1010G【fish】COMMENTS

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

16-1

EDITORIAL While China Stands By Published: May 27, 2010 There is only one country with any chance of getting through to North Korea. That is China, the North’s major supplier of aid, food and oil. As tensions on the Korean Peninsula continue to spiral — frighteningly — upward, China is refusing to get involved. China has only one concern: avoiding any crisis that might unleash huge refugee flows. If it believes that the status quo（说） is conducive to stability, it is mistaken. Relations between the Koreas have threatened to explode since last week when the South accused the North of torpedoing a South Korean warship, the Cheonan. It offered compelling forensic（辩论的，极其重要的） evidence（argu里面很好用哦） of the North’s role in the March attack, which killed 46 South Korean sailors. What makes this so especially dangerous is that North Korea’s erratic（古怪的） leader, Kim Jong-il, is in a power struggle to ensure that his youngest son succeeds him. (American intelligence officials suspect Mr. Kim may have ordered the attack to prove his willingness to take on South Korea and its Western allies.) North Korea often blusters（咆哮）, but it has gone much further this time. Over the last few days, it has cut almost all ties and agreements with the South and threatened war if Seoul proceeds with threatened sanctions. On Thursday, it severed a naval（海军的） hot line（电话热线） that was supposed to prevent clashes in disputed（怀疑的，争吵的） waters. bluster：咆哮，夸口，说大话，威胁 She blustered so much that it's hard to believe her.她尽说大话，所以没什么人相信她。 They blustered about how they will beat us all up.他们恐吓会如何痛打我们大家。 Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton tried hard this week to convince Chinese leaders of North Korea’s culpability（过失，有罪） — and of the need for Beijing to press the North to accept responsibility. There is no doubt about the North’s involvement. An international team investigated the incident, and South Korea has produced a torpedo propeller（螺旋桨） with North Korean markings. China needs to stop covering for its client and join in a United Nations Security Council statement that condemns the North’s behavior. Privately, Beijing should make clear to North Korea that any future acts of aggression will result in a cut off of aid. The United States, South Korea and Japan, which have taken a strong stand against the North（坚硬的立场）, also must leave some room for Pyongyang to back down（放弃，让步）. The two Koreas — which have never formally ended their war — need to finally set a demarcation line（分界线） in the West Sea where the Cheonan was attacked and sank. China could do real good if it worked with the United States to bring the two Koreas to the negotiating table（带回到谈判桌上）.

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

16-2

Oxford Tradition Comes to This: ‘Death’ (Expound) By SARAH LYALL Published: May 27, 2010 OXFORD, England — The exam was simple yet devilish（原型devil，恶毒的）, consisting of a single noun (“water,” for instance, or “bias”) that applicants had three hours somehow to spin into（把。。旋转捻成） a coherent essay. An admissions requirement for All Souls College here, it was meant to test intellectual agility, but sometimes seemed to test only the ability to sound brilliant while saying not much of anything. spin into:把。。旋转捻成 His colleague needed one of Mr.Hargis's customers to furnish him with some glowing testimonial that he could spin into a marketing brochure. 这位同事需要哈格里斯的一位客户提供一份热情洋溢的推荐信，好放到一个营销宣传册里。 “An exercise in showmanship to avoid answering the question,” is the way the historian Robin Briggs describes his essay on “innocence” in 1964, a tour de force（杰作，绝技） effort that began with the opening chords of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” and then brought in, among other things, the flawed heroes of Stendhal and the horrors of the prisoner-of-war camp（一出戏名） in the William Golding novel “Free Fall.” No longer will other allusion-deploying Oxford youths have the chance to demonstrate the acrobatic flexibility of their intellect in quite the same way. All Souls, part of Oxford University, recently decided, with some regret, to scrap（弃置） the one-word exam. scrap:弃置 Improve and ensure to produce qualified products and reduce scrap. 改善并保证生产合格的产品,并降低报废率. It has been offered annually since 1932 (and sporadically before that) as part of a grueling（累垮的，疲惫的）, multiday affair that, in one form or another, has been administered since 1878 and has been called the hardest exam in the world. The unveiling（揭开面纱） of the word was once an event of such excitement that even non-applicants reportedly gathered outside the college each year, waiting for news to waft out（燃烧，飘出）. Applicants themselves discovered the word by flipping over a single sheet of paper and seeing it printed there, all alone, like a tiny incendiary（纵火者） device. But that was then. “For a number of years, the one-word essay question had not proved to be a very valuable way of providing insight into the merits of the candidates,” said Sir John Vickers, the warden, or head, of the college. In a university full of quirky（诡诈的） individual colleges with their own singular traditions, All Souls still stands out for the intellectual riches it offers and the awe it inspires. Founded in 1438 and not open to undergraduates, it currently has 76 fellows drawn from the upper echelons（梯度） of academia and public life, most admitted on the strength of their achievements and scholarly credentials（凭据，国书，证书）. Previous fellows include Sir Isaiah Berlin, Sir Christopher Wren, William Gladstone and T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia). Hilaire Belloc and John Buchan are said to have failed to get in. In recent years, fellows have included a Nobel Prize winner, several cabinet members, a retired senior law lord and a lord chancellor. In addition, two young scholars are chosen each year from among Oxford students who graduated recently with the highest possible academic results. Called examination fellows, they get perks including room and board, 14,783 pounds (about $21,000) a year for a seven-year term and the chance to engage in erudite（饱学之士） discussions over languorous meals with the other fellows. But first they have to take the exam. It consists of 12 hours of essays over two days. Half are on the applicants’ academic specialties, the other half on general subjects, with questions like: “Do the innocent have nothing to fear?” “Isn’t global warming preferable to global cooling?” “How many people should there be?” and the surprisingly relevant, because this is Britain: “Does the moral character of an orgy change when the participants wear Nazi uniforms?” Those are daunting（使人望而却步的） enough. But it is the one-word-question essay (known simply as “Essay”) that candidates still remember decades later. Past words, chosen by the fellows, included “style,” “censorship,” “charity,” “reproduction,” “novelty,” “chaos” and “mercy.” It was not a test for everyone. “Many candidates, including some of the best, seemed at a loss when confronted with this exercise,” said Mr. Briggs, a longtime teacher of modern history at Oxford. Others found it exhilarating. “Brilliant fun,” a past applicant named Matthew Edward Harris wrote in The Daily Telegraph recently, recalling his 2007 essay, on “harmony.” He had resolved, he said, that “No matter what word I was given, I would structure my answer using Hegel’s dialectic.” And then, like a chef rummaging（检查，翻找） through the recesses of his refrigerator for unlikely soup ingredients, he added a discussion of Kant’s categorical imperative and an analysis of the creative tensions among the vocalists in Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (he didn’t get in). The writer Harry Mount, an Oxford graduate and the author of “Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life,” didn’t get in, either. His essay, in 1994, was on “miracles.” What was in it? “Crying Madonnas in Ireland, that sort of thing,” Mr. Mount said. “And the battle between faith and cynicism. I was a cynic and didn’t believe in miracles, and perhaps that was bad. I had just read about Karl Popper and his theory of falsification, so I threw in a bit about that.” Justin Walters, the founder and chief executive of Investis, an online corporate communication service company, said that writing his essay, on “corruption,” was not half as bad as the oral exam several weeks later, conducted by a long row of fellows peering across a table. “ ‘Mr. Walters, you made some very interesting distinctions in your essay. Are you prepared to defend it?’ ” he remembered one of the fellows asking. Unfortunately, he had only a vague recollection of what he had written. “You’re the teacher — you figure it out,” he recalled thinking. (He must have done something right: he got in.) Sir John, the current college warden（看守者）, has worked as the Bank of England’s chief economist and been president of the Royal Economic Society, among other jobs. He draws a self-protective veil over the memory of his own essay, in 1979, on “conversion.” “I do shudder at the thought of what I must have written,” he said. 感觉这篇文章写得挺意象的~

谦行天下UID: 2797557

14-1 徐小平推荐【learn by谦行天下】
OP-ED[美报纸的专栏特写专栏] CONTRIBUTOR
Many Faiths, One Truth
By TENZIN GYATSO
Published: May 24, 2010

WHEN I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion must be the best — and that other faiths were somehow inferior. Now I see how naïve[childish] I was, and how dangerous the extremes of religious intolerance[impatience with annoyances] can be today.
Related

Though intolerance may be as old as religion itself, we still see vigorous signs of its virulence[extreme harmfulness]. In Europe, there are intense debates about newcomers wearing veils or wanting to erect minarets and episodes of violence against Muslim immigrants. Radical atheists[someone who denies the existence of god] issue blanket condemnations of those who hold to religious beliefs. In the Middle East, the flames of war are fanned by hatred of those who adhere to a different faith.

