Level 5-Day 25.Vaclav Havel: 'Contamination of morality' (1)

词汇提示

1.contamination 污染

2.morality 道德

3.variation 变化

4.flourished 繁荣的

5.humiliates 羞辱

6.exploits 剥夺

7.obsolete 过时的

8.bequeathed 遗赠的

9.concepts 基本观念

10.regime 政权

11.autonomous 自主性

12.inexorably 无情地

13.totalitarian 极权主义者

原文

Vaclav Havel: 'Contamination of morality' (1)

My dear fellow citizens, for forty years you heard from my predecessors on this day different variations of the same theme; how our country flourished, how many million tons of steel we produced, how happy we all were, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspectives were unfolding in front of us.

I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you.

Our country is not flourishing.

The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nation is not being used sensibly.

Entire branches of industry are producing goods which are of no interest to anyone, while we are lacking the things we need.

A state which calls itself a workers' state humiliates and exploits workers.

Our obsolete economy is wasting the little energy we have available.

A country that once could be proud of the educational level of its citizens spends so little on education that it ranks today as seventy-second in the world.

We have polluted our soil, our rivers and forests, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, and we have today the most contaminated environment in Europe.

Adult people in our country die earlier than in most other European countries...

But all this is still not the main problem.

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment.

We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.

We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves.

Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.

Only a few of us were able to cry out loud that the powers that be should not be all-powerful, and that special farms, which produce ecologically pure and top-quality food just for them, should send their produce to schools,children's homes, and hospitals if our agriculture was unable to offer them to all.

The previous regime - armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology - reduced man to a force of production and nature to a tool of production.

In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship.

It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine, whose real meaning is not clear to anyone.

It cannot do more than slowly but inexorably wear down itself and all its nuts and bolts.

When I talk about contaminated moral atmosphere, I am not talking just about the gentlemen who eat organic vegetables and do not look out of the plane windows.

I am talking about all of us.

We had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped to perpetuate it.

In other words, we are all - though naturally to differing extents - responsible for the operation of the totalitarian machinery; none of us is just its victim:we are all also its co-creators.

翻译

瓦茨拉夫·哈维尔:“道德的污染”(1)

我亲爱的同胞们，四十年来的今天，你们从我的前任那里听到同一主题的不同变化;我们的国家是多么繁荣，我们生产了多少百万吨的钢铁，我们是多么幸福，我们是多么信任我们的政府，多么光明的前景展现在我们面前。
我猜你向我推荐这个职位不是为了让我也对你撒谎。
我们的国家并不繁荣。
我们国家巨大的创造力和精神潜能没有得到合理的利用。
整个工业部门都在生产人们不感兴趣的产品，而我们却缺乏我们所需要的东西。
一个自称工人国家的国家是对工人的羞辱和剥削。
我们陈旧的经济正在浪费我们仅有的一点能源。
一个曾经可以为其公民的教育水平感到自豪的国家，在教育上的花费如此之少，以至于今天它在世界上排名第72位。
我们污染了祖先留给我们的土壤、河流和森林，我们今天的环境是欧洲污染最严重的。
我们国家的成年人比大多数其他欧洲国家死得早。
但这还不是主要问题。
最糟糕的是，我们生活在一个被污染的道德环境中。
我们之所以道德上有问题，是因为我们习惯于说出与自己想法不同的东西。
我们学会了不相信任何东西，忽略彼此，只关心自己。
诸如爱、友谊、同情、谦卑或宽恕之类的概念失去了它们的深度和维度，对我们中的许多人来说，它们仅仅代表了心理学上的独特性，或者它们就像来自远古时代的误入歧途的问候，在计算机和宇宙飞船的时代有点可笑。
我们中只有少数人能够大声喊出，权力不应该是万能的，如果我们的农业不能为所有人提供食物，那些专门为他们生产生态纯净和高质量食物的特殊农场应该把他们的产品送到学校、儿童之家和医院。
前政权以其傲慢和不宽容的意识形态武装起来，把人贬低为生产力，把自然贬低为生产工具。
在这一点上，它既攻击了它们的实质，也攻击了它们的相互关系。
它把那些在自己的国家里熟练地工作的天才和自主的人，沦为某种巨大的、吵闹的、臭烘烘的机器的螺丝钉，而这些机器的真正意义谁也不清楚。
它只能缓慢而无情地消耗自身及其所有的螺母和螺栓。
当我谈到被污染的道德氛围时，我指的不仅仅是那些吃有机蔬菜、不看窗外的绅士们。
我说的是我们所有人。
我们都已经习惯了极权主义制度，把它当作一个不可改变的事实来接受，从而助长了它的延续。
换句话说，我们所有人——尽管自然在不同程度上——都要对极权主义机器的运作负责;没有人只是它的受害者:我们都是它的共同创造者。