网范文：“FOLLOW MY LEADER” 在他的新传记中,引用了一个十几岁的女孩,庆祝希特勒的50岁生日，一个伟大的人,一个天才,一个人带我们进入天堂的人。这篇历史范文讲述的是关于领导者的追随。什么样的原因导致这样看似怪诞的崇拜，为什么人们通常会崇拜独裁者，谈论专政,已经让我更多思考人类历史进化理论。我想先建立一个特定的框架。进化心理学通常关注的是,通过揭露人性和解释,它可以告诉我们人类文化的历史发展。
达尔文的宣言写在伦敦经济学院的中心，进化论让我们期待,在一定程度上人类已经进化到特定的社会和生态条件下的最优状态。下面的范文进行详述。
Ian Kershaw, in his new biography of Hitler2 , quotes a teenage girl, writing to celebrate Hitler’s 50th birthday in April 1939: “a great man, a genius, a person sent to us from heaven”. What kind of design-flaw in human nature could be responsible for such a seemingly grotesque piece of hero-worship? Why do people in general fall so easily under the sway of dictators? I shall make a simple suggestion at the end of this chapter. But I shall not go straight there. The invitation to talk about “Dictatorship: the Seduction of the Masses” in a seminar on “History and Human Nature”, has set me thinking more generally about the role of evolutionary theory in understanding human history. And I’ve surprised myself by some of my own thoughts. I’ll come to dictatorship in a short while, but I want to establish a particular framework first.
The usual reason that’s given for paying attention to evolutionary psychology is that, by exposing and explaining human nature, it can show us the constraints that have operated – and still do – on the historical development of human culture. I’ll quote if I may from the manifesto I myself wrote for the Darwin Centre at the London School of Economics: Evolutionary theory leads us to expect that, to the extent that human beings have evolved to function optimally under the particular social and ecological conditions that prevailed long ago, they are likely still today to be better suited to certain life-styles and environments than others. What’s more they can be expected to bring with them into modern contexts archaic ways of thinking, preferences and prejudices, even when these are no longer adaptive (or even positively maladaptive).
The emphasis, you’ll see, is on how nature and culture conflict. “We’re stone-age creatures living in the space-age”, as the saying goes. And the implication is that the modernising forces of culture have continually to fight a rearguard battle against the recidivist tendencies of human nature. Almost every evolutionary psychology textbook ends with a sermon on the importance of getting in touch with our “inner Flintstone” if we are not to have our best laid plans for taking charge of history thwarted. This idea of human nature and human culture pulling inexorably in different directions is of course hardly a new one, although arguably we can give it more of a scientific base than in the past. It was anticipated by Hobbes, by Rousseau, and of course by Freud. Denis Diderot put it strikingly in his Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage, in 1784:3
It’s not new . . . and I’m beginning to realise that in large measure it’s not true. Indeed the very opposite is true. If we take a fresh look at how natural and artificial man coexist in contemporary societies, what we see in many areas is evidence not of an ongoing civil war but of a remarkable collaboration between these supposed old enemies. We see that stone-age nature and space-age culture – or at any rate modern industrial culture – very often get along just fine. So much so, that perhaps it’s time we shifted our concerns, and started emphasising not how human nature resists desirable cultural developments but how it eases the path of some of the least desirable. For the fact is – the worry is, the embarrassment is – that human nature may sometimes be not just a collaborator but an active collaborateur with the invader.
True, once we do focus on collaboration, for the most part we’ll find the result productive and benign. Think of the major achievements of modern civilisation – in science, the arts, politics, communication, commerce. Every one has depended on cultural forces working with the natural gifts of human beings. Our incomparable mental gifts: the capacity for language, reasoning, socialising, understanding, feeling with others. Equally our incomparable bodily gifts: our nimble fingers, expressive faces, graceful limbs. We have only to look at our nearest relatives, the ungainly lumbering chimpanzees, whose minds can scarcely frame a concept and whose hands can hardly hold a pencil, to see how near a thing it was. Tamper with the human genome ever so little, and the glories of civilisation would topple like a pack of cards.
