剑桥雅思13Test4阅读passage3

You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27-40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

Book Review

书评

The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business

Sold Us Well-Being

By William Davies

评William davies的《幸福产业:政府和大企业如何向人们推销幸福》

'Happiness is the ultimate goal because it is self-evidently good. If we are asked why happiness matters we can give no further external reason. It just obviously does matter.’ This pronouncement by Richard Layard, an economist and advocate of 'positive psychology’, summarises the beliefs of many people today. For Layard and others like him, it is obvious that the purpose of government is to promote a state of collective well-being. The only question is how to achieve it, and here positive psychology - a supposed science that not only identifies what makes people happy but also allows their happiness to be measured - can show the way. Equipped with this science, they say, governments can secure happiness in society in a way they never could in the past.

“幸福是最终的目标,因为幸福的好处是不言自明的。假如问我们为什么幸福如此重要,我们给不出任何外部原因。只是很显然,它非常重要。”经济学家兼“积极心理学”倡导者 Richard Layard如此总结当代很多人的观点。对 Layard及其同类来说,很显然政府的目标是提升全体人民的幸福感。而现在的问题是如何提升幸福感。积极心理学——一一门不仅可以辨别什么可以让人幸福,还能衡量幸福的所谓科学——可以帮我们找到方法。据他们所说,有了这门科学,政府就能够以一种前所未有的方式为整个社会争取幸福。

It is an astonishingly crude and simple-minded way of thinking, and for that very reason increasingly popular. Those who think in this way are oblivious to the vast philosophical literature in which the meaning and value of happiness have been explored and questioned, and write as if nothing of any importance had been thought on the subject until it came to their attention. It was the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748—1832) who was more than anyone else responsible for the development of this way of thinking. For Bentham it was obvious that the human good consists of pleasure and the absence of pain. The Greek philosopher Aristotle may have identified happiness with self-realisation in the 4th century BC, and thinkers throughout the ages may have struggled to reconcile the pursuit of happiness with other human values, but for Bentham all this was mere metaphysics or fiction. Without knowing anything much of him or the school of moral theory he established - since they are by education and intellectual conviction illiterate in the history of ideas - our advocates of positive psychology follow in his tracks in rejecting as outmoded and irrelevant pretty much the entirety of ethical reflection on human happiness to date.

这简直是一种草卒的、头脑简单的思维方式,也正因为此,这一方式越来越大行其道那些如此思考的人忽略了大量存在的、探讨和质疑幸福的意义和价值的哲学文献,他们文章似乎表明在他们关注之前,人们从未思考过幸福这个话题的重要性。正是哲学家 JeremyBenthan(1748-1832)—而非别人——助长了这一思维方式的发展。对 Bentham来说,人类的福祉就是快乐和无痛苦。古希腊哲学家亚里士多德可能在公元前4世纪已经认识到了自我价值实现的幸福,古往今来的思想家们也都在努力协调追寻幸福与其他人类价值观之间的关系。但对 Bentham而言,这只是形而上学的或虚无飘渺的。由于对 Bentham及其建立的道德理论学派一无所知因为他们在思想史方面缺乏教育和理智的信念—一我们这些积极心理学的倡导者们遵循着他的研究方向,把迄今为止对人类幸福的伦理反思几乎全部斥责为完全过时,甚至无关紧要的。

But as William Davies notes in his recent book The Happiness Industry, the view that happiness is the only self-evident good is actually a way of limiting moral inquiry. One of the virtues of this rich, lucid and arresting book is that it places the current cult of happiness in a well-defined historical framework. Rightly, Davies begins his story with Bentham, noting that he was far more than a philosopher. Davies writes, ‘Bentham’s activities were those which we might now associate with a public sector management consultant’. In the 1790s, he wrote to the Home Office suggesting that the departments of government be linked together through a set of 'conversation tubes，，and to the Bank of England with a design for a printing device that could produce unforgeable banknotes. He drew up plans for a ‘frigidarium’ to keep provisions such as meat, fish, fruit and vegetables fresh. His celebrated design for a prison to be known as a ‘Panopticon，， in which prisoners would be kept in solitary confinement while being visible at all times to the guards, was very nearly adopted. (Surprisingly, Davies does not discuss the fact that Bentham meant his Panopticon not just as a model prison but also as an instrument of control that could be applied to schools and factories.)

