☆☆四星级☆☆Economist Debates阅读写作分析-----Mass intelligence

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http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/245


前言：

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结构：
1# about the debates & 介绍
2# background reading
3# opening statements
4# guest
5# guest
6# rebuttal statements
7# guest
8# guest
9# closing statements
10# decision
11# comments
12# comments
13# comments
14# comments
15# 汇总

P.S.我做的这个里面很多文章举例论证时提到很多名人，画作等，我做了注释，在WIKI了查了贴在文章后面，只是当时我自己不知道，有兴趣的筒子可以看一下。

About this debate

In an age of music videos and video games, of instant gratification and attention deficit disorder（注意力缺乏症）, it is easy to assume there is less appetite for high culture today than ever before. Yet museums, opera houses and other bastions of traditional culture report an explosion of consumption. As our universities mint increasing numbers of graduates, is the public truly getting smarter, or are we simply snacking on the sophisticated stuff while feasting on junk?

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background reading



A



SURVEY: HIGHER EDUCATION
The brains businessSep 8th 2005
From The Economist print edition
Mass higher education is forcing universities to become more diverse, more global and much more competitive, says Adrian Wooldridge

FOR those of a certain age and educational background, it is hard to think of higher education without thinking of ancient institutions. Some universities are of a venerable age—the University of Bologna was founded in 1088, the University of Oxford in 1096—and many of them have a strong sense of tradition. The truly old ones make the most of their pedigrees, and those of a more recent vintage work hard to create an aura of antiquity.

And yet these tradition-loving (or -creating) institutions are currently enduring a thunderstorm of changes so fundamental that some say the very idea of the university is being challenged. Universities are experimenting with new ways of funding (most notably through student fees), forging partnerships with private companies and engaging in mergers and acquisitions. Such changes are tugging at the ivy's roots.

This is happening for four reasons. The first is the democratisation of higher education—“massification”, in the language of the educational profession. In the rich world, massification has been going on for some time. The proportion of adults with higher educational qualifications in the OECD countries almost doubled between 1975 and 2000, from 22% to 41%. But most of the rich countries are still struggling to digest this huge growth in numbers. And now massification is spreading to the developing world. China doubled its student population in the late 1990s, and India is trying to follow suit.

The second reason is the rise of the knowledge economy. The world is in the grips of a “soft revolution” in which knowledge is replacing physical resources as the main driver of economic growth. The OECD calculates that between 1985 and 1997 the contribution of knowledge-based industries to total value added（倒装）increased from 51% to 59% in Germany and from 45% to 51% in Britain. The best companies are now devoting at least a third of their investment to knowledge-intensive intangibles such as R&D（Research and development研发）, licensing and marketing. Universities are among the most important engines of the knowledge economy. Not only do they produce the brain workers who man it, they also provide much of its backbone, from laboratories to libraries to computer networks.

The third factor is globalisation. The death of distance is transforming academia just as radically as it is transforming business. The number of people from OECD countries studying abroad has doubled over the past 20 years, to 1.9m; universities are opening campuses all around the world; and a growing number of countries are trying to turn higher education into an export industry.

The fourth is competition. Traditional universities are being forced to compete for students and research grants（科研补助金）, and private companies are trying to break into a sector which they regard as “the new health care”. The World Bank calculates that global spending on higher education amounts to $300 billion a year, or 1% of global economic output. There are more than 80m students worldwide, and 3.5m people are employed to teach them or look after them.

Enemies of promise

All this sounds as though a golden age for universities has arrived. But inside academia, particularly in Europe, it does not feel like it. Academics complain about “the decline of the donnish dominion” (the title of a book by A.H. Halsey, a sociologist), and administrators are locked in bad-tempered exchanges with the politicians who fund them. What has gone wrong?

The biggest problem is the role of the state. If more and more governments are embracing massification, few of them are willing to draw the appropriate conclusion from their enthusiasm: that they should either provide the requisite funds (as the Scandinavian countries do) or allow universities to charge realistic fees. Many governments have tried to square the circle（办不到的事） through tighter management, but management cannot make up for lack of resources.

So in all too much of the academic world, the writer Kingsley Amis's famous dictum that more means worse is coming to pass（发生）. Academic salaries are declining when measured against similar jobs elsewhere, and buildings and libraries are deteriorating. In mega-institutions such as the University of Rome (180,000 students), the National University of

Mexico (200,000-plus), and Turkey's Anadolu University (530,000), individual attention to students is bound to take a back seat（处于次要地位；黯然隐退）

The innate conservatism of the academic profession does not help. The modern university was born in a very different world from the current one, a world where only a tiny minority of the population went into higher education, yet many academics have been reluctant to make any allowances for massification. Italian universities, for instance, still insist that all students undergo a viva voce（口试） examination by a full professor（正教授）, lasting an average of about five minutes.

What, if anything, can be done? Techno-utopians believe that higher education is ripe for revolution. The university, they say, is a hopelessly antiquated institution, wedded to outdated practices such as tenure and lectures, and incapable of serving a new world of mass audiences and just-in-time information. “Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics,” says Peter Drucker, a veteran management guru. “I consider the American research university of the past 40 years to be a failure.” Fortunately, in his view, help is on the way in the form of internet tuition and for-profit（非盈利） universities.

Cultural conservatives, on the other hand, believe that the best way forward is backward. The two ruling principles of modern higher-education policy—democracy and utility—are “degradations of the academic dogma”, to borrow a phrase from the late Robert Nisbet, another sociologist. They think it is foolish to waste higher education on people who would rather study “Seinfeld” than Socrates, and disingenuous to confuse the pursuit of truth with the pursuit of profit.

The conservative argument falls at the first hurdle: practicality. Higher education is rapidly going the way of secondary education: it is becoming a universal aspiration. The techno-utopian position is superficially more attractive. The internet will surely influence teaching, and for-profit companies are bound to shake up a moribund marketplace. But there are limits.

A few years ago a report by Coopers & Lybrand crowed that online education could eliminate the two biggest costs from higher education: “The first is the need for bricks and mortar（房屋，房产）; traditional campuses are not necessary. The second is full-time faculty. [Online] learning involves only a small number of professors, but has the potential to reach a huge market of students.” That is nonsense. The human touch is much more vital to higher education than is high technology. Education is not just about transmitting a body of facts, which the internet does pretty well. It is about learning to argue and reason, which is best done in a community of scholars.

This survey will argue that the most significant development in higher education is the emergence of a super-league of global universities. This is revolutionary in the sense that these institutions regard the whole world as their stage, but also evolutionary in that they are still wedded to the ideal of a community of scholars who combine teaching with research.

The problem for policymakers is how to create a system of higher education that balances the twin demands of excellence and mass access, that makes room for global elite universities while also catering for large numbers of average students, that exploits the opportunities provided by new technology while also recognising that education requires a human touch.

As it happens, we already possess a successful model of how to organise higher education: America's. That country has almost a monopoly on the world's best universities (see table 1), but also provides access to higher education for the bulk of those who deserve it. The success of American higher education is not just a result of money (though that helps); it is the result of organisation. American universities are much less dependent on the state than are their competitors abroad（倒装）. They derive their income from a wide variety of sources, from fee-paying students to nostalgic alumni, from hard-headed businessmen to generous philanthropists. And they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, from

Princeton and Yale to Kalamazoo community college.

This survey will offer two pieces of advice for countries that are trying to create successful higher-education systems, be（神奇~+不懂） they newcomers such as India and China or failed old hands such as Germany and Italy. First: diversify your sources of income. The bargain with the state has turned out to be a pact with the devil. Second: let a thousand academic flowers bloom. Universities, including for-profit ones, should have to compete for customers. A sophisticated economy needs a wide variety of universities pursuing a wide variety of missions. These two principles reinforce each other: the more that the state's role contracts, the more educational variety will flourish.

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B




SURVEY: NEW MEDIA
What sort of revolution?Apr 20th 2006
From The Economist print edition
Both good and bad—but it's too early to say in what proportions





AS A rule, some people, such as Jacobins, tend to be more enthusiastic about revolutions than others, such as monarchs. Another fairly reliable rule is that revolutions abrupt enough to be associated with a single year (1642, 1789, 1848, 1917) tend to cause trouble but rarely bring lasting change. By contrast, revolutions gradual enough to be associated with a name (Renaissance（文艺复兴）, Reformation, Industrial Revolution) often do have enduring effects.
A third rule, or hypothesis, might be that revolutions seem never to be entirely for the better or the worse, but somehow manage to combine both.


