英文自修157：社会凝聚力与政府1（BBC瑞斯讲座1948权威与个体第二讲）

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转载、翻译：武太白

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REITH LECTURES 1948: Authority and the Individual
瑞斯讲座1948：权威与个体
Bertrand Russell
主讲人：伯特兰·罗素
Lecture 2: Social Cohesion and Government
第二讲：社会凝聚力与政府

TRANSMISSION: 2 January 1949 -Home Service
播出：国内广播1949年1月2日

The original mechanism of social cohesion, as it is still to be found among the most primitive races, was one which operated through individual psychology without the need of anything that could be called government. There were, no doubt, tribal customs which all had to obey, but one must suppose that there was no impulse to disobedience of these customs and no need of magistrates or policemen to enforce them. In Old Stone Age times, so far as authority was concerned, the tribe lived in a state which we should now describe as anarchy. But it differed from what anarchy would be in a modern community owing to the fact that social impulses sufficiently controlled the acts of individuals. Men of the New Stone Age were already quite different; they had government, authorities capable of exacting obedience, and large-scale enforced cooperation.
社会凝聚力的最初机制如今在原始族群中仍然有迹可循，这种机制通过个体心理起作用，无需借助任何可称“政府”的东西。无疑，有所有成员都必须遵守的部落风俗，但必须假定，没有不遵守这些风俗的冲动，也没有必要指派官员或警察强制执行这些风俗。说起“权威”，在旧石器时代，部落生活在如今我们所称的“无政府状态”。但这与现代社会所称的“无政府状态”有所区别，在于族群的本能足以控制个人行为。新石器时代的人们就已经完全不同了；他们有了政府，是能够要求群众服从、实现大规模合作的力量。

Alliance through War
战争同盟

This is evident from their works; the primitive type of small-tribe cohesion could not have produced Stonehenge, still less the Pyramids. The enlargement of the social unit must have been .mainly the result of war. If two tribes had a war of extermination, the victorious tribe, by the acquisition of new territory, would be able to increase its numbers. There would also in war be an obvious advantage in an alliance of two or more tribes. If the danger producing the alliance persisted, the alliance would, in time, become an amalgamation. When a unit became too large for all its members to know each other, there would come to be a need of some mechanism for arriving at collective decisions, and this mechanism would inevitably develop by stages into something that a modern man could recognise as government.
这从他们的作品明显可以看出，比如小部落的凝聚力是不可能造出巨石阵的，更别说金字塔了。社会单位的扩大肯定主要是战争的结果。如果两个部落进行的是消灭对方的战争，那么获胜的一方在得到新的领土后，就能够繁衍壮大。战争中如果两个或多个部落形成联盟，也能获得明显的优势。如果使得各方形成联盟的危险持续存在，久而久之联盟就会成为一体。当单位太大、成员间无法相互熟识的时候，就需要有一种机制来达成集体决定，而这种机制必将在历经各种阶段后成为现代人所知的政府。

As soon as there is government some men have more power than others, and the power that they have depends, broadly speaking, upon the size of the unit that they govern. Love of power, therefore, will cause the governors to desire conquest. This motive is very much reinforced when the vanquished are made into slaves instead of being exterminated. In this way, at a very early stage, communities arose in which, although primitive impulses towards social co-operation still existed, they were immensely reinforced by the power of the government to punish those who disobeyed it. In the earliest fully historical community, that of ancient Egypt, we find a king whose powers over a large territory were absolute, except for some limitation by the priesthood, and we find a large servile population whom the king could, at his will, employ upon state enterprises such as the Pyramids. In such a community only a minority at the top of the social scale—the king, the aristocracy, and the priests— needed any psychological mechanism towards social cohesion; all the rest merely obeyed. No doubt large parts of the population were unhappy; one can get a picture of their condition from the first chapters of Exodus. But as a rule, so long as external enemies were not to be feared, this condition of widespread suffering did not prevent the prosperity of the state, and it left unimpaired the enjoyment of life by the holders of power. This state of affairs must have existed for long ages throughout what we now call the Middle East. It depended for its stability upon religion and the divinity of the king. Disobedience was impiety, and rebellion was liable to call down the anger of the gods. So long as the upper social layers genuinely believed this, the rest could be merely disciplined as we now discipline domestic animals.
有了政府，一部分人的权力就大于其他人，广而言之，他们的权力大小取决于所管制的社会单位的大小。因此，对权力的热衷会使得统治者渴望征服。当被征服者被转化为奴隶而非屠戮殆尽，这一动机就更加增强。于是，在很早的阶段，就出现了这样的社群，尽管对社会合作的原始冲动仍然存在，但管治者对那些不服从的人所实行的惩罚极大地加强了对社会合作的服从。在史上最早的社会——古埃及，我们就发现其国王对于广袤领土的权力是绝对的，仅有的若干限制来自于神职系统，而我们也发现有庞大的奴隶人口，国王能够按照自身意愿指派他们去从事国家事业，如金字塔的建造。在这样的社会里，只有社会层级顶端的极少数人——国王、贵族和神职人员——需要有什么心理机制以维系社会凝聚；其他人全都服从就行了。无疑，人口中的大多数人没有幸福可言；读一读大逃亡的开初几章就知道了。然而一般情况是，只要没有外敌入侵的担忧，这种普遍苦难的情形与国家的繁荣昌盛往往并行不悖，而掌权者对生活的享受也不受影响。这种情况肯定在我们如今称为中东的地方存在过很久很久。社会稳定依赖的是宗教和君权神授。不服从就是不虔诚，叛乱会引起神的怒火。只要社会上层真心相信这些，其他社会成员就能够像我们驯养家畜一样加以驯服。