Such tensions are likely to increase as the world becomes more interconnected and cultures, peoples and religions become ever more entwined. The pressure this creates tests more than our tolerance — it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence and understanding across boundaries.

Granted, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions.

An early eye-opener for me was my meeting with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton in India shortly before his untimely death in 1968. Merton told me he could be perfectly faithful to Christianity, yet learn in depth from other religions like Buddhism. The same is true for me as an ardent Buddhist learning from the world’s other great religions.

A main point in my discussion with Merton was how central compassion was to the message of both Christianity and Buddhism. In my readings of the New Testament, I find myself inspired by Jesus’ acts of compassion. His miracle of the loaves and fishes[物质利益], his healing and his teaching are all motivated by the desire to relieve suffering.

I’m a firm believer in the power of personal contact[私下交往] to bridge differences, so I’ve long been drawn to dialogues with people of other religious outlooks. The focus on compassion that Merton and I observed in our two religions strikes me as a strong unifying thread among all the major faiths. And these days we need to highlight what unifies us.

Take Judaism[犹太主义], for instance. I first visited a synagogue[犹太教会堂] in Cochin, India, in 1965, and have met with many rabbis over the years. I remember vividly the rabbi in the Netherlands who told me about the Holocaust with such intensity that we were both in tears. And I’ve learned how the Talmud and the Bible repeat the theme of compassion, as in the passage in Leviticus that admonishes, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

In my many encounters with Hindu scholars in India, I’ve come to see the centrality of selfless compassion in Hinduism too — as expressed, for instance, in the Bhagavad Gita, which praises those who “delight in the welfare of all beings.” I’m moved by the ways this value has been expressed in the life of great beings like Mahatma Gandhi, or the lesser-known Baba Amte, who founded a leper colony[麻风病人的隔离区] not far from a Tibetan settlement in Maharashtra State in India. There he fed and sheltered lepers who were otherwise shunned. When I received my Nobel Peace Prize, I made a donation to his colony.

Compassion is equally important in Islam[伊斯兰教] — and recognizing that has become crucial in the years since Sept. 11, especially in answering those who paint Islam as a militant[好斗的] faith. On the first anniversary of 9/11, I spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, pleading that we not blindly follow the lead of some in the news media and let the violent acts of a few individuals define an entire religion.

Let me tell you about the Islam I know. Tibet has had an Islamic community for around 400 years, although my richest contacts with Islam have been in India, which has the world’s second-largest Muslim population. An imam[伊玛目] in Ladakh once told me that a true Muslim should love and respect all of Allah’s creatures. And in my understanding, Islam enshrines[珍藏] compassion as a core spiritual principle, reflected in the very name of God, the “Compassionate and Merciful,” that appears at the beginning of virtually each chapter of the Koran.

Finding common ground among faiths can help us bridge needless[unnecessary and unwarranted] divides at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever. As a species, we must embrace the oneness of humanity as we face global issues like pandemics, economic crises and ecological disaster. At that scale, our response must be as one.

Harmony among the major faiths has become an essential ingredient of peaceful coexistence in our world. From this perspective, mutual understanding among these traditions is not merely the business of religious believers — it matters for the welfare of humanity as a whole.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

14-2【learn by谦行天下】
Op-Ed Columnist
Two Theories of Change
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: May 24, 2010

These were philosophers who confronted a world of superstition and feudalism and sought to expose it to the clarifying light of reason. Inspired by the scientific revolution, they had great faith in the power of individual reason to detect error and logically arrive at universal truth.
superstition:迷信；an irrational belief arising from ignorance or fear
feudalism：封建主义；the social system that developed in Europe in the 8th century; vassals were protected by lords who they had to serve in war

Their great model was Descartes. He aimed to begin human understanding anew[重新]. He’d discard the accumulated prejudices of the past and build from the ground up, erecting one logical certainty upon another.

What Descartes was doing for knowledge, others would do for politics: sweep away the old precedents and write new constitutions based on reason. This was the aim of the French Revolution.

But there wasn’t just one Enlightenment[启蒙运动], headquartered[设立总部] in France. There was another, headquartered in Scotland and Britain and led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her 2004 book, “The Roads to Modernity,” if the members of the French Enlightenment focused on the power of reason, members of the British Enlightenment emphasized its limits.

They put more emphasis on our sentiments. People are born with natural desires to be admired and to be worthy of admiration. They are born with moral emotions, a sense of fair play and benevolence. They are also born with darker passions, like self-love and tribalism, which mar rationalist enterprises. We are emotional creatures first and foremost, and politics should not forget that.
mar:a mark or flaw that spoils the appearance of something

These two views of human nature produced different attitudes toward political change, articulated most brilliantly by Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Their views are the subject of a superb dissertation by Yuval Levin at the University of Chicago called “The Great Law of Change.”

As Levin shows, Paine believed that societies exist in an “eternal now.” That something has existed for ages tells us nothing about its value. The past is dead and the living should use their powers of analysis to sweep away existing arrangements when necessary, and begin the world anew. He even suggested that laws should expire after 30 years so each new generation could begin again.

Paine saw the American and French Revolutions as models for his sort of radical change. In each country, he felt, the revolutionaries deduced certain universal truths about the rights of man and then designed a new society to fit them.

Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.

Burke was horrified at the thought that individuals would use abstract reason to sweep away arrangements that had stood the test of time. He believed in continual reform, but reform is not novelty. You don’t try to change the fundamental substance of an institution. You try to modify from within, keeping the good parts and adjusting the parts that aren’t working.

If you try to re-engineer society on the basis of abstract plans, Burke argued, you’ll end up causing all sorts of fresh difficulties, because the social organism is more complicated than you can possibly know. We could never get things right from scratch.

Burke also supported the American Revolution, but saw it in a different light than Paine. He believed the British Parliament had recklessly trampled[crushed or broken by being stepped upon heavily] upon the ancient liberties the colonists had come to enjoy. The Americans were seeking to preserve what they had.

We Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or the British Enlightenment. Was our founding a radical departure or an act of preservation? This was a bone of contention[争论的原因] between Jefferson and Hamilton, and it’s a bone of contention today, both between parties and within each one.

Today, if you look around American politics you see self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role. You see self-confident Democratic technocrats who have tremendous faith in the power of government officials to use reason to control and reorganize complex systems. You see polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics.

The children of the British Enlightenment are in retreat. Yet there is the stubborn fact of human nature. The Scots were right, and the French were wrong. And out of that truth grows a style of change, a style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance.

azure9UID: 2789030

Law vs. Morality
by Tibor Machan
Tibor Machan is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
Added to cato.org on March 21, 2002
This article appeared on cato.org on March 21, 2002.

When the Enron case broke, many business bashers jumped at the chance to blame deregulation for the mess. The same had occurred when California started to experience blackouts and hikes in energy costs last year.

