经济学人 | 西方文明是一场骗局吗？

Asked what he thought of Western civilisation, Mahatma Gandhiis said to have quipped that such a thing “would be a good idea”. (The West, he suggested, was not so enlightened.) But as Josephine Quinn makes clear in her new book, Western civilisation has always been a bad idea, or at any rate a wrong-headed one.

据说圣雄甘地在被问及如何看待西方文明时，曾经打趣道，这东西真要有，“倒也不赖”。(在他看来，西方并没有那么文明。)不过，正如约瑟芬·奎恩在她的新书中阐述的那样，“西方文明”这个概念从来就不好，或至少也是有误的。

To compartmentalise history into a set of distinct and essentially self-contained civilisations is a misguided quest that has dangerously distorted our understanding of the world, Ms Quinn asserts: “It is not peoples that make history, but people, and the connections that they create with one another.”

试图将历史划分为一系列各不相同、本质上自成一体的文明是一种误入歧途的做法，它扭曲了我们对世界的理解，这很危险。奎恩主张：“历史的创造者不是各种人群，而是所有人，以及他们彼此间建立的联系。

Ms Quinn, a historian and archaeologist who teaches at Oxford, does not spend 500-odd pages trashing what generations of schoolchildren have been taught to take pride in as European achievements. Instead, she demolishes the underlying concept of what she calls “civilisational thinking”. Her argument is simple, persuasive and deserving of attention.

奎恩是任教于牛津大学的历史学家和考古学家。她没有花500多页的篇幅驳斥一代代学童被教导要以之为荣的“欧洲成就”，而是推翻了她称之为“文明思维”的底层概念。她的论据简明有力，值得关注。

The idea of civilisation, Ms Quinn points out, is relatively recent. The word was first used only in the mid-18th century and did not take hold of Western imaginations until the late 19th century.

奎恩指出，“文明”是一个相对较新的概念。这个词在18世纪中期才被首次使用，直到19世纪后期才引起了西方人的兴趣。

In that imperialist age, historians found that Greek, Roman and Christian civilisations made nice building blocks that could be stacked into a grand-looking construct, which they labelled “Western” or “European” civilisation.

在那个帝国主义时代，历史学家发现，希腊、罗马和基督教文明是一块块好砖，可以搬来砌成一座他们标榜为“西方”或“欧洲”文明的宏伟建筑。

To this they attributed a host of inherited “classical” virtues: vigour, rationality, justice, democracy and courage to experiment and explore. Other civilisations, by contrast, were regarded as inferior.

他们为这种文明披挂上一系列承继下来的“传统”美德：活力、理性、正义、民主，以及尝试和探索的勇气。相比之下，其他文明则被视为劣等文明。

It does not take much unpacking by Ms Quinn to expose the folly of this approach. Behold, for instance, John Stuart Mill, a philosopher in the 19th century, claiming that the Battle of Marathon, Persia’s first invasion of Greece in 490BC, was more important to English history than William the Conqueror’s triumph at Hastings in 1066. (Without an Athenian victory, the logic goes, the magical seed of Greek civilisation might never have grown into Western civilisation.)

无需过多拆解，奎恩就揭示了这种观点的荒谬性。比如，19世纪哲学家约翰·密尔曾声称，论对英国历史的重要性，公元前490年波斯首次入侵希腊的马拉松战役要胜过征服者威廉在1066年黑斯廷斯战役中取得的胜利。(这里面的逻辑是，如果没有雅典人的胜利，希腊文明的神奇种子可能永远不会成长为西方文明。）

Or consider “The Clash of Civilisations” (1996) by Samuel Huntington, an American historian, who declared it impossible to understand history without classifying humanity into mutually hostile civilisations between which, “during most of human existence”, contact has been “ intermittent or non-existent”.

再比如，美国历史学家塞缪尔·亨廷顿在其1996年出版的《文明的冲突》中宣称，如果不把人类划分为相互敌对的文明，就不可能理解历史，“在人类存在的大部分时间里”，各种文明之间的交往“断断续续或者根本不存在”。

What is non-existent is any truth to that notion. Ms Quinn’s brisk, scholarly romp across the arc of European history shows that, far from being rare, contact across and between cultures, often over surprisingly long distances, has been the main motor of human advancement in every age. Rather than being prickly and inward-looking, most societies have proved receptive to ideas, fashions and technologies from their neighbours.

这种观点根本站不住脚。透过奎恩对欧洲历史脉络专业而利落的梳理，我们可以看到，不同文化之间的交往一点也不罕见，甚至常常跨越了难以置信的遥远距离，成为每个时代人类进步的主要动力。事实证明，大多数社会都愿意接受来自邻居的思想、时尚和技术，而不是抵触和自我封闭。

Ancient Greece, for example, was less a place of origins than of transmission from Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian and Phoenician cultures, which themselves had mixed and exchanged ideas. And rather than being the wellspring of democracy, Athens was “something of a latecomer” to a form of governance that appears to have been first tried in Libya and on the islands of Samos and Chios.

例如，古希腊与其说是西方文明的发源地，不如说是埃及、苏美尔、亚述和腓尼基文化的传播地，而这些文化本身也经历了各种思想的融合与交流。雅典与其说是民主的源泉，不如说有点像民主的“后进者”——这种治理方式似乎最早试行于利比亚，以及希腊的萨摩斯岛和希俄斯岛等地。

Persians, eternally cast as Greeks’ polar opposites, actually imposed democracy on the Greek cities they ruled, suggesting “considerable Persian faith in popular support for their own hegemony ”, Ms Quinn notes.

总是被视为与希腊人截然不同的波斯人，事实上却在当年统治的希腊城邦中强制推行了民主，这表明“波斯人对民众支持自己的统治地位相当有信心”，奎恩指出。

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