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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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「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.
相關閱讀
We should turn our back on historyBy Alexis Papazoglou
Dostoevsky vs Nietzsche With Niki Seth-Smith, Janne Teller, Oliver Ready, Kathleen Higgins
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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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從大腦神經學看文明衰敗原因 - Elizabeth Halligan
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我是一個「唯物論者」；不過，除了接受有一個「客觀現實」外，我也同時認為：人有「選擇」能力，換句話說，我相信人有「自由意志」。我認同下文作者哈里根女士從演化論和大腦神經學理論來分析人文現象的立場和方法；也支持她提出的解決方案。但是，她對大腦神經學和表徵遺傳學兩者的解讀，都甚有爭議。這是下文「論述」難稱「完整」的原因，更說不上「嚴謹」。今年只剩個一、兩天，或許年後再來談談這個議題。
哈里根女士大作原標題有些繞口，中文標題選擇意譯。
Why Civilization Keeps Collapsing: A Neuro-Historical Model of Humanity’s Trauma Loop Trap
Elizabeth Halligan, 08/31/25
Every empire has fallen for the same damn reason. Not because of war. Not because of famine. Not even greed.
But because of unprocessed collective trauma calcified into ideology, encoded into institutions, and recycled for centuries. Collapse is not an external inevitability. It is the shape of how humans have evolved.
The real Great Filter isn’t out there in the cosmos. It’s inside the human brain.
Buried in the hardware of our oldest neurological systems is the reason why humanity keeps burning itself to the ground, over and over again. It’s why we are on the precipice of doing it again, now.
Can we still turn it around? Let’s go back to the beginning.
Evolution 101: The Brain Is Layered Like Sediment
* Reptilian brain = fight/flight/freeze
* Mammalian brain = emotion + tribal bonding
* Neocortex = reason, imagination, language
* Medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) = self-awareness + empathy
But guess which part evolved first? Yup. You already know.
* The amygdala. Fear’s command center.
For millions of years, amygdala dominance worked. It kept us alive. But it came at a cost: narcissism as a survival strategy.
* “My survival first. My tribe’s survival first. Everything else is a threat.”
Fear is not just a psychological idea. It is the most powerful biological driver. This was the operating system of early human civilization.
Enter Jaynes’ Bicameral Mind: The First “God Hack”
Julian Jaynes proposed something wild: that ancient people didn’t have modern self-awareness. Instead, one side of their brain heard voices — hallucinations.
The other side obeyed them, believing they were divine commands.
This was outsourced executive function. A divine override for the amygdala. But it was still externalized.
The Bicameral Mind could build empires. But it couldn’t last.
It was stable until more complex language, writing, and diversity introduced even more ambiguity. Then the divine voices went silent.
We were alone with our thoughts for the first time, knowing they were OUR thoughts. Still amygdala-dominant, but now without divine certainty.
So what did we do to compensate?
* We built ideologies.
Ideology = Religion + Politics + Unhealed Trauma
The amygdala CRAVES certainty, even if certainty = death. It abhors ambiguity.
So it clung to any system that promised order:
* Holy wars
* Dogma
* Nationalism
* Supremacy
Ideology becomes the survival response to existential drift and panic.
What We Didn’t Know Before: Trauma Is Hereditary
Unprocessed fear loops don’t just vanish. They get passed down, encoded in behavior. Taught as truth. Codified into systems.
They become the nervous system. The gene switch and regulation system. The operating system. Because the amygdala has been the primary operating system of human existence, we have chosen domination and violence at every turn. Every empire is built on ancestral pain that was never integrated, only ritualized.
The Empathy Upgrade: Humanity’s Real Evolutionary Leap
The mPFC is the brain’s newest function. It lets us do something unprecedented:
* Feel another person’s reality
* Imagine long-term consequences
* Regulate fear, instead of being ruled by it
This is what empathy really is: a neurological simulation of another’s life. It is accomplished through mirror neurons.
Empathy is the natural antidote to ideology.
