Joyce Carol Oates 乔伊斯·卡罗尔·奥茨
October 20, 2005 issue
1.
“If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind, would he not have done so by now?”
如果上帝有意干涉人类的堕落，难道他不早就这样做了吗？
—Blood Meridian 《血色边境》
Pascal’s enigmatic remark in the Pensées “Life is a dream a little less inconstant” would be a fitting epigraph for the novels of Cormac McCarthy, which unfold with the exhausting intensity of fever dreams. From the dense Faulknerian landscapes of his early, East Tennessee fiction to the monumental Grand Guignol Blood Meridian, from the prose ballads of the Border Trilogy to this new, tightly plotted crime novel, McCarthy’s fiction has been characterized by compulsive and doomed quests, sadistic rites of masculinity, a frenzy of perpetual motion—on foot, on horseback, in cars and pickups. No one would mistake Cormac McCarthy’s worlds as “real” except in the way that fever dreams are “real,” a heightened and distilled gloss upon the human condition.
帕斯卡在《思想录》中的神秘言论“生活是一个稍微不那么无常的梦”可以作为科马克·麦卡锡小说的适当题词，这些小说以令人精疲力竭的激烈梦境展开。从他早期、东田纳西小说中的浓密福克纳式风景到宏伟的大狂欢血色子午线，从边境三部曲的散文歌谣到这部新的、紧凑的犯罪小说，麦卡锡的小说以强迫性和注定的追求、男性残酷仪式、永恒运动的狂热为特点——步行、骑马、开车和拖车。除了作为发热梦境对人类状况的高度和浓缩的光泽之外，没有人会将科马克·麦卡锡的世界误认为是“真实”的。
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, Cormac McCarthy was brought to live in East Tennessee at the age of four and from there moved to El Paso, Texas, in 1974. By his own account, he attended the University of Tennessee in 1952 and was asked not to return because his grades were so poor. Subsequently he drifted about the country, worked at odd jobs, enlisted in the US Air Force for four years, of which two were spent in Alaska; after his discharge, he returned to the University of Tennessee for four years but left without receiving a degree. McCarthy’s first four novels, which won for him a small, admiring audience of literary-minded readers, are distinctly Southern Gothic in tone, setting, characters, language; his fifth, the mock-epic Blood Meridian (1985), set mostly in Mexico and California in the years 1849–1878, marks the author’s dramatic reinvention of himself as a writer of the West: a visionary of vast, inhuman distances for whom the intensely personal psychology of the traditional realistic novel holds little interest.
1933年出生于罗得岛的普罗维登斯，科马克·麦卡锡在四岁时搬到了田纳西州东部，然后在1974年搬到了得克萨斯州的埃尔帕索。根据他自己的说法，他于1952年进入田纳西大学，但由于成绩太差而被要求不要再回去。随后，他在全国各地漂泊，做过各种零工，入伍美国空军四年，其中两年在阿拉斯加度过；退伍后，他返回田纳西大学四年，但没有获得学位就离开了。麦卡锡的前四部小说赢得了一小部分文学爱好读者的赞赏，它们在语调、背景、人物和语言上都明显具有南方哥特式的特点；他的第五部小说《血色子午线》（1985年）主要设定在墨西哥和加利福尼亚，时间跨度为1849年至1878年，标志着作者将自己戏剧性地重塑为西部作家：一个对广阔而非人类的距离有着远见的人，对传统现实主义小说中的强烈个人心理几乎没有兴趣。
By Jerome Groopman 杰罗姆·格鲁普曼
Advances in our knowledge of the causes of diabetes, and in our ability to treat the disease, have long been hampered by racial prejudice and exorbitant drug prices.