Indeed, following some mild moves in the direction of a genuine free market in many parts of the globe and even here in the USA, a lot of well- positioned commentators with clearly statist sentiments experienced near-panic. Indeed, there might be, after decades and decades of sliding toward broader and broader scope for government authority in our lives, some retreat of state power in the offing. This, obviously, couldn't be allowed.
So, one way to attempt a reversal of the rather mild trend toward privatization and deregulation is to begin to blame everything on freedom. And one plausible spin would be to declare that corporations are no different from rouge states, in need, therefore, of the heavy hand of benign government regulators.

Tibor Machan is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.
In the back of some of these desperate efforts -- to stem any advance toward greater individual liberty in human community life -- is a lesson that might otherwise be missed. It is that when the state does gain widespread intrusive legal authority in the lives of the citizenry, the citizenry will begin to be guided not by its moral conscience and common sense but by the sole consideration of whether what people are doing is OK with the law-makers. Some corporations, for example, declare up front that they are not interested in business ethics -- which they take to vary from culture to culture -- but only in the law. (Which probably is what accounts for the prominence of legal departments at most corporate headquarters.)

But the problem extends farther than business. Recently in Orange County, California, the American Red Cross sponsored an event at a privately owned hotel to which a group of high school students had been invited to sing. Having learned that the singers would belt out some songs that had religious content, the Red Cross folks decided to demand that these be removed from the program, probably figuring that such would be the PC and legally harmless thing to do these days. And as much as this outraged a great many people in the community and ultimately led the Red Cross to issue an apology, what transpired made some kind of perverse sense.

When activities are carried out or supervised by the legal authorities, the principle that no special favors must be extended is the rule. Under the law, everyone must be treated the same, without regard to religion, color, national origin, and other special attributes. It is this idea that animates the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and, indeed, the rule of law itself.

The reasoning behind this is rather straightforward. The law governs us all as human beings who live in human communities. So, it is only our common humanity that must come into play as far as the law is concerned, nothing special about us. If one must not kill, assault, kidnap or rob others, that applies simply by virtue of being human not because one hails from Japan or has dark skin pigmentation. That is one reason why segregation, dictated by the laws of various Southern states, was so clearly unjust. That is why even when it would appear to make some sense, racial profiling is a very dubious police practice. That is why sexual or ethnic discrimination by governments is to be forbidden.
But there is a conflict between this unexceptional idea and the widening of the scope of government power. When we get away from the simple negative principles of a just human community -- don't kill, don't assault, don't rob, don't rape and such, meaning, basically, that we should all live together peacefully -- and start regimenting the details of human life, people are no longer similar at all, quite the contrary. Maybe some should and some should not smoke. Maybe some should and some should not go to church. Maybe some should and others should not paint certain kinds of pictures or play certain sports or purchase SUVs or talk with the animals. Only at some very basic level are we all -- or virtually all of us -- alike. We become differentiated rather quickly as it concerns the details of our lives -- some are parents, some teachers, some tall, some women, some young, some athletes, some Roman Catholics, some Jews, some Moonies and some even agnostics or atheists.

Well, in a community that respects -- and has made provisions for the protection of individual rights -- the diversity of human life has nearly free reign. Just look around America and this becomes evident! If now government tries to apply its principles of equal protection under the law to all the different areas of human activity that can arise in a highly diverse society, the task will be impossible and nearly totalitarian. If the American Red Cross acts, then, like a quasi-government, making its program suited to everyone equally, it will find itself unable to do anything even mildly special, let alone controversial. But if its programs are carried out for the general public, it could become concerned about whether to conform to the spirit if not the letter of the law. It may not have to but it may still consider it politically prudent to do this.

This is how we begin to leave our common sense and try to make practices adjust to some artificial one-size-fits-all vision of community life that, in fact, fits no one at all. But once education, recreation and athletics -- to list but a few things people do in life -- become quasi-government affairs, they cannot be differentiated based on different needs of different segments and members of communities. They gradually become the same, or at least pretend to be such, so as to accommodate the now impossible ideal of the now highly intrusive rule of law.

Not only will this generate completely artificial practices and bans but it will also take our minds off what is really important, namely, figuring out on our own how we should conduct ourselves in our lives. We now will be inclined to focus not on morality or ethics but on public policy and law. That is quite understandable, since when law and public policy are not heeded, severe consequences can ensue. We can be found to be law-breakers, which brings about costly sanctions. You smoke in a pub now and this means going to court, paying fines, putting your life on hold. You offend some group and spend years in court!
The American Red Cross officials may perhaps not be fully forgiven for losing their common sense but it is at least understandable why they worried so much about being politically correct. With religious songs at an event open to the public, they would risk bringing down upon them the wrath of the American Civil Liberties Union if not immediately the local police.
A society where laws have become the answer to all human problems, laws get completely confusing and many people begin to be concerned with nothing other than avoiding violating the law. Such a society is very likely to see ethics and morality slowly but surely recede from its midst.

azure9UID: 2789030

Education: Through the Wall of Ignorance
Monday, Apr. 21, 1947
—The Bill of Rights (1791)

Ever since this clause was written into the Bill of Rights, most Americans have considered the separation of church & state beyond debate. But an increasing number of Americans also deplore one by-product of this separation, which the Founding Fathers probably never had in mind: the almost complete exclusion of religion from the public schools and colleges.
In many state-operated schools, religion is as unmentionable as syphilis was in Victorian parlors. Result: a generation of religious illiterates—who perhaps know how to read & write, but not how, why or what to believe.

When the National Conference of Christians and Jews asked George Zook (TIME, Aug. 12) what to do about it, he thought at first that the question was "too hot a potato" for his powerful but conglomerate American Council on Education. But after reconsidering, he named a committee of thirteen educators to set down the basic principles on which they could agree. The committee, headed by F. Ernest Johnson of Columbia's Teachers College, included Protestant, Catholic and Jewish members (but no agnostics). Among them: Frank P. Graham, president of the University of North Carolina; Msgr. Frederick G. Hochwalt, director of education for the National Catholic Welfare Conference.

Last week, after more than two years' study, the committee published its conclusions, The Relation oj Religion to Public Education (American Council on Education; $1). Main thesis, as summed up by George Zook: "Schools should accept religion and the churches as a factor of social life, just as much as they do the waterworks." The committee proposed to teach about religion, but not to teach religion itself, in the schools. For a while the group had considered a proposal to find and teach a set of principles common to all faiths (e.g., some form of Golden Rule), but rejected this as "watered-down" religion acceptable to nobody.

Said the committee: "We who write this report are members of religious bodies to which we owe allegiance by conviction. For us, the democratic faith . . . rests on a religious conception of human destiny. . . . [We] believe that the American people are deeply, though not always articulately, conscious of a religious heritage to whose central values they want their children to be committed. . . .

"It is not the business of public education to secure adherence to any particular religious system. . . . But we believe it is the business of public education to impel the young toward a vigorous, decisive personal reaction to the challenge of religion. . . . A first step is to break through the wall of ignorance about religion and to increase the number of contacts with it."

The committee's ideas on how to break through the wall:
"In the study of ... community life—government, markets, industry, labor, welfare, and the like—there [is no] reason for the omission of contemporary religious institutions and practices."

"The study of the religious classics . . . in the regular literature program [should be expanded]. . . . The Bible is second to none among the books that have influenced the thought and ideals of the Western world. [It deserves study] conducted with at least as much respect as is given to the great secular classics, and devoid of arbitrary interpretations to the same extent. . . ."

"To confine the teaching of religion to separate 'religious courses' tends toward . . . splitting off of religion from the rest of life. . . . [Religious education] is not something to be added on to the school curriculum, but rather something to be integrated with it"—in existing classes on history, sociology, psychology, economics, philosophy, literature, music, the fine arts.

Concluded the committee: "On all sides we see the disintegration of loyalties . . . the revival of ancient prejudices, the increase of frustrations, the eclipse of hope. . . . Religion at its best has always been an integrating force, a spiritual tonic for a soul racked by fear and cringing in weakness. ... Its imperfections will not be lessened by an attitude of splendid isolation on the part of intellectuals, or of indifference on the part of those responsible for the education of youth."

