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本贴文来自于本人写的以下文章：
《新概念英语》的版本小史与删减内容
详情见附图
### 5
The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one knows him very well. For a hundred years or more he has been killed, captured, and imprisoned in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere, and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike. He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books, and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific) link with our ancestral past.
Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photo-graph has ever been taken of one in a wild state, no zoologist, however intrepid, has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in the dark jungles in which he lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried among the animals he loved so well. But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives, or how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups, or indicate the final extent of their intelligence. All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago. The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.
### 8
Parents have to do much less for their children today than they used to do, and home has become much less of a workshop. Clothes can be bought ready made, washing can go to the laundry, food can be bought cooked, canned or preserved, bread is baked and delivered by the baker, milk arrives on the doorstep, meals can be had at the restaurant, the works' canteen, and the school dining-room.
It is unusual now for father to pursue his trade or other employment at home, and his children rarely, if ever, see him at his place of work. Boys are therefore seldom trained to follow their father's occupation, and in many towns they have a fairly wide choice of employment and so do girls. The young wage-earner often earns good money, and soon acquires a feeling of economic independence. In textile areas it has long been customary for mothers to go out to work, but this practice has become so widespread that the working mother is now a not unusual factor in a child's home life, the number of married women in employment having more than doubled in the last twenty-five years. With mother earning and his older children drawing substantial wages father is seldom the dominant figure that he still was at the beginning of the century. When mother works economic advantages accrue, but children lose something of great value if mother's employment prevents her from being home to greet them when they return from school.
### 10
In our new society there is a growing dislike of original, creative men. The manipulated do not understand them; the manipulators fear them. The tidy committee men regard them with horror, knowing that no pigeonholes can. be found for them. We could do with a few original, creative men in our political life-if only to create some enthusiasm, release some energy but where are they? We are asked to choose between various shades of the negative. The engine is falling to pieces while the joint owners of the car argue whether the footbrake or the handbrake should be applied. Notice how the cold, colourless men, without ideas and with no other passion but a craving for success, get on in this society, capturing one plum after another and taking the juice and taste out of them. Sometimes you might think the machines we worship make all the chief appointments, promoting the human beings who seem closest to them. Between midnight and dawn, when sleep will not come and all the old wounds begin to ache, I often have a nightmare vision of a future world in which there are billions of people, all numbered and registered, with not a gleam of genius anywhere, not an original mind, a rich personality, on the whole packed globe. The twin ideals of our time, organization and quantity, will have won for ever.
### 12
What characterizes almost all Hollywood pictures is their inner emptiness. This is compensated for by an outer impressiveness. Such impressiveness usually takes the form of a truly grandiose realism. Nothing is spared to make the setting, the costumes, all of the surface details correct. These efforts help to mask the essential emptiness of the characterization, and the absurdities and trivialities of the plots. The houses look like houses; the streets look like streets; the people look and talk like people; but they are empty of humanity, credibility, and motivation: Needless to say, the disgraceful censorship code is an important factor in predetermining the content of these pictures. But the code does not disturb the profits, nor the entertainment value of the films; it merely helps to prevent them from being credible. It isn't too heavy a burden for the industry to bear. In addition to the impressiveness of the settings, there is a use of the camera which at times seems magical. But of what human import is all this skill, all-this effort, all this energy in the production of effects, when the story, the representation of life is hollow, stupid, banal, childish?
### 13
Oxford has been ruined by the motor industry. The peace which Oxford once knew, and which a great university city should always have, has been swept ruthlessly away; and no benefactions and research endowments can make up for the change in character which the city has suffered. At six in the morning the old courts shake to the roar of buses taking the next shift to Cowley and Pressed Steel; great lorries with a double deck cargo of cars for export lumber past Magdalen and the University Church. Loads of motor-engines are hurried hither and thither and the streets are thronged with a population which has no interest in learning and knows no studies beyond servo-systems and distributors, compression ratios and camshafts.
Theoretically the marriage of an old seat of learning and tradition with a new and wealthy industry might be expected to produce some interesting children. It might have been thought that the culture of the university would radiate out and transform the lives of the workers. That this has not happened may be the fault of the university, for at both Oxford and Cambridge the colleges tend to live in an era which is certainly not of the twentieth century, and upon a planer which bears little resemblance to the war-torn Earth. Wherever the fault may lie the fact remains that it is the theatre at Oxford and not at Cambridge which is on the verge of extinction, and the only fruit of the combination of industry and the rarefied atmosphere of learning is the dust in the streets, and a pathetic sense of being lost which hangs over some of the colleges.
