新概念英语3_le35-38

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[00:06.30]First listen and then answer the following question.
[00:11.05]What is the most influential factor in any human society?
[00:16.98]In man's early days,competition with other creatures must have been critical.
[00:24.56]But this phase of our development is now finished.
[00:29.52]Indeed,
[00:32.16]we lack practice and experience nowadays in dealing with primitive conditions.
[00:39.11]I am sure that,without modern weapons,
[00:43.86]I would make a very poor show of disputing the ownership of a cave with a bear,
[00:50.70]and in this I do not think that I stand alone.
[00:55.98]The last creature to compete with man was the mosquito.
[01:01.44]But even the mosquito
[01:04.68]has been subdued by attention to drainage and by chemical sprays
[01:11.16]Competition between ourselves,person against person,
[01:16.62]community against community,still persists,however;
[01:22.36]and it is as fierce as it ever was.
[01:26.83]But the competition of man against man is not the simple process
[01:32.68]envisioned in biology.
[01:36.16]It is not a simple competition for a
[01:40.83] fixed amount of food determined by the physical environment,
[01:46.40]because the environment that determines ourevolution
[01:51.05]is no longer essentially physical.
[01:55.49]Our environment is chiefly conditoned by the things we believe.
[02:01.23]Morocco and California are bits of the Earth in very similar latitudes,
[02:07.79]both on the west coasts of continents with similar climates,
[02:13.85]and probably with rather similar natural resources.
[02:19.13]Yet their present development is wholly different,
[02:23.88]not so much because of different people even,
[02:28.14]but because of the different thoughts that exist in the minds of their inhabitants.
[02:34.59]This is the point I wish to emphasize.
[02:39.66]The most important factor in our environment is the state of our own minds
[02:46.61]It is well known that where the white man has invaded a primitive culture,
[02:53.58]the most destructive effects have come not from physical weapons but from ideas.
[03:01.03]Ideas are dangerous.
[03:04.69]The Holy Office knew this full well
[03:09.23]when it caused heretics to be burned in days gone by
[03:14.38]Indeed,the concept of free speech only exists in our modern society
[03:21.53]because when you are inside a community,
[03:26.18]you are conditioned by the conventions of the community to such adegree
[03:32.95]that it is very difficult to conceive of anything really destructive.
[03:38.70]It is only someone looking on from outside that can inject the dangerous thoughts.
[03:46.56]I do not doubt that it would be possible to inject ideas into the modern world
[03:53.93]that would utterly destroy us.
[03:57.58]I would like to give you an example,but fortunately I cannot do so.
[04:04.35]Perhaps it will suffice to mention the nuclear bomb.
[04:09.78]Imagine the effect on a reasonably advanced technological society,
[04:16.31]one that still does not possess the bomb,of making it aware of the possibility,
[04:23.39]of supplying suffcient details to enable the thing to be constructed
[04:30.16]20 or 30 pages of information
[04:35.33]handed to any of the major world powers around the year 1925,
[04:42.59]would have been sufficient to change the course of world history.
[04:47.92]It is a strange thought,but I believe a correct one,
[04:52.88]that twenty or thirty pages of ideas and information
[04:58.21]would be capable of turning the present day world upside down,
[05:04.14]or even destroying it.
[05:07.80]I have often tried to conceive of what those pages might contain,
[05:13.97]but of course I cannot do so
[05:18.01]because I am a prisoner of the present-day world,just as all of you are.
[05:25.28]We cannot think outside the particular patterns
[05:30.45]that our brains are conditioned to
[05:34.50]or,to be more accurate we can think only a very little way outside
[05:41.66]and then only if we are very original.
[05:46.62]Lesson 46 Hobbies