翻译天堂  2016-09-29

In 1923, the British novelist D. H. Lawrence offered a grim assessment of America and Americans: “All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”1923年，英国小说家D·H·劳伦斯曾经对美国和美国人做出过颇为黑暗的论断:“所有其他东西：爱、民主、为了欲望的挣扎，都是表面现象。美国灵魂的本质是坚硬的、孤立的、冷酷的，是杀人者的灵魂。这种坚冰从未消融过。”

Lawrence’s observations of the American character did not draw upon deep wells of direct personal experience. When he wrote those lines, he had only been living in the United States for a bit more than a year and had spent much of that time among artists and the literati. But he was neither the first nor the last to make such an observation. Nearly 50 years ago, surveying both the wreckage of the 1960s and centuries of archives, the brilliant historian Richard Hofstadter acknowledged that “Americans certainly have reason to inquire whether, when compared with other advanced industrial nations, they are not a people of exceptional violence.”劳伦斯的论断并非来自丰富的个人经历。当他写下这段话时，他仅仅在美国居住了一年多，而且大部分时间里都混迹于艺术家和文学家之间。但他既不是第一个这样论述的人，也不是最后一个。大约五十年前，睿智的历史学家理查德·霍夫斯戴德通过审视60年代的惨痛经验和几个世纪以来的文档，得出了类似的结论：“同其他发达工业国家相比，美国人对暴力的崇尚是毋庸置疑的。”

The allegation that the American character is essentially murderous — or at least more murderous than that of other nations — still strikes a chord today. It’s not just the periodic invitations to violence that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has issued over the course of his campaign, most recently against his Democratic competitor Hillary Clinton. This summer’s headlines have also enumerated trauma after trauma. Eight members of a single family murdered in Ohio. Forty-nine dead in a mass shooting in Florida. Shootings by police claiming the lives of black Americans in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Maryland. Fatal shootings of police in Texas, Louisiana, and California. Breaking reports of horror follow one another fast enough to induce a kind of whiplash.美国精神在本质上是充满谋杀精神的，或者说比其他国家更富有谋杀精神美国精神在本质上是充满谋杀精神的，或者说比其他国家更富有谋杀精神，这一结论今天仍然令很多人点头赞同。共和党总统候选人唐纳德·特朗普在竞选过程中定期呼吁美国人使用暴力，最近一次呼吁针对的目标是民主党竞争对手希拉里·克林顿。不仅如此，今年夏天的媒体标题充斥着一次又一次的暴力事件: 俄亥俄州一家八口被谋杀；佛罗里达州大规模枪击事件导致49人死亡；路易斯安那州、明尼苏达州、马里兰州警察枪杀黑人；德克萨斯州、路易斯安那州和加利福尼亚州枪杀警察事件。暴力事件的特大新闻层出不穷，频率之高令人震惊。

Or consider the strenuousness with which each political party now routinely denies that Americans are inherently violent, a refrain that can begin to feel like protesting too much. In his final speech at the Republican National Convention last month, Trump bemoaned the “violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities” but, true to form, laid the blame on hordes of “illegal immigrants … roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens”; “brutal Islamic terrorism”; and the enabling of a Democratic president whom Trump has previously and unsubtly intimated isn’t really American himself..现在，两大政党不遗余力、例行公事般地否认美国人的暴力精神， 反而有点此地无银了。在上个月共和党大会的最后发言中，特朗普哀叹了“我们街上的暴力和社区中的混乱”，但是不出所料，他将责任归咎于“四处闲游威胁和平公民的非法移民”、“残酷的伊斯兰极端分子”，以及一个据他所说不算美国人的民主党总统 。

Democrats likewise tend to suggest that, for Americans, acts of violence are an aberration. Announcing a gun safety program in the wake of last December’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, President Barack Obama declared: “We are not inherently more prone to violence. But we are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency.” From this perspective, violence in America does not indicate anything “inherent” in the American character: It is about the presence of guns, the availability of which is a contingent and remediable matter of policy.民主党人也倾向于指出对于美国人来说，暴力行为是非正常的、不具代表性。奥巴马总统在去年12月加州圣伯蒂纳大规模枪击事件后宣布了枪支安全项目，他称：“我们并不是骨子里就更倾向暴力。但是我们是地球上唯一暴力事件如此频繁的发达国家。”从这个角度来说，美国的暴力问题并不代表美国精神：问题在于枪支的泛滥，而这一点是可以通过政策来解决的。

