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文化研究 – 開欄文
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1. 我了解文化的過程
我在高一 – 高二時，讀了家父的《中國文化之前途》後(出版年代不詳)，第一次從知識角度接觸到文化的概念。我當時寫了一篇讀後感，發表在《建中青年》。過了60年，現在已經不記得那篇文章的內容。當然，我後來也拜讀了家父的《古代中國文化與中國知識份子》(第5版)。
初中時從歷史課本學到國家積弱一百多年，內憂外患不斷；在國民黨「反共抗俄」教育下，「外有強敵」的陰影揮之不去。很自然的培養出追求富國強兵的意識。初、高中時，在經濟學和社會學的入門書之外，也看了《孫子兵法》和《戰爭藝術》。
大一時修了「社會學」這門課；教授是一位愛爾蘭神父，他非常詼諧。課堂中笑聲四起，更加深了我對社會學的興趣。開始工作後讀了一些介紹世界各地區文化的書(請見「參考資料」)。下班後在加州庫比蒂諾市的迪安薩社區大學修了一門「文化人類學」(Haviland 1983)。上了這門課以後，我從李基教授的《人類的成長》開始，進一步閱讀考古學、考古人類學、人類演化史、人類出非洲史、人類遷徙史、基因人類學、和population等領域的科普書籍和報導。
1980年以後，由於試圖了解「結構主義」，進而接觸到「後結構主義」和「後現代主義」。我花了相當多時間閱讀「後現代」理論諸大師的著作，寫過相關的一篇書評。也開始從「文化研究」領域的角度進一步了解「文化」。
對哲學的興趣，讓我有機會了解語言學(1959，書林)和符號學(1986)的理論。我從初中時就對「行為」和指導行為的「原則」很好奇；對倫理學的探索先後把我帶進社會學、心理學、和認知科學等相關領域的涉獵。我也就能夠從認知科學和心理學(1992)的角度來了解「文化」。理學院的訓練和在高科技產業界工作經驗，則使我養成從現實角度了解事情和事理的傾向。
以上是我試圖了解「文化」這個概念的簡單歷程，也是我相信自己能夠就「文化」相關議題略表淺見的依據。
我本來想把我對「文化」這個概念的了解，寫成一篇系統性的論文；斷斷續續地寫了近三年，終究因為老邁而無法成章。只在這篇拙作中簡要的做了說明(該文第3節)。
此外，我在網上曾多次討論「文化」議題(討論1、討論2、討論3 – 此欄有多篇討論「文化」的文章)；各位可以根據它們和上引拙作，評鑑一下我對文化的了解是否成立和說得通。
請參考本欄的姐妹欄：《古代文化/文明小檔案》。
2. 本部落格「文化研究」目錄
待增補。
本文於 修改第 1 次
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阿米許信眾拒絕接受科技原因 - Jacalyn Wetzel
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我在賓州費城的天普大學物理系研究所就讀近4年(1967--1971)；阿米許教會(或阿米許教信眾)是我最早接觸到美國社會許多「異於常理」現象之一。所以，我一直對該社群保持著很大的興趣(該欄2025/07/23貼文)。
The Amish are known for their old-fashioned lifestyle. Here’s the real reason they reject technology.
It was the invention of the telephone that started it all.
Jacalyn Wetzel, 06/01/26
Many people are fascinated by the Amish community. A big part of the fascination comes from the people who look and live as if they’ve been frozen in time. It turns out, the reason it appears that Amish people are stuck in the past is not that complicated.
People travel from all over the country to visit “Amish Country,” to get a glimpse into the Amish way of life. The community is located in south-central Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County, where they keep to themselves. In 2026, the religious sect still gets around on horse and buggy.
They don’t take part in any modernization, including zippers on their clothing. People today associate the Amish with being isolated from the outside world, but that wasn’t always the case. PBS reveals in a recent documentary that the Amish used to live in town with other communities until the early 1900s.
Sociologist, Donald B. Kraybill, tells PBS, “I think for the first hundred years from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century, the Amish felt more at home here.”
“Amish people shared a lot of lifestyle similarities with people who are not Amish. And so they were living in a largely Pennsylvania German culture where people spoke Pennsylvania German or Pennsylvania Dutch,” an unidentified voice is heard saying in the short clip.
Fleeing persecution
When the Amish came to the colonies, they were already accustomed to existing in isolation. The group practices a religion called Anabaptist (重浸派), a form of the Protestant religion that was considered “radical” in the late 1600s. Their belief in adult baptism and the rejection of infant baptism made them targets during the 16th century.
“Baptism, adult baptism was a capital offense, and they got the medieval equivalent of the electric chair,” Kraybill recounts. “2,000 to 3,000 died as martyrs. The government appointed Anabaptist hunters that would go out looking for them, so they would hold services in caves, hold services in the woods at night, and basically became an underground movement. And that has really stayed in the DNA of Amish culture and Amish history.”
Protecting and prioritizing connection
While the Amish enjoyed living life among their neighbors, the Industrial Revolution brought change. The clothing began to change, not only in style but also in the means of production. No longer were dresses and trousers being cut and sewn by hand. Machines made the process much quicker and less personalized. These changes made the group uneasy as the garments were seen as flashy and immodest according to the PBS documentary.
But it was the invention, and subsequent spreading use of the telephone, that caused them to retreat into community isolation.
“And it was with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the fads and the fashions that were becoming available. That’s what troubled the Amish mind and troubled the Amish soul,” Kraybill reveals. “The focus on the Amish society is on the community, always on the community. In American life, the focus is on the individual getting ahead. Freedom of individual choice, making a name for yourself, self achievement. All of those are in direct opposition to key values of the Amish way of life.”
The sociologist further explains that community, humility, and putting yourself under the authority of the church were all key parts of Amish life. These differences became a stark contrast between the Amish and their neighbors.
Kraybill shares, “The first item of technology that created an issue was the telephone. Because if you have a phone and you can call, why visit? Why go and see the person?”
According to PBS, by 1910, the Amish had banned having telephones in the home but allowed the use of public phones. The idea isn’t to avoid all technology, but to have a “firewall” between the Amish and technology. Amish people may still get around with a horse and carriage, but they will ride in a car being driven by someone else.
“The main core of Amish motivation is to keep the local church together,” Kraybill says. “If you give someone the keys to the car, they’re going to go off to the city. Young people will often get jobs. So to the Amish way of thinking, the car will fragment our community. It will splinter the community. It will pull us apart.”
In the world, not of it
The Amish community is aware that the world has changed drastically since the 1800s. This doesn’t stop them from continuing to keep things as analog as possible. Buttons, clasps, and hooks instead of zippers. Tilling farmland with animals pulling equipment instead of a machine. Using oil lamps instead of electricity, and sewing clothing by hand instead of purchasing from a store. These are all ways the Amish keep things simple.
“They’re in our world, but they’re not part of our world. They’re in the world but not of it, and that’s what they want to be,” Anthropologist, Karen M. Johnson-Weiner explains to PBS. “They are working together to actively live according to Christ’s teachings, and the majority of the world is not doing that.
So the sense is that we are pilgrims passing through this world on the way to the eternal world. We don’t get attached to this world. We don’t get attached to the things of this world. We do our best. We try to serve God, and then we hope that will mean we’re worthy of salvation.”
The post The Amish are known for their old-fashioned lifestyle. Here’s the real reason they reject technology. appeared first on Upworthy.
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「西方文化」到底指的是什麼 - Francis Fukuyama
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今年三月讀到「老朋友」福山教授這篇論文時(1)，覺得他「切入點」的政治氣味太濃；所以沒有即時轉載。在刊登了幾篇和他這個主題相關的文章後(2)，加上福山教授畢竟喝過幾缸墨水，下文內容頗有可觀之處；決定還是跟網友們分享。
此外，他拐彎抹角，罵人不帶髒字的文風，勘比金庸先生筆下武武林高手的「無招勝有招」；請參見：下文倒數第4段和最後一段針對盧比歐國務卿的評論。頗值得我這種只會把看不慣的人鬥倒鬥臭的村夫學習一、二。
附註：
1. 我跟他素未謀面，也沒有電郵往來；只讀過好幾篇他的文章(該欄2025/10/25)，和許多批評他那本名著的文章。
2. 請見：本欄2026/04/27、2026/04/16，和此欄2026/04/06、2026/04/04等四篇貼文；以及此欄2025/08/26。
What “Western Civilization” Really Means
It has less to do with faith—and more to do with the Enlightenment—than Marco Rubio thinks.
