Author: wulb

中共中央政治局委员、上海市委书记陈良宇腐败案成了近来的热门话题，中国大陆媒体的主要论调自然是称颂中共高层铁腕反腐、陈良宇及上海帮落马大快人心之类。海外英文媒体的分析重心集中于一点：反腐只是权力斗争手段，目的是为了即将召开的十七大人事安排洗牌。

认为此次反腐意在权力斗争，符合中国的实际情况。因为中国的腐败已经渗透到国家机器的每一根神经末稍，统治集团早就在政治保护关系的作用下编织了一张所谓“义务网络”。这张“义务网络”的基本规则是互相保护，如果某人落网而得不到保护，咬出同伙的可能就威胁着其余未落网者。也因此，陈良宇之类高阶贪官要落马，唯一的可能是政治上失势，保护伞失灵。

剩下的问题就是讨论这种为权力斗争服务的反腐败能够治理腐败吗？

笔者认为不能，因为中国政府已经堕落成为一个“盗贼型政权”，并且集中了当今世界上所有“盗贼型政权”的恶劣特点。

美国政治学者曾将非洲、南美以及南欧等国的腐败政府称之为“盗贼型政权”――用“盗贼”借喻贪婪无耻掠夺公共财产与私人财产的统治者，其实也不过分――并将之划分为四种类型：

受贿者集中于高层的有两类政权：一是政府与企业财团形成了双边垄断；二是“盗贼统治”的国家。而受贿者分布于政府中低层的也有两类政权：一是因为资源分配的关系导致行贿呈螺旋式上升；二是黑手党控制的国家。

这些臭名昭著的盗贼型政权包括：1954－1989年统治巴拉圭的阿尔弗雷？德？斯特罗斯纳政权、1965－1997年扎伊尔的蒙博托政权、1957－1986年间海地的杜瓦利埃家族政权。这些政权因其高度腐败，官员肆意掠夺公共财产及民财，其治下民不聊生，最后都被推翻，无一有好下场。

而中国现政权则集中了所有的盗贼型政权的特点：受贿者遍布政府高层与中低层，即使是一个小小的政府公务员，也莫不利用手中权力寻租。而四类盗贼型政权采取的掠夺手段莫不在中国出现，择其大端列举如下：

产业管制制度被官员们作为个人寻租的手段。只要某个行业有利可图，该行业的许可证就成为官员们谋取私利的手段，譬如煤矿、金矿与其它各种矿产的准入制度，都成了为官员们生产财富的金牛。而中国因此也成了世界上矿难最高、因滥采滥控而导致环境严重污染的国度。

土地国有化成为权势者获利渊薮。中国各级官员象一群通过转手倒卖牟利的地产中介商。政府凭仗权力用低价逼老百姓出让土地，高价卖给房地产开发商，从中牟利。这次倒台的陈良宇牵涉了十几家大房地产开发商，只是冰山一角而已。

国有企业私有化获得地方政府狂热支持，山东省诸城市市长陈光因一口气卖光了该市272家国有企业而获得“陈卖光”的绰号，成为中国“国企改革第一官”。而陈卖光因此积聚大量财富，最后挟款潜逃，至今不知躲在世界上哪个角落。整个中国，国有企业负责人犯罪成为腐败案件的主体部分，比如2004年国有企业管理层的职务犯罪占查办贪污贿赂案件总数的41.5％，其中相当部分都与国有企业改制有关。

偏爱某种类型的改革。中国至今改革已逾28年，但永远处于改革未完成状态，每次改革都成为权势者汲取财富的有效管道。国有企业改制，证券市场建立，土地制度改革，以及目前正在进行状态的金融体制改革，每一次改革几乎都使一批官员成了富翁。

上述这些强盗式掠夺行径的泛滥，使这个政权处于高度不稳定状态，维持稳定就成了现阶段中国统治集团的集体梦呓。没有任何既得利益者拥有永远掌权的自信，掠夺而来的财富无法经受政权更迭的风险，于是中国的政治精英集团与经济精英集团偏好移民它国， 中国成了世界上最大的资本外逃国。

