Chapter 1 (2/17/2023 读完) 总结笔记 + 有趣段落‘随意’翻译 (更新中)

第一章总结：

作者的目的是重新书写人类历史，改写目前通行但错误的叙述和叙述逻辑，改写盛行的以不平等 (inequality) 为开端发问的人类历史思考与叙述方式。

目前大历史的主流叙述其实都在一个错误的设问下展开，即探寻不平等的起源是什么 (what is the origin of inequality)。而关于这个设问丰繁复杂的解释又都脱离不开两种回答模式：不是卢梭的“善”就是霍布斯的“恶” [善恶是我的简化，书中是“自然状态” (state of nature)这个经典议题]。

两种回答模式即为：

卢梭：人性之初是善和纯洁，原始人类居住在平等、自由、无分化的社会中。但是这种状态只能在小规模的狩猎采集者们那里保持；

霍布斯：人性之初是恶，是所有人对所有人的战争，原始人类生活在死亡、野蛮、屠杀和恐惧之中。因此必定会需要并发展出国家等复杂制度加以限制，人无可奈何必须让渡一部分自由。

因此，这两种回答模式其实形成了一种通行的人类历史书写，即基于不平等的起源发问的一种线性的单一的进步史观：取代了小而散的狩猎采集，定居、农业和人口增长势不可挡，复杂制度、分化、不平等应运而生。农业、技术发展、城市等等一定会带来不平等，因此平等的社会是小型的、狩猎采集的、是仅存于原始的、是人性之初。

作者专门指出了卢梭和霍布斯其实说过了他们做的是一种思想实验（虽然是有问题的），但是后续的人类历史研究者们将其当做了事实，不管信奉卢梭还是霍布斯，人类的起源就“真实地”由这两个假设开始了，因此形成了一种对 “inequality” 灾难性的“绥靖”叙述。

第二章就要讨论 ‘不平等的起源’ 这个发问从何而来，谁问出了这个问题，为什么要问这个问题。

第一章有趣段落翻译 (按原书顺序，我将其分成了6个部分)：

第一部分 [卢梭和霍布斯以及主导叙述]：

why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly – the reasons for war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong？

为什么世界如此混乱，为什么人类经常如此恶劣地对待彼此 — 战争、贪婪、剥削，和对他人苦难的系统性冷漠是因为什么。我们一直都是这样吗，还是说在某个时刻，出了什么严重的问题？

It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

这基本上是一场神学辩论。本质上问题是：人之初，性本善还是恶？但如果你仔细想想，在此，这个问题其实没有什么意义。“善”和“恶”纯粹是人类的概念。任何人都不会争论一条鱼或一棵树是善还是恶，因为“善”和“恶”是人类为了相互比较而创造的概念。争论人类本质上是善还是恶，与争论人类本质上是胖还是瘦是一个意义。

Nonetheless, on those occasions when people do reflect on the lessons of prehistory, they almost invariably come back to questions of this kind. We are all familiar with the Christian answer: people once lived in a state of innocence, yet were tainted by original sin. We desired to be godlike and have been punished for it; now we live in a fallen state while hoping for future redemption. Today, the popular version of this story is typically some updated variation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, which he wrote in 1754. Once upon a time, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small. It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in ‘civilization’ and ‘the state’ – which also meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms.

尽管如此，当人们书写史前史时，几乎总是会回到这类问题上。我们都熟悉基督教的答案：人们曾经以纯真的状态生活，后来却被原罪所玷污；我们渴望成为神一样的人，却因此受到惩罚；现在我们生活在一个堕落的状态，同时期冀未来的救赎。今天，这个故事的流行版本通常是基于让-雅克·卢梭于1754年写的 Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Mankind Inequality 的更新。据说，很久很久以前，我们是狩猎采集者，生活如孩童般天真烂漫。在这些小型集群中人人平等，可能正是因为它们太小了。“农业革命”，以及城市的兴起后，这种快乐幸福结束了，迎来了“文明”和“国家” — 这也意味着书面文学、科学和哲学的出现，但与此同时，人类生活中几乎所有不好的也都出现了：父权制、军队、大屠杀和恼人的官僚主义，他们要求我们花费大量的时间填表格。

The problem is that anyone seeking an alternative to this rather depressing view of history will quickly find that the only one on offer is actually even worse: if not Rousseau, then Thomas Hobbes.

