Lesson57
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 modem 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
参考译文
在人类早期，同其他生物竞争必不可少。但现在人类发展的这一阶段已经结束。今天，我们在对待原始环境方面的确缺乏实践和经验。我敢肯定，要是没有现代武器，我在同熊争洞穴时会表现得很差劲，而且在这一点上我不认为我会孤立。同人类竞争的最恶劣生物是蚊子。但即使是蚊子，也已被注意排水和应用化学喷剂所征服。
不过，我们当中人与人、社团与社团的竞争仍在持续；而且同以往一样激烈。
但人与人的竞争不像生物学中所看到的过程那么简单。它不是为取决于自然环境中一定量的食物而进行简单的竞争，因为决定我们进化的环境基本上已不再是自然环境。我们的环境主要由我们所相信的事物所制约。摩洛哥和加州这两块土地纬度极为近似，都位于气候相似的大陆的西海岸，甚至连自然资源
也十分相似，然而它们目前的发展却完全不同，这不全是因为人的不同，而是因为存在于其居民脑中的思想不同。这就是我要强调的观点。我们环境的最重要因素是我们自身的思想状态。
人们都知道，在白人入侵原始文化之处，最具毁灭性的后果不是来自有形的武器而是来自思想。思想是很危险的。宗教法庭深知这点，因此它从前主张把异教徒烧死。言论自由之所以只存在于现代社会，是因为身居社团之中的你受其习俗制约之深，以致极难构想出真正具有毁灭力的东西。只有旁观者
才能注入危险的思想。我相信有可能给现代社会注入终将把人类毁灭掉的思想。我很愿意举一个例子给你瞧瞧，幸亏我不能这样做。或许提及核弹就已足够。设想有那么一个仍未拥有原子弹的、技术上相当先进的社会，如果让它知道这省可能性并为其制造提供足够的细节，其后果会是怎样。在1925年前后只要向任何一
个列强提交20或30面的思想和资料能把现今的世界来个兜底翻，甚至把它摧毁。我常在想像这些页里可能包含些什么内容，但我当然做不到这一点，因为我是当今世界的囚犯，就像你们大家那样。我们不能超越制约我们大脑的特定模式去进行思考，或者更准确地说，我们只能略为超越一些进行思考，而且我们还得具有非凡独创性才行。
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