This survey has argued that society is in the early phases of what appears to be a media revolution on the scale of that launched by Gutenberg in 1448. This invites comparisons. There are Jacobins and monarchs to be found in both revolutions. In the first, the Jacobins were, by turns, printers, publishers, Protestants and writers; in today's revolution, the Jacobins tend to be those bloggers, vloggers（Video blogging, sometimes shortened to vlogging or vidblogging is a form of blogging for which the medium is video） and podcasters that bay for the blood of the odious “MSM” (mainstream media). As to monarchs, the first revolution had popes, monasteries and the real thing; today's revolution has, well, the MSM. Both revolutions are firmly in the category of gradualist, name-not-year revolutions.

That leaves benefits and evils. Gutenberg's revolution undoubtedly had enormous democratising effects. It enabled entire populations to read the Bible in their own language, liberating them from Latinate clergies that had kept them in superstitious serfdom. Further on in the revolution, people got news from far-flung corners of the world; one of the things that impressed Alexis de Tocqueville during his travels through America in 1831 was that even frontier families in remote Michigan had weekly newspapers delivered to their doorsteps. And the dramatically lower cost of disseminating the written word allowed many more people to express themselves creatively.

Each of these benefits also seems to have had a dark side. The availability of religious texts in the vernacular led to literalist and fundamentalist movements, and indirectly to religious wars. The surge of textual expression produced not only classics but also pornography and propaganda. Printing presses（印刷机）
reproduced “Mein Kampf” just as accurately as the Gospels.

Hell or heaven?Against this backdrop, the big thinkers about today's media revolution tend to veer towards extremes of optimism or pessimism. Often the alignments are surprising. For instance, Michael Moritz, the venture capitalist（投机资本家） who became famous for spotting both Yahoo! and Google, has a strongly pessimist streak. He worries about “amplification of the internet soapbox” and imagines what role user-generated media would have played in “1931 in Munich, how easy it would have been to broadcast the message; I think the Nazis would have got power quicker.”


Paul Saffo, a futurologist and one of the world's most enthusiastic technophiles, also looks at the downside. “Each of us can create our own personal-media walled garden that surrounds us with comforting, confirming information and utterly shuts out anything that conflicts with our world view,” he says. “This is social dynamite” and could lead to “the erosion of the intellectual commons holding society together...We risk huddling into tribes defined by shared prejudices.”


Now for the optimists: Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a research foundation（研究基金会）, believes that “people will become not less but more aware of differing arguments as they become heavier internet users,” because contradictory views are just a hyperlink away. A survey by Pew appears to confirm this view. Mr Anderson of “The Long Tail” says that “opinion is a marketplace, and marketplaces work when you have liquidity.” Liquidity is exactly what participatory media provide.


Some people worry about what the new media will do not only to democracy but also to brains, thoughts, grammar and attention spans. These concerns usually arise out of encounters with teenagers in their native habitat—ie, in front of screens with several simultaneous instant-messaging “threads” (“cu2nite bfz4evr”—“see you tonight and best friends forever”), besides iTunes and a video game running in the background, blogs in the foreground, and homework in the small window to the bottom right.


Other people are not worried at all. Steven Johnson, the author of “Everything Bad is Good for You”, argues that the very things about new-media culture that scare older generations actually make younger generations smarter, because participatory media train kids from an early age to sift through and discard clutter, thus “enhancing our cognitive abilities, not dumbing them down”.


Linda Stone, a former executive at both Apple Computer and Microsoft and now a consultant, argues that the affliction of “continuous partial attention” is in fact a hallmark of the era that is now ending, not the one that is starting. For the past two decades, Ms Stone thinks, many people have felt overwhelmed and anxious, constantly afraid that they could miss out on social opportunities if they concentrate on any one thing. This is now producing its own backlash, Ms Stone argues, because as people “long for protection and meaningful connections, quality over quantity”, they are “discovering the joy of focusing”.


Many new-media companies understand this, she says. Just as Google calms the chaos of the web with a clean white page, other companies are working on the filtering technologies that could—counter-intuitively, perhaps—make the era of participatory media more serene than the era of mass media.


The honest conclusion, of course, is that nobody knows whether the era of participatory media will, on balance, be good or bad. As with most revolutions, it is a question of emphasis. Generally speaking, people who have faith in democracy welcome participatory media, whereas people who have reservations will be nostalgic for the top-down certainties of the mass media. Joseph de Maistre, a conservative who lived through the French Revolution, famously said that “every country has the government it deserves.” In the coming era, more than ever before, every society will get the media it deserves.

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C

The battle for brainpower

Oct 5th 2006
From The Economist print edition

IN A speech at Harvard University in 1943 Winston Churchill observed that “the empires of the future will be empires of the mind.” He might have added that the battles of the future will be battles for talent. To be sure, the old battles for natural resources are still with us. But they are being supplemented by new ones for talent—not just among companies (which are competing for “human resources”) but also among countries (which fret about the “balance of brains” as well as the “balance of power”).

The war for talent is at its fiercest in high-tech industries. The arrival of an aggressive new superpower—Google—has made it bloodier still. The company has assembled a formidable hiring machine to help it find the people it needs. It has also experimented with clever new recruiting tools, such as billboards featuring complicated mathematical problems. Other tech giants have responded by supercharging their own talent machines (Yahoo! has hired a constellation of academic stars) and suing people who suddenly leave.…

禁止阅读。。。。。。。

D

The net generation
The kids are alright
Nov 13th 2008
From The Economist print edition
WORRIES about the damage the internet may be doing to young people has produced a mountain of books（生动）—a suitably old technology in which to express concerns about the new. Robert Bly claims that, thanks to the internet, the “neo-cortex is finally eating itself”. Today’s youth may be web-savvy, but they also stand accused of being unread, bad at communicating, socially inept, shameless, dishonest, work-shy, narcissistic and indifferent to the needs of others.（这几个“缺点”写得很形象准确）


The man who christened the “net generation” in his 1997 bestseller, “Growing Up Digital”, has no time for（轻视，不耐烦） such views. In the past two years, Don Tapscott has overseen a $4.5m study of nearly 8,000 people in 12 countries born between 1978 and 1994. In “Grown Up Digital” he uses the results to paint a portrait of this generation that is entertaining, optimistic and convincing. The problem, he suspects, is not the net generation but befuddled baby-boomers, who once sang along with Bob Dylan that “something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is”, yet now find that they are clueless about the revolutionary changes taking place among the young.

“As the first global generation ever, the Net Geners are smarter, quicker and more tolerant of diversity than their predecessors,” Mr Tapscott argues. “These empowered young people are beginning to transform every institution of modern life.” They care strongly about justice, and are actively trying to improve society—witness their role in the recent Obama campaign, in which they organised themselves through the internet and mobile phones and campaigned on YouTube. Mr Tapscott’s prescient chapter on “The Net Generation and Democracy: Obama, Social Networks and Citizen Engagement” alone should ensure his book a wide readership.

Contrary to the claims that video games, Facebook and constant text-messaging have robbed today’s young of the ability to think, Mr Tapscott believes that “Net Geners” are the “smartest generation ever”. The experience of parents who grew up watching television is misleading when it comes to judging the 20,000 hours on the internet and 10,000 hours playing video games already spent by a typical 20-year-old American today. “The Net Generation is in many ways the antithesis of the TV generation,” he argues. One-way broadcasting via television created passive couch potatoes, whereas the net is interactive, and, he says, stimulates and improves the brain.

There is growing neuroscientific support for this claim. People who play video games, for example, have been found to process complex visual information more quickly. They may also be better at multi-tasking than earlier generations, which equips them better for the modern world.

Mr Tapscott identifies eight norms that define Net Geners, which he believes everyone should take on board to avoid being swept away（有意思的表达） by the sort of generational tsunami that helped Barack Obama beat John McCain. Net Geners value freedom and choice in everything they do. They love to customise and personalise. They scrutinise everything. They demand integrity and openness, including when deciding what to buy and where to work. They want entertainment and play in their work and education, as well as their social life. They love to collaborate. They expect everything to happen fast. And they expect constant innovation.