问题在于，任何想要找到对这种令人沮丧的历史观的替代品的人都会很快发现，唯一可供选择的观点实际上更糟糕：如果不是卢梭，那就是托马斯·霍布斯。

Hobbes’s Leviathan, published in 1651, is in many ways the founding text of modern political theory. It held that, humans being the selfish creatures they are, life in an original State of Nature was in no sense innocent; it must instead have been ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ – basically, a state of war, with everybody fighting against everybody else.

霍布斯1651年出版的《利维坦》在很多方面都是现代政治理论的奠基文本。它认为，人类是自私的生物，原始自然状态下的生命绝不纯洁善良；相反，它一定是“独居的、贫穷的、肮脏的、野蛮的、短暂的” — 基本上，就是一种战争状态，每个人都在相互争斗。

Insofar as there has been any progress from this benighted state of affairs, a Hobbesian would argue, it has been largely due to exactly those repressive mechanisms that Rousseau was complaining about: governments, courts, bureaucracies, police. This view of things has been around for a very long time as well.

就从这种愚昧的状态所取得的进步而言，霍布斯主义者会说，这正是由于卢梭所抱怨的那些压抑的制度：政府、法院、官僚机构、警察。这种观点也存在了很长时间。

As the reader can probably detect from our tone, we don’t much like the choice between these two alternatives. Our objections can be classified into three broad categories. As accounts of the general course of human history, they: 1. simply aren’t true; 2. have dire political implications; 3. make the past needlessly dull.

正如读者可能从我们的语气中察觉到的那样，这两种选择我们不太喜欢。我们的反对可以归为三大类。作为对人类历史一般进程的记述，它们：1. 根本不是真的；2. 具有可怕的政治影响；3. 让过去变得毫无必要的乏味。

第二部分 [“不平等”发问的问题所在，精彩！] ：

Something of a consensus has emerged among intellectuals and even, to some degree, the political classes that levels of social inequality have got out of hand, and that most of the world’s problems result, in one way or another, from an ever-widening gulf between the haves and the have-nots. At the same time, though, it frames the issue in a way that people who benefit from those structures can still find ultimately reassuring, since it implies no meaningful solution to the problem would ever be possible.

知识分子之间，甚至政治阶层之间已经形成了一种共识，即社会不平等的程度已经失控，世界上的大多数问题都以这样或那样的方式源于富人和穷人之间日益扩大的鸿沟。然而，与此同时，对不平等的发问是以一种让结构中受益的人最终仍能感到安心的方式构建的，因为它暗示不平等永远不可能有任何“真正的”解决方案。

After all, imagine we framed the problem differently, the way it might have been fifty or 100 years ago: as the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like ‘inequality’ sounds like it’s practically designed to encourage half-measures and compromise.

毕竟，想象一下我们用不同的方式来看待这个问题，就像50年或100年前那样：资本集中，或寡头垄断，或阶级权力。与前述任何一个词相比，“不平等”听着就是被用来鼓励折衷和妥协的。

It’s possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or breaking the power of the state, but it’s not clear what eliminating inequality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Opportunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we’ve ‘eliminated inequality’?) The term ‘inequality’ is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is even on the table.

我们可以想象推翻资本主义或打破国家权力，但消灭不平等到底意味着什么呢。(哪种不平等？财富？机会？人们到底要平等到什么程度，才能说已经“消除了不平等”？) “不平等”适用于技术官僚改革者来描述社会问题，这些改革者从一开始就认为，根本不存在真正的社会转型。

Debating inequality allows one to tinker with the numbers, argue about Gini coefficients and thresholds of dysfunction, readjust tax regimes or social welfare mechanisms, even shock the public with figures showing just how bad things have become (‘Can you imagine? The richest 1 per cent of the world’s population own 44 per cent of the world’s wealth!’) – but it also allows one to do all this without addressing any of the factors that people actually object to about such ‘unequal’ social arrangements: for instance, that some manage to turn their wealth into power over others; or that other people end up being told their needs are not important, and their lives have no intrinsic worth. The last, we are supposed to believe, is just the inevitable effect of inequality; and inequality, the inevitable result of living in any large, complex, urban, technologically sophisticated society. Presumably it will always be with us. It’s just a matter of degree.

