研究生英语高级教程unit8-9-11.doc

精品文档How to Live and Love in the 21st Century1 There are many reasons to think quotidian ethics matter. For one, go back to Aristotle, the inventor of what has come to be known as virtue ethics. Aristotle recognized that human beings are essentially creatures of habit. If we want to be good, we have to get into the habit of being good. And habits are formed by constant repetition of behaviors. The daily practice of civility and politeness helps, because it reinforces a regard for others and concern for their welfare. Another reason to be worried about small acts of virtue is that life is, on the whole, made up of small things. Most of us manage to avoid murdering people or stealing their carsAmong the majority, what makes the difference between people we think of as good and those we regard as selfish, mean or just disagreeable, is very much how they behave over myriad small issues. Just think about the nicest people you know and most of the time youll discover that your regard for them is not based on their tireless work to eradicate world poverty, but a basic decency expressed through their everyday dealings with others2 Just as good character comes from the bottom up, so does a good society. This is why the idea of clamping down on anti-social behavior builds on a genuine insight. Respect for our fellow citizens starts with a respect for their right to leave a train without having to push past others trying to get on, or to sit on a bus without having someone shouting in their ears the whole waySo it is that good manner and civility need to be reclaimed by social progressivesForget etiquette：it really doesnt matter how you hold your fork or which way you pass the port. What matters is how you treat your host and fellow guests. Its not primarily a question of rules; its a question of having an attitude of respect and consideration. Still, rules help, even if they are only of thumb. Here are some of ours.3 Wrong numbers You should not accept or continue a phone call if a shop assistant is serving you. If Jean-Paul Sartre were alive, which he isnt, and he gave advice, which he didnt, he may well have shed light on the correct use of a mobile phone. So when we ignore the presence of someone like a shop assistant, treating them as absent and the absent caller as present, we are doing no less than denying their humanity. For the same reason, you should never text anybody while in the middle of a conversation. Or email, for that matter. You should always monitor your volume when chatting on your mobile. People who havent yet learned this basic fact show themselves to be oblivious to the presence of others. This is no small failing. David Hume argued, that morals are founded on a basic sympathy for our fellow creatures, by which we can appreciate that they too have plans, projects and experiences of the world, ones that may not involve having to listen to the fascinating details of where-we-are-now. Confucius says, “What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.” QED.4 Travelling right Stop for pedestrians at pedestrian crossings. Even someone who rejects conventional morality and asserts their Nietzschean will to power has reason to do this. You demonstrate your power over the pedestrian more effectively, not by ignoring them, but by showing that you voluntarily stop, even though you could just motor on by. Such a display of magnanimity is worthy of the ubermensch. On public transport, allow people to alight before you board. Do not put your feet up on the seats. As Burke said, “Society is indeed a contract,” and each of us has to meet our side of the bargains.5 Good Loving Do not smooch in the company of others. It is an oddity of human nature that while pornography is much sought after, we do not generally delight in seeing others slurpily manifest their love in public. Maybe it is just envy: the single are harshly reminded of the lack of affection in their lives, the long-attached of the lack of raw passion in theirs. Whatever the explanation, public smooching is exceedingly irritating to others, which means we shouldnt do it. Always dump in person, not by text, fax or email. Hamlet may have said that “conscience doth make cowards of us all”, but surely it takes a special lack of conscience to be so cowardly as to end a relationship any other way than face to face. Its the only way to preserve both respect for the dumped and the dignity of the dumper.6 New age If you go through a door first you should always hold it open for those who follow. Age, gender and social class make no difference. Extending this common courtesy to all is a sign that we hold everyone in equal respect. In other words, its nothing less than an expression of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the smallest possible level. Offer your seat to the elderly, but dont assume theyll want it. Marx may have got his economics and history terribly wrong, but when it comes to public transport, you cant do much better than apply his principle, “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” The trouble is that many older people are fitter than the fat thirty somethings who can barely get their arses into the seats on public transport, and they resent the assumption that they are too frail to stand for more than five minutes without having a cardiac arrest. So although in general you should offer the elderly a seat, avoid patronizing them when you do so. Offer your seat to a pregnant woman. But please, only if youre confident she really is pregnant.7 Social work If invited to someones house for dinner, dont be one of the ungrateful fed. Exactly what you do can vary, and it is silly to think that you must always bring wine or flowers, or send a thank-you message, even though both are usually advisable. The main thing is not to take your hosts hospitality for granted and show gratitude. Dont