But what if there’s good reason to believe that being American has always involved a relationship of some kind to violence — whether as its victim, as its perpetrator, as a complicit party, or even as all of these at once. Rather than assuming, in Obama’s words, that Americans are “not inherently more prone to violence,” the country owes it to itself to finally try to consider the question directly.但是，如果我们有充分理由相信美国人本身就一直和暴力存在某种联系呢？——作为受害者、施害者、共犯、或者这三种身份的结合体。与其像奥巴马那样假设美国人“并不是骨子里就更倾向暴力”，这个国家应该为了自己而正视这个问题。

FBI agents investigate a damaged wall of the nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where a mass shooter, Omar Mateen, killed 49 people on June 12, 2016. How is violence quantified, and what are the benchmarks used to assess whether a given society’s level of violence is high or low, normal or exceptional? The general practice among researchers across numerous disciplines is to present yearly “intentional homicide” rates per 100,000 of a given nation’s population; crucially, these figures do not include deaths directly related to full-blown wars.如何量化暴力，如何衡量一个社会中的暴力是高或低、正常或非正常？纵览各个学科，研究人员的一般做法是借助于某个国家每10万人中的年度“谋杀犯罪率”，这一比率不包括全面战争直接造成的人员死亡。

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) compiles national figures for its reports, the most recent of which reflects data from 2012 and 2013. Per the UNODC, some 437,000 people were murdered worldwide in 2012, putting the average murder rate at 6.2 victims per 100,000 persons. But beyond that average figure, as you might expect, there is wide variation in terms of both individual nations and continents. Regionally, Central America and southern Africa both clock in at over four times the global average (more than 25 per 100,000), while Western Europe and East Asia are some five times lower than it. Within continents and regions, the variations can be stark. Thus, to take Africa as an example, the rate in Senegal is 2.8; Egypt, 3.4; Sudan, 11.2; and Lesotho, the highest, at 38. In Europe, Switzerland’s rate is 0.6; the U.K., 1; Finland, 1.6; Lithuania, 6.7; and Russia, the highest, at 9.2. The Americas show the widest variation: Canada’s rate is 1.6; Argentina, 5.5; Costa Rica, 8.5; Panama, 17.2; Mexico, 21.5; and Honduras, the highest in the world — at 90.4 per 100,000.联合国毒品与犯罪问题办公室负责收集各国数据编纂此报告，最新的是2012-2013年的数据。联合国毒品与犯罪问题办公室的数据显示，全世界范围内2012年有43万7千人死于谋杀，即每10万人中有6.2名受害者。但是如你所料，在此平均值之外，不同国家和大洲的平均值大相径庭。就地区来说，中美洲和南部非洲的比值高于世界平均值4倍（每10万人中超过25名受害者），西欧和东亚的平均值低于世界平均值5倍。在同一个大洲和地区内，各国平均值也大不相同。以非洲为例：塞内加尔2.8人，埃及3.4人，苏丹11.2人，莱索托最高-38人。在欧洲，瑞士0.6人，英国1人，芬兰1.6人，立陶宛6.7人，俄国最高-9.2人。美洲国家间的差别最大：加拿大1.6人，阿根廷5.5人，哥斯达黎加8.5人，巴拿马17.2人，墨西哥21.5人，洪都拉斯全世界最高每10万人中有90.4名受害者。

Against this backdrop, for the period of 2007-2012, the United States has averaged 4.9 homicides per 100,000 persons. America thus stands more or less shoulder to shoulder with Iran (4.1), Cuba (4.2), Latvia (4.7), and Albania (5). So much for the data on homicides tout court. The question then is whether or not to consider America’s standing among countries like these to be an aberration. Such states certainly aren’t in the same class as the United States in terms of development metrics like per capita GDP, and this fact tends to get cited by American politicians and political observers as prima facie evidence that something else (whether “terrorists” or guns) is skewing their country’s violence data, pushing it out of its allegedly more “natural” peer group — places like the Scandinavian states, the U.K., or Japan.相比之下，2007到2012年间，美国每10万人中有4.9人死于谋杀2007到2012年间，美国每10万人中有4.9人死于谋杀，同伊朗（4.1人）、古巴（4.2人）、拉托维亚（4.7人）和阿尔巴尼亚（5人）比肩。 显然，数据本身所说明的有限。真正的问题在于美国同这些国家排名类似，我们是否应视之为非正常。这些国家在经济发展（例如国民生产总值）上无法与美国相提并论，美国的政客和政治观察家经常利用这一点来证明其他因素（“恐怖分子”或者枪支）影响了美国的暴力犯罪数据，从而使得美国落后于自己的“同类国”，例如北欧国家、英国或者日本。

