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Huxley

Huxley
Huxley

Huxley’s Warning

赫胥黎的警告

英语1313 柳辰

131006050332

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first --- the Orwellian --- culture becomes a prison. In the second --- the Huxleyan --- culture becomes a burlesque.

导致一个文化精神的萎缩有两种方式。第一个——是奥威尔式,文化成为一个监狱。第二个——是赫胥黎式——文化成为一种滑稽。

No one needs to be reminded that our world is now marred by many prison-cultures whose structure Orwell described accurately in his parables.

众所周知,我们的世界被奥威尔在他的预言中准确描述的的那种监狱式的文化结构所破坏。

If one were to read both 1984 and Animal Farm, and then for good measure, Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, one would have a fairly precise blueprint of the machinery of thought-control as it currently operates in scores of countries and on millions of people.

Of course, Orwell was not the first to teach us about the spiritual devastations of tyranny

如果一个人去读1984和动物庄园,另外还有亚瑟卡斯特勒的中午的黑暗,那么这个人将会有一个对于大量国家还有数以百万计的人民进行思想控制的机构的相当精确的蓝图。

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当然,奥威尔不是第一个人去教导我们有关暴政对于一种精神的破坏。

What is irreplaceable about his work is his insistence that it makes little difference if our wardens are inspired by right- or left-wing ideologies.

The gates of the prison are equally impenetrable, surveillance equally rigorous, icon-worship equally pervasive.

他工作中不可替代的是如果狱长被左翼或者右翼思想所鼓动,他的一些不一样的坚持。

监狱的大门不能穿透,监视严格,偶像崇拜无处不在。

What Huxley teaches is that in the age of advanced technology, spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.

赫胥黎教导我们的是:在先进技术时代,笑脸相迎的敌人比脸上流露出怀疑和憎恨的人更可能带来精神的破坏。

In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice.

在赫胥黎的预言中,“老大哥”不会选择看着我们。

We watch him, by ours.

我们选择看着他

There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is re-defined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

不需要狱长或者门或者真理部门。当人们为琐事而分心,当文化生活重新被定义成一种娱乐的循环,当严肃的公共话题成为一种儿语的形式,在这时,简单来说人民成为了观众而他们的社会经营了一出滑稽剧,然后一个国家发现自己处于危险,文化的灭亡成为了明显的可能。

In America, Orwell's prophecies are of small relevance, but Huxley's are well under way toward being realized. For America is engaged in the world's most ambitious experiment to accommodate itself to the technological distractions made possible by the electric plug.

在美国,奥威尔的预言被小范围肯定,但是赫胥黎的预言被广泛的接受。对于美国正在进行的世界上最野心勃勃的实验,通过电插座使自己适应电磁干扰成为可能。

This is an experiment that began slowly and modestly in the mid-nineteenth century and has now, in the latter half of the twentieth, reached a perverse maturity in America's consuming love-affair with television.

这个实验在十九世纪中期和现在发展的缓慢并且谨慎。在二十世纪后期美国消费恋爱电视剧达到了一种反常的成熟。

As nowhere else in the world, Americans have moved far and fast in bringing to a close the age of the slow-moving printed word, and have granted to television sovereignty over all of their institutions. By ushering in the Age of Television, America has given the world the clearest available glimpse of the Huxleyan future.

世界上没有其他地方像美国一样,从缓慢印刷的时代发展的又远又快。并且授予电视超越其他机构的权力。通过电视时代的传达,美国已经给世界看到了一个清晰的赫胥黎预言的未来。

… …

What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.

我在这里也提出一个赫胥黎曾建议的解决办法。并且我做的没有他好。他认同H.G.WELLS的我们处于灾难与教育之间的比赛的观点。并且他不断写出我们理解政治和媒体的认识论的必要性。最后,他试图告诉我们在《美丽新世界》中折磨人们的并不是在嘲笑而不是思考,而是他们不知道他们在笑什么以及为什么去停止思考

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