1006G[REBORN FROM THE ASHES组]备考日记 by 正常点——任何的失败都有太多的必然

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Comment：

This is really a new, mystical and unknown sphere for me.

Only if religion enhances a group’s survival can it have power over the individuals and be preserved in the long course of history as the author claims. It emphasizes both the ruthlessness to outsiders and the individual sacrifice for the religious group.

This characteristic of religion—the so-called adaptive function—has similar natures to numerous organizations, such as family and social class. It is primarily through our identification with these social groups that we define ourselves. In other words, one’s identity keeps changing when he belongs to different units. The fact that mankind have no fixed status leads to the momentary identity. At the same time, one would like to accentuate his sense of belonging when he involves in a specific group. For example, one would unconsciously speak a dialect when he gets together with his countryman.

In sum, one tends to define himself through the social group he involves in and make decisions depending on his role in the group. Above all, no one is capable of surviving without the guideline of any group.

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关于这篇文章，还有一点思考：

Darwin evolution theory 可以被应用到社会学的领域:

"the evolution of society is similar to the evolution of individuals more or less. In the wild, different kinds of creatures change their physical structure or living habits in order to adapt the surroundings. People are struggling for surviving in this competitive society."——来自splendidsun

人们define themselves 依靠gruops, 并且随之带来了role--duty--action--evaluation，
借助Darwin的理论，进行类比：
我们找到了
role——we can also the group that dangle at the bottom of the food chain in our society——伊拉克难民

duty——So the group has to strenghen itself for survival by accentuate or emphasize the responsibility of its members—— 保卫国家领土主权的完整，不被侵犯，同时追求生命和自由平等

action——individuals have to take action to realize their collective objection——拿起武器，进行战斗，人体炸弹，恐怖活动

evaluation——outside accaptance and self-evaluation(belonging)

evolution——adaptive functioning，increasing cohesion, racial harmony and national identity——世界各国的援助支持和自我种族认同

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From 程远：
        类比不成立：自然界的食物链是由上帝决定的，但是社会的制度是由人决定的。如果默认这个类比，等于要求穷人默认自己是生来应该被剥削，再一句剥削而产生适应剥削的进化。

       至于Max Weber：崇尚自由竞争....

等待大师的回复邮件中:sleepy:

plukaUID: 2721764

新年快乐~~
话说，我们组要搞点啥活动不？

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Film
Floating in the Digital Experience
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: December 30, 2009

HOW much our world of moving-image entertainment has changed in the past decade! We now live in a world of the 24-Hour Movie, one that plays anytime and anywhere you want (and sometimes whether you want it to or not). It’s a movie we can access at home by pressing a few buttons on the remote (and agreeing to pay more for it than you might at the local video store) or with a few clicks of the mouse. The 24-Hour Movie now streams(喷射，流) instead of unspools, filling our screens with images that, more and more, have been created algorithmically（算法上的） rather than photographically.

And yet how little our world of moving-image entertainment has changed! On April 14, 1896, The New York Times ran an article with the exciting if cryptic（神秘的，令人困惑的，含义隐秘的） headline “Edison’s Latest Triumph.” The triumph was the Vitascope, a machine that “projects upon a large area of canvas groups that appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated（促使，开动） by separate impulses.” A proprietor（老板） of the music hall where the Vitascope was shown off said this machine would reproduce “scenes from various successful plays and operas of the season, and well-known statesmen and celebrities,” adding, “No other manager in this city will have the right to exhibit the Vitascope.”

Today, even when digital, our movies are still filled with celebrities and scenes from successful plays (and books and comics), and the owners of image technologies continue to hold on to their exclusive rights ferociously（凶猛）. Edison didn’t invent the Vitascope, but that’s another story. The story I want to tell here does involve him. But first I want to fast-forward（快进） to a recent night when, at a movie theater rigged（控制，操纵） for 3-D projection, I saw James Cameron’s “Avatar” with an audience that watched the screen with the kind of fixed attention that has become rare at the movies. True, everyone was wearing 3-D glasses, which makes it difficult to check your cellphone obsessively（痴迷）, but they also seemed captivated.

When it was over, people broke into enthusiastic applause and, unusually, many stayed to watch the credits, as if to linger in the movie. Although much has been made of the technologies used in “Avatar,” its beauty and nominal（名义） politics, it is the social experience of the movie — as an event that needs to be enjoyed with other people for maximum impact — which is more interesting. That’s particularly true after a decade when watching movies became an increasingly solitary affair, something between you and your laptop（笔记本电脑）. “Avatar”（化身，体现） affirms the deep pleasures of the communal, and it does so by exploiting a technology (3-D), which appears to invite you into the movie even as it also forces you to remain attentively（用心） in your seat.