But while such comparisons may sound rigorous at first blush, they are often naively aspirational (at best) or deliberately deceptive and chauvinistic (at worst). Nowhere is this more blatant than in the context of the debate over guns. For example, many gun control advocates and supposedly objective analysts will condemn violence in the United States as abnormal by invoking comparisons to “developed” nations as defined by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Yet these comparisons will regularly exclude Mexico, which is not only an OECD member but also America’s third-largest trading partner and its unfortunate next-door neighbor. The reason given for this exclusion, as though self-explanatory, is “the drug war.” The annual U.S. market for illegal drugs may be well over $109 billion, and an estimated quarter-million guns may be trafficked to Mexican cartels from the United States in any given year, but inviting the contemplation of such queasy moral entanglements is apparently less politically expedient, and more offensive to patriotic amour-propre, than demanding why America can’t just clean up its act and be more like the places we feel it “should” resemble.这种比较乍听上去貌似有理，但实际上它们往好了说是幼稚盲目，往坏了说则是故意欺骗和充满沙文主义。这一点在枪支问题的辩论上表现得淋漓尽致。比如说，很多支持控枪的人士和貌似客观的分析人员将美国与其他经济合作与发展组织(OECD) 定义的发达国家相比，得出的结论是美国的暴力问题是非正常的。但是这种比较通常会将墨西哥排除在外，而墨西哥不仅是OECD成员，还是美国第三大贸易伙伴和美国可怜的邻国。他们以 “毒品战争”为由排除墨西哥。美国每年非法毒品市场总值超过1090亿美元，每年从美国非法走私到墨西哥毒品组织的枪支高达25万支。这些事实使人不得不思考其背后令人作呕的道德缺失，但那在政治上是不合时宜的，还会伤害美国人的爱国自豪，更方便的是去质疑美国为什么不能改变自己的行为，把自己变得更符合我们关于美国的理想。

It’s not just our use of empirical metrics for evaluating violence in America that can be dubious. Opining on the supposedly inherent tendencies of vast groups of people toward violence — Americans, Muslims, the left-handed, anyone — should rightly raise flags. It’s the kind of thing you might expect from a 19th-century phrenologist, someone who would measure skulls for indicators of “destructiveness.” But although the vintage pseudo-scientific quackery underwriting such speculation may have fallen out of fashion, the sentiments themselves haven’t disappeared. Consider Iowa Rep. Steve King, for example, pontificating on the civilizational contributions of whites versus other “subgroups,” or research indicating widespread biases whereby black Americans are perceived to be both “prone to violence” and less susceptible to pain. Passing judgment on “a people” as an abstraction rarely leads anywhere good and frequently reveals more about the observer than the observed.不光是我们对美国暴力问题的检查方法出了差错，针对某一群体 （美国人、穆斯林、左撇子等等）来审视他们对暴力的固有内在倾向都是有问题的，就好像是19世纪的骨相学家通过衡量头骨来决定人的“破坏性”。这种古老的伪科学貌似已经过时，但是它所代表的精神并未消失。爱荷华州众议员史蒂夫·金宣扬比较白人同其他“亚种群”对人类文明做出的贡献，有些研究揭示出流传广泛的偏见，例如美国黑人“倾向使用暴力”而且“痛感较低”。对“一个种群”进行抽象的、先入为主的判断很少带来积极的结果，通常揭示出观察者、而非被观察者的本质特征。

But making claims about the inherent relationship “Americans” have with violence is especially dicey. The United States is an extremely heterogeneous country, with vast regional differences, considerable ethnic diversity, marked de facto segregation, and wide income inequality — which Americans would we be talking about?判断“美国人”和暴力行为的内在联系尤其包含风险。美国是异质化很高的国家，地域间巨大的差异、民族的多元，某些地区存在着事实上的种族隔离，更不用说居民收入的差距蛮大——我们要谈论的是哪一种 “美国人”?

Neighborhood residents hang out at a memorial for 18-year-old Michael Brown on Oct. 20, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. This is where considerations of the allegedly violent American national character run aground, though in a telling way. Because like most goods and ills in America — from job opportunities to education to healthy drinking water — violence is not equally distributed among Americans. Indeed, drilling down into the demographics of violence in America reads like an indictment of society’s broader treatment of the poor and marginalized. As analysts have pointedly observed, black Americans are some eight times more likely to be murdered than their white compatriots and, in any given year, will be killed at rates anywhere from 10 to 20 times the benchmark OECD rates. When the homicide rates for individual states rather than the national average are compared, the results are damning: The murder rates in Louisiana (11.93 per 100,000) and Washington, D.C., (13.92) are on par with figures from countries like Nicaragua (11), the Central African Republic (11.8), and Côte d’Ivoire (13.6).到这里，所谓关于美国人暴力精神的论断就很生动地不再成立了。就像美国所有的优点和缺点——从就业机会到教育到卫生的饮用水，暴力在美国人中并不是平均分布的。美国暴力犯罪的人口特点本身就是关于美国社会对穷人和边缘人群的对待的一纸诉状。分析人士指出，美国黑人被谋杀的可能性比白人高8倍，在任何一年中，他们的被谋杀率比OECD国家平均值高10到20倍。将每个州的杀人率同美国平均值相比，结果振聋发聩：路易斯安那州的谋杀率（每10万人中11.93起）和华盛顿哥伦比亚特区的谋杀率（13.92起）同尼加拉瓜（11起）、中非共和国（11.8起）和科特迪瓦（13.6起）差不多。