drink more at a party than you brought. This is a version of the so-called freeloader problem, which on a grander scale includes people who use public services without paying for them, accept charity while never giving, or ponce cigarettes but are never knowingly ponced themselves. This breaks Kants maxim that one should only act in a way that you can consistently wish all to follow. And, of course, we cant all freeload, as there would be no one to freeload from.8 Childs play Do include little Emily and baby Jack when addressing Christmas cards to their parents. Never tell somebody elses child off in front of them, or criticize adults for their poor parenting. Except when you should. Do not undertake. It may be a free country, but as John Stuart Mill pointed out, our liberty does not extend to causing harm to others. Undertaking is a safety and so a moral issue, not one of etiquette. Wipe down gym equipment after use. Stick to the swimming lane thats right for you. Remember that neither the cinema nor the theatre is your front room. Apart from, obviously, making sure your mobile is turned off, dont talk during the performance, and if you have to say something to your companion, make sure it is inaudible to others. If you want to talk, rent a video. Sorry, DVD. Dont punctuate your sentences with profanities in public. Its OK with fellow foul-mouthed fuckers, but many people are likely to be either offended or bored by your repetitive and unimaginative use of vocabulary. Dont think “I was here first” is a trump card. Let someone else go first if their need is greater. A person who only ever asserts their rights isnt necessarily always in the right. Dont write in and say these rules are stupid. Theyre not.The Global Food Crisis1 Last year the skyrocketing cost of food was a wake-up call for the planet. Between 2005 and the summer of 2008, the price of wheat and corn tripled, and the price of rice climbed fivefold, spurring food riots in nearly two dozen countries and pushing 75 million more people into poverty. But unlike previous shocks driven by short-term food shortages, this price spike came in a year when the worlds farmers reaped a record grain crop. This time, the high prices were a symptom of a larger problem tugging at the strands of our worldwide food web, one thats not going away anytime soon. Simply put: For most of the past decade, the world has been consuming more food than it has been producing. After years of drawing down stockpiles, in 2007 the world saw global carryover stocks fall to 61 days of global consumption, the second lowest on record. Agricultural productivity growth is only one to two percent a year. This is too low to meet population growth.2 High prices are the ultimate signal that demand is outstripping supply, that there is simply not enough food to go around. Such agflation hits the poorest billion people on the planet the hardest, since they typically spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food. Even though prices have fallen with the imploding world economy, they are still near record highs, and the underlying problems of low stockpiles, rising population, and flattening yield growth remain. Climate changewith its hotter growing seasons and increasing water scarcityis projected to reduce future harvests in much of the world, raising the specter of what some scientists are now calling a perpetual food crisis.3 With world population spiraling toward nine billion by mid-century, these experts now say we need a repeat performance, doubling current food production by 2030. In other words, we need another Green Revolution. And we need it in half the time. 4 Ever since our ancestors gave up hunting and gathering for plowing and planting some 12,000 years ago, our numbers have marched in lockstep with our agricultural prowess. Each advancethe domestication of animals, irrigation, wet rice productionled to a corresponding jump in human population. Every time food supplies plateaued, population eventually leveled off. Early Arab and Chinese writers noted the relationship between population and food resources, but it wasnt until the end of the 18th century that a British scholar tried to explain the exact mechanism linking the twoand became perhaps the most vilified social scientist in history.5 Thomas Robert Malthus, the namesake of such terms as “Malthusian collapse” and “Malthusian curse,” was a mild-mannered mathematician, a clergymanand, his critics would say, the ultimate glass-half-empty kind of guy. When a few Enlightenment philosophers, giddy from the success of the French Revolution, began predicting the continued unfettered improvement of the human condition, Malthus cut them off at the knees. Human population, he observed, increases at a geometric rate, doubling about every 25 years if unchecked, while agricultural production increases arithmeticallymuch more slowly. Therein lay a biological trap that humanity could never escape.6 “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” he wrote in his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. “This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence.” Malthus thought such checks could be voluntary, such as birth control, abstinence, or delayed marriageor involuntary, through the scourges of war, famine, and disease. He advocated against food relief for all but the poorest of people, since he felt such aid encouraged more children to be born into misery. That tough love earned him a nasty cameo in English literature from none other than Charles Dickens. When Ebenezer Scrooge is asked to give alms for the poor in A Christmas Carol, the heartless banker tells the do-gooders that the destitute should head for the workhouses or prisons. And if theyd rather die than go there, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.” 