“Avatar” serves as a nice jumping-off point to revisit how movies and our experience of them have changed. For starters, when a critic calls a new release “a film” these days, there’s a chance that what she (and you) are looking at wasn’t made with film processes but was created, from pre-visualization to final credits, with digital technologies. Yet, unless a director or distributor calls attention to the technologies used — as do techno-fetishists（盲目崇拜者） like Michael Mann and David Fincher, who used bleeding-edge digital cameras to make “Collateral” (2004) and “Zodiac” (2007) — it’s also probable that most reviewers won’t mention if a movie was even shot in digital, because they haven’t noticed or don’t care.

This seems like a strange state of affairs. Film is profoundly changing — or, if you believe some theorists and historians, is already dead — something that most moviegoers don’t know. Yet, because the visible evidence of this changeover（改变，转入） has become literally hard to see, and because the implications are difficult to grasp, it is also understandable why the shift to digital has not attracted more intense analysis outside film and media studies. Bluntly（直言） put, something is happening before our eyes. We might see an occasional digital artifact (usually, a bit of unintentional data) when a director shoots digital in bright light — look for a pattern of squares or a yellowish tint（黄色色调） — but we’re usually too busy with the story to pay much mind.

Should you care? I honestly don’t know, because I’m not sure what to think about this brave new image world we have entered. I love the luxurious look and warmth of film, and I fervently（热切） hope it never disappears. And yet many of us who grew up watching movies in the predigital era have rarely experienced the ones in, and shown on, film in all their visual glory: battered（破旧，磨损） prints and bad projection have helped thwart(挫败) the ideal experience. Theater 80 St. Marks, a downtown Manhattan repertory house（仓库） where I spent a lot of time in the 1970s, showed threadbare prints of classic and not-so-classic movies in rear（后方的） projection, which meant they often looked worse on screen than they did on my television back home.

It is because the movies and our experience of them has changed so radically in recent years — we can pull a movie out of our pocket now, much as earlier generations pulled out a paperback（平装版） — that makes it difficult to grasp what is happening. In 1996, Susan Sontag set off a storm in cine-circles（电影圈） with an essay, “The Decay of Cinema,” which could have been titled the death of specialized cinephilia, one centered on art-house film (“quintessentially（典型） modern”), from Dziga Vertov to Jean-Luc Godard, and experienced inside a movie theater, “ideally the third-row center.” Sontag’s essay inspired a spate of（一连串） similarly themed if often less vigorous examinations: Google the words “death of cinema,” and you get more than 2.5 million hits.

In one sense the beginning of the end of cinema as we tend to understand it can be traced to 1933, the year that a feature-length film — a 1932 detective tale called “The Crooked（弯曲） Circle” — was first shown on television. Few Americans owned sets in the 1930s, but the genie（魔鬼，精灵） was already out of the bottle, or, rather, the movies were out of the theater. As televisions began to fill postwar American homes — from an estimated 20,000 in 1946 to 30.5 million in 1955 — so did the movies, which, despite Hollywood’s initial anxiety, became a crucial television staple（主要产品）. (The studios soon learned that television was a revenue source.) Generations of cinephiles fell in love with the object of their obsession while flopped（跳） on the floor, basking in the glow of the family television.

In “The Virtual Life of Film,” an elegant 2007 inquiry into the past, present and future of film, the theorist D. N. Rodowick writes, “All that was chemical and photographic is disappearing into the electronic and digital.” Film captures moments in time, preserving them spatially（空间上） in images we can root around in, get lost in. Digital delivers data, zeroes and ones that are transformed into images, and this is a difference to contemplate. The truth is that the film object has already changed, from preproduction to projection. And the traditional theatrical experience that shaped how viewers looked at film and, by extension, the world, has been mutating for some time. The new types of image consumption and digital technologies have complicated our understanding of cinema.

And yet we still watch movies. And if it looks like a duck (in widescreen) and quacks（聊天，吹牛） like a duck (in stereo（立体声）), nothing has changed, right? It has and it hasn’t, as we will only understand as film continues to disappear. These days instead of falling in love with the movies at home in front of the television, new generations fall in love with movies they watch on hand-held devices that, however small, play images that are larger than those Edison showed to customers before the invention of the Vitascope. A teenager watching a movie on her iPhone might not be looking at an actual film. But she is enjoying something like it, something that because of its narrative strategies and visual style carries the deep imprint（印记） of cinema.

It’s also a good bet that this teenager also watches movies in theaters. If she goes to “Avatar,” she will see a movie that, despite its exotic beauty, seems familiar, even in 3-D. Narrative cinema employs devices, from camera placement to editing, that direct your attention and, if the movie is successful and you fall under its sway（受...统治，控制）, lock you into the story. Mr. Cameron might be a visionary of a type, but he’s an old-fashioned (and canny) storyteller and he locks you in tightly. The 3-D images are often spectacular, and his characters, like the figures in that 1896 Edison film, “appear to stand forth from the canvas, and move with great facility and agility, as though actuated by separate impulses.”

