无人喝彩的民主制
本站前言:这个文章对社会组织和制度建设研究还是有意义,至少代表了一种情况的存在.
西方的那一套有自己的生存现实,老要搞拿来主义是不对的,就如人类的文明起源都没有搞清楚,你能够说你那就是先进的吗.
作者：英国《金融时报》专栏作家约翰·劳埃德(John Lloyd)
2008年6月13日 星期五
不知不觉当中，我们的世界观已经发生了改变。俄罗斯，更重要的是中国，它们已不再被看作是“未来的”大国：我们已逐步将其视为“现实中的”大国。这种想法令人忧惧：它们会不会像历史上由来已久的那样，将世界看作一个“零和博弈”（zero-sum game）的宇宙？在这样的宇宙秩序里，如果太阳从东方升起，它就得（而且必须要）在西方降落。另一个发现，也使得这样的担忧与日俱增：这两个国家都没兴趣成为民主国家。就像罗伯特•卡根（Robert Kagan）在新著《历史的回归与梦想的终结》（The End of Dreams and the Return of History）里所提到的那样：“俄罗斯与中国的当权者相信强势中央政权的益处，并且蔑视民主体系中的弱点。”
不仅是当权者才会这样想。在BBC2台的周日节目《俄罗斯：与乔纳森•丁布尔比一起旅行》（Russia: A Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby）里，一位年轻人参加了圣彼得堡的一场聚会，聚会上满是用英语交谈、游历广泛、且饱经世故的人。这位年轻人说：“要知道，民主不再具有什么实质意义了。”另一位客人凑过来小声说道：“我本人并不喜欢民主。”在BBC2台的周六节目《紫禁城的秘密》（Secrets of the Forbidden City）里，出现了一位英国小伙，他是奥雅纳（Arup）公司在北京某处工地的建筑工程师。他略带羞赧地说：“他们这里是一党制的国家……当然也就不像西方国家那样又混乱又拖沓。”即使是西方人，当他们感受到中国式效率的一点好处时，就会蔑视民主体制里的弱点。
《紫禁城的秘密》所探讨的是15世纪早期明朝嗜杀成性的永乐皇帝。在他的统治期间，紫禁城建筑群在新都北京落成。永乐帝建紫禁城的目的，是为了巩固自身的权力。由于他采用暴力手段从侄儿手中篡夺皇权，因此他的权力基础并不稳固。近期发现的一些文档，也更加详尽地表述了这个故事：《紫》片就是对这个故事的还原，其中的一些片段则闪迴到当代中国。这部片子拍得有些过火，但它一边通过讲故事的叙述方式来推动影片的发展，一边也列举出了这个世界上最大宫殿的各种规模数据：100万名奴役工人被遣往人烟罕至的森林里伐木（半数的人未能生还）；重修从南京通往北京的大运河；建立由太监组成的管理阶层，以便监督基础设施方面的各项创新。至于后来同样践履大位、并且同样嗜杀的毛泽东，他对永乐皇帝也是大加推崇：毛和幸存下来的同志们住在永乐帝建造的宫殿里。这也是他身后的历届继任者所居住的地方。
与之相应的是，最终的结局便是规模和恐怖。永乐帝认定自己的一位嫔妃与太监相互调谑（也就只能如此了），于是便一举屠杀了2000名宫人。这也没什么：在那个年代里，皇帝们经常会做出比这更出格的事情。中国当下的情形依然如此。在影片中，与这些伐木工、太监以及不幸的嫔妃们交织在一起的故事，是当代中国的诸多闪光点：例如中国的在建项目如何消化掉了全球近一半的钢材，以及1/3的水泥；这些项目包括在北京新建300座摩天大楼、以及国内近100座新机场的计划等等。
尽管俄罗斯有一位“退而不休”、险恶粗鄙的前总统，但它基本上还算不上是中国这种类型的国家。唯一例外的共同点，是俄罗斯对于民主的鄙夷。乔纳森•丁布尔比受到俄罗斯情绪的感染，也表现出了自己对举止得体的蔑视。他在公映这部系列片时透露，自己已在若干年前与妻子分手，并且需要一次“救赎之旅”，这样可以“让我有时间来……想想已经发生的事情：这种痛苦持续了很长的时间。”
这部系列剧的“持续时间”也很长：总共有5集，每集1个小时。从第一集来看，显然这是一部非常感伤的片子：丁布尔比的救赎之旅，历经了破旧的摩尔曼斯克（Murmansk）、卡累利阿湖泊群（Karelian lakes），并在最后到达了圣彼得堡。他在半路上还遇见了一位白巫师（注：指实施与人无害的巫术的人）。这位巫师用一把刀给他做背部按摩；巫师那只漂亮的虎皮鹦鹉还在他肩膀上拉了一泡鸟粪；几位腰身柔曼的妙龄女郎，身着传统服装，为他跳舞唱歌，还称他是“俊俏小伙”（krasivy paren）。这样的情形，看来确实有助于疗治创伤。
然而，真正具有启示意味的，则是另一个时刻：一位面目稚嫩的小伙子带他来到圣彼得堡一座颓摇欲坠的大厦跟前。这个地方曾被用作集体公寓，而这位年轻人曾经在这里长大成熟。丁布尔比问他：你怎能忍受得了这种狭窄的空间，以及周围无时不在的一大群人？他回答道：“我们俄罗斯人将生命与日常生活分开来看。”在俄共垮台前后的那段时间里，我曾在俄罗斯居住过。他的这句话，是我那段时间里遭遇到的人群，以及种种经历的极好浓缩。内在的生命、浓烈的友情、嬉游的欢娱，包括文字的游戏，构成了一个平行于现实，却又更为生动的宇宙。相形之下，从其他的宇宙当中，只会生发出失望。对于拥有这种思维的人来说，现实世界令人失望，而民主可能只是现实世界的另一种伎俩；对于中国人来说，民主会延缓那些摩天大楼的崛起速度，它可能会结束祖国山河的一片大好时光。无论将来会出现什么样的情况，我们在这里所谈论的，都是一些规模巨大的东西。对于我们这些欧洲细佬们来说，只能感到震撼。
译者/李晖
No cheers for democracy
By John Lloyd
Friday, June 13, 2008
Stealthily, our view of the world has changed. We no longer see Russia, and above all China, as powers-to-be: we have come to see them as powers-that-are, and the thought is a fearful one. Will they see the world, as they have done throughout their histories, as a zero-sum universe in which, if the sun rises in the east, it sets – should set – in the west? Feeding that fear comes a realisation: that they are not interested in being democracies. The path up Mount Fukuyama is closed. As Robert Kagan puts it in his just-published The Return of History and the End of Dreams, “the rulers of Russia and China believe in the virtues of strong central government and disdain the weakness of the democratic system”.
And not just the rulers. In one scene in Russia: A Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby (Sunday, BBC2), a young man at a party in St Petersburg that was full of English-speaking, well-travelled sophisticates, said: “You know, democracy has no real meaning any more.” Another guest glided up and murmured: “I don't like democracy myself.” And in Secrets of the Forbidden City (Saturday, BBC2) a nice English chap, a construction engineer working for Arup on a Beijing building site, said slightly bashfully: “They have a one-party state here ... and there certainly isn't the same confusion and delay as in the west.” Even westerners, with the benefit of a bit of Chinese efficiency, disdain the weakness of the democratic system.