我们对糖尿病病因的认识和治疗能力的进步长期以来受到种族偏见和过高的药物价格的阻碍。
On April 9 of this year, The New York Times featured an obituary for Arthur D. Riggs, a scientist likely unknown to most readers. Riggs’s career was largely spent at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California, where he discovered how to use recombinant DNA technology—which brings together genetic sequences from multiple sources—to convert bacteria into factories that produce hormones for clinical use. Among his notable successes was the creation of artificial human insulin. “We chose insulin because it looked doable, and there was a need,” Riggs recalled in an interview last year. “At the time, diabetics were being treated with cow insulin because there was no source of human insulin. And cow insulin resulted in a high rate of allergic reactions.”
今年4月9日，《纽约时报》刊登了一篇关于亚瑟·D·里格斯的讣告，他是一位大多数读者可能不熟悉的科学家。里格斯的职业生涯主要在加利福尼亚州杜阿尔特市的希望之城国家医疗中心度过，他在那里发现了如何利用重组DNA技术（将来自多个来源的基因序列结合在一起）将细菌转化为生产临床用激素的工厂。他的一项显著成就是人工合成人胰岛素。“我们选择胰岛素是因为它看起来可行，而且有需求，”里格斯在去年的一次采访中回忆道。“当时，糖尿病患者使用的是牛胰岛素，因为没有人胰岛素的来源。而牛胰岛素会导致高发生率的过敏反应。”
Hormones regulate our growth and development as well as metabolism. They may act locally on the tissue that makes them, on nearby tissues, or on distant tissues after entering the bloodstream. When we’re healthy, hormone production is controlled through feedback loops in the body, which prevents either a deficiency or an excess. The disruption of these loops can lead to disease.
激素调节我们的生长发育和新陈代谢。它们可以在产生它们的组织上发挥局部作用，也可以在附近的组织或进入血液后对远处的组织产生作用。当我们身体健康时，激素的产生通过身体内的反馈环路来控制，以防止缺乏或过量。这些环路的紊乱可能导致疾病的发生。
Insulin is made in the pancreas and secreted into the bloodstream to promote the absorption of glucose by various tissues, which use it immediately for energy or convert the glucose to glycogen (for short-term storage) or fat (for long-term storage). Insufficient insulin or bodily resistance to it causes high levels of glucose to remain in the blood, a condition formally known as diabetes mellitus. It’s believed that more than 400 million people worldwide suffer from diabetes, which can lead to blindness, nerve damage, tissue necrosis necessitating amputation, kidney failure, and stroke. Every year about four million people die from complications of the disease.
胰岛素是由胰腺产生并分泌到血液中，以促进各种组织对葡萄糖的吸收，这些组织会立即将其用作能量或将葡萄糖转化为糖原（用于短期储存）或脂肪（用于长期储存）。胰岛素不足或对其的抵抗会导致血液中葡萄糖水平升高，这种情况被正式称为糖尿病。据信全球有超过4亿人患有糖尿病，这可能导致失明、神经损伤、组织坏死导致截肢、肾功能衰竭和中风。每年约有400万人死于该疾病的并发症。
Reading the Philosophers of the New Right 阅读新右派哲学家的著作
July/August 2023 2023年7月/8月Published on June 20, 2023
2023年6月20日发布
or more than half a century, the luminaries of the mainstream American right had a clear mission and sense of where they came from. If liberals were fixated on quixotic schemes for building a perfect society, conservatives would be on hand to do the sober work of defending liberty against tyranny. Conservatives traced their roots to 1790, with the British statesman Edmund Burke’s warnings about the dangers of revolution and his insistence on the contractual relationship between the inherited past and the imagined future. They counted the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott and the Austrian émigré economist Friedrich Hayek as ancestors and viewed public intellectuals, such as the American writer William F. Buckley, Jr., and people of action, such as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. President Ronald Reagan, as fighters for the same cause: individualism, the wisdom of the market, the universal yearning for freedom, and the conviction that solutions to social problems will bubble up from below, if only government would get out of the way. As Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator and forefather of the modern Republican Party, put it in The Conscience of a Conservative, in 1960, “The Conservative looks upon politics as the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of the social order.”