一个国家的领导者如果只满足于利用反腐败来打击政治对手，却不想正本清源，重构政治制度，那就无法有效地打击腐败。在中国这样一个“盗贼统治”的极权国家中，这种为权力斗争服务的反腐败只会导致一个结果：使国家的帮派政治得到更强烈的催化剂，促使官僚集团更加倾向于只向自己的政治保护者效忠，而义务网络的编织会越来越趋于完善，腐败犯罪向更高形式发展。

70 年代末，邓小平为中国制定了一个中心、两个基本点的基本国策，即：以经济改革开放促进经济发展，以极权政治运作保证政治稳定从而保证经济改革和发展。此后二十多年，中国经济确实有高速发展，但是这样的经济发展并没有如邓小平之愿带来社会满意和政治稳定，而是导致许多问题和强烈的不满。而稳定越来越靠镇压来维持。近年来，镇压出现了新的动向：越来越以黑社会化运作暴力方式来制造恐怖和报复反抗者。这一动向，引起关注中国进步的人们的义愤和焦虑。

中国政治与行政研究所是一批海外中国学者创办的独立民间研究机构。其主要宗旨是研究和探索中国发展面临的政治问题、条件和选择，并且在公共空间中发起和推动对这些重大课题的关注和辩论。为唤起更强烈的公共关注并制止这一倾向，中国政治与发展研究所在 9 月22 日召开了”中国政府黑社会华滥用暴力问题研讨会”，邀请各方面专家研究和讨论中国政府黑社会化滥用暴力的现象、性质、原因、程度、后果、前景和出路。在这个会议上，我的观点浓缩起来是这样的：

粉碎”四人帮”之后，社会上对中共的国家暴力问题逐渐淡漠。一直到了”六四”，中共政权的暴力本质才再一次受到人们的注意。实际上，如果我们梳理一下不太遥远的历史，就可以发现，国家暴力始终是中共统治的基础和维持统治的秘诀。

1950年代，共产党在大陆面临建立与巩固新的政权的挑战。如何完成这个任务，部分地取决于并且决定着政权的性质。以毛泽东为首的中共政权采用了政治暴力作为巩固政权的手段，这就是著名的 “红色恐怖”：土改，肃反，三反五反，胡风事件，反右运动等等。政治运动自从1949年之后几乎从来没有停止过，而每次政治运动，带来的都是残酷的镇压以及社会恐惧心理的滋长。历史可以看到，恐惧的阴云逐渐积累，一直发展到了狂风暴雨的顶峰 — 文化大革命。可以说，一部中华人民共和国的政治发展史，就是一部国家暴力与社会恐惧相互交织的历史。离开”恐惧”这个词，我们就无法真正了解那个政权以及它带给中国政治生活的深远影响。

政治暴力并不仅仅是极权制度的手段，更是它的本质。政治暴力的运用的目的不仅仅在于巩固政权，更在于行使政权。已往我们都认为国家暴力只是维持统治的手段，但是对于中共这个通过暴力建立政权，并从列宁，斯大林那里得到很多指导的政党来说，暴力本身就是他们执政的一种方式，暴力也是”革命”的一种形式。正如 Stephen Cowtois在《共产主义黑皮书》序言中所说：”（共产国家）把镇压当成制度，并在某些阵发的阶段将恐怖上升为一种统治方式。”恐怖成了”继续革命”的内容，有了意识形态性。”。犹有甚者，中共通过暴力调动国家机器中非人性的部分，使得人性的恶的部分可以与恶性的制度相互配合，这成为了中共统治的秘诀。

极权制度为什么采用暴力手段？国家暴力是如何以及通过怎么的机制实施的？国家暴力背后的文化，历史与政治渊源是什么？暴力是极权制度的本质还是手段？这些问题都值得我们在回顾历史的过程中认真思考。

RFA

毛泽东死去整整三十年了。围绕着对毛泽东的评价仍然有很大的争议。在我看来，这些争议在相当程度上还不是来自对有关历史事实的不同认定，而是源于不同的评价标准和推理逻辑。

