“恶”在黑色幽默动画创作中的应用分析——以毕设《囚船》为例外文翻译资料

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

—L. P. Hartley

If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one. It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence. Cultural memory pacifies the past, leaving us with pale souvenirs whose bloody origins have been bleached away. A woman donning a cross seldom reflects that this instrument of torture was a common punishment in the ancient world; nor does a person who speaks of a whipping boy ponder the old practice of flogging an innocent child in place of a misbehaving prince. We are surrounded by signs of the depravity of our ancestorsrsquo; way of life, but we are barely aware of them. Just as travel broadens the mind, a literal-minded tour of our cultural heritage can awaken us to how differently they did things in the past.

But having documented dozens of declines and abolitions and zeroes, my mood is one not so much of optimism as of gratitude. Optimism requires a touch of arrogance, because it extrapolates the past to an uncertain future. Though I am confident that human sacrifice, chattel slavery, breaking on the wheel, and wars between democracies will not make a comeback anytime soon, to predict that the current levels of crime, civil war, or terrorism will endure is to sally into territory where angels fear to tread. What we can feel sure about is that many kinds of violence have declined up to the present, and we can try to understand why that has happened. As a scientist, I must be skeptical of any mystical force or cosmic destiny that carries us ever upward. Declines of violence are a product of social, cultural, and material conditions. If the conditions persist, violence will remain low or decline even further; if they donrsquo;t, it wonrsquo;t.

It is natural to recount the history of violence as a moral saga—a heroic struggle of justice against evil—but that is not my starting point. My approach is scientific in the broad sense of seeking explanations for why things happen. We may discover that a particular advance in peacefulness was brought about by moral entrepreneurs and their movements. But we may also discover that the explanation is more prosaic, like a change in technology, governance, commerce, or knowledge. Nor can we understand the decline of violence as an unstoppable force for progress that is carrying us toward an omega point of perfect peace. It is a collection of statistical trends in the behavior of groups of humans in various epochs, and as such it calls for an explanation in terms of psychology and history: how human minds deal with changing circumstances.

Many people implicitly believe in the Hydraulic Theory of Violence: that humans harbor an inner drive toward aggression (a death instinct or thirst for blood), which builds up inside us and must periodically be discharged. Nothing could be further from a contemporary scientific understanding of the psychology of violence. Aggression is not a single motive, let alone a mounting urge. It is the output of several psychological systems that differ in their environmental triggers, their internal logic, their neurobiological basis, and their social distribution. Dominance is the urge for authority, prestige, glory, and power, whether it takes the form of macho posturing among individuals or contests for supremacy among racial, ethnic, religious, or national groups. Revenge fuels the moralistic urge toward retribution, punishment, and justice. Sadism is pleasure taken in anotherrsquo;s suffering. And ideology is a shared belief system, usually involving a vision of utopia, that justifies unlimited violence in pursuit of unlimited good.

The moral sense sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture, sometimes in ways that decrease violence, though often (when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical) in ways that increase it. And the faculty of reason allows us to extricate ourselves from our parochial vantage points, to reflect on the ways in which we live our lives, to deduce ways in which we could be better off, and to guide the application of the other better angels of our nature.No aspect of life is untouched by the retreat from violence. Daily existence is very different if you always have to worry about being abducted, raped, or killed, and itrsquo;s hard to develop sophisticated arts, learning, or commerce if the institutions that support them are looted and burned as quickly as they are built.The historical trajectory of violence affects not only how life is lived but how it is understood. What could be more fundamental to our sense of meaning and purpose than a conception of whether the strivings of the human race over long stretches of time have left us better or worse off? How, in particular, are we to make sense of modernity—of the erosion of family, tribe, tradition, and religion by the forces of individualism, cosmopolitanism, reason, and science? So much depends on how we understand the legacy of this transition: whether we see our world as a nightmare of crime, terrorism, genocide, and war, or as a period that, by the standards of history, is blessed by unprecedented levels of peaceful coexistence.

The question of whether the arithmetic sign of trends in violence is positive or negative also bears on our conception of human nature. Though theories of human nature rooted in biology are often associated with fatalism about violence, and the theory that the mind is a blank slate is associated with progress, in my view it is the other way around. How are we to understand the natural state of life when our species first emerged and the processes of history began? The belief that violence has increased suggests that the world we made has contaminated us, perhaps irretrievably. The bel

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从前就仿佛是一个陌生的国度：那里的事情都与我们不同。——L.P.哈特雷

如果从前是一个陌生的国家，它会是一个及其暴力的国家。人是健忘的，经常会忘记生活曾经是多么的危险，时时刻刻，从各个方面都透露出野蛮。文化记忆抚平了往日的堡垒，从前的血腥褪去，只留下轻描淡写的纪念。从女人们佩戴的十字项链上，谁会想到那曾经也是古代常用的刑罚工具？当人们说要教训孩子一顿，谁也不会想到一种旧俗，为处罚王子胡作非为，要另一个无辜的孩子代受鞭笞。我们周围处处都是祖先生活方式的丑恶痕迹，但我们几乎根本意识不到它们的存在。人们说旅游拓宽视野，对我们的文化遗址进行一次思考，也许能够提醒我们，从前的生活有何不同。

