated by the written word.

我在书中所说的事情以及像马歇尔·麦克卢汉和沃尔特·翁这样的人会说的事情更加神秘，更加情感化，更加面对面的互动，而不是以书面文字为媒介。

So, I guess the thing the title is pointing at is this sort of well-known thought in media-theoretical circles that a society after literacy, in some ways, resembles a society before literacy.

所以，我想标题所指的是媒体理论界的这种众所周知的思想，即识字之后的社会在某些方面类似于识字之前的社会。

And, I try not to press too hard on the historical parallels.

而且，我尽量不要过分强调历史相似之处。

You may think I've overdone it, but I guess if the book has two themes, it's the idea that the decline of literacy may push us back through a kind of reversal of many of the gains of the Enlightenment, which I think was a sort of phenomenon symptom of literacy, and also that it may push us back to a political situation that resembles one that existed before literacy.

你可能认为我做得太过分了，但我想如果这本书有两个主题，那就是识字率的下降可能会通过对启蒙运动的许多成果的逆转而推动我们倒退，我认为这是识字率的一种现象症状，而且它可能会将我们推回到类似于识字之前存在的政治状况。

So, I guess the theme is slightly going back in time to a time before literacy.

所以，我想这个主题稍微回到了识字之前的时代。

Russ Roberts: I'm not sure I agree or disagree.

拉斯·罗伯茨：我不确定我是否同意。

I think it's a really interesting idea to think about.

我认为这是一个非常有趣的想法。

And your book starts with a really interesting--it's a very short book, by the way.

你的书以非常有趣的开头——顺便说一句，这是一本非常短的书。

I want to tell listeners.

我想告诉听众。

It's about 170 pages on my Kindle.

我的 Kindle 上大约有 170 页。

I ironically read it on my phone.

讽刺的是，我在手机上读到了它。

We'll talk about that later, maybe.

也许我们稍后会讨论这个问题。

But, your book starts off with, really, a history of reading, and I've never thought about the question of: when did reading become common?

但是，你的书实际上是从阅读的历史开始的，我从来没有想过这样的问题：阅读是什么时候变得普遍的？

When did literacy become common?

识字什么时候开始普及？

So, when did reading take off?

那么，读书是从什么时候开始兴起的呢？

James Marriott: It's a really good question.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：这是一个非常好的问题。

And I think this is something I really wanted to hammer home in the book, which is that I think we're so used to reading, we're so used to literacy, and it's so ubiquitous in our society, and we spend our entire lives reading, that we very easily forget to think about how unusual it is and how recent it is.

我认为这是我真正想在书中强调的一点，那就是我认为我们已经习惯了阅读，我们已经习惯了识字，它在我们的社会中如此普遍，我们一生都在阅读，以至于我们很容易忘记思考它是多么不寻常以及它是多么新近。

So, the statistics of literacy rates in ancient societies are fascinating.

因此，古代社会识字率的统计数据是令人着迷的。

By some estimates, in ancient Mesopotamia, I think in the Mesopotamian city-state, you might have had 20 people alive who could read and write.

据估计，在古代美索不达米亚，我想在美索不达米亚城邦，可能有 20 个人会读写。

The early history of literacy for thousands and thousands of years is incredibly fragile, and it's not at all a cultural phenomenon.

几千年的早期识字历史极其脆弱，它根本不是一种文化现象。

It's a kind of esoteric elite code or secret that's passed down among a wealthy scribal elite.

这是一种在富有的文士精英中流传下来的深奥的精英密码或秘密。

And, some rulers in some societies would have learned to read; some wouldn't.

而且，某些社会的某些统治者会学会阅读；有些人不会。

That's the situation that prevails.

这就是普遍存在的情况。

I mean, in ancient Rome, the literacy rate is probably about 10%.

我的意思是，在古罗马，识字率大概是10%左右。

It's edging up a little bit by the end of the Middle Ages.

到中世纪末期，这一数字略有上升。

The obvious big event for literacy is the invention of the printing press, which means that books can proliferate enormously.

对于识字来说，最明显的重大事件是印刷机的发明，这意味着书籍可以大量繁殖。

When people have more access to books, more people can read; books become useful for more things.

当人们有更多的机会接触到书籍时，就会有更多的人能够阅读；书籍变得对更多事情有用。

Driven by Protestantism, a strand of Christianity which places a huge emphasis on the written word, more people become literate to read the Bible.

在新教（基督教的一个分支，非常重视书面文字）的推动下，越来越多的人开始识字并阅读《圣经》。

And, one story of literacy is that these things interrelate and feed each other up until the middle to the end of the 18th century, when there's this phenomenon that's called the Reading Revolution by some historians, which is this idea that reading has sort of been increasing steadily since the printing press, and you reach this point in the middle to the end of the 18th century where it suddenly seems, as numerous journalists and authors were writing at the time, that absolutely everybody is reading.

而且，关于读写能力的一个故事是，这些东西相互关联、相互促进，直到 18 世纪中后期，出现了一种被一些历史学家称为“阅读革命”的现象，即自印刷机出现以来，阅读量一直在稳步增长，而在 18 世纪中后期，你会发现，正如当时众多记者和作家所写的那样，突然似乎每个人都在阅读。

And there are all these wonderful accounts of people complaining that you can be walking in the street and the people walking down, bumping into you because they're reading a novel.

还有很多精彩的报道，人们抱怨你走在街上，而人们走下来却撞到你，因为他们正在读小说。

Or, you go to the pub and there are just loads of peasants sitting there reading almanacs, or you go and see what earth your servant girl is doing, and she's in the kitchen reading a newspaper.

或者，你去酒吧，有很多农民坐在那里读年鉴，或者你去看看你的女仆在做什么，她正在厨房里看报纸。

And, journalists are always prone to exaggeration, but it really did seem to strike people at the time that there was this point in the middle to the end of the 18th century when it seemed like not many people had been reading, and then suddenly everybody was reading, and books were everywhere, and magazines were everywhere, and newspapers were everywhere.

而且，记者总是容易夸大其词，但在18世纪中叶到末期的某个时刻，似乎确实没有多少人读书，但突然间每个人都在读书，书籍无处不在，杂志无处不在，报纸无处不在，这确实让人们感到震惊。

And, if you're going to find an inflection point, that's not mass literacy, but I think that is the beginning of this modern literate world that we know.

而且，如果你要找到一个拐点，那不是大众识字率，但我认为这是我们所知道的现代识字世界的开始。

Russ Roberts: We did an episode with Janine Barchas on inexpensive paperbacks and Jane Austen and how the widespread availability of affordable books launched the popularity of a whole bunch of people, one of whom was Jane Austen.

拉斯·罗伯茨：我们和珍妮·巴查斯一起制作了一集关于廉价平装书和简·奥斯汀的节目，讲述了廉价书籍的广泛普及如何引起了一大群人的欢迎，其中之一就是简·奥斯汀。

One of the challenges, I think, with this claim that reading is important--by the way, you and I share something in common.

我认为，挑战之一是声称阅读很重要——顺便说一句，你和我有一些共同点。

We love books.

我们喜欢书。

We read, I think, an enormous amount.

我想，我们读了很多书。

We spent an enormous amount of our life--I'm older than you, but I've spent a huge part of my life immersed in a book, reading in times where I should have been watching where I was going.

我们度过了生命中的大部分时光——我比你年长，但我生命中的大部分时间都沉浸在书本中，在我本应该关注的地方读书。

So, I totally--we're on the same page there.

所以，我完全——我们意见一致。

But the question that's hovering in the background of this book and that comes forward in the last part is whether it matters to civilization, whether it matters to our political process.

但这本书的背景和最后一部分提出的问题是，它对文明是否重要，对我们的政治进程是否重要。

Certainly, it should, on paper.

当然，在纸面上应该如此。

It should be the case that a literate population should make better decisions, you would think, you would hope.

你会认为，你会希望，有文化的人口应该做出更好的决定。

But, I'd have to say that if I think back to this revolution, which was a big deal, it wasn't like a 20% increase in people reading books or a 10% increase.

但是，我不得不说，如果我回想一下这场意义重大的革命，它并不像读书人数增加了 20% 或增加了 10%。

It was an enormous increase, again, mainly through the printing press and the fall in the price of owning a book and access to books.

这又是一个巨大的增长，主要是通过印刷机以及拥有一本书和获得书籍的价格的下降。

Shouldn't the world have looked radically different?

世界不应该看起来完全不同吗？

And, you try to make the case that it did, but I'm skeptical.

而且，你试图证明它确实如此，但我对此表示怀疑。

So, make that case again.

那么，再次说明这一点。

It should have been a revolution in how the world turned out.

这本应该是世界格局的一场革命。

It should have been almost visible in political outcomes.

它应该在政治结果中几乎可见。

And, I'm not sure it is.

而且，我不确定是不是这样。

So, give me your best shot.

所以，请尽你所能。

James Marriott: Yeah.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：是的。

I mean, I wouldn't go so far as to claim that literacy is the only factor that matters in the history of politics.

我的意思是，我不会声称识字率是政治史上唯一重要的因素。

I think it does look pretty radical.

我认为它看起来确实相当激进。

For instance, I think the important thing to say about literacy, perhaps, is that I think the more literacy spreads through society, the more of a democratizing effect that has on the society.

例如，我认为关于扫盲的重要一点也许是，我认为扫盲在社会中传播得越多，对社会的民主化影响就越大。

The more people who can access information and ideas, the more people can become politically involved, and the more people are thinking critically about power.

越多的人能够获取信息和思想，就越多的人能够参与政治，就越多的人对权力进行批判性思考。

And, it used to be the case that historians would claim that the French Revolution was basically a consequence of philosophers like Rousseau publishing their anti-monarchical and proto-Republican ideas in books like The Social Contract .

而且，历史学家过去常常声称，法国大革命基本上是卢梭等哲学家在《社会契约论》等书中发表反君主制和原始共和主义思想的结果。

That's probably overstated, but I think if you look at the history of--in Britain, perhaps more you're talking about the end of the 17th century.

这可能有点夸张，但我认为如果你看看英国的历史，也许你更多地谈论的是 17 世纪末。

In Europe, you're talking about the 18th century.

在欧洲，你谈论的是18世纪。

You begin the 18th century, in which Europe is a society run, to a very large degree, by absolutist monarchs who have total power of their populations, surrounded by ministers.

时间从 18 世纪开始，欧洲在很大程度上是一个由专制君主统治的社会，他们拥有对其人民的全部权力，周围都是大臣。

Political affairs are basically palace secret, discussed by a small minority of a political elite.

政治事务基本上属于宫廷秘密，由少数政治精英讨论。

When you get to the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, society is looking a lot more democratic.

到了 18 世纪末和 19 世纪初，社会看起来更加民主。

You have newspapers.

你有报纸。

The phenomena of the absolutist monarch is radically waned.

专制君主的现象已彻底消失。

In France, you have a republic.

在法国，有一个共和国。

In England, the monarch is much less the sole authority in the country than they were at the beginning of the century.

在英格兰，与本世纪初相比，君主不再是国家的唯一权威。

You have reports of Parliament being written; ordinary people involved in politics; public affairs are no longer just debated in state rooms.

你们正在撰写议会报告；参与政治的普通人；公共事务不再仅仅在国事厅里进行辩论。

There's a kind of collective decision made by the public sphere.

这是一种由公共领域做出的集体决定。

And, I do think politics really looks radically different.

而且，我确实认为政治看起来确实截然不同。

I think that sort of end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century is a great age of democratic revolution and democratic reform, and I think that is directly linked to the spread of literacy through society.

我认为18世纪末、19世纪初是民主革命和民主改革的伟大时代，我认为这与社会识字率的传播直接相关。

Russ Roberts: Well, it could be there's a sweet spot.