You can get lost in a movie, or so it seems, and melt into its world. But even when seated third row center and occupying two mental spaces, you understand that you and the movie inhabit separate realms. When I watched “The Dark Knight” in Imax, I felt that I was at the very edge of the screen. “Avatar,” in 3-D, by contrast, blurs（模糊） that edge, closing the space between you and the screen even more. Like a video game designer, Mr. Cameron seems to want to invite you into the digital world he has created even if, like a film director, he wants to determine your route. Perched between film and digital, “Avatar” shows us a future in which movies will invite us further into them and perhaps even allow us to choose not just the hero’s journey through the story, but also our own.

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Comment:

What a wonderful experience do we have through the amazing development of visual presentation. Thanks to the existence of film, television, video tape, computer and digital camera, numerous original works such as paintings and historical documents are available to everyone. Not only do they create a brand new world, but they also enable anyone-not just scholars-to have access to these works. To illustrate this point of view clearly, here’s a good example. Li, a Chinese student who has never been abroad before, could drone on for hours about the dramatic moment that God breathes life into Adam by the magical touch in the magnificent fresco of the Sistine Chapel in Italy. The reason why he has an exhaustive knowledge of this art works comes from a documentary film about the famous art works all over the world and the satisfactory Internet search engine.

Of course, anxiety and apprehension have occurred when a trend forces mankind to accept something new. In this case, it refers to the rise of visual novelty which aims at altering mankind’s life gradually and completely. Most of the 30s and above have witnessed the earth-shaking change especially since the invention of computer and the wide spread of Internet. The original fear that books are meant to be replaced by the computer is eliminated when man recognize the drying up of imagination which should be fired by books. So the current trend is that books and computers would coexist for quite a long time.

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Beyond Righteousness（正义） and Gain

by Zhou Guoping

"A virtuous man is concerned with righteousness while a mean man, with gain,” Confucius（孔子） says. The "righteousness" and "gain" have long been a central theme in the Chinese philosophy of life. But, what if I am neither virtuous nor mean?

There was once a time when almost everyone claimed to be a gentleman and every word uttered was about righteousness. At that time, there might have been some truly virtuous men who were so righteous as to give up whatever was profitable. But, more likely, one might meet hypocrites who used righteousness as a fig leaf（遮羞布） for their cupidity, or pedants（书呆子，空论家） believed in whatever passed for righteousness. Gone are the old days. The social trend has taken on a dramatic change unawares: the reputation of righteousness nosedived（暴跌）, truly virtuous men became extinct, hypocrites dropped the fig leaf and the scales（鱼鳞） fell from the eyes of the pedants. With- out exception, they all joined in the scramble（争夺） for gains. It is believed that the philosophy of life has changed and a new interpretation of righteousness and gain looms large: seeking material gains is not the exclusive patent（专利） of the mean, but a golden rule for all.

"Time is money" is a vogue word nowadays. Nothing is wrong when entrepreneurs apply it to boost productivity. But, when it is worshipped as a motto of life and commercialism takes the place of other wisdom of life, life is then turned into a corporation and, consequently, interpersonal relations into a market.

I used to mock at the cheap "human touch（人情味）". But, nowadays even the cheap “touch” has become rare and costly. Can you, if I may ask, get a smile, a greeting, or a tiny bit of compassion for free?

Don’t be nostalgic, though. It is in fact of little help if you try to redeem（赎回） the world or salvage（救助） the corrupt minds through preaching various brands of righteousness. Nevertheless, beyond righteousness and gain, I believe, there are other attitudes towards life; beyond virtue and meanness, there are other individualities. Allow me to coin（模压，生造） a sentence in the Confucian style: "A perfect man is concerned with disposition（性格，倾向，气质）."

Indeed, righteousness and gain, seemingly poles apart（相距甚远）, have much essence in common. Righteousness calls for a devotion to the whole society while gain drives one to pursue material interests. In both cases, one’s disposition is over- looked and his true “self” concealed. "Righteousness" teaches one to give while "gain" induces one to take. The former turns one’s life into a process of fulfilling endless obligations while the latter breeds a life-long scramble for wealth and power. We must remember, however, the true value of life is beyond obligations and power. Both righteousness and gain are yoked by calculating minds. That’s why we often find ourselves in a tense interpersonal relationship whether Mr. Righteousness is commanding or Mr. Gain, controlling.

If "righteousness" stands for an ethical philosophy of life, and "gain," a utilitarian one, what I mean by "disposition" is an aesthetical philosophy of fife, which advocates taking your disposition as the operational guidance for your fife, whereby everyone is allowed to keep his true "self". You do not five for the doctrines you believe in or the materials you possess. Instead, your true "self" makes you who you are. The true meaning of life lies not in giving or possessing, but in creating, which actively unfolds your true disposition, or, in other words, the emotional gratification you obtain through the exertion of your essential power. Different from giving, which is the performance of an external responsibility, creating is the realization of one’s true self. The difference between creating and possessing is more than crystal clear. Let’s take creative writing as an example: "Possessing" focuses on the fame or social status a piece of writing may bring, while "creating" highlights the plea- sure in the process of writing. A man of disposition seeks nothing but the communication of feelings while in company, and the cultivation of taste while possessing something. More valuably, in a time when most people are busy hunting for wealth and being hunted by it, a man of disposition is al- ways at ease in social intercourses. Here I' m not talking about the leisure of traditional Chinese scholar-officials, nor the complacency of conservative peasants（农民）, but about a peaceful mind coming from a non-materialistic attitude towards life. Using the writing example again, I’ve been wondering why a writer needs to be prolific. If he dreams of being enshrined（供奉）, an immortal short poem is enough. Otherwise, he could be pretty much satisfied with a carefree life. In this sense, writing is merely a way for such a life.

