---
author: Big Think
date: '2026-10-02'
guest: ''
layout: post.njk
source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzol1qf9qTo
speaker: Big Think
tags:
- social-technology
- political-theory
- civic-theology
- consensus-spoofing
- republican-virtues
title: 自由主义：人类最伟大的社会技术及其与基督教的关联
summary: 文章探讨了自由主义作为一种社会技术的核心理念，即通过规则、合作和平等来组织大规模人口。它分析了自由主义的三大支柱（自由市场、共识欺骗、取消文化），并指出当代基督教在公民神学实践中如何通过“耐心、协商与相互包容”的精神，重建基督教与世俗民主制度之间的同盟关系，为公共生活提供新的治理模式。
insight: ''
draft: true
series: ''
category: philosophy-wisdom
area: society-thinking
project: []
people: []
companies_orgs: []
products_models: []
media_books: []
status: evergreen
---
### 自由主义：人类最伟大的社会技术
**Jonathan Rauch**: 我叫乔纳森·劳赫（Jonathan Rauch）。我是布鲁金斯学会（Brookings Institution）的高级研究员，我的整个职业生涯都在努力理解自由主义的价值观和制度，以及如何对它们进行改进。今天在 Big Think 节目中，我将探讨人类历史上最具革命性也最重要的一项技术——自由主义，自由主义在当代面临的威胁，以及一个令人惊讶的发现：我们的自由民主体制究竟是如何依赖于基督教的。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: My name is Jonathan Rauch. I'm a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and I've spent my career trying to understand liberal values and institutions and how to improve them. Today on Big Think, I'm going to talk about the most revolutionary and important technology in human history, which is liberalism, the modern threats to liberalism, and then the surprising discovery of how our liberal democracy relies on Christianity.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 感谢收看 Big Think。如果您想支持我们的工作，我们鼓励您加入我们的会员社区。作为会员，您将收到我们的季刊纸质杂志，这是一份精美编排的合集，汇集了最重要的思想和访谈。Big Think 专为渴望深入探索宏大思想的好奇者而设。若要支持您希望在世界上看到的媒体，请访问 bigthink.com/join。现在回到访谈。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Thank you for watching Big Think. If you'd like to support our work, we encourage you to join our members community. As a member, you'll receive our quarterly print magazine, a beautifully designed collection of the ideas and interviews that matter most. Big Think is for curious people who want to take deep dives into big ideas. To support the media you want to see in the world, go to bigthink.com/join. And now back to the interview.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 第一章：自由主义，人类最伟大的技术。在政治理论中，最重大、最深刻的问题之一就是“什么是自由主义”，因为它是当今政治制度的核心概念。对此有几种不同的剖析角度。其一是哲学维度的剖析。这可以追溯到霍布斯（Hobbes）等哲学家，但尤其是 17 世纪的哲学家约翰·洛克（John Locke），他被公认为自由主义的奠基人；随后还有伊曼努尔·康德（Immanuel Kant）以及美国的开国先贤们。詹姆斯·麦迪逊（James Madison）就是伟大的自由主义思想家之一。他们的核心思想是：组织人类社会的传统方式存在根本缺陷。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Chapter 1, Liberalism, humanity's greatest technology. One of the biggest and deepest questions in political theory is is what is liberalism because it's the core concept of today's political institutions and there are a few different cuts at that. One is philosophical. This goes back to philosophers like Hobbes but especially John Locke 17th century philosopher considered the founder of liberalism and then people like Immanuel Kant the founding fathers. James Madison was one of the great liberal thinkers and their core idea was that the traditional way of organizing human societies was flawed.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 这种传统方式是自上而下的。你知道，当一个群体的规模超过大约 150 或 200 人时，成员之间就绝无可能彼此熟识并建立起信任关系。因此，你必须组织大量的人口，而其中很多人彼此都是陌生人。传统的组织方式是设立一个酋长、头领或独裁者，建立一套等级森严的阶层结构，并由上至下发号施令——君主制、祭司集团，在这批思想家出现之前，人类社会一直都是这样运转的。直到他们站出来提出：让我们尝试一种截然不同的社会组织方式——在这里，由规则来取代统治者；在这里，努力促进合作而非诉诸强迫；在这里，确立人人平等的地位而非等级森严的阶层，因而在原则上每个人都是互换平等的。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And that's from the top down. You know, when you've got a group of more than about 150 or 200, there's no way they can all know each other and have trusting relationships. So, you're going to have large numbers of people to organize. And a lot of them are going to be strangers. And the traditional way of doing that is you'll have a chief or a boss or a dictator and you'll have a hierarchy and you'll have orders issued from the top down. Monarchy, priesthoods. That's the way it was done until these guys came along and said let's try organizing society in a radically different way where instead of having rulers you have rules and instead of having coercion you try to foster cooperation and where instead of having hierarchies you have equality. So in principle everyone's interchangeable.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 这一转变带来的结果就是：任何人都可以投票，任何人都能以相同的价格购买商品，任何人都可以进行一项科学实验并观察到相同的结果。一旦做到了这一点，你就拥有了自由主义的社会系统。而这正是其具有颠覆性变革意义的地方。在美国，在我一生的记忆里，“自由主义”（Liberalism）通常指的是政治左翼的一种学说，例如它倾向于支持政府项目，并且与保守主义针锋相对。然而，那与现在正在回归的含义有着非常大的区别，而后一种含义正是我今天谈论它时所采用的定义。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Well, that leads to anyone can vote, anyone can buy at the same price, and anyone can perform an experiment and be able to see the same thing. Once you do that, you got liberal social systems. And that's what's so transformative. In the United States, for my lifetime, liberalism meant a doctrine on the political left. it it likes government programs for example and it was opposed to conservatism. Well, that's a very different meaning from the meaning that's now coming back and it's the meaning that I use today whenever I talk about it.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 你或许可以把它理解为小写字母开头的自由主义（small-l liberalism），它无关左翼或右翼。自由主义既有偏左翼的流派，也有偏右翼的流派。但它往往被称为古典自由主义（classical liberalism）或传统自由主义。在欧洲，人们就直接称之为自由主义。这正是美国建国先贤们所指的自由主义，即《独立宣言》中所阐明的学说：人皆生而平等，并享有不可剥夺的权利。所以这就是我今天所要讨论的内容，以及由它衍生出来的方方面面。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: You could think of it maybe as small l liberalism and and that's not about left or right. There's left-leaning versions of liberalism and there are also right-leaning versions. But that's what often been called sometimes classical liberalism, traditional liberalism. In Europe, it's just called liberalism. But it's what our founding fathers in the United States meant by liberalism, which is the doctrine that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. So that's what I'm talking about today. and all of the many things that spin off of that.
### 自由主义作为社会技术的三大支柱
**Jonathan Rauch**: 我对自由主义的理解与常人略有不同。因为大多数谈论和思考自由主义的人都是政治理论家，他们会告诉你这是一种政治学说——它确实也是。自由主义正如《独立宣言》中所作的最佳表述那样，是一种坚信“人皆生而平等，并享有不可剥夺的权利”的思想。但自由主义同时也是一种构建社会的运作方式。它是一种社会技术（social technology）。它是用来解答人类所面临的最艰难问题的一种方式：你如何去组织大量人口之间的协作，特别是当其中绝大多数人彼此素昧平生的时候？
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: I have a slightly unusual take on on liberalism because most people who talk and think about it are political theorists who will tell you it's a political theory and it is. Liberalism is the idea stated best in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. But liberalism is also a way to structure societies. It's a social technology. It's a way to answer maybe the most difficult question humans have which is how do you organize cooperation of large numbers of people most of whom will be strangers to each other.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 自由主义对此给出了独一无二的答案，而且是一个极其有效的答案。作为一种社会技术，作为一种组织人类群体的方式，它的成效如此卓著，以至于在字面意义上彻底重塑了人类物种。这项社会技术的核心理念在于：依靠规则而非统治者来治理社会；依靠合作而非强制力来推进行动；设定所有人平等且地位可互换的前提，而不是建立一套让某些人凭借出身、财富或其他特权来掌权的等级制度。那么，你该如何将这一套构想具象化？落实到现实操作中时，它究竟意味着什么？
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And liberalism gives a unique answer to that and a uniquely effective answer to that. so effective that as a social technology as a way to organize our groups it is literally species transforming the social technology the core idea is you operate societies according to rules not rulers you use cooperation not coercion and you assume equality and the people are interchangeable instead of hierarchy in which some people are by virtue of their birth or their wealth or whatever in charge. So, how do you instantiate that? What does that actually mean when the rubber hits the road?
**Jonathan Rauch**: 事实表明，人类社会中存在着三大伟大的自由主义社会系统。在某些领域中它们各自独立，但它们共享着同一个核心理念，并且始终在相互作用；而我们每一天所珍视的一切——和平、繁荣、自由与真理——全都仰赖于它们。这其中的第一个系统是自由市场（liberal markets），通常被称为资本主义。其核心理念是建立一个广阔的市场，人们通过价格等机制进行协商与博弈；在理论渊源上，我们可以将其追溯至亚当·斯密（Adam Smith）。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Well, it turns out that there are three great liberal social systems and in some realms they're distinct, but they have the same core idea and they're interacting all the time and we all depend on them every day for everything we hold dear. Peace, prosperity, freedom, and truth. So, the first of those is liberal markets, often called capitalism. That's the idea that you have a big marketplace and people negotiate through mechanisms like prices and we trace that back in its theoretical form to Adam Smith.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 第二个重大的自由主义系统是自由民主（liberal democracy）。在美国，我们将其追溯到我们的建国先贤们，他们是这一理念最伟大的化身，并围绕这一理念构筑了整部宪法。自由民主的核心在于：权力的正当性源于被统治者的同意，这种同意通过选民的投票表达体现；政府设立多个分支，每个分支拥有各自的权力中心，从而实现相互竞争与妥协；设立多层级的政府架构；最重要的是，法律面前人人平等。这是自由民主的核心精髓：无论你是谁，都无法获得法外的特殊优待。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: The second big liberal system is liberal democracy. And this in the United States we trace to our founding fathers, the greatest avatars of this idea who built the constitution around it. And that's the idea of consent of the governed through their expression as voters, multiple branches of government, each with its own power centers so that they're competing and compromising multiple levels of government. and above all equality before the law. The core concept of a liberal democracy. You don't get special treatment depending on who you are.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 接下来是第三个系统。这个系统经常被人们忽略，但它与前两个系统同样属于自由主义范畴，也同样至关重要。我称之为“自由科学”（liberal science）。这是我们用来寻找真理、化解分歧的系统，它既能维护和平，又能让我们紧密扎根于客观现实。这个系统试图回答：当面对关于什么是真、什么是假的分歧时，我们究竟该如何解决？人们往往在这个问题上各执一词，而如果一个社会无法就契合现实的真理达成某种共识，它是无法维持运转的。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And then there's a third system. This is the one that often gets left out, but it's just as liberal and just as important as the other two. I call it liberal science. And that's our system for finding truth and settling disagreements in a way that both keeps the peace and keeps us in touch with reality. And that's the system that says, so how do we settle conflicts over what's true and what's false? People often disagree on that and you can't run a society if you can't come to some kind of consensus about truth that's in touch with reality.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 传统的解决方式是依赖祭司或者政治局，求助于神谕，或者依附于传统习俗以及像《圣经》这样的典籍。过去人们就是这样解决争端的，但效果并不理想。自由科学则主张：“不，我们要采取完全不同的做法。我们将要求人们在既定规则的约束下，展开持续不断的相互批评与思想交锋。”比如，如果有人做了一项实验，那么每个人都必须能够重复这项实验；又比如，任何人都不允许动用武力去强行终止对话。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Traditional way of doing that, you'd have a priest or a politburo. You'd use an oracle. You'd lean on tradition or a text like a Bible. That's how you'd settle things. Doesn't work very well. Liberal science says, "No, we're going to do something different. We're going to require people to be in a constant exchange of criticism according to rules." Like, if there's an experiment, everyone needs to be able to do it. And like no one can shut down the conversation using force.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 正是通过这种机制，我们确立了今天所看到的科学界、新闻界以及法律体系。那是一个开放式、基于规则的求真系统，这就是自由科学。我认为它是这三大系统中最重要、最成功的一个，因为它为我们带来了技术突破与知识的飞跃。毫不夸张地说，在当今世界，全球科学界在任何一个清晨所产生的新知识，都比整个人类物种在最初的 20 万年间所积累的还要多。但这三大系统全都在同一套原则下运转：它们依赖规则，具有非人格化的制度特征，并且保障系统内个体的平等地位。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And through that process, we're going to establish what looks today like science and journalism and law. And that's an open-ended rules-based truth seeking system. That's liberal science. I think it's the most important and successful of the three because that's given us the technological advances and the advances in knowledge. It is literally true that any given morning, our global world of science produces more new knowledge than humanity did in its first 200,000 years. But those three are all working on the same principles, which is they're relying on rules and they're depersonalized and people are equal within those systems.
### 规则的界限、内部争论与去中心化特质
**Jonathan Rauch**: 关于自由市场的一个巨大误解，是人们容易将它与自由意志主义（libertarianism）混为一谈。自由意志主义者确实是自由主义传统的一个分支，但他们这个分支在本质上追求的是将他们所认定的自由与个体自主性最大化。他们极力排斥政府，试图在一切可能的地方把政府干预降到最低。他们心目中的自由资本主义是一种非常放任自流的特殊形态。他们要求绝对最小化的政府干预，并极度强调私有财产权是一项固有的自然权利。他们当中的许多人甚至断言，政府根本无权征税，也无权在狭窄边界之外对财产进行监管。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: A big misconception about liberal markets confuses it with libertarianism. And and libertarians are a branch of liberalism, but they're a branch that's really fundamentally they maximize what what they consider freedom, individual autonomy. They want to minimize government at every turn. And their idea of liberal capitalism is a specific type that's it's very laissez-faire. They want absolutely minimal government intervention. They put a strong emphasis on property rights as inherent rights. Many of them will say government doesn't even have the right to tax or to regulate property beyond very narrow limits.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 自由意志主义只是自由主义传统中的一条支流，而且仅仅是一条支流而已。自由主义的核心要宽广得多，它为制定和探索资本主义的不同规则留下了充裕的空间。自由经济与自由市场的开山鼻祖、伟大的原初理论家亚当·斯密，并不是一个主张小政府的自由意志主义者。他坚信政府应当提供关键的基础公共服务，坚信政府应当投资提供教育。历史上许多伟大的自由主义思想家一直以来都持这种观点。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Well, that is one tributary of the liberal tradition, but it's only that. The core of liberalism is much broader and it leaves a lot of room to define different types of rules for capitalism. The founder, the great theorist, original theorist of liberal economics, liberal markets, Adam Smith was not a small government libertarian. He believed that government should provide important basic public services. He believed that it should provide education. Uh, a lot of the great liberal thinkers have always thought that.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 正因如此，自由主义内部存在着巨大的讨论空间，这有时会让很多人感到困惑，包括我自己也曾如此。在这一传统内部，关于具体规则应当如何制定，始终存在着大量的争辩。例如：该如何制定土地分区规划法？是否应当出台反垄断法？财产权的合理边界究竟在哪里？诸如此类。这些都是极为艰难、充满争议且举足轻重的问题。但同样重要的是要意识到，这些争论全都是在同一个基本框架内作画，而框架的边界就是：在自由主义的大背景下，我们正在探寻能够最大化我们的和平、繁荣、自由与知识的规则。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And there's room in liberalism, this is why it sometimes can be confusing to lots of people, including me. There's tons of room within this tradition to debate what the specific rules should be. Like, you know, what do you do about zoning laws? Should you have anti-monopoly laws? What are the boundaries of property rights? All of these things. And these are hard and contested questions and they're super important. But it's equally important to realize that they're all coloring within the same lines and that those lines are the idea that we are looking for rules that maximize our peace and our prosperity and freedom and knowledge within that larger context of liberalism.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 这三种形态的自由主义——自由市场、自由民主、自由科学——都是博大而宽广的领域，它们内部都伴随着关于具体规则应如何设定的持续争论。以自由民主为例：你究竟希望引入多少直接民主成分？是想遵循建国先贤的设计——仅每隔几年举行一次选举，其余事务全权交由代议士处理？还是想效仿某些州的实践，采用直接公投和公民倡议制度？在宪法中究竟应当明文保障哪些权利？行政权力的边界又在何处？如此种种，不一而足。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Liberalism of all three types, liberal markets, liberal democracy, liberal science, they're all big broad fields and they all have constant debates within themselves over what the specific rules should be. So liberal democracy, how much direct democracy do you want? Do you want to do it like the founders did it, which is you only have elections every few years and the rest is done by representatives? Do you want to do it with direct referenda and initiative like some of the states do? What do you guarantee in the constitution? What are the limits of executive authority? On and on and on.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 这正是自由主义者日常赖以生存的思考工作。人们常拿这个开玩笑，说一个典型的自由主义者甚至都无法和自己达成一致。自由科学也是同样的道理。它的巨大优势之一，就在于自由科学的边界处于持续的界定中；这里所说的自由科学也包括新闻业，以及所有试图通过可重复验证的调查报道和科学实验来寻求客观真理的领域。他们总是在不断地就什么是正确的方法论展开激烈争辩：这究竟算不算真正的科学？是否有某种方法比其他方法更好？新闻业的职业伦理边界在哪里？
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: This is what liberals do for a living. And to the extent that people joke about it, they say, you know, a liberal is someone who can't even agree with herself. And the same is true in liberal science. One of its great strengths is that the boundaries of liberal science, I include in that journalism and all the fields that try to seek objective truth by doing replicable reporting and experiments. They are constantly arguing with each other about what the right methodologies are. Is it real science? Is this some other process better than others? What are the boundaries of journalism?