拉斯·罗伯茨：嗯，可能有一个最佳点。

It could be it's a U-shaped or an inverted U-shaped function.

它可能是一个 U 形函数或倒 U 形函数。

So, for example, you mentioned The Social Contract .

例如，您提到了《社会契约》。

Thomas Paine gets a lot of credit for influencing the American Revolution.

托马斯·潘恩因影响美国革命而受到很多赞誉。

We could think of many, many books-- Uncle Tom's Cabin --that electrified the public and led to important movements, although it's hard to know whether those claims are true, but certainly there's a plausibility to it.

我们可以想到很多很多书——《汤姆叔叔的小屋》——让公众兴奋不已，并引发了重要的运动，尽管很难知道这些说法是否属实，但它肯定有其合理性。

The problem I have--and it's the same issue with the Internet.

我遇到的问题——互联网也有同样的问题。

The Internet has democratized information beyond imagining and beyond what books could be, and, of course, the problem is, is that half of what's on the Internet is wrong; you just don't know which half.

互联网使信息民主化，超出了想象，也超出了书本所能达到的程度，当然，问题是，互联网上的内容有一半是错误的；你只是不知道是哪一半。

And the same would be true of books.

书籍也是如此。

And you can see this--and, by the way, I don't want to have listeners think this book is a--it is a bit of a screed, although I don't think James Marriott is capable of a real screed--meaning you're making the case for something, is the way I would put it.

你可以看到这一点——顺便说一句，我不想​​让听众认为这本书是——它有点长篇大论，尽管我不认为詹姆斯·马里奥特有能力写出真正的长篇大论——这意味着你正在为某件事辩护，这就是我所说的方式。

But, the problem, of course, is that there's a lot of bad books, and there's a lot of books that are lies, and there are books that encourage people to do awful things.

但是，问题当然是有很多坏书，有很多书是谎言，还有一些书鼓励人们做可怕的事情。

So, I can imagine that in the early days of literacy, when there was limited access to publishing books, some of the best books got published, we would hope, and they were very provocative and influential.

所以，我可以想象，在识字的早期，当出版书籍的机会有限时，我们希望一些最好的书籍能够出版，而且它们非常具有挑衅性和影响力。

Eventually, it got so democratized--and I'm not criticizing democracy, I just mean that there was a lot more available to a lot more people--it's a pretty mixed bag.

最终，它变得如此民主化——我不是在批评民主，我只是说有更多的东西可供更多的人使用——这是一个相当复杂的过程。

I mean, I think you'd have trouble defending the idea that the Internet is leading to better political outcomes because people have more information.

我的意思是，我认为你很难捍卫这样一种观点：互联网正在带来更好的政治结果，因为人们拥有更多的信息。

They do have more information, just not so reliable.

他们确实有更多信息，只是不太可靠。

James Marriott: Yeah.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：是的。

No, I agree, and I think--I mean, this book is a bit of a polemic.

不，我同意，而且我认为——我的意思是，这本书有点争论。

I guess my argument would not be that--

我想我的论点不会是——

Russ Roberts: That's a nice word.

拉斯·罗伯茨：这个词很好。

That's a better word.

这是一个更好的词。

Sorry.

对不起。

It's not a screed.

这不是熨平板。

James Marriott: Well, jeremiad is the thing that it has also being called.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：嗯，它也被称为“悲哀”。

I guess my argument with that would be I'm not at all saying that books are perfect and not at all saying that every book has a benign influence.

我想我的论点是，我根本不是说书籍是完美的，也不是说每本书都有良性影响。

My argument would be that the way that books structure information and present us with a picture of the world is fundamentally more rational and more coherent and more intelligent than the picture of information that you get if you are just talking to someone or if you're watching a video or a TikTok or, God forbid, even listen to a podcast.

我的观点是，书籍构建信息并向我们呈现世界图景的方式从根本上来说比你在与某人交谈、观看视频或 TikTok 或（上帝禁止）甚至听播客时获得的信息图景更理性、更连贯、更智能。

I mean, there are various arguments that have made about this.

我的意思是，对此有各种各样的争论。

When we write, we're forced to consider our ideas more carefully.

当我们写作时，我们被迫更仔细地考虑我们的想法。

You can go back and refine your ideas until you've thought of the best version of what you want to say.

您可以返回并完善您的想法，直到您想到您想说的内容的最佳版本。

Writing allows you to externalize a part of your mind.

写作可以让你外化你的一部分想法。

So, you put your idea in the paper, you see how it stands up, you go back, and you refine it.

所以，你把你的想法写在论文中，看看它是如何站起来的，然后你回去并完善它。

Readers, when you're given a written text, you have the ideas of the author fixed in front of you, so you can submit them to greater critical analysis.

读者们，当您收到书面文本时，作者的想法就固定在您面前，因此您可以将它们提交给更严格的批判性分析。

You can think about them more; you can reread them more.

你可以多想一想；你可以多读一遍。

I think all this stuff is harder to do in conversation or over video.

我认为所有这些事情在对话或视频中更难做到。

Writers can't bypass logical argument through things like charm or shouting at somebody you disagree with or crying to persuade someone that you're being so horrifically mistreated, you should believe me, even though my argument isn't logical.

作家不能通过诸如魅力或对你不同意的人大喊大叫或哭泣来说服某人你受到如此可怕的虐待之类的事情来绕过逻辑论证，你应该相信我，即使我的论点不合逻辑。

So, the range of illogical appeals is much more restricted in the book than it is in person or in a video.

因此，书中不合逻辑的诉求范围比面对面或视频中的要少得多。

And I think these things don't make books perfect, but they mean that books tend to make more rational arguments about the world.

我认为这些东西并不会让书籍变得完美，但它们意味着书籍往往会对世界做出更理性的论证。

I guess my other point would be, I think every argument has to stand up to its reductio ad Hitler .

我想我的另一点是，我认为每一个论点都必须经得起希特勒的还原。

Someone will inevitably bring the Nazis--

不可避免地会有人带来纳粹——

Russ Roberts: I was thinking about it, yeah.

拉斯·罗伯茨：是的，我正在考虑这个问题。

I was thinking about Mein Kampf .

我在想《我的奋斗》。

James Marriott: Well, exactly.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：嗯，确实如此。

I mean, my argument there would be that you could say there are two very famous arguments made for Nazism, perhaps, in different forms of media.

我的意思是，我的论点是，你可以说有两个非常著名的纳粹主义论点，也许是通过不同形式的媒体提出的。

One is Mein Kampf , the book that Hitler wrote--the semi-autobiographical, mad, illogical, rambling, deranged book that he wrote.

一本是《我的奋斗》，希特勒写的那本书——他写的一本半自传体的、疯狂的、不合逻辑的、漫无边际的、精神错乱的书。

And the other is the Leni Riefenstahl film, The Triumph of the Will .

另一部是莱妮·里芬斯塔尔的电影《意志的胜利》。

Mein Kampf was found unreadable even by senior Nazis.

即使纳粹高层也觉得《我的奋斗》难以读懂。

You have letters from senior Nazi saying, 'Oh my God, this book is awful.

你会收到纳粹高级官员的来信，说：‘天哪，这本书太糟糕了。

I can't be bothered to read it.' And although millions of copies were sold of Mein Kampf , there's good evidence that very few Germans ever managed to get through that book to the end, because Nazism, when you attempt to present it coherently in the form of a written text, makes no sense at all, and nobody wants to hear about it.

我懒得读它。尽管《我的奋斗》售出了数百万册，但有充分的证据表明，很少有德国人能够读完这本书，因为纳粹主义，当你试图以书面文本的形式连贯地呈现它时，它根本没有任何意义，也没有人想听它。

And, it's just hard to fit that terrible idea into the logical argument that's required of a book, I would say.

而且，我想说，很难将这个可怕的想法融入到一本书所需的逻辑论证中。

The other argument for Nazism, Leni Riefenstahl's film, The Triumph of the Will , is--we wouldn't agree with it politically, but it's often regarded as an artistic masterpiece, and it's shown on university film courses, and that's a film that is thought to make a very powerful argument for Fascism.

支持纳粹主义的另一个论点是莱妮·里芬斯塔尔的电影《意志的胜利》，我们在政治上不会同意它，但它通常被认为是一部艺术杰作，并且在大学电影课程中放映，这部电影被认为为法西斯主义提供了非常有力的论据。

And, I guess the comparison there would be that a bad idea translates much better into a film than it does into a book.

而且，我想这样的比较是，一个坏主意转化成电影比转化成书要好得多。

A book requires you to fit the idea into a logical form, and if you can't explain it logically, it all begins to fall apart.

一本书要求你将想法融入逻辑形式，如果你不能逻辑地解释它，那么一切就会开始崩溃。

In a film, you have music; you have dramatic imagery.

在电影中，你有音乐；在电影中，你有音乐；在电影中，你有音乐。你有戏剧性的意象。

Logic and argument are much less important, and therefore Nazism can be much more effectively expressed over a film than a book.

逻辑和论证远没有那么重要，因此纳粹主义可以通过电影比通过书籍更有效地表达。

And, that goes for all bad ideas.

而且，这适用于所有糟糕的想法。

You can sort of launder a bad idea better through a screen than you can through a book, would be my case.

我的情况是，通过屏幕比通过书籍更好地洗刷一个坏主意。

Russ Roberts: Yeah, and I think that's true.

拉斯·罗伯茨：是的，我认为这是真的。

And, I think a lot of what I loved about your book is its attempt to put into words--which is not easy, but would only really be effective in a book--to put into words what reading does to your brain and your ideas and your view of yourself and your view of the world.

而且，我认为我喜欢你的书的很多原因是它试图用文字表达——这并不容易，但只有在一本书中才会真正有效——用文字表达阅读对你的大脑、你的想法、你对自己的看法和你对世界的看法。

And, by the way, just for inside joke here, I refrain from making a reference to Succession , the TV series, and Tom's interview of a journalist, but anybody wants to find out about that, can.

顺便说一句，只是为了开个内部玩笑，我没有提及电视剧《继承之战》以及汤姆对记者的采访，但任何人想了解这一点都可以。

Russ Roberts: Let's move on.

拉斯·罗伯茨：我们继续吧。

I want to talk about the point you just made, though, which is the limitations of the visual arts, which I happen to love and you love much of it as well.

不过，我想谈谈你刚才提出的观点，那就是视觉艺术的局限性，我碰巧喜欢视觉艺术，你也很喜欢它。

You confess as much.

你也承认这么多。

But its limitations.

但其局限性。

And, you say something I think quite deep here.

而且，你在这里说了一些我认为很深刻的话。

Quote:

报价：

And, I think--you know, people will say to me, 'I have a great idea, but it's not worth writing a book because nobody reads anymore.' Now, that's an interesting practical question, but the reason you write the book isn't to get the idea out in the world because the idea is a sentence.

而且，我认为——你知道，人们会对我说，“我有一个好主意，但不值得写一本书，因为没有人再读了。”现在，这是一个有趣的实际问题，但你写这本书的原因并不是要把这个想法公诸于世，因为这个想法是一个句子。

You can describe many great books in a sentence or two, a paragraph at most, but you don't read the book to absorb the paragraph.

你可以用一两句话、最多一个段落来描述许多好书，但你读这本书并不是为了吸收该段落。

You read the book to have an intellectual experience hanging out with an intellectual figure, a thoughtful person; and through the process of grappling with that person's ideas, ideally something happens other than that you're informed of something.

你读这本书是为了获得与一个知识分子、一个有思想的人相处的知识经验；在与那个人的想法进行斗争的过程中，理想情况下会发生一些事情，而不是你被告知的事情。

And I think this distinction between information and knowledge or information and wisdom is strike surprisingly misunderstood and unappreciated.