对不平等问题，人们热衷于对数字进行修补，争论基尼系数和机能失调的阈值，调整税收制度或社会福利机制，甚至用显示情况有多糟糕的数据震惊公众 (“你能想象吗？世界上最富有的1%人口拥有世界上44%的财富！”) — “不平等”允许人们做所有事，除了解决人们实际上真正反对的各种“不平等的”社会安排及其因素：例如，一些人设法将他们的财富转化为对其他人的权力；或者其他人被告知他们的需求不重要，他们的生活没有内在价值。总之，我们应该相信，这些只是不平等的必然结果；而不平等是生活在任何庞大、复杂、城市化、科技发达的社会中不可避免的结果。大概它将永远与我们同在，只是程度问题。

第三部分 [本书愿景，我个人非常喜欢！]：

First of all, it’s bizarre to imagine that, say, during the roughly 10,000 (some would say more like 20,000) years in which people painted on the walls of Altamira, no one – not only in Altamira, but anywhere on earth – experimented with alternative forms of social organization. What’s the chance of that? Second of all, is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human？That is, beings with the capacity for self-creation, even freedom? The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.

首先，难以想象的是，在人们在阿尔塔米拉的墙壁上作画的大约一万年 (有些人会说两万年) 的时间里，没有人 — 不仅是在阿尔塔米拉，而是在地球上的任何地方 — 尝试过其他形式的社会组织。这种可能性有多大？其次，对不同形式的社会组织进行试验的能力本身不就是我们之所以为人的精髓吗？也就是说，有自我创造能力，甚至自由的存在？正如我们将看到的，人类历史的终极问题不是我们获得物质资源 (土地、卡路里、生产资料) 的平等机会，而是我们都一样的拥有确定如何共同生活的能力。

【我：作者认为人类历史研究的根本在于探寻人如何运用自己的能力，如何做决定，如何做选择】

rediscover the freedoms human has to fundamentally change the system, if human has that capacity then what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place.

重新发现人类所拥有的自由，以从根本上改变系统。如果人类有这种能力，那么最重要的是，我们是否能够重新发现最初使我们成为人类的自由。

We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

我们源于集体的自我创造。如果我们以这种方式来研究人类历史呢？如果我们从一开始就把人视为富有想象力、富于理解力、有趣的生物呢？他们应该被这样认识。如果我们不讲述人类是如何从某种田园诗般的平等状态中堕落的，而是问问我们是如何被困在如此牢固的概念桎梏中，以至于我们甚至无法想象重塑自我的可能性，会怎么样?

第四部分 [有趣的案例和第二章的一些影子]：

Romito 2 is the 10,000-year-old burial of a male with a rare genetic disorder (acromesomelic dysplasia): a severe type of dwarfism, which in life would have rendered him both anomalous in his community and unable to participate in the kind of high-altitude hunting that was necessary for their survival. Studies of his pathology show that, despite generally poor levels of health and nutrition, that same community of hunter-gatherers still took pains to support this individual through infancy and into early adulthood, granting him the same share of meat as everyone else, and ultimately according him a careful, sheltered burial. Neither is Romito 2 an isolated case.

Romito 2来自一万年前的一个墓葬，死者是一名患有罕见遗传疾病 (肢端发育不良)的男性：这是一种严重的侏儒症，在他活着的时候，这种疾病让他在社群中显得异常，也无法参与生存所必需的高海拔狩猎活动。对他的病理研究表明，尽管普遍较低的健康和营养水平，他归属的狩猎采集群仍然不遗余力地抚养他从婴儿到成年早期，给他和其他人一样的肉，并最终给他一个精心的、受保护的坟墓。Romito 2并非个案。

When archaeologists undertake balanced appraisals of hunter-gatherer burials from the Palaeolithic, they find high frequencies of health-related disabilities – but also surprisingly high levels of care until the time of death (and beyond, since some of these funerals were remarkably lavish). we would have to reach the exact opposite conclusion to Hobbes (and Pinker): in origin, it might be claimed, our species is a nurturing and care-giving species, and there was simply no need for life to be nasty, brutish or short.

当考古学家对旧石器时代的狩猎采集墓葬进行评估时，他们发现了频发与健康有关的残疾，但在死亡之前 (以及之后，因为其中一些葬礼非常奢华)，护理水平也惊人地高。我们将得出与霍布斯 (和平克) 完全相反的结论：在起源上，我们可以说，我们懂得养育和照顾，并不肮脏、野蛮或短暂。

As we get to grips with the actual evidence, we always find that the realities of early human social life were far more complex, and a good deal more interesting, than any modern-day State of Nature theorist would ever be likely to guess

当认真研究实际证据时，我们总是发现，早期人类社会生活的现实远比任何现代自然状态理论家猜测的要复杂得多，也有趣得多。

…...