在半个多世纪的时间里，美国主流右派的杰出人物们一直有着明确的使命和自我认知。如果自由派一心追求建立一个完美社会的异想天开的计划，保守派就会冷静地捍卫自由免受暴政的侵害。保守派将自己的根源追溯到1790年，英国政治家埃德蒙·伯克对革命危险的警告以及他对传承的过去与想象中的未来之间契约关系的坚持。他们将英国哲学家迈克尔·奥克肖特和奥地利移民经济学家弗里德里希·哈耶克视为祖先，并将公共知识分子（如美国作家威廉·F·巴克利）和行动者（如英国首相玛格丽特·撒切尔和美国总统罗纳德·里根）视为为同一事业而战的人：个人主义、市场智慧、对自由的普遍渴望以及解决社会问题将从底层涌现的信念，只要政府退居二线。 正如亚利桑那州参议员、现代共和党的奠基人巴里·戈德沃特在1960年的《保守派的良心》中所说：“保守派将政治视为一种实现个人最大自由的艺术，同时又与社会秩序的维护相一致。”
Washington and New Delhi Share Interests, Not Values 华盛顿和新德里有共同利益，但价值观不同
Benedetto Cristofani 贝内代托·克里斯托法尼
It has been a ritual for decades. Whenever American policymakers travel to India, they sing paeans to the beauty of Indian politics, to the country’s diversity, and to the shared values connecting—in the words of multiple U.S. presidents—“the world’s oldest democracy” and “the world’s largest democracy.” This rhetoric may be gauzy, and it is certainly grandiose. But to Washington, it is not empty. In the view of U.S. policymakers, common democratic principles will be the foundation of an enduring U.S.-Indian relationship, one with broad strategic significance. The world’s two biggest democracies, they say, can’t help but have similar worldviews and interests.
几十年来，这已经成为一种仪式。每当美国政策制定者前往印度时，他们都会赞美印度政治的美丽，赞美这个国家的多样性，赞美连接着“世界上最古老的民主国家”和“世界上最大的民主国家”的共同价值观。这种言辞可能有些虚幻，但肯定是宏大的。但对华盛顿来说，这并不是空洞的。在美国政策制定者看来，共同的民主原则将成为美印持久关系的基础，这种关系具有广泛的战略意义。他们说，世界上最大的两个民主国家不可避免地会有相似的世界观和利益。
“Our common interest in democracy and righteousness will enable your countrymen and mine to make common cause against a common enemy,” U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt wrote to Mohandas Gandhi, then the de facto leader of India’s independence movement, during World War II. During the Cold War, successive presidential administrations tried to get New Delhi to stand against Moscow by arguing that, as a democracy, India was a natural enemy of the Soviet Union. When President George W. Bush struck a breakthrough civilian nuclear deal with India in 2005, he declared that India’s democratic system meant that the two states were “natural partners” united “by deeply held values.”
“我们对民主和正义的共同兴趣将使你们国家的人民和我的人民能够共同对抗一个共同的敌人。”美国总统富兰克林·罗斯福在二战期间写信给当时印度独立运动的事实上领导人莫汉达斯·甘地。在冷战期间，连续的美国总统政府试图让新德里站在莫斯科对立面，通过辩称作为一个民主国家，印度是苏联的天然敌人。当乔治·W·布什总统在2005年与印度达成突破性的民用核能协议时，他宣称印度的民主制度意味着这两个国家是“天然伙伴”，通过深深的价值观团结在一起。
How Inequality and Insecurity Fueled a Crisis in the West 不平等和不安全如何引发了西方的危机
The world is in the throes of a pervasive crisis. The gap between rich and poor has widened in most countries. Although industrialized economies are still growing, the real incomes of people working in them have barely increased since 1980, and in some places, such as the United States, the real wages of low-skilled workers have dropped sharply. The economic malaise has a corollary in politics: democracy is floundering. According to Freedom House, more countries have lost freedom than gained it every year for the past 17 years. Authoritarianism seems to be on the rise. For many governments, China’s statist form of capitalism offers a tempting model. Russia, under President Vladimir Putin, has launched the biggest war in Europe since the end of World War II. The twenty-first century so far has been marked by repression, turbulence, and the disintegration of democratic institutions.