Bernard Shaw once said, “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it." With it I couldn’t agree more. I did admire him for his easy and humorous way in describing the quandary（困境） of life. However, a deep ponder over it has brought home to me that Shaw’s standpoint is no other than "possessing", which keeps us stranded in a double dosage（计量） tragedy of life: it' s a pain not to possess your heart' s desire, and a tedium（乏味）, to have possessed it. However, if we shift the standpoint from "possessing" to "creating", and look at life with an esthetic eye, we can interpret Shaw’s words the other way round: there are two comedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire, so you still have the opportunity to seek or create it. The other is to get your heart’s desire, and then you are able to enjoy tasting or experiencing it--Of course, life can never be free from pains, and a wealth hunter can not dream of the sadness of a man who places a premium（保险费，佣金，奖励） on his true disposition. However, to be free from the mania for pos- session may at least save you many petty worries and pains, and let you enjoy a graceful life. 1 have no intention to prescribe the esthetic viewpoint as the cure for a corrupt world. I just want to express a belief: there is a life more worth living than the one haunted by righteousness and gain. And, this belief will help me sail through the unpredictable waters of my future life.

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Comment：
Well, I have to say that the author is excessively sensitive on the goal in life much or less. Faced with the food shortage, over-capacity of production, environmental issues and so on, mankind should pay more attention to these global severe threatens instead of persuading others to subscribe the motto of righteousness on shield. I concede that what the author emphasizes is an undoubtedly fact, however, it is not the right time to preach the ideal of being a true man when one is surrounded with thorny difficulties.

Maybe pragmatism is detrimental in some aspects, but it has advantages over the naïve idealism, especially taking the current global plight into consideration. After all, no one would like to live in a dilapidated house and concern about his meals. In this case, the wealth hunter should receive a warm welcome when he is also a wealth creator. Thanks to the liability to pay taxes, the rich also have to make a contribution to the society such as the infrastructure development and the unemployment benefits. Without their pursuit for utilitarian, poverty and stagnation would rule the world ruthlessly.

In sum, as far as I am concerned, the pursuit of wealth is not contradicted with the goal to realize the true value of life. And the utopian condition for the majority is to unify the two objections to the fullest extent possible. Maybe only artists and layman Buddhists could have access to peacefulness and serenity and the state of neglecting the fame and money.

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看了Pluca的comment，很赞其中关于世俗将人们面对现实的无奈描写：
“"We all live in the gutter," yes I know the next words, promising and beautiful, yet this line alone have been heavy enough. I'd like to read essays delving human's heart, exploring the inner universe, finding out the silent galaxy singing within; this sometimes feels like touching the eternal and escaping the mundane. Yet simply too often the gravity drags me down, with the pale face and dim lights flickering  in the murky, reminding that here's still earth: enoumous, inextricable, right in the gutter.”

这使我想起了关于离心力于向心力的那段描述：

There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star a hunderd millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages explained by the hours.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

今天回来竟然还没有留新作业，所以就先补上1.1的吧！
The World in 2010
The Americas
Canada's northern goal
Nov 13th 2009
From The World in 2010 print edition
By Jeffrey Simpson, OTTAWA


The Arctic is no longer the forgotten frontier（边疆）
Canada is a northern nation. “O Canada”, the national anthem, speaks of “true north, strong and free”. But for most Canadians, 80% of whom live within 200km (124 miles) of the United States border, the Far North (Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut) is a vast area never visited, largely unknown, usually forgotten and populated only by aboriginal peoples with quaint（离奇有趣） customs. All that will start to change in 2010.

Pangnirtung（庞纳唐）, population 1,300, on the east coast of Baffin Island, a settlement mostly known for Inuit（因纽特） art and a nearby national park, will see construction start on a C$42m ($40.5m) harbour for the small Inuit fishing fleet（船队）. At Gjoa Haven, the only settlement on King William Island, cabins（客舱） used by polar-bear researchers will be upgraded. At Eureka, on Ellesmere Island, an atmospheric laboratory will be overhauled（大修）. At Iqaluit, capital of the Nunavut territory, tens of millions of dollars will be spent on badly needed housing, a research institute and a research vessel（船）.