有人说：毛泽东统治中国二十七年，当代人要么是受益者，要么是受害者，因此他们的评价未必客观冷静，所以对毛的正确评价还需留给后人。

我不赞成这种说法。古人说盖棺论定，意思是由于人的复杂性和可变性，人的好坏、功过只有到生命结束后才能作出结论。毛泽东已经死了三十年了，凭什么还不能对他盖棺论定？

其实，对某些人来说，不等盖棺就可以论定。譬如一个系列杀手，只要他杀人的事实得到确认，我们就可以判定他是个杀人犯，是个坏蛋，我们就有权对他绳之以法，乃至判处死刑，哪怕他还很年轻，远远没到自然死亡的时候。这就告诉我们，一个人，只要他犯下了一起（或几起）十分严重的罪行，我们就有权对他定性下结论。

毛泽东正是这种人。早在毛泽东发动大跃进造成至少三千万中国人活活饿死的滔天大罪时，他就已经使自己跻身于人类历史上的最大暴君之列。毛泽东早就恶贯满盈了，没有文革这场浩劫他就已经是历史上的最大暴君之一了。加上文革这桩大罪，只是使他在人类历史最大暴君的排行榜上再往前移动几位，而他作为暴君的定性是早就确定不移的了。这里还暂且不谈他在更早些时候犯下的几桩大罪，如镇反——毛泽东自己都说他发动的镇反运动比秦始皇的焚书坑儒还要厉害一百倍；还有血腥的土改运动和”三面架机枪，只准走一方”的强迫性的资本主义工商业改造，消灭了整整一代经济精英；还有反右，如此等等。

毛泽东的罪恶实在是罄竹难书。除非你对这些严重的犯罪事实从根本上提出有依据的质疑，否则你就没有理由质疑我们的结论。如果你对这些事实都大体承认，但依然不接受毛泽东是暴君的结论，我们就要问你，你的暴君的标准是什么？照你说，一个统治者还要坏到什么地步才算得上暴君？

注意：我们说毛泽东是暴君，并不是仅仅基于受害者的立场，而是基于人类共同的善恶标准。笼统地说受害者或受益者是没有什么意义的。不错，在任何时代，哪怕在最暴虐的时代，也总有一些人是既得利益者。相比之下，在毛时代，尤其是在文革期间 ，毛泽东几乎把中国社会各阶层的人都挨个得罪了个遍，以至于到头来居然找不出哪一种人可以算得上既得利益者，那在历史上倒真是很少见的。

更重要的是，我们在对某一事物作价值判断时，不能仅仅根据自己的利害得失，还要看它是否符合公理，是否符合公正概念。如果某一些人的幸福是建立在另外一些人的痛苦之上，那么这种幸福就是不可取的，是应该批判的。即便一些人的受益并非建立在另一些的受害之上，但只要别人的受害是不公正的，那么，虽然你不是受害者而是受益者，你也应该站在公正的立场上对加害者表示抗议。

希特勒搞政治迫害，发动世界大战，其受害者主要是犹太人和外国人，相当数量的德国人并不是受害者，也许其中不少还是希特勒政策的受益者；可是在二战后的德国，却并没有多少德国人公开表示对希特勒的怀念。原因就在于，德国人承认希特勒犯下了严重的反人性反人道的罪行，因此他们认为，即便自己是希特勒统治下的受益者，也不应该为之唱颂歌。这就叫公理。这就叫公道。

最后我要再次重申，我不赞成对毛泽东进行三七开或七三开一类评价方法。道理很简单。没有什么道德的储蓄银行，让人们可以在那里积存好事，以便在适当的时候提取相当数目去抵消他所做的不公道的事情。因为对人的评价不同于对事的评价。人一辈子做很多事。对具体的事而言，我们可以评价说哪些是好事，哪些是坏事；我们也可以开出一列清单，看一看在他所作的各种事中，好事占几成，坏事占几成。但对人的评价则不同。对人的评价涉及一条道德底线。这条底线决定了我们对此人的整体评价。一个医生借行医之名害死了病人，那么他就是杀人犯，他就必须受到惩处。这和他是否还治好过别的病人毫不相干。所谓坏人，并不是指在他生平所做的一切事中，坏事的比例超过了好事，而是指他做出了违犯道德底线的事。否则天下就差不多没有还能称得上坏人的人了。如果那位医生在法庭上高呼冤枉，说： “我治好过一百个病人，只害死了十个病人。我做的好事比坏事多十倍，对我至少应该九一开。怎么能说我是坏人呢？”通吗？