世界正处于一场普遍危机之中。贫富差距在大多数国家都在扩大。尽管工业化经济体仍在增长，但自1980年以来，工人的实际收入几乎没有增加，而在一些地方，如美国，低技能工人的实际工资大幅下降。经济困境在政治上也有相应的表现：民主正在陷入困境。根据自由之家的数据，过去17年来，失去自由的国家数量超过了获得自由的国家数量。威权主义似乎正在兴起。对许多政府来说，中国的国家资本主义模式是一个诱人的典范。在普京总统的领导下，俄罗斯发动了自二战结束以来欧洲最大规模的战争。到目前为止，21世纪以来的特点是压制、动荡和民主机构的瓦解。
Two thought-provoking recent books seek to anatomize these pessimistic times in fresh ways. In The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, Martin Wolf, a veteran economics commentator at the Financial Times, suggests that the root cause of this malaise lies in the breakdown of the relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy. In A World of Insecurity, the economist Pranab Bardhan argues that the ills plaguing the world are best understood not in terms of inequality but in terms of insecurity—simmering economic and social anxiety about job loss, declining incomes, poverty, and cultural change.
两本引人深思的近期著作试图以新的方式剖析这个悲观时代。在《民主资本主义的危机》一书中，金融时报资深经济评论员马丁·沃尔夫认为，这种困境的根源在于资本主义与自由民主之间的关系破裂。而在《不安的世界》一书中，经济学家普拉纳布·巴尔德汉认为，困扰世界的问题最好不是从不平等的角度来理解，而是从不安全感的角度来理解——人们对失业、收入下降、贫困和文化变革的经济和社会焦虑。
America Is Not 而美国没有
**July/August 2023 2023年7月/8月**Published on June 20, 2023
2023年6月20日发布
In March, at the end of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood at the door of the Kremlin to bid his friend farewell. Xi told his Russian counterpart, “Right now, there are changes—the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years—and we are the ones driving these changes together.” Putin, smiling, responded, “I agree.”
三月份，在中国国家主席习近平访问莫斯科结束时，俄罗斯总统弗拉基米尔·普京站在克里姆林宫门口向他的朋友告别。习近平告诉俄罗斯总统：“现在，有一些变化，这种变化我们已经有100年没有见过了，而我们正是一起推动这些变化的人。”普京微笑着回答：“我同意。”
The tone was informal, but this was hardly an impromptu exchange: “Changes unseen in a century” has become one of Xi’s favorite slogans since he coined it in December 2017. Although it might seem generic, it neatly encapsulates the contemporary Chinese way of thinking about the emerging global order—or, rather, disorder. As China’s power has grown, Western policymakers and analysts have tried to determine what kind of world China wants and what kind of global order Beijing aims to build with its power. But it is becoming clear that rather than trying to comprehensively revise the existing order or replace it with something else, Chinese strategists have set about making the best of the world as it is—or as it soon will be.
语气虽然不正式，但这绝非一次即兴的交流：“百年未有之大变局”自2017年12月习近平首次提出以来，已成为他最喜欢的口号之一。尽管这个口号可能看似普通，但它巧妙地概括了当代中国人对新兴全球秩序（或者说混乱）的思考方式。随着中国的实力增长，西方决策者和分析师一直试图确定中国希望建立何种世界，以及北京打算如何利用自身实力构建全球秩序。然而，越来越明显的是，中国战略家们并非试图全面修订现有秩序或用其他东西取而代之，而是着手充分利用现有世界秩序，或者说即将到来的秩序。
While most Western leaders and policymakers try to preserve the existing rules-based international order, perhaps updating key features and incorporating additional actors, Chinese strategists increasingly define their goal as survival in a world without order. The Chinese leadership, from Xi on down, believes that the global architecture that was erected in the aftermath of World War II is becoming irrelevant and that attempts to preserve it are futile. Instead of seeking to save the system, Beijing is preparing for its failure.