**Jonathan Rauch**: 这种持续的争辩恰恰是制度的特性（feature），而非缺陷（bug），因为威权体制无一具备这种能力。没有哪个威权系统能够就规则和指导方针展开持续不断的公开讨论，也没有哪个威权系统能在面临危机时刻动态调整这些规则——而我认为许多人都会认同，自由主义在今天正处于这样一个危机关头。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And and that's a feature, not a bug, because none of the authoritarian systems can do that. None of them can be in a constant conversation about what the rules and guidelines should be and about how to readjust those rules when we're at a moment of crisis as I think a lot of people would agree liberalism is today.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 我此前提到过，自由主义是一项独一无二的社会技术。世上没有任何其他事物可以与之比拟；与历史上存在过的一切制度以及当今可供选择的其他替代方案——无论是威权主义、民粹主义还是神权政治——相比，它都具有彻底的革命性。它究竟有何与众不同？它具备一些极其关键的特质，并由此带来了各种各样的深远影响。那么，这些特质是什么呢？首先，它是去中心化的（decentralized）。如果你试图在世界上找一位“自由世界的总指挥”，你是绝对找不到的。世界上不存在所谓“科学界总统”，也不存在“市场总指挥”。美国虽然有一位总统，但他只是一个被赋予具体法定权力的个人；并没有哪位总统能凌驾于整部宪法之上，也没有哪位总统可以独揽统摄所有的州、所有的法官以及所有的政府分支部门。而这一切绝非偶然——
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: I mentioned that liberalism is a unique social technology. There's nothing else like it and it's revolutionary compared to everything that came before and everything else that's available as alternatives today. you know, authoritarianism, um, populism, theocracy, you name it. What's different about it? It has some super important traits that have all kinds of implications. Okay, what are those? First, it's decentralized. You can go and look for the president of liberal world. You won't find anyone. There's no president of science. There's no president of the market. There is a president of the United States, but it's a individual with specific powers. There's no president of the whole constitution. There's no president of all the states and all the judges and all the branches of government. And that's on
### 自由主义的核心特征：去中心化与信息流动
**Speaker**: 目的。自由主义认为，听着，人类不能被赋予庞大的权力，不能让单单一个人总揽大权。部分原因在于，掌权者极有可能走向腐败并追逐私利；但更深层的原因在于，即便那个人是柏拉图式的哲人王守护者、拥有至高无上的智慧，他们也绝不可能掌握哪怕是接近充足的信息。这个世界太广袤了，单凭任何一个人，所能知晓的也不过是其中极其微小的一隅。
Original English
**Speaker**: purpose. Liberalism says, look, human beings can't be trusted with huge amounts of power with one person in charge. Partly because that person's likely to be corrupted and self-interested, but partly because even if that person's a platonic style philosopher, guardian who's perfectly wise, they're not going to have anything like enough information, the world is so vast and one person can't know more than the tiniest fraction of that.
**Speaker**: 因此相反，你拥有的是一个去中心化的系统，信息始终在从四面八方汇聚与流淌。而这正如伟大的经济学家 F·A·哈耶克所指出的那样，正是自由市场的精髓所在。自由市场是一台庞大无比的信息处理机器，而所有这些分散的信息最终都凝结、呈现在价格之中。科学领域亦是如此。自由民主政体同样如此：你拥有各个层级、各个分支的政府机构、议员与委员会，他们不断汲取信息，并致力于在谈判博弈中周转消化这些信息。当然，自由科学也是同一逻辑——极其去中心化的研究人员、实验室、学术机构和大学遍布全球，各自从事着不同的研究，却依然能够紧密协同。
Original English
**Speaker**: So instead, you have a decentralized system where information is always flowing through from all kinds of quarters. And that of course is the genius as FA Hayek the great economist pointed out of a liberal market. It's a gigantic information processing machine and those information are all represented in the price. The same is true of science. The same is true of liberal democracy where you've got all of those levels of government and branches of government and agencies and politicians and committees pulling in information and looking to cycle those through negotiations. And of course the same is true of liberal science. very decentralized researchers, labs, institutions, universities all over the world doing different things yet coordinating.
### 去身份化与大规模非强迫协作
**Speaker**: 第二个核心特征：去身份化（非个人化）。当然，在现实中世界并不完美，我们还有很长的路要走；但在理想的自由主义体系中，你是谁应该完全无关紧要。如果我今天在自己所在的华盛顿特区市中心做一个实验，另一个在孟加拉重复这项实验的人也理应获得相同的结果。我们各自是谁毫无关系。市场中的价格和规则也是如此；在自由民主中，我们每个人都拥有一张完全平等的选票。这里的核心理念在于，一旦你剥离了个人的立场与特权，让所有人成为平等的、可互换的主体，这就使我们能够超越少数恰好达成一致、属于同一个部落或身处同一地理空间的人群，去实现大规模协同。我们现在能够协调数以百万计、数以亿计甚至数以十亿计遵从这些共同规则的人类。
Original English
**Speaker**: Second key characteristics, depersonalized. In an ideal liberal system, of course, the world isn't perfect. We have some distance to go, but in an ideal liberal system, it shouldn't matter who you are. If I do an experiment today in downtown Washington DC where I'm sitting, someone else who repeats that information in Bengal should get the same result. It shouldn't matter who we are. Same with prices, rules and markets, liberal democracy, we all get one vote. The idea here is if you take personal standpoint and privilege out of it so that we become interchangeable that allows us to coordinate among not just a handful of people who happen to agree on things or be in the same tribe or be in the same physical place. We can now coordinate millions, hundreds of millions, billions of human beings who follow those rules.
**Speaker**: 这正是科学的伟大之处。它是一项庞大的全球性事业，其中某个国家的研究人员可以在一个周末内鉴定出冠状病毒的基因序列，两周后，另一个国家——事实上是许多不同的国家——的研究人员便能设计出针对它的疫苗。所有人都在通过这些制度网络进行通力协作。顺便说一句，这也有助于保障自由，因为它意味着任何人都无法成为独裁者去颐指气使地命令别人，而这就自然引出了第三个特征。
Original English
**Speaker**: And that's the greatness of science. It's one gigantic global enterprise in which someone in one country can identify the corona virus over a weekend and two weeks later someone in a different country many countries in fact can design a vaccine for it. All collaborating through these institutions by the way that also helps with freedom because it means you can't be an authoritarian and command other people which leads to the third.
**Speaker**: 第三个特征是自愿性与非强迫性。自由主义总是在孜孜不倦地寻找替代强迫与暴力的解决方式。诚然，有时强迫和强制力是必不可少的——有人会违法乱纪，国家必须征收税收。但自由主义体系一直在探索如何将这种强迫降到最低，转而为人们提供自愿合作的正向激励。当然，这正是亚当·斯密“看不见的手”的神奇魔力所在。但这也是科学的奇妙之处：你激励人们去开展实验，通过彼此说服来创造新知，没有任何人有权力说：“如果你犯了错，我就要把你关进监狱，或者奉国家权威之名烧光你所有的著作。”这种非强迫性不仅捍卫了自由，而且由于它为庞大体量的人群提供了大规模协作的积极激励，因而能为你带来更优异的成果。
Original English
**Speaker**: It's consensual. It's non-coercive. Liberalism is always looking for alternatives to coercion and force. Now, sometimes you need coercion and force. People break the law. You've got to raise taxes. But they're looking for ways to minimize this and instead give people incentives to cooperate. And of course, that's the magic of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. But that's also the magic of science. You inspire people to do experiments and persuade each other to create knowledge. No one's in a position to say, "I'm going to throw you in jail if you're wrong, or I'm going to have all your books burned by authority of the state." That non-coercion not only protects freedom, but it also gives you better results because it's giving people positive incentives to cooperate on a gigantic scale.
### 自我纠错机制与历史的演进方向
**Speaker**: 这几项革命性变革中的第四个，便是自我纠错能力。这时肯定会有人反驳说：“看看历史上有多少事情彻底走偏了，根本没有得到纠正，甚至长达两百年都未见起色。”他们会直指蓄奴制。毫无疑问，在科学界，错误的理论有时会残存很长一段时间；在政治领域，类似吉姆·克劳法案这种恶劣的局面也会持续极其漫长的岁月。然而，自由主义作为一种社会制度之所以独一无二，是因为在人类组织社会的所有其他体系中，你无论把历史的磁带向前倒带还是向后播放，都看不到任何具有确定性的进步方向。你不会看到它明确走向平等或更高的人权，看不到走向更丰富的知识或更大的自由，也看不到真正的经济进步。在人类历史的大部分时间里，经济增长曲线基本上都是绝对平缓的，毫无波澜。
Original English
**Speaker**: The fourth of these revolutionary changes is self-correcting. Now, someone's going to say, "Look at all the things that went wrong and didn't get corrected at all or maybe didn't get corrected for 200 years." and they're going to point to slavery. And unquestionably in science, you get bad theories that survive for a long time. In politics, you get bad situations like Jim Crow that last a very long time. And yet, liberalism is unique as a system because all other systems for organizing society, you can run the tape either forward or backward, and you won't see a direction of progress. You won't see progress specifically toward equality or greater human rights. You won't see progress toward greater knowledge or freedom. You won't see economic progress. For most of human history, basically the economic growth curve was flat. Nothing happened.
**Speaker**: 但自由主义与众不同。它具有明确的方向性，那就是随着时间的推移不断进行自我纠错。所有这些制度设计的核心，都在于主动探寻并发现彼此的谬误与盲区。这意味着在自由主义的历史磁带上，你永远能清晰分辨出它正在朝哪个方向运转。如果你看到更多知识被生产出来，看到越来越多的人被纳入人权与平等的保护伞之下，看到政府日益依据法治规则运行而减少专制作风，看到市场持续创造增长并不断拓展，你就能明确知道历史磁带正在向前挺进。而这正是自由主义独具的特质。
Original English
**Speaker**: Liberalism is different. It has a direction which is it self-corrects over time. All of these systems about looking for and finding each other's mistakes and errors. And that means the liberal tape, you can always tell it's running in a direction. If you're seeing the production of more knowledge, if you're seeing more and more people being drawn into the circle of human rights and equality, if you're seeing government that is more rules-based according to rule of law and less authoritarian, and if you're seeing markets that are producing growth and expanding, you always know which way the tape is running. And that is unique to liberalism.
### 矛盾与冲突是特性而非缺陷：个人的亲历见证
**Speaker**: 许多人在认识自由主义时常犯一个错误，马克思当年就犯了这个错误。自由主义体系往往充满了纷争与矛盾，常常会犯下错误，也会引发人们无休止的争吵。马克思认为这是资本主义不可救药的致命缺陷——它蕴含着内在矛盾，并且在这些矛盾的激化演变过程中，系统终将自爆或瓦解，进而被共产主义所取代。然而，所有这些人未能洞悉的是：体系内部的那些矛盾、那些冲突、那些持续不断的挑战，恰恰是它的内在特性（feature），而非程序漏洞（bug）。
Original English
**Speaker**: One mistake that I think a lot of people make about liberalism, Marx made this mistake. It's often full of conflicts and contradictions and it'll be getting stuff wrong and it'll have people arguing about things and Marx thought that this was a fatal flaw of capitalism. It had internal contradictions and in the working out of those contradictions it would blow itself up or fall apart and communism would then supersede it. And what all these people don't understand is that those contradictions, those conflicts, those constant challenges within the system are a feature, not a bug.
**Speaker**: 因为正是通过在这些矛盾中不断周旋、化解与推演，我们才得以引入全新的观念、全新的体制、全新的法律与妥协，带来所有那些一方面孕育活力与变革、另一方面又维系整体宏观稳定性的要素。因此，确实，自由主义有时会陷入停滞，在支流漩涡中打转；糟糕的状况可能会延续很久。我对这种经历再熟悉不过了。我是一名美国同性恋者，一个出生于1960年美国的男同性恋。在我成长的那个人人自危的时代，同性恋行为在全美每一个州都是违法的，我们真真切切面临着牢狱之灾的威吓。在当时，若说今天的我能够与一名男子结为合法夫妻、生活得幸福美满，那是完全不可思议的。
Original English
**Speaker**: Because working through those is what allows us to bring in the new ideas, the new systems, the new laws, the compromises, all the things that allow for both dynamism and change on the one hand and yet an overarching stability on the other. And so yeah, liberalism can get stuck for a while and kind of a side eddy. Bad things can go on for a long time. I know that story. I am a homosexual American. I'm a gay man born in America in 1960. In every single state in the union, it was illegal to be gay. We were actually menaced with prison in the world I grew up in. The idea that today I would be married to a man, happily married, unbelievable.
**Speaker**: 然而，也正是在这样一个系统内部，社会的崇高追求与社会对待同性恋群体的残酷现实之间，那显而易见的内在矛盾被彻底激发出来。这种断裂促成了广泛的焦虑与反思，催生了抗议抗争，引发了司法诉讼，并最终唤醒了人们的良知。而今，我幸福地结婚已经超过十年了。因此，面对那些声称“自由主义并不完美、它会陷入僵局”的人，我总是鼓励并告诉他们：“你说得没错，但世界上没有任何人提出过比它更好的主意，事实上，连一个勉强能望其项背的主意都没有。”
Original English
**Speaker**: And yet it was within that system that the contradictions, the obvious contradictions between the aspirations of society, how it's supposed to treat people and the reality of society, how it was treating gay people. That became something that led to ferment. It led to protest. It led to litigation. And it sparked people's consciences. and here I am happily married now for over 10 years. And so I just encourage people who say, "Yeah, liberalism isn't perfect. It gets stuck." I say, "Yeah, but no one has a better idea." And actually no one has an idea that's nearly as good.
### 自由主义的繁重门槛与四项核心产物
**Speaker**: 自由主义是极具挑战性的。它要求人们恪守各种繁复的规则，要求人们在面对同伴时努力忽略彼此的特定身份，要求人们尽可能摒弃部落归属感，与全球各地素昧平生的陌生人在各种项目上携手协作。它保护少数群体的权利，而这往往是多数群体极不情愿去做的。自由主义在深层次上是极其反直觉的。相比于部落主义或君主制这些深植于人类出厂本能的治理模式，自由主义对普通人提出的要求要严苛得多。这就意味着，我们这些信仰自由主义的人，在余生的每一天清晨醒来，都必须从零开始重新向世人阐释这套系统。我们的孩子未来必须这么做，他们的后代以及后代的后代也必须如此往复。
Original English
**Speaker**: Liberalism is very challenging. It requires people to follow all kinds of rules. It requires them to try to blind themselves to the identity of the people they're dealing with. It asks them to try to put aside their tribal affiliations, cooperate with total strangers across the world on all kinds of projects. It protects minority rights, something that majorities never like to do. It's deeply counterintuitive liberalism. asks a whole lot of people way more than tribalism or monarchy which are our hardwired systems of governance. And so that means that every day we who are liberal have to get up every morning for the rest of our lives and reexplain this system from scratch. And our kids will have to do it and their kids and so will their kids.
**Speaker**: 我们阐释这套系统的一种方式，就是我一直以来的做法——指出这是一套保障我们权利的系统。但对大众而言，最关键的论证方式，在于审视自由主义的实际产物，直面反问：它究竟为我们带来了什么？答案在至少四个不同维度上是显而易见的。排名不分先后：第一是自由（Freedom）。“自由主义”（Liberal）一词词根源自“自由”（Free）。自由且平等的个体这一理念是深植其中的；并非所有制度都具备这一基因。但这意味着系统内建了某些防护机制，以防专制威权的个人、宗族或政治运动企图攫取系统控制权、进而边缘化或排挤驱逐他人。没有其他任何体系能够提供如此高度的自由。
Original English
**Speaker**: And one way we do that is the way I've been doing it, which is by saying this is the system that protects our rights. But the most important way to do it for a lot of people is to look at the products of liberalism to say what is this actually done for us? And the answer here is very evident on at least four different fronts. So no particular order. Freedom. Liberal comes from the root of free. The idea of free and equal individuals is hardwired. That's not true of every system. But that means that there are certain builtin guard rails against authoritarian individuals and tribes and movement to try to take over the system and marginalize or force out other people. No other system provides that degree of freedom.
**Speaker**: 第二是繁荣（Prosperity）。在人类尝试过的无数其他制度中——现代世界包括了共产主义，旧时代包括了封建主义——没有任何一种制度能够产生持续的经济增长与繁荣，而我们今天却把这种繁荣视为理所当然。当GDP年增长率仅为比如2%时，我们便觉得这是一个平庸黯淡的年头，却完全没有意识到，在以往的旧体制下，一个世纪能实现2%的增长就已经相当了不起了。因此，我们享受着身边所目睹的这份巨大繁荣。当然，繁荣也伴随着相生的各种问题，这也正是我们前面讨论的持续重估与动态调整机制所必需面对的，但它是不可或缺的基础。
Original English
**Speaker**: Second, prosperity. None of the other systems that have been tried and there have been many and they include in the modern world communism and they include in the previous world feudalism. None has produced consistent economic growth and prosperity which we now take for granted. We assume it's a you know mediocre year if GDP growth rises by I don't know 2% a year not realizing that under previous regimes 2% a century would be pretty good. So we get this tremendous prosperity that we see around us. Of course, we get problems that go with that and that's part of the constant re-evaluation and adjustment that we talked about, but that's essential.
### 知识爆发与终极产物：和平作为社会技术
**Speaker**: 第三，我们收获了知识（Knowledge）。这套系统最伟大的特质或许在于：人类如今在任何一个普通早晨所创造的新知识总量，字面意义上已经超越了我们作为物种存在最初20万年所积累的总和。而且我们生产知识的速率还在不断加速。按照现代科学的所有衡量标准来看，我们学得越快，学到的知识就越庞大。而现在人工智能又加入到了这一进程中，未来的潜力难以估量。没有其他任何体系能以如此惊人的速度催生知识，也没有其他任何体系能够引导我们对“谁是正确的”达成理性共识、促使我们开展建设性对话，并通过实证检验与理性论证来相互说服。
Original English
**Speaker**: Third, we get knowledge. Possibly the greatest aspect of the system is that humanity now produces literally more new knowledge in any given morning than it did in our first 200,000 years as a species. And the rate at which we're producing knowledge is only accelerating. By all the measures of science that we have, the faster we learn, the more we learn. And now AI is coming to that mix. So who knows? No other system produces knowledge at that rate. And no other system is able to bring us into agreement about who's right, force us into constructive dialogue, persuade each other through experiment and rational argumentation.