These patterns have important implications for the workplace. Employers who ban the use of Facebook in the office—the equivalent of forbidding older staff to use their rolodexes—show clear signs of being out of touch, he argues. Two out of three Net Geners feel that “working and having fun can and should be the same thing”. That does not mean they want to play games all day, but that they want the work itself to be enjoyable. They also expect collaboration, constant feedback and rapid career advancement based on merit. How they will react to being fired en masse as the downturn worsens remains to be seen, but Mr

Tapscott suspects they will take it in their stride（take in one's stride轻而易举地做某事）.
Two things do worry Mr Tapscott. One is the inadequacy of the education system in many countries; while two-thirds of Net Geners will be the smartest generation ever, the other third is failing to achieve its potential. Here the fault is the education, not the internet, which needs to be given a much bigger role in classrooms (real and virtual). The second is the net generation’s lack of any regard for personal privacy, which Mr Tapscott says is a “serious mistake, and most of them don’t realise it.” Already, posting pictures of alcohol fuelled parties, let alone mentioning drug use or other intimate matters, is causing a growing number of job applicants to fail the “reference test” as employers trawl Facebook and MySpace for clues about the character and behaviour of potential employees.

More optimistically, the Net Geners are much more positive than their predecessors about their family. Half of those interviewed regard at least one parent as their “hero”. Mr Tapscott believes the internet is producing an improved, more collaborative version of family life, which he calls the “open family”. Parents increasingly recognise that their youngsters have digital expertise they lack but want to tap, and also that their best defence against their children falling foul of the dark side of the internet, such as online sexual predators, is to win their children’s trust through honest conversation. Ironically, Mr Tapscott’s recommended “platform” for this essential social networking could hardly be more old tech: the family dinner table.

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E


Intelligence
Dimming Oct 30th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Disturbing evidence of a decline in youngsters’ brainpower


EVERY year Britain’s school-children provide gratifying evidence of their increasing smartness. More leave primary school having done well in tests of reading, writing and arithmetic; more get top grades in national exams at ages 16 and 18. Nay-sayers, though, think this progress overstated, even illusory. They attribute rising marks to dumbed-down curricula, downward-drifting grade boundaries and teaching to the test. But even the gloomiest assessment, it appears, may not go far enough. In important ways, the country’s children appear to be becoming dumber.

Michael Shayer of King’s College London has been testing children’s thinking skills since 1976, when he and colleagues started studying the development of reasoning abilities in young people. In 2006 and 2007 he got 14-year-olds to take some of the same tests as 30 years earlier. The findings, to be published early next year, are sobering. More than a fifth of youngsters got high scores then, suggesting they were developing the ability to formulate and test hypotheses. Now only a tenth do.

The tests did not change, so the decline was not caused by different content or marking. And since they explored the ability to think deeply rather than to regurgitate information or whizz through tasks, the results matter deeply. In the purest test of reasoning, pupils were shown a pendulum and asked how to find out what affects the rate at which it swings. “Their answers indicated whether they had progressed from the descriptive thinking that gets us through most of our days, to the interpretative thinking needed to analyse complex information and formulate and test hypotheses,” Professor Shayer explains.
In 1976 more boys than girls did well, a fact the researchers put down to boys roaming further out of doors and playing more with tools and mechanical toys. Both sexes now do worse than before, but boys’ scores have fallen more, suggesting that a decline in outdoor and hands-on play has slowed cognitive development in both sexes. Britain’s unusually early start to formal education may make things worse, as infants are diverted from useful activities such as making sand-castles and playing with water into unhelpful ones, such as holding a pen and forming letters.

British children’s schooling may be hampered, too, by the tests that show standards rising. These mean teachers’ careers depend on coaching the weakest, rather than on stretching all children, including the most able. This interpretation is supported by another, more positive, finding from the research: that fewer children do very badly now than did 30 years ago.

When asked to speculate further on why fewer British teenagers now display mature reasoning, Professor Shayer eschews local explanations and puts the blame squarely on television and computers. They take children away from the physical experiences on which later inferential skills are based, he thinks, and teach them to value speed over depth, and passive entertainment over active. That chimes with other researchers’ findings of cognitive gains on tasks that require speed rather than close reasoning—useful, perhaps, as the pace of life accelerates, but hardly a substitute for original thought.
So what of children elsewhere? Britain’s are not the only ones kept inside for fear of traffic or paedophiles, or slumped in front of a screen for much of the day. “There is no similar evidence from elsewhere,” says Professor Shayer. “No one has looked for it.” Perhaps they should.

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F


International
The museum-building bingeNov 19th 2008
From The World in 2009 print edition
By Emily Bobrow, NEW YORK
Starchitecture(Starchitect or also stararchitect [star + architect] is a term used to describe architects whose celebrity and critical acclaim have transformed ..)., civic pride and the race to become the next Bilbao
Like religious pilgrims, tourists have flocked to Bilbao in record numbers ever since the Guggenheim anointed the rusty Spanish city with a glorious, shimmering outpost. Frank Gehry’s museum, opened in 1997, inspired a speculative building（为出售出租建房)boom in the museum world. New iconic structures have sprouted up all over—more than two dozen in the United States alone—in a trend dubbed the “Bilbao effect”. The recipe seemed simple: choose a “starchitect”, raise tens of millions of dollars, add a pinch of buzz (did you say “titanium wings”?) and voilà: you have a tourist-luring, economy-fuelling, shrine-like（尝试用这种结构）source of civic pride.

But it is not so simple to replicate Bilbao’s success—as several grand museum projects may discover in 2009.

In Chicago, Renzo Piano’s $370m addition to the city’s landmark Art Institute is slated（？） to open in May 2009. His Modern Wing is designed to harmonise with the original Beaux Arts building yet evoke an airy lightness. Made from glass, steel, aluminium and limestone, it looks a little as if it is floating. Its most distinctive element is the “flying carpet” canopy roof, with aluminium blades designed to diffuse natural light inside. A footbridge connects the wing to the Millennium Park next door, where there is already a concert pavilion designed by Mr Gehry and an enormous sculpture by Anish Kapoor. “It’s like defying gravity,” Mr Piano has said.

Museums often enjoy high visitor numbers in the first year or two, but then attendance tends to taper off
Blair Kamin, the architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, predicts that the extension’s third-floor galleries overlooking the park will be hailed as “some of the most beautiful rooms in Chicago”. Yet this hardly means that James Cuno, the institute’s director, can sit back, relax and observe the coming throngs. Museums often enjoy cheeringly high visitor numbers in the first year or two, but then attendance tends to taper off.

“Sustainability is the new buzzword,” explains Javier Pes, editor of Museum Practice, a journal published by the Museums Association. Wealthy private donors have been happy enough to contribute large sums in exchange for a glamorous new wing named after them. But donations tend to ebb after the museum reopens, and directors need to find other ways to pull in tourists after the initial excitement wears off, such as pricey blockbuster shows. Operating costs go up.

In Denver, for example, where Daniel Libeskind designed a new $110m building for the art museum, an initial boom of visitors in 2006 has waned, and budget constraints have forced the museum to cut staff. The remarkable new structure—an explosion of angles and intersecting shapes—is the centrepiece of Denver’s nascent culture district. Yet some visitors complain of feeling disoriented inside.

The coming year will usher in several other glamorous new museums. François Pinault, a French luxury-goods magnate, beat the Guggenheim for the chance to transform a 17th-century customs house into a contemporary-arts centre in Venice. The Punta della Dogana building is timed to reopen with the Venice Biennale, after a minimalist renovation from Tadao Ando, a Japanese architect.

The eternal building site in RomeIn Rome, Zaha Hadid’s ambitious vision for Italy’s national museum for contemporary art—the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, or maxxi—should at last open its doors more than a decade after she won an international competition to design it. (Funding hiccups and the peculiarities of Italian politics caused the building to be dubbed the “eternal building site”.) The building features long, curving, windowless cast-concrete walls and a glass roof.

Such investments are clearly unsafe bets for urban renewal. That, plus the economic downturn, may dampen enthusiasm for the “Bilbao effect” in some places. But the Gehrys and the Hadids need not worry about finding future work. As long as there are cash-rich and asset-poor parts of the world, such as China and the Gulf (Abu Dhabi has ambitious plans for a Louvre and a Guggenheim), grand cultural cathedrals will continue to rise.

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G






Domestication
Not so dumb animals Oct 16th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Wolves are, after all, cleverer than dogs



DOMESTICATION is not normally reckoned good for a species’s intelligence. All that grey matter is expensive to grow, so if you have an owner to do your thinking for you, then you do not need so much of it. Natural selection (not to mention deliberate selection by people) might therefore be expected to dumb domestic animals down.