### 17
The fact that we are not sure what ' intelligence' is, nor what is passed on, does not prevent us from finding it a very useful working concept, and placing a certain amount of reliance on tests which ' measure' it.
In an intelligence test we take a sample of an individual's ability to solve puzzles and problems of various kinds, and if we have taken a representative sample it will allow us to predict successfully the level of performance he will reach in a wide variety of occupations.
This became of particular importance when, as a result of the 1944 Education Act, secondary schooling for all became law, and grammar schools, with the exception of a small number of independent foundation schools, became available to the whole population. Since the number of grammar schools in the country could accommodate at most approximately 25 per cent of the total child population of eleven-plus, some kind of selection had to be made. Narrowly academic examinations and tests were felt, quite rightly, to be heavily weighted in favour of children who had had the advantage of highly-academic primary schools and academically biased homes. Intelligence tests were devised to counteract this narrow specialization, by introducing problems which were not based on specifically scholastically-acquired knowledge. The intelligence test is an attempt to assess the general ability of any child to think, reason, judge, analyse and synthesize by presenting him with situations, both verbal and practical, which are within his range of competence and understanding.
### 19
A gentleman is, rather than does. He is interested in nothing in a professional way. He is allowed to cultivate hobbies, even eccentricities, but must not practise a vocation. He must know how to ride and shoot and cast a fly. He should have relatives in the army and navy and at least one connection in the diplomatic service. But there are weaknesses in the English gentleman's ability to rule us today. He usually knows nothing of political economy and less about how foreign countries are governed. He does not respect learning and prefers ' sport'. The problem set for society is not the virtues of the type so much as its adequacy for its function, and here grave difficulties arise. He refuses to. consider sufficiently the wants of the customer, who must buy, not the thing he desires but the thing the English gentleman wants to sell. He attends inadequately tr technological development. Disbelieving in the necessity of large-scale production in the modern world, he is passionately devoted to excessive secrecy, both in finance and method of production. He has an incurable and widespread nepotism in appointment, discounting ability and relying upon a mystic entity called ' character,' which means, in a gentleman's mouth, the qualities he traditionally possesses himself. His lack of imagination and the narrowness of his social loyalties have ranged against him one of the fundamental estates of the realm. He is incapable of that imaginative realism which admits that this is a new world to which he must adjust himself and his institutions, that every privilege he formerly took as of right he can now attain only by offering proof that it is directly relevant to social welfare.
### 24
Walking for walking's sake may be as highly laudable and exemplary a thing as it is held to be by those who practise it. My objection to it is that it stops the brain. Many a man has professed to me that his brain never works so well as when he is swinging along the high road or over hill and dale. This boast is not confirmed by my memory of anybody who on a Sunday morning has forced me to partake of his adventure. Experience teaches me that whatever a fellow-guest may have of power to instruct or to amuse when he is sitting in a chair, or standing on a hearth-rug, quickly leaves him when he takes one out for a walk. The ideas that come so thick and fast to him in any room, where are they now? where that encyclopaedic knowledge which he bore so lightly? where the kindling fancy that played like summer lightning over any topic that was started? The man's face that was so mobile is set now; gone is the light from his fine eyes. He says that A (our host) is a thoroughly good fellow. Fifty yards further on, he adds that A is one of the best fellows he has ever met. We tramp another furlong or so, and he says that Mrs A is a charming woman. Presently he adds that she is one of the most charming women he has ever known. We pass an inn. He reads vapidly aloud to me: ' The King's Arms. Licensed to sell Ales and Spirits.' I foresee that during the rest of the walk he will read aloud any inscription that occurs. We pass a milestone. He points at it with his stick, and says ' Uxminster.I1 Miles.' We turn a sharp corner at the foot of the hill. He points at the wall, and says ' Drive Slowly.' I see far ahead, on the other side of the hedge bordering. the high road, a small notice-board. He sees it too. He keeps his eye on it. And in due course ' Trespassers,' he says, ' will be Prosecuted.' Poor man! -mentally a wreck.