当然，毛泽东现象是一个极其复杂的现象，值得我们和后人进行更深入细致的研究。希特勒死去六十年了，有关希特勒的论文和书籍至今仍层出不穷，也有个别人为希特勒作翻案文章，但是那不会改变世人对希特勒是暴君这一基本结论。同样地，毛泽东是暴君这一基本结论也是不可改变的。

RFA

电影《约瑟的故事》评论（3之3）

埃德南，波提乏的凶恶且重要的助手，后来侍候约瑟的善良且欢快的管家。由于环境的变化，恶者变成了善人。

以《约瑟的故事》中这个次要人物来核对《圣经。旧约。创世纪》，我发现：电影中的这个人物完全是虚构的，即《创世纪》并无此人。

这是一个现实的遗憾，因为我们无法用现代的艺术去改写古老的文献。但无论如何，在细节上，我对波提乏安排埃德南去侍候被任命为宰相的约瑟之行为，表示怀疑。

怀疑这是一个安插耳目的行为。

随着情节的发展，我的妄猜成了可笑的无知。同时，也印证了不管我多自以为是地认为已经皈依基督，但我的文化遗传基因还在顽强地工作。中国人、汉文化，那种并不高尚的“警惕”成了我不止一次体验但又积习难改的内心活动的第一反应。

埃德南曾经请求骤然而贵的约瑟，宽恕他对后者所做得不少的恶行，比如在约瑟初被卖为奴时，他因约瑟坚定的信仰而加重后者的工作量，完不成时即加以殴打。这些理应受到报复，但约瑟没有，他对不得已屈服的埃德南说出了：“饶恕比仇恨更伟大”的誓言。从此，埃德南成了约瑟的忠心管家。

这就是宽容的收获！

与当年埃德南踩住约瑟头质问“你的上帝在哪里”相比，埃德南在麦仓中逗约瑟的两个儿子玛拿西和以法莲──那样欢快的情节，一个恶人因跟从一个善人而变善了，这不能不说是平凡生活中上帝显示给人们的启示。

对于这个虚构的埃及人，我宁愿相信他是个真实的存在！

对缺乏历史知识的那些信徒来说，“埃及”是一个永远的反义词。甚至“剥夺埃及人”（spoil the Egyptians）也变成了成语──成了剥夺敌人财物的同义语。但是，要没有波提乏的明智，约瑟也许早死于欲火中烧的埃及女人的诬陷了。

上帝借着埃及的地力与财产养育以色列人，这是他伟大救赎计划的一部分；上帝也借约瑟的行为，向埃及人展现了他的大能！波提乏敬佩约瑟坚守信仰的真诚精神，终于在自己信奉的阿蒙（太阳）神与约瑟信奉的唯一神耶和华，做出了明智的妥协。他对升为埃及宰相的约瑟说：“愿你的神保佑你，也保佑埃及。”

没有上帝给予约瑟的智慧，埃及就无法渡过七年大饥荒。

与“虚构的埃德南”相比，因渎职而入狱的法老的酒政与膳长却在《创世纪》中有记载，尽管没详具其名。

可恶的膳长在进入监狱之初，狠狠地抽打了身为犯人的约瑟一顿，声言为波提乏妻子的名声而为。连波提乏本人都不再提及那场本为冤案的丑剧，膳长之为就显得多此一举了，甚至很可笑！当波提乏要让约瑟为酒政与膳长解梦之时，膳长仍然瞧不起约瑟，竟自嘲自己已经沦落到要奴隶解梦的地步。约瑟告知了酒政，三天后官复原职。膳长怀着侥幸一试的心情要求解梦。善良的约瑟不忍说出膳长将在三天后被砍头的预言，以免使之伤心，虽然最终在逼迫下不得不以实相告。

