人类还能与彼此好好相处吗？
What if Humans Just Can’t Get Along Anymore?
FARHAD MANJOO
2021年8月5日
At the broadest level, human history is a story about cooperation. Individually, we big-brained, hairless primates are fairly ridiculous creatures, easy pickings for any dad-bod Simba roaming the plains. But get us together and we achieve dominion over land and sky.
广义上讲，人类历史是一部关于合作的故事。从个体角度上看，我们这些大脑发达、没毛的灵长类动物是相当可笑的生物，即使在平原上自由奔跑的身材发福的辛巴，抓到我们也易如反掌。但是，团结起来的我们统治了陆地和天空。
Reluctantly, violently, often after exhausting every other possibility, people keep stumbling toward one another to get pretty much everything done. From the family to the village to the city, nation-state and global mega-corporation, cooperation and coordination among groups of increasing size and complexity is, for better or worse, how we all got to now.
常常在尝试了所有可能性后，几乎所有事情都是人们不情愿地、粗暴地跌跌撞撞走向彼此来完成的。从家庭到村庄，再到城市、民族国家和全球大型企业，群体规模越来越大，复杂性越来越高，无论好坏，我们走到今天靠的是群体之间的合作与协调。
But what if we’ve hit the limit of our capacity to get along? I don’t mean in the Mister Rogers way. I’m not talking about the tenor of our politics. My concern is more fundamental: Are we capable as a species of coordinating our actions at a scale necessary to address the most dire problems we face?
但是，我们会不会已经到达了好好相处的极限呢？我不是指《罗杰斯先生》里的那种相处。我说的不是我们的政治要旨。我担忧的是更根本的东西：作为一个物种，我们是否有能力在必要的范围内协调我们的行动，以解决我们面临的最可怕的问题？
Because, I mean, look at us. With the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change, humanity is contending with global, collective threats. But for both, our response has been bogged down less by a lack of ideas or invention than by a failure to align our actions as groups, either within nations or as a world community. We had little trouble producing effective vaccines against this scourge in record time — but how much does that matter if we can’t get it to most of the world’s people and if even those who have access to the shots won’t bother?
因为——我想说的是——看看我们现在的样子。随着新冠病毒大流行和气候变化，人类正在与全球性、集体性的威胁作斗争。但是在这两件事上，我们的应对陷入了僵局，与其说是因为缺少想法或发明，不如说是因为我们无法作为一个团体——无论是国家还是国际社会——采取一致的行动。我们毫不费力地在创纪录的时间内生产出有效的疫苗来对抗病毒这一祸害——但是，如果我们不能将其提供给世界上的大多数人，并且那些能得到疫苗的人也不费心去接种它，那又有什么意义呢？
Global failures of cooperation are, of course, nothing new; we did have those two world wars. But now we’re facing something perhaps even more worrying than nationalist enmity and territorial ambition. What if humanity’s capacity to cooperate has been undone by the very technology we thought would bring us all together?
当然，全球合作失败并不是什么新鲜事；我们可是打过两次世界大战的。但现在我们面临的事情，可能比民族主义仇恨和领土野心更令人担忧。我们以为技术可以将我们团结起来，但如果人类的合作能力被技术消除了怎么办？
The internet didn’t start the fire, but it’s undeniable that it has fostered a sour and fragmented global polity — an atmosphere of pervasive mistrust, corroding institutions and a collective retreat into the comforting bosom of confirmation bias. All of this has undermined our greatest trick: doing good things together.
互联网并不是始作俑者，但不可否认的是，它助长了一种乖戾的、支离破碎的全球政体——一种充斥着不信任和腐败的政府的氛围，以及集体退缩到确认偏见的怀抱，因为它令人感到舒适。所有这些都破坏了我们的首要秘诀：团结起来把事情做好。
It is true that each of us is affected differently by a changing climate and Covid-19, but with both, our fates are linked; what happens to each of us is tied up with the actions of others. Often the links are blurry. Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest could well affect the sea level in Florida, but it’s probably difficult to forge much common cause between poor farmers in Brazil and retirees in Boca Raton.
确实，我们每个人都受到不断变化的气候和新冠病毒的不同影响，但在这两件事上，我们的命运是相互关联的；我们每个人的遭遇都与他人的行为息息相关。通常这种关联并不清晰。亚马孙雨林的森林砍伐很可能会影响佛罗里达州的海平面，但巴西的贫困农民和博卡拉顿的退休居民之间，可能很难建立很多共同的目标。
Sometimes, though, our fates are so obviously intertwined, you want to scream. Vaccines work best when most of us get them. Either we all patch up this sinking ship or we all go down together. But what if lots of passengers insist the ship’s not sinking and the repairs are a scam? Or the richest passengers stockpile the rations? And the captain doesn’t trust the navigator and the navigator keeps changing her mind and the passengers keep assaulting the crew?