### 30
Each civilization is born, it culminates, and it decays. There is a widespread testimony that this ominous fact is due to inherent biological defects in the crowded life of cities. Now, slowly and at first faintly, an opposite tendency is showing itself. Better roads and better vehicles at first induced the wealthier classes to live on the outskirts of the cities. The urgent need for defence had also vanished. This tendency is now spreading rapidly downwards. But a new set of conditions is just showing itself. Up to the present time, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this new tendency placed the home in the immediate suburbs, but concentrated manufacturing activity, business relations, government, and pleasure in the centres of the cities. Apart from the care of children and periods of sheer rest, the active lives were spent in the cities. In some ways the concentration of such activities was even more emphasized, and the homes were pushed outwards even at the cost of the discomfort of commuting. But, if we examine the trend of technology during the past generation, the reasons for this concentration are largely disappearing. Still more, the reasons for the choice of sites for cities are also altering. Mechanical power can be transmitted for hundreds of miles, men can communicate almost instantaneously by telephone, the chiefs of great organizations can be transported by airplanes, the cinemas can produce plays in every village, music, speeches, and sermons can be broadcast. Almost every reason for the growth of cities, concurrently with the growth of civilization has been profoundly modified.
### 37
The Victorians, realizing that the greatest happiness accorded to man is that provided by a happy marriage, endeavoured to pretend that all their marriages were happy. We, for our part, admitting the fact that no feat of intelligence and character is so exacting as that required of two people who desire to live permanently together on a basis of amity, are obsessed by the problem of how to render the basic facts of cohabitation simpler and more reasonable, in order that unhappy marriages may less frequently result. The Victorians would have considered it ' painful' or ' unpleasant' were one to point out that only four marriages out of every ten are anything but forced servitudes. We ourselves start from this very assumption and try to build from it a theory of more sensible relations between the sexes. Of all forms of arrant untruthfulness Victorian optimism appears to me to have been the most cowardly and the most damaging.
Truth, therefore, is an attitude of the mind. It is important, if one does not wish to inconvenience and to bore one's friends, not to tell lies. But it is more important not to think lies, or to slide into those mechanical and untruthful habits of thought which are so pleasant and so easy as descents to mental ineptitude. The Victorian habit of mind (which I consider to have been a bad habit of mind) was unduly preoccupied by what was socially and morally convenient.
Convenience is, however, in all affairs of life, an execrable test of value. One should have the courage to think uncomfortably, since it is only by rejecting the convenient that one can come to think the truth.
Not, after all, that there is any such thing as truth. At best we can approach to some relative approximation. On the other hand, there is surely such a thing as untruth. One is generally aware when one has said something, or acted in some way which has left on other people an impression not strictly in accordance with the facts. One is generally aware, also, when one has thrust aside an inconvenient thought and slid into its place another thought which is convenient. One's awareness in the former case is in general more acute than in the latter, since we are more on the look-out for the lies we utter than for those we merely think. In fact, however, it is the untruthful thought which is the more vicious of the two. Spoken lies are invariably tiresome and may actually. be dishonest. But continuous lying in the mind, a disease to which the Anglo-Saxon is peculiarly exposed, spells the destruction of human thought and character.
### 40
Populations increase and decrease relatively not only to one another, but also to natural resources. In most parts of the world, the relation between population and resources is already unfavourable and will probably become even more unfavourable in the future. This growing poverty in the midst of growing poverty constitutes a permanent menace to peace. And not only to peace, but also to democratic institutions and personal liberty. For overpopulation is not compatible with freedom. An unfavourable relationship between numbers and resources tends to make the earning of a living almost intolerably difficult. Labour is more abundant than goods, and the individual is compelled to work long hours for little pay. No surplus of accumulated purchasing power stands-between him and the tyrannies of unfriendly nature or of the equally unfriendly wielders of political and economic power. Democracy is, among other things, the ability to say ' no' to the boss. But a man cannot say ' no' to the boss, unless he is sure of being able to eat when the boss's favour has been withdrawn. And he cannot be certain of his next meal unless he owns the means of producing enough wealth. for his family to live on, or has been able to accumulate a surplus out of past wages, or has a chance of moving to virgin territories, where he can make a fresh start. In an overcrowded country, very few people own enough to make them financially independent; very few are in a position to accumulate purchasing power; and there is no free land. Moreover, in any country where population presses hard upon natural resources, the general economic situation is apt to be so precarious that government control of capital and labour, production and consumption, becomes inevitable. It is no accident that the twentieth century should be the century of highly centralized governments and totalitarian dictatorships; it had to be so for the simple reason that the twentieth century is the century of planetary overcrowding.