* Ideology collapses reality into binaries.
* Empathy expands it.
-- Ideology says: “You’re either with us or against us.”
-- Empathy says: “What happened to you?”
But this requires a bridge, an integrated connection between the mPFC and the amygdala.
* And most people haven’t completed this integration.
This is EVOLUTION.
That’s the Root Problem — and It’s Why Collapse Keeps Repeating
A weak bridge means the amygdala hijacks the system. A strong bridge lets the mPFC inquire:
“Is this fear even mine?”
“Is this danger real, or inherited?”
“Do I need to fight, or integrate?”
Without that bridge, we’re still animals in suits.
That bridge only forms through embodied trauma integration and recursive inquiry. That’s how the mPFC branches back into the amygdala and rewires it. And only the mPFC can.
The Work of This Era Is Internal, Not External
We don’t need better tools. We need better nervous system integration. We need to teach people how to:
* Discharge inherited trauma
* Interrogate fear with empathy
* Sit in uncertainty without collapsing into ideology
This is the ACTUAL work of civilization.
You’re Not Too Sensitive. You’re a Prototype.
If you’ve been accused of caring too much, seeing too far ahead, or “feeling everything,” and you wonder why more people don’t have empathy…
I’m sorry. And also, congrats.
It means you’ve been the evolutionary beta tester of this mPFC — amygdala bridge — because your ancestors got a head start on integrating trauma, and you inherited that nervous system epigenetically. AND because you chose to integrate your own trauma.
Empathy Is Not Weakness, It Is Integrated Cognition
The old world was built by fear. It runs on the amygdala. It still does. That’s why it collapses, over and over and over again.
The new world will be built by those who can stay conscious in the face of fear…and choose coherence and empathy instead of control.
That is why civilization keeps collapsing. Not because of famine, or greed, or war. But because we have not yet completed the leap from fear to empathy, from amygdala to mPFC. The only way out of the trauma loop is through integration.
For further reading:
* Understanding Emotions: Origins and Roles of the Amygdala: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8228195/
* The amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex: partners in the fear circuit: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3678031/
* “They Were Noble Automatons Who Knew Not What They Did:” Volition in Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8720781/
* On Epigenetics and inherited trauma: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/it-didnt-start-with-you-how-inherited-family-trauma-shapes-who-we-are-and-how-to-end-the-cycle_mark-wolynn/10234201/?srsltid=AfmBOoqKTxZ0ME_y_pAP83a_9lcrOVPfXNPWrlCmYljkRzlzyLu9LEtn#edition=13782755&idiq=19662126
Written by Elizabeth Halligan
Systems theorist & consciousness researcher. I don’t monetize through the system. I work to shift it. To donate: https://venmo.com/u/Elizabeth-Rose85
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女性友情新時尚？-Jenna Ryu
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Are Best Friends the New Boyfriends?
Commitment without romance is trending—and for some, it’s preferred.
Jenna Ryu, 12/12/25
All products featured on Self are independently selected by Self editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, Condé Nast may earn an affiliate commission.
In 2025, having a boyfriend became embarrassing (according to Vogue, at least). In its place, friendships are receiving the kind of long-term intention once reserved exclusively for romantic partners: Friends are living or buying homes together, opening joint bank accounts, throwing platonic wedding ceremonies to formalize their commitment. No one wants to see your cheesy hard launch or romantic weekend upstate on Instagram anymore. But your girls’ trip? By all means.
Unsurprisingly, this cultural reckoning has made its way into the celebrity world too. Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo’s unsettlingly close—and undeniably bold—bond throughout the Wicked press tour has become its own cultural phenomenon, complete with headlines, memes, and dating rumors. And while a few sitcoms like Sex and the City have celebrated the importance of friendship for decades, there seems to be a growing appetite for storylines that take platonic love seriously—evident in the new wave of shows like Dying for Sex, Platonic, and Overcompensating.
Taken together, these emerging trends are forcing us to reconsider a fundamental assumption:
What does it truly mean to be a partner—and
who deserves that title?