谦行天下UID: 2797557

15-1【learn by谦行天下】
Synthetic biology
And man made life
Artificial life, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, has arrived
May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

TO CREATE life is the prerogative of gods. Deep in the human psyche, whatever the rational pleadings of physics and chemistry, there exists a sense that biology is different, is more than just the sum of atoms moving about and reacting with one another, is somehow infused with a divine spark, a vital essence. It may come as a shock, then, that mere mortals have now made artificial life.
prerogative : right reserved exclusively by a particular person or group

Craig Venter and Hamilton Smith, the two American biologists who unravelled[dicover] the first DNA sequence of a living organism (a bacterium) in 1995, have made a bacterium that has an artificial genome—creating a living creature with no ancestor (see article). Pedants may quibble that only the DNA of the new beast was actually manufactured in a laboratory; the researchers had to use the shell of an existing bug to get that DNA to do its stuff.
Pedant:a person who pays more attention to formal rules and book learning than they merit

Nevertheless, a Rubicon has been crossed. It is now possible to conceive of a world in which new bacteria (and eventually, new animals and plants) are designed on a computer and then grown to order.

That ability would prove mankind’s mastery over nature in a way more profound than even the detonation of the first atomic bomb. The bomb, however justified in the context of the second world war, was purely destructive. Biology is about nurturing and growth.

Synthetic biology, as the technology that this and myriad less eye-catching advances are ushering in[be a precursor of] has been dubbed, promises much. In the short term it promises better drugs, less thirsty crops (see article), greener fuels and even a rejuvenated chemical industry. In the longer term who knows what marvels could be designed and grown?

On the face of it, then, artificial life looks like a wonderful thing. Yet that is not how many will view the announcement. For them, a better word than “creation” is “tampering”. Have scientists got too big for their boots? Will their hubris bring Nemesis in due course? What horrors will come creeping out of the flask on the laboratory bench?
hubris :overbearing pride or presumption
Nemesis :something causes misery or death

Such questions are not misplaced—and should give pause even to those, including this newspaper, who normally embrace advances in science with enthusiasm. The new biological science does have the potential to do great harm, as well as good. “Predator” and “disease” are just as much part of the biological vocabulary as “nurturing” and “growth”. But for good or ill it is here. Creating life is no longer the prerogative of gods.

Children of a lesser god
It will be a while, yet, before lifeforms are routinely designed on a laptop. But this will come. The past decade, since the completion of the Human Genome Project, has seen two related developments that make it almost inevitable. One is an extraordinary rise in the speed, and fall in the cost, of analysing the DNA sequences that encode the natural “software” of life. What once took years and cost millions now takes days and costs thousands. Databases are filling up with the genomes of everything from the tiniest virus to the tallest tree.

These genomes are the raw material for synthetic biology. First, they will provide an understanding of how biology works right down to the atomic level. That can then be modelled in human-designed software so that synthetic biologists will be able to assemble new constellations of genes with a reasonable presumption that they will work in a predictable way. Second, the genome databases are a warehouse that can be raided for whatever part a synthetic biologist requires.
warehouse :a storehouse for goods and merchandise

The other development is faster and cheaper DNA synthesis. This has lagged a few years behind DNA analysis, but seems to be heading in the same direction. That means it will soon be possible for almost anybody to make DNA to order, and dabble in[涉猎，浅尝] synthetic biology.

That is good, up to a point. Innovation works best when it is a game that anyone can play. The more ideas there are, the better the chance some will prosper. Unfortunately and inevitably, some of those ideas will be malicious. And the problem with malicious biological inventions—unlike, say, guns and explosives—is that once released, they can breed by themselves.

Biology really is different
The Home Brew computing club launched Steve Jobs and Apple, but similar ventures produced a thousand computer viruses. What if a home-brew synthetic-biology club were accidentally to launch a real virus or bacterium? What if a terrorist were to do the same deliberately?

The risk of accidentally creating something bad is probably low. Most bacteria opt for an easy life breaking down organic material that is already dead. It doesn’t fight back. Living hosts do. Creating something bad deliberately, whether the creator is a teenage hacker, a terrorist or a rogue state, is a different matter. No one now knows how easy it would be to turbo-charge an existing human pathogen, or take one that infects another type of animal and assist its passage over the species barrier. We will soon find out, though.
It is hard to know how to address this threat. The reflex, to restrict and ban, has worked (albeit far from perfectly) for more traditional sorts of biological weapons. Those, though, have been in the hands of states. The ubiquity of computer viruses shows what can happen when technology gets distributed.

Thoughtful observers of synthetic biology favour a different approach: openness. This avoids shutting out the good in a belated attempt to prevent the bad. Knowledge cannot be unlearned, so the best way to oppose the villains【恶棍】 is to have lots of heroes on your side. Then, when a problem arises, an answer can be found quickly. If pathogens can be designed by laptop, vaccines can be, too. And, just as “open source” software lets white-hat computer nerds work against the black-hats, so open-source biology would encourage white-hat geneticists.

Regulation—and, especially, vigilance—will still be needed. Keeping an eye out for novel diseases is sensible even when such diseases are natural. Monitoring needs to be redoubled and co-ordinated. Then, whether natural or artificial, the full weight of synthetic biology can be brought to bear on the problem. Encourage the good to outwit the bad and, with luck, you keep Nemesis at bay.

lty900301UID: 2715509

comments 14-1

Many Faiths, One Truth

By TENZIN GYATSO

Published: May 24, 2010

WHEN I was a boy in Tibet, I felt that my own Buddhist religion(佛教) must be the best — and that other faiths were somehow inferior. Now I see how naïve(天真) I was, and how dangerous the extremes(极端分子) of religious intolerance（偏执。对别人的意见不宽容） can be today.

Related

Though intolerance may be as old as religion itself, we still see vigorous signs of its virulence（the quality or state of being virulent: as  a : extreme bitterness or malignity of temper  : RANCOR  b : MALIGNANCY, VENOMOUSNESS  *ameliorate the virulence of a disease*  c : the relative capacity of a pathogen to overcome body defenses）. In Europe, there are intense debates about newcomers wearing veils（面纱） or wanting to erect（竖立） minarets（伊斯兰尖塔寺） and episodes（插曲） of violence against Muslim immigrants. Radical(tending or disposed to make extreme changes in existing views, habits, conditions, or institutions) atheists(one who believes that there is no deity) issue blanket condemnations(谴责) of those who hold to religious beliefs. In the Middle East, the flames of war are fanned(be fanned 被煽动) by hatred（憎恨） of those who adhere to a different faith.

Such tensions are likely to increase as the world becomes more interconnected and cultures, peoples and religions become ever more entwined(to twine together or around/to become twisted or twined). The pressure this creates tests more than our tolerance — it demands that we promote peaceful coexistence(和平共处) and understanding across boundaries（边界国界）.

Granted（conj.算是如此，但是）, every religion has a sense of exclusivity as part of its core identity. Even so, I believe there is genuine potential for mutual(相互的) understanding. While preserving faith toward one’s own tradition, one can respect, admire and appreciate other traditions.

An early eye-opener for me was my meeting with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton in India shortly before his untimely（不合时宜的） death in 1968. Merton told me he could be perfectly faithful to Christianity, yet learn in depth from other religions like Buddhism. The same is true for me as an ardent Buddhist learning from the world’s other great religions.

A main point in my discussion with Merton was how central compassion was to the message of both Christianity and Buddhism. In my readings of the New Testament, I find myself inspired by Jesus’ acts of compassion. His miracle of the loaves and fishes（物质利益）, his healing and his teaching are all motivated by the desire to relieve suffering.

