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身為芝加哥大學教務長,很榮幸介紹今天的期末演講嘉賓-肯尼斯.彭慕蘭。彭慕蘭教授於2012年加入本校教職員行列,成為本校第18位大學級教授(university professor),大學級教授的資格為符合本校最高學術目標的國際公認專業領域卓越學者。身為中國史專家,他以現代觀點探討全球史與東西方經濟發展的關聯,他對歷史的研究延伸至社會科學與人文學科,在許多領域造成影響。他的研究涉及18世紀至今的社會、經濟、環境、政治變遷之間的關聯,多半與中國有關,也包括與其他國家的比較及關聯。彭慕蘭教授目前致力於幾本著作,其中一本是探討近代中國的土地權與水權,以及其對社會結構與經濟發展的影響。另一本著作《為何中國如此龐大》(Why Is China So Big),探討中國在單一政治體制下的發展與維持。他是唯一獲得兩次美國歷史協會費正清獎的學者,因為他關於東亞歷史的傑出著作《大分流:歐洲、中國與現代世界經濟的發展》以及《腹地的構建:1853至1937年華北鄉村的國家、社會、經濟》。他曾獲得許多獎項,包括美國學術團體理事會、美國哲學學會、古根漢基金會、普林斯頓高等研究院以及國家人文基金會頒發的獎項。身為美國歷史學會會長、本校歷史系系主任及多學科領域首席研究員,彭慕蘭教授發起「如何協助研究生為校內外生涯做好準備」的全國討論。今天的演講主題是「為不完整而奮鬥」,請跟我一起歡迎大學級教授肯尼斯.彭慕蘭,第522屆期末演講嘉賓肯尼斯。
十分感謝,很榮幸來到這裡。據說芝加哥大學期末演講很棒的一點是,我今天可以「討論自己的研究」,這在其他大學的期末演講相當少見。儘管如此,我們不會以學術會議的討論方式進行演講,因此請大家放鬆。演講內容不會有評估農民的卡路里攝取量、森林濫伐情況的分析或對中國治國策略演進的反思。回顧過去的期末演講,做為借鑒-這是歷史學家的職業病-我查閱上一位擁有這份榮耀的歷史學家-我的同事Adam Green的演講內容。他討論了一種與歷史無關的趨勢,有時被稱為「正向心理學」或「幸福研究」,以及這種趨勢與他所研究的非裔美國人歷史的可能關聯。這就是芝加哥大學:一所注重跨學科研究的大學。我也注意到Adam演講中一個發人深省的觀點,關於20世紀初一位研究奴隸制度的著名歷史學家。雖然他是一位才華洋溢的學者,他的研究卻使世界變得更糟,他描繪了一幅具說服力但虛假的畫面:和諧的種植園與不嚮往自由的人們。
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It says some wonderful things about the University of Chicago that my instructions for today were“talk about your research”: something that is rarely part of convocation speeches elsewhere. But even here, we do not talk about research at convocation the same way we talk about it at academic conferences. So relax: there will be no estimates of peasants’ caloric intake, analyses of deforestation, or reflections on the evolution of Chinese statecraft. Looking back for guidance – an occupational hazard – I checked what the last historian to have this
honor, my colleague Adam Green, had said. He discussed a trend well outside history– what is sometimes called “positive psychology” or “happiness research” -- and its possible connection to his own research in African American history. It’s U of C: Inter-disciplinarity R Us. I also noted a sobering comment in Adam’s talk , about a famous early 20th century historian of slavery: that though he was clearly a gifted scholar, his work had made the world worse by painting a persuasive but false picture of harmonious plantations, and of people unsuited for freedom.