Dogs, however, look like an exception to this rule. Some, such as herding sheepdogs, have been bred for tasks that seem to involve a lot of intelligence. More intriguingly, an experiment carried out in 2004 by Brian Hare, then at Harvard and now of Duke University in North Carolina, suggested that natural selection in the context of domestication had boosted dogs’ intelligence, too, by allowing them to understand human behaviour in a way that their ancestors, wolves, cannot. The latest study of the matter, however, suggests that is not the case after all, and that wolves, not dogs, are the clever ones.

Dr Hare’s experiments involved showing his animals two upside-down cups, one of which covered food. A human would then gesture in some way at the cup covering the food. In theory, if the animal being tested was properly interpreting the gestures, it should have been lured to the object that the experimenter was indicating. And that is what Dr Hare found. Dogs selected the cup hiding the food far more than half the time, whereas the wolves he used for comparison got it right no more frequently than chance.

That led him to conclude that domestic dogs have evolved an ability to understand what their masters are up to by living among people for so long. Monique Udell of the University of Florida, however, begs to differ. She observed that Dr Hare’s wolves, though captive, had not been raised among humans, and wondered whether learning rather than evolution explained his observations. Her team therefore worked with a mixture of pet dogs, dogs from animal shelters that had had minimal interaction with people, and wolves raised by humans. They exposed their animals to an experiment similar to Dr Hare’s and came up with strikingly different results.

As they report in Animal Behaviour, the wolves outperformed both shelter dogs and pets. Indeed, six of the eight wolves followed human gestures perfectly in more than eight out of ten trials. Only three of eight pets were as successful as that and, as with Dr Hare’s wolves, none of the shelter dogs performed better than chance. Far from being dumb, then, wolves are smarter than dogs. You just have to bring 'em up proper.

米饭袜子UID：2532172

opening statements

The moderator's opening remarks

Near the farm where I grew up in Africa there is a school. It has no desks, only a single blackboard and
intermittent supplies of chalk. Nevertheless, the teaching is inspired and the most exciting moment each month is when the latest crate of books arrives from the British charity that supports the school. The children who go there may be among the poorest in the world, but every morning nearly 100 boys and girls turn up for class, fired up by a thirst for knowledge and their parents' conviction that learning to read and write is the first step to a better future.

Education in rural Africa is a lucky strike, a route out of poverty. No one takes it for granted because it is not available to everyone. But in the richer West education is a right. How—rather than whether—our children are educated is at the centre of the debate about whether we are wising up or dumbing down. So are other issues: what is the effect of the internet, for example, or should we learn foreign languages, study grammar or the classics, go to museums, learn to read music?

This promises to be a fascinating—and controversial—debate, not so much because it is about how we choose to spend our time, but because it goes to the heart of what sort of human beings we want to be.

Intelligent Life, The Economist's quarterly sister magazine, has been looking into what is happening to culture in Britain. The editor, Tim de Lisle, presents a mass of evidence that makes a seemingly irrefutable case: all over the country, more people are going to museums, visiting literary festivals and listening to classical music than ever before. If that isn't wising up, it is hard to know what is.

Susan Jacoby, a scholar whose career began as a reporter on the Washington Post and whose writing now focuses on American intellectual history, sees no reason for Westerners to pat themselves on the back. The education bar, in the Anglo-American world, at least, she says, is being set lower and lower. Fewer and fewer people read books; instead they just hoover up information on the internet. After she wrote an article for her former paper on the decline of reading, she received a deluge of emails from people who said they were proud that they never read books at all. They couldn't see the point.

In making their opening presentations, both our debaters point out a subtext in the argument of the other side, which is a good place to start asking questions.

Mr de Lisle argues that it is not culture that is in retreat in the West, but stuffiness, the sort of snobbery that once saw high culture as the preserve of people who saw themselves as somehow better than those who enjoyed pop culture. Is he right? Does the very fact that culture is more democratic alone make it more accessible?

Ms Jacoby agrees that more people are being exposed to culture, but she worries about how this is being done. If it is just the result of better marketing, then surely culture is turning into something that is seen exclusively as a commodity. This may be good news because there are more affluent people with leisure time.

But it is not so good for those who worry that we are not becoming more cultured, but simply better at absorbing packaged information.

Wising up? Or dumbing down? This is a debate that will generate a lot of noise. Will it also shed some light on the world we live in? Over to you.

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The proposer's opening remarks

You have to hand it to "dumbing down". It is a brilliant label: succinct, sticky and hard to peel off. It has a rhythm to it which is so good, we have used it again for "credit crunch". And there is undoubtedly some truth in it. Certain areas of life have dumbed down.（举着这里有一点点讽刺的味道）

If you look at the 21st century and your gaze alights on the exhibitionist nonentities of reality television, or the bestseller lists bulging with celebrity memoirs, or the commuters blankly flicking through Mcnewspapers, you may well deduce that life is becoming dumb and dumber.

Labels, however, can be too good. Dumbing down has become so entrenched that it has closed our minds to what else is happening. It has encouraged us to see intellectual and cultural standards as a river, flowing in one direction only, always downhill. In fact they are more like a road, with heavy traffic on both sides.（准备转了）

（前三段都是作者的铺垫，传说中的先+后-，八过这里作者用的比喻境界很高，好几遍才明白=。=）

At Intelligent Life, The Economist's quarterly sister magazine, we recently commissioned one of The Economist's senior writers, John Parker, to look into what is happening with culture. He found plenty of evidence of the opposite of dumbing down: wising up（转过来了）

（开始举例论证ABC）.

ALook at the public's appetite for museums. When Art Newspaper drew up a chart for global museum admissions (in February, covering the calendar year 2007), Paris came out top with the Louvre on 8.3m and the Pompidou Centre second with 5.5m, while three of the next six places went to Britain: Tate Modern with 5.2m, the British Museum with 4.8m and the National Gallery with 4.1m. The Arts Council says that admissions to a clump of Britain's leading museums as a whole went up from 24m in 1999-2000 to 40m in 2007-08.

This is partly accounted for by one of Tony Blair's better decisions, to scrap
entry charges and replace them with the modern version of the begging bowl, the big perspex ball, in which other people's generosity sits there silently reproaching you. But this cannot be the sole explanation, because some of the biggest draws in those museums have been the special exhibitions, which tend not to be free.

At the British Museum, the Terracotta Army was a roaring success and the Hadrian show was so crowded when I went in October that sweat was pouring down visitors' faces. That annual figure for the British Museum of 4.8m has already shot up to 6m in 2008, which is thought to be a record. For Chinese New Year, which fell during the Terracotta Army's run, the museum added a Chinese food market, a theatre troupe and a trail of specially commissioned lanterns, and it was so inundated that it shut the doors for the first time since the Chartists' uprising in 1848.

BThen there is the evidence of literary festivals. In October 2008 alone, according to the Arts Council, there were 43 of them in Britain. At the best-known of all British bookfests, Hay-on-Wye, the number of tickets sold has gone from 2,000 in 1988 to a projected 165,000 in 2009. A cynic I mentioned this to argued that it was another facet of celebrity culture, showing only that people like to see writers in the flesh, not that they are engaging with their ideas.

He was displaying the blinkered, narrow, either-or mentality of the true cultural snob. Yes, there is probably an element of celebrity culture at work here – when Jeremy Clarkson gives a talk at Hay, for instance. But most of the talks at most of the festivals are given by writers who could walk down the street without anyone recognising them. And you can tell from the questions afterwards that the public are engaging with the content of the books.

（用most反cynic，有力）

CMr Parker found plenty more evidence of wising up: the fact that operas are now being screened in cinemas, the popularity of lecture series like Intelligence Squared and the success of Classic FM, which began as a midmarket rival to BBC Radio 3 and has become Britain's most popular commercial radio station. These two stations provide a microcosm of the wider phenomenon of mass intelligence. Radio 3 used to be a monopoly, serious, rigorous, formal and hopeless at preaching to the unconverted. Then along came Classic FM, cosy, approachable, populist and mildly obsessed with projecting classical music as a form of relaxation. Result: far more people now listen to classical music on the radio. More people even listen to Radio 3, which has at last loosened its tie and spotted that a national radio station, funded by the licence fee, has an obligation to reach out to people.

It's not culture that is in retreat here: it's stuffiness.

Behind all these indicators lies a powerful demographic factor. More of us are going to university than ever before.