但是，尽管我记录到一些暴力减少的趋势，一些恶法的废除和恶行的消除，我的心情与其说乐观，不如说是感激。乐观需要一些傲慢，因为它需要从过去推演不可知的未来。虽然我坚信，短期内我们不会再见到活人祭祀，奴隶制，残酷刑罚折磨和民主国家间的战争，我也可以预期，目前的犯罪，内战，恐怖主义虽然仍将存在，但将蜷缩在那些最阴暗的角落里，世界上总会有些地方连天使也无法涉足。可以确定的是，许多种类的暴力恶劣行径已经下降到目前的水平，我们可以尝试理解为什么会发生这样的下降。作为科学家，我必须对任何带着我们进步的神秘力量和命运保持怀疑。暴力下降是社会，文化和物质进步的成果。如果这些条件继续存在，暴力就会保持在一个较低的水平，甚至会持续减少，如果这些条件不在了，那么暴力的水平就会上升。

暴力的历史很自然地可以演绎成一个道德传奇——一场正义反抗邪恶的英勇奋战，但这不是我的出发点，我的方法是对历史的因缘进行广义的科学解释，我们可能会发现，道德领袖们——主流道德的制定者和捍卫者们以及他们的活动对和平有着特殊的贡献。我们也可能发现一些更直白的原因，比如技术，政府，商业或者知识等方面的变化对和平的作用。暴力减少不能被看做一个不可阻挡的，能将人类带向完美和平这一终极目标的绝对进步力量，它只是基于不同历史阶段，不同人类群体行为的一组统计趋势。对此，它需要我们给出心理学和历史学方面的解释：人类心智是如何应对情势之变的。

许多人坚信“暴力压力释放论”：人类本身具有一种内在的侵犯性——死亡本能和嗜血的冲动，这种聚积在我们内心的冲动必须阶段性地进行释放。这种理论完全背离现代科学对暴力心理的理解。侵犯并不是单一的动机，而是一种日渐强烈的冲动。它是由受环境影响，内在逻辑，神经反应，以及社会意识形态影响下的心理系统共同的产物。支配欲表现为对权威，声望，荣誉和权利的追求，它的表现形式可以是个体之中，也可以是种族，部落，宗教和民族之间的权利冲突。复仇心也能激起人类的道德冲动，实行报复，惩罚和伸张正义。虐待狂以他人的痛苦为乐。意识形态则是一种共享的信仰体系，通常具有乌托邦式的幻想，而为了追求无限的善可能会不择手段的使用暴力。

道德感将一套规则和戒律神圣化，用来约束和管理同一种文化群体中的相互关系。有些时候，这些规则和戒律会使暴力减少，但部落中绝对的权威的的规定则会增加暴力。理性让我们得以超脱有限的视角，反思我们的生活方式，从而探索改善的方法，并引导人们天性中其他的美德。暴力的退却对人类生活的影响无处不在。一个人如果时刻需要担心自己被抢劫，强暴或者杀害，如果他赖以生存和发展的设施在完善之前就被洗劫或是毁坏，他就很难在生活中发展美好的艺术，很难进行自己的学习和事业。暴力的历史发展不仅仅只影响人们怎样生活，也影响他们对生命的认识。人类长久的战乱，处境到底是改善还是恶化？还有什么比解释这个问题更能让我们意识到生命的意义和目的呢？家庭，部落，传统和宗教，饱受个人主义，世界主义，理性和科学重重方面的压迫，对于这种现代性，我们有该何去何从？我们的世界到底是一个充斥着犯罪，恐怖主义，屠杀和战乱的噩梦，还是以历史标准度量，正在经历一个前所未有的和平共处时期，答案取决于我们如何解读历史的变迁。

对于暴力变化趋势是倾向减少还是增加的判断也离不开我们对人性的理解。虽然人们通常认为以基于生物学的人性理论，将暴力视为宿命，而心智白板论则认为暴力行为是后天习得的。而我的看法恰恰与之相反。人们应该学会去理解人之初的自然本始状态和人类历史进程的开端，相信暴力在持续增长的人认为，我们创造的世界已经毒化了人类自身，并且这种变化可能无法逆转；而认为暴力在不断减少的人认为，人类的起点确实很低，但文明的进步可以将我们带向崇高，我们可以期望这一向上的进程持续进行下去。

今天我们享受着和平，是因为过去几代人遭受暴力的蹂躏，而为了减少暴力奋起反抗，今天我们也应该继续努力。确实，对暴力在减少这一事实的认识，最有效的证明了人类的努力是值得的。人性中的残暴，长久以来就是道德教化的对象。认识到某种力量能压制减少人类的残暴性，我们就能找出其中的因果关系。所以，我们要在平靖进程，文明进程，人道主义革命，长期和平，新和平和权利革命中寻找他们的共性。每一个共性指出一种途径，人们循环这条途径以自制，移情，道德和理性战胜了掠夺欲，支配欲，复仇欲，施虐欲或者其他意识形态的偏见。

《人性中的善良天使——暴力为什么会减少》

史蒂芬·平克

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