I’m a firm believer in the power of personal contact（私下交往） to bridge differences, so I’ve long been drawn to dialogues with people of other religious outlooks. The focus on compassion that Merton and I observed in our two religions strikes me as a strong unifying thread among all the major faiths. And these days we need to highlight what unifies us.

Take Judaism, for instance. I first visited a synagogue in Cochin, India, in 1965, and have met with many rabbis over the years. I remember vividly the rabbi in the Netherlands who told me about the Holocaust with such intensity that we were both in tears. And I’ve learned how the Talmud and the Bible repeat the theme of compassion, as in the passage in Leviticus that admonishes, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

In my many encounters with Hindu scholars in India, I’ve come to see the centrality（中心） of selfless compassion in Hinduism too — as expressed, for instance, in the Bhagavad Gita, which praises those who “delight in（因...感到快乐） the welfare（福利） of all beings.” I’m moved by the ways this value has been expressed in the life of great beings like Mahatma Gandhi, or the lesser-known（几乎不为人知的，很陌生的） Baba Amte, who founded a leper colony（麻风病人隔离区） not far from a Tibetan settlement in Maharashtra State in India. There he fed and sheltered lepers who were otherwise shunned(to avoid deliberately and especially habitually). When I received my Nobel Peace Prize, I made a donation to his colony.

//关于一个同情的例子，可以用

Compassion is equally important in Islam（这里又提到了回教） — and recognizing that has become crucial in the years since Sept. 11, especially in answering those who paint Islam as a militant faith. On the first anniversary of 9/11, I spoke at the National Cathedral in Washington, pleading that we not blindly follow the lead of some in the news media and let the violent acts of a few individuals define an entire religion.（这里提到了一些不能盲目跟从某个人的领导等等）

Let me tell you about the Islam I know. Tibet has had an Islamic community for around 400 years, although my richest contacts with Islam have been in India, which has the world’s second-largest Muslim population. An imam in Ladakh once told me that a true Muslim should love and respect all of Allah’s creatures. And in my understanding, Islam enshrines（把...奉为神圣） compassion as a core spiritual principle, reflected in the very name of God, the “Compassionate and Merciful,” that appears at the beginning of virtually each chapter of the Koran.

Finding common ground among faiths can help us bridge needless divides at a time when unified action is more crucial than ever. As a species, we must embrace（拥抱） the oneness of humanity as we face global issues like pandemics, economic crises and ecological disaster. At that scale, our response must be as one.

Harmony among the major faiths has become an essential ingredient of peaceful coexistence in our world. From this perspective, mutual understanding among these traditions is not merely the business of religious believers — it matters for the welfare of humanity as a whole. （很不错的一个观点）

lty900301UID: 2715509

COMMENT 15-1

Germany vs. Europe

Published: May 26, 2010

Germany’s commitment to the European Union has been central to(对...极为重要) its postwar rehabilitation（to restore to a former state） and its economic success. For years, Germany played the role in Europe that America so frequently plays globally — the locomotive(机车，火车头) whose dynamism(a dynamic or expansionist quality) and demand helps turn around recessions（衰退） before they deepen into depressions. (这个比喻感觉很好)

Now, at the worst possible moment, Germany is turning to nationalist illusions. Europe’s past economic successes are now viewed as German successes. Europe’s current deep problems are everyone else’s except Germany’s. That is neither realistic nor sustainable(capable of being sustained). But German politicians and commentators are callously（冷酷无情地，麻木不仁地） and self-destructively feeding these ideas.

Earlier this year, when Germany was still refusing to participate in a bailout（救助）, the country’s largest newspaper by circulation, Bild, suggested Greece should sell the Acropolis to pay off its bond market creditors. (It estimated the monument could bring in $140 billion.) A senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party suggested auctioning off some of Greece’s Aegean islands. Meanwhile, a Bild poll（投票） showed a majority of Germans in favor of expelling Greece from the euro.

After a rough stretch following reunification(重新统一), Germany took the tough decisions necessary to restore its competitiveness and revive growth. As a result, it is doing far better than the rest of Europe, with a low fiscal deficit（财政赤字） and strong export surpluses（出口补贴）. But its export-dependent economy would sputter（to spit or squirt from the mouth with explosive sounds） if European consumers — its main customers — could no longer afford to buy its goods. German banks lent billions to Greece and other troubled European countries. If things don’t turn around quickly, those loans may have to be written down（减低账面价值）.

Germany also has contributed less than its fair share to the global stimulus, preferring to free ride on（搭便车） American and Chinese stimulus spending. And the euro’s underlying（潜在的） problem — the lack of an enforceable common fiscal policy, which allowed Greece and the others to rack up（击倒，获胜） deficits they could not afford — is the responsibility of all the euro’s creators, Germany prominent among them.

Germans have not been eager to hear those less-flattering parts of the story, and their leaders haven’t been eager to tell them. For months, Mrs. Merkel resisted all appeals — by other European leaders and Washington — to, well, be a European leader. When Germany finally agreed to contribute to a bailout fund — under threat of a Continentwide crash — Europe’s economic problems were far worse, and Germany and others had to ante up（【美国英语】下赌注） a lot more cash.

Europe’s most-troubled economies today — Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy — bear plenty of responsibility for this mess. They spent lavishly during the bubble. They failed to reform their rigid and inefficient labor markets and to contain（牵制） their increasingly uncompetitive wage costs. The rest of Europe, including Germany, should have demanded adjustments earlier, but didn’t.

With devaluation（货币贬值） not an option for euro members, Europe’s high-deficit countries have been forced into steep tax increases and deep spending cuts to bring their soaring deficits under control and calm the bond markets. Necessary as they are, these cuts also run a very high risk of plunging the Continent into deep recession this year unless Germany offsets them with aggressive stimulus of its own. We hope Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will remind German officials of that on his visit to Berlin on Thursday.

Instead of committing to more spending, Germany is now preparing a multiyear program of deep spending cuts. Given its troubled history, we can understand its fear of deficit spending and inflation. But right now more German austerity（经济紧缩） will likely cripple（使跛） Europe’s nascent recovery and Germany’s own prosperity. That is another hard truth that Mrs. Merkel needs to tell her party and her country.

这篇文章主要谈到的是德国经济与欧洲经济，从中我学到了很多经济词汇，和一些很有用的句式短语。。

lty900301UID: 2715509

Comment 16-1

Editorial

While China Stands By

Published: May 27, 2010

There is only one country with any chance of getting through to(字面义：打通电话。引申义：能与...对话，交流) North Korea. That is China, the North’s major supplier of aid, food and oil. As tensions on the Korean Peninsula continue to spiral — frighteningly — upward（令人恐怖的上升）, China is refusing to get involved.

China has only one concern: avoiding any crisis that might unleash（解除...的束缚） huge refugee flows. If it believes that the status quo is conducive to（有利于） stability, it is mistaken.

Relations between the Koreas have threatened to explode since last week when the South accused the North of torpedoing（用鱼雷袭击） a South Korean warship, the Cheonan. It offered compelling forensic（适于法庭的） evidence of the North’s role in the March attack, which killed 46 South Korean sailors.

What makes this so especially dangerous is that North Korea’s erratic（不稳定的，古怪的） leader, Kim Jong-il, is in a power struggle（权力斗争） to ensure that his youngest son succeeds him. (American intelligence officials suspect Mr. Kim may have ordered the attack to prove his willingness to take on South Korea and its Western allies（西方同盟国，这里应该指中国）.)

North Korea often blusters（吓唬）, but it has gone much further this time. Over the last few days, it has cut almost all ties and agreements with the South and threatened war if Seoul proceeds with threatened sanctions（制裁）. On Thursday, it severed（切断） a naval hot line that was supposed to prevent clashes in disputed waters.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton tried hard this week to convince Chinese leaders of North Korea’s culpability（有罪） — and of the need for Beijing（经常在电影或者杂志中看到，一个国家的首都来指代这个国家的政府） to press the North to accept responsibility. There is no doubt about the North’s involvement. An international team investigated the incident, and South Korea has produced a torpedo propeller（推进器，螺旋桨） with North Korean markings.