我认为信息和知识或信息和智慧之间的这种区别令人惊讶地被误解和不被重视。

James Marriott: I remember you making this point brilliantly, I thought, the last time I spoke to you.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：我记得上次与您交谈时，您出色地阐述了这一点。

I think we were talking about the difference between memorizing a list of facts about a person and having read--I think we were using the example of Churchill, the example of having read a long biography of Winston Churchill, 700-page book.

我想我们正在讨论记住一个人的一系列事实和阅读之间的区别——我想我们正在使用丘吉尔的例子，阅读一本长达 700 页的温斯顿·丘吉尔传记的例子。

And, when you do that, I think you've gained much more than just a series of isolated facts about Churchill.

而且，当你这样做时，我认为你获得的不仅仅是一系列有关丘吉尔的孤立事实。

You've gained a sort of wholistic, inexpressible understanding of a person with all their contradictions.

你对一个充满矛盾的人有了一种全面的、难以言表的理解。

And, it would be something you simply couldn't summarize; and it would be something you'd probably be hard-pressed to regurgitate into your own words, but you just have in your head.

而且，这将是你根本无法总结的事情；这可能是你很难用自己的话来反驳的东西，但你只是在你的脑海里。

I think reading a long book in a subject gives you this very rich picture of reality that is, as you say, is much more than a list of bullet points.

我认为阅读一本关于某个主题的长书可以给你提供非常丰富的现实图景，正如你所说，这不仅仅是一张要点列表。

It's composed of emotions and connections that you yourself have made.

它由你自己建立的情感和联系组成。

And, I think only books offer that rich intellectual experience.

而且，我认为只有书籍才能提供丰富的知识经验。

Russ Roberts: That wasn't my example, I don't think, but--we can check it, but I appreciate it.

拉斯·罗伯茨：我不认为那不是我的例子，但是——我们可以检查它，但我很感激。

And, I think it's an example, I think, that's useful, a distinction that's useful to think about between a biography and a hagiography.

而且，我认为这是一个有用的例子，对于思考传记和圣徒传记之间的区别很有用。

A hagiography means treating the subject of the biography as a saint, right?

圣徒传记意味着将传记的主题视为圣人，对吗？

A hagiography of Churchill is probably a little bit misleading.

丘吉尔的传记可能有点误导。

He was a very flawed man, but a savaging of Churchill would also be uninformative.

他是一个非常有缺陷的人，但对丘吉尔的野蛮攻击也毫无意义。

I recently heard about this reaction that John le Carré had when a biography of him came out.

我最近听说约翰·勒卡雷（John le Carré）的传记出版后他的反应。

And, he had been promised that it would be an honest biography: It would be warts and all.

而且，他被承诺这将是一本诚实的传记：这将是毫无瑕疵的。

He said: 'Well, there was no all .

他说：“嗯，没有全部。”

It was just the warts.' That's an anti-hagiography, and that's also uninformative.

这只是疣而已。这是一种反圣徒传，而且也没有提供任何信息。

But, a serious biographer gives you, like you say, a feeling of having known the person in some way.

但是，正如你所说，一位严肃的传记作家会给你一种以某种方式认识这个人的感觉。

James Marriott: Yeah.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：是的。

My case would be that although not all books are perfect, the length and detail that a book requires, I think, tends to push an author towards a progressively more complex picture of a subject.

我的情况是，虽然并非所有的书都是完美的，但我认为，一本书所需的长度和细节往往会促使作者对某个主题进行逐渐更复杂的描述。

I think the longer you're writing, the more boring polemic becomes.

我认为你写得越长，争论就会变得越无聊。

I'm a newspaper columnist, and I know that, get much beyond 900 words and a one-sided argument becomes pretty tedious.

我是一名报纸专栏作家，我知道，超过 900 字，片面的争论就会变得相当乏味。

You can listen to a podcast in which someone sort of presents their point of view.

您可以收听播客，其中有人表达了他们的观点。

And I think it's probably another point for literacy: that if someone's presenting their point of view in person, it's quite compelling.

我认为这可能是素养的另一个要点：如果有人亲自表达他们的观点，那是相当引人注目的。

You've got their emotions behind it.

你的背后隐藏着他们的情绪。

You know how much it means to them personally.

你知道这对他们个人来说意味着什么。

You can hear their voice.

你可以听到他们的声音。

You can watch them getting animated about something.

你可以看到他们对某件事变得充满活力。

In a book, being rounded out for 400 pages quickly becomes boring.

在一本书中，四舍五入到 400 页很快就会变得无聊。

And I think books almost create complexity of thought in their authors.

我认为书籍几乎创造了作者思想的复杂性。

I mean, that is far from the only instance of a biographer who I think has set out to be nicer about their subject than they want it to be.

我的意思是，我认为这远不是唯一一个传记作家在主题上比他们想要的更好的例子。

I just think the more detail you go into--and a book just demands detail--the picture of reality just becomes more and more complex the more you write.

我只是认为你写得越多——而一本书只需要细节——你写得越多，现实的画面就会变得越来越复杂。

And, a 500-page biography saying that John le Carré was a wonderful person would be unreadable--apart from perhaps by John le Carré.

而且，一本 500 页的传记说约翰·勒卡雷是一个了不起的人，这可能是不可读的——除非约翰·勒卡雷写的。

Russ Roberts: Well, his complaint was, it was that he's a horrible person.

拉斯·罗伯茨：嗯，他的抱怨是，他是一个可怕的人。

Russ Roberts: But, let's talk about the Republic of Letters, which I thought was a fascinating insight into the history of science and knowledge generally.

拉斯·罗伯茨：但是，我们来谈谈《文学共和国》，我认为它是对科学和知识史的一个令人着迷的洞察。

This is the idea that, in the 18th century in particular, and I guess some of the 19th as well, people wrote lots of letters to each other, and they were very wise people, some of these folks--Benjamin Franklin, Leibniz, and many, many, many others--but they basically had a community, a social network.

这个想法是，特别是在 18 世纪，我想在 19 世纪的一些人也是如此，人们互相写了很多信，他们都是非常聪明的人，其中一些人——本杰明·富兰克林、莱布尼茨和许多、许多、许多其他人——但他们基本上有一个社区，一个社交网络。

It's an enormous part of what allowed science to advance at that time.

这是当时科学进步的重要组成部分。

Talk about that.

谈谈那个。

James Marriott: Yeah.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：是的。

I find this fascinating.

我觉得这很有趣。

So, the Republic of Letters is, I mean, as you say, this community of writers, thinkers, philosophers, and scientists that grew up in Europe in the 17th century and existed into the 18th century, who were writing to each other about their ideas, publishing journals, publishing magazine articles.

所以，我的意思是，正如你所说，文学共和国是一个由作家、思想家、哲学家和科学家组成的社区，他们在 17 世纪的欧洲成长起来，一直存在到 18 世纪，他们互相写信谈论自己的想法，出版期刊，出版杂志文章。

In that sort of old-fashioned Whig view of history, in which we view history as continually progressing towards greater progress and greater democracy and a better future, this used to be something that people talked about a lot.

在那种老式的辉格党历史观中，我们认为历史不断朝着更大的进步、更大的民主和更美好的未来前进，这曾经是人们经常谈论的事情。

It went out of fashion a bit, and I think the Republic of Letters was all viewed as a bit romanticized and idealized.

它有点过时了，我认为文人共和国都被视为有点浪漫化和理想化。

But it's been very interestingly revived as an idea recently by--Steven Pinker talks about it very compellingly in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature .

但有趣的是，最近史蒂文·平克（Steven Pinker）在他的书《我们本性中的更好的天使》（The Better Angels of Our Nature）中非常引人注目地谈论了它，它作为一个想法得到了复兴。

The economist Joel Mokyr probably has done more than anyone to revive the idea that this community of intellectuals writing to each other in Europe was immensely important in driving scientific innovation, economic growth, and, ultimately, the industrial revolution.

经济学家乔尔·莫克尔（Joel Mokyr）可能比任何人都更努力地复兴这样一种观念，即欧洲知识分子的相互写信社区对于推动科学创新、经济增长以及最终的工业革命极其重要。

I mean, Joel Mokyr goes so far as to say it's the single cultural fact that explains the Industrial Revolution.

我的意思是，乔尔·莫基尔甚至说这是解释工业革命的唯一文化事实。

It's this community of idea-sharing that grew up in Europe.

这是在欧洲成长起来的思想共享社区。

That sounds extravagant, but I think we need to--understanding the importance of literacy requires us to get our heads around the world that existed before literacy, and if you have intelligent people alone in a village and they can't explain their ideas to anyone other than their immediate neighbors, scientific innovation is very hard to accumulate.

这听起来有点夸张，但我认为我们需要——理解识字的重要性需要我们了解识字之前存在的世界，如果一个村庄里只有聪明人，而他们无法向除了近邻之外的任何人解释他们的想法，那么科学创新就很难积累。

The more literacy spreads, the more people are able to spread their ideas, and then ideas can spread further and further.

识字传播得越多，就有越多的人能够传播他们的思想，然后思想就能传播得越来越远。

More people are drawn into the conversation.

更多的人被吸引到谈话中。

And, you get this crescendo effect.

而且，你会得到这种渐强效果。

More and more people are joining the conversation; more ideas are shared.

越来越多的人加入对话；分享更多想法。

Joining ideas together becomes easier.

将想法结合在一起变得更容易。

People have a pool of ideas to draw on.

人们有很多想法可以借鉴。

And, thought about science, thought about philosophy, thought about literature just becomes progressively more complex as more and more people are pouring their ideas into this central pool.

而且，随着越来越多的人将他们的想法倾注到这个中心池中，关于科学、哲学、文学的思考变得越来越复杂。

I guess the other point to make is that we might think that superficially sounds a little bit like Twitter, everybody tweeting their ideas out in this kind of crazed chaos.

我想要说的另一点是，我们可能会认为表面上听起来有点像 Twitter，每个人都在这种疯狂的混乱中发布自己的想法。

The other point to make is that this was a literate community, and their conduct and their exchange of information was structured in ways that we associate with the written word.

另一点需要指出的是，这是一个有文化的社区，他们的行为和信息交换的结构方式与我们与书面文字相关联。

So, it wasn't just people shouting over each other and yelling at each other, and whoever shouts loudest gets their idea heard, or whoever has got the funniest meme gets their idea heard.

所以，这不仅仅是人们互相大喊大叫，谁喊得最大声，谁的想法就会被听到，或者谁拥有最有趣的表情包，谁的想法就会被听到。

Literacy, as we were saying, forces a more logical and a more rational, evidence-based mode of expression.

正如我们所说，识字能力迫使人们采用一种更符合逻辑、更理性、基于证据的表达方式。

So, you have this huge community of people who are communicating via writing, which tends to demand standards of evidence, standards of logical argument, written text, promote analysis in readers.

因此，你有一个通过写作进行交流的巨大社区，这往往需要证据标准、逻辑论证标准、书面文本，促进读者的分析。

And, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this huge community of ideas pouring together through the medium of writing was, as Joel Mokyr says, a major driver in scientific and technological innovation in Europe.

而且，我认为，正如乔尔·莫基尔所说，这个通过写作媒介汇聚在一起的巨大思想社区是欧洲科技创新的主要推动力，这一点并不夸张。

Russ Roberts: I'd say two things about it.

拉斯·罗伯茨：对此我想说两件事。

One, it was a conversation among a whole group of people, but it was done in writing.

第一，这是一群人之间的对话，但是以书面形式进行的。

So, there was the thoughtfulness that you talked about earlier, which is not unimportant.

所以，就有你刚才谈到的深思熟虑，这个也不是不重要。

It would be tempting to say that the other important thing about it is that it was private.