We may fritter away much of our time while we are there, standing in the students' union bar drinking subsidised beer, but at the very least those years plant a seed of curiosity and a sense of possibility. Twenty-five years on, several of my contemporaries have now gone back to university for more. Kingsley Amis famously said that when higher education expanded, more would mean worse. In fact, more has meant less of the sort of snobbery he was displaying by saying that. Studies have shown that today's graduates are cultural omnivores, able to enjoy high and pop culture alike. Which is where dumbing down gets it wrong. Catchy as it is, the phrase has a certain dumbness built into it. The real story is more complex and more heartening.

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The opposition's opening remarks

The formulation of the proposition offers an unintentionally comic example of the spread of lowest-common-denominator culture1
along the information highway. The use of the word "appetite" is revealing, because it implies that culture is essentially a commodity. Regardless of whether we are wising up or dumbing down, culture is not a product but a process. The only pertinent question is what kind of culture fires our imagination and provides the sustenance of our daily lives. And the only culture worthy of the best human aspirations is composed, as St Augustine observed in his Confessions, of "a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future".

（上来没有先讨论wising up or dumbing down的问题，而是抛出另一个问题：什么是real culture，这样既能引起读者兴趣，又使观点显得很insightful，直奔问题核心一休范文test3，阿狗范文test2）

By that standard, we in the Anglo-American world (it is dangerous to generalise about the entire planet) are setting the bar lower and lower, because we are increasingly unwilling to devote time and attention to reading books that hold the key to our past. It is not a question of whether people read Dickens and Tolstoy, as opposed to Dan Brown and Barbara Cartland2, but whether they read anything longer than the text bites that constitute "reading" on the web. I place the word in quotation marks because most of us are engaged online not in uninterrupted traditional reading but in a vulture-like swoop to gather tidbits of information.

（由real culture的标准比照现在，are setting the bar lower and lower，标准都lower and lower了，那mass intellegence就更不用说了！太强了，从本质上来论，感觉比pro的insightful多了，而且超有力）

（那么这个标准lower and lower怎么证明呢？下面，作者把论证具体到reading这件事上进行详述12）

The defining phenomenon of our society during the past three decades has been the triumph of video over print culture in general, and of shorter blocks of text over longer, reflective articles. This process began in old-fashioned print media and has reached its apotheosis on the internet. We all inhabit a culture of distraction.

1According to a 2007 report by the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States, more than 40% of adults from ages 25 to 44 and nearly half of those under 25 read no books except those required for work or school. Between 1982 and 2002, the proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing outside the classroom nearly doubled. In the UK, where more book titles are published per head per year than in the United States, the decline of reading among the young is equally pronounced. Even J. K. Rowling's blockbuster Harry Potter series, a prime example of a successful melding of celebrity, video and book marketing, did not produce any discernible increase in other reading among teenagers.
（这里是说J. K. Rowling的书也没能带动读书热潮?）

And there is no shortage of academic poohbahs3 who say that it does not matter. "If you look at what most people need to read for their occupation, it's zero narrative," commented Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford University, in an article in the New York Times. "What children really need to do is learn to read for information, which they can do on the internet." What a splendid goal: a culture of zero narrative.

2One of the little-noticed portions of the US Endowment report showed that nearly six out of ten middle- and high-school students use other media—from television to video games—at the same time that they say they are reading. It is only reasonable to suppose that multi-tasking has the same effect on reading as mobile phone use does on drivers, who are between two and four times more likely to have serious accidents than those who do not use their phones in the car.

It makes as much sense to say that computers are making us smarter, a mantra supported by as little evidence as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, as it does to assert that the spread of forks throughout Europe during the late Renaissance made us smarter eaters. Neither tool, however useful, reveals anything about the quality of what we are ingesting: the maxim "garbage in, garbage out" applies equally to the appetite for food and information. The tiresome accusation that anyone who recognises the limits of computers is a Luddite4 ignores the truth that isolated information is useless unless it is understood within a larger framework of knowledge.

(例证结束)

Of course there is much more to culture than reading. What fool (even a Luddite) would claim otherwise? But reading alone helps us make sense of all of the many elements of culture. You can enjoy the painting, sculpture and music of any era without knowing a thing about it (including the date when it was created), but only the written word can explain the relationship of any cultural phenomenon to the past, present and future.

（太强大啦！！不忘对方可能攻击自己的点“there is much more to culture than reading”。关于对对方可能攻击自己的点进行论述补充这方面，在看ETS的AW intro的时候有提到过，但看很多范文都米能做到这一点，在这里见识啦！！）

If culture is seen exclusively as a commodity, then there is good news from a marketing standpoint simply because there are more affluent people with leisure time. The article "The Age of Mass Intelligence", published in the winter issue of Intelligent Life magazine, offers a stellar example of the culture-as-commodity perspective. If we are going to more literary festivals graced with celebrities and greased with abundant alcohol, if we are spending freely in the museum shops of world capitals and if we are willing to give Anna Karenina a try because Oprah Winfrey has conferred her imprimatur on Tolstoy and his doomed heroine, why, we must be getting smarter and anyone who says otherwise is a doomsayer, an intellectual snob, and—most cutting of all—an elitist.

Finally, the idea that reading books—especially fiction—is a superfluous elitist pastime now has strong support across the board, from technocrats trying to introduce more video games into classrooms to ordinary non-readers. After writing an article for the Washington Post last spring on the decline of reading, I received a blizzard of emails calling me an elitist. "I haven't read a book in at least five years," said one man who described himself as a 40-year-old stockbroker, "and that doesn't make me any less informed than an elitist who has time to sit on her butt all day to prove that she's smart."

In a culture of zero narrative, ignorance of anything other than packaged information is not something to be ashamed of but something to brag about.（正话反说）

1 The phrase is used to describe the most basic, least sophisticated level of taste, sensibility, or opinion among a group of people. This is most often used in criticism of art, products or media thought to be aiming itself at such a group, the implied complaint usually being that the subject has been simplified to appeal to a wider audience.

2 Dame Mary Barbara Hamilton Cartland DBE CStJ (9 July 1901 – 21 May 2000) was a successful English author, known for her numerous romance novels. She also became one of the United Kingdom's most popular media personalities, appearing often at public events and on television, dressed in her trademark pink and discoursing on love, health and social issues. Other than her fictional romance books, she also wrote health and cookery books, and stage plays and recorded an album of love songs. She was often billed as the Queen of Romance

3 The name has come to be used as a mocking title for someone self-important or high-ranking and who either exhibits an inflated self-regard, who acts in several capacities at once, or who has limited authority while taking impressive titles.

4 1811-1816年英国手工业工人中参加捣毁机器的人，现在引申为反对机械化和自动化的人

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Featured guest

Modern Western civilisation came into being about three centuries ago as an intellectual vision, shaped by the Enlightenment philosophy1 that human beings could conduct their social, economic and political matters with reason and responsibility. It was conceived out of the idea that men and women were rational, were able to think for themselves, were committed to logic and scientific enquiry and would be able to govern themselves in a responsible manner. Today, however, we are not managing our affairs in an intellectual manner. We have evolved into a chaotic post-intellectual culture.

（背景式开头引出当今We have evolved into a chaotic post-intellectual culture.的问题，并在下段开头就开始分析其成因，衔接非常紧密）

The modern view was based on scientific empiricism, humanism, reason, individualism, personal and social responsibility, liberal democratic principles, exploration, capitalism, growth and progress. We proceeded under the elegant assumption that the citizenry would evolve into an increasingly intellectual populace, and hence could be entrusted with more and more responsibility for its own destiny. During the 19th and 20th centuries, however, this modern paradigm of scientific and humanistic reason gradually lost some of its cohesiveness and its sense of inevitable destiny. Romanticism, existentialism, urbanisation, capitalistic exploitation, Marxism, scientific uncertainties, global warfare, enveloping technology and international politics all contributed to the erosion of Enlightenment idealism.

（开头结尾呼应，线段开头句承上启下）

We sense today that something has gone amiss. Many of our intellectually-based institutions—schools, business enterprises, the judicial system, churches, the family, government, indeed the very idea of democracy itself—are no longer functioning the way they were originally envisioned. We send increasing numbers of our youngsters on to higher education, but we know that our schools are not turning out citizens that can cope with our increasingly incoherent society. We rush down the path to embrace new advances in digital and genetic technologies, but we are not clear in what direction this path is leading us. We invest all of our material expectations in the economic free marketplace,—and then watch it collapse around us.