China needs to stop covering for its client and join in a United Nations Security Council statement that condemns the North’s behavior. Privately, Beijing should make clear to North Korea that any future acts of aggression will result in a cut off of aid. The United States, South Korea and Japan, which have taken a strong stand against the North, also must leave some room for Pyongyang to back down（放弃，让步）.

The two Koreas — which have never formally ended their war — need to finally set a demarcation line in the West Sea where the Cheonan was attacked and sank. China could do real good if it worked with the United States to bring the two Koreas to the negotiating table.

//看了这篇社论很有感触，一篇关于天安门舰艇被击沉的新闻。中美持有不同的态度。 中国在处理此类事情上一向保持着中立的态度。不过也让我看到了老美的想法，我觉得这在以后的GRE写作中都是很有帮助的。但，我们是中国人，该帮的就帮，不该帮的就不帮~原则！！

凝羽欲翔UID: 2733350

17-1

Law vs. Morality by Tibor Machan Tibor Machan is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. Added to cato.org on March 21, 2002 This article appeared on cato.org on March 21, 2002. When the Enron case（安然公司的倒闭） broke, many business bashers（怒殴者，痛击者） jumped at the chance to blame deregulation（不正常） for the mess（借此机会。。。）. The same had occurred when California started to experience blackouts（灯火管制，暂时的意识丧失） and hikes（远足） in energy costs last year. Indeed, following some mild moves in the direction of a genuine free market in many parts of the globe and even here in the USA, a lot of well- positioned commentators with clearly statist sentiments experienced near-panic. Indeed, there might be, after decades and decades of sliding toward broader and broader scope for government authority in our lives（由于sliding而导致政府管辖的范围越来越广）, some retreat of state power in the offing. This, obviously, couldn't be allowed. So, one way to attempt a reversal（反转） of the rather mild trend toward privatization and deregulation is to begin to blame everything on freedom. And one plausible spin would be to declare that corporations are no different from rouge（口红，胭脂） states, in need, therefore, of the heavy hand of benign government regulators（好形象哦）. Tibor Machan is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. In the back of some of these desperate efforts -- to stem any advance toward greater individual liberty in human community life -- is a lesson that might otherwise be missed. It is that when the state does gain widespread intrusive legal authority in the lives of the citizenry, the citizenry will begin to be guided not by its moral conscience and common sense but by the sole consideration of whether what people are doing is OK with the law-makers. Some corporations, for example, declare up front（公然宣称） that they are not interested in business ethics -- which they take to vary from culture to culture -- but only in the law. (Which probably is what accounts for the prominence of legal departments at most corporate headquarters.) But the problem extends farther than business. Recently in Orange County, California, the American Red Cross sponsored an event at a privately owned hotel to which a group of high school students had been invited to sing. Having learned that the singers would belt out（引吭高歌） some songs that had religious content, the Red Cross folks decided to demand that these be removed from the program, probably figuring that such would be the PC and legally harmless thing to do these days. And as much as this outraged a great many people in the community and ultimately led the Red Cross to issue an apology, what transpired （蒸发，排出）made（transpired这里不是动词吗？为什么还要加made呢？） some kind of perverse sense. When activities are carried out or supervised by the legal authorities, the principle that no special favors must be extended is the rule. Under the law, everyone must be treated the same, without regard to religion, color, national origin, and other special attributes（用到Issue中比较好用哦）. It is this idea that animates the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and, indeed, the rule of law itself. The reasoning behind this is rather straightforward. The law governs us all as human beings who live in human communities. So, it is only our common humanity that must come into play as far as the law is concerned, nothing special about us. If one must not kill, assault, kidnap or rob others, that applies simply by virtue of being human not because one hails from Japan or has dark skin pigmentation（pigment：色素）. That is one reason why segregation, dictated by the laws of various Southern states, was so clearly unjust. That is why even when it would appear to make some sense, racial profiling（种族轮廓） is a very dubious（可疑的） police practice. That is why sexual or ethnic discrimination by governments is to be forbidden. But there is a conflict between this unexceptional idea and the widening of the scope of government power. When we get away from the simple negative principles of a just human community -- don't kill, don't assault, don't rob, don't rape and such, meaning, basically, that we should all live together peacefully -- and start regimenting（变成团的，把。。编成团） the details of human life, people are no longer similar at all, quite the contrary. Maybe some should and some should not smoke. Maybe some should and some should not go to church. Maybe some should and others should not paint certain kinds of pictures or play certain sports or purchase SUVs or talk with the animals. Only at some very basic level are we all -- or virtually all of us -- alike. We become differentiated rather quickly as it concerns the details of our lives -- some are parents, some teachers, some tall, some women, some young, some athletes, some Roman Catholics, some Jews, some Moonies and some even agnostics or atheists. Well, in a community that respects -- and has made provisions for the protection of individual rights -- the diversity of human life has nearly free reign（统治）. Just look around America and this becomes evident! If now government tries to apply its principles of equal protection under the law to all the different areas of human activity that can arise in a highly diverse society, the task will be impossible and nearly totalitarian（极权主义）. If the American Red Cross acts, then, like a quasi-government（准政府）, making its program suited to everyone equally, it will find itself unable to do anything even mildly special, let alone controversial. But if its programs are carried out for the general public, it could become concerned about whether to conform to the spirit if not the letter of the law. It may not have to but it may still consider it politically prudent to do this. This is how we begin to leave our common sense and try to make practices adjust to some artificial one-size-fits-all vision of community life that, in fact, fits no one at all. But once education, recreation and athletics -- to list but a few things people do in life -- become quasi-government affairs, they cannot be differentiated based on different needs of different segments and members of communities. They gradually become the same, or at least pretend to be such, so as to accommodate the now impossible ideal of the now highly intrusive rule of law. Not only will this generate completely artificial practices and bans but it will also take our minds off what is really important, namely, figuring out on our own how we should conduct ourselves in our lives. We now will be inclined to focus not on morality or ethics but on public policy and law. That is quite understandable, since when law and public policy are not heeded（留心，留意）, severe consequences can ensue（追求）. We can be found to be law-breakers, which brings about costly sanctions. You smoke in a pub now and this means going to court, paying fines, putting your life on hold（延迟，耽搁）. You offend some group and spend years in court! The American Red Cross officials may perhaps not be fully forgiven for losing their common sense but it is at least understandable why they worried so much about being politically correct. With religious songs at an event open to the public, they would risk bringing down upon them the wrath（激怒） of the American Civil Liberties Union if not immediately the local police. A society where laws have become the answer to all human problems, laws get completely confusing and many people begin to be concerned with nothing other than avoiding violating the law. Such a society is very likely to see ethics and morality slowly but surely recede from its midst.

agnes2010UID: 2794922

【14-2】

studied by Agnes

Op-Ed Columnist

Two Theories of Change

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: May 24, 2010

These were philosophers who confronted a world of superstition and feudalism【对抗迷信和封建的世界】 and sought to expose it to the clarifying light of reason【理性的光辉】. Inspired by the scientific revolution, they had great faith in the power of individual reason to detect error and logically arrive at universal truth.

Their great model was Descartes. He aimed to begin human understanding anew. He’d discard the accumulated prejudices of the past【摒弃过去积累的偏见】 and build from the ground up, erecting one logical certainty upon another.

What Descartes was doing for knowledge, others would do for politics: sweep away the old precedents and write new constitutions based on reason【扫除就有的先例建立基于理智的新章程】. This was the aim of the French Revolution.

But there wasn’t just one Enlightenment, headquartered in France. There was another, headquartered in Scotland and Britain and led by David Hume, Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her 2004 book, “The Roads to Modernity,” if the members of the French Enlightenment focused on the power of reason, members of the British Enlightenment emphasized its limits.