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我也打算從心理學家Daniel Kahnemann的研究談起,他因對行為經濟學的基礎貢獻獲得諾貝爾獎。探討另一個觀點:「令人信服的歷史可能對你產生壞影響。」我希望這些概念的結合能引發你思考芝加哥大學堅持「教育不僅在於專門學科」的做法成就了什麼。儘管這場演講是為了恭喜你們期末順利,及祝福你們一切順利,主要目的還是探討令許多畢業生和家長困擾的問題:我在這裡學到什麼?我為了什麼做準備?Kahneman的基本觀點是:人類天生抗拒統計性思考,仰賴瞬間的判斷,與使瞬間判斷合理化的感性故事。舉例來說,他向人們闡述美國腎癌罹患率最低的地區多半是南部或中西部小鎮,當地居民上教堂比例較高,多半支持共和黨等等。許多人聽見後會迅速將這些事實組合起來,形成一個有利健康的解釋:戶外生活、新鮮食物與堅定的道德信仰。但Kahnemann隨後指出,腎癌罹患率最高的地區也多半是南部與中西部小鎮,當地居民上教堂比例較高,傾向於支持共和黨。人們聽見後,將這些事實組合成一個關於貧窮、無知和管理鬆散的故事。真正的解釋是,腎癌相當罕見,因此人口眾多的鄉鎮罹病率接近全國平均值人口,較少的鄉鎮罹病率遠低於平均值,如同大醫院每年的男性出生率約51%,但某些日子的男性出生率可能是20%或80%。那些例外鄉鎮(罹病率較低),唯一的客觀事實是人口較少,但我們被編造故事解釋所有事實的渴望所誤導,或許這也證實了我們對「刻板印象」的執著,這導致我們容易受到日常生活中「常識」的影響。
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Let me also start with a psychologist’s work -- that of Daniel Kahnemann, who won a Nobel Prize for fundamental contributions to behavioral economics – and with another idea about how compelling history can be bad for you. This joint exercise is, I hope, not a bad proxy for thinking about what U of C achieves by insisting that education be more than technical. So while this talk is, of course, about congratulating you and wishing you well, it aims more squarely at part of a question that nags at many graduates (and parents): What did I learn here? What am I prepared for? Kahneman’s basic point is that humans are hard-wired to resist thinking statistically, relying instead on snap judgments and emotionally powerful stories that are rationalizations of those snap judgments. In one illustration, he describes telling people that the counties in the US with the lowest rates of kidney cancer are mostly small rural ones, which tend to be in the South or Midwest, have high rates of church attendance, vote Republican, etc. Many people hearing this will quickly put these facts together, framing a story in which outdoor living, fresh food, and firm morals explain good health. But then Kahnemann notes that the counties with the highest kidney cancer rates are mostly small and rural, usually Southern or Midwestern, have high rates of church attendance, and lean Republican; people hearing this assemble a story about poverty, ignorance, and lax regulation. The real explanation is simply that kidney cancer is rare. Thus counties with big populations will have rates clustering around the national mean, while some counties with small populations will be very far from the mean, at both ends – just as roughly 51% of any major hospital’s births over a year will be boys, but the figure for some days will be 20% or 80%. The only relevant fact about the exceptional counties is their small populations–but we are misled by our desire to have a story explaining all the facts, , and perhaps also confirming our stereotypes. This has disturbing implications for the “common sense” we use in daily life.
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你們或許能明白為何歷史學家也會有這種困擾,即使那些-如同我本身-傾向於將事物盡可能量化的人。因為無法做實驗,我們經常藉由觀察與已知事實的相符性來評估結論,這使我們容易偏向於那些宣稱能解釋所有已知事實的結論,如Kahneman察覺的人們一貫做法。事實上在他400多頁的著作中,唯一涉及「歷史」的主題提出的結論是:「我們傾向於構築與相信與過去事實有關的敘述,這將誤導我們信賴名不符實的『專家』。」為了避免這種情況,我們必須謹記:符合所有已知事實不等於能完整解釋所有已知事實。不充分的解釋相當於雙面刃,歷史學家不斷強調「在相關背景下」解讀歷史,想真正「瞭解」林肯第二次就職演說,必須明白1865年時演說中關鍵字的用法,以及當時人們對南方各州的態度;想瞭解中國人為何參與太平天國起義,必須瞭解當時中國人談論的一切事物,從地主和佃農的關係到神靈附體到滿清官員與英國鴉片商的勾結。這或許得藉由零碎的記錄構築一個完整的故事。
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You can probably see why it is also disturbing for historians, even those (like myself) who like to quantify when we can. Unable to do experiments, we often begin evaluating arguments by asking if they are consistent with all confirmed facts – which can easily slide into preferring the argument that claims to explain all confirmed facts, as Kahneman catches people doing. And indeed, the only index entry for “history” in his 400-plus page book references the assertion that “our tendency to construct and believe coherent narratives of the past” deludes us into trusting incompetent “experts.” To avoid this, history must always bear in mind that being consistent with all confirmed facts is different from explaining them all. Parsimonious explanations are a two-edged sword. Historians talk endlessly about reading “in context”: that you only really “get” Lincoln’s Second Inaugural when you know how its key words were being used in 1865 and what others wanted to do with the South, and that to grasp why people joined China’s Taiping Rebellion one must read what they (or their literate neighbors) said about everything from landlord-tenant relations to spirit possession to rumors about collusion between Manchu officials and British opium traders. This may seem to call for constructing a total story from the fragmentary record.