Francis Fukuyama, 03/03/26
We are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir. — Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference, February 14, 2026.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio got a standing ovation at the end of his talk at the Munich Security Conference in February, largely for his assertion, quoted above, that the United States and Europe are all part of a single “Western Civilization.” His listeners were doubtless gratified that he backed away from the aggressive nastiness towards Europe displayed by Vice President JD Vance the year before, and that he seemed to be anchoring the trans-Atlantic relationship in values, as countless American leaders had done in the years before the rise of Donald Trump.
But what is the “Western Civilization” to which Rubio was referring? His version of it is likely to be quite different from the understanding of most contemporary Europeans, and from mine as well. (Rubio did manage to get in a dig at me and the “end of history.”)
For an important group of American conservatives, “Western Civilization” denotes a specifically Christian civilization, and a culture built around active Christian belief. Rubio alludes to this by speaking not of “Christian heritage” but of “Christian faith” in his remarks. His list of shared aspects of common civilization also includes the words “heritage” and “ancestry,” which echo Vance’s use of the term “heritage Americans” to imply, it would seem, that our culture is based on a common ethnicity as well as shared religion.
There is no question that Western civilization is rooted in “Christian heritage.” One of the deepest Christian values is belief in the universal equality of all human beings in the eyes of God. National conservatives mock the liberal belief in universal human equality, and Rubio himself argues that no one fights for an abstraction, but for a particular way of life. But there’s one important abstract idea that lies at the core of Christianity and of Western culture. It was expressed by the Apostle Paul in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (《加拉太書》3:28節)
Many important thinkers, from Alexis de Tocqueville to G.W.F. Hegel to Friedrich Nietzsche, have understood that Christianity spawned modern liberal democracy. Most people who defend human rights today do not do so in religious terms, but there is no question that modern understandings of rights descend from Christian religious beliefs.
But in making this transition, Western civilization detached itself from any overt identification with religion. The reasons for this were historical: following the Protestant Reformation, Europeans spent the next 150 years killing each other over differing interpretations of Christian doctrine, over ideas like transubstantiation or childhood baptism. Since Medieval times, there has been no monolithic Christian doctrine; Protestantism spawned a “way of life” quite different from Catholicism.
As a result of this disagreement over final ends, the Enlightenment founders of modern liberalism agreed to push religion into the realm of private belief, and to focus politics on life itself rather than the good life as defined by a particularly religious doctrine. In addition, early natural scientists were engaged in a prolonged struggle with the Catholic Church; it was only with the separation of empirical inquiry from religious dogma that modern natural science, and the economic world it made possible, emerged.
So there is in fact a very different understanding of Western civilization from the one that Rubio advances, one that is built around liberalism itself, encompassing Enlightenment values like openness, tolerance, and skepticism about received ideas. This version of Western civilization downgraded the role of religion in politics. We can fully acknowledge the Christian origins of many of our ideas about democratic rights without defining our shared civilization in religious terms. Indeed, societies were very diverse with regard to religious belief not just in the current era of mass migration, but all the way back to the sixteenth century.
Even worse than shared religion is an effort to define our civilization in terms of “heritage” or “ancestry.” I hate to remind Marco Rubio, but his particular heritage and ancestry lead back to an authoritarian and Catholic Habsburg Empire, while that of James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson lead to a very different and more liberal Protestant part of Europe.
Last month saw the passing of the civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. Jackson played a critical role in keeping alive the struggle for racial equality begun by his mentor Martin Luther King. But Jesse Jackson was decidedly unhelpful in one respect. Back in 1987 he came to Stanford University and participated in a march where students chanted “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go.” As a result of these sorts of pressures, Stanford and other elite universities got rid of their Western culture core courses, and replaced them with an incoherent mishmash of multicultural offerings. This was a big mistake.
Jackson apparently disavowed this rejection of Western culture, as well he might. His own life was completely framed by Western civilization, under either of its definitions. He was a Christian minister in a civil rights movement that was led by other Christian ministers like Martin Luther King, who preached succor for, as Jesus put it in Matthew, “the least of these.” And he was also an advocate for universal human rights, someone whose advocacy was protected by a rule of law established by his nation’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
This protection will not survive unless students in the West learn the history of their own culture. The only way to counter reactionary ideas like those of Rubio or Vance is to have a proper understanding of how Western civilization evolved and is today defined by liberal Enlightenment values that were originally rooted in Christian belief. It is these “abstract ideas” that define our way of life, and for which we should be willing to struggle and die today.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
This article has been updated to reflect the fact that Jesse Jackson disavowed the chant at Stanford.
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探尋文化衰亡或綿延的因素 --- Evan Gough
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這種研究對了解文化的發展幫助可能不大。在大多數情況下，社會科學的研究結果受到研究人員「立場」和「基本假設」兩者的「制約」。「模擬」次數再多，其結果還得靠研究人員預設的「基本假設」和「相關參數」兩者來「決定」。
請至原網頁觀看相關圖、表、和視頻。
Which Types of Civilizations Collapse and Which Can Endure?
Evan Gough, 04/21/26
Some thinkers say that technological civilizations could grow to the point where they can build Dyson Spheres around stars, capturing a star's energy output for their own use. But new research says that it depends on how they govern themselves, how they use resources, and how they recover from collapse. Sadly, some types of civilization appear to be doomed. Image Credit: Kevin Gill/ Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0). 示意圖
Human history is littered with expired civilizations, and scholars and archaeologists have made a determined effort to understand why and how civilizations collapse. They've found that symptoms like a growing wealth gap and distrust of the elites are precursors to civilizational collapse. But what about global technological civilizations like the one we live in now? How long can they last? What causes their collapse? How can they recover?
These are difficult questions to grapple with. Many of the variables and parameters involved are well beyond the horizon of our knowledge. Still, it's worth a try as a sort of thought experiment.
A new paper titled "Projections of Earth's Technosphere: Civilization Collapse-Recovery Dynamics and Detectability" explores some of these questions. The paper is available on arxiv.org and the lead author is Celia Blanco. Dr. Blanco is a researcher affiliated with the Centro de Astrobiología (CAB, CSIC-INTA) in Spain and the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science in Seattle, Washington.
"One of the most puzzling questions in astrobiology is whether intelligent civilizations exist elsewhere in the galaxy, and if so, why we have not yet detected them," the authors write. "This apparent contradiction, often referred to as the Fermi Paradox or the Great Silence, raises the question of why, in a galaxy billions of years old, we observe no clear signs of advanced extraterrestrial life."
The idea of the Great Filter applies to this thinking. The Great Filter is proposed as a barrier that prevents simple life from advancing and becoming technological civilizations that expand to other stars in a galaxy. There are many steps along that path, and the Great Filter idea says that at least one of the steps is extremely improbable. It can potentially explain the Great Silence.
This study doesn't directly address what a Great Filter might actually be, but it does examine collapse itself, how and why a collapse might happen, and how long recovery could take.
"How long a technological civilization remains active, and what determines whether it collapses or persists, is a central question for both projecting humanity’s future and assessing the prevalence of detectable intelligence in the galaxy," Blanco and her co-authors write.
To understand this issue, the researchers turned to simulations. They started with an "Earth-originating civilization" and modelled the collapse and recovery dynamics for ten plausible futures. In each case, they ran 200 simulation runs for 1,000 years. The authors say that outcomes were driven by the interplay between exposure to hazards, resource pressures, and types of governance.
The idea of a duty cycle is central to this work. "The duty cycle, defined as the fraction of its total lifespan that a civilization is technologically active, ranges from ∼0.38 to 1.00," the authors explain. A duty cycle of 1.00 indicates no collapse.
The ten scenarios the researchers work with are a fascinating look at the kinds of futures that may lie ahead for humanity, according to the researchers.
This table shows the 10 scenario descriptions and sociotechnical tags. Image Credit: Blanco et al. 2026. 社會情況/相應技術與治理方式對照表
In these scenarios, some factors are equal across all and some are not. Background hazards like an asteroid strike are spread equally, while others like the resource depletion rate are not. The overall interplay between all factors determines the outcome for each of the civilization types.