（这段写得好！！！背！！！）

The information explosion overwhelms us overwhelms us, adding to our disorder rather than to our knowledge. Our technological leaps determine new urgencies and uncertainties with every quantum jump（巨大飞跃）. （观点收了）The long-cherished economic promise of ever-expanding growth and progress seems to have vanished. We have entered into a new and unstable postmodern era of post-intellectualism. We question scientific reason and rationalism and embrace spontaneity and passion; we have swapped our commitment to privacy for the promise of security; we have downplayed competition in order to foster sensitivity; we have embraced hi-tech expertise while surrendering control of our own destiny; we have sacrificed our individualism on the altar of retribalisation; we have given up a broad liberal arts intellectual perspective in order to focus on specialised vocational training; we have abandoned our quest for universal truth and adopted a loose form of moral relativity（排比的贴近生活的有力例证，啥也不说了，背）. As a result, our modern civilisation has evolved into a postmodern rejection of reason and structure. As we liberated ourselves from the tyranny of history and the rigidity of truth-seeking, we also liberated ourselves from responsibility（值得深思）. We have engineered a new era of ambiguity and futility. Whatever.

1The Age of Enlightenment or simply The Enlightenment is a term used to describe a time in Western philosophy and cultural life centered upon the eighteenth century, in which reason was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority.

Developing more or less simultaneously in Germany, France, Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Portugal the movement spread through much of Europe, including the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Russia and Scandinavia as well as in America. It could be argued that the signatories of the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the Polish-Lithuanian Constitution of May 3, 1791, were motivated by "Enlightenment" principles.

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Culture offers us a rich, nebulous and contested set of resources to engage with the most important question we ever have to ask: how should we live? It allows us to engage with the lives of others in a way which informs our own. From art, literature, film, music, history, psychology, philosophy and science, we discover how people of other ages, genders, classes, religions, countries and centuries managed the tricky task of living.

（开门见山谈culture的作用，下段例证）

From the letters of Abelard1 and Heloise2 we learn how devotion can sustain us through separation, from Goya's black paintings3 how anxiety can consume us, from Virginia Woolf4 how powerful our desire for privacy can be（老米也很喜欢用排比的说，其实排比挺好的，感觉流畅优美，学习学习）. We may find individual examples motivating, challenging or comforting, irrelevant, irritating or infuriating（强大的形容词啊）. However we respond, engaging with culture sharpens our own sense of what we value and how we want to live. No wonder we are so hungry for it.

（这段不仅例证了上段而且很巧妙地回答了当今人们“文化热”的原因，很自然，让人信服）
For too long great parts of our culture were archived, stewarded and protected by various elites who told us what was important and what was not. Today, more than ever before, each of us has the opportunity to become our own steward, sifting, questioning and reorganising the wealth of ideas available to us. This freedom leads us to think deeply about what we value and why, gleaning ideas and opinions from others not merely to regurgitate them but to form and reform our own. We annotate margins, collect postcards, take photographs, bookmark, blog and comment, creating and recreating personal anthologies or collections or playlists that sustain us in a deeply personal way（这里把culture的含义扩大化大众化了，能很好的迎合作者的观点）. As a writer, Jeanette Winterson5, elegantly put it, "The consolation of art is everything you have seen, read, heard and kept inside you as a talisman against the popular lie that nothing matters any more."（的确elegant，记下了）

（上面说culture对大众的重要性，下面则展开面临的barreiers）

There remain significant barriers to accessing and reshaping the cultural inheritance that belongs to all of us. Fear and snobbery are among the most powerful. Thankfully we are beginning to get over the ideologically dated distinction between elite and popular culture. Penguin recently edited extracts from Augustine and Freud, Machiavelli and Nietzsche, Plutarch and Arendt, among others, for their Great Ideas series, offering beautifully designed original texts as a form of cultural self-help. Not all the authors are people whose advice for living we would necessarily want to follow, but reading them broadens our thinking about love, family, politics, work and play, better equipping us to answer the very personal question of how each of us wants to live.

When Oprah Winfrey6 chose Anna Karenina for her book club a couple of years ago, rightly telling readers it is an "extremely sexy（有吸引力的） and engrossing read" and offering "discussion questions, quizzes, character journeys and plot points to uncover the meaning of family and love in 19c Russia", she was inviting us to interpret the passion, anxiety and concern of Tolstoy's characters in relation to our own lives. Far from dumbing down, this kind of enlightened thinking puts culture back where it belongs: in the service of wiser everyday living.

（最后一句不仅非常自然的亮出了作者的观点，而且从头到尾，作者一步步把我们带入她的的观点中，服。另外作者所理解的wising up更贴近生活，更具普遍性，感觉so好）

1 Peter Abelard (Lt: Petrus Abaelardus or Abailard; Fr: Pierre Abélard) (1079 – April 21, 1142) was a medieval French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician. The story of his affair with and love for Héloïse has become legendary. The Chambers Biographical Dictionary describes him as "the keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the 12th Century"

2
Living within the precincts of Notre-Dame, under the care of her uncle, the canon Fulbert, was Héloïse. She was remarkable for her knowledge of classical letters, which extended beyond Latin to Greek and Hebrew. Abélard sought a place in Fulbert's house, then seduced Héloïse. The affair interfered with his career, and Abélard himself boasted of his conquest. Once Fulbert found out, they were separated, but met in secret. Héloïse became pregnant and was sent by Abélard to Brittany, where she gave birth to a son she named Astrolabe after the scientific instrument.

To appease Fulbert, Abélard proposed a secret marriage in order not to mar his career prospects. Héloïse initially opposed it, but the couple married. When Fulbert publicly disclosed the marriage, and Héloïse denied it, she went to the convent of Argenteuil at Abélard's urging. Fulbert, believing that Abélard wanted to be rid of Héloïse, castrated him, effectively ending Abélard's career. Héloïse was forced to become a nun. Héloïse sent letters to Abélard, questioning why she must submit to a religious life for which she had no calling.

According to historian Constant Mews in his The Lost Love Letters of Héloïse and Abélard, a set of 113 anonymous love letters found in a fifteenth century manuscript represent the correspondence exchanged by Héloïse and Abelard during the earlier phase of their affair.

3
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (30 March 1746 – 16 April 1828) was a Spanish painter and printmaker. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown and a chronicler of history. He has been regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and as the first of the moderns. The subversive and subjective element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Manet and Picasso.

In later life Goya bought a house, called Quinta del Sordo ("Deaf Man's House"), and painted many unusual paintings on canvas and on the walls, including references to witchcraft and war. One of these is the famous work Saturn Devouring His Sons (known informally in some circles as Devoration or Saturn Eats His Child), which displays a Greco-Roman mythological scene of the god Saturn consuming a child, possibly a reference to Spain's ongoing civil conflicts. Moreover, the painting has been seen as "the most essential to our understanding of the human condition in modern times, just as Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling is essential to understanding the tenor of the 16th century".[11]

This painting is one of 14 in a series known as the Black Paintings. After his death the wall paintings were transferred to canvas and remain some of the best examples of the later period of Goya's life when, deafened and driven half-mad by what was probably an encephalitis of some kind, he decided to free himself from painterly strictures of the time and paint whatever nightmarish visions came to him. Many of these works are in the Prado museum in Madrid.

4
Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English novelist and essayist, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

5
Jeanette Winterson OBE (born 27 August 1959) is a British novelist.

Winterson was born in Manchester, England and raised in Accrington, Lancashire by adopted parents Constance and John William Winterson. On track to becoming a Pentecostal Christian missionary, she began evangelising and writing sermons at age six, but by sixteen Winterson declared she was lesbian and left home.[1] She soon after attended Accrington and Rossendale College and supported herself at a variety of odd jobs while earning her bachelors degree in English literature at St Catherine's College, Oxford.

After moving to London, her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published when she was twenty-four years old. It won the 1985 Whitbread Prize for a First Novel, and was adapted for television by Winterson in 1990, which in turn won the BAFTA Award for Best Drama. She won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for The Passion, a novel set in Napoleonic Europe.

Winterson's subsequent novels explore the boundaries of physicality and the imagination, gender polarities, and sexual identities, and have won several literary awards. Her stage adaptation of The PowerBook in 2002 opened at the Royal National Theatre, London. She also bought a derelict terraced house in Spitalfields, East London, which she refurbished into a flat as a pied-a-terre and a ground-floor shop, Verde's, to sell organic food.[2]

Winterson was made an officer of Order of the British Empire (OBE) at the 2006 New Year Honours.