Those who cast these figures as artifacts of so-called “black-on-black crime” not only often traffic in thinly veiled racism, but don’t even attempt to understand the problem at hand. Most crimes of any sort in any place — not just murders — involve members of the same group targeting one another in close geographic proximity. And in a nation as segregated as the United States remains to this day, the concentration of violence in crowded ghettos and benighted postindustrial areas should be unsurprising. Americans have a history of citing violence as the cause of their racial prejudices. But the reality is that anti-black racism is itself the defining feature of the institutions and social pressures that generate everyday violence in the United States.把这些数据归咎于所谓的“黑人谋杀黑人”不仅带有几乎不加掩饰的种族歧视，而且完全不了解问题之所在。任何一个地区的大部分犯罪（不仅是谋杀）都是在临近地理区域之内的同一族群中发生的。作为美国这样一个至今仍然种族隔离盛行的国家，暴力犯罪集中发生于拥挤的贫民区和工业衰退地区并不奇怪。美国人传统上习惯于将暴力当作种族歧视的原因，但现实是针对黑人的种族主义本身才是在美国导致日常犯罪的机制和社会原因美国人传统上习惯于将暴力当作种族歧视的原因，但现实是针对黑人的种族主义本身才是在美国导致日常犯罪的机制和社会原因。

What Americans should reflect on is how deftly their society has contained and distilled the phenomenon into marginalized communities — and how that distribution of violence is something the majority of Americans of either political persuasion tend to deem irrelevant to their periodic national debates about the country’s safety or lack thereof. The Washington-based politician or journalist who sees a headline-grabbing rampage of shootings as a sign that America is descending into barbarity, and as threatening its status as an “advanced” country, exists in a kind of cognitive bubble: Literally only blocks away, bodies regularly drop at rates otherwise only seen in violence-prone corners of the developing world. Taking an even broader view, it is arguable that, but for modern advances in antibiotics and trauma care, murder rates in such parts of the United States would surpass those historically associated with medieval Europe. American “progress,” such as it is, has apparently consisted in merely blunting some deadly outcomes and enabling others.美国人应当反思的是他们的社会是何其巧妙地将暴力现象隔离到了边缘社群里，而这种犯罪分布本身已经被大多数属于两党的美国人视为无物，在关于国家安全或者不安全的辩论中几乎消失。华盛顿的一些政客和记者将频频发生的枪击事件视为美国堕落回蛮荒状态的标志，或认为它们威胁了美国作为发达国家的身份。这些人都生活在自己的认知泡沫里：距离他们几个街区的地方，尸体出现的频率就和发展中国家的暴力地区差不多。从更宏观的历史角度来看，我们甚至可以说，如果没有现代医学在抗生素和疗伤方面的进步，美国这些地区的谋杀率比中世纪欧洲还要高。 美国所谓的“进步”是对一些暴力犯罪的遏制，对其他的暴力犯罪的纵容。

Guns are undeniably a central part of this landscape. In environments in which violence is already present, and in which more violence is probable, the presence of guns appears to quicken lethal outcomes. This is true on both the level of households and the level of communities. Research indicates that, over the course of their lifetimes, one-quarter of American women will experience physical or sexual violence from a domestic partner; this rate puts the United States alongside Jordan, Serbia, Nepal, and Guatemala. But when a gun is present in an American home where there is a history of domestic violence, the likelihood that a woman living there will be killed has been credibly estimated to increase some twentyfold. On the community level, homicide rates in cities like Chicago and New York are roughly equivalent — but only for murders that don’t involve guns; gun homicides in the former are easily an order of magnitude higher than the latter.毋庸置疑，枪支是问题的核心内容之一。在暴力已经存在、而更多暴力可能出现的环境下，枪支的存在加快了致命结果的出现。在个别家庭里是如此，在社区层面上也是如此。研究表明，在一生中，四分之一的美国妇女会遭遇伴侣的身体或性暴力，这一比率和约旦、塞尔维亚、尼泊尔、危地马拉的数据比肩。但是当有家暴现象的家庭中存在枪支时，可信的估计表明妇女被枪杀的可能性就提高了20倍。在社区层面上，芝加哥、纽约这样的大城市非枪支谋杀率是几乎一样的，但是在芝加哥，枪支造成的谋杀案则要比纽约高很多。

