西方的“免煮柿油”为何滞销

最近，东欧一些国家的知识分子在匈牙利的“中欧大学”聚会，讨论1989东欧“苏东波”以及2011年的“阿拉伯之春”问题。（见Hundary’s Revolution and the Arab Spring—by Christia Freeland @Reuters, 06/19/2011）。

其中有两个观点很有意思，特评介如下。

（1）在1989年“苏东波”前后，人们普遍相信：有了民主自由就会有经济繁荣。可是20多年后的今天， “民主”变成了滞销品。据人权活动家和由亿万富翁索罗斯赞助的《开放基金会》的负责人阿耶尔•奈尔说，那时候，美国非常成功地向全世界推销了这么一种观念：一个国家只要有政治上的自由，就会自然获得经济上的繁荣。可是现在，美国这套“免煮柿油”已经不吃香了。中国的崛起，以及西方国家在2008年金融风暴之后所面临的种种困难，打破了政治自由可以带动经济繁荣的神话。[评：“免煮柿油”终究不是好货。]

（2）通讯技术革命为人们提供了方便推翻专制政府的手段。但同时，这些技术也使得一个社会更加难于建立持久的、稳固的民主政治。政治科学家和研究民主与专制的著名思想家伊万•克拉斯蒂夫认为，通讯技术革命制造了“公共空间碎片”现象。互联网社会媒体的诞生，使得人们难于建立一个单一的公共讨论平台。人们往往倾向于接受“能够证实自己偏见的信息”（如成千上万的、互相取暖的博客）。这种“物以类聚”的现象，或许有利于人们组织起来去推翻一个暴君，但却非常不利于建立一个实行民主所依赖的公民空间。[评：积极推崇“民主”的人士，绕了半天，才知道“民主集中制”是必需的！]

 译后：

中国的一些所谓的“知识分子”（如常常在港台报刊杂志上撰文的许知远等），也哀叹中国“公民力量碎片化”。许知远甚至表露过埋怨、嫉妒韩寒的意思。不少华人知识分子，好高骛远，不想做艰苦的工作，只幻想着“一呼百应”。可悲！

原文如下：

– The first is that selling democracy has become harder now than it was 20 years ago. That’s because, as Aryeh Neier, the human rights activist and head of the Open Society Foundations, explained, the equation of prosperity and democracy, which was universally acknowledged in 1989 and the period that followed, has broken down today.

“In 1989, the U.S. had succeeded in conveying the view that economic prosperity and political freedom go hand in hand,” Mr. Neier said. “That is by no means so certain today. The rise of China and the difficulty the West continues to have in recovering from the financial crisis have broken the link between prosperity and freedom.”

– A second big idea was that while technology has probably made it easier to rebel against authoritarian governments, it has also made it tougher to build enduring, deeply rooted democratic polities to replace them.

Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist and one of the world’s leading thinkers about democracy and authoritarianism, argued that the communication revolution had created a “fragmentation of the public space.” Instead of all of us being part of a single public debate, the Internet and social media have allowed us all to consume only “the information that confirms our biases.” That may be useful when you are trying to bring together a crowd to topple a tyrant, but, as Krastev explained, it makes constructing the common civic space upon which a functioning democracy depends much harder.