That’s the good news. But what about the bad? Think of the worst achievements of civilisation: war, genocide, capitalist greed, religious bigotry, alienation, drug addiction, pornography, the despoliation of the earth, the dreariness of urban life. Every one of these too has come about through cultural forces working with the natural gifts of individual human beings. Our incomparable talents for aggression, competition, deceit, xenophobia, superstition, obedience, love of status, demonic ingenuity. We have only to look at chimpanzees to see how nearly we could have avoided it. Chimpanzees are hardly capable even of telling a simple lie. Would you like to know the condensed history of almost all our miseries [again]? Here it is. There existed a natural man; an artificial man was introduced within this man; and within this cavern a perfidious conspiracy arises which lasts for life.
Yet, you may want to object that this way of putting things makes no sense scientifically. What justification can there be for talking, even at the level of metaphor, of natural and artificial man being “at war”, or “collaborating” or “forming alliances” – as if human nature and human culture really do have independent goals? Don’t theorists these days think in terms of gene-culture co-evolution: with human beings being by nature creatures that make culture which in turn feeds back to nature and so on, in a cycle of dependent interaction – for which the bottom line always remains natural selection? Indeed isn’t much of human culture, including many aspects of civilisation, best thought of as part of the extended human phenotype, indirectly constructed by the human genes that it helps preserve – rather as, say, a beaver’s dam is indirectly constructed by the beaver’s genes? No one talks about an “alliance” between a beaver and its dam (let alone a war).
Yes, except that to an audience of historians I need hardly say that any such view of human culture – as on a par with the beaver’s dam or even the tool-making traditions of chimpanzees – ignores precisely what it is that makes human culture special. I say “precisely what it is” . . and no doubt everyone would want to be precise in different ways. But what I mean here is that once a culture becomes the creation of thousands upon thousands of semiautonomous individual agents, each with the capacity to act both as an originator of ideas and as a vehicle and propagandist for them, it becomes a complex dynamical system: a system which now has its own developmental drive – no longer ruled by natural selection, but ruled by whatever principles do rule such complex systems.
We are only just beginning to understand what these principles are. Nobody believes any longer that Hegelian laws dictate the course of human history. Few believe in the Marxist version (though perhaps more should – Engels’ remarkable book Dialectics of Nature anticipated in several ways modern ideas about complexity and chaos). Even Adam Smith’s hidden hand of capitalism has been relegated to the nursery. But that there are laws of development, theorists are increasingly confident. And certain central concepts are becoming established. Probably the most important, simple and easy to understand is the idea of “attractors”. Attractors are just that – basins of attraction, places where complex systems tend to end up as if they were drawn there. They are semi-stable states of equilibrium, in a sea of instability – like whirlpools in the wide ocean tending to catch within them anything that strays into their fields of influence (although they do not of course literally pull).
Weather systems, economies, fashions, ecosystems, dripping taps, traffic-flow along motorways – all tend to settle into discrete attractor states. Now, the existence of attractors does not of course mean that, strictly speaking, the system that exhibits these attractors has its own goals (certainly not consciously formulated). An economy headed for recession doesn’t exactly “want” to get there. Nonetheless it will seem to anyone caught up in such a recession, or it might be in an artistic movement, a religious crusade, or a slide toward war, that he is part of something larger than himself with its own life force. While being one of the players whose joint effects produce the movement, he does not have to play any intentional part in it. Indeed even in fighting it he may ironically promote it, or in embracing it oppose it.
Remember that shocking news headline (see Chapter 23): “Archduke Ferdinand still alive: First World War a mistake”? Perhaps we could have capped it with this: “Second World War a mistake: Hitler a twerp.” A twerp. But nonetheless, to that young girl and so many others of her compatriots whose own breath created the twisting wind that sent him skywards, “a great man, a genius, a person sent to us from heaven”. It can happen with ideas as well. Take the case of Soviet Communism. J. M Keynes wrote: “How a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history must always remain a portent to historians of opinion.”8 A portent to students of human nature too.()
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