### 43
Faith in controlled nuclear fission is now being shown by the construction of atomic power stations. In Britain, Calder Hall on the coast of Cumberland first made its contribution to the National Electricity grid in 1957. Subsequently a chain of nuclear power stations was planned. Of necessity they are sited near the coasts or tidal water because of the need of much water for cooling and a certain discharge of possible radioactive effluent. Atomic power is associated in the public mind with the destructive force of atom bombs and partly for this reason, though it is claimed that there is no danger to be associated with atomic power stations, they are being sited away from populous centres.
The present position is that the three main sources of power are coal, oil and water power. We sometimes refer to electricity, gas or petrol as if they were the actual sources of power, forgetting that electricity must be generated by the consumption of coal or oil or by the utilization of water power, whilst coke, gas and petrol are examples of secondary fuels by which coal and oil may be more effectively used.
Where alternative sources of power are available there are some marked contrasts in handling. The bulk and weight of coal required in the majority of manufacturing industries is large in comparison with the bulk and weight of other raw materials. This is not always true--as with the manufacture of pig iron and steel from low-grade iron ores-but it did lead to the concentration of industrial developments on the coal-fields, a phenomenon well seen in such countries as Britain where the Industrial Revolution came before the days of oil or electricity. Coal being a solid must be distributed mainly by rail or water.
By way of contrast oil can be transported large distances by pipeline but overseas movement has involved building of large numbers of tankers, including now some of the, largest vessels afloat. Unless suitable on other grounds oilfields have not become industrial regions; on the contrary the oil industry is marked by a certain amount of smell and an element of danger, hence the siting of refineries. at a distance from population centres. It is not always realized that the owners of pipelines can handle the oil of different customers, sending it through at different periods. Natural gas can also be transported large distances by pipe. Early. in 1959 Britain received the first ship cargo of natural gas-liquefied for the purpose of transport.
### 46
After millennia of growth so slow that each generation hardly noticed it, the cities are suddenly racing off in every direction. The world population goes upby two per cent a year, city population goes up by four per cent a year, but in big cities the rate may be as much as five and six per cent a year. To give only one example of almost visible acceleration, Athens today grows by three dwellings and loo square metres of road every hour. There is no reason to believe that this.
pace will slacken. As technology gradually swallows up all forms of work, industrial and agricultural, the rural areas are going to shrink, just as they have shrunk in Britain, and the vast majority of their people will move into the city. In fact, in Britain now only about four or five per cent of people live in rural areas and depend upon them; all through the developing world the vanguard of the rural exodus has reached the urban fringes already, and there they huddle, migrants in the favellas and barrios of Latin America, in shanty towns in Africa, in those horrifying encampments one sees on the outskirts-of Calcutta and Bombay. We are heading towards an urban world.
This enormous increase will go ahead whatever we do, and we have to remember that the new cities devour space. People now acquire far more goods and things. There is a greater density of household goods; they demand more services such as sewage and drainage. Above all the car changes everything: rising incomes and rising populations can make urban car density increase by something like four and five per cent in a decade; traffic flows rise to fill whatever scale of highways are provided for them. The car also has a curious ambivalence: it creates and then it destroys mobility. The car tempts people further out and then gives them the appalling problem of getting back. It makes them believe they can spend Sunday in Brighton, but makes it impossible for them to return before, say, two in the morning. People go further and further away to reach open air and countryside which continuously recedes from them, and just as their working weeks decline and they begin to have more time for leisure, they find they cannot get to the open spaces or the recreation or the beaches which they now have the time to enjoy.
Recently some studies were made in the behaviour of mice when exposed to more than a certain degree of density, frustration, and noise, and the mice just became deranged. I think some sociologists wonder whether it might not be the same for men. This combination of very high density of population, goods and services, and machines, all increasing with almost brutal speed, does account for some really antisocial tendencies in modern urban growth.
