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Lesson 45
Of men and galaxies
人和星系
What is the most influential factor in any human society?
In man's early days, competition with other creatures must have been
critical. But this phase of our development is now finished. Indeed, we lack
practice and experience nowadays in dealing with primitive conditions. I am sure
that, without modern weapons, I would make a very poor show of disputing the
ownership of a cave with a bear, and in this I do not think that I stand alone.
The last creature to compete with man was the mosquito. But even the mosquito
has been subdued by attention to drainage and by chemical sprays.
Competition between ourselves, person against person, community against
community, still persists, however; and it is as fierce as it ever was.
But the competition of man against man is not the simple process envisioned
in biology. It is not a simple competition for a fixed amount of food determined
by the physical environment, because the environment that determines our
evolution is no longer essentially physical. Our environment is chiefly
conditioned by the things we believe. Morocco and California are bits of the
Earth in very similar latitudes, both on the west coasts of continents with
similar climates, and probably with rather similar natural resources. Yet their
present development is wholly different, not so much because of different people
even, but because of the different thoughts that exist in the minds of their
inhabitants. This is the point I wish to emphasize. The most important factor in
our environment is the state of our own minds.
It is well known that where the white man has invaded a primitive culture,
the most destructive effects have come not from physical weapons but from ideas.
Ideas are dangerous. The Holy Office knew this full well when it caused heretics
to be burned in days gone by. Indeed, the concept of free speech only exists in
our modern society because when you are inside a community, you are conditioned
by the conventions of the community to such a degree that it is very difficult
to conceive of anything really destructive. It is only someone looking on from
outside that can inject the dangerous thoughts. I do not doubt that it would be
possible to inject ideas into the modern world that would utterly destroy us. I
would like to give you an example, but fortunately I cannot do so. Perhaps it
will suffice to mention the nuclear bomb. Imagine the effect on a reasonably
advanced technological society, one that still does not possess the bomb, of
making it aware of the possibility, of supplying sufficient details to enable
the thing to be constructed. Twenty or thirty pages of information handed to any
of the major world powers around the year 1925 would have been sufficient to
change the course of world history. It is a strange thought, but I believe a
correct one, that twenty or thirty pages of ideas and information would be
capable of turning the present-day world upside down, or even destroying it. I
have often tried to conceive of what those pages might contain, but of course I
cannot do so because I am a prisoner of the present-day world, just as all of
you are. We cannot think outside the particular patterns that our brains are
conditioned to, or, to be more accurate, we can think only a very little way
outside, and then only if we are very original.
FRED HOYLE Of Men and Galaxies
New words and expressions 生词与短语
dispute
v. 争夺
mosquito
n. 蚊子
subdue
v. 征服
drainage
n. 下水系统
envision
n. 预想
Morocco
n. 摩洛哥
latitude
n. 纬度
heretic
n. 异教徒，异端邪说
conceive
v. 想像
suffice
v. 足够
nuclear
adj. 原子弹的
original
adj.有独到见解的
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发表于 2016-7-11 22:48:00