But these considerations do not easily translate to the national level. Although in the past year many cities have experienced a sharp and disturbing increase in homicides, with no clear explanation as to why, overall violent crime rates have been dropping for decades, even as Americans have consistently expressed a conviction that crime has been steadily getting “worse” and even as they have accordingly purchased more guns than ever before. From a certain perspective, when considering America’s unprecedented saturation with firearms, observers may be forced to admit that the surprising thing is how much more violent America could be than it currently is.但是这些因素并不一定能够在全国范围内适用。在过去一年中，虽然美国人不断表示犯罪问题在“恶化”，购买的枪支比以往任何时候都多，很多城市的谋杀率大幅上升且原因不明，但是总体来说暴力犯罪的比率在过去的几十年中一直在下降。从某个角度上说，虽然美国前所未有的枪支泛滥，观察家们也许不得不承认令人吃惊的是美国本可以比现在更加暴力。

Gun enthusiasts try out laser sighting systems at an annual National Rifle Association meeting, held in Louisville, Kentucky, on May 21, 2016. If there is any singular feature that characterizes how many Americans understand our national relation to violence, it is our ingenuity at looking the other way, at siloing problems away from one another, and at disavowing, sublimating, or repackaging our complicity in the most easily observable patterns.如果用一个特征来形容美国人如何看待自己国家同暴力的关系， 那就是我们聪明地无视问题、孤立问题、我们否认、美化或者重新包装这最简单明了的行为模式中我们共同犯下的罪行。

Signs of supposed progress in expressions of American violence often disguise profound continuities. For example: The era of highly visible public lynchings, which is estimated to have claimed some 5,000 lives, has passed. Yet since then we have moved on to an institutionalized death penalty regime, wherein states that previously had the highest numbers of lynchings now have the greatest numbers of black people on death row. Both per capita and in raw numbers, America’s prisons warehouse more human beings than any other country on the planet, and its police demonstrate a clear pattern of racial bias in killing their fellow citizens at a rate stratospherically higher than that of any of its supposed peer nations. U.S. soldiers are deployed in some 135 countries, and the number of troops actually engaged in combat is almost certainly much higher than authorities are willing to admit. Meanwhile, America is far and away the world’s largest exporter of weapons, with the global arms industry’s largest and most profitable players based in the United States and reaping booming markets in conflict zones while being heavily subsidized by federal and state tax dollars.美国暴力问题貌似出现的积极改善通常隐瞒了深刻的持续问题。美国暴力问题貌似出现的积极改善通常隐瞒了深刻的持续问题。例如，黑帮对黑人的公开私刑据估计已经造成了5000人死亡，但那个时代已经过去了。我们进入了死刑体制机制化的时代，过去公开私刑数量最多的州目前也有着最多的黑人死刑犯。美国监狱关押的人数在人均和绝对水平上都高于世界上任何其他国家；美国警察在杀害美国公民时表现出来的种族歧视也远远超过任何类似的国家。美国现在在135个国家部署了士兵，实际参与战斗的士兵数字也比政府愿意承认的高许多。同时，美国还是世界上最大的军火出口商，全球军火产业中最大、利润最高的公司都在美国，冲突地区给他们带来了巨大的市场，他们同时还享受着联邦和州税带来的巨额补贴。

Everyday Americans may not be “inherently more prone to violence,” but our way of life is certainly structured around violence and around selectively empowering, quarantining, directing, and monetizing it at home and abroad. The majority of Americans apparently find no cognitive dissonance in this arrangement, if we even perceive it at all. Instead, we express bafflement and outrage that we are not something other than what we are and what we have always been. Plumbing what lurks within the “essential American soul,” a cynic might suggest, is a self-indulgent exercise, a red herring. The better question might be whether we even have one in the first place.寻常美国人也许并不“从骨子里倾向暴力”，但是我们的生活方式很明显围绕着暴力展开，充斥着在国内和国外选择性支持、隔离、支配、以及商业化的暴力行为。大多数美国人对这样的安排并无异议，很多人甚至对此毫无察觉。相反，如果有人认为我们表里不一，我们则表示困惑和愤怒。愤世嫉俗者可能会说，探索“真实的美国灵魂”本身就是自我放纵、是烟雾弹。真正的问题是我们是否从一开始就具有灵魂。