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Geoffrey Elton 1967年的經典著作《歷史的實踐》鼓勵我們研究測試目標,「直到能預測他們接下來會說什麼」。但背景知識無法保證預測的準確性,頂多讓我們知道測試目標接下來可能說或做的事物範圍,然後觀察這些可能性將如何變化。換句話說,重建「背景」讓我們瞭解留給研究者什麼樣的空間是重要的,因此這種「不完整」是歷史學家所追求的。我們必須追求「不完整」,因為Kahneman的觀點是正確的:我們的缺點是想得到一個完整、確定的畫面,這需要知識、甚至道德訓練的幫助,在累積知識的同時進行系統性整理,在偏離真理前制止自己。這種對「不完整」的追求與堅持違反我們具有危險傾向的天性,我們往往自認對事物的瞭解已足夠接近真相,認為新資訊不足為奇。過度「完整」的歷史往往呈現一種相當具體的形式:著眼於一個國家,賦予其具有單一性、普遍性、永存性的角色,構築成一個故事。當然,我們知道每個國家的內部情況並非一致,外部的影響也大不相同,然而,現代社會中的國家認同感與強加於其上的利害關係如此強烈,以至於我們一再屈服於本能的誘惑,為了統一和解釋所有事實,將國家區分為不同單元,將其「社會結構」或「文化」解讀為命運使然。
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Geoffrey Elton’s 1967 classic The Practice of History urged us to study our subjects “until one knows what they are going to say next.” But contextual knowledge never yields predictive certainty – at best, it lets us bound the range of things our subjects might have said (and done) next, and see how those possibilities were changing. In other words, reconstructing “context” shows us what room was left for actors to matter. Thus the “incompleteness” that the historian reaches. And one has to strive for that because Kahneman is right: our default is to want a total, deterministic picture, and it takes intellectual (perhaps even moral) discipline to simultaneously accumulate knowledge, arrange it systematically, and stop ourselves before we go too far. This is incompleteness achieved and preserved against our natural but dangerous tendency to think we know enough to close our stories, and to render new information unsurprising. Excessively “complete” history has often taken a very specific form: that of tales held together by focusing on a nation and imputing to it a single, pervasive, and self-perpetuating character. We know, of course, that nations have never been either homogeneous within nor isolated from broader influences without; yet national identities (and the interests reinforcing them) have been so strong in modern times that we have repeatedly succumbed to the temptation to make nations into units for unifying and explaining all the facts, reading their “social structure” or “culture” as destiny.
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然而,越來越多前瞻性歷史研究與其他種類的單元產生關聯:追蹤人口、商品、思想與細菌的長距離傳播,以及同教派信仰者、貿易夥伴、工藝或科學開創者,或海洋盆地居民之間的交流。在芝加哥大學和其他大學,我們的課程仍以一些較常見的單元區分,例如「中國」、「墨西哥」、「美國」等,對人類學家或社會學家來說並非完全如此。我們或許擁有Kahneman指出的懶惰因素,即安於我們本身或學生具有的缺陷:根據已知「模式」重塑包含所有事實的故事,儘管其中存在更複雜的形式,儘管當我們進一步研究時,我們所知的程度足以得到更嚴格的結論。然而,其中也存在較積極的作法。很少人能否認,我們可以將出生率下降,法蘭西第三共和國政權與19世紀末藝術運動統稱為「法國1870-1914」,我們可以合理期待,藉由比較這些事件獲得一些解釋,因為我們知道有人經歷過這一切。
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And while more and more cutting-edge historical research works with other kinds of units -- tracing long-distance flows of people, commodities, ideas, and germs, and networks of co-religionists, trading partners, practitioners of some craft or science, or denizens of some ocean basin -- our curricula, at Chicago and elsewhere, are still dominated by units such as “China,” “Mexico,” and “the United States.” (This is less true of, say, anthropologists or sociologists.) We may have here elements of the kind of laziness Kahneman points to: indulging our own or our students’ weakness for all-inclusive stories that re-create known “types,” albeit in more sophisticated forms, even though, we know enough to be more rigorous. Yet there is also something more positive going on. While few of us want to argue anymore that one can tie falling birth rates, Third Republic politics and fin de siècle artistic movements into a neat package called “France 1870-1914,” we can legitimately expect some explanatory gain from juxtaposing those things because we know that the same people experienced all three.