Secrets ... was set in the reign of the early 15th-century Ming emperor and mass murderer Yongle, who built the Forbidden City palace complex in his new capital, Beijing. He did so to underpin his power, shakily built on the base of his violent deposition of the chosen emperor, his nephew. Documents recently discovered tell this story in some detail: and Secrets ... reconstructed it, with interludes flashing forward to today's China. It was hammy, but a storybook narrative drove it along, as did the recitation of the scale of the world's largest palace – a million slave workers sent logging in uncharted forests (half never came out); a grand canal rebuilt from Nanjing to Beijing; a managerial class of eunuchs created to oversee the infrastructural innovations. Mao Zedong, later successor as emperor and mass murderer, much admired Yongle: he and those of his comrades he had not had killed lived in the palaces Yongle built, and their successors do so still.
The denouement was suitably massive and horrible. Yongle had more than 2,000 of his concubines slaughtered for the alleged dallying of one of them with a eunuch – a dallying that could only have gone so far. No matter: in those days, emperors always went much further, and China still does. Interlaced with the logs, eunuchs and the unfortunate concubines were contemporary nuggets – such as that half the world's steel and a third of its cement are sucked up by China's building programme; one that includes plans for 300 skyscrapers in Beijing and nearly 100 new airports in the country.
Russia, for all the menacing boorishness of its barely retiring president, isn't quite in that league, except in contempt for democracy. Infected, Jonathan Dimbleby showed contempt for propriety by publicising this series through revelations that he had left his wife some years before, and needed a “redemptive journey” which had “given me time to ... think about what happened: pain continues for a long time”.
The series also continues for a long time: five one-hour episodes, and on the evidence of the first it will be quite soppy – Dimbleby on redemptive journeys through battered Murmansk, the Karelian lakes and down to St Petersburg – meeting, on the way, a nice white witch who gave him a kind of back massage with a knife and whose nice budgie relieved itself on his shoulder, and some nice ladies of a certain age and girth who put on traditional dress and danced and sang for him, calling him a krasivy paren (handsome lad), which seemed to help the pain.
There was a genuinely revelatory moment, though, when a youngish man took him to a crumbling St Petersburg mansion that had been made into collective flats, where the man had grown up and matured. When Dimbleby asked him how he put up with the cramped quarters and the crowds of people constantly around, the man said: “We Russians separate life, and everyday life.” It was a good encapsulation of my experience of the people I met when I lived in Russia before and after the collapse of communism. The inner life, the intensity of friendship, the delight in play, including the word play, constituted a parallel and much more vivid universe than that from which only disappointment could be expected. For such a mentality, democracy can be seen as merely another manoeuvre of the disappointing real world; while for the Chinese, it threatens an end to the good times rolling over their land by slowing up the skyscrapers. However this may go, we're talking massive here, and we little European peoples quake.经济观察,无人喝彩的民主制