6
Oprah Gail Winfrey (born January 29, 1954) is an American media personality, Academy Award nominated actress, producer, literary critic and magazine publisher, best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history.[2] She has been ranked the richest African American of the 20th century,[3] the most philanthropic African American of all time,[4] and was once the world's only black billionaire.[5][6][7][8][9] She is also, according to some assessments, the most influential woman in the world

Born in rural Mississippi to a poor teenage single mother and later raised in an inner city Milwaukee neighborhood, Winfrey was raped at age 9 and at 14-years-old gave birth to a son, who died in infancy.[13] Sent to live with the man she calls her father, a barber in Tennessee, Winfrey landed a job in radio while still in high school and began co-anchoring the local evening news at the age of 19.[14] Her emotional ad-lib delivery eventually got her transferred to the daytime talk show arena, and after boosting a third-rated local Chicago talk show to first place,[6] she launched her own production company and became internationally syndicated.

Credited with creating a more intimate confessional form of media communication,[15] she is thought to have popularized and revolutionized[15][16][17][18] the tabloid talk show genre pioneered by Phil Donahue,[15] which a Yale study claimed broke 20th century taboos and allowed LGBT people to enter the mainstream.[19] By the mid 1990s she had reinvented her show with a focus on literature, self-improvement, and spirituality. Though criticized for unleashing confession culture[18] and promoting controversial self-help fads, she is generally admired for overcoming adversity to become a benefactor to others.[20] In 2006 she became an early supporter of Barack Obama and one analysis estimates she delivered over a million votes in the close 2008 Democratic primary race,[21] an achievement for which the governor of Illinois considered offering her a seat in the U.S. senate

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rebuttal

The moderator's rebuttal remarks

In their rebuttals, both our speakers examine how we acquire knowledge. For Susan Jacoby, the real issue is: "how much time we devote to ephemera,as opposed to lasting cultural experience and knowledge that cannot be acquired without effort".

Ms Jacoby sees the decline in book reading, particularly reading by young men under 25, who are quite happy to spend three hours a day playing video games, but half of whom never read a book unless required to do so for work or school, as the strongest sign that we are heading towards an era she describes as "unprecedented, oxymoronic mass intelligence". Tim de Lisle, although he doesn't actually say so, would also be worried by a world where reading is so visibly in decline. But he doesn't see that happening. Instead he points out two things: that the surprising thing about the internet is not how much of it is downmarket, but how much of it is upmarket, and that, once people get used to it, they actually read voraciously online.

Neither speaker has raised a question I would be keen to see discussed,
not least because I have an 11-year-old child. She is(luckily) a voracious reader and (less good) an avid watcher of American sitcoms（情景喜剧） on television. What she doesn't like doing quite so much is practising her music every day, or being told she should regularly be playing scales. My question is this: if part of the human cultural experience is not drinking in painting or music, say, but actually being creative, how important is it, or even just necessary,to do this in a disciplined way? In other words, should acquiring culture be easy or should it take work?

I have been struck by two things I've read recently. One is MalcolmGladwell's new book, "Outliers", in which he argues that the one thing that marks out people who are outstandingly good at music or sport or computers, for example, is that by the time they reach adulthood they have put in about 10,000 hours of practice. The other is a comment from the floor. Johnzero argues that technology has made it much easier for people to produce art. "Participating in culture used to mean sitting still while others presented to you their curated collections." In the emerging future it will mean creating one's own collections, supportedby technology. "Our deepest desire is not to witness art. It is to create, to do."
Technology will certainly help. But how much effort do we need to make ourselves become musicians, film-makers, even video artists?

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The proposer's rebuttal remarks

It's a pleasure to be having this debate. Susan Jacoby makes her points with vigour and learning, and I'm enjoying standing on the other side of the net, trying to return her crisp volleys.

I suspect we don't actually disagree on much. We both believe in culture, after all. And I fully agree with her point about confining our scope to the Anglo-American（英美的，英美间的） world: it is indeed reckless to generalise about the whole world. That said, I do believe that MsJacoby has got the wrong end of a few sticks here. Let's take some of them one by one.

"The formulation of this question offers an unintentionally comic example of the spread of lowest-common-denominator culture along the information highway." This is the first thing Ms Jacoby has to say, and it is astonishing. Let's consider what is going on here. A debate is being held under the auspices of a leading current-affairs magazine. We are following the format of an Oxford Union debate. Some distinguished academics and authors are taking part, and some journalists. The debate crisscrosses the Atlantic and pops up on the computer screens of thousands of readers all over the world, who can follow it free of charge and join in themselves. Twenty years ago, this couldn't have happened, because we didn't have the technology. To me, this debate is another example of wising up. To Susan Jacoby, it's"lowest-common-denominator"（爆笑，这俩人太会相互讽刺了）. Isn't there quite a lot out there that is lower?

"The use of the word 'appetite' is revealing," Ms Jacoby argues,"because it implies that culture is essentially a commodity." At the risk of being blunt, I would say that it doesn't. Appetites come from one area of life (our needs, our urges), commodities from another (the world of buying and selling). We often talk of sexual appetites, but that doesn't mean we're thinking of sex as a commodity. If we feel hungry for some culture, and go along to the Metropolitan Museum orTate Britain, does that make the pictures we see there a commodity? No.A work of art may be a commodity at certain moments in its life, when it comes under the hammer. But it is a work of art all the time.（这个反例很浅显很有说服力）

"Culture is not a product but a process." Surely it's both. It's a capacious concept, covering many processes, at the end of which are umpteen（无数）
products.

"The only culture worthy of the best human aspirations is composed, as St Augustine observed in his Confessions,of 'a present of things past, a present of things present, and apresent of things future". Nice quote, but the point ends up being a circular one: the only culture worthy of the best aspirations is the best culture. In fact, there is plenty of room and use for culture that is not top-quality. You can see this by looking at ancient Greek literature. Herodotus can be awful, but his Histories are good in parts, and he is the first historian we've got, so we're stuck with him. Whole swathes of Plato are rubbish, but he is important because he is our first major philosopher, and the first we know of who laid out arguments for totalitarianism. Even Homer, the first genius inWestern literature, nodded when he wrote the second book of the Iliad, with its deadly-dull catalogue of ships（举例很好很强大）.

（以上是针对J的第一段反驳的，因为J的整个论证都是围绕第一段自己对culture的独到见解来说的，作者这里首先就把对方论证的前提给一个个否定了，在论证上马上就有了优势）

"...the text bites that constitute 'reading' on the web. I place the word in quotation marks because most of us are engaged online not in uninterrupted traditional reading but in a vulture-like swoop to gather tidbits of information." The vulture is a nice image, but it doesn't bear much examination（可用在阿狗上的好句子）. When gathering tidbits, we are often checking facts, doing what we used to do with reference books（参考书）. Are we vulture-like when we look something up in a dictionary or encyclopedia?（有力的反问）Ms Jacoby seems to look at the web and see the worst of it. She sounds like a man I worked with on a website in 2000, who said, when I proposed a new daily feature of about 500 words, "Nobody wants to read reams of stuff online." That turned out to be spectacularly untrue.Most of us soon got used to reading online, and in many cases we now read voraciously. The most clicked-on feature on the New York Times website in 2007 was "Unhappy meals", Michael Pollan's outstanding magazine piece on what has gone wrong with our diet. It is 10,000 words long(例子很鲜活，证明了人们正在逐步get used to reading online.)

The surprising thing about the web is not how much of it is downmarket. It's how much of it is upmarket. When we rise from the sofa, turn off the TV and go to our computers, our brow rises too. In cyberspace, the most popular newspapers are serious ones: The Sun, page-3 girls and all, is outshone by The Guardian. USA Today gets fewer hits than The New York Times.iTunes has given birth to iTunesU. On the web, a thousand flowers bloom, and many of those flowers are highly sophisticated. Julian Lloyd Webber, the cellist, was saying the other day that he uses YouTube to watch great classical performances（虽然也是在说网络的利弊问题，但观点很新：网络的surprising之处不是在它有多少缺点，而是由多少优点。后面的举例.也很好，背吧）

The internet has had another immense effect on how cultured we are.Through email, it has made writers of almost everyone with a computer.To write about your life is to make sense of it. It's one of the most creative, reflective, cultured things you can do. And millions of people whose writing had shrunk into the narrow confines of the business letter are now writing every day—some better than others, for sure, but most better than they used to write before.
（分别从三个方面谈及了网络与文化的关系问题：1、人们正逐步习惯网上阅读，而不是单纯地信息输入；2、网络的upmarket 3、网络在人们writing方面丰富）

Ms Jacoby may well be right to say that book-reading has declined over a generation or so. There are so many more options now. But those options are much richer than the literary world is prepared to admit.Kids with XBoxes are now playing the guitar or the drums, as well as designing worlds of their own. Cheap camcorders（便携式摄录机） have turned millions of us into amateur film-makers. Photography, as you can see from a glance at flickr, is now practised to high standards by a lot of people.Whether it's an art or a craft is immaterial: it's certainly culture.(I'm going by Brian Eno's definition: culture is all the things we choose to do. So a national cuisine is culture, but eating to survive isn't.)