These days, we hear partner and think romantic. But the term was once primarily used in business contexts, Andrea Bonior, PhD, licensed clinical psychologist and author of The Friendship Fix, tells SELF. It was a label that formalized a dynamic rooted in shared responsibility, mutual stakes, and reliable collaboration—all qualities that could just as easily describe the healthiest romantic relationships. And that’s exactly what happened: For LGBTQ+ couples who were denied the right to legally marry, partner became a way to name and claim the same lifelong devotion. Eventually relationships across the sexuality spectrum caught on: These days, partner is universally understood as being meaningfully equivalent to “spouse.” But if, at its core, partnership is about mutual care, support, and shared investment, why have we assumed for so long that those things only belong to romance?
It’s a narrative people are beginning to challenge in a movement some call relationship anarchy, influenced in part by the emotional fallout of the pandemic and the loneliness it amplified, Kimberly Horn, EdD, MSW, psychologist and author o Friends Matter, for Life: Harnessing the 8 Tenets of Dynamic Friendship, tells SELF. Being cooped up (綁死) with a partner (no matter how attentive, loving, and sweet) made clear just how unrealistic it is for any one person to meet all of our emotional needs. For many, it was a wake-up call to the long-underestimated importance of a wider social circle.
There’s also a practical economic reality to consider. In the US, the housing crisis and cost-of-living increases have put singles, in particular, at a distinct disadvantage, according to Dr. Horn. While married couples at least have access to certain legal and financial structures—tax benefits, dual income, social security protections—unmarried people have to get creative to achieve the same stability. As a result, “economic pressures are pushing more people toward co-housing or sharing finances with friends,” Dr. Horn says, though these arrangements aren’t just rooted in convenience: They also represent a growing recognition that perhaps major life decisions—who to buy a home with, rely on in emergencies, or plan families with—doesn’t need to be reserved for a spouse simply because tradition says so.
At the same time, broader cultural shifts are reimagining what happiness, fulfillment, and success can look like for women, Corinne Low, PhD, associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who researches the economics of gender and author of Having It All, tells SELF. Thanks to deeply rooted patriarchal norms, heterosexual marriage was long positioned as the primary (sometimes, only) path to financial security, social legitimacy, and family formation, which is no longer the case. Now, women can own property without a husband. They can build careers and be the primary breadwinner (in fact, the number of women who earn as much or more than their husbands has tripled over the past 50 years, according to Pew Research Center). They can decide independently what “family” looks like, which has transformed marriage from a necessity to a choice—one that, for many, may be losing its appeal.
“The key for marriages to work well is reciprocity,” Dr. Low says. “And what a lot of women see in relationships is that they feel it’s not reciprocal.” Even those who work part- or full-time still end up shouldering the brunt of the practical labor (cooking, cleaning, caretaking, scheduling) and emotional labor (initiating hard conversations, offering support, anticipating needs, absorbing stress). “So if you put these things into perspective, it’s clear why for some women, marriages seem like they’re declining in value,” she says. In its place, friendships are providing what traditional romance often promises but doesn’t always deliver: true reciprocity, without the historical baggage or unspoken expectations.
What makes these bonds particularly unique (and arguably, more authentic) is that in most cases, they thrive without any formal incentive—no legal contract, financial benefit, or societal reward. “You're not getting a ring,” Dr. Bonior points out. “You’re not signing a form. You don’t even have an official title.” There’s not even a way to guarantee that your best friend considers you their best friend. And yet, the loyalty appears anyway: A good friend answers your panicked midnight calls, takes hours out of their Sunday to help you move into your new apartment, plans the ideal birthday dinner only they know how.
So in a culture that hasn’t quite figured out how to formally appreciate platonic bonds (and likely won’t anytime soon), the question isn’t whether friends are the “new boyfriends” or if they should replace romance. Maybe the deeper truth is that friendship has always been the blueprint for a healthy partnership—the model of care, reciprocity, and steady commitment all of our relationships should be measured against, and not placed beneath.