**Speaker**: 而这就引出了自由主义实际上最根本的终极产物——那就是和平（Peace）。自由主义的一个决定性关键要素，就是它致力于以非强迫、协作的方式来平息争端，努力寻求和平的化解途径。它倡导：“听着，我来遵守这些规则，你也遵守同样的规则。我们对其中的部分规则达成共识；我们在某些原则上可能存有分歧，不得不重新谈判协商。但只要我们生活在一个能够共同遵从规则的社会里，我们就不必兵戎相见，不必借助暴力和流血来解决争端。我们能够找到替代方案来化解我们的分歧。”
Original English
**Speaker**: And that leads to what may in fact be the ultimate liberal product and that's peace. A crucial element of liberalism, another defining element is it tries to settle disputes in non-coercive cooperative ways. It looks for peaceful ways to resolve things. It says, "Look, I'm going to follow some rules and you're going to follow the same rules. We're going to agree to some of those rules. We may disagree about principles and have to renegotiate. But if we live in a society where we can follow those rules, we don't have to go to war with each other and settle things through violence, through bloodshed. We can find alternative ways to end our disputes."
**Speaker**: 归根结底，所有这些子系统都是在践行这一使命：自由市场在不强迫人们陷入暴力冲突的前提下分配稀缺资源；自由民主迫使人们在跨越各级政府架构中相互妥协、理性谈判，而无需诉诸武力；而自由科学则平息了关于“现实本质”的争端——而在人类历史上，这往往曾引发惨绝人寰的大规模宗教战争。据现代研究估算，在那些历史宗教战争中，现今德国领土上多达三分之一的人口丧生其中。你何曾见过“科学战争”？从未见过科学家们端起弓箭或喷火器、开着坦克去把持不同理论的同行消灭殆尽。他们必须通过摆事实讲道理来相互说服。因此我认为，和平才是自由主义最崇高的产物。如果你非要逼我从这四项成就中选出最珍贵的一项，那或许就是和平。
Original English
**Speaker**: And ultimately, that's what all of these systems do. Liberal markets allocate scarce resources without forcing people into violent conflicts. Liberal democracy forces people to compromise and negotiate with each other all across multiple levels of government without violence. And liberal science settles disputes about the nature of reality which historically have caused massive wars, wars of religion. It's thought today, you know, a third of the population of today's Germany was killed in those wars. You've never seen science wars where scientists, you know, get their bows and arrows or their flamethrowers or whatever and get in tanks and start wiping each other out. They have to persuade. And peace, I think, is the ultimate product of liberalism. And maybe if you had to pin me down on the one of the four that's most precious, it might be that one.
**Speaker**: 如果人们只能记住关于自由主义的一点，那就是：我们过去往往过于抽象地去理解它，把它仅仅看作一种宏大宣言或某种政治哲学理论。但事实上，它更是一种社会技术（social technology）。它是人类有史以来所发明出的最重要、也是最卓越的社会技术，因为它使我们能够在数十亿人的规模上、在全行星乃至国家尺度上协调人类纷繁复杂的事务。而且……
Original English
**Speaker**: If people take away one thing about liberalism, it's that we too often think of it abstractly, you know, as a grand statement or as a political theory. But it is also a social technology. And it's the most important human social technology and the best social technology ever invented because it allows us to coordinate human affairs on a scale in the billions on a planetary scale as well as a national scale. And
### 知识宪法与真理的判定
**Jonathan Rauch**：它带来了前所未有的和平、自由、知识与繁荣。所有这些确实都是事实。而其中最容易被忽视的部分，正是我所称的“知识宪法”（the constitution of knowledge）。这也是我认为自己倾注最多思考、耗费最多笔墨的部分，而且在某种程度上，它也是当前承受压力最大的部分。
任何人类社会在任何规模下——无论是小部落还是大国家——所面临的最艰难问题之一，就是去判定对于外部世界的客观真理，究竟谁是对的，谁是错的。在某些情况下这并不一定很难：如果你生活在一个小型人类群体中，面临的问题是“灌木丛里的动静究竟是老虎还只是一阵风？”、“去哪里能找到水源？”或者“邻近部落在哪里安营扎寨？”，要与现实保持接触并不算太难。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: It allows unprecedented peace, freedom, knowledge, and prosperity. And all of those things are true. And the most overlooked part of this is what I call the constitution of knowledge, which is the part that that I think I've given the most thought to and have spilled the most ink on. and in some ways is is the part that may be under the most strain right now.
One of the hardest problems that any human society faces at any scale, whether it's a small tribe or a large nation is figuring out who's right and who's wrong about what's actually true in the outside world. Now, that's not necessarily hard. And if you're in a small group of humans and you have a question like, "Is that a tiger in the bush or just a breeze?" or "Where can I find water?" or "Where is the neighboring tribe camped?" It's not too hard to stay in touch with reality.
**Jonathan Rauch**：但是，只要你触及任何比这更抽象的问题，比如“为什么不下雨？”、“我应该向哪位神灵祈祷才能降雨？”，分歧和争论就会出现。而很多事情都系于这些争端之上。这些分歧往往会导致冲突和战争；或者为了避免冲突，你最终会求助于威权主义式的解决方案，比如祭司和神谕，而这些与现实根本毫无关联。结果就是，社会变得既压抑又愚昧，而在最初的两三十万年里，人类事务正是这样运作的。从知识的角度来看，这种模式的结果相当糟糕。
于是，自由主义应运而生。它审视了这段充满瑕疵的历史，又审视了16世纪和17世纪的宗教战争。欧洲人爆发内战，天主教徒对抗新教徒，新教徒内部也自相残杀，在极其漫长的时间里造成了极其巨大的死亡人数。人们不禁发问：“我们该如何阻止这种杀戮？”他们给出的回答是：“好吧，让我们转向一种全新的方式来判定什么是真，什么是假。”
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: But as soon as you get to anything much more abstract than that, like why is it not raining? What god should I pray to to make it rain? You get contention. And a lot depends on those disputes. Those contentions often lead to conflict and war or to avoid them you wind up with authoritarian solutions like priests and oracles which have no contact with reality at all. So you get societies that are oppressive and ignorant and that's the way we ran human affairs for the first 200 300,000 years. It didn't work out super well from the point of view of knowledge.
So, liberalism comes along and it looks at this spotty record and then it looks at the wars of religion in the 1500s and 1600s. People in Europe went to war, Catholic versus Protestant, Protestant versus Protestant, and huge huge numbers of deaths over a long period of time. And they said, "How can we stop that?" And they said, "Well, let's switch to a different way of deciding what's true and what's false."
**Jonathan Rauch**：也就是说，我们要确立一套规则，我们必须用任何人都能见证的证据和合理论证来说服彼此。无论你是谁，都不应该影响结论。因此，我们要设立几条基本原则：第一条是没有最终决定权（no final say）。不会再有任何王公或祭司有权强行终止辩论，你永远可以提出下一个质疑。另一条原则是没有纯粹的个人权威（no purely personal authority）。我不会因为自己的肤色、出生于哪个部落或任何其他个人身份而拥有特权发言权。如果我说我能观察到某件事物，你也必须能够观察到；如果它对我而言合乎理性，对你也必须合乎理性。这便为一套让人们可以相互纠错、相互寻找疏漏的机制奠定了基石。
在这样的体系中，我们找到了一种应对“现实”之核心困境的方法——即我们所有人天生都带有偏见。人类被记录在册的认知偏差有数十种之多，但我们却无法看清自己的偏见。这些偏见阻碍我们把握现实，而我们自己却视而不见。然而，你能看清我的某些偏见，我也能看清你的某些偏见。如果我们将彼此置于一个拥有强制我们达成共识、迫使我们相互说服和相互批评的规则与制度环境中，我们就能驾驭这些偏见，让它们相互对抗、相互制衡。而这一过程的产物，就是真理。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Let's say we're going to have a set of rules and we're going to have to persuade each other using evidence and reason argument that anyone can see. It shouldn't matter who you are. So, we're going to have a couple rules. One is no final say. You don't have a prince or a priest who's in a position to shut down the debate. You can always ask the next question. And the other is no purely personal authority. I don't get special say because of my color or because who I was what tribe I was born into or anything else. If I say I can see it, you have to be able to see it. If it seems rational to me, it has to seem rational to you. That gives us the foundation for a system in which people can start correcting each other and looking for each other's mistakes.
In a system like that, we figure out a way to cope with the fundamental problem of reality, which is that we are all inherently biased. There are dozens and dozens of documented human cognitive biases, but we cannot see our own biases. They prevent us from grasping reality, but we cannot see our own biases. However, you can see some of mine, and I can see some of yours. And if we're put into an environment where we have rules and institutions that force us to agree, that force us to persuade each other and criticize each other, we put those biases, we harness them, we pit them against each other. And the product of that is truth.
### 制衡与制度化探索
**Jonathan Rauch**：我将这套机制称为“知识宪法”。我为什么要用这个词？因为我刚才概述的这项原则，在结构上与《美国宪法》的核心原则几乎完全一致。《美国宪法》假定社会中必然存在许多不同的派系，人们来自不同地域，拥有不同利益，秉持不同意识形态。面对这种情况该怎么办？麦迪逊在《联邦党人文集》中写下了那句名言：“如何解决野心的问题？你无法遏制野心。唯一有效的办法，就是用野心对抗野心。”我认为这是整个政治理论史上最伟大的单一构想。你通过宪法迫使人们妥协，以此来驾驭野心。这就是为什么总统可以否决国会的法案，但国会可以推翻否决；法院可以推翻国会的法律，而其他部门又可以通过修正案改变宪法。所有这些安排，都在迫使人们进行持续不断的协商与妥协，而在另一端最终形成的，便是一种共识。
事实证明，我们用来组织知识探索的制度、规范和规则，其内在结构与我们用来构建宪政政府体制的规则极其相似。这就是“知识宪法”。它是由那些规范我们集体探索知识过程的制度、规则与规范所构成的。这绝不是一个隐喻，也不是明喻或修辞手法。“知识宪法”是真实存在的。它虽未被统筹写在单一的法典里，却白纸黑字地记录在许许多多的地方。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: I talk about this thing called the constitution of knowledge. Why do I say that? It's because the principle that I just outlined is almost identical in structure to the principle of the US Constitution, which says you're going to have a lot of different factions in societies, people from different regions, people with different interests, people with different ideologies. What do you do about that? Well, Madison says famously in the Federalists, "How do you solve the problem of ambition? You can't contain ambition. There's only one thing that works. You pit ambition against ambition. I think the single greatest idea in the whole of political theory. You harness ambition by forcing people through the constitution to compromise. That's why the president can veto what congress does, but congress can override the veto. But the courts can override congress, but the others can change the constitution. All of that is forcing people to have an ongoing negotiation and compromise. And what comes out the other end is something like a consensus.
It turns out the institutions and norms and rules that we use to structure the search for knowledge are very similar in structure to the ones that we use to structure our constitutional form of government. That's the constitution of knowledge. It's the institutions and the rules and the norms that structure our collective search for knowledge. It is not a metaphor. It's not a simile or figure of speech. There actually is a constitution of knowledge. It's not written down in one place, but it's written down in lots of places.
**Jonathan Rauch**：这些规则包括美国大学教授协会在20世纪初首次编纂的学术规程；包括美国报纸编辑协会在同一时期为正当新闻报道制定的行业规则；包括所有的引文规范和实验室伦理运作规程；也包括法律领域中关于律师如何出示证据、坚守事实真相，以及在违规时承担惩罚的各项程序法规，等等等等。这些规则和架构引导着我们的求知过程，正是它们让科学与智识的进步成为可能。
“知识宪法”是一套极为稳健的体系，原因正如我们之前讨论过的：它是去中心化的、开放的、非强迫性的，并且具备长期的自我调节能力。所有这些特质让它具有强大的生命力。试想一下，如果你想终结全球科学的演进进程，你能去哪里下达这个禁令？你或许可以在一个国家内部压制它一段时间，比如曾经的苏联，但这种压制最终必将崩溃，因为你终会与客观现实迎头相撞。因此，在这个意义上，鉴于没有任何其他体系能以如此和平、高效且契合现实的方式在全球规模上创造知识，它显得格外坚韧稳健。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: These are the rules that the American Association of University professors first wrote down in the early part of the 20th century. They're the rules the American Society of Newspaper editors wrote down around the same period about the right way to go about reporting. They're all the rules for citations and how labs operate ethically. They're the rules in law about how lawyers present evidence and stick to truth and can be penalized if they don't. On and on and on. Those are the rules and structures which guide us in our search for knowledge. And that's what makes science and intellectual progress possible.
The constitution of knowledge. It's a very robust system because for reasons that we've already discussed, it's decentralized. It's open-ended. It's it's non-coercive. It's self- adjusting over time. And all those things make it very enduring. Like if you want to end the process of global science, where would you go to do that? You can do that in a country for a while like the Soviet Union, but then it's going to collapse because you're collide with reality. So in the sense that there's no other system that works for creating knowledge on a global scale in a way that's peaceful and productive and realistic, it's very robust.
### 脆弱性与各方势力的抵触
**Jonathan Rauch**：但在另一方面，它也是非常脆弱的，因为你必须把这所有规则和参数调校得完全准确。许多人认为，只要有言论自由就足够了：你拥有一个思想市场，拥有广泛的言论自由，最好的思想自然就会脱颖而出。如果你问大多数美国本科生知识从何而来，很多人都会回答说来自“思想市场”，仿佛这一切是自动发生的。问题在于，它根本不是自动发生的。光有言论自由是不够的，你还需要所有这些规则与指导准则。而在科学领域，一个人需要历经数十年的教育和严格训练，才能掌握这些规则与学术自律，并成为熟稔其运作方式的专家。由于其中存在太多可能出错的环节，这套体系因此显得极为脆弱。
更根本的脆弱性还在于：对许多人来说，知识宪法与他们内心里执意相信的东西是相互敌对的。举例来说，知识宪法通过我所称的“基于现实的共同体”（reality-based community）——包括科学界、新闻界、法律界与政府系统，所有以现实为基准的领域——彻底驳斥了“地球大约只有5600年历史”的说法。这种说法完全站不住脚。这些领域的人们不再争论这个问题，也不再为此耗费精力进行探索。但现实中依然有很多人坚信地球只有约5600年的历史，他们认为这种信念至关重要，并对学校教授其他知识感到极其愤慨。同样，有许多人对生物学坚持进化论感到不满；眼下也有很多人对大量关于疫苗接种的科学研究感到不满，他们不同意、也不喜欢这些结论——其中恰好就包括现任卫生与公众服务部部长。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: On the other hand, it's also fragile because there are all of these rules and settings that you have to get right. A lot of people think, well, free speech is enough. You have a marketplace of ideas and you have a lot of free speech and out of that the best ideas will float to the top. If you ask most American undergraduates where knowledge comes from, you know, a lot of them will say the marketplace of ideas as if it's automatic. The problem is it's not automatic. Free speech isn't enough. You need all of these rules and guidelines. And in the sciences, it takes decades to come through an educational and training process to learn those rules and those disciplines and become expert in how they work. And those are fragile because there's a lot that can go wrong.
And they're also fragile more fundamentally Because for a lot of people the constitution of knowledge is hostile to what they want to believe. For example, the constitution of knowledge through the what I call the reality based community that's science, journalism, law and government, all reality based have refuted the idea that the earth is about 5,600 years old. It it just doesn't wash. People no longer in those fields contest that. They no longer explore it. There are a lot of people who believe that the earth is about 5,600 years old and they believe that that's very important and they're very unhappy. People are taught otherwise. There are a lot of people who are unhappy that for example biology insists on evolution. There are a lot of people who are unhappy right now that we have a lot of science about vaccination that they disagree with uh and that they don't like. One of those happens to be the sitting secretary of health and human services.
**Jonathan Rauch**：因此，任何人只要是在竭力捍卫某种违背科学共识的特定信仰，就绝不会喜欢这套体系。或者，如果有人坚信我们生活在一个神迹或魔法每日都在发生的世界里，他们同样不会喜欢这个体系，因为科学不允许神迹和魔法存在——科学只承认其他人能够重复验证的事物，而顾名思义，神迹是无法被重复检验的。所以，这部分人会感到强烈不满。
威权主义者更是会对它深恶痛绝，因为世上没有什么比“现实”更具反威权色彩了。所有的客观规律都在告诫独裁者：入侵那个国家、背负巨额债务，或是把政治对手投入监狱，这些做法行不通。但他们根本不想听这些。他们只想为所欲为，绝不容许科学、自由主义科学以及知识宪法成为他们的绊脚石。因此，威权主义者一旦得势，首先要做的事就是扼杀知识宪法，因为他们认定这是一股自己无法掌控的力量——在这一点上，他们的直觉完全没错。所有这一切都意味着，在历史上一直存在、并且未来也永远会存在一个庞大、多元且执拗的群体，他们敌视知识宪法。他们要么反感其中的某一部分，要么全盘否定它。这就是我们始终面临的严峻挑战，这也将我们带入了当下——带入了我们眼前正在面对的危机。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: So, anybody with a particular belief that they're defending that goes against say a scientific consensus is not going to like this system. or anyone who believes that we live in a universe where miracles or magic occur on an everyday basis, they're not going to like this system because you're not allowed to have miracles and magic in science because you can only have things that other people can reproduce. And by definition, miracles aren't reproducible. So, they're going to be unhappy with it.
authoritarians are going to be super unhappy with it because there's nothing more anti- athoritarian than reality. All those things that tell dictators, you know, invading that country or uh taking undertaking huge amounts of debt or throwing your opponents in jail, it's not going to work. They don't want to hear that. They want to do what they want to do and they're not going to let science, liberal science and the constitution of knowledge get in the way. So the first thing authoritarians do when they can is shut down the constitution of knowledge because they believe it's a power that they cannot control. And they're right about that. All of that means that there always has been and that there always will be a large and varied and determined constellation of people who don't like the constitution of knowledge. They either don't like part of it or they don't like all of it. And that's the challenge that we're always facing. And that brings us to the present. That brings us to the challenges right now.