The figure below shows how technology and resource availability affect each type of society.
These panels show the resulting trajectories of global technology T(t) and available resources R(t), averaged across runs. "The Golden Age (S3) and Out of Eden (S10) show uninterrupted growth and resource stability throughout the 1000-year window," the authors write. "In stark contrast, scenarios such as Big Brother (S1) and Sword of Damocles (S6) suffer early collapses and high collapse frequencies. This leads to severe contractions in their technology and extended periods of inactivity. Image Credit: Blanco et al. 2026.
The simulations also revealed how each type of scenario would collapse. Some types never collapse, some collapse quickly, and some collapse and recover multiple times in the 1,000 year runs.
Each of the 10 scenarios was simulated for 200 runs, and these panels show the results. Golden Age and Eden never collapse, while Big Brother and Sword of Damocles collapse quickly. Some, like Big Brother and Restoration, suffer repeated collapses. Image Credit: Blanco et al. 2026.
The researchers used these results to understand what kind of technosignatures might be observable in each case. They focused on nitrogen dioxide, chlorfluorocarbon-11, chlorofluorocarbon-12, and carbon tetraflouride.
The Sword of Damocles stands out as the only scenario showing carbon tetrafluoride. It's also notable that Living with the Land, Transhumanism, Deus ex Machina and Out of Eden show no CFCs.
These panels show what types of chemical technosignatures may be detectable in the atmospheres of each type of civilization. Note that "C" is mislabelled and should read "CFC-12". Different civilation types produce different amounts of each type, and each chemical has a different lifetime, affecting overall results. Nitrogen dioxide only persists for hours or days in an Earth-like atmosphere, while carbon tetraflouride can last for 1,000 years or more. Image Credit: Blanco et al. 2026.
There are obviously some limitations to these simulations which the authors acknowledge and explain.
"Our modeling framework is grounded in Earth-originating scenario typologies, drawing from narrative futures methodologies informed by contemporary geopolitical, ecological, and technological trends," the researchers explain. "These projections embed assumptions about governance structures, resource constraints, and recovery dynamics that may not extend to non-terrestrial civilizations or to those that do not follow Earth-like developmental pathways."
That said, the results are interesting. It won't come as a shock that resource depletion plays a critical role, as does the post-collapse recovery fraction.
"Sensitivity analysis reveals that the resource depletion rate and the post-collapse recovery fraction are consistently the most impactful levers across scenarios, suggesting that reducing resource consumption may be at least as important as mitigating existential hazards for avoiding civilizational collapse," the authors write.
Two different viewpoints run into each other in this work. One viewpoint says that technological civilizations are unstable and prone to collapse. From this view, technological civilizations are one asteroid impact, one global pandemic, or one global nuclear conflagration away from extinction. A different viewpoint says that there's a point in their development in which technological civilizations become resistant to collapse. They've built technological defenses against catastrophic impacts, are resilient to a global pandemic, and have somehow left warfare behind.
"Both patterns emerge naturally in our simulations—not from differences in exogenous shocks, but from internal sociotechnical structure," the researchers conclude. "The long-term fate of a civilization, it appears, is less a matter of luck than of design."
Check out Fraser Cain's interview with one of the authors of this paper, Dr. Jacob Haqq-Misra, in this video.
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Evan Gough is a science-loving guy with no formal education who loves Earth, forests, hiking, and heavy music. He's guided by Carl Sagan's quote: "Understanding is a kind of ecstasy."
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「西方」在政治論述中的用法 - Mark C. Henrie
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下文可以跟本欄2026/04/16貼文，以及此欄2026/04/04和04/06這兩篇貼文等相互參照。用我的話語來說：「保守」者，「『保衛』既得利益階層」也；「西方」者，「披上遮羞布之『戰鬥旗幟』」也。從這兩個角度看，大家就很容易了解這四篇文章，以及時下各領域中「保守派」的種種「論述」。例如，近代最亮眼的「西方傳統」之一是「帝國主義」；在「保守派」的「後真相」腔調中，它化身為「反恐政策」。從而，我不怎麼了解全文最後一段的意旨和邏輯。
原文部份段落甚長，我做了分段動作；讀起來不需要「一氣呵成」那麼費力。
The West
Its defense is close to the heart of conservatism—and a source of conflict.
Mark C. Henrie, 02/25/26
Conservatism is distinguished from other modern political movements in that it is primarily defensive rather than progressive. The conservative seeks to hold fast to that which is good—and experienced as such—whereas other political movements, tendencies, and ideologies reach for a posited good, one that is not yet possessed. Characteristically, the imagined goods of progressive ideologies are conceived to be “universal” values (such as liberty, equality, and fraternity), whereas the goods and values defended by conservatives are more readily understood as particulars. There does not appear to be a single substance knowable as Tradition, but rather many historical traditions, great and small, each making its claim for conservation on its own particular terms. As a result, there may be a Socialist International or a Communist International—one may even speak of a Liberal International—but there has never been a Conservative International.
There is, however, a “quasi-universal” that conservatives of many nations, and American conservatives among them, have understood themselves to be conserving: the West. Obviously, the very word indicates that this good or value is not universal—it excludes, at least, the East. On the other hand, insofar as the term denotes a civilization transcending in space any particular Western state, transcending in time the history of any particular Western nation, and transcending in intellectual scope or catholicity any particular Western philosophy or theoretical doctrine, “the West” appears to stretch toward a kind of universality.
To speak of the West is to speak of something cosmopolitan, and yet not deracinated. If it is not an eternal essence, then perhaps at least it is something sempiternal. The defense of the West is close to the heart of what it means to be a conservative in the modern world—yet the definition of the West is also a deep source of conflict among conservatives of various sorts.
As a practical matter, and for evident geopolitical reasons, “the West” has been a term most often employed with respect to matters of international conflict. By invoking loyalty to the West as a whole, one may make “one’s own” the political concerns of other peoples who are not immediately evidently one’s own. In other words, the West is a basis or rationale for “natural” alliance in time of war.
Thus, the British during the First World War were eager for that conflict to be seen by their potential allies as one pitting the liberal and civilized traditions of Western Europe against invading hordes from the East, “the Hun.” In this way, isolationist America and unenthusiastic Commonwealth countries could be brought into the conflict as allies in the common defense of (Western) civilization itself—rather than in the defense of British imperial interests.
The inclusion of the Soviet Union among the Allies of the Second World War obstructed recourse to the language of the West, but even still, both Churchill and de Gaulle in their wartime speeches spoke of the defense of “liberal and Christian civilization,” a good short description of the meaning of the West. With the Nazi defeat and the advent of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the defense of the West could once more serve as the basis for the NATO alliance against the totalitarianism of the East Bloc.
It was in the context of the Cold War that the West became an especially important concept for American conservatives. Given that context, the term carried in the first instance both geostrategic and economic connotations—mirroring the fact that our communist adversaries understood economics to be at the “base” of all political, cultural, and spiritual life. Thus, despite its cultural dissimilarity, Japan could be understood to stand among the Western nations, since it was a free-market democracy and a U.S. ally, while Spain under Franco might be understood to stand outside the West, since it was not (yet) a NATO member, nor a democracy.
Just as the various strains of American conservatism found themselves in growing tension absent the unifying “glue” of communism, so the various strains of the Western tradition jostled for preeminence in our civilizational self-understanding.
Yet throughout the Cold War period, conservative thinkers worked to reach a deeper level of analysis of the crisis of the twentieth century. Many, following Eric Voegelin, concluded that Soviet communism was an extreme instance of “Gnostic revolt”—in effect, a characteristic heresy within the Western experience, rather than something arising from outside the West. If the “armed doctrine” threatening the West was itself a bastard child of the West’s own traditions, however, then the defense of the West began not on the tense military frontier dividing the two Germanies; rather, the defense of the West must begin with an effort to educate Western publics about the orthodox strains of the Western heritage. But what exactly were the “orthodox” traditions of the West?
That last question became urgent after the fall of communism in 1989–91. No longer facing an Eastern Bloc, the contours and boundaries of the West were thrown into doubt. Just as the various strains of American conservatism found themselves in growing tension absent the unifying “glue” of communism, so the various strains of the Western tradition jostled for preeminence in our civilizational self-understanding. The standard nineteenth-century accounts of Western civilization understood the West to have four roots.