人们很容易说它的另一个重要的事情是它是私有的。

You weren't waving it about the way social media is to gain attention or so on.

你并不是在谈论社交媒体是如何吸引注意力的。

But I think that would probably be wrong.

但我认为这可能是错误的。

I think in the 17th and 18th and 19th century, great men--and they're usually men, there weren't so many women in this Republic--knew that their letters might stand the test of time and be read by others.

我认为在 17、18 和 19 世纪，伟大的男人——他们通常是男人，这个共和国没有那么多女人——知道他们的信件可能经得起时间的考验并被其他人阅读。

So, there was probably some posing and preening and taking down of people that was very modern in these correspondences.

因此，这些信件中可能存在一些非常现代的摆姿势、打扮和打压人的行为。

I think the difference is who was doing it.

我认为区别在于谁在做这件事。

And this kind of goes against your point in a certain way.

这在某种程度上违背了你的观点。

It was a very elite group who were in this community.

这是这个社区中非常精英的群体。

It wasn't as democratized as social media.

它并不像社交媒体那样民主化。

When you're interacting with Adam Smith, David Hume, and Newton, the standards are high.

当你与亚当·斯密、大卫·休谟和牛顿互动时，标准是很高的。

And so, I think what's missing from our current spread of information that was there is norms .

因此，我认为我们当前的信息传播中缺少的是规范。

I think the norms that these folks labored under were probably--they were self-imposed.

我认为这些人所遵循的规范可能是他们自我强加的。

They were obedience to the unenforceable--in Lord Moulton's phrase--and that kept this community in the direction of producing knowledge and not just rage or silliness.

用莫尔顿勋爵的话来说，它们是对不可执行的事物的服从，这使这个社区朝着生产知识的方向发展，而不仅仅是愤怒或愚蠢。

James Marriott: Yeah, I think that's definitely true.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：是的，我认为这绝对是真的。

I mean, I think compared to the social world that had existed before literacy, it was a Republic of Letters.

我的意思是，我认为与识字之前存在的社会世界相比，这是一个文学共和国。

It was called the Republic of Letters, not the Kingdom of Letters or the Dictatorship of Letters, for a reason.

它被称为“文学共和国”，而不是“文学王国”或“文学专政”，这是有原因的。

James Marriott: One of the points that people like Joel Mokyr would make is that if you are a scientist and you walk into a room of scientists in a London scientific institution, or you walk into a court where scientific ideas are being discussed in a court, and you're a bit shabby, and you come from a slightly lower class, and you have a poor accent, and you have a brilliant idea about thermodynamics or hydraulics, you're very likely to be looked down upon.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：像乔尔·莫基尔这样的人会提出的观点之一是，如果你是一名科学家，走进伦敦一家科研机构的科学家房间，或者走进法庭，法庭上正在讨论科学思想，你有点寒酸，你来自稍低的阶层，你的口音很差，而且你对热力学或水力学有一个绝妙的想法，你很可能会被人瞧不起。

And your ideas are very likely to be--the seriousness of which your ideas are accepted is very likely to be influenced by your personal appearance and your social background.

而你的想法很可能——你的想法被接受的严肃性很可能受到你的个人外表和社会背景的影响。

When you write those ideas down in a letter or you print them in a journal, the test of your ideas is much more are they good ideas than are they being purveyed by somebody who is wearing a fabulous jacket and a wonderful wig, as people wanted in the 17th century?

当你把这些想法写在信中或打印在日记中时，对你的想法的考验更多的是它们是否是好想法，而不是像 17 世纪人们所希望的那样，由一个穿着漂亮夹克、戴着漂亮假发的人提供的想法？

So, there's definitely a democratizing effect there.

所以，这肯定有民主化的效果。

I guess--I mean, maybe I am a little bit of an elitist.

我想——我的意思是，也许我有点精英主义者。

Now, I guess to your point about the norms and the standard of conversation demanded by that community: writing--unfortunately, expressing ideas coherently in language--is actually, I think, quite a minority skill.

现在，我猜想你关于该社区所要求的规范和对话标准的观点：写作——不幸的是，用语言连贯地表达想法——实际上，我认为，这是一种相当少数的技能。

I think a lot of people--we live in a world where everybody does it, and we find it easy to forget that not everybody is capable of it.

我认为很多人——我们生活在一个每个人都这样做的世界里，我们发现很容易忘记并不是每个人都有能力做到这一点。

And there is perhaps a little bit of an element of benign elitism--that, if the standard of admission to this community is: 'Can you express your ideas logically in writing?' there's already a bar that probably restricts you to talented, thoughtful, intellectual people.

也许有一点良性精英主义的元素——如果进入这个社区的标准是：“你能用书面逻辑表达你的想法吗？”已经有一个酒吧可能将你限制为有才华、有思想、有知识的人。

And, maybe it's democratizing and a creator of elitism in a way that is perhaps quite a benign combination of those qualities.

而且，也许它正在民主化，并以一种也许是这些品质的良性结合的方式创造了精英主义。

That might have bee a bit snobbish, but I imagine that probably was--you couldn't turn up into the Republic of Letters like a sort of a troll on Elon Musk's X and just start screaming at everybody incoherently, because no one would take you seriously.

这可能有点势利，但我想这可能是——你不能像埃隆·马斯克 X 上的巨魔一样出现在文学共和国，然后开始语无伦次地对每个人尖叫，因为没有人会认真对待你。

James Marriott: Yeah.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：是的。

Well, you just couldn't communicate.

好吧，你们只是无法沟通。

Those ideas wouldn't work in writing, or you wouldn't be able to write them; and therefore you just wouldn't participate in it.

这些想法在书面上行不通，否则你就无法写出它们；因此你就不会参与其中。

So, I think there probably is a little bit of benign--literacy probably does--there's an element of benign elitism to the restrictions of literacy.

所以，我认为这可能有一点良性——识字可能有——对识字的限制有一种良性的精英主义元素。

Russ Roberts: I want to talk about a purely aesthetic concern, and I think you talk about it implicitly.

拉斯·罗伯茨：我想谈论一个纯粹的美学问题，我认为你含蓄地谈论了它。

I don't remember if it's explicit.

我不记得是否明确了。

But, when I think about the great works of literature, some of which I have read, and as you point out a number of times, the sentence structure in, say, Henry James is very off-putting.

但是，当我想到伟大的文学作品时，其中一些我读过，正如您多次指出的那样，亨利·詹姆斯的句子结构非常令人反感。

I personally think that's for the best, but that's just a difference.

我个人认为这是最好的，但这只是一个区别。

De gustibus non est disputandum.

De gustibus non est disputandum。

But certainly, much of the great writing of the past is more complicated than what is expected now.

但可以肯定的是，过去的许多伟大著作比现在预期的要复杂得多。

Adam Smith is a good example.

亚当·斯密就是一个很好的例子。

You can read Adam Smith with [?profit?], either his The Wealth of Nations or The Theory of Moral Sentiments .

你可以阅读亚当·斯密和[？利润？]，要么是他的《国富论》，要么是《道德情操论》。

It's accessible, but it's a little challenging compared to a modern writing that you'd find on Substack, say.

它很容易理解，但与您在 Substack 上找到的现代写作相比，它有点具有挑战性。

And, what will the world be like if the greatest works of the past are not accessible to people, not because they're illiterate, but they don't have the patience, they don't have the practice, they don't have the sitzfleisch --the patience--to actually work through them?

而且，如果人们无法接触到过去最伟大的作品，不是因为他们不识字，而是因为他们没有耐心，他们没有实践，他们没有 sitzfleisch——耐心——来真正地完成它们，世界会变成什么样子？

And, that just makes me sad.

而且，这让我很难过。

I don't think the world's a poorer place in any practical way if, say, Shakespeare is inaccessible to modern readers, which in many ways is, of course, for all kinds of reasons.

我不认为，如果现代读者无法接触莎士比亚的话，世界在任何实际方面都不会变得更贫穷，当然，这在很多方面都是出于各种原因。

But, there's something terribly lost, a real tragedy there for me aesthetically, that great works are not accessible.

但是，对我来说，有一些可怕的失落，真正的美学悲剧，那就是伟大的作品无法获得。

To the flip side, many of the movies that my parents loved and they wanted me to love, I couldn't stand because they were so slow--from their time.

另一方面，我的父母喜欢的许多电影，他们希望我喜欢的电影，我也无法忍受，因为它们太慢了——从他们的时代来看。

And, similarly, I discovered that my children could barely sit through High Noon , which I consider one of the greatest movies of all time, and I suspect I'd have trouble sitting through it these days.

同样，我发现我的孩子们几乎无法看完《正午》，我认为这是有史以来最伟大的电影之一，而且我怀疑这些天我会很难看完它。

So, many, many things are lost for all kinds of reasons as culture and as modernity, as the world moves on.

因此，随着世界的发展，许多很多东西由于文化和现代性等各种原因而消失。

But, does this aspect of our current world sadden you?

但是，当今世界的这一方面是否让您感到悲伤？

James Marriott: Yeah, it does immensely.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：是的，效果非常好。

And, I agree, if we all stop reading Shakespeare, that's not the thing that will make our politics fall apart or make scientific innovation come to an end, but I think we're alive in this fascinating, rich, diverse, and interesting world, and I think if you're a thoughtful, intelligent human being, the thing that you want to do with your time on earth, one of them, is probably to understand it as well as you can--understand as much of what's going on here as you can, get your head around as much of the diversity of the human experience as you can, and have it as many different points of view as you can.

而且，我同意，如果我们都停止阅读莎士比亚，这不会让我们的政治分崩离析或让科学创新终结，但我认为我们生活在这个迷人、丰富、多样化和有趣的世界里，我认为如果你是一个有思想、聪明的人，你在地球上的时间想做的一件事，其中之一，可能就是尽可能地理解它——尽可能多地理解这里发生的事情，了解你的想法。尽可能多地了解人类经历的多样性，并尽可能多地获取不同的观点。

I mean, this to me would seem almost one of the great purposes of life: to understand this world.

我的意思是，对我来说，这几乎是人生的伟大目的之一：了解这个世界。

We've been dropped in this bizarre planet out of nowhere.

我们不知从哪里掉到了这个奇异的星球上。

We want to see as much of it as possible.

我们希望尽可能多地看到它。

We want to understand as much of it as possible.

我们希望尽可能多地了解它。

It's true that some very important things can be expressed simply in slogans, and I could tell you something important in a 16-second TikTok video.

确实，一些非常重要的事情可以简单地用口号来表达，我可以在一个16秒的TikTok视频中告诉你一些重要的事情。

But there's a whole range of human experience and a whole range of information about the world and understanding about the world that can only be accessed in books, that can only be accessed through the increased complexity of books.

但是，人类的全部经验、关于世界的全部信息以及对世界的理解只能从书籍中获得，只能通过日益复杂的书籍来获得。

The richness of the world is only available in books.

世界的丰富只有在书本上才能找到。

I mean, if you're [?] to only go so far to say there are kinds of human knowledge that have basically been created by literacy.

我的意思是，如果你[？] 只说有些人类知识基本上是通过识字创造的。

Things like history and philosophy, as we know them today, only exist in books.

我们今天所知道的历史和哲学之类的东西只存在于书本中。

If you want the entire rich history of Prussia, say, the only option is to read a book.

例如，如果您想了解普鲁士的全部丰富历史，唯一的选择就是读书。

If you want all the detail, if you want all the stories, if you want all the philosophical thoughts all woven through about what this state of Prussia means--to pick a slightly random example--all you can do is read a book.

如果你想要所有的细节，如果你想要所有的故事，如果你想要所有关于普鲁士这个国家意味着什么的哲学思想——举一个稍微随意的例子——你所能做的就是读一本书。

That is a kind of information and knowledge about the world that you can't access in any other way.