### 全球对自由主义的反扑与周期性危机
**Jonathan Rauch**：第二章：全球对自由主义的反弹。自16、17世纪诞生之日起，自由主义从一开始就伴随着巨大争议。它自始至终面临着强大而执着的反对势力。你可以看看曾将伽利略软禁的教会；可以看看马克思主义和共产主义；可以看看诸如当今伊朗这样的政教合一政权；也可以看看法西斯主义。一代又一代庞大的人群出于各种原因宣称：自由主义是错误的。他们指责它破坏了自然秩序，亵渎了上帝，容许了危险的另类生活方式，制造了不公，诸如此类，不胜枚举。
今天的情况也毫不例外。放眼当下，这已成为随处可见的大标题。我们看到无数相关著作出版，其中许多甚至出自我们最杰出的自由主义思想家之手。诸如詹姆斯·戴维斯·亨特（James Davison Hunter）、弗朗西斯·福山（Francis Fukuyama）、布林克·林赛（Brink Lindsey）等卓越的思想家都在指出：自由主义当前正深陷危机之中。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Chapter two, the global backlash to liberalism. Since the day it was originated back in the 16th and 17th centuries, liberalism has been controversial from the very beginning. It has had powerful and dedicated opposition. You can look at the church which put Galileo under arrest. You can look at Marxism and communism. You could look at theocracies places like Iran today. You can look at fascism. One after another, large numbers of human beings have said for one reason or another, liberalism is wrong. It upsets the natural order of things. It offends God. It allows dangerous alternative lifestyles. It's unfair. on and on and on and today is no exception to that.
There's a headline today. We see it everywhere. We see tons of books being written, many of them being written by our most prominent liberal thinkers. You know, people are great thinkers, people like James Davis and Hunter and and Francis Fukuyama and Brink Lindseay and others who were saying liberalism is in crisis right now.
**Jonathan Rauch**：这并不是人们第一次发出这种警告。早在卡尔·马克思所处的时代，自由主义就曾陷入过危机。马克思绝不是蠢人，他敏锐地观察到了当时社会剧烈的动荡变革，在那个时代看来，资本主义似乎正在走向自我毁灭——因为正如查尔斯·狄更斯等人所记录的那样，19世纪40年代和50年代工厂里的劳动条件极其恶劣悲惨。当时的情形看起来就像是资本主义不仅没有改善人们的生活，反而让境遇更加恶化，不仅没有消除阶层分化，反而加剧了社会割裂，等等。这场危机最终催生了共产主义，而共产主义后来被证明是人类历史上最嗜血的意识形态。
我们经历过周期性的危机，而这些危机的共同点，往往都发生于社会发生急速变革的时期。当自由主义制度建立起来并在正常运转、看起来运行良好的时候——例如在20世纪70年代、80年代和90年代，我们曾以为我们拥有相当不错的国会体制，经济的大多数引擎都在全速运转，财政预算也实现了平衡等等——随后，冲击便降临了……
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: It's not the first time people have said this. Liberalism was in crisis when Karl Marx came along. Markx was no dummy. Markx was seeing turbulent change in society that looked at the time as if capitalism was on track to dismantle itself because the working conditions in the factories of the 1840s and 1850s as documented by people like Charles Dickens were were so deplorable. Looked like capitalism was making people worse off not better off and making society more stratified not less stratified and so forth. And that led to a crisis which of course led to communism. Communism turned out to be the most bloodthirsty ideology in in human history.
We've had recurrent crises and they tend to have in common periods of rapid social change. When you've got liberal institutions that have been set up and they're kind of ticking along and they seem to be running okay. So, you know, in the 1970s and 80s and 90s, we thought we had a pretty good congressional system and the economy seemed to be firing on most cylinders and the budget was balanced and so forth. And then we get shocks and
### 自由主义系统的冲击与适应
**Jonathan Rauch**: 这些外部冲击引发了混乱与动荡。由于这些自由主义系统本质上是去中心化的，而且建立在规则之上，它们不可能做到说转弯就立刻转弯。它们是随着时间推移逐步演进的，往往自下而上地发展。因此，它们不可避免地会经历某些特定时期——在这些时期，社会对它们提出的要求，远远超出了它们所能交付的能力。当然，所有其他制度形式只会更糟糕，因为它们极度腐败且专制，根本缺乏良好的输入与反馈机制。但在这种时刻，自由主义面临的真正挑战在于如何适应、如何变革、如何满足新的需求，并以足够快的基础节奏找到新的做事方式、新的制度结构、新的产品以及新的理念来进行调适。很多人认为，而且我认为他们很可能是对的，我们眼下正处于这样一个转折时刻之中。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Those shocks cause disruptions. And because of the decentralized nature of these liberal systems and because they're rules based, they can't turn on a dime. They evolve over time. They tend to be bottom up. And so they go through these periods when society is demanding more from them than they can deliver. Now all the other systems would be worse because they're so corrupt and authoritarian and they don't have good inputs. But in these moments, the challenge for liberalism is to adapt, to change, to meet new needs, to find new ways of doing things, new structures, new products, new ideas at a fast enough clip to adapt. And a lot of people think, and I think they're quite probably right, that we're in one of those moments right now.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 我们经历了一连串严重的冲击。我们遭遇了“9·11”恐怖袭击，遭遇了2008至2009年的金融海啸。市场每隔一段时间就会崩溃瓦解，自从亚当·斯密那个时代起，我们对此就心知肚明。但这引发了一场深重危机，导致人们对自由主义的信心大幅滑坡。接着我们又经历了新冠疫情（COVID），许多人认为现行体系在应对疫情方面表现得很差；我们可以对此展开争论，但它确实给整个体制带来了沉重的负荷。此外，社交媒体集中爆发，而传统新闻业等领域的现实守门人（即常规主流媒体）却日渐衰落。伴随而来的还有破坏力极强的算法崛起——正如俗话所言，“激怒即参与度”（enragement is engagement）。与此同时，由于其他各种原因，传统建制化宗教也在日渐衰落，导致大批人在生活中苦苦寻觅意义。所有这些因素交织叠加，几乎在同一时间扑面而来。这确实需要应对太多复杂局面了。无论你是自由派还是非自由派，这都是极其难以消化的巨大压力。而这正是我们眼下正在全力调适的现实。我不想糊弄任何人，这绝对是一场极其严峻的考验。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: So, we've had a series of shocks. We had 911, the financial meltdown of 2008, 2009. Every so often markets fall apart. We've known that about them since Adam Smith's time. And that caused a crisis which has caused a a a big reduction in confidence in liberalism. You had COVID which a lot of people think the system didn't handle very well. We can argue about that, but that put a lot of strain on the system. You had the eruption of social media and the decline of the traditional reality gatekeepers in places like journalism, you know, conventional mainstream media. You had the rise of algorithms which are disruptive. You know, as the saying goes, enragement is engagement. And you've had a decline for other reasons in traditional organized religion which left a lot of people looking for meaning in life. And you get all those things and they're kind of coming along at once, right? That's a lot to deal with. It doesn't matter if you're liberal or illiberal. That is a lot to deal with. And that's what we're adjusting to right now. And it's I I won't I won't kid anyone. It's it's a major challenge.
### 非自由主义与后自由主义的多重光谱
**Jonathan Rauch**: 自由主义是一项相对晚近的发明。它充其量只能追溯到大约350年前，在整个人类进化历程中不过是短短一眨眼的工夫。而非自由主义则是除它之外的一切，它的历史要久远得多。它囊括了无数关于治理政府、运作经济和追寻真理的理论与体系，而这些体系往往建立在强权胁迫、等级制度、部落主义以及对不同人群划分根本尊卑等级的基础之上。如果你断言一个来自非洲的人天生低人一等、只能沦为奴隶，那就是非自由主义。如果你宣称自由是一个危险的概念——这个观念可以一直追溯到柏拉图，远远早于现代自由主义。柏拉图认为民主与自由必然走向颓废堕落，他主张建立一种朝鲜式的独裁统治，并由类似他自己这样的人来掌舵。非自由主义的渊源远比自由主义深厚得多，并且表现形态数不胜数。它实际上是一个总括性术语，涵盖了几乎所有质疑“人人生而自由平等”这一核心观念的学说。而这种质疑又分化出了形形色色的不同流派。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: So liberalism is a recent invention. Like it's really dates back to 350 years ago. That's the blink of an eye in human evolution. Illiberalism is everything else and it's a lot older. It's all of the many many theories and systems of running a government, an economy, a truth seeeking process which is based on coercion for example, on hierarchy, on tribe, on fundamental distinctions between different types of humans. So if you're saying that a person from Africa is inferior and can only be a slave, that is illiberalism. If you're saying that freedom is a dangerous concept, that's an idea that goes back to Plato, which is long before modern liberalism. He believed that democracy, that freedom would would lead to decadence. He wanted to have a North Korean style dictatorship led by someone like himself. Illiberalism goes back much longer than liberalism, and it takes many, many forms. It's really it's a catch-all term for really almost anything that disputes the core idea that all humans are born free and equal. And that comes in in so many different flavors.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 今天我们身边聚集了这样一个群体，他们被笼统地冠以“后自由主义”（post-liberalism）之名。这些人虽然在右翼表现为一种形式，在左翼表现为另一种形式，但他们的核心主张基本上一致：自由主义已经过时了，它无法再满足我们作为一个国家、作为一个共同体、或者作为基本个体的现实需求。它衍生出了各种版本：有神学倾向的人宣称自由主义敌视上帝、敌视信仰以及信仰共同体，正在让我们与最根本的传统价值观脱节；民族主义立场的后自由主义者则坚称，自由主义消解了国家边界，瓦解了维系国家运转的族群纽带与其他社会纽带，从而将我们彻底融化在一大锅跨国界的、全球化的、毫无意义且不动脑筋的迷汤之中——美国的副总统似乎就坚信类似的说法。此外，在右翼阵营里还有形形色色的资本主义反对者，以及各种认为科学构成了威胁的人群，那边充斥着诸如此类的各类思潮。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: So today we've got a group um that go loosely under what's called post-liberalism. And those are groups of people. They're they exist in one form on the right and another form on the left. But they basically say liberalism is out of date. It's no longer serving our needs as a country or as a community or as basic humans. It comes in all kinds of flavors. People of a theological bent who say liberalism is hostile to God, to faith, to communities of faith, and that's unmuring us from our basic values. You have nationalist post-liberals who say liberalism dissolves national boundaries and it dissolves ethnic ties and other social ties that hold countries together. So it's dissolving us in this big multinational global meaningless mindless soup. Vice President of the United States seems to believe something like that. You've got opponents of capitalism on the right. Um you've got all kinds of people who think that science is threatening antia. There's there's all kinds of things over there.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 而在左翼阵营，则有一群与后现代形式的非自由主义紧密相连的人。这批人宣称根本不存在客观现实这回事；一切归根结底都只是话语，全看是谁在操控话语，而掌控了话语权的人就掌控了现实本身。因此在他们看来，科学不过是一场为了维护特权白人男性利益而玩弄的游戏。他们在过去甚至探讨过诸如“非洲中心主义科学”之类的概念；他们质疑“真理”本身是否具有意义，认为世间万物归根到底彻头彻尾都是政治。这种思潮在学术界的左翼阵营中实际上已经扎下了极深的根基。所有这些思潮目前都在社会上四处流传。它们当中没有任何一种是完全崭新的；而我们今天所面临的挑战，一如既往，就是要抵御这些思想的侵蚀，有力地论证反驳它们。要知道，它们绝非软弱愚蠢的浅薄论调；它们是根本错误的观念，但绝不软弱，也绝不愚蠢。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And then on the left you have people who are identified with post-modern forms of illiberalism. And these people who say there's no such thing as objective reality. It's really all just about discourse and it's about who controls the discourse and those who control the discourse control reality. So they say science is just a game that's being played for the benefit of privileged white males. They've talked in the past about, you know, they've had afroentric science. Um they question the very idea that truth should even matter. They think it's politics all the way down. And that's had a deep foothold actually in the academic left. And all of those things are circulating out there. Um, none of them is entirely new. And the challenge today, as always, is is to defend from those ideas, to make our case against them. You know, they're not they're not weak and stupid ideas. They're wrong ideas, but they're not weak and stupid.
### 来自左翼的威胁：取消文化与共识欺骗
**Jonathan Rauch**: 在我关于“知识宪法”（the constitution of knowledge）的著作中，我着重指出了两大严峻挑战：其一主要来自左翼，被称为“取消文化”（cancel culture）；其二主要来自右翼，即反自由主义的宣传战活动。这两者形态迥异，但有着一个共同的目标——那就是削弱美国乃至全世界关于现实的集体共识感知，并摧毁我们赖以锚定现实的基石制度。让我们先从左翼的这一挑战讲起。这里的左翼并非自由主义左翼，他们不是那些中左翼人士，而是更偏向极左翼的群体。他们是后现代主义者，坚信客观真理本身就是个谎言；他们认为科学是一种具有殖民色彩的压迫性制度，我们必须从中得到解脱；他们渴望构建一种特定群体享有凌驾于其他群体之上的特权阶级体系。他们摸索出了一套策略：尽管自己在大学等文化机构中属于少数派，但只要他们组织起来，以某种实质上能够惩罚异见的方式运作，他们就能制造出一种虚假的共识，表面上看起来整座大学校园似乎人人都站在极左立场，而任何挑战他们在种族、阶级、性别等议题上既定论断的言行，都必然是危险的、很可能是错误的。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: The two biggest challenges I point to in my book on the constitution of knowledge, one is coming predominantly from the left and it's called cancel culture and another is coming predominantly from the right and that's a campaign of anti-liberal propaganda and they're quite different but they have a common goal which is to undermine Americans or potentially the world's collective sense of reality and undermine the institutions that we rely on to keep us connected to reality. So start with the one on the left, not the liberal left. These are not, you know, center-left people. These are more the far left. These are the postmodernists. These are the people who believe objective truth is itself a lie. These are the people who believe that science is a colonialist and oppressive institution that we need to be freed from. These are the people who'd like uh to have a hierarchy in which certain groups would be privileged over other groups. They figured out that even though they're a minority in cultural institutions like universities, that if they organized and functioned in ways that could basically punish disscent that they could create a false consensus where it kind of appears that everyone on campus is on the left and that challenging these propositions they uphold about race, class, gender, whatever it happens to be, is certainly dangerous and probably wrong.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 这是一种非常老练的宣传手段，被称为“共识欺骗”（consensus spoofing）。它的根基在于一条心理学原则，并在无数经典实验中得到了反复证实：如果我和另外七个人坐在同一个房间里，其他所有人都异口同声地主张一件在我看来显然不成立的事情，只要他们一口咬定那是真的，我就会不可避免地受到影响——要么选择保持沉默，要么更严重的是，甚至开始怀疑自己的亲眼所见。因此，只要你能操纵表面上的共识假象，你在极大程度上就能让人们彻底动摇甚至改变自己的信念；而在极小限度上，也能迫使人们彻底闭嘴。这正是取消文化所起的作用。它的逻辑在于：我们将调动一切可能的社会机制，这些手段不一定来自政府，但我们会对你立案调查、对你展开猛烈声讨，在社交媒体上对你发起网络围攻，威胁砸掉你的饭碗，摧毁你的声誉，给你扣上种族主义者、同性恋恐惧者或跨性别恐惧者等各种污名。只要你敢公开发表与我们认定的“正确立场”相悖的异见，我们有十二种不同的方法让你的生活痛不欲生。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And this is a very sophisticated propaganda technique. It's called consensus spoofing. And it's based on the psychological principle. It's been demonstrated in countless experiments. That if I'm sitting in a room with seven other people who all say something that doesn't seem to me to be true, but they're all insisting that it's true, I'm going to be influenced by that. Either to stay quiet, but more often to even doubt what my own eyes tell me. So if you can manipulate the apparent consensus, you can make people doubt their beliefs at at sometimes at a maximum. You can make people change their beliefs. At a minimum, you can make people shut up. And that's what cancelling did. This said, we're going to use all kinds of social mechanisms. We won't be governmental necessarily, but we're going to investigate you. We're going to hammer you, uh, brigade you on social media. We're going to threaten your job. We're going to threaten your reputation. We're going to call you things like racist or homophobe or transphobe. We have a dozen different ways to make your life miserable if you speak out in dissent from what we think correct the correct viewpoint is.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 我相信大家此刻心里都在想：这种手段根本不算新鲜，它自古有之。然而，这些手法被极其高效地套用到了诸多大学等具体环境之中，并且配备了社交媒体这样前所未有的新型武器。在过去，想要发起一份谴责某人的联名请愿书既困难又耗时；但有了社交媒体，一切都是瞬间发生的。你可以立刻登录Facebook，登录当时的Twitter，迅速策划组织一场针对某人的声讨运动，一夜之间就能迫使当事人公开道歉或被全网批斗；甚至有些时候，他们即便低头道歉了，也依然难逃被千夫所指的下场。这就是取消文化。它是一种真实发生过的现象，是有据可查的历史事实。它与理性的学术批评截然不同——在科学体系下、在知识宪法的规范下，理性批评是受到充分保护和鼓励的，两者有着本质的区别。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: As people are, I'm sure thinking right now, there is nothing new about this. This goes back to the beginning of time. But these techniques were effectively harnessed in environments like many universities and they had new tools like social media. It used to be it was difficult and timeconuming to try to round up you know a petition against someone to condemn them. With social media it was instantaneous. You could get on Facebook, you could get on what was then Twitter and organize a campaign against someone and overnight they would have to apologize or be vilified. and sometimes they apologized and were vilified anyway. So that's cancel culture. It was a real thing. It's a documented thing. It's not the same as reason criticism which is allowed under science under under the constitution of knowledge. It's quite different.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 不过，这种狂潮大概在几年前就已经见顶了。尽管它现在依然存在，依然是一个棘手的问题，我们仍需保持警惕并与之抗争；但如今已有越来越多的人看清了它的本质。特别是在大学校园里，大家越来越清晰地意识到自己被这类战术操纵了，意识到极少数激进分子竟然成功压制了正常的公开辩论与合理异见。人们开始反思校园内缺乏足够的观点多样性，认识到学生和教职员工应当享有更充分的自由去开展深入坚实的学术对话。我不能说我们已经彻底扭转了局势，但我认为我们正在朝正确的总体方向迈进。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: That however probably peaked a few years ago. It's still out there. It's still a problem and we still need to fight it and be aware of it. But a lot more people now are aware of it. especially on campus, they've become more aware that they've been manipulated by these kinds of tactics, that small numbers of activists have managed to shut down debate and disscent. That there's not enough viewpoint diversity on campus, that students and faculty need to feel more free to have robust conversations. I wouldn't say we've turned a corner there, but I'd say we're headed in the right general direction.