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藉由包羅萬象的失敗模型,從古典馬克思主義到現代化理論,我們將這些不同事件放在一起,並非為了減少它們對一些新主要變數的影響,而是因為為了在特定領域尋找可能的差異性解釋,我們必須廣泛撒網。在任何研究領域中,最主要的限制往往並不明確,因為它們被視為理所當然。一方面,它們包含給定的物質條件,如降雨量和礦藏地點,或為了應付這些給定條件而制定的規則。其改變相當緩慢,長期看來可視為固定不變,然後追蹤它們的影響,如同我的一些研究。另一方面,這些限制被視為理所當然,也包括給定目標強烈堅持的假設。這個假設也許在短期內同樣具有約束力、同樣難以察覺,例如,主流生活也許由「對人們來說自然之事」的想法所塑造,這種想法看似顯而易見,以至於只有在非主流資源中才會清晰地浮上檯面:存在於不得不教導這些「命定」角色的孤兒檔案中,存在於將偶然解釋為「天意」的地方神話故事中,存在於因違反當時常識而總是被邊緣化的組織宣言中。
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Sobered by the failures of various all-encompassing models – from classical Marxism to modernization theory -- we bring these different registers together not to reduce them all to effects of some new master variable, but because our search for differentiated explanations of what was possible in specific realms must cast a wide net. The most crucial constraints in any sphere of action are often not enunciated, because they are taken for granted. They include, on the one hand, material conditions like rainfall and the location of mineral deposits that really are given, or rules devised to cope with those givens which change so slowly that we can take them as fixed over long periods, and track their effects (as some of my work does). On the other hand, they include a given group’s strongly held assumptions, which may be equally binding in the short run, and equally invisible. Mainstream lives may, for instance, be shaped by ideas about what is natural to men and women which seem so obvious that they only surface explicitly in non-mainstream sources: the archives of an orphanage that found it had to teach these “natural” roles after all, local miracle tales that encode exceptions to “nature,” or the manifesto of an organization that always remained on the fringes precisely because it denied the common sense of its time.
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事實上有時歷史學家必須藉由與其他類似情況比較,才能察覺一些視為理所當然的事物,因此我們藉此瞭解其中的可能性,無論是關於國家或其他層面的「背景」。不僅是我們從文獻中查到的事件,或從歷史學家前輩承襲來的知識,我們迅速建構、重建這些背景,以便為不斷變化的問題尋找答案。藉由這種做法,我們得以更加瞭解特定時間和地點的結構、機構、文化之間的相互作用,探索在一知半解的情況下瞭解其相互作用的方式。這將我們帶回「今天我們為何在此」這個問題。因為你們當中只有少數人是歷史學家或將成為歷史學家,但你們所有人都將成為歷史中的角色。因為本校,無論在課程或校園文化上,你們都參與本校文化的再造並留下足跡,在結構與機構上樹立良好典範。因為本校異乎尋常地堅持你們從許多不同角度反映-不僅是你們所學的事物,也包括你們能教導的事物。你們已具備-不僅是尋找及參與故事真相的能力,也具備阻止自己偏離故事真相的能力。離校之際,對那些打算留在這裡的人來說,工作的樂趣之一就是教導能傳承我們研究的人,但幫助與我們不同領域的人瞭解我們的工作也能得到同樣的樂趣,瞭解如何仿效我們的做法或許能幫助他們評估及改變他們領域中的可能限制。因此除了恭喜你們、祝你們好運,我還想感謝你們的參與。你們已完成學業,現在請邁開腳步,為追求「不完整」而奮鬥,謝謝。
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In fact sometimes what is taken for granted only surfaces when the historian him or herself introduces comparisons with a partially analogous situation elsewhere. So the “contexts” –national or otherwise -- through which we seek to understand what was possible aren’t simply things we read in the documents, or inherit from the last historian to study something: we build and rebuild them, somewhat on the fly, to answer an ever-shifting set of questions. By doing so, we get better –at understanding the interplay of structure, agency, and culture in some particular time and place, and at developing ways for understanding that interplay in other half-known situations. That brings us back to why we are here today – because while only a handful of you are or will be historians, all of you are and will be historical actors. And because our university, both in its curriculum and in its culture – a culture you have both reproduced and left your mark on, in a nice example of structure and agency – is unusually insistent that you reflect, from many different angles, upon what you learn and what can be learned, you are equipped, not only to find and act on the stories in the facts, but to stop yourself from leaping on stories that the facts don’t need. For those of us who remain here as you leave, one joy of our work is teaching people who will carry on what we do; but an equal joy is helping people who will do very different things get some sense of what we do, and how doing likewise may help them as they assess and shape the limits of what’s possible in their fields. So along with congratulations and good luck, let me say thank you. Your educations here are complete; now go forth and strive for incompleteness.