The important point here is that, as a ‘non-state’ people, the Yanomami are supposed to exemplify what Pinker calls the ‘Hobbesian trap’, whereby individuals in tribal societies find themselves caught in repetitive cycles of raiding and warfare, living fraught and precarious lives, always just a few steps away from violent death on the tip of a sharp weapon or at the end of a vengeful club. That, Pinker tells us, is the kind of dismal fate ordained for us by evolution. We have only escaped it by virtue of our willingness to place ourselves under the common protection of nation states, courts of law and police forces; and also by embracing virtues of reasoned debate and self-control that Pinker sees as the exclusive heritage of a European ‘civilizing process’, which produced the Age of Enlightenment (in other words, were it not for Voltaire, and the police, the knife-fight over Chagnon’s findings would have been physical, not just academic).

这里的重点是，作为一个“非国家”民族，亚诺马米人被认为是平克所谓的“霍布斯陷阱”的典型代表，即部落社会中的个体发现自己陷入了劫掠和战争的重复循环中，过着糟糕危险的生活，在利器的尖端或复仇的棍棒的末端，总是离暴力死亡只有几步之遥。平克告诉我们，这是进化为我们命定的悲惨命运。我们之所以能够幸免，是因为我们愿意将自己置于民族国家、法院和警察部队的共同保护之下；同时，还因为接受了理性辩论和自我控制的美德，平克认为这些美德是欧洲“文明进程”的独家传统，它创造了启蒙时代 (换句话说，如果没有伏尔泰和警察，查农发现的人人刀战将成了物理上的，而不仅仅是学术上的)。

The idea that our current ideals of freedom, equality and democracy are somehow products of the‘Western tradition’ would in fact have come as an enormous surprise to someone like Voltaire. As we’ll soon see, the Enlightenment thinkers who propounded such ideals almost invariably put them in the mouths of foreigners, even ‘savages’ like the Yanomami.

认为我们现在的自由、平等和民主的理想是“西方传统”的产物，这种想法实际上会让伏尔泰(们)感到非常惊讶。我们很快就会看到，提出这些理想的启蒙思想家几乎总是借外人之口，甚至是像亚诺马米这样的“野蛮人”。【我：第二章主讲】

Insisting, to the contrary, that all good things come only from Europe ensures one’s work can be read as a retroactive apology for genocide, since (apparently, for Pinker) the enslavement, rape, mass murder and destruction of whole civilizations – visited on the rest of the world by European powers – is just another example of humans comporting themselves as they always had; it was in no sense unusual. What was really significant, so this argument goes, is that it made possible the dissemination of what he takes to be ‘purely’ European notions of freedom, equality before the law, and human rights to the survivors.

相反，坚持一切美好的事物都来自欧洲，是确保了一个人的作品可以被解读为对种族灭绝的追溯性道歉，因为 (显然，对平克来说) 欧洲列强对世界其他文明的奴役、强奸、大屠杀和毁灭，只是人类一如既往的本性的另一个例子，因此，这一点也不奇怪。这种观点认为，真正重要的是，这使他所认为的“纯粹的”欧洲的观念 — 自由、法律面前人人平等、人权 — 的传播成为可能。

第五部分 [历史方法，我个人非常喜欢作者的描述和立场]：

One of the most pernicious aspects of standard world-historical narratives is precisely that they dry everything up, reduce people to cardboard stereotypes, simplify the issues (are we inherently selfish and violent, or innately kind and co-operative?) in ways that themselves undermine, possibly even destroy, our sense of human possibility. ‘Noble’ savages are, ultimately, just as boring as savage ones; more to the point, neither actually exist. Helena Valero was herself adamant on this point. The Yanomami were not devils, she insisted, neither were they angels. They were human, like the rest of us.

标准世界历史叙事最有害的方面之一，正是它们让一切干瘪枯竭，把人简化为纸板式的刻板形象，简化了问题 (我们是天生自私和暴力，还是天生善良和合作？)，而这些叙事方式本身破坏了，甚至可能摧毁了我们对人类可能性的感知。“高贵”的野蛮人最终和野蛮人一样乏味；更重要的是，其实两者都不存在。海伦娜·瓦莱罗在这一点上很坚定。亚诺马米人不是魔鬼，她坚持说，他们也不是天使。他们是人类，和我们一样。

Now, we should be clear here: social theory always, necessarily, involves a bit of simplification. Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible.

现在，我们应该清楚一点：社会理论总是，必然地，包含一些简化。社会理论在很大程度上是一个假想游戏，在这个游戏中，我们只是为了论证而假设只有一件事在发生：本质上，我们把一切都简化为一幅漫画，以便能够发现原本看不见的模式。

One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify. Hobbes and Rousseau told their contemporaries things that were startling, profound and opened new doors of the imagination. Now their ideas are just tired common sense. If social scientists today continue to reduce past generations to simplistic, two-dimensional caricatures, it is not so much to show us anything original, but just because they feel that’s what social scientists are expected to do so as to appear ‘scientific’. The actual result is to impoverish history – and as a consequence, to impoverish our sense of possibility.