Athens stood emblematically as the source of the West’s philosophical traditions.
Jerusalem was the source of the West’s religious traditions.
Rome was the source of the West’s legal traditions. And
Germany—the German forests, in which had dwelt the Gothic tribes—was the source of the peculiarly Western spirit of liberty and contract.
In such an account, the West was merely an alternative term for “Western Christendom.” Christianity, after all, had absorbed ancient philosophy; the Church had displaced the Roman empire as a universal jurisdiction; and the Goths were converted.
In such an account, Christianity is the primary “marker” of the West, and so Rome, the eternal city, might be understood as the main taproot among the other, lesser roots. Such an account had, and continues to have, a particular appeal for traditionalist conservatives: The West they seek to defend is Christendom.
The first challenge to this standard nineteenth-century account of the West occurred during the First World War: For the purposes of that war, Germany had to be located outside the West, and so a rich literature on the Gothic dimensions of the Western experience was lost. As a result, we would in time no longer be able to understand what Montesquieu, for example, meant when he praised England for having retained its Gothic constitution; Western liberty would have to be extracted from other and perhaps less adequate sources.
In Protestant-dominated America, moreover, a Jerusalem–Athens–Rome account of the West was generally thought unsatisfactory, since it conferred primacy to Roman Catholicism as the synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem—something non-Catholics were not prepared to do. Many American conservatives were therefore attracted to Leo Strauss’s articulation of the West’s tradition as one of Jerusalem and Athens in irresolvable tension.
This account had something to offer everyone. Catholics could read Strauss and supply Rome as the arena in which this tension had been worked out in history. Jews could appreciate an account of the West in which the religion of the Old Testament was understood to have priority over the New. Post-Kierkegaardian Protestants could resonate with the either-or existential choice between Athens and Jerusalem that Strauss posited as the fate of every thinking man.
For all of that, Strauss’s own choice was for Athens, not Jerusalem: Athens is the taproot in this account of the West. For the neoconservative followers of Strauss, therefore, Socratic enlightenment is the primary “marker” of the West. The West they seek to defend is not Christendom, but rather the civilization that enlightenment built and in which universal reason has its home: in other words, the civilization of liberalism.
Of course, enlightenment reason is not a “quasi-universal” to be defended on its own particular terms. It is a universal, simply. The neoconservative champions of an America understood not as the youngest daughter of the West but rather as “the first universal nation” are therefore engaged in a project that more closely resembles the other progressive ideologies which have characterized the modern age than it resembles traditional conservatism. Consequently, it is noteworthy that in the “war on terror,” in which Western societies confront the ancient threat from the East—Islam—we nevertheless hear little from prominent neoconservatives about the defense of the West.
Further Reading
Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture
M. Stanton Evans, The Theme Is Freedom: Religion, Politics, and the American Tradition
David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
This entry was originally published in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, p. 915.
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希臘奧林帕斯山上12位神祇-- Simeon Netchev
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下文介紹希臘神話中住在奧林帕斯山上的12位神祇及其職掌。全文甚為簡約；比較詳細的說明，請見以下兩個「超連結」：Twelve Olympian和奧林帕斯12位神祇。
The Twelve Olympian Gods of Ancient Greece
Simeon Netchev, 10/01/24
Download Full Size Image 12位奧林匹克神祇肖像
The Twelve Olympian Gods (Greek: Δωδεκάθεον, Dodekatheon) represent the core pantheon of ancient Greek religion, embodying divine authority over the natural world, human affairs, and cosmic order. Traditionally worshipped as the gods of Mount Olympus, they include
Zeus (king of the gods, associated with thunder and law)
Hera (marriage)
Poseidon (the sea)
Demeter (agriculture)
Athena (wisdom and war)
Apollo (light, prophecy, music)
Artemis (the hunt and wilderness)
Ares (war)
Aphrodite (love)
Hephaestus (craftsmanship)
Hermes (messengers and trade)
Dionysus (wine and theater)
Hades, though a brother of Zeus and Poseidon, was excluded from this group as ruler of the underworld. The concept of the Olympians has roots in the Mycenaean period (c. 1600–1100 BCE), with the earliest literary codification appearing in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Hesiod’s Theogony (both c. 8th century BCE).
The identity of the Twelve was never fully fixed, reflecting the diversity of cult practices across the Greek world. In some traditions,
Hestia, goddess of the hearth, replaced Dionysus,
while figures such as Heracles, Leto, or Asclepius occasionally appeared among the Olympians.
Their worship shaped Greek cultural identity and civic life, with festivals such as the Olympic Games (founded in 776 BCE) held in their honor. The Olympian pantheon provided a shared religious framework that unified the city-states while allowing local variation, and their myths deeply influenced later Roman religion and Western cultural traditions.
Simeon Netchev is a freelance visual designer and history educator, passionate about the human stories that shape the past.
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保守派心中的「西方文化」 -- James Diddams
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請參考：此欄2026/04/04與04/06這兩篇貼文。
What Do Conservatives Mean by “Western Civilization”?
James Diddams, 03/31/26
At the 2026 Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered a rousing speech that was well-received both by his fellow Republicans and the Europeans. The civilizational themes hit upon by Rubio were grandiose as possible, emphasizing the unbreakable bonds between Europe and the United States,
“Forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”
Less well-received was Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s appearances in Germany that same week, where, among other remarks, she derided Rubio’s speech as “a pure appeal to Western culture.” She went on,
“I think it’s also important to note how thin that foundation is. Culture is changing. Culture [has] always changed. Culture for the entire history of human civilization has been a fluid, evolving thing that is a response to the conditions that we live in. And so they want to take this mantle of culture. At the end of the day though, you know, it is very thin. And so the response that we have to have is again—it’s material. It’s class-based.”
When it comes to AOC’s assertion that Western civilization is an unhelpful myth which must be put aside in favor of her materialist vision of politics, there are two seemingly contradictory truths to be held in tension:
1. The concept of “Western civilization” really does lack a firm definition. I’m not pedantically referring here to the way that designers of Western civ curricula will inevitably quibble around the margins. Instead, I mean that there is no political program or set of moral beliefs that obviously follow any such curricula.
Even as Western civilization defies precise definition, it is still immensely useful as an aesthetic signifier and rallying cry for people with very different philosophical precepts to nevertheless be united by their shared devotion to a set of practical policy goals.
To be blunt, when conservatives appeal to “Western civilization,” they are referring to everything they like to ever come out of Europe and nothing they don’t like, with the line drawn by working backwards from predetermined ideological conclusions.
To prove this point, we can observe the difficulty of selecting a representative group of Western thinkers and delineating between those we value for the sake of intellectual growth and those whose ideas we actually want to inform the moral and political conscience of our nation. This is to say, whom do we read for pedagogical purposes versus whom do we read but also lionize as integral to our civilizational self-understanding?
Over the last several hundred years we might take Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Gramsci, Sartre, and MacIntyre as a representative set of intellectuals without which the Western canon could not be complete. And yet, for some of these thinkers their ideas have an ambivalent relationship at best to Rubio’s description of the West (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Sartre) while others (Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Gramsci) would be actively opposed to it. In MacIntyre’s case, he was a Catholic steeped in Thomism, yet also an avowed Marxist who wanted nothing to do with “the West”—MacIntyre may be on the syllabus, but does he get a building named after him?
To take another edge case, we might ask: Is Russia part of Western civilization? On one hand, it’s impossible to imagine the canon without Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Andrei Rublev. Yet, Russia has always had an oppressive, autocratic government inimical to the freedom and equality integral to the West. Do thinkers who have upheld Russian authoritarianism such as Ivan Ilyin, Vladimir Lenin, and Alexander Dugin count as legitimate representatives of Western civilization? How can we be consistent in claiming all the Russians we like as part of the West while excluding all those we don’t?
There are yet more yawning chasms of disagreement over the rightful heirs to the West (integralists, postliberals, neo-reactionaries), but suffice to say that, from a purely analytical perspective, this phrase is so capacious as to verge on meaningless. Does Western civilization lend itself to democracy and liberalism or authoritarianism and theocracy? All of the above, and then some. F.A. Hayek, noted libertarian economist, once described conservatives (Western civilization appreciators), in contrast to classical liberals, as being forced to resort “so frequently” to “mysticism” to defend their positions, a critique conservatives would do well to consider.
