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2015-8-5
今天做了一点点翻译，水平太差，贴出来希望和大家交流交流。

Self-regard
You are not special
The Road to Character. By David Brooks.
Random House; 300 pages; $28. Allen Lane; £17.99
PEOPLE are too full of themselves, saysDavid Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times. Joe Namath, a starquarterback of the 1960s, once shouted to his bathroom mirror: “Joe! Joe!You’re the most beautiful thing in the world!”—with a reporter watching. But itis not just celebrities who puff themselves up, and the evidence is not justanecdotal. The proportion of American teenagers who believe themselves to be“very important” jumped from 12% in 1950 to 80% in 2005. On a test that askssubjects to agree or disagree with statements such as “I like to look at my body”and “Somebody should write a biography about me”, 93% of young Americans emergeas being more narcissistic than the average of 20 years ago.

纽约时报的专栏作家David Brooks说人们总是关注自己。20世纪60年代的四分卫明星Joe Namath，曾经在记者的注视下对着他卧室的镜子大喊“Joe！Joe！你是这个世界上最伟大的人！”但是不仅仅名人吹嘘他们自己，证据表明这不只是趣闻轶事。相信他们自己非常重要的美国青年的比例从1905年的12%跃升到了2005年的80%。在一项测试中93%的美国青年表现的比20年前更加自恋。

With the rise in self-regard has come an unprecedentedyearning for fame. In a survey in 1976, people ranked being famous 15th out of16possible life goals. By 2007, 51% of young people said it was one of their principalambitions. On a recent multiple choice quiz, nearly twice as many middle schoolgirls said they would rather be a celebrity’s personal assistant than thepresident of Harvard University.

In “The Road to Character” Mr Brooks chartsthe change in popular culture that made this possible. This involves digesting troughsfull of tripe such as Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray, Love”, a bestseller that tellswomen that “God dwells within you as yourself, exactly the way you are.” (Mr Brooksclaims to be “the only man ever to finish this book”.)
在”The Road to Character”这本书中，Brooks用图表说明了在流行文化中这种现象之所以发生的变化。其中包括消化一些无聊的废话，例如Elizabeth Gilbert的畅销书“Eat，Pray，love”，告诉妇女们“上帝以你的方式与你同在。”（Brooks声称是唯一读完这本书的男人。）

Not everyone these days is a self-loving birdbrain,he admits. Some are meritocratic materialists who have “streamlined [their]inner humanity to make [their] ascent more aerodynamic”. Mr Brooks offers analternative—and more austere—set of values to live by. People need torediscover that “the ultimate joys are moral joys”, he says. He offers a seriesof chapter-length biographies to illustrate this idea.
他承认并不是现在的每个人都是自恋的蠢货。一些唯物主义的精英他们优化内心的人格，提升的更加容易。Mr. Brooks 提供了一套更加俭朴的替代方案——一套生活价值观。他说人们需要重新去发现“终极的快乐是道德的快乐。”他提供了一系列章节的人物传记来表明他的想法。

He tells the story of Frances Perkins, whorather than looking inside herself to find a purpose in life asked what theworld was calling her to do. After she saw workers hurling themselves fromwindows to their deaths to avoid the great fire at the Triangle Shirtwaistfactory in 1911, she devoted herself to campaigning for better workingconditions. She rose to become Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of labour, andwas instrumental in the creation of Social Security (public pensions) inAmerica.

The ultimate sin, for the Oprah generation,is to be repressed. Nonsense, says Mr Brooks. Dwight Eisenhower spent his life repressinghis inner self, and it helped the Allies win the Second World War. He “spent thenights staring at the ceiling, racked by insomnia and anxiety, drinking andsmoking”. Yet “he put on a false front of confident ease and farm-boygarrulousness” to raise the troops’ morale. He was splendidly inauthentic.Later on, as president, he was willing to appear tongue-tied if it would helpconceal his designs. Indeed, he was happy to let people think him stupid, which“is how we know he was not a New Yorker”.

Dwight Eisenhower的一生都在压抑着自己的内心，这使得同盟国赢得了二战的胜利。他一整晚盯着天花板，受失眠和焦虑的煎熬，抽烟和酗酒。但是他摆出一副虚假的轻松自信以及乡下男孩般的健谈去提升军队的士气。之后作为总统，如果有助于隐藏他的想法的话，他更愿意闭口不言。事实上，他更乐意让人们认为他是个傻子，正如我们所知道的他不是纽约人一样。

This is not a reactionary book. Mr. Brooksacknowledges that earlier generations pointlessly abstained from certain pleasuresand cruelly disregarded the rights of women, non-whites and sexual minorities.His heroes are both ancient (St Augustine) and modern (Bayard Rustin). Hestresses that all were flawed (Eisenhower took a mistress, whom he treatedicily, for example) and some were often miserable (Samuel Johnson, author ofthe first English dictionary, lived in terror of hellfire). If you want to bereassured that you are special, you will hate this book. But if you likethoughtful polemics, it is worth logging off Facebook to read it.

这并不是一本保守的书。Mr.Brooks承认老一辈心甘情愿地抛弃一部分的享乐，并且残酷地否定妇女、有色人种和同性恋者的权益。他的英雄们既有古代的，也有现代的。他强调一切都是有缺陷的（比如艾森豪威尔有一个他很冷淡对待的“小三”），有的甚至是常常痛苦的（第一本英语字典的作者Samuel Johnson一生都活在对地狱火的恐惧之中）。如果你想得到“你是特别的”的肯定，你会讨厌这本书的。但如果你想看到充满思辨的想法法，这本书很值得你退出Facebook来读一读。