（book-reading 的下降不代表culture的下降。关于这一点，在J的OP里提到过reading不代表culture但能体现主要的culture，在这里作者则很成功的淡化了这个“主要”的概念，从而反驳对方。总体感觉是：事实上，当今世界对cultrue的理解早已不是那么死板，因为人们有了太多太多其他选择。）

Many fine old-school minds are programmed to look down on video, but visual intelligence is still intelligence. And so is emotional intelligence. One of the refreshing things about culture today is that it has become less defensive, less exclusive, less narrow about what counts as intelligence. It's telling what Ms Jacoby has to say about Harry Potter. She describes the Potter series as "a prime example of a successful melding of celebrity, video and book marketing". For the record, J.K. Rowling's rise to the top of the bestseller lists had nothing to do with celebrity or video, and little to do with marketing.When the first book took off, Ms Rowling was an unknown single mother writing in Edinburgh cafés to save on her heating bills. The book flew off the shelves because children fell in love with it. If she is a celebrity now, it is only because her books have done so well.（J的文章里引用Harry potter那段我也没理解用意，但作者在这里的观点我很赞同）

In her desire to push the idea of culture as commodity, Ms Jacoby misunderstands the points we made in Intelligent Life about museums and literary festivals. "We are spending freely in the museum shops of world capitals," she retorts, but the article to which she refers had plenty to say about museums, and nothing at all about museum shops. She describes literary festivals as "graced with celebrities and greased with abundant alcohol". It's a well-made phrase, washed down with some lively alliteration, but it does make you wonder if its author has ever been to Hay-on-Wye, where many of the talks are given during the day, to audiences of children and their parents, who are not noticeably drunk, by writers who are only very faintly famous.

Ms Jacoby ends by saying "In a culture of zero narrative..." Again,zero narrative is a memorable phrase. But does it actually tell us anything about the world today? The last time we had a culture of zero narrative was shortly before our ancestors learned to talk. We have been wising up—more or less—ever since.（这个太强大了，作者在驳了一系列J的观点之后，以一个很调侃的结尾说，即使一切都如J所言，那我们比起祖先至少也是wising up了。虽然是一个调侃，但读到这里真是就想去投pro的票了）

全篇在反驳对方的时候基本都是采用了先引用疑问点再驳的结构，这个文章结构没啥特别的，但驳的内容很精彩

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The opposition's rebuttal remarks

The most ubiquitous words used in defence of the concept that we are living in an era of unprecedented, oxymoronic mass intelligence are elitism,snobbery and stuffiness. These labels, designed to preclude serious discussion, are invariably applied to anyone who argues that our culture is steadily changing for the worse as video and digital infotainment（信息娱乐片） supplant print and shorten our individual and collective attention spans. (言简意赅)If all of the doomsayers (another dismissive term) are snobs who long for a return to a world in which servants knew their place and never aspired to university, our culture must be in fine shape.

The only evidence offered by Tim de Lisle in support of the resolution consists of rising attendance figures at museums and literary festivals and the large new audience for Classic FM radio in the UK. This is not surprising, since Mr de Lisle is the editor of Intelligent Life magazine, and the lengthy article he commissioned for the publication's winter issue relied almost exclusively on the same data, while ignoring cultural developments that support a less rosy view.

I have nothing against museums, literary festivals or even Classic FM, despite the fact that the station's format, featuring snippets of music short enough not to tax anyone's attention span, is roughly equivalent to the old Reader's Digest condensed books. Some of my best friends, and I myself, frequent both museums and literary festivals. Yes, the number of tickets sold for such festivals has increased from roughly 2,000 in 1988 to a projected 165,000 in 2009(although the latter projection may turn out to be too optimistic in view of the worldwide financial collapse).
But what do these figures really mean? If celebrity-driven literary festivals were evidence of a culture that values reading, we might expect that more people would now be reading more books, that magazines would be flourishing and filled with advertisements from companies eager to reach educated readers, and that traditional print media like newspapers, which are rapidly going out of business, would be more successful online（利用对方举证来推测本应出现的现象，但实际情况并非如此，这种反驳方法很高效.）
None of this has happened. Reading of both fiction and nonfiction books has declined dramatically during the past 20 years in the United States; the drop in the UK is not as striking but, as in the United States, distaste for serious reading is most pronounced among the young. Young men under 25, who spend about three hours a day playing video games in both countries, are most indifferent to reading: more than half never read a book unless required to do so for work or school. If you think that video games can substitute for books as the foundation of worthwhile culture, then there is no problem.

A decade ago, newspaper publishers thought that online editions would snag young people who were deserting traditional print editions.Not so. Only about one-quarter of online readers—the same percentage asprint readers—are under 35.

When Mr de Lisle hears "a cynic" suggest that literary festivals are mainly a manifestation of celebrity culture, he identifies "the blinkered, narrow, either-or mentality of the true cultural snob". I would argue that the modern literary festival is an exercise in true cultural snobbery, because it is open only to those who have the price of a ticket and travel and whose exposure to some form of higher education has made them see such festivals as cultural credentials.Consider the contrast between the festivals and truly democratic cultural institutions such as the library of the British Museum and the New York Public Library. A passion for learning, not an admission fee or a university credential, was all that was required for thousands of immigrants to receive a free education in New York's great research library in the early decades of the 20th century

这里从一个新的角度证明. the modern literary festival is an exercise in true cultural snobbery即哪些人才真正地“有能力”把它当成一种culture？）

Kingsley Amis's well-known prediction that the expansion of access to universities would dilute the quality of education for all, with its
unmistakable implication that only an aristocracy was fit for learning,would never have sat well with Americans. However, higher education in both the United States and the UK, except in the most elite institutions, is in trouble today, not for the anti-democratic reason cited by Amis but because of the patronising assumption, beginning in early schooling, that rigorous academic standards cannot be applied to economically and socially diverse groups of students. That assumption is the essence of class-bound elitism.

If higher education were doing a proper job, young people with university degrees ought to be more knowledgeable than their elders.But every study of historical knowledge and awareness of currentaffairs shows that older Americans, who have much less formal educationthan those under 50, know more than the young. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. One bit of "goodnews" cited in this report is that Americans with some post-secondary education were four times as likely as those with a high-school education to locate Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel on a map(already filled in with the names of countries, by the way). The bad news: only 23% in the university group actually came up with the right answer. Think about it: three-quarters of American university alumniliterally cannot read a map（素材）

The crowds at the Terracotta Army exhibition presumably knew where China was located (or they knew after attending the exhibit). But they are a minority among the population, and no self-congratulatory statements about today's university graduates being "cultural omnivores" can alter that disturbing fact.

One of the sillier premises of almost everything written about the modern "appetite" for culture is that there is anything new about appreciating cultural experience on many levels. The point is not whether it is possible to enjoy video games and books, rock and classical music, YouTube videos and Old Masters. The real issue is how much time we devote to ephemera, as opposed to lasting cultural experience and knowledge that cannot be acquired without effort. I realise that this position assumes the existence of a cultural hierarchy, and for that I make no apologies. I like both fast-food cheeseburgers and vegetables, but if I eat the former 20 times weekly week and the latter five times, I will be badly nourished and unmistakably pudge

J在谈culture时总是很深入，比如在谈到现在人们能接触到各种“culture”时她提出那些是真正的lasting cultural experience and knowledge么？

总的来说PRO的观点很大众，很容易被接受和理解，OPP的观点虽然insightful，但把它放在当今世俗当道的社会上似乎显得有点格格不入或者死板，这也就是为什么pro能在rebuttal里找出那么多反驳点的原因。而从最终pro获胜来看，是否也说明了一种dumding down呢？个人一点看法。