Defenders of the West face a double bind. One option entails acknowledging that, by “Western civilization,” what’s really meant is Anglo-American classical liberalism, an admission which significantly truncates the horizon of acceptable discourse. The other is to embrace an understanding of Western civilization that is, to use a Chestertonian phrase, so open-minded that our brains fall out. While the former necessarily comes with certain self-imposed epistemic limitations, the latter creates an ouroboros situation where it’s not even clear why the West is worth preserving.
One solution to this problem is to take Christianity specifically as the essence of Western civilization—preferring terms like Christendom, Christian civilization, and Judeo-Christian civilization which strike nearly the same tone but with greater clarity. Morally, at the heart of these various phrases is a Christian humanism that can be summarized by two contentions.
First, that persons cannot be reduced to their material circumstances or biological functioning and therefore cannot be absolved of moral responsibility. Whether God worked through Darwinian evolution or some other means, we are not merely animals as such but beings imprinted with the image of divinity (imago dei) and thus possess free will and moral responsibility.
The second follows from the first: that collectivism, whether communist or fascist, is categorically wrong because it treats persons as means to the end of a better world instead of ends in themselves.
This all having been said, there is a sense in which the capaciousness of Western civilization is actually a strength rather than a weakness. While terms like Christian humanism or Christian civilization may be preferable, the truth is that these terms are not broad enough to sustain the ecumenism necessary for a broad political movement. This is evident by the fact that donors are not rushing to empty their wallets in defense of “Christian humanism,” and if someone wants to support “Christian civilization” they will probably just donate to their church.
“Western civilization,” in contrast, functions as a Rorschach test to many different groups: to libertarians, anti-collectivism and small government; to foreign policy hawks (like Rubio), a means of uniting disparate nations against a common foe; to Christians, a positive reference to their spiritual heritage; and to Jews, a way to relate to European civilization that respects their contributions without asking them to convert. Each of these groups is attracted to the idea of Western civilization from different philosophical precepts, yet in practice arrive at many of the same conclusions. There are others in the conservative movement who, without necessarily being religious, still ascribe to something close to the imago dei—a perspective which leads them to be good coalition partners, if not coreligionists. C.S. Lewis once analogized Christianity to a house with a hallway connecting to many rooms, the hallway representing “mere Christianity” and the rooms particular denominations. A similar analogy could be drawn for Western civilization, where one should not be a Western civilizationist as such, but rather acknowledge their particular beliefs under the roof of Western civ.
There’s something to be said about this conception of Western civilization as mirroring the notion of “fusionism” known to many on the center-right. The more one studies the history of National Review and its founder, Bill Buckley, along with Frank Meyer, Brent Bozell, Russell Kirk, and others, the more one realizes how stark the disagreements among these people were over the meaning of Western conservatism. Nevertheless, they persisted in their coalition because it was apparent that, whatever their differences, there was more to unite than to divide them. The same could be said of the American founding, whose laborers included orthodox Christians, heterodox Christians, and deists—and yet, even from significantly different starting points, they still designed a form of government currently in operation longer than any other. Whether we’re discussing the idea of Western civilization or the essence of America, it works better in practice than in theory.
In conclusion, Western civilization deserves two cheers, not for its clarity of meaning but for its usefulness. Even so, Christians must bear in mind the ways in which their religion is and is not synonymous with Western civilization—recalling how in St. Augustine’s own time he witnessed the demise of Rome, and yet did not despair owing to his faith in God. Amen.
James Diddams is the Managing Editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy. His writing has been featured in Christianity Today, First Things, Providence, Mere Orthodoxy, Law & Liberty, The American Conservative, The National Interest, and the Acton Institute’s Religion and Liberty Online. He graduated from Wheaton College (IL) and his website is jamesdiddams.org.
Providence is the only publication devoted to Christian Realism in American foreign policy and is primarily funded by donors who generously help keep our magazine running. If you would care to make a donation it would be highly appreciated to help Providence in advancing the Christian realist perspective in 2025. Thank you!
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男人為什麼喜歡大胸脯女性 -- Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley
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請參考：
* 本欄2025/07/04兩篇貼文
* Why Do Men Love Breasts
* New Theory on Why Men Love Breasts
Why Men Like Big Breasts
The sociological and physiological, as well as cultural, reasons why men like big breasts and how this can be related to the Donald Trumps white house
Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley, 04/11/26
There are many reasons why heterosexual men like big breasts; the reasons are many, related to health, nutrition and even social and economic factors such as where you come from.
Big breasts are a sign of wealth, power and influence, depending on where you are from around the world and depending on how you got rich and if you are from a poor or rich background.
We can see this in the White House and in the Donald Trump administration, which is full of women who have adopted the bimbo look and aesthetic straight out of Miami, not to say they are stupid, just that they have large tracts of real estate compared to other administrations.
The reason for this look is that there is a lot of new money in the White House, and, aesthetically, Donald Trump is a poor person rich person, which means a poor person in the USA would want, in their mind, a lifestyle ethically similar to Donald Trump’s.
That’s also why Donald Trump, during his 2016 and 2024 election campaigns, connected with middle America: even though he is rich and from a rich family, his style and his love of McDonald’s very much connect him to the everyday American voter.
It’s a big reason why the WASP American cannot stand him and why Donald Trump won large parts of the African American and Latino vote.
It’s why new money is not all that representative of the old American money, and the WASP traditions in the USA, and WASP stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
In the United States, new money and Donald Trump are much closer to the aesthetics of African-American women and women of Spanish descent, hence the influence of Minima and its Cuban immigrants on American culture.
Shock as (Only) One Trump Appointee Caught Up In Bimbofication Scandal
Different cultures
If you’re reading this from other nations and cultures and not just the USA and UK, some studies state that more prosperous men are more interested in smaller breast sizes, while poorer men are more interested in larger breasts.
The big difference is also between old and new money: people who have just got rich want to show everybody they are successful, which means expensive cars, expensive homes, and an expensive woman on their arm.
For those who are truly wealthy, who come from a generation of wealth and success, they don’t need big shows to display their wealth; they focus on maintaining and expanding it. When it comes to women, they don’t get married based on a woman’s cup size.
They get married and get into relationships not just for sex, not just for fun and not just for a woman’s figure.
Successful men enter relationships with women who are educated and from the same cultures and social hierarchies as they are, because a relationship is a life partnership, and any children would reflect both parents.
The link to social and economic status
There is also a link to poverty, with the perception that a woman with larger breasts has more fat reserves, while a more prosperous man doesn’t care about fat reserves because he has the wealth to provide for his woman in terms of resources.
That and they’re in no danger of him not having access to all the calories he and his partner would need, is also a big reason why poor people like big breasts compared to the wealthy men.
There’s also a survey of 139 cultures that divides preferences: in the Far East and Asian-speaking nations, such as South Korea, Japan, and China, preferences are for A-cup breasts; in the Russian Federation and Scandinavian cultures, they prefer D-cup breasts, if not larger.
As for Western and Central Europe, they have a preference for C-cup breasts. North America, particularly the United States, prefers D-cup breasts, whereas in Africa, preferences are between A and C cups.
Men from these nations come from different countries and economies, which can influence their preferences for women’s size and shape. This is also closely linked to poverty and wealth.
It has been found in some African societies that, due to the AIDS epidemic and other sexually transmitted diseases in those nations, men prefer women who are fatter due to it being a sign of health.
Still, when those men, for example, from Nigeria, moved to the United Kingdom, they developed the Western European attitude to sexual preferences as other men born in that society, who like a woman to be trim.
A woman’s breast size can also be linked to their age of majority, or the perceived majority on the part of the man viewing a woman who has a larger cup size can be perceived as a woman of childbearing age.
Keep in mind these from an environment where men and women died and married young. It can be hard to keep track of a woman’s age.
Males and others within primitive tribal societies have to use visuals to guess when the woman is ready to be married and have children.
Anthropology
Furthermore, in contemporary school environments, if a woman or should say a young girl, develops her breast size, particularly a large Size when she is 12 or 13 years old, other women, including her teachers, will subconsciously expect her to be more mature.
Other people she interacts with will perceive her as older and subconsciously expect her to act older and behave more responsibly than her actual age warrants, which is wrong because a young girl is a young girl.
They are just not ready for that kind of attention, especially when it comes from young teenage boys and men.