这是一种你无法通过任何其他方式获取的关于世界的信息和知识。

There's no podcast that can explain 600 pages' worth of the history of Prussia to you.

没有任何播客可以向您解释 600 页的普鲁士历史。

And, it just seems terribly sad to me because, in inventing writing and inventing literacy and inventing the book, we have expanded what we can understand about the world.

而且，这对我来说似乎非常悲伤，因为在发明写作、发明读写能力和发明书籍的过程中，我们扩展了我们对世界的理解。

If you're literate and if you're reading long books, there is a whole sphere of understanding about the world that is richer, more subtle, more detailed.

如果你有文化，如果你正在读长篇书籍，你就会对世界有一个更丰富、更微妙、更详细的理解。

And, if you don't read it, you're just losing that.

而且，如果你不读它，你就会失去它。

And, that seems to me to be a terrible shame.

而且，在我看来，这是一种可怕的耻辱。

And I'm not saying that literacy is the only way that we can understand the world.

我并不是说识字是我们理解世界的唯一途径。

You can go traveling, or you have relationships, and you have friends, and you see the world through those things, but we have this amazing other sphere of experience which happens in books, and it would seem terribly sad to lose that; and our experience of the world, I think, really would just be impoverished without it.

你可以去旅行，或者你有人际关系，你有朋友，你可以通过这些事情来看待世界，但我们拥有书本中发生的令人惊奇的其他经验领域，失去这些似乎会非常悲伤;我认为，如果没有它，我们对世界的体验就会变得贫乏。

Russ Roberts: Well, I think you could learn a lot about Prussia from a really good podcast series.

拉斯·罗伯茨：嗯，我认为你可以从一个非常好的播客系列中了解很多关于普鲁士的知识。

It might take 20 or 30 episodes, but, of course, that podcast couldn't be created without reading a bunch of books about Prussia.

它可能需要 20 或 30 集，但是，当然，如果不阅读一堆有关普鲁士的书籍就无法创建该播客。

So, it would be an illusion.

所以，这将是一种幻觉。

Russ Roberts: I think the deeper point--which you make--which I think is quite profound and moving, is the following.

拉斯·罗伯茨：我认为你提出的更深层次的观点是相当深刻和感人的，如下所示。

You say, quote:

你说，引用：

I mean, that's a really beautiful idea I've never thought about.

我的意思是，这是一个我从未想过的非常美好的想法。

I mean, it's obvious you can learn something from fiction.

我的意思是，很明显你可以从小说中学到一些东西。

Even though it's not true, there's truth in it.

尽管这不是真的，但其中也有真理。

But, I think the deeper point is that this idea that you can, through the wisdom of an author, access what it means to be a human being--that is not a small thing.

但是，我认为更深层次的一点是，你可以通过作者的智慧，了解作为一个人的意义——这不是一件小事。

James Marriott: No, I mean, I quite agree.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：不，我的意思是，我非常同意。

I think other art forms can share bits of this.

我认为其他艺术形式也可以分享这一点。

A film can show you something about life.

一部电影可以向你展示一些关于生活的东西。

But I think there's something special about the way that when you read a novel: one of the things people say about reading is that it's an active and not a passive process.

但我认为阅读小说的方式有一些特别之处：人们对阅读的评价之一是，这是一个主动的过程，而不是被动的过程。

You are at work when you read a novel.

当你看小说时，你正在工作。

Your imagination is at work; you are creating images in your mind based on the words of the page.

你的想象力在发挥作用；您正在根据页面上的文字在脑海中创建图像。

And this is why reading is so immersive.

这就是为什么阅读如此令人身临其境。

And, we've all had feeling of reading books and feeling like we've lived another life and seen the world through different eyes, and I think you only get that through fiction.

而且，我们都有过读书的感觉，感觉我们过着另一种生活，通过不同的眼睛看世界，我认为你只能通过小说才能获得这种感觉。

Films can't give it to you because you see the exterior world, you're not--a film can't give you direct access to the mind of somebody else.

电影无法给你这些，因为你看到的是外部世界，但你不是——电影无法让你直接进入别人的思想。

But, writing is the medium we use to set out what's in our minds.

但是，写作是我们用来表达想法的媒介。

It's the medium that we communicate with mind-to-mind, and through extended, concentrated reading of a novel, you do see the world through other eyes.

它是我们心灵交流的媒介，通过长时间、专注地阅读一本小说，你确实可以通过别人的眼睛看到世界。

And, I think that is something special and unique to novels.

而且，我认为这是小说的特殊之处和独特之处。

And, it doesn't exist in, for instance, oral poetry.

而且，它并不存在于例如口头诗歌中。

Oral poetry is much less interested in the subtleties of human consciousness and the fine differences of human experience.

口头诗歌对人类意识的微妙之处和人类经验的细微差别不太感兴趣。

This way of inhabiting other minds, I think, only comes to us in prose fiction.

我认为，这种寄居他人心灵的方式只有在散文小说中才会出现。

And, that to me is just an extraordinary thing, and again, something else that we would not want to lose.

而且，对我来说，这是一件非同寻常的事情，也是我们不想失去的事情。

Russ Roberts: I don't completely agree with that.

拉斯·罗伯茨：我不完全同意这一点。

I think a great film, through dialogue --not through action, but through dialogue--can give us insight in the similar way to a book.

我认为一部伟大的电影，通过对话——不是通过动作，而是通过对话——可以像书一样给我们洞察力。

It's just that it's shorter.

只是它更短了。

And, when people complain that, oh, the movie wasn't as good as the book, there are many things about the movie that are often much better than the book.

而且，当人们抱怨，哦，电影不如书本时，电影中有很多东西往往比书本好得多。

But what almost always fails is the inner workings of the mind that is not merely communicated by dialogue.

但几乎总是失败的是心灵的内部运作，而不仅仅是通过对话来传达。

You can't have a character say, 'Gee, I'm deceiving myself.' But, you can let the viewer start to suspect as much.

你不能让一个角色说：“哎呀，我在欺骗自己。”但是，你可以让观众开始怀疑。

So, I just think it's just limited in its expanse.

所以，我只是认为它的范围有限。

And I guess, to be fair to the visual medium, a really great--truly great--series on television that stretches--and there aren't very many, but there are some--that stretches for over a number of seasons, and so for hours and hours, I think approximates the understanding of the human condition the way a great work of fiction does.

我想，公平地对待视觉媒体，一个真正伟大的——真正伟大的——电视系列剧的延伸——虽然不是很多，但有一些——延伸了好几季，所以在几个小时里，我认为近似于一部伟大的小说作品对人类状况的理解。

I'm thinking of series like Shtisel or The Americans , Crash Landing on You while we're on it.

当我们在拍摄《Shtisel》或《美国谍梦》、《爱的迫降》等系列时，我正在考虑这些系列。

These are lengthy looks into human beings.

这些都是对人类的冗长观察。

Now, you don't get the speculation that the author can provide, but I think a great dialogue writer can get close.

现在，你无法得到作者可以提供的猜测，但我认为一个伟大的对话作家可以接近。

James Marriott: I do take your point, and I agree there are plenty of long TV series I like.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：我确实同意你的观点，而且我同意有很多长篇电视剧我喜欢。

I guess, for me, I still think--there's no shade on film or TV; there are many masterpieces in those mediums.

我想，对我来说，我仍然认为——电影或电视上没有阴影；这些媒介中有许多杰作。

It's just an argument for there really is something special about novels.

这只是一个论点，因为小说确实有一些特别之处。

Even a great film or TV show is constantly confronting you with the difference between you-the-watcher and the person on screen.

即使是一部伟大的电影或电视节目也会不断地让你面对观看者和屏幕上的人之间的差异。

You're continually confronted with difference because you can see it.

你不断面对差异，因为你可以看到它。

And, the experience that I have reading sometimes is that where I end and the book begins is almost impossible to say.

而且，我有时阅读的经验是，我的结尾和这本书的开始几乎是不可能说出来的。

You feel like you're incorporating this experience into yourself.

你感觉自己正在将这种体验融入到自己之中。

And, it's not only that a book can tell you about thoughts and inner monologue in a way that often, almost always, looks extremely clunky on film, it's the active process of reading means that we incorporate a book, I think, into our lives and into our minds in a way that we just can't in a film.

而且，一本书不仅可以以一种在电影中看起来极其笨拙的方式告诉你想法和内心独白，我认为，积极的阅读过程意味着我们将一本书融入我们的生活和我们的思想中，而这是我们在电影中无法做到的。

And, I don't know about you, but I just feel like there are many films I love.

而且，我不了解你，但我只是觉得有很多我喜欢的电影。

No film feels to me quite part of my life in a way that, say, reading Anna Karenina has.

对我来说，没有一部电影像《安娜·卡列尼娜》那样成为我生活的一部分。

Almost my experience of life and my experience of reading Anna Karenina , there's a kind of blurring at the edges that I never have quite found watching a film.

几乎在我的生活经历和阅读《安娜·卡列尼娜》的经历中，有一种我在看电影时从未发现过的边缘模糊的感觉。

Or do you think I'm just being overly romantic?

或者你认为我只是过于浪漫？

Russ Roberts: Well, I wouldn't have picked Anna Karenina , but that's just me.

拉斯·罗伯茨：好吧，我不会选择安娜·卡列尼娜，但这就是我。

Russ Roberts: I think it's a fair point in the--this is the way I would say it, and tell me if you agree.

拉斯·罗伯茨：我认为这是一个公平的观点——这就是我所说的方式，如果你同意的话请告诉我。

I just happened to re-watch Bridge of Spies , which I think is a masterpiece--an underappreciated, really superb, superb film.

我刚刚重看了《间谍之桥》，我认为这是一部杰作——一部被低估的、非常精彩、精彩的电影。

And I'll watch--you see Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance having a conversation of--a lot in the background that we're aware of because we know a lot about them already.

我会观看——你会看到汤姆·汉克斯和马克·里朗斯的对话——很多我们都知道的背景，因为我们已经对他们了解很多了。

But, I'm watching a conversation, and it's true: I can have the suspension of disbelief, and it feels real.

但是，我正在观看一段对话，这是真的：我可以暂停怀疑，感觉很真实。

This happens to be an historical incident, but we don't have these actual dialogues between these two people.

这恰好是一个历史事件，但我们没有这两个人之间的实际对话。

One was an accused spy, and one was a lawyer, American lawyer.

一个是被指控的间谍，一个是律师，美国律师。

But, there's something different about reading a dialogue.

但是，阅读对话有一些不同。

I just finished The Radetzky March last night, which is a pretty obscure novel.

我昨晚刚刚读完《拉德茨基进行曲》，这是一本相当晦涩难懂的小说。

It's by Joseph Roth.

这是约瑟夫·罗斯的作品。

There's many, many extraordinary scenes in that book.

那本书里有很多很多非凡的场景。

Not much happens.

没有发生太多事情。

I don't think it would make a very good movie.

我不认为这会成为一部非常好的电影。

There's very little action.

动作很少。

Most of the effect of that book is to make you feel like you're living in 1914--the Austro-Hungarian Empire of 1914, before the First World War.

这本书的主要作用是让你感觉自己生活在 1914 年——第一次世界大战之前的 1914 年奥匈帝国。

That's quite an achievement.

这是一项相当大的成就。

And in that sense, it does become part of your life.

从这个意义上说，它确实成为你生活的一部分。

Because, it's not like, 'Oh, I'm listening to these people talk.' I feel like I'm in the room with a great author, and I don't feel like I'm in the room with a great movie.

因为，这不像，“哦，我正在听这些人说话。”我觉得我和一位伟大的作家共处一室，但我不觉得我和一部伟大的电影共处一室。

I'm watching through a one-way glass.