### 47
The modern Plato, like his ancient counterpart, has an unbounded contempt for politicians and statesmen and party leaders who are not university men. He finds politics a dirty game, and only enters them reluctantly because he knows that at the very least he and his friends are better than the present gang. Brought up in the traditions of the ruling classes, he has a natural pity for the common people whom he has learnt to know as servants, and observed from a distance at their work in the factory, at their play in the parks and holiday resorts. He has never mixed with them or spoken to them on equal terms, but has demanded and generally received a respect due to his position and superior intelligence. He knows that if they trust him, he can give them the happiness which they crave.
A man of culture, he genuinely despises the self-made industrialist and newspaper-king: with a modest professional salary and a little private income of his own, he regards money-making as vulgar and avoids all ostentation. Industry and finance seem to him to be activities unworthy of gentlemen, although, alas, many are forced by exigencies of circumstance to take some part in them. An intellectual, he gently laughs at the superstitions of most Christians, but he attends church regularly because he sees the importance of organized religion for the maintenance of sound morality among the lower orders, and because he dislikes the scepticism and materialism of radical teachers. His genuine passions are for literature and the philosophy of science and he would gladly spend all his time in studying them. But the plight of the world compels his unwilling attention, and when he sees that human stupidity and greed are about to plunge Europe into chaos and destroy the most glorious civilization which the world has known, he feels that it is high time for men of good sense and good will to intervene and to take politics out of the hands of the plutocrats of the Right and the woolly-minded idealists of the Left. Since he and his kind are the only representatives of decency combined with intelligence, they must step down into the arena and save the masses for themselves.
### 49
Rockets and artificial satellites can go far above the ionosphere, and even escape from the Earth. Yet they are complex and expensive, and in their present stage of development they cannot lift massive telescopes, keep them steady while the observations are being carried out, and then return them safely. Balloons are much easier to handle, and are also vastly cheaper. Their main limitation is that they are incapable of rising to the ionosphere. A height of between 80, 000 and
90,000 feet is as much as can reasonably be expected, and so balloon-borne instruments can contribute little to either ultra-violet astronomy or X-ray astronomy. All the same, the balloon has much to be said in its favour, since it can at least carry heavy equipment above most of the atmospheric mass-thus eliminating blurring and unsteadiness of the images. Moreover, water-vapour and carbon dioxide in the lower air absorb most of the infra-red radiations sent to us from the planets. Balloon ascents overcome this hazard with ease.
Hot-air balloons date back to the year 1783, and within a few months of the first flight a French scientist, Charles, went up two miles in a free balloon. Yet there is little resemblance between these crude vehicles and a modern scientific balloon, which has by now become an important research tool.
The main development has been carried out by M. Schwarzschild and his team at Princeton University in the United States, in collaboration with the United States Navy, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The ' Stratoscope' flights of 1959, concerned mainly with studies of the Sun, were remarkably successful, and the project has now been extended. With Stratoscope II, the overall height from the telescope to the top of the launch balloon is 66o feet; the balloons together weigh over two tons, and another two tons of ballast are carried for later release if height has to be maintained during the night. The telescope, plus its controls, weighs three-and-a-half tons. Two large parachutes are also carried; in case of emergency, the instruments and their records can be separated from the main balloon system, and brought down gently. Many of the radio and electronic devices used are similar to those of artificial satellites.
### 50
In mediaeval times rivers were the veins of the body politic as well as economic. Boundaries between states or shires, they were crossed by fords which became the sites of towns, or by bridges which were often points of battle. Upon rivers the people of that time depended for food, power and transport.
In our day fish are caught in the sea and brought to us by rail and lorry; only the angler still thinks fresh-water fish important, and pollution of rivers drives him into smaller and smaller reaches in which to practise his sport. But in earlier times, when sea fish were eaten only by those who lived on the sea coast, when meat was obtainable only for part of the year, and when fasts were frequent and universally practised, river fish played an important part in the national life. Every abbey and great man's house had its fish pond, and across the rivers great and small stretched the fish weirs, usually made of stakes and nets or basketwork. Between the owners of the fisheries and the bargemaster who needed an unimpeded passage continuous war was fought, till the importance of freshwater fish lessened as the practice of fasting ceased to be universal, as meat became available all the year round, and as the transport of sea fish inland became practicable.