I’ve never been a woman, but I imagine that the woman reading this will understand what I am getting at when you were 12 years old and developing breasts or other young girls in your age group, if they were early developers.
Would have been treated badly for being early bloomers; they were just not ready and should have been allowed to be kids a bit longer.
Maybe it is the modern world that is cruel to young women.
In more ways than one, it was better in the past, according to anthropologist Alan Macfarlane, who examines the development of English culture and family and cross-references his findings with Russia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Japan.
That was in his book The Origins of English Individualism: The Family Property and Social Transition, first published in 1978, which made the point that, in England from the 13th century onward and in Japan from the 17th century onward, marriages took place on average between the ages of 20 and 30.
In Japan, that happened due to population control after the end of the Sengoku period (1467 to 1603), which restored peace and meant the population was no longer affected by war; to maintain a healthy population, women and men married much later.
In medieval England, until the mid-20th century, the average age of marriage for those outside the aristocracy was lower because women worked, and it was understood that a fully grown woman was more likely to bring a baby to full term.
That did not happen with the nobility due to the political stakes with Eleanor of Castile marrying Edward I of England when she was 13, and Edward was 15.
Most infamously, it was Henry VII’s mother, being pregnant at age 12 and having him at 13, which rendered her unable to have any more children due to her being too young and the trauma inflicted on her body.
I am not saying we must return to the past, only that women have been overly sexualised and that sex happens when they are way too young, hence the rise of teenage pregnancies since the 1960s, which tells us something is very wrong with our society.
Or maybe humans are just terrible at managing our own freedom, or there are too many perverts over-sexualising women when they are too young for money and sex.
Written by Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley
I have been writing from 2014 to the present day; my writing is focused on history, politics, culture, geopolitics and other related topics.
Published in E³ — Entertain Enlighten Empower
Putting the reader first
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美國人最好讀讀尼切的著作 -- Avital Ronell
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這篇文章應該是龍奈兒教授一篇論文的「前言」(請參見本欄上一篇)；它只有短短1,000多字，但讀起來頗為吃力。或許她不但得到德希達的哲學衣鉢，連文風也一脈相傳(請見下文之後所附的「作者簡介」)；或許是譯者的問題，或許是我閱讀能力有待提升？
龍奈兒教授跟我一樣厭惡川痞，但她的「批判」可是「哲學級」或「核彈級」；不像老夫只拿得出「純罵街」的三斧頭。轉載她大作於此，請慢慢欣賞。
順帶說兩句：
1) 她的 "made-in-Germany nationalisms” 應該不是「人身攻擊」或「種族偏見」；而是在影射川痞的「法西斯」習氣。
2) 從她大作脈絡看，英文版中的 “undermined” 一字，可能以 “underestimated” 或 “overlooked” 來翻譯較信、達。
America must learn from Nietzsche
A country lost to intellectual discourse
Avital Ronell, 07/11/24
Editor’s Notes：This work offers an analysis of America’s turning mean and MAGA (Make America Great Again), tracking the incorporation of European racisms and seizing upon particular algorithms of social injustice, theoretically locked in. The depth of American anti-intellectualism—the astonishing pride of stupidity, politically pitched—must not be undermined. With its borrowed made-in-Germany nationalisms, Avital Ronell argues that America is a country lost to intellectual discourse.
Among so many time-release questions and effects of language, we are given to understand that events turning on historical delivery still hit you in the gut and make your immune system give way—and not only because of this or that decimating decree, violent dispatch, or throw-back to primal injury. Friedrich Nietzsche, the first philosopher to put his body on the line, warned against the way political events, the implacable rhetoric of politics, and recurring destructions would disturb your organs, making you want to puke. Shuttered by migraines and retching, Nietzsche dismantled any certitude we might have about separating work from life, thought from existence, and body from the pulse of malheur in political strife. Donning night goggles, Nietzsche also took it upon himself to capture futural flashes: in order to give a leg up to philosophers of the future, he had to calibrate the capacity for human figures of dominance to mutate and step away from false sovereignties. Ever becoming- woman, choosing Eve as the primal “gay scientist,” Nietzsche made it a matter of duty to regender and multiply the existing possibilities of inhabiting different facets of Geschlecht (gender, genus), resetting the sexualities, adding question marks, implanting zoomorphic insets, sizing up difference among species, and breaking genus down. Nietzsche took time to review, in short, everything that would have sought to stabilize a concept of “humanity,” suppressing its violent undertow and a history of severely mis-managed disavowal. Kant had already thrown in the towel regarding the human as essence, pointing out the instabilities of the human figure in its mutating self- production. It was not clear what the future would hold, as humanity lost substance and “man” no longer lined up as a refracted image of God. For his part, Kant had to pen in the wayward human through moral laws, short- leashing the autonomy of man. Becoming dangerous to itself, man as concept was on the ropes. Being and responsibility, caught in the ongoing destruction of humanitas, had to convene a summit meeting. The outer reaches of sovereignty appeared to muscle up mainly in acts of self- destruction. For what is more sovereign than running high on empty, itching to do away with oneself, and scaling back on exalted figures by means of willed extinction?
Intent on going down and stepping away, step by step, and by dint of purposeful overstep, Nietzsche practiced a takedown of European thought, aiming his star power at Hegel but also gunning for the startup troubleshooter, Kant. Only Spinoza, Goethe, Emerson, Brutus, and a few other breakout phenoms were kept on Team Nietzsche. The raids Nietzsche conducted were thoroughgoing, not sparing any piece of human or suprahuman substance, embodiment, or cultural strain. Nietzsche rooted out all sorts of stalwart claims while rummaging through the digestive tract. Sidelining the culinary and speculative habits associated with Germanity, Nietzsche not only scandalized contemporaries by turning French, but also began laying claim to an African spirit that pervaded the writing that came under the name “Friedrich Nietzsche” and the pseudonyms his work generated. For the transhuman shakeout that wanted more for us, beginning with a nonpessimistic practice of difference and Dis-tanz, Nietzsche taught us to dance, to take measure and calibrate the steps, to whirl without turning down or blindly denying the brunt of a nihilistic encroachment.
This work offers an analysis of America’s turning mean and MAGA (Make America Great Again), tracking the incorporation of European racisms and seizing upon particular algorithms of social injustice, theoretically locked in. In a recent turn that has not ceased to run its course, something on the order of a nihilistic disclosure has been exposed in its distorted human carrier under the Germanic name “Trumpf.” As alien, disturbing, and inassimilable as the invasiveness of the “Trump brand” has been since it crossed over from Germany to Queens to Manhattan, losing the “f” on the shuttle between Florida and Freiburg, it would be wrong to treat this alarming symptom only as a loathsome aberration—as if the Trumpfs had landed without secret roots in the makeup of an enlightened diction of commerce and mature social structures, supported by vigilant controls or philosophical setups. How fatiguing for us all!
Worn down, exhausted, dimmed, we increasingly feel that we can’t go on, we must go on, leaning into the emptiness of an energy- sapping call. Concerning America’s destinal downturn and the chronic misfiring of borrowed made-in-Germany nationalisms, it is by no means clear that traditional forms of argument and debate can be relied on to counter the hyperbolic stupidity consistent with an assemblage of handed-down cultural codes and their critical cohorts. We are in many ways backed against a hermeneutic wall, charged with filling in recalcitrant blanks, no matter how untimely this effort at understanding seems. It is not as if we did not know what has been happening it is rather that knowledge itself has fallen under a dictatorship of dunces traumatically mowing down the fields of any convincing recovery operation.
The depth of American anti-intellectualism—the astonishing pride of stupidity, politically pitched—must not be undermined. Nevertheless, we should keep alive the vibrancy of ambivalence and skeptical observation, putting ourselves on ambivalent alert. For it is the case that, at the same time as adopting dumbing and numbing attitudes of incomprehension, America, with nearly dialectical finesse, operates as an enormous reception center, a unique import–export hub, betting on a ground-level incapacity as the only chance for reoriginating stale inventories of European reasoning, be they incubated in ancient Greek thought or, frankly, made in America as a side hustle of university culture, still short on emergent world sectors of cultural ebullience.