Add to that oil and gas exploration in the Beaufort Sea; C$100m for social housing（社区住宅）; the same sum for geology research; another C$90m for economic-development projects; C$85m to improve Arctic research stations. The result is activity such as the Far North, from Alaska in the west to Baffin Bay in the east, has never before seen. And still to come—delayed by debilitating（减弱） squabbles（争吵） among Canada’s shipbuilders and the usual cost overruns（泛滥，溢出） of military projects—are three Arctic patrol（巡逻） ships and a polar icebreaker, plus the publication of plans for a deep-water port at Nanisivik, on the north coast of Baffin Island. Later in the year, if all goes according to plan, the federal government will select a community that will get a High Arctic Research Station.

During the cold war, Canada and the United States constructed a Distant Early-Warning detection system against any attack by Soviet bombers. Apart from this DEW line, Canada paid little heed（注意，留心） militarily to the Far North. Soviet and American submarines（潜艇） roamed（漫游） under the Arctic ice without Canada having any ability to monitor them. The Canadian government outfitted（供给，装备） a few Inuit with baseball hats and rifles（步枪）, called them Rangers, and forgot about the region.

Now, the rush is on to discover the Far North, quite literally in the sense of research into atmosphere, ice and animals; and more urgently to get ready for the widening of sea lanes（航道） caused by global warming. Higher temperatures mean less sea ice and more scope for mineral and fossil-fuel exploration, more foreign ships traversing（遍历） the north, and potential conflicts with other Arctic states over the seabed, sea lanes, and sea and land borders.

The Arctic is full of unresolved border delineations（轮廓图）. Canada and the United States disagree over the maritime（海事） boundary between Alaska and Yukon. Canada and Denmark have both planted flags on tiny Hans Island. Canada will continue working in 2010 to prepare its claim under a United Nations convention（根据公约准备索赔） for underwater rights extending as far as the North Pole, a claim that will surely conflict with one already filed by Russia.

No country agrees with Canada’s contention that the Northwest Passage (there are actually two or three possible routes) belongs to Canada. The United States, Russia and the European Union all believe the passage constitutes an international strait. The trickiest decision for Canada is whether to consider the United States as friend or rival in the Far North, a decision that has to come soon. Do the two countries co-operate in managing the sea lanes? Do they sort out their maritime border dispute（解决争执）? Do they support each other against Russia, or go their own ways?

Canada’s belated interest in its Far North is somewhat ironic given that climate change has hit the Far North harder than any other part of the Earth, and yet Canada’s record in curbing greenhouse-gas emissions is the worst in the G8. In the Kyoto climate-change protocol（协议）, Canada pledged to reduce emissions by 6% from 1990 levels by 2008-12; instead, emissions have risen by 27% and will rise again in 2010, especially if development intensifies in the tar（焦油） sands of Alberta.

No matter who governs Canada in 2010—the country’s fractured political system has thrown up（呕吐，放弃） a series of unstable governments—all parties agree that the rush to research, develop and protect the Far North has become a national priority（国家重点）. The Conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, made the Far North one of his signature issues after being elected in 2006. That the other parties now agree with this priority, without giving him any credit（相信） of course（倒置）, means that the days of benign（良性，仁慈） neglect（善意忽视） of the Far North are over.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Comment：

This passage depicts an incredible picture of the exploitation in Arctic in the future. I have never reckon that global warming is something more than climate change and potential threatens, while the author reveals the advantages including military and economic areas. Since the irresistible trend of mineral and fossil-fuel exploration is established on the basis of the national territory and sovereign rights, military conflicts are inevitable in the pursuit of the domestic grossly material interests.

At the same time, the establishment and the fracture of the international cooperation are all based upon the mural profits. In this world, we have countless events to prove this open secret, especially in such a commercial society, which means that the value of everything can be estimated by price and marked on its tag. It seems like a tragedy directed by the resolution of wealth-hunter, however, it merely witnesses the Darwin’s theory of evolution in the sphere of society essentially.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

From pluca:
权利的获取也是义务的开始，Canada have to shoulder the responsibility to protect the environment. But taking its poor record in G8, its protection is inevitably sceptical.

From fancy:
All of the projects in Canada's agenda sounds un-environmental friendly.
At the same time, the word "ironic" reveals the author's attitude towards the greedy Canada. Global warming is nothing more than a new approach to the acquirement of substantial material wealth. This rapacious country neglects the Arctic when it is full of ice, but now it rushes to exploit it completely thanks to the new emerging lanes and more mineral oil. What a shame it is to establish its economic development on the basis of environmental destruction. Maybe we can charge this murder in court only if all other nations converge at the communal profit.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

了几天比较简单的文章，今天我们读一读稍微难点的文章。该段文章
节选自Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius(c. 480–c.524)的
<The Consolation of Philosophy>一书的第五部分。

2008年harvard university press出版的由David R. Slavitt翻译的
<The Consolation of Philosophy>中评价说:"（The Consolation of Philosophy）
rich with metaphors of travel, of the home, of music, and of craft. Both, too,
are deeply allusive, bringing togetherliterary echoes and resonant rewritings.