但正如 William davies在他最近出版的《幸福产业》一书中所指出的,幸福是不言而喻的福祉,这种观点实际上限制了道德探究的方式。这本内容丰富、结构清晰、引人入胜的书的优点之一是把当前的幸福狂热置于一个明确的历史框架中。确切地说, Davies以 Benthan作为故事的开始,认为 Bentham远非一个哲学家。 Davies写道:“ Bentham的活动我们现在可以理解成类似公共部门的管理顾问。”在18世纪90年代,他写信给内政部,建议政府部门通过一套“对话管”联系在一起,并向英格兰银行建议设计一种印削设备用于制造防伪钞票。他制定了一个“冷藏室”的计划,以保持肉类、鱼类、水果和蔬菜等食物的新鲜。他的监狱设计被称为“囫形监狱”,在监狱里,囚犯们被单独监禁,并且随时都可以受到狱警监控,这一设计差点被米纳。(令人惊讶的是, Davies并没有提及Benthan的本意,即他的“圆形监狱”并不只是一个监狱模型,而且是作为一种监控工具,还可以应用于学校和工厂。)

Bentham was also a pioneer of the ‘science of happiness’. If happiness is to be regarded as a science, it has to be measured, and Bentham suggested two ways in which this might be done. Viewing happiness as a complex of pleasurable sensations, he suggested that it might be quantified by measuring the human pulse rate. Alternatively, money could be used as the standard for quantification: if two different goods have the same price, it can be claimed that they produce the same quantity of pleasure in the consumer. Bentham was more attracted by the latter measure. By associating money so closely to inner experience, Davies writes, Bentham 4set the stage for the entangling of psychological research and capitalism that would shape the business practices of the twentieth century’.

Benthan也是所谓“幸福科学”的先驱如果幸福被当作一1门]科学,那么它必须能够被衡量, Bentham提出了两种可能的方法他认为幸福是多种谕悦感的混合休,可以通过测量人体脉搏率进行量化。或者可以用货币进行量化:如果两种不同的商品具有相同的价格,则可以认为它们在消费者中产生等量的幸福感 Benthan对后一种方法更感兴趣。Davies写道, Benthan通过将金钱与内在心理活动紧密地联系起来,他“为心理学研究和资本主义的关联奠定了基础,这将塑造20世纪的商业行为”。

The Happiness Industry describes how the project of a science of happiness has become integral to capitalism. We learn much that is interesting about how economic problems are being redefined and treated as psychological maladies. In addition, Davies shows how the belief that inner states of pleasure and displeasure can be objectively measured has informed management studies and advertising. The tendency of thinkers such as J B Watson, the founder of behaviourism*, was that human beings could be shaped, or manipulated, by policymakers and managers. Watson had no factual basis for his view of human action. When he became president of the American Psychological Association in 1915, he 'had never even studied a single human being’: his research had been confined to experiments on white rats. Yet Watson’s reductive model is now widely applied, with 'behaviour change’ becoming the goal of governments: in Britain, a ‘Behaviour Insights Team’ has been established by the government to study how people can be encouraged, at minimum cost to the public purse, to live in what are considered to be socially desirable ways.

《幸福产业》一书描述了幸福科学的研究如何成为资本主又的组成部分,我们了解到了很多关于经济问题如何被诊断为心理疾病并施以治疗的新鲜事此外, Davies还提到了种观点、(即内部快乐与痛苦可以得到客观的衡量)是如何启发管理学研究和广告领域的。行为主义创始人 dB Watson等思想家倾向于认为,决策者和管理者可以塑造告或操纵他人Watson并没有事实依据来证明他对人类行为的观点1915年他成为美国心理学协会主席时,他“甚至从来没有研究过人类”:他的研究对象仅限于白鼠:但 Watson的简化模式、现在被广泛应用,导致政府将“行为改变”定为目标。比如,在英国,政府已经建立了“行为洞察小组”来研究如何用最少的经费来鼓励人们过上社会认可的生活。

Modern industrial societies appear to need the possibility of ever-increasing happiness to motivate them in their labours. But whatever its intellectual pedigree, the idea that governments should be responsible for promoting happiness is always a threat to human freedom.

现代工业社会似乎需要不断增长的幸福感来激励人们工作:但无论其知识背景如何,政府应该负责促进幸福这一观念永远威胁着人类的自由。

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