Becoming woman, Nietzsche also became an early-bird hyphenated (French–, African–, Polish–, Swiss–, Italian–, Jewish–) American. The philosopher understood in prescient waves that thinking always abuts on a foreign exchange that is unavoidable, if barely calculable, according to his style of shredding identities and keeping the outside in, the foreign near. Heidegger tried to call Nietzsche home, like the straying boy in Lecture V of What Is Called Thinking? But she was gone. Set up, Nietzsche would not stick around for mystified nationalisms.
This is an extract from Avital Ronnel’s ‘America: The Troubled Continent of Thought’.
Avital Ronell is the Jacques Derrida Chair and professor of philosophy at The European Graduate School / EGS, as well as University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of German, Comparative Literature, and English at New York University. She studied under Derrida.
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尼切、科技、啟蒙時代的結束 – Carlo Bordoni
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下文作者關切的主題如：「溝通行為」和「個人本位觀」等，都值得進一步探討。
最近看到很多篇引用尼切大名或思想的論文(如本欄下一篇)；大概當下一些多愁善感的人又在「虛無主義」的幽靈籠罩下喘不過氣來？
「索引」的中譯如有不妥，尚祈指正。
索引：
anomie：一個社會中「道德淪喪」或「前無規範可循」時的狀況
atavistic：原始的、重返初始狀況；過時、落後
cultural individualism：文化/社會脈絡中的「個人本位觀」(相對於政治脈絡中的「個人主義」)；請同時參見：individualistic culture
egregious：非常糟糕、明顯出格、極度荒謬、超出一般可以接受的範圍
hubris：虛驕、自大狂、自以為是；沒有實質基礎的驕傲
hypertrophied：此處：自我澎脹的
oppositional aggression：「對抗式的攻擊性」溝通行為；請同時參見：oppositional defiant disorder
passive aggression behavior：「隱藏式的攻擊性」溝通行為
pithecanthropus：「爪哇猿人」；下文中「林德索人」和「爪哇猿人」兩詞的「用法」屬於「揶揄」或「諷刺」
Nietzsche, Tech, and the end of the Enlightenment
How technology unshackles humanity
Carlo Bordoni, translated by Margherita Volpato, 03/06/24
Editor’s Notes：The human condition has always been underpinned by aggressive individualism, usually dormant and constrained by civilisation. Marry that to digital technology, argues Carlo Bordoni, and we reawaken our inner Neanderthal – a violence that emerges in the very online phenomenon of passive aggression. This work is based on Carlo’s new book Ethical Violence published by Polity Press UK.
From physical abuse to verbal abuse and passive aggression, we are constantly surrounded by violence. Violence has always been integral to human evolution, as though inscribed in our DNA, and we depend on it to defend ourselves, overpower others, and to ensure our survival. Perhaps violence is best viewed as a mark of human incompleteness and imperfection. Nietzsche defined man as “the still undetermined animal”, one whose perfection is still in the distant future. The online phenomenon of passive aggression, of seething keyboard warriors using principled opposition to veil their inner violent drives, cast today’s humans as little more than technologized Neanderthals, or pithecanthropus technologicus.
We have, at least in part, attempted to contain human violence through civilisation. We can see this most clearly in Norbert Elias’s writings in The Civilising Process, which focused not only on exploring the topic of aggression but every aspect of civilized relations, including what makes proper table manners. And education is equally formative as it is repressive. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile — a seminal text of the Enlightenment, an age in which rationality was called upon to ensure social stability as well as law and order — it is through education that a good citizen is formed. Aside from its ethical necessity, repressing aggression has always been a civilizing task. It is a task that has been further complicated by technology.
Violence and aggression are always ready to re-emerge, especially under contemporary norms of individualism. It is undeniably true that individualism has its positive traits: after all, progress is achieved through one’s separation with the community, in which the individual is lost in the totality of others. Human narratives are marked by this constant need for separation, to achieve greater personal autonomy and individualisation from others. Therefore, individualism could be seen as a step forward towards emancipation, if it weren’t, at the same time, accompanied by a revival of ancient instincts that go directly against it. It is in this painful contradiction that lies the drama of our contemporary existence, split between the need to evolve and the desire to reconnect with an unresolved past.
Just as the sociologist Émile Durkheim warned, when social structures unravel and anomie prevails, we not only run the risk of regressing but of dismantling the very structures of society. Without rules, our spontaneous characteristics would take over, those traits that are, yes, instinctual but also uneducated. In this way, aggression and violence resurface in groups where there was once harmony, creating potential enemies and dangerous competitors out of previous co-inhabitants.
Individualism can transform into a socially destructive force. Its recent history is an example of how it can easily creep back into any occasion. Perhaps we need to look to our past to understand where these ideas stem from. The Renaissance introduced the individual as the centre of the world, before scientific advances demonstrated the limits of man in comparison to the infiniteness of the universe.
The early 18th century saw the rise of phenomenology, in which the Austrian philosopher Edmund Husserl introduced the concept of accepting that things are not as they seem, that we can never capture things objectively. Things are only as we see them, subjectively. Phenomenology, whilst perhaps unable to reinstate man in a central position in the universe, at least placed him at the centre of his own environment. It reconstituted in man the right to reason and give meaning to the things he sees.
This was revolutionary for thought, and you could suggest that it has led us into the age of egocentrism, reinforcing the value of the individual over the social. The individual’s primacy in the modern world means that the social constraints against our corrupted human nature are weakened.
Millennia of civilisation taught our primitive ancestors to respect others, contain our propensity towards aggression, and to develop mature civil manners. But beneath the veneer of manners, individualism always remained in place on a psycho-social plane. Cultural individualism reawakened the Neanderthal that was dormant in each of us, reawakening the impulsive and insensitive traits of primitive man.
For a while, the rise of cultural individualism didn’t seem too problematic. However, everything changed when our inner Neanderthal gained access to digital technology. I use the term Neanderthal metaphorically here to illustrate how, upon accessing this new technology, human behaviour seems to regress back to that of our primitive ancestors.
In this new arena we see people who feel entitled to every right, who cannot control their responses and resort to violence regardless of those who stand in their way, those who react with kicks and punches against those who reprimand them. We can try to make sense of this behaviour, but the atavistic fear of not being valued or feared, or of being ignored, isn’t sufficient justification for some of the more egregious behaviour displayed online.
Aggression has, therefore, become a social problem. This is characterised at its core by an oppositional mindset: a sense that we are right in the face of others’ wrongness. While we could describe this as stemming from a need to affirm oneself in the face of doubt, it has become a pathological issue. This form of opposition is no longer an affirmation of one’s own integrity and capacity for reason; rather, it aims to negate the integrity of others. When they are wrong, they aren’t merely incorrect – they are ethically bankrupt too.
We can make sense of oppositional aggression as individualism taken to an extreme — an individualism that stems from a desire to detach oneself from stiflingly homogeneous culture. If so, perhaps, it is only a condition of growth and characterised, like all moments of growth, by difficult contradictions. But unchecked growth can be dangerous. Pithecanthropus technologicus – our contemporary Neanderthal, adapted for the technological age – derives his omnipotence from his social environment: the education provided by it, a general permissiveness, a lack of authority and the belief in his own knowledge. The ancient Greeks categorised these traits under hubris, and made sure their heroes were punished for it, containing and limiting its excesses with tragic ends.
Instead, we added digital technology, an exterior interface that facilitates a conversation between the self and reality. It gives our Neanderthal the impression that he can realise anything he wants without much effort or interference. The hypertrophied individual begins to believe that he can influence others – and often manages to – thanks to the power of these instruments, which become an extension of those attributes that make him feel infallible. The Neanderthal of the third millennium has been liberated from the overwhelming fear of the natural world and the transcendental force of religion.
An individual that regresses to the state of nature is stuck in the centre of hostile environment in which he must defend himself from others and, if possible, must try to dominate them. If he cannot achieve this with force he must attempt to achieve this with his personality, his gestures and actions. It is this that makes man naturally aggressive. But pithecanthropus technologicus does not fear solitude. Inside, he relates to the outside world solely through technology. He does not perceive the passing of time. Faced with and consumed by the screen he can never be bored, using it as a buffer from others and sequestering himself to his comfort zone.
Technology has become a portable comfort zone, full of opportunities for the mind to converse with its alter ego without any external distractions. This comfort leads to a state of mental regression which does not allow for any contradiction, refusals or differences of opinion. It is this that enrages the Neanderthal. He may not be able to fight physically, having progressed somewhat from his ancestor the pithecanthropus erectus, who resorted only to physical violence, so he resorts to passive aggression.