然而，有时候，我们的命运是如此明显地交织在一起，让你想要尖叫。当我们大多数人接种疫苗时，疫苗效果最好。要么我们一起修补这艘要沉没的船，要么我们一起沉船。但是，如果很多乘客坚持认为这艘船没有在沉，并且维修是一个骗局，怎么办？或者最富有的乘客囤积供给？或者船长不信任领航员，领航员不断改变主意，并且乘客不断袭击船员？
I should say there is a good chance my take is too dreary. There has been a great deal of scholarship on how humans coordinate their actions in response to natural threats, and a great deal of it has echoed my pessimism — and been wrong. In 1968 the ecologist Garrett Hardin published a famous essay arguing that because people tend to maximize individual utility at the expense of collective good, our species was doomed to blindly exploit the world’s resources. He called this the “tragedy of the commons,” and in the following years he was among a group of intellectuals who advocated tough measures to avert the coming “population bomb,” among them curtailing the “freedom to breed.”
我得说，我的看法很可能太忧虑了。已经有很多关于人类如何协调他们的行动以应对自然威胁的学术研究——其中很多呼应了我的悲观立场——但它们错了。1968年，生态学家加勒特·哈丁(Garrett Hardin)发表了一篇著名的论文，认为由于人们倾向于以牺牲集体利益为代价来最大化个人效用，我们这个物种注定要盲目地开发世界资源。他称之为“公地悲剧”，在接下来的几年里，他是一群主张采取强硬措施来避免即将到来的“人口炸弹”的知识分子之一，其中包括限制“繁殖自由”。
But Hardin was proved wrong both on the theory and on the prediction. (He was wrong about a lot of other things, too: He opposed immigration and global famine relief, and he maintained an interest in eugenics. The Southern Poverty Law Center says that white nationalism “unified his thought.”) The population bomb never went off. The world’s birthrate declined as the poorest people were lifted out of poverty. And as the pioneering political economist Elinor Ostrom showed over a lifetime of research, there are countless examples of people coming together to create rules and institutions to manage common resources. People aren’t profit-maximizing automatons; time and again, she found, we can make individual sacrifices in the interest of collective good.
但哈丁在理论和预测上都被证明是错误的。（他在很多其他方面也错了：他反对移民和全球饥荒救济，他对优生学有兴趣。南方贫困法律中心(Southern Poverty Law Center)说白人民族主义“将他的思想合而为一”。）人口炸弹始终没炸。在最贫穷的人摆脱贫困之际，世界出生率下降了。正如开创性的政治经济学家埃莉诺·奥斯特罗姆(Elinor Ostrom)在毕生研究中所表明的那样，人们聚集在一起制定规则和制度来管理公共资源的例子不胜枚举。人不是利益最大化的机器人；她一次又一次地发现，为了集体利益，我们可以做出个人牺牲。
Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009. In her prize lecture she wrote that “humans have a more complex motivational structure and more capability to solve social dilemmas” than rational-choice economists have given us credit for. The key to unlocking these capabilities, she said, was building the right institutions. Capitalist markets and nation-states had taken us only so far. Now, she suggested, we needed to imagine new kinds of groups that could improve how humans innovate, learn and adapt together to take on looming environmental challenges.
奥斯特罗姆于2009年获得了诺贝尔经济学奖。在她的获奖演讲中，她写道，“人类具有更复杂的动机结构和更强的能力，以解决社会困境”，而不只是经济学家认为的理性选择。她说，释放这些能力的关键是建立正确的机构。资本主义市场和民族国家不能带我们走得更远。现在，她建议，我们需要想象新的组织，它们可以改进人类如何共同创新、学习和适应，以应对迫在眉睫的环境挑战。
She died in 2012, so she did not witness what came next: the rise across much of the world of conspiratorial alternate realities and intense polarization that have hampered progress on so many global problems. As a species, we are still searching for the institutions Ostrom predicted we’d need to focus humanity’s collective power. I hope she was right that we are up to the task — but I can’t say I’m optimistic.
她于2012年去世，因此没有看到接下来发生的事情：世界大部分地区兴起了阴谋论调的另类现实和强烈的两极分化，阻碍了许多全球问题的进展。作为一个物种，我们仍在寻找奥斯特罗姆预测我们需要的那种集中人类集体力量的机构。我希望她是对的，并且我们能胜任这项任务——但我并不感到乐观。