### 来自右翼的威胁：虚假信息与“淹没防区”战术
**Jonathan Rauch**: 好，那么当今面临的另一个大问题又是什么？另一大严重威胁在于：在过去，如果你想操控现实，主要途径之一是施行信息审查，因为当时存在着众多的守门人。比方说作为政府，你可以直接关闭或者起诉一家与你唱反调的媒体机构。但随着社交媒体以及相关技术的诞生，人们赫然发现：等一下，你其实可以采取与传统审查完全相反的手段。你可以彻底淹没对方的声音；你可以通过史蒂夫·班农（Steve Bannon）所说的“用狗屎淹没整个防区”（flooding the zone with shit），让那些说真话的人变得极难甚至根本无法获得公众关注。这是班农的原话，它精准概括了一种最初由俄罗斯人开创的宣传战术——俄罗斯人至今仍是这套战术最高超的实践者。这套方法被称为“虚假信息水炮”（firehose of falsehood）运动。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Okay. What's the other big problem today? The other big threat it used to be if you wanted to manipulate reality, one way to do that was censorship because we had a lot of gatekeepers. So if you were government, for example, you could out and out shut down um or prosecute an outlet that you disagree with. But then along comes social media and related technologies and they say actually wait a minute, you can do the opposite of censorship. You can drown people out. You can make it very difficult or impossible for people telling the truth to get attention by doing what Steve Bannon called flooding the zone with [ __ ] Now, this is something he actually said and it's a a very good summary of a propaganda technique that was originally pioneered by the Russians. They're still the best practitioners. And it's called fire hose of falsehood disinformation campaigns.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 它的终极目的不是抛出一个单一的虚假叙事来尝试说服大众，而是倾泻出一场充斥着谎言、半真半假的陈述、夸大其词与阴谋论的信息洪流，以至于公众彻底分不清东南西北。人们再也辨别不出什么是真的、什么是假的，继而变得愤世嫉俗、悲观宿命。而一旦大众陷入冷漠和宿命论，他们就会彻底沦为被动的看客，选择闭门不出。普京正是通过这种方式操纵和控制了俄罗斯民众。而在美国，同样出现了一位对这套手法心领神会的人物——他就是唐纳德·J·特朗普（Donald J. Trump）。在我看来，他是自20世纪30年代某些我不愿指名道姓的历史人物以来，最具手腕的宣传操盘手。他在这些门道上堪称登峰造极。他自己深知这一点，因为在其漫长的职业生涯中他曾多次公开谈论过这些技巧。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And that's where the goal is not to put out a single false narrative and persuade people. It's to put out such a deluge of false narratives of lies, halftruths, exaggeration and conspiracy theories that people can't tell what's up anymore. They can't tell what's true, what's false. They become cynical f of fatalistic. And when they're cynical and fatalistic, they become passive and they stay home. That's how Putin has manipulated the Russian population. Along comes a guy in America who understands this. His name is Donald J. Trump. He is, in my opinion, the most sophisticated propaganda operative since certain people in the 1930s who I won't name. He is brilliant at this stuff. He knows he's good at it because he's talked about it over the course of his career.
**Jonathan Rauch**: 特朗普非常明白，只要你把一句假话重复得足够多，它就会在人们脑海中根深蒂固；事实上，仅仅是迫使人们去辟谣和驳斥它，反而会加深这种虚假印象的烙印。他深知，只要你以足够快的语速连续抛出足够多自相矛盾的话语，公众就会彻底丧失对现实的辨别方向。因此，你绝不能固守一个连贯自洽的说法不变，而是要以不同的频率抛出各种大相径庭的话。他还精通另一项宣传战术，那就是“反咬一口”（reversal/倒打一耙）。比如在涉及“他更愿意让一个傀儡来当美国总统”的交锋中，情况非常清楚，大家都在质问你不愿承认俄罗斯的干预；他却能当场反驳说：“我不是傀儡，你才是傀儡！”无论你指控我什么，我都原封不动地反扣在你的头上——这是制造群体性认知混乱的又一杀手锏。随后，无论是在竞选期间还是入主白宫之后，他都调动了所有可能的途径来服务于这个目的，甚至利用政府机构……
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: He understands that if you say something false often enough, it will sink in. And in fact, just making people refute it will make it sink in even more. He understands that if you say enough self-contradictory things at a fast enough clip, people will lose their orientation to reality altogether. So you don't want to have a consistent story and stick with it. You want to say all kinds of different things at a different rate. He understands another propaganda tactic. It's called reversal. That's because he'd rather have a puppet as president of the United States. And it's pretty clear. It's pretty clear you won't admit that the Russians have engaged. I'm not the puppet. You're the puppet. Whatever you say about me, I turn around and say to you another tactic of mass confusion. He then both as a candidate and then as a president harnesses every avenue to this end. He uses the government
### 虚假叙事与政府机构的现实锚定
**主讲人**：……以及利用白宫来传播大选谎言。他和他的支持者将法庭作为工具。他们诉诸法庭，实际上是将其当成宣泄虚假信息的“谎言长流水”（firehose of falsehood）宣传渠道，以此在整个社会范围内充斥并散布这些虚构叙事。他们拥有自己的媒体渠道，掌控着社交媒体网络，在共和党内部还有一大批为其随声附和、不断机械重复的传声筒。这些都是极其精细且老练的认知操纵策略。在美国的政治与社会语境中，我们以往并不习惯与这类策略打交道。东欧国家以及波罗的海沿岸地区对这些手法再熟悉不过，但我们在本土却鲜有应对经验，因此它们确实让我们猝不及防。而我们这些身处“基于现实的共同体”（reality-based community）之中的人，至今仍在竭尽全力奔跑、苦苦挣扎，试图迎头赶上，并重新确立对客观现实的认知坐标。我不得不坦言，目前的局势依旧充满变数、胜负未定，局势确实异常严峻。
Original English
**Speaker**: ...and the White House to propagate election lies. He and his supporters used the court. They were going to court as a fire hose of falsehood propaganda channel to just populate the world with these false narratives. They have their own media channels. They have social media. They have the repetitors in the Republican party. These are very sophisticated cognitive manipulation tactics. They're not something that we're accustomed to dealing with in an American context. Eastern Europeans and places in the Baltics know all about them, but we're not used to them here. And they caught us off guard. And we in the reality based community are still racing and struggling to catch up and to reestablish orientation to reality. And it's I got to say it's touch and go. It's really tough.
**主讲人**：此时此刻我最忧虑的攻击，也就是来自特朗普总统、MAGA运动以及脱离客观现实的保守派媒体和社交媒体阵营所发起的冲击，其危险程度远远超出其他问题。对基本客观现实的公然挑战，如今已经渗透并控制了联邦政府的关键权力分支。于是你可以看到，在司法部这样的核心部门内部，有人正依据本届政府内部律师心知肚明并不属实、甚至根本不构成违法的情由，对总统的政治对手、异见人士以及他心怀宿怨的个人展开司法起诉与追查。可一旦体制内的专业人士提出异议，指出“你们绝不能这样做”时，他们就会立刻被直接解职或边缘化排挤。不仅如此，包括国土安全部在内的政府机构，也开始公开推波助澜那些彻头彻尾的虚假谎言，例如所谓“大选被窃取”的论调。当一个国家的政府机器亲自下场充当虚假宣传叙事的驱动引擎时，美利坚合众国就已经步入了一个性质完全不同的危险世界。
Original English
**Speaker**: The attacks that I worry about at the moment, the attack from President Trump and the MAGA movement and the elements of non realitybased conservative media and social media worry me much more. The challenges to basic reality now control crucial branches of the federal government. So you have people in places like the Justice Department waging prosecutions of the president's political antagonists and enemies and just people he has grudges against based on what lawyers in the administration know are not true narratives or not violation of law. But when those people object and say you can't do that, they get fired or sidelined. You have agencies of government like for example the Department of Homeland Security promoting narratives that are just plain false like that the election was stolen. When you have the government driving false propaganda narratives in the United States you're in a different world.
**主讲人**：美国政府与所有自由主义宪政体制一样——甚至在程度上尤甚于多数国家——在其制度结构设计上，通体贯穿着一系列专门用以确保国家机器始终牢固锚定在客观事实之上的制度安排。之所以必须如此，原因再朴素不过：如果政府不能被客观现实所锚定与约束，那么它本质上就是极权主义的。缺乏客观事实约束的政府可以肆意炮制并宣扬一套属于它自己的替代性虚构现实，并以此为借口对公民施加抓捕、投进监狱乃至肉体消灭。而在人类历史上，极权政权向来就是这么做的。正因如此，从国会预算办公室（CBO）、情报系统到司法部门，再到联邦政府各层级专业机构——诸如美国国家海洋和大气管理局（NOAA）、国家气象局以及劳工统计局——它们全部承担着一项核心职能，那就是通过扎实的数据与事实，强制国家权力和政府运作保持与真实世界的连接。一旦你蓄意破坏、颠覆了这些体制内的现实校准机制，用凭空捏造的替代现实——或者用凯莉安·康威（Kellyanne Conway）当年那句臭名昭著的说法，“替代性事实”（alternative facts）——取而代之，你就已经在与极权主义统治模式眉来眼去了。因为极权政府的核心企图恰恰就是劫持、操控并垄断真理本身。我并不是断言我们已经彻底沦落到了那个地步，但我的确是在严正警告：我们必须保持最高级别的警惕，因为现实中确实有人正在竭力将这种统治手法强加在我们身上。
Original English
**Speaker**: American government like all liberal governments but maybe more than most. American government is just structured, shot through with institutions designed to keep it moored from reality for the simple reason that if the government isn't moored to reality, it's totalitarian. It can propound its own alternative version of reality and it can use that to arrest you, to throw you in jail or kill you. And that's what historically they've done. So you've got everything from the Congressional Budget Office and intelligence community and places like the Justice all through the government, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the weather bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they're all in the business of forcing government to stay real. When you subvert those government mechanisms and you use them to substitute alternative reality or as Kellyanne Conway famously put it, alternative facts right there, you are flirting with a totalitarian style of government because that's what totalitarian governments try to do. Hijack and control truth itself. I'm not saying we're all the way there, but I'm saying we need to be really careful because there are people trying to do that to us right now.
### 全球认知战与虚假信息长流水
**主讲人**：这两者在某种程度上都是全球范围内的现象，但“取消文化”（cancel culture）现象归根结底主要局限于英语圈国家。我们最常见到这种现象的舞台是美国、加拿大、英国、澳大利亚和新西兰；甚至即便利在这些国家内部，它目前似乎也已显现出式微和退潮的势头。究其原因，依靠恐吓和群体施压的手法强迫人们长期保持噤声是非常困难的；久而久之，大众必然会感到：“这根本讲不通，我再也不想配合这种闹剧了。”事实证明，这种反弹正在实实在在地发生。然而，反观那些系统性的虚假信息认知攻势、“谎言长流水”机制以及其他极度高超的认知战手段，情况又如何呢？这些手段是彻头彻尾全球化的。它们最早可以一路追溯至沙皇时代以及列宁时期的苏俄政治手法。直到今天，俄罗斯依然是全世界运用此类战术最为炉火纯青的行家里手，但如今这些手段已经在全球各地被广泛模仿与采纳。
Original English
**Speaker**: These are both worldwide phenomenon, but cancel culture phenomena turns out to be mostly an Anglosphere phenomenon. We've seen it most in the United States and Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and even there it seems to be on the wane because, you know, it's pretty hard to use tactics of intimidation to shut people up for a very long time because after a while they feel, you know, this doesn't make sense. I don't want to do this anymore. And that seems to be happening. What about the campaigns of disinformation, the fire hose of falsehood, the other very sophisticated cognitive warfare techniques? Those are global. Those originate at the time of the Czars and Lenin in Russia. Russia is still the world's best practitioner of these tactics, but they're being imitated across the globe.
**主讲人**：比如在匈牙利，此前被击败的执政当局曾极力在乌克兰战争问题上炮制并散布虚假叙事，声称“这场冲突完全是由乌克兰挑起的，乌克兰才是我们的真正敌人”；在波兰等国，你同样能目睹有人在娴熟运用这套手法；当然，在当下的美国，这些手段更是随处可见。我们在全球范围内看到，各国的右翼威权主义与民粹主义政党正在全面驾驭社交媒体以及其他认知操纵战术。早在2016年英国脱欧公投的竞选活动中，人们就已经窥见了这种端倪：关于脱欧本身究竟是一项明智决策还是历史倒退，公众尽可以见仁见智展开辩论；然而，当时脱欧派所祭出的最核心王牌主张——即宣称脱欧之后每周能省下巨额资金并直接注入英国国家医疗服务体系（NHS）——从根本上就是一则彻头彻尾的谎言，而且发起者在宣传时对这一点心知肚明。但这则虚构叙事在互联网空间被证明极具传播力与煽动性，他们成功将其扩散并深入人心。甚至可以说，正是凭借这一关键谎言的驱动，脱欧公投才得以最终通过。
Original English
**Speaker**: So, you know, you see them in places like Hungary where the government that was recently defeated was trying to propagate narratives that were false about the war in Ukraine, saying, you know, it was instigated by Ukraine and Ukraine is our enemy. You see people using these tactics in places like Poland. Of course, you see them in the United States right now. So, we see these right-wing authoritarian and populist parties all over the world harnessing social media and other tactics. You saw some of this in the Brexit campaign in 2016 where we can have an argument about whether Brexit was a good idea or a bad idea. But the main argument that the Brexit side used, which was that it would allow huge amounts of money to be captured and diverted into the British National Health Service. That was just false and that was known to be false. But that proved to be a powerful narrative online which they were able to propagate. Arguably that caused Brexit to go through.
### 聪明人的认知漏洞与“知识宪法”的防御价值
**主讲人**：面对我们正在探讨的所有这些操纵技巧，至关重要的一点是必须清醒地认识到：我们之中的每一个人在它们面前都是脆弱的。高智商或聪明才智并不能为你提供天然的免疫屏障。事实上，现有的大量实证研究表明，高智力人群往往更容易受到认知操纵的影响，因为我们拥有更强的思维能力，能够更加精巧自洽地为自己听到的、本就渴望去相信的一切观点寻找合理化借口与合理解释。聪明并不能保护你不被欺骗。这些深层次的认知缺陷深深根植于我们大脑演化机制以及我们感知世界的方式之中。而如何调动、刺激并精准利用这些内在心理缺陷，已经演变成了一门极其精致的操纵技术。那么，面对这种攻势，人类究竟该如何进行有效抵御？这正是为什么我们必须构建并坚守一套“知识宪法”（constitution of knowledge）。从根本机制来看，知识宪法的核心使命，就是通过建立强制性制度规范，迫使我们必须将个人的主观信念与感知，置于他人的审视、批判和独立认知检验之下，以此来对冲并克服人类自身的认知缺陷。它促使我们彼此比对检验并追问：“好，在这种具体情境下，究竟谁的主张正确、谁的主张有误？什么是真实发生的，什么纯属虚构？”并且这一求证过程必须严格建立在缜密的证据规则与理性逻辑基础之上。这是人类抵御群体盲从与虚假信息的唯一有效护甲。而这恰恰正是为什么全球各地的威权反自由力量正在竭尽所能拆毁知识宪法体制，因为唯有摧毁这套事实求证机制，他们才能强行兜售属于他们自己的虚构现实，抑或制造更为危险的后果——让整个社会陷入事实彻底瓦解、再无客观共识的完全混乱状态。
Original English
**Speaker**: All of these techniques that we're talking about, it's very important to understand we are all vulnerable to them. Being smart does not help. In fact, there's evidence that smart people are more vulnerable to cognitive manipulation because we're better at rationalizing whatever it is that we hear that we want to believe. Being smart does not protect you. These are fundamental cognitive flaws in our brains and how we perceive the world. And mobilizing them and exploiting them is a fine art. How do you resist them? That's why you need a constitution of knowledge. Ultimately, what the constitution of knowledge is doing is protecting us from our own cognitive flaws by forcing us to subject our own beliefs and perceptions to the beliefs and perceptions of others to compare them and say, "Okay, who's right and who's wrong in this situation? What's true and what's not?" And to do this on rigorous principles of evidence and reason. That's the only protection. And that's why these forces around the globe are trying to dismantle the constitution of knowledge so that they can substitute their own version of reality or even worse total chaos and no reality at all.