Rivers were also the most important source of power. Every stream had its mills, not only for grinding corn, but for all the other industrial processes of the time, such as fulling* cloth or driving the hammers of ironworks. Placed down the bank wherever a head of water could be got, these mills were to be found on the tiny stream that ran through a village, or on the bigger river that was also used for navigation. An artificial cut was made from the river to bring the water at proper height to the water-wheel, and, in order to make sure of a supply of water at all seasons, the mill-owner usually built a weir across the river to hold back the water and so form an artificial reservoir. If the river were navigable, the centre of such a weir was made of planks held vertically by cross beams so that they could be removed when it was necessary to pass a barge, or was fitted with a single pair of gates. Such weirs were called staunches or flash-locks; they did not disappear from the bigger rivers till present times, and may still be seen in the Fens.
*Cleansing and thickening.
### 53
The French Foreign Legion was founded by a Royal Ordinance, written on a small piece of official French War Office notepaper dated March 9th, 1831, and signed by the then reigning monarch of France, Louis-Philippe. He had been on the throne for barely eight months when he authorized this measure, which was as much a product of necessity as of careful planning, although there may be divided views on this.
The reasons for forming the French Foreign Legion were probably twofold. In the first place the men of the disbanded royal bodyguard and the Regiment of Hohenlohe, suddenly turned loose on to the street of a capital seething with unrest, unemployed and perhaps disgruntled at their abrupt dismissal, were a potentially dangerous element. They were trained to the use of arms, and should they become tools of the politically ambitious or discontented they would present a distinct menace to the new régime, not yet too firmly established and sure of itself.
For some time Paris had been swarming with countless other discharged foreign soldiers who had served in the French army at various times under the Empire and the Republic, many of whom were in needy circumstances and open to suggestion, whilst others were openly looking for trouble and always ready to take part in any disturbance. It was clearly both expedient and desirable to remove these dangers as far away from the capital as possible.
Next, the Algerian adventure had begun, and it appeared that this might prove expensive in lives. The more Frenchmen killed in North Africa, the less popular the government at home would be, so if foreign cannon fodder was available so much the better. The Algerian landing had been viewed with mixed feelings in a politically divided France, but there does not seem to have been any marked indication on the part of the politicians that they were unanimous that the occupation should be abruptly terminated ; most were wary and many apprehensive as to how the Algerian business would turn out.
The formation of a foreign legion seemed therefore to be an ideal method of killing these two birds with one stone. Once the conditions were made clear there does not seem to have been any serious opposition.
Marshal Soult was reputed to be the man behind the scheme both for removing and using the unemployed foreign ex-soldiers. He could not have failed to recognize, once they were formed into disciplined units, how useful they would be, both for garrison duty and for active operations in Algeria, nor the fact that if their casualties were heavy or their conditions not of the best, there would be no embarrassing reaction for agitation in France on their behalf.
The Royal Ordinance decreed that there should be a legion formed of foreigners for service outside France, which was to be called the ' Foreign Legion' and it was to be part of the French army and under the control of the War Minister. It laid down that as far as possible companies should be composed of men of the same nationality or who spoke a common language. Algeria was not specifically mentioned but as it was the only scrap of foreign territory of any size possessed by France at that moment, there was no doubt as to the meaning of the phrase ' outside France'.
In the anxiety to get dubious, restless characters out of the country no questions were asked as to nationality, previous record or history, and no proof of identity was required. The name and particulars given by the recruit were accepted at face value and many gave *noms de guerre* *, for understandable reasons. Thus the practice began, and the tradition started of ' asking no questions' This tradition of guaranteeing anonymity began to develop quickly, although it was not until later that it was carried to the extreme of denying all knowledge of any individuals who were in its ranks and of refusing point blank to answer questions or to allow any outside contact with the legionnaires.
*Pseudonyms.
### 56
Science and technology have come to pervade every aspect of our lives and, as a result, society is changing at a speed which is quite unprecedented. There is a great technological explosion around us, generated by science. This explosion is already freeing vast numbers of people from their traditional bondage to nature, and now at last we have it in our power to free mankind once and for all from the fear which is based on want. Now, for the first time, man can reasonably begin to think that life can be something more than a grim struggle for survival. But even today, in spite of the high standard of living which has become general in the more fortunate West, the majority of people in the world still spend nearly all their time and energy in a never-ending struggle with nature to secure the food and shelter they need. Even in this elementary effort millions of human beings each year die unnecessarily and wastefully from hunger, disease, or flood.