一个人必须简化这个世界，才能发现新东西。问题来了，有了新发现之后很长一段时间，人们还在继续简化。霍布斯和卢梭向他们同时代的人讲述了令人吃惊、深刻的议题，打开了想象的新大门。现在他们的想法是老生常谈了。如果今天的社会科学家继续将过去几代人的思想简化为简单的二维夸张漫画，这并非为了向我们展示任何原创，而是因为他们认为这是社会科学家应该做的，以便显得“科学”。实际的结果是使历史变得贫瘠，枯竭了我们对人类可能性的感知。

【我：我认为一项大理论一定是抽象的“简化的”，我们的任务是在此基础上增加维度，增加复杂性，增加现实感】

Let us end this introduction with an illustration, before moving on to the heart of the matter. The logic is perfectly circular. If precious objects were moving long distances, this is evidence of ‘trade’ and, if trade occurred, it must have taken some sort of commercial form; therefore, the fact that, say, 3,000 years ago Baltic amber found its way to the Mediterranean, or shells from the Gulf of Mexico were transported to Ohio, is proof that we are in the presence of some embryonic form of market economy. Markets are universal. Therefore, there must have been a market. Therefore, markets are universal. All such authors are really saying is that they themselves cannot personally imagine any other way that precious objects might move about. In fact, anthropology provides endless illustrations of how valuable objects might travel long distances in the absence of anything that remotely resembles a market economy…and there are plenty of other possibilities that in no way resemble ‘trade’.

在进入问题的核心之前，让我们用一个例子来结束这个介绍。循环论证出现了。如果贵重物品经过长途运输，这就是“贸易”的证据，那如果贸易发生了，它就一定是以某种商业形式存在的。因此，比如说3000年前波罗的海的琥珀被运到地中海，或者墨西哥湾的贝壳被运到俄亥俄州，这一事实就证明我们正处于某种市场经济的雏形之中。市场是普遍的，因此一定有市场，因此市场是普遍的。所有这些作者真正想说的是，他们自己无法想象珍贵物品任何其他可能移动的方式。事实上，人类学提供了无数的例证，说明在没有任何类似市场经济的东西的情况下，珍贵物品是如何长途跋涉的。还有很多其他的可能性与“贸易”完全不同。

第六部分 [收尾]：

In this book we will not only be presenting a new history of humankind, but inviting the reader into a new science of history, one that restores our ancestors to their full humanity. Rather than asking how we ended up unequal, we will start by asking how it was that ‘inequality’ became such an issue to begin with, then gradually build up an alternative narrative that corresponds more closely to our current state of knowledge.

在这本书中，我们不仅将呈现一种新的人类历史，而且还将邀请读者进入一种新的历史科学，一种让我们的祖先完全恢复人性的科学。与其问我们是如何不平等的，我们将从探寻“不平等”是如何成为一个问题开始，然后逐渐建立一个更符合我们当前知识状态的替代叙述。

if humans did not spend 95 per cent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what did they imply? What was really happening in those periods we usually see as marking the emergence of ‘the state’? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful possibilities, than we tend to assume. At the same time, this book is also something else: a quest to discover the right questions. If ‘what is the origin of inequality?’ is not the biggest question we should be asking about history, what then should it be?

如果人类进化史上95%的时间都不是在小规模的狩猎采集群体中度过，那么他们在那段时间里都在做什么呢？如果农业和城市并不意味着陷入等级和统治，那么它们意味着什么？在那些我们通常认为标志着“国家”出现的时期，究竟发生了什么？答案往往出乎意料，这表明人类历史的进程可能不像我们通常认为的那样一成不变，而是充满了有趣的可能性。与此同时，这本书还有其他意义：探索什么是正确的问题。如果 ‘不平等的起源是什么？’ 不是我们应该问的关于历史的最大问题，那么我们应该问什么呢？

【我的评价：目前读到了第二章中间部分，非常非常喜欢，对我来说很惊艳，格雷伯本人的学术志趣和立场都和我太契合了，好遗憾我没能早点看到他的作品。。。准备以后每周抽出一天读一章，然后更新笔记。书写得也挺通俗易懂，逻辑展开都是一环一环，娓娓道来，很舒服。btw，中国赶紧出翻译版吧，枪炮那些就别老出什么新版本了，不是要批判欧洲中心论嘛，这本目前来看，才是真的再批判哦】