### 二十一世纪美国法西斯主义的雏形与18项诊断指标
**主讲人**：当前最令人困惑且极具争议的争论之一，莫过于该如何给美国的MAGA运动及其在海外的对应势力准确定性。在不同国家，这些政治势力的面貌各有不同——比如波兰的法律与公正党（PiS），或者德国的选择党（AfD），它们通常都带有极右翼色彩并且呈现出反自由主义（illiberal）的特质。而这场讨论正在促成人们形成一种深刻的警觉认知：此时此刻，就在美国本土，在特朗普的第二个执政任期内，通过MAGA运动及其所推行的战术手段，我们正在实时目睹一种形态已然呼之欲出——那就是某种经过翻新改造、适用于21世纪语境的美国本土法西斯主义的演变形态。至少在我个人看来确实如此。我以往一直非常谨慎，极力避免给MAGA运动贴上法西斯主义的标签，因为在过去，许多典型的法西斯要素与该运动并不吻合，尤其是在他的第一个总统任期内。例如，他们当时似乎对通过武力兼并或强占他国领土并无野心，也没有在本土建立受控的准军事化秘密警察力量，更看不出对组织系统性的街头政治暴力有多大狂热。因此，在很长一段时间内，历史上法西斯主义的诸多核心要素确实是不存在的。但不幸的是，到了第二个任期，我们已经开始清晰地看到这些征兆逐一浮出水面。
Original English
**Speaker**: One of the most confusing debates at the moment is what to say about the MAGA movement in the United States and its foreign equivalents. They're all different in different countries. Things like the Peace Party, PiS Party in Poland and AfD in Germany, which tend to be on the far right and tend to be illiberal. One of the things that this is leading to is an understanding that right now in real time in the United States during the second Trump administration and through the MAGA movement and its tactics, we're seeing something that's starting to emerge as a kind of updated 21st century version of American fascism. At least to me at least. I'm someone who really avoided characterizing the MAGA movement as fascist because a lot of things just didn't fit certainly not in the first term. Like they didn't seem interested in conquering or coercing territory from other countries and they didn't seem interested in standing up domestic military parapolicing units. They didn't seem that interested in street violence. So there's a lot of elements of fascism that we didn't see that. Unfortunately, we're starting to see them now in the second term.
**主讲人**：世界上从来不存在某种拥有唯一精确学术定义的“法西斯主义”，历史上也从未有过。即便在法西斯分子群体内部，他们自己对于法西斯主义究竟由什么构成也从未达成过统一界定。正因如此，我的分析方法是提炼出一份包含18项特征的诊断清单，这些特征无一例外都是历史上历次法西斯政权形态所共有、且目前在特朗普执政架构中全部有所体现的典型表征。如果现实中仅仅出现了一两项，哪怕是五六项，你或许还可以宽慰自己说“好吧，这里面确实掺杂着一些不良苗头”。然而，当你看到这整整18项特征接连齐备、甚至这份清单我完全还可以进一步继续扩充时，你就必须清醒地意识到：我们正面临着极其深重和真实的体制危机。
Original English
**Speaker**: There's not one clearly defined thing called fascism. There never has been. Not even fascists have agreed on what fascism is. So, my approach is a diagnostic list of 18 things that are all characteristic of iterations of fascism that we've seen and all of which are appearing in the Trump administration. If it was one or two or even five or six, okay, you know, maybe there's some bad stuff going on. But when you see 18 of these things, and I could have extended the list, you got real trouble on your hands.
### 施密特主义、权力崇拜与对制度基石的侵蚀
**主讲人**：那么，我们所说的究竟是哪些具体迹象呢？首先是对暴力的狂热推崇与美化（valorization of violence）。当权力和支持者以暴力为荣，甚至在社交网络上公开散布政治梗图，狂欢庆祝直升机上的人员手持机枪残杀沉船幸存者时，这就是对暴力的极端赞美。另一个显著特征是，法西斯主义者对理性的程序化协商与审议深恶痛绝，在他们眼里，审慎的论证与程序只会拖累效率与行动步伐；相反，他们近乎狂热地推崇“意志的胜利”（triumph of the will）——即由最高领袖一锤定音、不容置疑、迅速且铁腕地推进决策。而在本届政府的运作中，我们一次又一次地看到这种机制在上演。再比如动用准军事化的警察执法力量，并向其明确传达他们无需受制于法治约束、被告知他们可以随心所欲处置并扣押任何目标，进而对普通公民公然实施暴力行径。这绝非自由民主政体的制度特征，但如果放在任何一个法西斯国家，这种景象你绝不会感到哪怕一丝意外。
Original English
**Speaker**: So what kinds of things are we talking about? We're talking about the valorization of violence, like when you glory in violence, when you're putting out memes, celebrating killing of boat survivors by people in helicopters with machine guns. Another is that fascists hate rational deliberation. They think it slows them down. And they celebrate the triumph of the will, which is rapid, firm decision-making by the leader, no questions asked. And we're seeing that again and again in this administration. The use of paramilitary police forces that are told that they are not accountable to the rule of law, that are told that they can do anything they want and touch anyone they want, committing acts of violence against citizens. That's not a hallmark of liberal democracy, but that is something that you would not be at all surprised to see in a fascist country.
**主讲人**：在我看来，其中最核心的问题还带有深刻的哲学意味。20世纪初法西斯主义最具代表性的理论家，是德国法学家卡尔·施密特（Carl Schmitt）。施密特系统性地阐发了一套政治哲学：他宣称，政治的本质绝不是自由主义所标榜的那样——即在一个存在分歧的多元世界中寻找彼此和平共处与达成妥协的机制；恰恰相反，政治的本质在于清晰辨别我们的敌人，并以铁腕手段消灭他们。在施密特看来，政治生来就是关于赢得胜利、碾碎敌手。而如今，我们甚至听到本届政府的在职高级官员在公众场合公开宣称：“你们尽可以整天把国际准则、体面规范那一套挂在嘴边，但在残酷的真实世界里，杰克（Jake），这个世界真正的主宰法则只有力量、武力与强权。”这是一种赤裸裸地用绝对支配与强权逻辑来置换法治与道德准则的企图。这种视法治和道德原则为软弱、怯懦和失败者专属枷锁的思维定势，构成了法西斯主义自我精神认同的最深层内核。此外，还有执政官员公开扬言：“对立面是彻头彻尾的邪恶，我们绝不会放过你们，属于你们的时代彻底终结了。”所有这些言论和行径，与詹姆斯·麦迪逊以及美利坚建国先父们所确立的自由主义宪政传统格格不入、深相抵触，但它们却无一不是威权主义与法西斯主义在各个历史版本中的标准母题。
Original English
**Speaker**: To me, one of the biggest is more philosophical than that. The preeminent philosopher of fascism in the early part of the 20th century is a German named Carl Schmitt. Schmitt promulgated the theory that what politics is about is not as in liberalism figuring out ways to get along with each other in a pluralistic world where we disagree. It's the opposite of that. It's about identifying our enemies and crushing them. He said politics is inherently about winning and crushing your enemies. Now, we heard a member of this administration say publicly, "You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power." That substitution of domination and strength for rule of law and morality. The idea that the rule of law and of moral principles are for wimps and sissies and losers. That's core to the self-conceptualization of fascism. And the idea also stated by an administration official that the other side is wicked and we're coming to get you. Your time is over. These things and others like them are all deeply alien to the tradition of James Madison and our founders, the liberal tradition and they are all common to versions of authoritarianism and fascism.
**主讲人**：在此我必须严正声明，我绝不是在断言美利坚合众国已经蜕变成了一个法西斯国家。我们的司法系统在很大程度上依然维系着独立性；我们的国会依然保留着部分的制度独立；我们的各州政府依然享有独立权力；广大民众依然保持着自主与独立；独立自由的新闻媒体也依然在发挥监督职能。我坚信，在制度坚韧的美国，无论是特朗普、MAGA势力还是任何其他政治狂人，都绝无可能重演希特勒在魏玛德国、或者墨索里尼在意大利所做到的全面夺权与独裁改造。然而，他们确实有能力做到的，是不断侵蚀、蚕食我们整个立宪民主体制的根基，并在我们国家的主要大党之一内部，将数以千万计的公民全面涵化、驯化为一种彻底拥抱法西斯政治逻辑的认知模式。而单单是这一深层转变本身，其危险程度就已足以令人不寒而栗。
Original English
**Speaker**: I am not saying America is a fascist country. Our courts remain independent. Our Congress remains partly independent. Our state governments remain independent and our people remain independent and our media remain independent. There is no way that Trump or MAGA or anyone else can do in the United States, I believe, what Hitler did in Germany or what Mussolini did in Italy. But what they can do is eat away at the foundations of the system and acculturate a whole bunch of people in our major one of our major political parties to a fascist way of thinking about our country. And that by itself is pretty dangerous.
### 自由主义的意义困境与制度设计
**主讲人**：第三章，自由主义与基督教之间令人意想不到的历史关联。思想界对自由主义一直存在一种极为普遍的标准批评，即认为自由主义体系无法为个体提供更广阔、更崇高的人生终极意义感。这种指责大体可以划分为一强一弱两种版本：弱版本的批判主张自由主义本身并不直接供给生命的目的与崇高意义；而强版本的批判则走得更远。在我看来，弱版本的批评完全切中事实，而强版本的指控则难以成立。弱版本的核心洞见在于：自由主义对于现代文明而言是绝对不可或缺的必要条件，但它本身并不构成充分条件。自由主义确实无法直接赐予你超越性的神圣体验，也无法代替你界定你在浩瀚宇宙中的本体位置。然而，这恰恰是有意为之的制度设计——这是自由主义的核心特性（feature），而非它的缺陷漏洞（bug）。自由主义之所以在形态上被刻意设计得如此“薄”（deliberately thin），正是建国先贤们一再强调的初衷：自由主义政体的唯一职能，就是搭建一个开放而中立的公共空间，让个体得以在这个空间内自由地重新发明自我、自主创建各自的社群生活与社会组织。它必须主动从宗教信仰的领域撤出，退让开道；必须从人类创造发明的领域退后，保持不干涉；必须从终极真理的阐释权中抽身，从而将探寻真理与安顿生命的权利完整交还给个体，允许人们自行去探索、展开属于他们自己的生命图景。然而……
Original English
**Speaker**: Chapter 3, the surprising link between liberalism and Christianity. There is a standard criticism of liberalism and it's that liberalism does not provide people with a larger sense of meaning in life. There's a weaker version of the critique that liberalism doesn't provide meaning in life, purpose in life. And then there's a stronger version of it. And I think the weaker one is true. And the stronger one is not true. And the weaker one just says liberalism is necessary, but it's not sufficient. It doesn't give you a sense of transcendence or a place in your world. And that's on purpose. That's a feature, not a bug, of liberalism. It's deliberately thin. Something the founders stressed, liberalism is going to create the space for people to invent themselves and invent their communities and their societies. It's going to get out of the way of religion. It's going to get out of the way of invention. It's going to get out of the way of truth and allow people to unfold that for themselves. But
### 自由主义的意义困境与后自由主义批判
**Jonathan Rauch**：自由主义做不到、没有试图去做，也根本无法做到的，是回答那些终极问题——比如善与恶的分别，比如我为什么会来到这个星球上？比如我应该将毕生精力奉献给什么？建国先贤们告诉过我们，可以追溯到约翰·洛克（John Locke，可以说他是一切自由主义理论的奠基人）的自由主义理论家们都曾说过：听着，关于这些问题，你们必须向其他源头去寻求答案。这永远都会是自由主义面临的一个难题，因为对许多人来说，自由主义所提供的是不够的，而且它本来也不被期望能够提供足够的东西。但这意味着我们面临着“意义的挑战”——人们不断向我们这些自由主义者发问：“那么这一切究竟是为了什么？意义何在？”而我们只能回答：“我不知道，你来告诉我。”因此，这种批评是真实的，但这是一项特性，而非缺陷（a feature, not a bug）。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: what it doesn't do, what it doesn't try to do, and what it cannot do is answer ultimate questions like the difference between good and evil, like why am I here on this planet? like what should I dedicate life to doing? And the founders told us liberal theorists going back to lock arguably the father of it all have said look you're going to have to look to other sources for that and that will always be a problem for liberalism because to a lot of people it's not enough and it's not supposed to be enough but that means we have this challenge of meaning where people keep saying to us liberals so what is it all for? what's the meaning and we say I don't know you tell me so that criticism is true but it's a feature not a bug
**Jonathan Rauch**：然而，还有一种更为强烈的批判，它至少可以追溯到 19 世纪的马克思，尤其是尼采。如今，它已成为所谓“后自由主义”（post-liberalism）的主要思想流派，主要来自非自由主义或非自由右翼（illiberal right），通常也被一些人称为神权政治论者（theocrats）。这种批判的强硬版本认为：自由主义在本质上具有破坏性，会侵蚀信仰、家庭、社区和国家等核心价值观。他们声称这些事物无法共存，因为自由主义将个体的自主性与自由置于所有其他价值观之上。它宣扬“做你想做的任何事，怎么做都无所谓；你不需要对上帝负责，也不需要对家庭负责等等”。他们认为，一个自由主义社会必然会逐渐瓦解其赖以生存的根基价值观，最终走向自我毁灭。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: then there's a stronger criticism and this dates back to the 19th century at least to Marx especially to Nietz and now it's major strand of what's called post-liberalism mostly from the illiberal or uh liberal right often the uh the theocrats as some have called And the strong version of this critique says liberalism is by its very nature destructive of core values like faith, family and community and nation. They say these things cannot coexist because liberalism puts individual autonomy and freedom before all other values. It says do whatever you want. It doesn't matter. you're not accountable to God, you're not accountable to family and so forth. That what a liberal society is going to do is undermine the values that it depends on and ultimately self-destruct.
**Jonathan Rauch**：因此他们主张，我们必须脱离自由主义，转向一个建立在宗教原则之上的社会。在某一派别看来，这意味着天主教原则；而在其他人看来，则意味着各种形式的基督教民族主义（Christian nationalism），即他们所谓的“七山使命”（Seven Mountains Mandate）等等。他们想要用许多不同的东西来替代自由主义，但它们的共同点在于，对价值观的来源持有一种威权主义式的视角——价值观必须来自上帝、《圣经》或诸如此类的权威。然而，这种强硬版本的批判根本是错误的。我们从过去 350 年的历史中知道，在允许人们自主选择信仰和宗教的社会里，宗教与信仰制度反而更加强大。建国先贤们之所以在第一修正案中明确禁止政府设立国教，正是因为他们深刻理解国家政权对宗教构成的危险。此外，这也是你能够真正、真诚地归向上帝的唯一途径；因为如果是有人通过政府法令强制你这么做，无论你是基督徒还是其他任何人，那都不是真正的信仰见证。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And therefore, we need to move away from liberalism and toward a society founded on religious principles. That means to one school Catholic principles, to others it means forms of Christian nationalism, the seven mountains mandate they call it. uh lots of different things that they want to substitute for liberalism, but that have in common a kind of authoritarian view of where values come from from God, the Bible, what have you. Now, that strong version is just wrong. We know from 350 years that's that religion, faith institutions are stronger in societies that allow people to choose their own faith and their own religion. The reason the founders put in the first amendment forbidding government to have a state religion is that they understood that the state is a danger to religion. And it's also the only way you can honestly come to God because if someone is forcing you to do that by government fiat, that's not real witness whether you're a Christian or anyone else.
### 世俗自由主义对信仰传统的忽视与价值共生
**Jonathan Rauch**：在这里，确有其真实性的一面，也是像我这样的人正在严肃对待的一部分批判，那就是：在一个崇尚消费主义、充满物质主义和高度世俗化的世俗自由主义世界里，做一个有信仰的人确实充满了挑战。而且我认为事实确实如此：我们这些世俗自由主义者忽视了我们的信仰制度和信仰传统的重要性，特别是基督教传统，因为那是美国立国之初的信仰传统。我们失去了与这种重要性的联系，未能意识到它是支撑我们民主制度的关键基石。而且在对待我们身边的基督徒和其他有信仰的人群时，我们也没有做到应有的包容、热情与好奇。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: What is kind of true here and the part of this critique that folks like me are taking seriously is it's challenging to be a person of faith in a secular liberal world that's where a lot of people are consumeristic where you've got a lot of materialism where you've got a lot of secularism and I think it is true that we secular liberals lost track of the importance of our faith institutions and our faith faith tradition, specifically Christianity, because that's America's founding faith tradition. We lost touch with how important that is as an undergurting of our democracy. And we haven't been as welcoming as we should be, as inclusive as we should be, as curious as we should be about the Christians and other people of faith in our in our midst.
**Jonathan Rauch**：自由民主本身并不提供其运作所需的全部价值观。它必须依赖外部源头来提供大部分这些价值观，去传授它们、宣扬它们，并赋予一种超越性（a sense of transcendence）。当你审视抵御威权主义挑战（例如法西斯主义，或者共产主义）的安全防线时，先贤们所理解的、林肯所理解的，正是基督教的原则在以其自身的方式充当自由主义的堡垒。让我试着解释一下我这么说的意思。我并不是说历史上实践中的基督教始终都是自由主义的。上帝知道——我是一名美国同性恋者，在历史上让同性恋美国人的生活变得痛苦、悲惨乃至常常走向自杀的首要力量，正是那些被误导的宗教说教。所以我绝不是要在这一点上粉饰太平。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Liberal democracy does not supply all of its own values. It relies on outside sources to provide a lot of those values, to teach them, to promulgate them, to give a sense of transcendence. And when you look at safeguards against authoritarian challenges like for example fascism or for that matter like communism, something I think that the founders understood and that Lincoln understood is that the principles of Christianity are in their own way bull works of liberalism. Let me try to explain what I mean by that. And what I don't mean is that Christianity as practiced all of the time is liberal. God knows I'm a I mean I am a gay American and the number one force that made life miserable and painful and often suicidal for gay Americans was misguided religious teachings. So I'm not white whitewashing any of that.