尽管大多数西方领导人和决策者试图保护现有的基于规则的国际秩序，或许更新关键特征并纳入更多参与者，但中国战略家越来越将他们的目标定义为在一个没有秩序的世界中生存。中国领导层，从习近平到下层，相信二战后建立起来的全球架构正在变得无关紧要，而试图保护它的努力是徒劳的。北京方面并不寻求拯救这个体系，而是为其失败做准备。
Although China and the United States agree that the post–Cold War order is over, they are betting on very different successors. In Washington, the return of great-power competition is thought to require revamping the alliances and institutions at the heart of the post–World War II order that helped the United States win the Cold War against the Soviet Union. This updated global order is meant to incorporate much of the world, leaving China and several of its most important partners—including Iran, North Korea, and Russia—isolated on the outside.
尽管中国和美国都认为后冷战时代的秩序已经结束，但他们对于接班人的选择却存在着很大的差异。在华盛顿，人们认为大国竞争的回归需要重塑二战后的联盟和机构，这些联盟和机构帮助美国在冷战中战胜了苏联。这个更新的全球秩序旨在纳入世界的大部分地区，将中国和其一些最重要的伙伴，包括伊朗、朝鲜和俄罗斯，孤立在外。
Ukraine’s Future and Putin’s Fate
**July/August 2023**Published on June 20, 2023
- ANDREA KENDALL-TAYLOR is Senior Fellow and Director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. From 2015 to 2018, she was deputy national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
- ERICA FRANTZ is Associate Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University.
- They are the co-authors, with Natasha Lindstaedt, of Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes.
“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” U.S. President Joe Biden said of his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, a month after Russia launched a brutal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Biden’s off-the-cuff remark, which his administration swiftly sought to walk back, did not merely reflect anger at the destruction unleashed by Putin’s war of choice. It also revealed the deeply held assumption that relations between Russia and the West cannot improve as long as Putin is in office. Such a sentiment is widely shared among officials in the transatlantic alliance and Ukraine, most volubly by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, who last September ruled out peace talks until a new Russian leader is in place.
There is good reason to be pessimistic about the prospects of Russia’s changing course under Putin. He has taken his country in a darker, more authoritarian direction, a turn intensified by the invasion of Ukraine. The wrongful detention of The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich in March and the sentencing of the opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza to a 25-year prison term in April, for example, are eerily reminiscent of measures from Soviet times. Once leaders grow to rely on repression, they become reluctant to exercise restraint for fear that doing so could suggest weakness and embolden their critics and challengers. If anything, Putin is moving Russia more and more toward totalitarianism as he attempts to mobilize Russian society in support of not just his war on Ukraine but also his antipathy to the West.
If the West’s relations with Russia are unlikely to change while Putin is in power, perhaps things could improve were he to depart. But the track record of political transitions that follow the exits of longtime authoritarian leaders offers little room for optimism. The path to a better Russia is not just narrow—it is treacherous. Authoritarian leaders rarely lose power while still waging a war they initiated. As long as the war continues, Putin’s position is more secure, making positive change less likely. What is more, authoritarian regimes most often survive in the wake of the departure of longtime leaders such as Putin; were Putin to die in office or be removed by insiders, the regime would most likely endure intact. In such a case, the contours of Russian foreign policy would stay largely the same, with the Kremlin locked in a period of protracted confrontation with the West.
One development, however, could spark more substantive change in Russia: a Ukrainian victory. Kyiv’s triumph in the war raises the possibility, even if only slightly, that Putin could be forced out of office, creating an opening for a new style of Russian government. A Russian defeat in the war could galvanize the kind of bottom-up pressure that is needed to upend Putin’s regime. Such a development carries risks—of violence, chaos, and even the chance of a more hard-line government emerging in the Kremlin—but it also opens the possibility of a more hopeful future for Russia and for its relations with its neighbors and the West. Although fraught, the most likely path to a better Russia now runs through Ukrainian success.