They put more emphasis on our sentiments. People are born with natural desires to be admired and to be worthy of admiration. They are born with moral emotions, a sense of fair play and benevolence. They are also born with darker passions, like self-love and tribalism, which mar rationalist enterprises. We are emotional creatures first and foremost【首要的】, and politics should not forget that.

These two views of human nature produced different attitudes toward political change, articulated most brilliantly by Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Their views are the subject of a superb dissertation by Yuval Levin at the University of Chicago called “The Great Law of Change.”

As Levin shows, Paine believed that societies exist in an “eternal now.” That something has existed for ages tells us nothing about its value. The past is dead and the living should use their powers of analysis to sweep away existing arrangements when necessary, and begin the world anew. He even suggested that laws should expire after 30 years so each new generation could begin again.

Paine saw the American and French Revolutions as models for his sort of radical change. In each country, he felt, the revolutionaries deduced certain universal truths about the rights of man and then designed a new society to fit them.

Burke, a participant in the British Enlightenment, had a different vision of change. He believed that each generation is a small part of a long chain of history. We serve as trustees for the wisdom of the ages and are obliged to pass it down, a little improved, to our descendents. That wisdom fills the gaps in our own reason, as age-old institutions implicitly contain more wisdom than any individual could have.【对下一代的教育之类的文章可以用用~学习！】

Burke was horrified at the thought that individuals would use abstract reason to sweep away arrangements that had stood the test of time. He believed in continual reform, but reform is not novelty. You don’t try to change the fundamental substance of an institution. You try to modify from within, keeping the good parts and adjusting the parts that aren’t working. 【从内部进行修改，取其精华去其糟粕】

If you try to re-engineer society on the basis of abstract plans, Burke argued, you’ll end up causing all sorts of fresh difficulties, because the social organism is more complicated than you can possibly know. We could never get things right from scratch.

Burke also supported the American Revolution, but saw it in a different light than Paine. He believed the British Parliament had recklessly trampled upon the ancient liberties the colonists had come to enjoy. The Americans were seeking to preserve what they had.

We Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or the British Enlightenment. Was our founding a radical departure or an act of preservation? This was a bone of contention between Jefferson and Hamilton, and it’s a bone of contention today, both between parties and within each one.

Today, if you look around American politics you see self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role. You see self-confident Democratic technocrats who have tremendous faith in the power of government officials to use reason to control and reorganize complex systems. You see polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics.

The children of the British Enlightenment are in retreat. Yet there is the stubborn fact of human nature【本性难移】. The Scots were right, and the French were wrong. And out of that truth grows a style of change, a style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance.

lty900301UID: 2715509

17-2

Education: Through the Wall of Ignorance Monday, Apr. 21, 1947 —The Bill of Rights (1791) Ever since this clause was written into the Bill of Rights（人权法案）, most Americans have considered the separation of church & state beyond debate（无可争辩，无异议）. But an increasing number of Americans also deplore one by-product of this separation, which the Founding Fathers probably never had in mind: the almost complete exclusion of religion from the public schools and colleges. In many state-operated schools, religion is as unmentionable（不宜说出口的） as syphilis（梅毒） was in Victorian parlors（这个比喻太牛叉了）. Result: a generation of religious illiterates（文盲）—who perhaps know how to read & write, but not how, why or what to believe（名词解释）. When the National Conference of Christians and Jews asked George Zook (TIME, Aug. 12) what to do about it, he thought at first that the question was "too hot a potato" for his powerful but conglomerate American Council on Education. But after reconsidering, he named a committee of thirteen educators to set down the basic principles on which they could agree. The committee, headed by F. Ernest Johnson of Columbia's Teachers College, included Protestant, Catholic and Jewish members (but no agnostics). Among them: Frank P. Graham, president of the University of North Carolina（北卡！！！）; Msgr. Frederick G. Hochwalt, director of education for the National Catholic Welfare Conference. Last week, after more than two years' study, the committee published its conclusions, The Relation oj Religion to Public Education (American Council on Education; $1). Main thesis, as summed up by George Zook: "Schools should accept religion and the churches as a factor of social life, just as much as they do the waterworks." The committee proposed to teach about religion, but not to teach religion itself, in the schools. For a while the group had considered a proposal to find and teach a set of principles common to all faiths (e.g., some form of Golden Rule), but rejected this as "watered-down" religion acceptable to nobody. Said the committee: "We who write this report are members of religious bodies to which we owe allegiance（忠诚） by conviction. For us, the democratic faith . . . rests on a religious conception of human destiny. . . . [We] believe that the American people are deeply, though not always articulately, conscious of a religious heritage to whose central values they want their children to be committed. . . . "It is not the business of public education to secure adherence to any particular religious system. . . . But we believe it is the business of public education to impel（推动，驱动） the young toward a vigorous, decisive personal reaction to the challenge of religion. . . . A first step is to break through the wall of ignorance about religion and to increase the number of contacts with it." The committee's ideas on how to break through the wall: "In the study of ... community life—government, markets, industry, labor, welfare, and the like—there [is no] reason for the omission of contemporary（当代的） religious institutions and practices." "The study of the religious classics . . . in the regular literature program [should be expanded]. . . . The Bible is second to none among the books that have influenced the thought and ideals of the Western world. [It deserves study] conducted with at least as much respect as is given to the great secular classics, and devoid of（没有，缺乏） arbitrary interpretations to the same extent. . . ." "To confine the teaching of religion to separate 'religious courses' tends toward . . . splitting off of religion from the rest of life. . . . [Religious education] is not something to be added on to the school curriculum, but rather something to be integrated with it"—in existing classes on history, sociology, psychology, economics, philosophy, literature, music, the fine arts. Concluded the committee: "On all sides we see the disintegration（分解，瓦解，崩溃） of loyalties . . . the revival of ancient prejudices, the increase of frustrations, the eclipse of hope. . . . Religion at its best has always been an integrating force, a spiritual tonic for a soul racked by fear and cringing in weakness. ... Its imperfections will not be lessened by an attitude of splendid isolation on the part of intellectuals, or of indifference on the part of those responsible for the education of youth."

关于一篇religion的文章。。

agnes2010UID: 2794922

【17-2】

studied by Agnes

Education: Through the Wall of Ignorance

Monday, Apr. 21, 1947

—The Bill of Rights (1791)

Ever since this clause was written into the Bill of Rights, most Americans have considered the separation of church & state beyond debate【无疑义，无可争辩】. But an increasing number of Americans also deplore one by-product【副作用】 of this separation, which the Founding Fathers probably never had in mind: the almost complete exclusion of religion from the public schools and colleges.

【deplore-express strong disapproval of; regret strongly】

In many state-operated schools, religion is as unmentionable as syphilis was in Victorian parlors. Result: a generation of religious illiterates—who perhaps know how to read & write, but not how, why or what to believe.

When the National Conference of Christians and Jews asked George Zook (TIME, Aug. 12) what to do about it, he thought at first that the question was "too hot a potato" for his powerful but conglomerate American Council on Education. But after reconsidering, he named a committee of thirteen educators to set down the basic principles on which they could agree. The committee, headed by F. Ernest Johnson of Columbia's Teachers College, included Protestant, Catholic and Jewish members (but no agnostics). Among them: Frank P. Graham, president of the University of North Carolina; Msgr. Frederick G. Hochwalt, director of education for the National Catholic Welfare Conference.

Last week, after more than two years' study, the committee published its conclusions, The Relation oj Religion to Public Education (American Council on Education; $1). Main thesis, as summed up by George Zook: "Schools should accept religion and the churches as a factor of social life, just as much as they do the waterworks." The committee proposed to teach about religion, but not to teach religion itself, in the schools. For a while the group had considered a proposal【审议了一项建议】 to find and teach a set of principles common to all faiths (e.g., some form of Golden Rule), but rejected this as "watered-down" religion acceptable to nobody.