The Consolation(安慰，慰藉) of Philosophy （节选）
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius
Translated by David R. Slavitt

“As we have agreed, I think, things are known not according to their natures but according to the nature of the one who is comprehending them. Let us consider, then, insofar as we can, what the nature of divine（神圣的，非凡的） substance must be so that we can have some inkling of the kind of knowledge the divine mind has. All who live by reason agree that God is eternal, and we must therefore think about what eternity means. This will clarify what the divine nature is and also what divine knowledge must be. Eternity is the whole, simultaneous, perfect possession of limitless life, which we can better understand perhaps by comparing it to temporal things. One who lives in time progresses in the present from the past and into the future. There is nothing in time that can embrace the entirety of his existence. He has no idea about tomorrow and has already lost his hold on the past. In this day-to-day life, he lives only in the transitory moment. Whatever is in time—even though, as Aristotle says, time had no beginning and has no ending and extends into infinity—is still not what may correctly be called ‘eternal.’ Its life may be infinitely long, but still it does not comprehend its entire extent simultaneously. It is still waiting for the future to reveal itself and it has let go of much of the past. What may properly be called eternal is quite different, in that it has knowledge of the whole of life, can see the future, and has lost nothing of the past. It is in an eternal present and has an understanding of the entire flow of time.

“Those philosophers are wrong, then, who took Plato’s dictum that the world had no beginning and had no end and inferred from that that the created world is co-eternal with the Creator. It is one thing to proceed through infinite time, as Plato posits, but quite another to embrace the whole of time in one simultaneous present. This is obviously a property of the mind of God. God should not be thought of as older than the created world but different in his grasp of time in the immediacy of his being. The endless and infinite changing of things in time is an attempt to imitate eternity, but it cannot equal its immobility and it fails to achieve the eternal present, producing only an infinite number of future and past moments. It never ceases to be and therefore is an imitation of eternity, but it is balanced on the knifeedge of the present, the brief and fleeting instant, which we may call a kind of costume of eternity. But since it is not equal to that eternal state, it falls from immobility to change, from the immediacy of a continuing present to the infinite extent of past and future moments, and it confers on whatever possesses it the appearance of what it imitates. And since it could not abide in permanence, it seized instead on the infinite flow of time, an endless succession of moments, and in that way could appear to have a continuity, which is not the same as permanence. All this is to say that if we use proper terms, then, following Plato, we should say that God is eternal but the world is perpetual.

“Now, since every judgment is able to comprehend things only according to the nature of the mind making that judgment, and since God has an eternal and omnipresent nature, his knowledge surpasses time’s movements and is made in the simplicity of a continual present, which embraces all the vistas of the future and the past, and he considers all this in the act of knowing as though all things were going on at once. This means that what you think of as his foreknowledge is really a knowledge of the instant, which is never-passing and never-coming-to-be. It is not pre-vision (praevidentia) but providence (providentia), because, from that high vantage point, he sees at once all things that were and are and are to come. You insist that those things of the future are inevitable if God can see them, but you must admit that not even men can make inevitable those things that they see. Your seeing them in the present does not confer any inevitability, does it?”

“No, not at all.”

“And if you accept the distinction between the human and the divine present, then it would follow that, just as you see things in the temporal present, he must see things in the eternal present. So his divine prescience does not change the nature of things, but he sees them in his present time just as they will come to be in what we think of as the future. And he cannot be confused but sees and understands immediately all things that will come to pass whether they are necessitated or not—just as you can see at the same time a man walking on the ground and the sun rising in the sky, and, although the two sights coincide, you understand immediately that the man’s walking is willed and the sun’s rising is necessitated. And it is similarly true that his observation does not affect the things he sees that are present to him but future in terms of the flow of time. And this means that his foresight is not opinion but knowledge based on truth and that he can know something is going to happen and at the same time be aware that it lacks necessity.

“Now, if you were to say that what God sees as going to occur cannot not occur and that what cannot not occur happens of necessity, and make a problem of the word ‘necessity,’ I will answer that it is absolutely true but is, indeed, a problem, not so much for logicians as for theologians. All I can tell you is that this future event from the point of view of divine knowledge is necessary, but from its own nature is utterly and entirely free. There are actually two necessities, one of them simple—as that all men are mortal—and the other conditional—as that when you see a man walking it is necessary that he be walking. Whatever you know cannot be otherwise than as you know it. But this conditional necessity is different from the simple kind in that it is not caused by the thing’s nature but by the addition of the condition. It is not necessary that a man go for a walk, even though it is necessary, when he is walking, that he is walking. It is in the same way that if divine providence sees anything in its eternal present, that must necessarily be, even though there is no necessity in its nature. God can see as present future events that happen as a result of free will. Thus, they are, from God’s point of view, necessary, although in themselves they do not lose the freedom that is in their nature. All those things, then, that God knows will come to be will, indeed, come to be, some of them proceeding from free will, so that when they come to be they will not have lost the freedom of their nature, according to which, until the time that they happened, they might not have happened. So why is it important that they are not necessary if, from the aspect of divine knowledge, it turns out that they are tantamount to being necessary? It is like the examples I proposed to you a moment ago of the rising sun and the walking man. While these things are happening, they cannot not be happening, but of the two, only one was bound to happen while the other was not. In the same way, the things God sees in his eternal present will certainly happen, but some will happen because of the necessity of things and others will happen because of those who are doing those actions. From the aspect of divine knowledge, then, they are necessary, but considered in themselves they are free from the compulsion of necessity. So are things that you look at with the senses singular, but if you look at them from the point of view of reason, they are universal.