Faced by the impossibility of reacting openly, he manages opposition in another, equally effective way. Who hasn’t reacted to an unjust order, a disrepectful comment, by hiding their anger behind a veiled opposition? Perhaps we are all always passive aggressive. Or, perhaps, hidden in us remains a part of that Neanderthal that has not yet acclimatized to civilised society.
This piece was originally published in "7", Il Corriere della Sera, 12 January 2024 and was translated by Margherita Volpato.
Carlo Bordoni is a sociologist, journalist, former lecturer at the University of Florence and Director of the Academy of Fine Arts, Carrara (Italy). He writes for the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera and its literary supplement, la Lettura.
Margherita Volpato is a Contributing Editor for IAI News, the online magazine of the Institute of Art and Ideas.
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人日益「孤獨」的原因及後果 - Mental Garden
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下文也可以放在「孤獨感」或「心理學」這兩個專欄；我選擇把它放在此處的理由是：「孤獨」不只是一種「心理」狀態，而且跟大多數「心理狀態」一樣，它不只表現在「行為」上，更是「行為」的結果。而「行為」必然有其外在的因素(如科技) ，以及往往受到跟社會其他人互動的制約(如「社會建構」過程。所以，我們可以把「孤獨」當成一個「文化」現象來理解和研究。
Why We’re Becoming Increasingly Lonely
Why young people are spending more time alone
Mental Garden, 12/25/25
A few days ago, while walking through the neighborhood at sunset, I passed by a sports complex.
There were benches, trees, a basketball court, soccer fields… and almost no one. Only a few people were playing; a few small groups were sitting together, looking at their phones while talking. It felt strange to see so few people on a day and at a time when I remembered the place being full of people in my childhood.
It was a space designed for meeting others that had lost its reason for being. That left me thinking…
It’s not just that young people go out less than before. It’s that they’re stopping seeing each other.
And that change comes with a cost we’re only just beginning to see. If this increasingly isolated and digital life we live feels exhausting to you, today you’ll discover what’s really happening — and what effects it has (and will have) on the well-being of new generations.
The disappearance of meeting up
The problem isn’t being alone. It’s the disappearance of face-to-face encounters.
For a while, the idea of a “loneliness epidemic” was met with skepticism. It was hard to prove. Loneliness leaves no physical trace, isn’t easily measured, and for years there was barely any reliable historical data to compare against. It was reasonable to wonder whether we were facing a real change or simply a better way of measuring something that had always been there (Burn-Murdoch, 2025).
That doubt was reasonable. What’s no longer so easy is to keep ignoring it.
In recent years, many sources have begun to converge in the same direction. Time-use analyses reveal a sustained decline in in-person socialization. And mental health problems are growing precisely in the same age groups where isolation is increasing — not among older adults.
It’s not definitive proof of causality, but it is a relationship that’s hard to ignore. When so many lines of research start telling the same story, it’s worth listening to what they have to say…
The decline of in-person socialization
Youth social life hasn’t disappeared, but it has changed very quickly.
Data from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe show a sharp drop in how often adolescents and young adults interact in person with friends, family, or peers. I’m not talking about partying less — it’s something more basic: seeing each other, sharing space, being together without a screen in between. In Europe, the proportion of young people who don’t socialize even once a week has gone from 1 in 10 to 1 in 4 in a decade (Burn-Murdoch, 2025).
That’s a huge cultural shift.
Percentage of time spent alone by sex and age from 2004 to 2022 (Source) 統計圖表 1
But the generational comparison makes it even more striking.
Today, a 20-year-old socializes as much as a 30-year-old did two decades ago. In other words, someone who is 20 today socializes like a 30-year-old adult did in the early 2000s. This means fewer meetups and shorter ones, fewer plans with friends, fewer shared activities.
And that void doesn’t stay empty: it gets filled with other things…
Technology: your new best friend (and almost the only one)
The change didn’t happen all at once, but it was very precise in timing.
The spread of mobile phones and social media coincides almost exactly with the period when in-person socialization begins to decline and time spent alone skyrockets. It’s not a direct accusation (correlation does not imply causation), but it is a correlation that’s hard to ignore (Burn-Murdoch, 2025).
Something stopped happening outside, in public spaces. And something started to take its place inside a screen.
Comparison of activities by time use and sense of purpose over the last decade (Source) 統計圖表 2
Time-use studies clearly show which activities replaced in-person social life. Hours spent playing video games, scrolling, consuming social media content, and jumping from stimulus to stimulus in front of screens — alone in a room — grew significantly.
And here comes an uncomfortable fact.
When young people aged 18 to 29 are asked how they feel while doing these activities, they themselves rate them as the least meaningful parts of their day. The ones that leave the least sense of purpose. The ones that bring the least satisfaction afterward. The chart you saw reflects their own perception of their habits.
It’s not a worried adult saying this. It’s the people who spend the most time there (Burn-Murdoch, 2025).
They’re aware that something isn’t working, but they’re trapped in the loop. Technology is not the enemy.
The problem arises when it replaces social life instead of complementing direct interaction. A video call can maintain a bond, but it can’t replace the emotional density of sharing space, laughter, and activities.
And that difference changes everything.
Never so connected… and so little together
There’s one variable that fits almost all the pieces of the puzzle: time spent alone.
The time-use data we saw show that adolescents and young adults are spending more and more hours of the day alone — but not inactive in contemplative silence. On the contrary: frenetic activity involving video games, social media, videos, and endless scrolling.
What stands out is the loneliness factor.
Doing the same activity alone is associated with lower happiness and a weaker sense of purpose than doing it with others. It doesn’t matter whether it’s eating, walking, watching a show, or playing video games. Company enhances everything. And when these data are combined with changes in life satisfaction among young people between 2010 and 2023, loneliness and activities help explain why satisfaction declined.
The problem isn’t being alone sometimes — it’s turning it into the default way of doing everything.
Percentage of life satisfaction by age in 2010 and 2023 (Source) 統計圖表 3
The chart on the right: A model was built to predict the outcome. People were asked to rate each activity based on their sense of purpose and happiness while doing it. The activities were part of Americans’ routines in 2010 and 2023.
The model and the reality observed in 2023 are quite similar. It was predictable.
* In 2010, 38% of adolescents and young adults were satisfied with their lives.
* In 2023, 25% of adolescents and young adults were satisfied with their lives.
And these data matter.
Adolescence and youth are social stages and sensitive periods of psychological development. Scientific evidence shows that the young brain is especially sensitive to social interaction, validation within groups, and a sense of belonging. Social deprivation during these stages increases the risk of emotional problems and lower well-being (Burn-Murdoch, 2025).
The damage is usually not immediate, but it is cumulative.
Like the metaphor of the frog in slowly heating water — each small change seems tolerable until it ends up burned in boiling water without realizing it. Fewer meetups this week. A bit more time online. Another plan gets canceled and you stay home scrolling through social media for hours.
Nothing dramatic on its own. All harmful together. The good news is that this isn’t irreversible.
Understanding what’s happening is the first step toward designing family, educational, urban, and digital environments that once again make human connection easier. The great paradox is that we’ve never been more connected — yet no one is having physical encounters.
Everyone is online while the parks are empty.
Want to know more? Here are 3 related ideas to explore further:
1. Why are we so tired?
2. Why is it getting harder and harder to concentrate?
3. Digital minimalism: How to reclaim time and calm in a fast-paced world
Your turn: If you looked at your week from the outside, how much of your social time happens in physical presence… and how much in digital solitude?
* Quote of the day: “We are wired for connection. But the key is that, at any given moment, it has to be real.” — Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness
* Here I plant ideas. In the newsletter, I make them grow.
Daily insights on self-development, writing, and psychology — straight to your inbox. If you liked this, you’ll love the newsletter.
Join 48.000+ readers: Mental Garden. See you in the next letter, take care!
References
* Burn-Murdoch, J. (2025). Young people are hanging out less — it may be harming their mental health. Financial Times. URL
Written by Mental Garden
Productivity and psychology inisghts in useful life lessons +3M monthly views and +300 articles
Published in Change Your Mind Change Your Life
Read short and uplifting articles here to help you shift your thought, so you can see real change in your life and health.
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