我正透过单向玻璃观看。

It might feel vivid and real to me, but not the way a book does because of that process, I think, of having to use your imagination.

对我来说，它可能感觉生动而真实，但不是一本书的方式，因为我认为，这个过程必须发挥你的想象力。

James Marriott: Yeah, I entirely agree.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：是的，我完全同意。

I think it's a good example because I think if you were to film The Radetzky March --I mean, as you said, it would be pretty slow--but watching, you would be continually confronted with the alienness of the world: the costumes people were wearing, the way they walked, the houses they were living in.

我认为这是一个很好的例子，因为我认为如果你要拍摄《拉德茨基进行曲》——我的意思是，正如你所说，它会非常慢——但是在观看时，你会不断面对这个世界的陌生性：人们穿着的服装，他们走路的方式，他们居住的房子。

We would be continually confronted with the alienness of that human experience.

我们将不断面临人类经历的陌生性。

The visual world confronts us with difference.

视觉世界让我们面临着差异。

I can see that I'm a different person to you.

我可以看出我和你是不同的人。

When you read a book, the extraneous stuff and the stuff that separates us as human beings--I mean, this is one of the points that's made about the importance of literacy as a force for human rights, is that when we look at each other face to face, we see our difference.

当你读一本书时，那些无关紧要的东西以及将我们作为人类分开的东西——我的意思是，这是关于识字作为人权力量的重要性的观点之一，就是当我们面对面地看着对方时，我们看到了我们的差异。

When we experience someone else's thoughts and feelings through a book, the thing that strikes is our similarity.

当我们通过一本书体验别人的想法和感受时，最引人注目的是我们的相似之处。

An example that's often made is slave memoirs in the--it was quite common for abolitionists to ask freed slaves to write their memoirs for publication in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

一个经常被提及的例子是奴隶回忆录——在 18 世纪末和 19 世纪初，废奴主义者要求获得自由的奴隶撰​​写回忆录以供出版是很常见的。

And the idea was that in a memoir, if you're a white reader and you're very racist and prejudiced, as most people were at that time, to speak face to face to a slave would just confront you with the human difference, and you might find it hard to get over that, that this person had different color skin to you.

这个想法是，在一本回忆录中，如果你是一个白人读者，并且你像当时的大多数人一样，非常种族主义和偏见，与奴隶面对面交谈只会让你面对人类的差异，你可能会发现很难克服这个人与你有不同的肤色。

To experience someone's thoughts and feelings through a book, the thing that's to the fore--the similarity, not the difference.

通过一本书体验某人的想法和感受，最重要的是相似之处，而不是差异。

And I think that allows us to access other minds.

我认为这让我们能够接触到其他人的想法。

I think it's the exact--and that's why these memoirs are an important force for the abolitionist movement, because they allowed people to see the human similarity between themselves and people who are different to them.

我认为确实如此——这就是为什么这些回忆录是废奴运动的重要力量，因为它们让人们看到自己和与他们不同的人之间的人类相似性。

And it's why reading The Radetzky March is a more powerful experience to both of us than to watching the film because a book shows us human similarity and allows us into a world through that similarity in a way that the visual world is just always confronting us with difference, I think.

这就是为什么阅读《拉德茨基进行曲》对我们来​​说比看电影更强大的体验，因为一本书向我们展示了人类的相似性，并让我们通过这种相似性进入一个世界，我认为视觉世界总是让我们面对差异。

Russ Roberts: So, I'm going to give another example from that book, from The Radetzky March , because I don't know if this is true, but there's a lot of birds in that book.

拉斯·罗伯茨：所以，我要举那本书中的另一个例子，《拉德斯基进行曲》，因为我不知道这是否属实，但那本书中有很多鸟。

The characters are listening to birds a lot--at dawn, at dusk, at night.

角色们经常在黎明、黄昏和夜晚聆听鸟鸣。

There will be a scene where a character is walking along a dusty road, and that kind of page--and it could go on for a page or more--instead of saying so-and-so walked from here to there, which you can do, and sometimes that's what you do, but to give you all the things that are happening in the world around the characters that are walking--the birds and the sky and the rain and the mud and the dust--gives you a chance as a reader to immerse yourself in that.

会有一个场景，一个角色沿着一条尘土飞扬的道路行走，这种页面——可以持续一页或更多——而不是说某某从这里走到那里，你可以这样做，有时这就是你所做的，而是给你在行走的角色周围的世界中发生的所有事情——鸟儿、天空、雨、泥土和灰尘——让你作为一个读者有机会沉浸在其中那个。

And, we talked about this when we talked about Tolstoy's Master and Man .

而且，我们在谈论托尔斯泰的《师与人》的时候也谈到了这一点。

You get cold reading that story.

读那个故事你会感到寒冷。

You have to inhabit the characters.

你必须融入角色。

And, of course, there are modern films that do that.

当然，有些现代电影也能做到这一点。

There'll be a minute-long, two minutes--it's eternal in a film--where nothing happens, and a character is walking along, and you hear the different birds.

会有长达一分钟、两分钟的时间——这在电影中是永恒的——什么也没有发生，一个角色在走着，你听到不同的鸟儿叫。

In the case of the book, you can mention what's on the character's mind, you know what happened before, you know what they're thinking about, you're forced to think about what they're thinking about; and that's that process you're talking about of getting into the other person's head.

就书而言，你可以提到角色的想法，你知道之前发生了什么，你知道他们在想什么，你被迫去思考他们在想什么；这就是你所说的进入对方头脑的过程。

Very hard to do that in a movie.

在电影中很难做到这一点。

Maybe it's just our different expectations.

也许只是我们的期望不同。

I tend not to like movies where nothing happens, and I can tolerate a book where nothing happens.

我不太喜欢什么都没有发生的电影，但我可以容忍什么都没有发生的书。

I think it's partly due to the difference between the media.

我认为部分原因是媒体之间的差异。

James Marriott: Yeah.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：是的。

I think that's a brilliant point and put very well, that, in a way there's almost something slightly less truthful about the way that a film depicts the world for us because our entire experience of the world is not--we don't experience the world over there on a screen happening to other people.

我认为这是一个很精彩的观点，说得很好，在某种程度上，电影为我们描绘世界的方式几乎有些不太真实，因为我们对世界的整个体验并不是——我们不会在屏幕上体验到发生在其他人身上的世界。

Our entire experience of the world is colored by our internal states and our internal emotions, our internal feelings.

我们对世界的整个体验都受到我们的内在状态、内在情绪、内在感觉的影响。

And, my experience of the world at the moment is a sort of vibrating haze of anxiety as I wait for my book to come out, and everything that happens to me is colored by this nervousness.

而且，当我等待我的书出版时，我对世界的体验是一种焦虑的振动阴霾，发生在我身上的一切都被这种紧张所影响。

And, this is a way of depicting the world that comes very easily to an author who can depict our attention.

而且，对于能够描绘我们注意力的作者来说，这是一种描绘世界的方式，这种方式很容易实现。

And, if you're describing my state of mind as an author now, I could imagine how you would describe the world colored by this sort of slightly--everything is slightly shimmering at the edges with this sort of nervousness.

而且，如果你现在描述我作为一名作家的心态，我可以想象你会如何描述这个被这种轻微着色的世界——一切都在这种紧张的边缘微微闪烁。

It's very hard to show us that in a film in the same way, because a film director can't direct our attention--how do you color birdsong with anxiety or emotion or rage when you're filming it?

很难以同样的方式在电影中向我们展示这一点，因为电影导演无法引导我们的注意力——当你拍摄时，你如何给鸟鸣增添焦虑、情感或愤怒的色彩？

You're, in a way, a position that's in some ways more objective, but in some ways less truthful.

在某种程度上，你的立场在某些方面更客观，但在某些方面不太真实。

As you say, if you have a character in The Radetzky March walking down a road in the film and they hear a birdsong, you can't explain the internal meaning of that birdsong to a film audience.

正如你所说，如果电影《拉德茨基进行曲》中的一个角色走在路上，他们听到鸟鸣声，你就无法向电影观众解释鸟鸣声的内在含义。

I mean, and you're so right: and that's only just a fraction of the richness and truthfulness of a novel's depiction of the world, I think.

我的意思是，你说得很对：我认为这只是小说对世界的描述的丰富性和真实性的一小部分。

Russ Roberts: Maybe we'll do a book club on The Radetzky March .

拉斯·罗伯茨：也许我们会在《拉德斯基进行曲》上举办一个读书俱乐部。

I'm not sure it'll be very popular, but it's quite an unusual novel.

我不确定它会很受欢迎，但这是一本很不寻常的小说。

The writing is quite extraordinary.

写作非常非凡。

So, I encourage people to take a look at it.

因此，我鼓励人们看看它。

It starts very slowly.

它开始得很慢。

It doesn't get much faster, by the way, because--I'll just say one other thing about it, then we'll move on.

顺便说一句，它并没有变得更快，因为——我只想说另一件事，然后我们继续前进。

It's trying to capture something that's even harder to capture on screen than what we've been talking about so far, which is the slow, steady sense that the world is unmoored, that all the things that you believed in and thought were true are fading away.

它试图捕捉到一些比我们到目前为止所谈论的更难在屏幕上捕捉到的东西，那就是一种缓慢而稳定的感觉，即世界没有停泊，所有你相信和认为真实的事情都在消失。

And, in this case, it has to do with the norms and authority of the Emperor and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

而且，在这种情况下，这与皇帝和奥匈帝国的规范和权威有关。

And, you can't show that in a film directly--or even indirectly, as Roth does in this book.

而且，你不能直接在电影中展示这一点，甚至不能像罗斯在本书中那样间接地展示这一点。

The last thing I'll say is that, in a way, the main character is the Austro-Hungarian Empire, not Carl Joseph Trotta.

我要说的最后一件事是，从某种程度上来说，主角是奥匈帝国，而不是卡尔·约瑟夫·特罗塔。

I think that's his name.

我想这就是他的名字。

Russ Roberts: Anyway, I want to go to a different insight of yours that I really thought was interesting.

拉斯·罗伯茨：无论如何，我想谈谈你的不同见解，我真的认为很有趣。

I'm sure you and I are alarmed at the state of discourse on social media in many ways.

我相信你和我都对社交媒体上很多方面的言论状态感到震惊。

And, you say the following:

并且，你说了以下的话：

Close quote.

关闭报价。

Now, I think that's an incredibly deep insight, because--we don't have to go into the names.

现在，我认为这是一个令人难以置信的深刻见解，因为我们不必讨论这些名字。

I just mention Tucker Carlson because you happened to use that as an example.

我只是提到塔克·卡尔森，因为你碰巧用它作为例子。

But there's so many people on the Internet who say so many things that are inane, indefensible, not true, absurd, and there's a tendency to treat them as if they were authors and say, 'Well, that doesn't make any sense,' or 'That's not logical,' or 'What's the evidence for that?'

但互联网上有很多人说了很多空洞的、站不住脚的、不真实的、荒谬的事情，而且有一种倾向，把他们当作作者来对待，并说，“好吧，这没有任何意义”，或者“这不合逻辑”，或者“有什么证据吗？”

And your point, which I think is frighteningly appropriate, is that I don't think they see themselves--you're saying they don't see themselves in that role.

我认为你的观点非常恰当，我认为他们没有看到自己——你是说他们没有看到自己扮演这个角色。

Their role is to entertain their audience.

他们的作用是娱乐观众。

Truth is not what's so important.

真相并不是那么重要。

What's important is memorable stories for enraptured audiences.

重要的是让观众难忘的故事。

And, I think that's a really brilliant way of describing what's wrong with our current level of discourse on social media.

而且，我认为这是描述我们当前社交媒体话语水平存在问题的一种非常出色的方式。

And, you know, people say these ridiculous things, and, of course, people on the other side rear up and, 'Oh, it's not true.