“And now you may perhaps object that it lies in your power to change your intention and thereby to frustrate providence and turn it into nonsense, because whatever providence may have foreseen, you can do something else. And my answer is that you can decide to do something else, but the truth of providence will have seen that as well in its eternal present, and whatever you may try to do that is different or unpredictable will have been understood and predicted, whichever way you turn, so that you cannot avoid or evade divine foreknowledge, just as you cannot escape being seen by an eye that is focused on you, even though you decide to dart one way when you had been going in another direction. And what would you reply? That it is within your power to alter divine knowledge, since you were going to do this but abruptly changed your mind and chose instead to do that, and therefore divine knowledge must have changed just as quickly? It is not at all the case. Divine prescience runs ahead of everything and recollects it to the eternal present of its own knowledge. It does not change because it does not need to, having already foreseen the change you made at the last moment. God has this complete knowledge and understanding and vision of all things not from the unfolding of the events themselves but from the simplicity of his own perfect knowledge. It is in this light that we can answer the question you posed a while back about our providing a part of God’s knowledge. The power of his knowledge includes everything in an eternal present and does not at all rely on the unfolding of later events. In this way, man’s freedom is maintained in its integrity, and therefore God’s rewards and punishments are meted out fairly and appropriately, because free will is operating and men are not compelled by necessity. God has prescience and is a spectator from on high, and as he looks down in his eternal present, he assigns rewards to the good and punishments to the wicked. In this way, our hopes and our prayers are not at all in vain. Our prayers, if they are of the right kind and are pleasing to God, are not without effect. And the conclusion, then, is clear, that you must avoid wickedness and pursue the good. Lift up your mind in virtue and hope and, in humility, offer your prayers to the Lord. Do not be deceived. It is required of you that you do good and that you remember that you live in the constant sight of a judge who sees all things.”

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The role of the business school
Deans（院长） debate
Dec 1st 2009
From Economist.com
http://www.economist.com/business-education/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15006681

How do business schools remain relevant in today’s changing world?AS THE clamour（喧闹，喧哗） grows for more regulation to address the corporate failings that led the world into a two-year recession, business schools sense a chance to drive the agenda. By producing academic research that can inform the debates within Washington and Brussels, there is a chance to become relevant once again. But business is also changing its mind about it wants from MBA students. The super-confident, gung-ho（狂热的） leader, that was once their calling card（电话卡，名片，指纹）, has fallen out of fashion. So can schools adapt to a changing world?
To find out, The Economist spoke to two prominent business deans（院长） from either side of the Atlantic: Santiago I&ntilde;iguez de Ozo&ntilde;o, dean of Spain’s IE Business school, and Paul Danos, dean of Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business in America.

Has the role of the business school changed as a result of the economic crisis?
Santiago I&ntilde;iguez de Ozo&ntilde;o: Actually management is very much demanded these days. Management is everywhere. All our universities are demanding programmes in management from many different quarters: for engineers, for doctors, for architects.
But some things have changed. The presence of the visible hand [of regulation] is now more explicit. This means that business schools may have a role in preparing members of governments and the administration. The collaboration between the public and private is becoming one of the fastest growing areas of business schools.
We also see more demand for entrepreneurship courses. In times of crisis managers need to reinvent their existing businesses, launch new products and diversify. But also there are many opportunities for the creation of new business—start-ups in fields like technologies, biotechnology, in energy, even in education.
Then we also see some things changing at business schools. We field the demand from the real world to develop research which can actually address the real problems of business. This will probably affect the profile of professors. Not only must they be solid（扎实） in terms of their research skills and teaching skills, they should also be able to interface with（与...接口） the top management.