Yet, in the West, science and technology have made it possible for us to have a plentiful supply of food, produced by only a fraction of the labour that was necessary even a few decades ago. In the United States, for instance, one man on the land produces more than enough food to feed fifteen men in the cities, and, in fact, there is a surplus of food grown even by this small proportion of the American labour force. We have considerably extended our expectation of life. We have enriched our lives by creating physical mobility through the motor-car, the jet aeroplane, and other means of mechanical transport; and we have added to our intellectual mobility by the telephone, radio, and television. Not content with these advances, we are now thrusting forward to the stars, and the conquest of space no longer strikes us as Wellsian or Jules Vernian. And with the advent of the new phase of technology we call automation, we have the promise both of greater leisure and of even greater material and intellectual riches.
But this is not inevitable. It depends on automation being adequately exploited. We shall need to apply our scientific and technological resources to literally every aspect of our society, to our commerce, our industry, our medicine, our agriculture, our transportation.
It is fascinating and encouraging to observe the development of this immense process, a process in which man appears all the time to be engaged in the act of creating an extension of himself. In his new technological successes this appears particularly true. He is extending his eyes with radar; his tongue and his ear through telecommunications; his muscle and body structure through mechanization. He extends his own energies by the generation and transmission of power and his nervous system and his thinking and decision-making faculties through automation. If this observation is accurate, as I believe it is, the implications are far-reaching. It might be reasonable to conclude that the direction of modern science and technology is towards the creation of a series of machine-systems based on man as a model.
### 60
Although truth and justice may be the most powerful impulses to show moral courage, there are others. Compassion is one of these. Tentatively it can be suggested that this is the main influence upon those who urge the abolition of capital punishment. It is recognition of compassion's part that leads the upholders of capital punishment to accuse the abolitionists of sentimentality in being more sorry for the murderer than for his victim. This is nonsense but with it some organs of the popular Press played upon the emotions of their readers so successfully that many candidates for Parliament were afraid to support abolition for fear of losing votes and the result was the muddle-headed Homicide Act of 1957 which made murder with robbery a capital crime and allowed the poisoner to escape the gallows. That illogical qualification shows how flimsy is the argument that capital punishment is a deterrent to murder. The poisoner always works on a calculated plan of action and therefore is able to consider whether or not his taking another's life is worth the risk of his own; the violent thief is usually at the mercy of an instant emotion. The only arguable plea for capital punishment is the right of society to retribution in this world with the prospect of life in another, but since what used to seem to the great majority of civilized humanity the assurance of another life beyond the grave has come to seem to more and more people less certain, a feeling for the value of human life has become deeper and more widespread. This may seem a paradoxical claim to make at a time when mankind is so much preoccupied with weapons of destruction. Nevertheless, it is a claim that can be sustained and if compassion animates those who urge the abolition of the death penalty it is not a sentimental compassion for the mental agony inflicted upon a condemned man but a dread of destroying the miracle of life.
When in the eighteenth century offences against the law that today would not earn a month in prison were punished with the death penalty, the severity of the penal code had no serious effect on the prevalence of crime. When it made no difference to the fate of a highwayman whether he had killed his victim or merely robbed him of a few pieces of silver, there were no more murders then than there were when men like Sir Francis Burdett succeeded in lightening the excessive severity of the penal laws. In those days the sacredness of life on earth was not greatly regarded because a life in the world to come was taken for granted except by a comparatively small minority of philosophers.
Nor was the long-drawn ordeal of the condemned cell inflicted either upon the condemned man or his gaolers once upon a time. Those who believe in capital punishment may have arguments for its retention, but surely no reasonable argument can be found for retention of the sickening mumbo-jumbo that accompanies it from the moment that the judge dons the black cap with what looks like a pen-wiper balanced on the top of his wig, to the reading of the burial service over the condemned man before he is dead. Moreover, it was more merciful to launch the condemned man into eternity twenty-four hours after he was sentenced than to keep him shivering on the brink of that dread gulf for nearly three weeks. Hanging is an atrociously archaic way of killing a human being and the self-satisfied modernity of the electric chair is just as atrocious. The administration of a strong sleeping draught to the condemned man every night from which one night he does not awake, seems a more civilized alternative to our present barbarous procedure, if capital punishment through the influence of backward minds be retained. |
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发表于 2022-7-2 19:08:47
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