而且，你知道，人们会说这些荒谬的话，当然，另一边的人会站起来说，‘哦，这不是真的。

Where's the evidence for that?' And, they don't say, 'Oh my gosh, I guess I made a lot of that up.

证据在哪里？而且，他们不会说，‘哦，天哪，我想这些都是我编造的。

I shouldn't have said that.' They never say that.

我不应该这么说。他们从来不这么说。

Because that's not the business they're in.

因为那不是他们从事的业务。

They don't care.

他们不在乎。

James Marriott: Yeah, absolutely.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：是的，绝对是。

And, I think we're so easily at risk of forgetting that things like presenting an argument logically, supplying evidence for it, and working it out to its rational conclusions.

而且，我认为我们很容易忘记诸如逻辑地提出论点、为其提供证据以及得出合理结论之类的事情。

These things, I think, are not actually natural to human communication.

我认为这些东西对于人类交流来说实际上并不自然。

A lot of the points that are made about communication in pre-literate societies by Marshall McLuhan and Walter Ong is that things that we value in the exchange of information are created by literacy.

马歇尔·麦克卢汉和沃尔特·翁关于前文字社会中的交流提出的很多观点是，我们在信息交流中重视的东西是由识字创造的。

So, in this pre-literate world, if you're trying to talk to somebody and persuade somebody of something, it makes much more sense to entertain them, to move them, to charm them, to get really angry, and to bring someone along with your rage.

所以，在这个没有文字的世界里，如果你想和某人交谈并说服某人做某事，那么更有意义的是娱乐他们、感动他们、迷惑他们、真正生气并让某人与你一起愤怒。

These things all make complete sense in person-to-person communication.

这些事情在人与人之间的交流中都完全有意义。

If I were to just dryly talk to you like a book, you would find that a weird and inhuman way for me to speak to you.

如果我只是像读书一样干巴巴地对你说话，你会发现我对你说话的方式很奇怪而且不人道。

Books impose these impersonal and not completely rational, but I think more rational, forms of communication.

书籍强加了这些非个人化的、不完全理性的、但我认为更理性的交流形式。

And, I just think we completely miss how our entire public discourse and the things that we value in it are the product of literacy.

而且，我只是认为我们完全错过了我们的整个公共话语和我们所珍视的事物是识字的产物。

They're not at all inevitable to human communication.

它们对于人类交流来说并不是不可避免的。

And, one of the fascinating things about these books, this great Walter Ong book, Orality and Literacy , is the similarities that jump out at you as a modern reader between oral discourse and internet discourse.

而且，沃尔特·翁（Walter Ong）这本伟大的书《口语与读写能力》的迷人之处之一是，作为现代读者，口头话语和网络话语之间存在相似之处。

So, for instance, Walter Ong would say that some of the characteristics of discourse in society about writing are it's more emotional.

例如，沃尔特·翁（Walter Ong）会说，社会上有关写作的话语的一些特征是它更加情绪化。

You live in a much more emotionally-heightened world because everything is face to face.

你生活在一个情绪更加激动的世界，因为一切都是面对面的。

You have people's voices; you have their personalities.

你有人们的声音；你有他们的个性。

It's this emotionally heightened world in which logic takes a backseat.

在这个情绪高涨的世界里，逻辑处于次要地位。

And, to come from an oral culture to a literate culture is, in some ways--Marshall McLuhan says--is this kind of uncanny experience.

而且，马歇尔·麦克卢汉说，从某种意义上说，从口头文化转向文字文化是一种不可思议的经历。

If you come from the warmth and emotional dynamism and the anger and the squabbling and the face-to-face nature of communication in a traditional village, the world of literacy in which we're not communicating face to face--or we weren't before TV and the Internet, and every piece of information arrived to you in the form of a completely impersonal--humans reduced to just pages of text--that can, in some ways, seem quite a chilly and impersonal environment.

如果你来自传统村庄的温暖、情感活力、愤怒、争吵和面对面交流的本质，在读写世界中，我们不是面对面交流——或者我们不是在电视和互联网出现之前，每一条信息都以完全非个人化的形式到达你——人类被简化为只有几页文本——在某些方面，这似乎是一个相当寒冷和非个人化的环境。

And, it's unnatural.

而且，这是不自然的。

It's unnatural to communicate through text.

通过文字交流是不自然的。

But the chilly impersonality of text, I think--to me, this is perhaps the crucial point about what print does for our public discourse--is that it just cools it.

但我认为，文本的冰冷的非个性化——对我来说，这也许是印刷品对我们公共话语的作用的关键点——在于它只是让它冷却下来。

It's very fun to hear someone becoming angry in person.

听到有人亲自生气是非常有趣的。

We love watching arguments, and we love watching debates, and we love watching rhetorical showmanship and people flinging insults at one another.

我们喜欢看争论，我们喜欢看辩论，我们喜欢看修辞表演和人们互相辱骂。

That's really boring to read in a book eventually.

读一本书真的很无聊。

As I say, with an opinion column, what with 900 words of invective might be interesting, if I just ranted at you for the length of a book, it would be really tedious, and therefore we tend not to do it.

我说，一个观点专栏，900字的谩骂可能会很有趣，如果我只是骂你一本书的篇幅，那真的很乏味，所以我们往往不这样做。

And, yeah--as I say, we just mustn't forget how much of what we value in our public discourse and have valued is almost unnatural to human communication.

是的，正如我所说，我们不能忘记我们在公共话语中所重视的东西以及我们所重视的东西对于人类交流来说几乎是不自然的。

And, what we valued is this strange, impersonal thing that writing gave us and that we're now losing.

而且，我们所看重的是写作给我们带来的这种奇怪的、非个人化的东西，而我们现在正在失去这种东西。

Russ Roberts: So, I want to digress for a second, or what seems like a digression.

拉斯·罗伯茨：所以，我想稍微离题一下，或者说似乎离题了。

It's not.

它不是。

There's an extraordinary podcast called The History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs.

有一个非凡的播客，名为《500 首歌曲中的摇滚史》。

It's produced by Andrew Hickey.

它由安德鲁·希基制作。

If you don't know it or haven't heard it and you care about music from popular music anytime from the 1950s on, you will find it extraordinary.

如果您不知道或没有听过它，并且您关心 20 世纪 50 年代以来的流行音乐，您会发现它非同寻常。

And, he says something in there that blew me away--that you also say, which is--there's a four-part series that goes for seven or eight hours, I think, on "Sympathy for the Devil," the Rolling Stones song.

而且，他在那里说了一些让我震惊的话——你也说，那就是——有一个四部分的系列，我想，关于滚石乐队的歌曲“对魔鬼的同情”，持续了七八个小时。

And he says, 'Well, Jagger was reading this book called The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov.' And, if you've read the Master and Margarita , it opens with two Russian intellectuals poo-pooing the existence of God and making fun of belief and faith.

他说，“嗯，贾格尔正在读布尔加科夫的这本书，名为《大师与玛格丽特》。”而且，如果你读过《大师》和《玛格丽特》，你会发现，这本书一开始就是两个俄罗斯知识分子对上帝的存在嗤之以鼻，并嘲笑信仰和信仰。

And suddenly this suave gentleman shows up, and we come to realize--they think he's crazy at first--but we come to realize it's Satan.

突然，这位温文尔雅的绅士出现了，我们开始意识到——他们一开始认为他疯了——但我们开始意识到这是撒旦。

It's the devil, and he knows some things they don't know, and they have a comeuppance.

这是魔鬼，他知道一些他们不知道的事情，他们也有报应。

It's a brilliant opening of the book.

这是本书的精彩开篇。

But, that's the opening of "Sympathy for the Devil," where Jagger sings, 'Please allow me to introduce myself.

但是，这是《同情魔鬼》的开头，贾格尔唱道：“请允许我介绍一下自己。”

I'm a man of wealth and taste.' And, he took that right out of The Master and Margarita , which is a pretty obscure novel.

我是一个有钱有品味的人。而且，他直接从《大师与玛格丽塔》中汲取了这一点，这是一本相当晦涩的小说。

And, you argue that Paul McCartney and many other great songwriters were great readers.

而且，您认为保罗·麦卡特尼和许多其他伟大的歌曲作者都是伟大的读者。

They were influenced by--and Andrew Hickey in his podcast has many, many examples--and some of the great lyrics of a very different medium, popular music, were influenced by reading books.

他们受到读书的影响——安德鲁·希基在他的播客中有很多很多的例子——而另一种媒介——流行音乐——的一些伟大歌词也受到了读书的影响。

And, if we lose that, our songs will be less interesting.

而且，如果我们失去了这一点，我们的歌曲就会变得不那么有趣。

James Marriott: That's an annoyingly good example that I wish I'd managed to put in my book.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：这是一个令人恼火的好例子，我希望我能把它写进我的书中。

Maybe this later edition we can include it.

也许以后的版本我们可以将其包含在内。

Yeah.

是的。

I mean, I guess this is another point that I make of what literacy gives us as a culture, which is, I think, all the things that we've spoken about: the richness of books, the detail of books, the complexity of books, I think, informs a whole society, and it's not always immediately apparent that it's doing that, but it's often there providing, I think, a level of richness and nuance to all other kinds of cultural media that we might not think of.

我的意思是，我想这是我关于读写能力给我们带来的文化的另一点，我认为，我们所谈论的所有事情：书籍的丰富性，书籍的细节，书籍的复杂性，我认为，告诉了整个社会，而且它的作用并不总是立即显而易见，但我认为，它经常为所有其他类型的文化媒体提供我们可能没有想到的丰富性和细微差别。

I mean, I gave the example of pop music specifically because it's so unlikely.

我的意思是，我专门举了流行音乐的例子，因为它不太可能。

I mean, it can be taken too far.

我的意思是，它可能走得太远了。

As I say in the book, I'm not suggesting that if you want to be in a boy band, take your pile of Penguin classics down to the British library and get reading.

正如我在书中所说，我并不是建议如果你想加入男孩乐队，就把一堆企鹅经典作品带到英国图书馆去阅读。

But I think it is very striking that so many great popular musicians and so many great popular songs are informed by books and are informed by reading.

但我认为非常引人注目的是，如此多伟大的流行音乐家和如此多伟大的流行歌曲都是通过书籍和阅读获得的。

Bob Dylan, the obvious example of a great reader.

鲍勃·迪伦（Bob Dylan），伟大读者的典型例子。

Paul McCartney, the obvious example of a great reader.

保罗·麦卡特尼（Paul McCartney）是伟大读者的典型例子。

And I just think any art that is rooted in the richness and complexity of reading will tend to give you a richer, deeper, more complex understanding of the world.

我只是认为任何植根于阅读的丰富性和复杂性的艺术往往会让你对世界有更丰富、更深入、更复杂的理解。

And I use the example of pop music, as I say, because no one really thinks of pop music as a particularly literate genre.

正如我所说，我使用流行音乐的例子，因为没有人真正认为流行音乐是一种特别有文化的流派。

And, those musicians are probably also singing for a more literate population that was more accustomed to enjoying complex thoughts and complex ideas and complex feelings.

而且，这些音乐家可能也在为更有文化的人群歌唱，他们更习惯于享受复杂的思想、复杂的想法和复杂的感受。

And, this is amazing research.

而且，这是一项了不起的研究。

I'm not going to be able to remember the figure off the top of my head that finds that in the last 20 years, pop songs have become less lyrically complex and less melodically complex.

我记不起我脑子里突然想到的一个数字：在过去的 20 年里，流行歌曲的抒情和旋律变得不再那么复杂。

And, that's not entirely just because everybody has stopped reading books.

