Civilization-and-History-参考译文.doc

精品文档（1）Most of the people who appear most often and most gloriously in the history books are great conquerors and generals and soldiers, whereas the people who really helped civilization forward are often never mentioned at all. We do not know who first set a broken leg, or launched a seaworthy boat, or calculated the length of the year, or manured a field; but we know all about the killers and destroyers. People think a great deal of them, so much so that on all the highest pillars in the great cities of the world you will find the figure of a conqueror or a general or a soldier.历史书上最常见和最风光的人物大多为伟大的征服者、将军和士兵，然而对于真正推动人类文明前进的人，却很少提及。我们不知道历史上谁第一个医好了病人的断腿，谁第一个发明了能够在海上行驶的船只，谁第一个计算出了一年的周期，以及谁第一个给田地施肥等等，但是我们却知道那些杀戮者和毁灭者。走进世界许多著名城市里，刻有他们雕像的纪念碑高高耸立，以表达民众对他们的无限敬重。（2）And I think most people believe that the greatest countries are those that have beaten in battle the greatest number of other countries and ruled over them as conquerors. It is just possible they are, but they are not the most civilized. Animals fight; so do savages; hence to be good at fighting is to be good in the way in which an animal or a savage is good, but it is not to be civilized. Even being good at getting other people to fight for you and telling them how to do it most efficiently - this, after all, is what conquerors and generals have done - is not being civilized.我想大部分人都认为征服者是王者，他们击败众国，使敌人臣服，一统天下。他们也许是王者，但他们却不是最文明的人。动物动武，野蛮人动武，因此士兵们运用兵器制胜和动物、野蛮人动武制胜没什么两样，这其实很不文明。即使王者和将军他们领导士兵，运筹帷幄，高效指挥，但是这其实也很不文明。（3） People fight to settle quarrels. Fighting means killing, and civilized peoples ought to be able to find some way of settling their disputes other than by seeing which side can kill off the greater number of the other side, and then saying that that side which has killed most has won. And not only has won, but, because it has won, has been in the right. For that is what going to war means; it means saying that might is right.人们通过战争解决争端，战争意味着杀戮。文明国家应该通过其它方式解决争端，而不是战争。在战争中双方都在杀戮，最后杀人多的一方获胜。并且不仅仅获胜，而且因为它获胜了，所以它就是正义。这就是进行战争的意义，它意味着宣扬“强者就是公理”。（4）That is what the story of mankind has on the whole been like. Even our own age has fought the two greatest wars in history, in which millions of people were killed or mutilated. And while today it is true that people do not fight and kill each other in the streets - while, that is to say, we have got to the stage of keeping the rules and behaving properly to each other in daily life - nations and countries have not learnt to do this yet, and still behave like savages.人类过去的历史基本上就是这样。即使在我们当今时代，我们还是遭遇了两次世界大战，成千上万人被战争戮杀。今天，的的确确，平日大街上人们不再动用兵器杀戮，换句话说，我们在日常生活中已经做到循规蹈矩，举止有仪，然而民族和国家还没有学会这一点，行为仍如同动物、野蛮人，随时有可能发动战争。（5） But we must not expect too much. After all, the race of men has only just started. From the point of view of evolution, human beings are very young children indeed, babies, in fact, of a few months old. Scientists reckon that there has been life of some sort on the earth in the form of jellyfish and that kind of creature for about twelve hundred million years; but there have been men for only one million years, and there have been civilized men for about eight thousand years at the outside. These figures are difficult to grasp; so let us scale them down. Suppose that we reckon the whole past of living creatures on the earth as one hundred years; then the whole past of man works out at about one month, and during that month there have been civilizations for between seven and eight hours. All we can ask is that they will sometimes have done something else.但是我们不应该期望过高，毕竟人类种族在地球上出现的历史不长。从进化论观点来看，人类尚处在婴幼儿阶段，实际上是几个月大的婴儿。科学家们认为在地球漫长的历史上，有一种形似水母的生命体持续存在了12亿年，而文明人类才出现了至多8000年。这个数字对比可能很难理解，让我们打一个浅显的类比：假设这种形似水母的生命体持续时间为100年，那么整个人类的历史就是一个月，在这一个月里，文明人出现的时间只是7到8个小时。（6）So you see there has been little time to learn in, but there will be oceans of time in which to learn better. Taking mans civilized past at about seven or eight hours, we may estimate his future, that is to say, the whole period between now and when the sun grows too cold to maintain life any longer on the earth, at about one hundred thousand years. Thus mankind is only at the beginning of its civilized life, and as I say, we must not expect too much. The past of man has been on the whole a pretty beastly business, a business of fighting and bullying and gorging and grabbing and hurting. We must not expect even civilized peoples not to have done these things. All we can ask is that they will sometimes have done something else.所以你看人类在过去学习文明的时间实地很短暂，但是在未来我们会有充裕的时间去学习文明。仍然假设人类过去的文