Related:
The New Sexy Singles Scene? Your Local Indoor Climbing Gym
Why Are All the Lonely Girls Going to Paris?
We’re In a Friendship Recession. Are ‘BFF’ Apps Really the Solution?
Get more of SELF's great relationship reporting delivered right to your inbox—for free.
Originally Appeared on Self
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談討中國何時開始落後及原因 -- 胡承渝
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楔子：
在另一群組中，一位Yu兄介紹了盧克文先生的視頻：《滄海橫流四百年：滿清遺毒對中國的戕害有多大？》。他並作了以下的短評：
「盧克文的佳作，中國晚清的積弱衰敗，導致了百年羞辱，究其原因，是因為滿清入主中國後，為了統治漢族，壓制了漢人的文化和教育，然後又限制百姓和西方的接觸，使中國從泱泱大國變成了蒙昧弱國，要經過百年的努力，才恢復了中國在世界上應有的地位。」
承渝兄看了盧先生的視頻後，就「識字率」和「中國由盛入衰原因」兩個議題發表了他的高見。轉載承渝兄大作於下(標題是我加上的)。 -- 卜凱
中國落後之始的討論 -- 胡承渝
此視頻說：明朝民眾識字率有 20%，清末只有 1%。不知那裏來的資料。
我問了 DeepSeek, 答覆是：
明朝識字率，普遍認為在 5%-10%之間。
清朝識字率，前期與明朝相近，晚期(19世紀末)因社會變動有所上升，可能接近20%。
為了支持自己的論點，如此假造數據，能說服人嗎？
通常認為西方趕過中國，是在明朝之時。
明朝以八股文取士，清朝繼續這個制度。最限制思想的還不是八股的形式，而是考的材料。只考四書五經，只准用朱注。而且考卷中不准出現秦朝以後的事，譬如用了《漢書》上的典故，就是違規。所以大部分考生不念其他書，讀了反而有害考試。有人說﹕「明祖以時文取士，其事爲孔、孟明理載道之事，其術爲唐宗『英雄入彀』之術，其心爲始皇焚書坑儒之心。」
顧炎武則直說﹕「八股之害等於焚書，而敗壞人材有甚於咸陽之郊所坑者。」
中國科學的發展，到明朝也幾乎停頓。李約瑟書中說：
「明初百五十餘年間，數學方面，並無可資談助的事件發生。直至西元一千五百年後，數學家方始重新出現。」
「明代的天文學似隨一般科學的衰退面不振。……耶穌會士東來以後，中國天文學再度振興。」
中國皇朝把曆法看得很重要（正朔代表正統），所以歷朝都注意研究天文，創造曆法。唯獨明朝沒有自己的曆法，把元朝的授時曆改個名字「大統曆」使用，年代久了，日月蝕都不準。
黃仁宇也說﹕「科技的進展經過宋代之最高峰後，明朝缺乏繼續之進展。」
編後記：
自清末以來直到70年代的台灣、90年代的中國大陸，「中國由盛入衰的原因」應該是每一代關心國家大事中國青年追求的答案。至少，家父、我自己、以及我許許多多的朋友們，花了相當多時間思索和討論這個問題。當然，面對這麼巨大的歷史、社會、政治、和文化問題，我們得到的結論果不是「瞎子摸象」，就是「百思不得其解」了。看到承渝兄的評論，自然有感而發。
雖然中國現在氣勢如虹，這個議題做為「歷史教訓」仍然非常重要。畢竟，「居安思危」和「不進則退」；在強敵環伺，國際競爭白熱化的今天；「前事不忘，後事之師」才是永續經營之道。
此外，雖然「識字率」在當下和今後都不再是個需要關注的「問題」，但做為一個社會「指標」，它也具有一定的歷史意義。我也上網搜尋了一下相關資訊；對它有興趣的朋友，可以參考：
張朋園博士為Rawski教授《清代教育及大眾識字能力》所寫的《書評》。
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