而且，这并不完全是因为每个人都停止读书了。

It's also because the environment that we are entering is one that favors simplicity, immediacy, isn't very good at following a long and unfailing idea.

这也是因为我们正在进入的环境是一个崇尚简单、即时的环境，不太擅长遵循一个长期且不会失败的想法。

Nowadays, if you want a pop song to go viral on TikTok, it has to grab you within three or four seconds.

如今，如果你想让一首流行歌曲在 TikTok 上走红，它必须在三四秒内抓住你的注意力。

And that's how lots of music spreads nowadays.

这就是当今许多音乐的传播方式。

I think with the death of literacy and the move into this more visual smartphone-based culture, we're moving from a culture that was much more able to handle nuance and complexity because it was rooted in literacy to one that is increasingly hostile to those things.

我认为，随着识字能力的消亡以及转向这种更加视觉化的基于智能手机的文化，我们正在从一种更能够处理细微差别和复杂性的文化转变，因为它植根于识字能力，而转向对这些事物越来越敌视的文化。

And, to use that point about the human experience of the world, if you're listening--there's a kind of--a long Bob Dylan song can paint you a picture of reality and its complexity and the complexity of human beings that is very hard to do if you have a two-minute-long, much less complex, much less rich song.

而且，用关于人类对世界的经验的这一点来说，如果你正在听——有一种——一首鲍勃·迪伦的长歌可以为你描绘出一幅现实的图画，以及它的复杂性和人类的复杂性，如果你有一首两分钟长、不那么复杂、更不丰富的歌曲，这是很难做到的。

There's room for both, but I just fear that we're losing more complex cultural forms.

两者都有空间，但我只是担心我们正在失去更复杂的文化形式。

Russ Roberts: Yeah.

拉斯·罗伯茨：是的。

"Early one Sunday morning, I was laying in bed, wondering if she'd changed at all, or if her hair was still red," to pick one of the long ones.

"Early one Sunday morning, I was laying in bed, wondering if she'd changed at all, or if her hair was still red," to pick one of the long ones.

James Marriott: On TikTok, you swipe past [inaudible 00:58:10], mid-harmonica solos.

James Marriott: On TikTok, you swipe past [inaudible 00:58:10], mid-harmonica solos.

I don't think they would last on TikTok.

我认为他们不会在 TikTok 上长久存在。

Russ Roberts: So, one of the other parts of the book we didn't talk about, which I very much appreciated, was the realization that this is not such a new phenomenon: that, we're focused on the smartphone, but television really was the beginning of the screen, the visual attractiveness of time sink for us, and that the remote control was the original scrolling.

拉斯·罗伯茨：所以，书中我们没有谈论的其他部分之一，我非常欣赏，是认识到这并不是一个新现象：我们专注于智能手机，但电视确实是屏幕的开始，对我们来说时间沉没的视觉吸引力，而遥控器是最初的滚动。

And I think that's very true.

我认为这是非常正确的。

Anybody who has been in a hotel room late at night as I have, in the old days when you didn't have a cell phone and there were 200 channels on the TV, you just found yourself sometimes--I was going to say often--mindlessly scrolling across channels.

任何像我一样深夜呆在酒店房间的人，在过去，当你没有手机、电视上有 200 个频道时，你会发现自己有时——我经常说——不假思索地浏览频道。

I remember when I would complain about television--and I have a scene in one of my books where I really go off against TV, which is funny now because it's so unimportant relative to the cell phone--I remember telling my dad I was worried about the attractiveness of television.

我记得当我抱怨电视时——我的一本书中有一个场景，我真的反对电视，现在这很有趣，因为它相对于手机来说是如此不重要——我记得告诉我爸爸我担心电视的吸引力。

He said, 'Well, let's see how it holds up.

他说：‘好吧，让我们看看它的效果如何。

Books have been around for centuries, and TV is 20 years old as a mass medium, maybe.' But, I think he should have been more worried.

书籍已经存在了几个世纪，而电视作为大众媒体也许已有 20 年的历史。”但是，我认为他应该更担心。

I think there's an inevitability about this trend--that you're Sisyphus here: you're doing something that is unlikely to succeed.

我认为这种趋势是不可避免的——你就是西西弗斯：你正在做一些不太可能成功的事情。

We're seeing a much longer trend that--reading is either going to be something--the people who can read, say, Henry James or Middlemarch by George Eliot; or who choose to--forget whether they can or they can't.

我们看到了一个更长期的趋势——阅读要么会成为某种东西——那些能够阅读亨利·詹姆斯或乔治·艾略特的《米德尔马契》的人；或者谁选择——忘记他们是否可以。

People who choose to, it's going to be probably a pretty small number.

选择这样做的人可能会很少。

I don't know what that means for the future of the world.

我不知道这对世界的未来意味着什么。

There is something incredibly sad about it to me, but I think that's a reality that's going to be unlikely to change.

There is something incredibly sad about it to me, but I think that's a reality that's going to be unlikely to change.

You can make all the arguments you want, 'Oh, this is going to be bad for democracy,' or 'Reading is really fun; you should try it.' It's a tough sell in our world, and I worry that that sell is just going to get even more and more difficult.

你可以提出所有你想要的论点，“哦，这对民主不利”，或者“阅读真的很有趣;”你应该尝试一下。 It's a tough sell in our world, and I worry that that sell is just going to get even more and more difficult.

So, I hate to be pessimistic, and I hate to end on such a pessimistic note.

所以，我讨厌悲观，也讨厌以如此悲观的方式结束。

So, you got anything positive for me?

那么，你有什么积极的东西给我吗？

James Marriott: No. Well, I am by profession something of a pessimist and, unfortunately, by inclination and temperament.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：不。嗯，我的职业是个悲观主义者，不幸的是，我的倾向和性格也是如此。

I think the point about TV is important because it reminds us that this is a long--I'm sure it is perhaps slightly this, but I hope it's more than just newspaper columnist comes along and yells about this very recent thing that's appeared in the world that's unsettling everybody, and actually we'll look back and think, 'Oh, that was just a flash in the pan.

我认为关于电视的观点很重要，因为它提醒我们，这是一个漫长的过程——我确信它可能有点这样，但我希望这不仅仅是报纸专栏作家出现并大喊最近出现在世界上、让每个人都感到不安的事情，实际上我们会回顾并思考，‘哦，那只是昙花一现。

TikTok existed for 15 years and never moved on to something else.' We're living perhaps towards the end of a very long revolution in our culture that, as you say, begins with television, begins in the 1950s and 1960s.

TikTok existed for 15 years and never moved on to something else.'我们的文化也许正处于一场漫长的革命的尾声，正如你所说，这场革命始于电视，始于 20 世纪 50 年代和 1960 年代。

The first statistics for serious declines in reading come from the 1950s and 1960s.

The first statistics for serious declines in reading come from the 1950s and 1960s.

And we are moving into a world in which these things are much less important.

我们正在进入一个这些事情不再那么重要的世界。

And that's a very long story.

这是一个很长的故事。

And, I think the length of the story should remind us of its seriousness.

而且，我认为这个故事的长度应该提醒我们它的严肃性。

It's been happening for such a long time that this is not just something that, 'Oh, we'll just switch TikTok off.' 'Oh, we'll just get a handle on smartphones, and then it will be all right.' This is a very long-term trend in our culture, and I think that perhaps should make us a bit less hopeful.

这种情况已经发生了很长时间，以至于这不仅仅是“哦，我们将关闭 TikTok ”这样的事情。 “哦，我们只要掌握智能手机就可以了。” This is a very long-term trend in our culture, and I think that perhaps should make us a bit less hopeful.

This is not a recent thing.

这并不是最近发生的事情。

This is a long direction that, very soon it'll be 100 years old.

This is a long direction that, very soon it'll be 100 years old.

I guess the argument I try and make at the end of my book--and your publisher always says, 'What about solutions?

I guess the argument I try and make at the end of my book--and your publisher always says, 'What about solutions?

What's your solution to this problem?' And, you kind of think, 'Oh my God, I'm a horrible pessimist.

你对这个问题的解决方案是什么？ And, you kind of think, 'Oh my God, I'm a horrible pessimist.

What on earth have I got to say that's positive?'

What on earth have I got to say that's positive?'

The analogy that's often made, and I'm far from the first person to make that analogy, is between the rise of junk food and the culture of exercise in the 1960s and 1970s.

人们经常将 20 世纪 60 年代和 1970 年代垃圾食品的兴起与运动文化进行类比，而我并不是第一个做出这种类比的人。

So, McDonald's comes along; the world is flooded with burgers and chicken nuggets and chips; and a lot of people get much fatter.

于是，麦当劳应运而生； the world is flooded with burgers and chicken nuggets and chips;很多人变得更胖了。

A smaller proportion of the population decide that they want to--they've understood that being healthy and skinny is no longer something that you can just do by absorbing the ambient nutrition environment around you; it's going to require effort.

一小部分人决定他们想要这样做——他们已经明白，健康和苗条不再是仅仅通过吸收周围环境的营养就能做到的；而是需要改变。这需要努力。

And these people begin to concentrate on working hard at their fitness.

And these people begin to concentrate on working hard at their fitness.

They start running marathons, they start going to the gym, they start lifting weights.

They start running marathons, they start going to the gym, they start lifting weights.

And, people realize that physical fitness will require conscious effort.

And, people realize that physical fitness will require conscious effort.

And I kind of wonder--and I think probably this is already happening--is that in our current information environment, people will begin to decide that cognitive fitness will require a conscious effort, and that if we want to be cognitively fit, we can't just sit around absorbing the kind of informational junk food that's flying at us from every angle.

我有点想知道——我认为这可能已经发生了——在我们当前的信息环境中，人们将开始认为认知健康需要有意识的努力，如果我们想要认知健康，我们就不能只是坐在那里吸收从各个角度向我们飞来的信息垃圾食品。

We'll have to sit down and really concentrate on reading difficult books, exercising our brains.

我们必须坐下来，真正集中精力阅读困难的书籍，锻炼我们的大脑。

And, I think if there is a future for reading, it will be something that feels a lot more--to use a kind of horrible phrase--intentional and a lot less just like, 'I'm sitting at home or in the airport, I'm bored, what will I do?

而且，我认为，如果阅读有一个未来，那么它将会是一种感觉更加强烈的东西——用一种可怕的短语来说——是故意的，而不是像‘我坐在家里或机场里，我很无聊，我会做什么？

I will read a book because that's the most obvious entertainment available to me.'

I will read a book because that's the most obvious entertainment available to me.'

I think it'll be much more: I want to read a book because I think this is a sort of experience that I value and that the world is not giving to me naturally.

我认为它会更多：我想读一本书，因为我认为这是一种我重视的体验，而世界并没有自然地给予我。

Therefore, I'm going to make sure that every evening I sit down for half an hour, an hour, to really try to really make sure that I read.

因此，我要确保每天晚上我坐下来半个小时，一个小时，真正努力确保我阅读。

I mean, in some ways, I think that probably is the future of reading.

我的意思是，在某些方面，我认为这可能是阅读的未来。

In some ways, it's good that I think probably it does have some kind of future.

从某些方面来说，我认为它确实有某种未来是件好事。

I guess it does still make me sad that it has to be--I think it's slightly more artificial, and it will be less part of our inevitable lives in the way that it once was.

我想它仍然让我感到悲伤，它必须是——我认为它稍微更人为，而且它将不再像以前那样成为我们不可避免的生活的一部分。

Russ Roberts: My guest today has been James Marriott.

拉斯·罗伯茨：今天我的客人是詹姆斯·马里奥特。

His book is The New Dark Ages .

他的书是《新黑暗时代》。

James, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

詹姆斯，感谢您参与 EconTalk。

James Marriott: Thanks very much for having me.

詹姆斯·马里奥特：非常感谢您邀请我。