7 This isnt the first time the world has stood at the brink of a food crisisits only the most recent iteration. In 1943 as many as four million people died in the “Malthusian correction” known as the Bengal Famine. For the following two decades, India had to import millions of tons of grain to feed its people.8 Then came the Green Revolution. In the mid-1960s, as India was struggling to feed its people during yet another crippling drought, an American plant breeder named Norman Borlaug was working with Indian researchers to bring his high-yielding wheat varieties to Punjab. The new seeds were a godsend, says Kalkat, who was deputy director of agriculture for Punjab at the time. By 1970, farmers had nearly tripled their production with the same amount of work. 9 However, the Green Revolution Borlaug started had nothing to do with the eco-friendly green label in vogue today. With its use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to nurture vast fields of the same crop, a practice known as monoculture, this new method of industrial farming was the antithesis of todays organic trend. Rather, William S. Gaud, then administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, coined the phrase in 1968 to describe an alternative to Russias Red Revolution, in which workers, soldiers, and hungry peasants had rebelled violently against the tsarist government. The more pacifying Green Revolution was such a staggering success that Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. 10 Today, though, the miracle of the Green Revolution is over in Punjab: Yield growth has essentially flattened since the mid-1990s. Over irrigation has led to steep drops in the water table, now tapped by 1.3 million tube wells, while thousands of hectares of productive land have been lost to salinization and waterlogged soils. Forty years of intensive irrigation, fertilization, and pesticides have not been kind to the loamy gray fields of Punjab. 11 In the dusty farming village of Punjab, village elder Jagsir Singh, adds up the toll: “Weve had 49 deaths due to cancer in the last four years,” he says. “Most of them were young people. The water is not good. Its poisonous, contaminated water. Yet people still drink it.” 12 All the while the population clock keeps ticking, with a net of 2.5 more mouths to feed born every second, which leads us, inevitably, back to Malthus. 13 On a brisk fall day that has put color into the cheeks of the most die-hard Londoners, I visit the British Library and check out the first edition of the book that still generates such heated debate. Malthuss Essay on the Principle of Population looks like an eighth-grade science primer. From its strong, clear prose comes the voice of a humble parish priest who hoped, as much as anything, to be proved wrong. 14 Though his essays emphasized “positive checks” on population from famine, disease, and war, his “preventative checks” may have been more important. A growing workforce, Malthus explained, depresses wages, which tends to make people delay marriage until they can better support a family. Delaying marriage reduces fertility rates, creating an equally powerful check on populations. It has now been shown that this is the basic mechanism that regulated population growth in Western Europe for some 300 years before the industrial revolution. 15 None of the great classical economists saw the industrial revolution coming, or the transformation of economies and agriculture that it would bring about. The cheap, readily available energy contained in coaland later in other fossil fuelsunleashed the greatest increase in food, personal wealth, and people the world has ever seen, enabling Earths population to increase sevenfold since Malthuss day. And yet hunger, famine, and malnutrition are with us still, just as Malthus said they would be. New science of happiness1 For most of its history, psychology had concerned itself with all that ails the human mind: anxiety, depression, neurosis, obsessions, paranoia, delusions. Over the decades, a few psychological researchers had ventured out of the dark realm of mental illness into the sunny land of the mentally hale and hearty. Martin Seligman，a psychologist at University of Pennsylvania, wanted to look at what actively made people feel fulfilled, engaged and meaningfully happy. Mental health, he reasoned, should be more than the absence of mental illness. It should be something akin to a vibrant and muscular fitness of the human mind and spirit. What Makes Us Happy 2 So, what has science learned about what makes the human heart sing? More than one might imaginealong with some surprising things about what doesnt ring our inner chimes. Take wealth, for instance, and all the delightful things that money can buy. Research by Deiner, among others, has shown that once your basic needs are met, additional income does little to raise your sense of satisfaction with life. Neither do education, youth, marriage and sunny days. 3 On the positive side, religious faith seems to genuinely lift the spirit, though its tough to tell whether its the God part or the community aspect that does the heavy lifting. Friends? A giant yes. A 2002 study conducted at the University of Illinois by Diener and Seligman found that the most salient characteristics shared by the 10% of students with the highest levels of happiness and the fewest signs of depression were their strong ties to friends and family and commitment to spending time with them. “Word needs to be spread,” concludes Diener. “It is important to work on social skills, close interpersonal ties and social support in order to be happy.” Measuring Our Moods 4 Of course, happiness is not a static state. Even the happiest of peoplethe cheeriest 10%feel blue at times. And even the bluest have their moments of joy. That has presented a challenge to social scientists trying to measure happiness. That, along with the simple fact that happiness is inherently subjective