**Jonathan Rauch**：我同样需要澄清另一点我并非意指的事情：我并不是在说“美国是一个基督教国家”，或者“宪法是一份基督教文件”。建国先贤们在建国文件中特意拒绝了提及耶稣和基督教。当时有人极力游说他们这样做，但他们断然拒绝了。我也绝不是说你必须是基督徒才能成为优秀的美国公民，绝非如此。我自己就不是基督徒，我是一个持无神论立场的犹太人。那么，我究竟在表达什么？我想说的是：耶稣基督的核心原则，与詹姆斯·麦迪逊（James Madison）的核心原则有着惊人高度的契合。这是一件直到最近我才充分领会到的事情。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: I also need to say another thing I'm not saying which is America is a Christian country and the Constitution is a Christian document. The founders specifically rejected references to Jesus and Christianity in the founding documents. They were prevailed upon to do that and they refused. And I'm not saying that you have to be a Christian to be a good American citizen. Far from it. I am not a Christian. I'm an atheistic Jew. Okay. So what am I saying? The core principles of Jesus Christ map awfully well onto the core principles of James Madison. And that's something that I did not appreciate enough until recently.
### 耶稣的三大核心价值与自由主义美德的映射
**Jonathan Rauch**：耶稣宣扬了三大核心的颠覆性价值观，它们与此前所有的传统都截然不同（orthogonal to everything that went before）。当然，它们扎根于犹太教，但与以往的一切都有着本质的区别。第一条，“不要害怕”（Don't be afraid）。人们常说这是《圣经》中重复频率最高的一句训诫。他的意思是要超越当下的物质世界，放眼于永恒的来世。如果你整天生活在恐惧戒备、疑神疑鬼的状态中，你就会忘却上帝对你自有安排，而耶稣在自身生命中所展现出的那种从容与平静，以及对上帝计划的笃信，将帮助你在人生中做出更明智的选择，帮助你成为一个更好的人。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Jesus promulgates three core revolutionary values that are orthogonal to everything that went before. I mean, they have roots in Judaism, of course, but but they're different from everything that went before. Number one, don't be afraid. That's people say the most frequently repeated injunction in the Bible. What he means by that is look beyond this world to the next world. And if you're living your life hunker down in fear, being paranoid, you're forgetting that God has a plan for you and that the calm that Jesus demonstrates in his own life. The faith in God's plan will help you make better choices in life and help you be a better person.
**Jonathan Rauch**：第二条，“效法耶稣”（Imitate Jesus）。耶稣是一个激进的平等主义者，这在当时的历史上是前所未有的。耶稣的同行者是穷人、弱者、妓女、瘸腿者、病患以及社会弃儿。耶稣传递的信息是：所有人类都具有与生俱来的平等与尊严。在当时，这无疑是一个崭新的观念，而且这种价值是内在固有的——你绝不能把人当作达到目的的手段，每个人本身就是其自身的目的。耶稣基督教的第三大原则是“彼此饶恕”（Forgive each other）。我们可能会愤怒，可能会有人对我们犯下令人发指的暴行和罪过，但施加审判是上帝的权柄，而不是我们的权柄，我们必须选择饶恕。这是所有诫命中最艰难的一条。但正是它孕育出了怜悯与恩典等教义，而这些正是基督教的核心所在。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Two, imitate Jesus. Jesus is a radical egalitarian. This is new in history up in that point. Jesus's people are the poor and the weak, the prostitutes, the lame, the sick, um the outcast. Jesus's message is that all humans have an innate equality and dignity. And of course, that's a new idea. And that this is inherent. You never use people as a means to an end. Every individual is an end unto themselves. And the third principle of Jesus's Christianity is forgive each other. We may be angry. We may have outrages and sins committed against us, but it is God's place, not our place, to judge. And we must forgive. And that's the hardest commandment of all. But this leads to doctrines like mercy and grace, which are courted Christianity.
**Jonathan Rauch**：在为我的新书做调研期间，作为一个基督教的局外人，我访谈了许多神学家和牧师，没有人反驳这三点是基督教的核心教义。当然，有些人希望补充其他要素，比如悔改（repentance）。但每个人都一致认同，这些正是其教导的核心。现在，让我们把这三项原则对应并转化到詹姆斯·麦迪逊以及自由主义的核心美德之上——也就是我们的开国先贤们所强调的、公民为了维持这套政治体制运转所必须展现出的品质。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: researching my book, I'm an outsider to Christianity, but I interviewed theologians and pastors and no one disputed that those are three core doctrines of Christianity. I mean, some people wanted to add some other things like repentance. But everyone agrees that's at the heart of the teaching. Okay, let's take those three things and let's translate them over to James Madison and the core some of the core virtues of liberalism. the things that our founding fathers said that citizens need to show, need to demonstrate in order to keep our system running.
**Jonathan Rauch**：其中之一便是：在民主机制中，你有时会输掉选举。但这并不是世界末日。不要整天活在恐惧之中，害怕一旦对方获胜，你所熟知的生活就会彻底终结，以至于你不得不去窃取选举、否认选举结果或终结民主制度。事实上，有时候经历失败反倒是一件好事。要以一种探索冒险的精神而非恐惧的心态来面对它——你会从中吸取教训，他们也会从中学习成长，大家共同分享这个国家。这与“不要害怕”、不要蜷缩自闭的教导形成了极其完美的契合。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: One of them is sometimes you're going to lose an election. It's not the end of the world. Don't go through life being afraid that if the other side wins, it's the end of life as you know it and thus you have to steal the election or deny the election or end democracy. In fact, it's a good thing that sometimes you lose. Approach that in a spirit of adventure and not fear. You're going to learn from it. They're going to learn from it. Share the country. That maps very well onto don't be afraid. Don't be crouched down.
**Jonathan Rauch**：第二点，效法耶稣——人类个体根本的平等与尊严。这一条的对应关系显而易见，因为它直接写在《独立宣言》当中，完全脱胎于基督教的这些教义：“人人生而平等，造物者赋予他们若干不可剥夺的权利。”他们所表达的正是每个人与生俱来的平等和尊严，而这自然也是自由主义本身的核心原则，两者之间存在着极为直接的血脉联系。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Number two, imitate Jesus, fundamental equality and dignity of human individual. Well, that one's pretty obvious because it's right there in the Declaration of Independence and it's right out of those doctrines of Christianity. All men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. What they meant by that is that inherent equality and dignity of every person. And that of course is the core doctrine of liberalism itself. A very direct connection.
**Jonathan Rauch**：第三点，也就是最艰难的那一条：彼此饶恕。这一点在政治机制中虽不能直接等同转换，但它间接转化为了“政治克制”（forbearance）的原则——在自由民主制度中，你有时会赢得选举，但政治获胜的目的绝不是为了彻底消灭对手。我们刚才谈到了威权主义与法西斯主义；根据卡尔·施密特（Carl Schmitt）和其他法西斯主义者的理论，政治的目标就是消灭对立阵营，必要时甚至要在肉体上消灭对方。自由主义则说：“不，你必须展现出克制。当他们处于在野状态时，你对待他们的方式，应当是你未来某天一旦失去权力时希望被对待的方式。”这样才能建立起维系整个制度运转所必需的互惠性（reciprocity）与信任感。不仅如此，这还能拯救你自己的灵魂。因为如果你毕生都试图去摧毁和统治那些与你意见相左、与你不同的人，你的自身正直与善良也将在此过程中一同被摧毁殆尽。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And the third thing, the hard one, forgive each other. That doesn't translate directly, but it does translate indirectly into the principle of forbearance, which is sometimes in a liberal democracy, you're going to win an election, but the goal of winning in politics is not to obliterate the other side. We talked a minute ago about authoritarianism and fascism, and that according to Carl Schmidt and other fascists, your goal is to obliterate the other side. If necessary, you even murder the other side. Liberalism says, "No, you're going to show forbearance. You're going to treat them when they're out of power, the way you'll want to be treated someday if you're out of power. And that's going to build reciposity and trust that makes this system possible. And more than that, it's going to save your soul. Because if you go through life trying to destroy and dominate people who disagree with you, who are not like you, your own integrity and your own goodness will be demolished along with that.
### 福音派政治化、末日叙事与民主危机
**Jonathan Rauch**：至此，你看到了三大基督教核心价值观，以及三大自由主义核心美德，它们彼此支撑、相辅相成。我常把它们比作两块木板：单靠各自独立树立时都站不太稳，但如果把它们互相倚靠在一起，就能产生相得益彰的支撑效果。这就是为什么先贤们指望当时的美国能够求助于基督教——不是作为政府制度的强制组成部分，而是作为更广泛公民社会的底层支撑，他们希望通过基督教信仰来助力维护民主制度。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: So there you have three core Christian values. You have three core liberal values and they support each other. I say they're like two planks which don't stand all that well individually, but if you lean them against each other, they're mutually reinforcing. And that's one of the reasons why the founders expected America in their day to turn to Christianity as not the necessary part of government, but as part of the substrate of the broader civil society, which they hoped would help support democracy by being Christian.
**Jonathan Rauch**：那么，当基督教背离了这些核心价值观时，会发生什么呢？在美国的白人福音派教会中，我们看到了几乎等同于与共和党完全合流的现象。我们目睹了深度的政治化与偶像崇拜。全美范围内，对现代可能出现的最不具备基督品格的人物（the least Christlike figure）给予最强有力支持的群体，恰恰是白人福音派基督徒。对这一现状深感痛心的牧师们指出，这形成了我所谓的“恐惧之堂”（church of fear）；我曾交谈过的一位牧师将其称作“战场心态”（battlefield mindset）——也就是人们去教堂不再是将目光投向来世，而是带着将基督之道动员为世俗武器的意图，旨在赢得今生的战争，去打赢文化战争，去“痛击自由派”（own the libs）。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: What happens when Christianity moves away from those core values? In the white evangelical church in America, we've seen what amounts to something very close to a fusion with the Republican party. We've seen politicization. We've seen the elevation. Um the strongest supporters in the country of the least Christlike figure possibly to emerge in modern times are white evangelical Christians. And pastors who do not like this report what I call the church of fear. what one of them I talked to calls the battlefield mindset, which is we're not going to church with our eyes on the next world. We're going to church with our eyes on mobilizing the word of Christ to win in this world, to win the culture wars, to own the libs.
**Jonathan Rauch**：这造成了多重严重后果。其一，它导致了白人福音派教会的急剧萎缩。现在，隶属于教会的美国人比例已经不足半数；而在整个 20 世纪，这一比例始终维持在 70% 左右。这给民主机制带来了沉重负担，因为失去教会后，人们开始转向党派政治去寻找生命中的超越性意义。但那根本不是政治所具备的功能——政治的核心是妥协与谈判，而非提供终极意义。紧接着你还会面对另一个难题：当人们深陷于这些末日叙事之中——例如“如果我们输掉下一次大选，我们的生活方式就会危在旦夕，甚至我们在社会中庆祝圣诞节的权利都将荡然无存”——那么每一次选举都演变成了一场关乎生死存亡的末日决战，而这对自由民主制度而言是极其致命的毒药。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: That's had a couple effects. One is it's causing the rapid shrinkage of white evangelical churches. Fewer than half of Americans are now affiliated with a church. It was 70% 70% through the whole 20th century. And that's making it hard for democracy because now people are looking to partisan politics for their transcendent meaning in life. And that's not what politics does. Politics is about negotiation, not ultimate meaning. And then you have the other problem that when people get caught up in these narratives, these apocalyptic narratives of if we lose the next election, our way of life is endangered and our very position are being able to have Christmas in society is endangered. Then every election becomes apocalyptic and that's that's toxic to a liberal democracy.
**Jonathan Rauch**：因此，随着白人新教和白人福音派逐渐背离自由民主的这些价值观，随着二者之间从相互支持变为彼此对立，一切境况都变得愈加艰难。我认为，这正是推动当前自由民主危机的关键根源之一。所以，我对这一切的最终结论是：如果美国要成为一个更成功的民主国家，同时也是一个更成功的基督教社会，它实际上需要更多的基督教。但我所指的是耶稣当年所传道的那种基督教。对我个人而言，理解健康的基督教对于健康的美国民主制度的重要性，完全是一段漫长的思想探索之旅。这根本不是我最初的起点。事实上，早在 2003 年，我曾为《大西洋月刊》（The Atlantic）写过一篇我自认为是……
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: So as white Protestantism, white evangelicalism pulls away from those values of liberal democracy, as they become less mutually supportive and more mutually antagonistic, everything gets harder. And that I think is part of the crisis driving liberal democracy. And so where I come out all this is I think America needs more Christianity if it's going to be more successfully democratic and more successfully Christian. But the kind of Christianity I meant is the kind of Christianity that Jesus preached. For me, understanding the importance of healthy Christianity to healthy American democracy has has just been a journey. It's not at all where I started. In fact, in 2003 for The Atlantic, I wrote what I think is
### 宗教世俗化实验的失败与信仰的重估
**Jonathan Rauch**：那是我写过的最愚蠢的一篇文章。相信我，这个头衔可是“实至名归”，因为争夺这个名号的有力竞争者还真不少。当时我撰文赞颂了一种被我称为“冷漠神论”（apatheism）的现象。我指的就是世俗化——当时我看到数据显示美国人正变得越来越缺乏宗教信仰，我便说：“这难道不是好事吗？”因为在人类历史上，宗教往往具有分裂性，如果宗教少一些，我们大家就能相处得更融洽。然而，这个实验我们至今已经进行了整整22年。我们目睹了美国历史上前所未有的宗教大倒退。在此之前，没有任何时期能与如今这种脱离教会的速度相提并论；所谓的“无宗教倾向者”（nones）——即没有任何宗教归属的人群——出现了极为惊人的激增。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: ...the dumbest thing I've ever written. And believe me, that's an honorary designation because there's some other real contenders for that spot. But I wrote in praise of what I called apatheism. And by that I meant secularization, which is I was looking at the numbers showing that Americans were becoming less religious. And I said, "Isn't that great?" Because religion is divisive in human history and we'll all get along better if we have less of it. Well, we've been running that experiment now for 22 years. We've seen a retreat from religion like nothing in American history. There's no parallel for the rate of dechurching that we've seen, the stratospheric rise of what are called the "nones"—these are people who have no religious affiliation.
**Jonathan Rauch**：而我们看到，这种转变的后果包括更多的孤独、更多的疏离感、更强烈的社会失范感、虚无主义、愤怒以及有害的党派之争。人们开始用某种将世俗概念神圣化的伪宗教，来取代传统宗教生活中具有超越性的价值。觉醒文化（Wokeness）似乎就是其中的一种形式；某些形式的环保主义似乎也带有这种色彩；更有赤裸裸的党派狂热，让人们把“在政治上击败对手”视作自己生命的全部意义。所以说，这项社会实验我们已经做过了，事实证明我彻底错了，错得离谱。而且我认为许多人也得出了同样的结论。这在一定程度上推动了当代自由主义者重新发现信仰的重要性——只要理解得当，信仰本身就是我们民主制度的坚固堡垒。我只是很希望自己当初不必通过这种惨痛的方式吸取教训，或者说，我们社会不必经历这种惨痛的教训才明白这一点。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And we've seen that the result of that include more loneliness, more isolation, more sense of anomie, nihilism, anger, and toxic partisanship. People replacing transcendent value of religious life with a kind of deified religion. Wokeness seems to be a version of this. Certain forms of environmentalism seem to partake of this. And just rank partisanship where the meaning of my life is defeating the other side in politics. So, we've run the experiment and I was wrong. I was just flat wrong. And I think a lot of other people have reached the same conclusion. And that's partly driving the contemporary liberal rediscovery of the importance of faith as properly understood a bulwark of our democracy. I only wish that I had not had to learn the hard way or that we had not had to learn the hard way.
### 主流教会的“文化稀薄化”
**Jonathan Rauch**：在我看来，基督教主要存在三种形态，每一种都伴随着独特的社会影响。第一种形态，是20世纪下半叶在主流教会（mainline churches）中所发生的变化。这些教会包括主流的路德宗、圣公会、卫理公会，以及在某种程度上（尽管程度可能略轻）的天主教。我们这里主要指的是白人教会，黑人教会则处在完全不同的境遇中。这些主流教会逐渐变得“文化稀薄”（culturally thin）。所谓文化稀薄，意思是基督教原本是一种具有反主流文化特质的教义。耶稣当年的教导与他所处时代的犹太教格格不入，与那个时代的罗马美德更是大相径庭。它要求人们通过将重心放在来世、通过践行彻底的宽恕等方式，与周围的社会保持差异。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: The way I think about it is kind of three varieties of Christianity, each with its own social implications. And the first of those is what happened to the mainline churches in the second half of the 20th century. These are your mainline Lutheran and Episcopalians and Methodists and to some extent though maybe a lesser extent Catholics. We're talking here about the white churches predominantly. The black church is in a different space. They got culturally thin. And what's meant by that is the Christianity is a countercultural doctrine. Jesus's teaching is at odds with the Judaism of his time. It's even more at odds with the Roman virtues of his time. And it asked people to be different from the surrounding society by focusing, for example, on the next world, by being radically forgiving.
**Jonathan Rauch**：正是这种“与众不同”，构成了基督教历史上最核心的力量源泉。从历史经验来看，当它展现出一种反主流文化的生活范式时，往往是最具生命力的。然而，许多主流教会却丢掉了这一特质，开始彻底融入周围的环境。它们沦为了又一种平淡无奇的消费选择。曾有一位退休的主流教会牧师告诉我，在他所在的教派里，整场教会集会下来甚至从未提起过“上帝”这个词，这种情况早已司空见惯。他们完全沉浸在一种“社会福音”式的说教中，关注的不再是圣经经文，而是“我们在日常生活中做了什么来推进社会正义”。推进正义固然是件好事，但如果脱离了耶稣的具体教导与圣经文本，它的力量就会大打折扣。于是，它们就这样逐步融入了周边偏左翼的世俗社会。试想一下，如果你只想做一个偏左翼的社会活动家，你根本没有必要把周日的时光奉献给教会。因此，这些教会逐渐边缘化漂流，失去了它们存在的根本理由（raison d'être）；他们心知肚明，如今也正在竭尽全力试图纠正这一局面。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And that's been Christianity's historic strength, its differentness. It does best historically when it presents an example of a countercultural way of living. And a lot of the mainstream churches lost that and they began blending into the background. They became just another consumer choice. One retired mainline pastor told me that in his denomination, it became common for there be a whole church gatherings in which the word God was never mentioned. They got absorbed in a social gospel kind of teaching which was not so much about the scripture. It was about what are we doing in our daily lives to advance justice. Now that's a good thing but it's not as strong if it's divorced from the specific teachings of Jesus and the Bible. And they just kind of blended into the surrounding left-leaning society. Well, if you want to be a left-leaning social activist, you don't need to give up your Sunday. And those churches kind of drifted away and lost a lot of their raison d'être and they know it and now they're working hard to try to fix that.