Have you seen a change in what professors are researching over the last two years?
Paul Danos: Research grinds（磨） slowly. Let's take a marketing professor who's an expert on internet marketing. Well that hasn't changed because of this crisis. Some people say "everything has changed," well it's not true. Most of the courses that we teach MBAs have not changed because of the crisis.
I think the change has come at a higher level. It's the level of: can leaders be made to be both responsible and analytical enough to understand the complexity of the world? And why did the leaders, the regulators, the CEOs and the board（董事会） members miss these risk factors? Well you can debate that but it doesn't change everything. It doesn’t even change everything in finance. Finance is primarily the same as it was before the crisis. When you get to a higher level though, when you start asking CEOs and board members to contemplate their responsibilities, then you have to think about it in a different way. So it's subtle, nuanced（细微差别）.
Santiago I&ntilde;iguez de Ozo&ntilde;o: This brings me to another thing that many of our schools are currently contemplating: that all the areas evolve over time. So in finance, as Paul was saying, the golden rules are still valid. But the institutions, the concepts of risk, the ways of assessing risk have evolved in the past years. We need people to come back to school. Managers cannot just rely on what they learned 30 years ago in their MBA programmes. This is a clinical profession like medicine, like architecture, where you need to update your knowledge. So something that may come out from this crisis is the need of managers to come back to school and update their knowledge and validate what they do in the real world.
Paul Danos: I think one thing I've walked away from the crisis with is that no-one can know it all. You need the right kind of probing mindset（心态） when you attack problems of such complexity because no one could have ever seen the combination of factors before. So it's not the understanding of every eventuality（偶然性）—which is impossible—it's the right mindset.
So at Tuck we have instituted a whole series of small scale, deep courses where students are forced into that sceptical mindset of truly questioning the foundation of theories. Now that sounds esoteric, but it's really practical.
My main takeaway was not that it was an ethics problem, not that people were cheating overtly, it is that people were using the wrong mental attitude when they approached extremely complex problems that they hadn't seen before. Practice can hypnotise you into using old models and old ways of thinking. When you talk to people about the risk management systems in the big banks and at the Fed and at the regulators, it's amazing how they put together old models and old ways of thinking and tried to lay it on top of a new system.
So it proved that they weren't doing it right; they just didn't have the right mental attitude about the models and how they worked and how they hooked up（接上，组合，挂上钩子）. So we're trying to reinvestigate that.

Does that imply that schools have historically failed to inculcate that attitude in their students?
Paul Danos: The crisis was not caused by the broad 90% of our students who went into businesses. It was caused by the dynamics of the interplay between big banks and the regulators. Now you might say [that] those are business people too and they were trained at business schools. True, but ordinary corporations didn't do what banks did. I'm on boards of corporations and we weren't blinded, we weren't 40-to-1 leveraged. So this particular virus was in the banking system, and I think it can be analysed. I really think, at the end of the day, even though the banks themselves were irresponsible, the real irresponsibility was with the regulators because when everything else fails, the regulators are supposed to keep things safe and keep people from doing unsafe things and they didn't do it.

Can business schools exert any leverage over （对...有影响）regulators?
Paul Danos: I think so. We have a group at Tuck right now that is made up of several schools—finance professors and economists—and they are writing white papers on many aspects of regulation. So they, as an independent party, are trying to get their voice into Washington and into Europe about the future of regulation and the future regime. They are able to get into congressional and other hearings, but it's just one voice. You know how politics is: there are many voices and lobby groups（游说集团） trying to influence the future of regulation.

Santiago I&ntilde;iguez de Ozo&ntilde;o: My impression is that we still need to develop many new things in financial theory and the way we assess risk. Again, we are attending the early stages of these sciences. If you look at medicine 200 years ago and the remedies that were applied to some illnesses we get horrified now. So we will probably see some changes and here academics are actually paying the best possible service to society. Again, now we need good management. We need to recover the golden rules of what is good management, what is establishing the mission for a company. And from business schools I think we can train regulators because they need a very solid technical preparation that they lack. If you look at public administrations, people in both national, local and federal administrations, they need more preparation in finance, in management in order to take better decisions.
Paul Danos: For instance, we're doing a lot of work with healthcare delivery which is a big, important topic. If you talk to people who try to deliver healthcare, one of the biggest problems is that there's very little management education. I'm not talking about high-level finance, I'm talking about the basics of budgets, of cost containment, of deficiency. Very little of that is part of the medical-school training.
I think that in every aspect of society some amount of management education is necessary in order for those institutions to deliver the services that they intend to deliver at a reasonable cost.

Is the nature of leadership changing?
Paul Danos: If you looked at the top-level demand from executives for our programmes, it's almost all about leadership. And it's really interesting how it has evolved. So much is now focused on a teamwork-based leadership model that really emphasises self-awareness. It's a very humanistic philosophy. It's not the person that charges ahead and rallies（召集） the troops. It's more of a person that is sensitive to the situation and to themselves.
Santiago I&ntilde;iguez de Ozo&ntilde;o: It is a different sort of leadership than the one which has grown in the past decade. It is not charismatic leadership, but teamwork. We will also see in the future many institutions getting rid of this spirit of elitism（精英） or arrogance which has contributed to create this atmosphere of overconfidence. They [believed that they] were actually beyond any controls or rules—that Nietzschean moral of the super-masters. We will get back to more controls, the golden rules, more supervision, getting rid of superficial things. History is very recurrent（复发性） and we are attending again a move of the pendulum（钟摆）.