Said the committee: "We who write this report are members of religious bodies to which we owe allegiance【拥护】 by conviction. For us, the democratic faith . . . rests on a religious conception of human destiny. . . . [We] believe that the American people are deeply, though not always articulately【表达能力强的 口齿清楚的】, conscious of a religious heritage to whose central values they want their children to be committed. . . .

【rest on- be based on】

"It is not the business of public education to secure adherence to any particular religious system. . . . But we believe it is the business of public education to impel the young toward a vigorous, decisive personal reaction to the challenge of religion. . . . A first step is to break through the wall of ignorance about religion and to increase the number of contacts with it."

The committee's ideas on how to break through the wall:

"In the study of ... community life—government, markets, industry, labor, welfare, and the like—there [is no] reason for the omission of contemporary religious institutions and practices."

"The study of the religious classics . . . in the regular literature program [should be expanded]. . . . The Bible is second to none among the books that have influenced the thought and ideals of the Western world. [It deserves study] conducted with at least as much respect as is given to the great secular classics, and devoid of arbitrary interpretations to the same extent. . . ."

"To confine the teaching of religion to separate 'religious courses' tends toward . . . splitting off of religion from the rest of life. . . . [Religious education] is not something to be added on to the school curriculum, but rather something to be integrated with it"—in existing classes on history, sociology, psychology, economics, philosophy, literature, music, the fine arts.

Concluded the committee: "On all sides we see the disintegration of loyalties . . . the revival of ancient prejudices【古老偏见的重新上演】 the increase of frustrations,【挫败感的增加】 the eclipse of hope【希望的消失】. . . . Religion at its best has always been an integrating force, a spiritual tonic【心灵补药】 for a soul racked by fear and cringing in weakness. ... Its imperfections will not be lessened by an attitude of splendid isolation【光荣的鼓励（以前的英国外交政策，表示不卷入欧洲政治漩涡】 on the part of intellectuals, or of indifference on the part of those responsible for the education of youth."

agnes2010UID: 2794922

【17-1】

studied by Agnes

Law vs. Morality

by Tibor Machan

Tibor Machan is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.

Added to cato.org on March 21, 2002

This article appeared on cato.org on March 21, 2002.

When the Enron case broke, many business bashers【商业犯】 jumped at the chance to blame deregulation for the mess. The same had occurred when California started to experience blackouts and hikes【an increase in cost】in energy costs last year.

Indeed, following some mild moves in the direction of a genuine free market in many parts of the globe and even here in the USA, a lot of well-positioned commentators with clearly statist sentiments experienced near-panic. Indeed, there might be, after decades and decades of sliding toward broader and broader scope for government authority in our lives, some retreat of state power in the offing. This, obviously, couldn't be allowed.

So, one way to attempt a reversal of the rather mild trend toward privatization【私有化】 and deregulation is to begin to blame everything on freedom. And one plausible【apparently reasonable and valid】 spin would be to declare that corporations are no different from rouge states, in need, therefore, of the heavy hand of benign government regulators.

Tibor Machan is an adjunct scholar【辅助学者】 at the Cato Institute.

In the back of some of these desperate efforts -- to stem any advance toward greater individual liberty in human community life -- is a lesson that might otherwise be missed. It is that when the state does gain widespread intrusive legal authority in the lives of the citizenry, the citizenry【the body of citizens of a state or country】 will begin to be guided not by its moral conscience and common sense but by the sole consideration【唯一的考虑】 of whether what people are doing is OK with the law-makers. Some corporations, for example, declare up front【预先】 that they are not interested in business ethics -- which they take to vary from culture to culture -- but only in the law. (Which probably is what accounts for the prominence of legal departments at most corporate headquarters.)

But the problem extends farther than business. Recently in Orange County, California, the American Red Cross sponsored an event at a privately owned hotel to which a group of high school students had been invited to sing. Having learned that the singers would belt out【sind loudly and forcefully】 some songs that had religious content, the Red Cross folks decided to demand that these be removed from the program, probably figuring that such would be the PC and legally harmless thing to do these days. And as much as this outraged【使震怒】 a great many people in the community and ultimately led the Red Cross to issue an apology, what transpired made some kind of perverse sense.

When activities are carried out or supervised by the legal authorities, the principle that no special favors must be extended is the rule. Under the law, everyone must be treated the same, without regard to religion, color, national origin, and other special attributes.【法律对所有人一视同仁的说法】It is this idea that animates the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and, indeed, the rule of law itself.

The reasoning behind this is rather straightforward. The law governs us all as human beings who live in human communities. So, it is only our common humanity that must come into play as far as the law is concerned, nothing special about us. If one must not kill, assault, kidnap or rob others, that applies simply by virtue of being human not because one hails from Japan or has dark skin pigmentation. That is one reason why segregation, dictated by the laws of various Southern states, was so clearly unjust. That is why even when it would appear to make some sense, racial profiling is a very dubious【fraught with uncertainty or doubt】 police practice. That is why sexual or ethnic discrimination by governments is to be forbidden.

But there is a conflict between this unexceptional idea and the widening of the scope of government power. When we get away from the simple negative principles of a just human community -- don't kill, don't assault, don't rob, don't rape and such, meaning, basically, that we should all live together peacefully -- and start regimenting【严密地管制】 the details of human life, people are no longer similar at all, quite the contrary. Maybe some should and some should not smoke. Maybe some should and some should not go to church. Maybe some should and others should not paint certain kinds of pictures or play certain sports or purchase SUVs or talk with the animals. Only at some very basic level are we all -- or virtually all of us -- alike. We become differentiated【分化】 rather quickly as it concerns the details of our lives -- some are parents, some teachers, some tall, some women, some young, some athletes, some Roman Catholics, some Jews, some Moonies and some even agnostics or atheists.

Well, in a community that respects -- and has made provisions for the protection of individual rights -- the diversity of human life has nearly free reign. Just look around America and this becomes evident! If now government tries to apply its principles of equal protection under the law to all the different areas of human activity that can arise in a highly diverse society, the task will be impossible and nearly totalitarian. If the American Red Cross acts, then, like a quasi-government, making its program suited to everyone equally, it will find itself unable to do anything even mildly special, let alone controversial. But if its programs are carried out for the general public, it could become concerned about whether to conform to【符合 遵照】 the spirit if not the letter of the law. It may not have to but it may still consider it politically prudent【careful and sensible】 to do this.

This is how we begin to leave our common sense and try to make practices adjust to some artificial one-size-fits-all vision of community life that, in fact, fits no one at all. But once education, recreation and athletics -- to list but a few things people do in life -- become quasi-government affairs, they cannot be differentiated based on different needs of different segments and members of communities. They gradually become the same, or at least pretend to be such, so as to accommodate the now impossible ideal of the now highly intrusive rule of law.

Not only will this generate completely artificial practices and bans but it will also take our minds off what is really important, namely, figuring out on our own how we should conduct ourselves in our lives. We now will be inclined to【倾向于】 focus not on morality or ethics but on public policy and law. That is quite understandable, since when law and public policy are not heeded, severe consequences can ensue. We can be found to be law-breakers, which brings about costly sanctions. You smoke in a pub now and this means going to court, paying fines, putting your life on hold. You offend some group and spend years in court!

The American Red Cross officials may perhaps not be fully forgiven for losing their common sense but it is at least understandable why they worried so much about being politically correct. With religious songs at an event open to the public, they would risk bringing down upon them the wrath of the American Civil Liberties Union if not immediately the local police.

A society where laws have become the answer to all human problems, laws get completely confusing and many people begin to be concerned with nothing other than avoiding violating the law. Such a society is very likely to see ethics and morality slowly but surely recede from its midst【从中退却】.

关于法律和道德的美文~很长 不过有收获~