### 福音派教会的政治化与“锋利化”
**Jonathan Rauch**：接下来发生的，主要发生在本世纪的白人福音派教会身上，我将其称为“锋利教会”（sharp church）。这是世俗化的另一种表现形式。它并不是教会模糊了与广泛世俗文化界限的那种“稀薄化”；恰恰相反，它极度窄化了教会的内涵，开始宣称：“要想成为一名基督徒，你必须持有某种特定的政治立场。你必须在同性恋、堕胎甚至国防问题上持有完全一致的见解。”接着它演变成：“你必须支持某个特定的政党，而这个政党就是共和党。”这种趋势始于20世纪80年代的杰里·福尔韦尔牧师（Jerry Falwell）、帕特·罗伯逊牧师（Pat Robertson）和路易斯·谢尔顿牧师（Louis Sheldon），但在过去十年里更是全面激化。正如我们顶尖的宗教人口统计学家瑞安·伯奇（Ryan Burge）所指出的，这实际上已经构成了共和党与白人福音派之间职能上的彻底合流。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: Then comes what happens to the evangelical church, the white evangelical church in this century predominantly and that's what I call the sharp church. This is a different form of secularization. And it's not the thinning out of the church where you lose the boundaries of church and the broader culture. Instead, it's where you narrow down the church and you begin to say, "In order to be a Christian, you need to have a certain view of politics. You need to have a specific view of homosexuality and abortion and even national defense." And then it becomes you need to support a specific political party and that party is Republican. That begins in the 1980s with Reverend Jerry Falwell and Reverend Pat Robertson and Reverend Louis Sheldon, but it really turbocharges in the last 10 years where you see what amounts to, as Ryan Burge, our leading religious demographer, has said, a functional merger of the Republican party and white evangelicalism.
**Jonathan Rauch**：这种转变在两个层面上“磨尖”了基督教的这一分支。其一，它让教会的信息变得锋利无比——使其充斥着强烈的党派色彩与分裂性，公然宣告“如果你在这些政治议题上与我们步调不一致，你就没有资格留在这里”，这与耶稣具有普世包容性的教导完全背道而驰。其二，它也在字面意义上“削尖”了教会，使教会的体量急剧缩水，因为许多人根本不愿意置身于那种充满对立的环境中。因此，在白人福音派建制教会中，同样出现了此前在主流教会中发生过的人数暴跌。两者的崩塌如出一辙，进而直接促成了“无宗教倾向者”的激增；这些脱离了教会的人，转而向党派政治去寻求他们的人生价值观。事实证明，无论是“稀薄教会”还是“锋利教会”，都无法承担起开国元勋们寄望于基督教发挥的作用——也就是我所说的“深厚教会”（thick church）所应当承担的使命。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: And that sharpens Christianity, that wing, in a couple ways. One, it sharpens the message. It makes it partisan. It makes it divisive, says you can't be here if you're not with us on these political issues, very contrary to the universalistic message of Jesus. But it also literally sharpens the church in the sense it makes the church smaller because a lot of people don't want to be there for that. So you see the same kind of collapse in numbers of white evangelical organized churches that you'd previously seen in the mainline churches. They have the same collapse and that leads to this rise of the nones, the unchurched, and they're looking to partisan politics for their values. So neither it turns out the thin church nor the sharp church is really doing the job that the founders hoped Christianity could do and that's the job of what I call the thick church.
### “深厚教会”的构建与公民神学
**Jonathan Rauch**：所谓“深厚教会”，指的是这样一种基督教形态：它之所以“深厚”，在于它能够构筑起极其紧密的社区纽带，对信徒提出精神与行为上的严肃要求，而绝不仅仅沦为一种随意的消费选择；它超越了这一点，创造出深切的社区联结、超越感、集体敬拜的庄严、生命的终极意义，以及蕴含切实戒律的经文教导。同时，它之所以“深厚”，还在于它能在很大程度上与我们的自由民主体制保持和谐与共鸣。它明确表明：我们将保持自身作为一个独特文化实体的纯粹性，但我们也深刻理解，当耶稣的价值观与麦迪逊（宪政）的价值观同向同行时，我们的国家才会更加繁荣强大。这两者完全可以并行不悖——这就是我所说的“深厚教会”：它既保持反主流文化的深沉内核，又具备健康运转的社会功能，并能够坚定支持一个包含多元异质群体的多元主义社会。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: That's a form of Christianity which is thick in the sense of creating strong bonds of community, asking people of their followers, not just being a consumer choice, doing more than that, creating that community, that sense of transcendence, of group worship, of meaning in life, of scriptural teachings that have actual commandments, and also thick in the sense of being in harmony to a large extent with our liberal democracy of saying we are going to be a distinct cultural entity but we're going to understand that our country is stronger when the values of Jesus and the values of Madison are in alignment and you can do both of these things. That's what I mean by a thick church—both countercultural and functional and supportive of a pluralistic society with people who are different from itself.
**Jonathan Rauch**：那么，你究竟该如何同时做到这两点呢？听上去这二者之间似乎充满矛盾：你如何才能既作为一种文化上独树一帜、不流俗于本国泛世俗文化的深厚基督教存在，同时又能对民主制度提供有力支撑？须知在民主社会中，周围的大多数人注定会与你大相径庭，会有许多无神论者、非基督徒等等，持有截然不同的观点。你怎样才能兼顾这两端？事实证明，对此存在一个极佳的解法，这个答案浓缩在一个由两个单词组成的术语中，这也是我开展这项研究之前从未听闻的概念——它被称为“公民神学”（civic theology）。请允许我阐述一下它的内涵，以及为什么我认为它是连接基督教世界与自由民主世界的一座至关重要的桥梁。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: So, how do you do those two things? Like they sound maybe contradictory. How do you be a culturally distinctive thick Christianity that's not like the rest of the culture in the country and yet also supportive of democracy in which people are going to be different from you. A lot of people will be atheists or non-Christian or whatever and they'll have very different views. How do you do both of those things? It turns out there's a good answer to that and that answer is captured in a two-word phrase I didn't know before I started doing this work. It's called civic theology. Let me just say what that is and why I think it's such an important connecting bond between Christian world and liberal world.
### 个人灵命塑造与公共行为的割裂
**Jonathan Rauch**：时至今日，教会在个人生活层面践行所谓的“门徒培训”（discipling）方面，其实依然表现得相当出色。门徒培训，又称“灵命塑造”（spiritual formation），意味着帮助人们在实际生活中更具基督的样式，按照基督的形象来塑造其品格。令人赞叹的是，当下依然如此：当阿什维尔市（Asheville）遭遇洪灾被洪水淹没时，教会往往是第一批抵达现场提供援助与慰藉的力量。同样真实的是，许多教会依然在各自社区中发挥着卓越的作用，关怀饥饿者，每周四定期分发食物，接纳救济处于困境的人群。在他们切身的微观世界里，教会成员之间往往展现出了极具基督风范的互助之爱。当然并非总是尽善尽美，偶尔你也会见到一些恶劣的行为。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: The church has been pretty good to this day at doing what it calls discipling people in their personal lives. Discipling people, also known as spiritual formation, means helping people to become more Christlike in their lives, forming them in the image of Christ. And it is still true, wonderfully true, that when the city of Asheville is underwater from a flood, the churches are the first on the scene with aid and comfort. And it is still true that a lot of churches are doing great work in their communities and for the hungry and serving food every Thursday and taking in the needy. And in their own immediate worlds, members of churches are often very Christlike to each other. Not always. You see some horrible behavior.
**Jonathan Rauch**：然而，这就引出了另一个核心问题——而这正是美国基督教、尤其是白人福音派严重失职的地方：基督究竟希望基督徒在政治活动和社交媒体上表现出怎样的言行举止？引用基督教作家大卫·弗兰奇（David French）的名言——这里容我引用一句稍显粗鄙的原话，但他讲得极其透彻：“如果你一边宣称‘我在社交媒体上或许是个混蛋（asshole），但你该去施食厨房看看我有多虔诚’，那绝对不是基督的样式。”你根本不能把在个人日常生活中的基督徒面貌，与在社交媒体上肆意撕咬他人、谩骂侮辱，甚至做出撕裂国家行径的做派割裂开来。毫无根据地用最坏的恶意揣测他人、拒绝宽恕、将政治视作残酷支配对手的竞技场、将自己的教会沦为推进文化战政治的夺权工具——在这种文化战中，非得一方将另一方置于死地不可。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: But then there's this other question, and this is where American Christianity, especially white evangelicalism, has really fallen down on that job. How would Christ want Christians to behave in politics and on social media? There in the famous words of the Christian writer David French. I'm going to use a bit of language here, but he puts it awfully well. If you're saying, "I may be a bit of an asshole on social media, but you should see me in the soup kitchen." That's not being Christlike. You can't make a division between being Christian in your immediate personal life and then going on social media and ripping people's guts out, calling them names, or behaving in ways that are going to tear apart our country. Thinking the worst of others, being unforgiving. Viewing politics as a forum for domination. Viewing your own church as a vehicle for moving forward toward a culture war politics in which one side has to dominate the other.
### 公民神学实践与联盟的重建
**Jonathan Rauch**：因此，长久以来在个人的“灵命塑造”与面向公共生活的“公民灵命塑造”之间，存在着一道人为割裂的屏障。如今，许多基督徒已经意识到，事情已经走向了极其扭曲的地步。教会未能在其神圣使命中建立起一套完备的公民神学，来为基督徒解答这一问题：我们在社交媒体上究竟该如何活出基督的样式？这绝不意味着你需要放弃自己在各项社会议题上的固有立场——无论那是关于堕胎、同性恋、扶贫计划还是战争；这绝不要求你改变自己的内心信仰与观念世界。但它切实意味着，你可能需要彻底改变自己在公共公民领域中的处事行为模式。面对他人，你是否能够更加仁慈、多一份包容与宽恕？你是否愿意下功夫倾听他人的立场与观点？你是否愿意秉持麦迪逊式的协商妥协精神，而非诉诸法西斯式的支配征服狂热？
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: So there's been this artificial barrier between personal civic spiritual formation and civic spiritual formation. And a lot of Christians now have realized that something's gone very wrong here. The church has failed in its mission of having a civic theology that answers this question for Christians. How can we be Christlike on social media? That doesn't mean you give up your positions on whatever the social issue is. Abortion, homosexuality, poverty programs, war. It doesn't mean that you change your outlook in what you believe, but it may mean you change your view of how you behave in the civic realm. Can you be kinder and more forgiving of others? Can you work to listen more to their point of view? Can you take a Madisonian spirit of negotiation rather than a fascistic spirit of domination?
**Jonathan Rauch**：目前，基督教内部已有许多重要的力量正在致力于推进这一转变。像“基督教与公共生活中心”（Center for Christianity and Public Life）这样的机构，正在积极探讨如何将基督教义与健康的公民生活紧密融合。在所有这些探索中，我认为最引人注目的，当属耶稣基督后期圣徒教会（Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints）当下正在进行的实践。当然，福音派内部或许有一整套关于他们究竟算不算正统基督徒的边缘争论，但他们同样敬拜耶稣基督，他们接纳圣经，并践行着我们一直在探讨的那三项核心教义。更为关键的是，他们实际上构建起了一套成熟完备的公民神学：这套神学主张，基督所期望的追随者在公共生活中展现的见证，是一种被他们称作“耐心、协商与相互包容”（patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation）的精神。这并不意味着你必须放弃自身的基本主张，而是要秉持耐心、协商与彼此迁就。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: There are major elements of Christianity that are working on doing that. There are places like the Center for Christianity and Public Life that are now working on these questions of merging the doctrines of Christianity with civic life. The most interesting of all of these I think is what's happening right now in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Now, there's a whole side debate evangelicals may want to have about whether they're Christian or not, but they worship Jesus Christ. They accept the Bible and they advance those three doctrines that we've been talking about. But they have actually built a full-fledged civic theology which says that what Christ wants followers of Jesus to witness to in public life is a spirit of what they call patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation. Doesn't mean you give up your basic view, but patience, negotiation, and mutual accommodation.
**Jonathan Rauch**：他们将此称为“和平使者倡议”（peacemaking initiative），这里所指的正是公共公民社会的和平；他们坚信，尽一切可能平息公共政策领域的剑拔弩张、为多元群体的共存创造更大空间，正是他们作为基督徒义不容辞的使命。而且他们绝非仅仅停留在口头说教，而是切切实实付诸了行动。他们在2022年公开支持了一项具有里程碑意义的妥协法案——该法案在联邦层面承认了我本人的同性婚姻（尽管这完全违背他们教会自身的教义规范），但与此同时，这项法律也在同一部法条中明确确立了对该教会的宗教豁免保护，使其免于被强迫承认该项婚姻。这恰恰就是开国元勋们所期盼的格局。这正是所谓的“深厚教会”：在教会内部及其教义边界之内，拥有坚定深厚的信仰体系；而在教会外部，它同样愿意达成谅解，去积极支持并构筑一个更强大的世俗公民社会。我认为，再也没有什么事情比重建并巩固基督教与世俗民主制度之间的同盟关系更为紧迫重要的了。如果两者能够守望相助，其余所有棘手难题的化解都将容易得多；而一旦两者背道而驰、相互撕扯，一切都将陷入泥潭。
Original English
**Jonathan Rauch**: They call this their peacemaking initiative and by that they mean civic peace and they think this is part of their mission as Christians to try to tamp down the issues in public policy where that's possible and create more room to live together. And they've not only talked the talk, they've walked the walk. They actually supported a piece of landmark compromise legislation in 2022 which federally recognized my same-sex marriage, which is against their church doctrine, while also enshrining in the very same law protections for their church to not have to recognize that marriage. And that's exactly what the founders wanted. That's a thick church. You have a strong church within its borders, what it believes, yet it's also willing to come to terms with and support a stronger civil society outside the church. That's a thick church. I can't really think of anything more important than rebooting and strengthening an alliance between Christianity and secular democracy. Everything else will be so much easier if these things are supportive of each other than if they're pulling in opposite directions. And my...
### 对基督徒的呼吁与公民神学
**讲者**：我对基督徒的呼吁——你们知道，我一直都在这么说。我是一个局外人，我绝不会为了国家的利益，去告诉任何不想成为基督徒或不信基督教的人去改信它。绝非如此。你们知道，我不是基督徒，我也不会成为一名基督徒。但我要传达给基督徒的信息是：我们国家要建设一个更强大的民主制度，坦率地说，要拥有一个更文明的社会所需要的要素，其实全都写在福音书里。如果基督教能够弘扬我所提到的耶稣的那些核心原则——不要惧怕、效法耶稣、彼此饶恕，并且下定决心与全国其他群体、尤其是与整个基督教界展开互动，积极倡导一种公民神学，将这些核心要素引入我们的公共领域。这不仅有益于民主，而且同样重要甚至更为重要的是，这或许也将有益于基督教本身。当基督教变得高度政治化、尖锐刻薄、党派色彩浓厚，变得和社交媒体上的其他乱象别无二致时，人们对它不再感兴趣也就不足为奇了。因此，我想向基督徒传达的信息是：这里存在着一种强烈的需求交汇，而我们国家所需要的良方，其实就在那本书中。
Original English
**Speaker**: plea to Christians, you know, I say this all the time. I'm an outsider and I'm not telling anyone who doesn't want to be a Christian or doesn't believe in Christianity to become one for the good of the country. Far from it. You know, I'm not a Christian. I'm not going to become one. But the message to Christians is that the elements that our country needs to be a stronger democracy and frankly a more civil society are right there in the gospels. If Christianity were to elevate those core principles of Jesus that I've spoken of, don't be afraid, imitate Jesus, and forgive each other. and make a point of engaging with the rest of the country and especially with the Christian world of promulgating a civic theology that emphasizes those elements brought over into our public sphere. It's going to be good for democracy and just as important maybe it's going to be good for Christianity. When Christianity becomes politicized and sharp and harsh and partisan and when it looks like everything else going on in social media, no wonder that's not something people are interested in. So what I'm my message to Christians is there's a powerful convergence of needs here and that what our country needs is right there in the book.
### 基督教作为民主的承重墙
**讲者**：与此相辅相成的另一个信息，源于我个人的经历——作为一名世俗自由派、一名不信教者、一名无神论者，以及一名在成长过程中目睹过基督教最丑恶一面并有着痛苦经历的同性恋者。我认为，我们当中有太多人把婴儿连同洗澡水一起倒掉了。我认为我们忘记了一点：我们需要建国宪纲文件之外的源头来支撑这些核心美德——也就是建国先贤们所称的“共和美德”；而且一个健康的基督教对我们自身也是至关重要的。事实证明，基督教是我们民主制度中的一堵承重墙，我们需要它变得更加坚固，其迫切程度丝毫不亚于他们自己。
Original English
**Speaker**: And then the complimentary message to that is um you know it comes from my own journey as a secular liberal as a non-believer as an atheist as a gay person who had very bitter experiences of Christianity growing up when I saw it at its worst. I think too many of us threw out the baby with the bathwater. I think we forgot that we need sources outside our framing documents that uphold these these core virtues um that the founders called republican virtues and that we have a stake in healthy Christianity. Christianity turns out to be a loadbearing wall in our democracy and we need it to be stronger as much as they do.
### 结语与订阅倡议
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Original English
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