《圣经》中解梦的概况有之，但细节仍由《约瑟的故事》的剧作家来虚构。这当然也是基于约瑟宽容、智性、善良之性格逻辑的虚构，而其中最大的人性丑陋得以避免。如果仍按“我的逻辑”即波提乏将埃德南送给约瑟是用来“安插耳目”的理解，那么，在膳长被处死时，约瑟完全可以开怀大笑或喜极而泣。

约瑟没有按“我的逻辑”去做。如此，证明我的（文化基因）浅薄已经不足为道，恰恰相反，约瑟把从他的唯一神那里得来的智性恰当地使用了，而没有用于私愤的发泄。假如一定要借此发泄私愤，完全可以在说给膳长解梦结果之前，哈哈大笑。再阴险一点的是，告诉他完全相反的结果。

约瑟因为他的信仰，使恶毒的报复与自己无关了。

《约瑟的故事》成为我有生以来看到的最好的影片！

就《约瑟的故事》之整个场景设置而言，它的“低亮度”增加了它的历史凝重感与神秘感。作为一个“冒充的”评论家，我几乎对国外重要演艺家、导演及著名制片人，一无所知，但是整个影片对埃及王宫的“复制”成为一项杰出的艺术成就。还有，就是它的音乐带着埃及的富丽、雄厚乃至有些虚张，也成了影片富具感染效果的一部分。

唯一不足则是：约瑟入狱时的辅助场景──狱卒鞭打已服刑犯人的场面过于应景化。其他呢，则无可挑剔。

在虚构中诠释宗教的历史，在宗教的历史中为虚构找到逻辑起点，恰是该片的核心成果。这个荣誉当归于剧作家深厚的宗教历史学养，及制片人对此的灵犀之悟。

什么时候能见到一部如此恢宏的国产宗教片呢？也许这个提问只是一个美丽的梦想──根本就不用解析的荒诞之梦。因为我们除了胡言乱语的“英雄”之外，根本就不曾有过宗教。

（2006年10月5日凌晨，定稿于绵逸书房）

民主论坛

毛泽东当年妄图称霸世界，建政之后就更是一面倒向前苏联，同时养了几个虎狼小国作盟友；毛泽东的继任者依然如故，称霸世界的梦，至今不醒……。

尽管毛泽东和他中共的继任者这样一厢情愿地一面倒向前苏联和俄罗斯，前苏联和后苏联也并没有放过中国，除了保护外蒙独立，而且继承沙俄占去了中国最大的固有领土，甚至几次险些在中苏边境酿成大的战端。至今，中国人在俄罗斯受到了欺辱甚至被无辜杀害，中共政府也基本上是装聋作哑，似乎既没有看见也没有听见。

所谓的“中越边境自卫反击战”，中国人眼看着敌手吃着中国的粮食，穿着中国的衣服，拿着中国的枪炮打我们的中国士兵：“高山下的花环”尚未凋谢，中共政府就又急着和人家握手言欢了。中共总是忘不了那个共产主义阵营的头头梦。

中共对朝鲜这个难兄难弟更是自作多情。现在的史料早已证明，所谓的“抗美援朝”，完全是毛泽东伙同金日成还有斯大林一手制造的。当然，中共海外的喉舌“凤凰台”的评论员们至今不敢把这层窗户纸捅破，“凤凰台”的评论员们现在不但敢骂金正日，也敢骂金日成了。

这才叫：养虎为患，自作自受 ！

这一切说明，以意识形态作为处理国家与国家关系的指导原则，是完全错误的；地缘政治学才是指导国家与国家关系的根本原则。

其实，这一点中国人在古代就懂得，被简约为“远交近攻”。

到了当代，倒不一定非要“远交近攻”，至少不要可笑到“远攻只近交”吧。

现在，中国的大麻烦来了。

穷凶极恶的金正日，不顾几百万人活活饿死也要向全世界进行核讹诈。

金正日也公然宣布要进行核武器试验了，金正日还公然说什么要在“科学、安全的条件下进行核试验”，也不知道这个把国家搞得穷得叮当响的金正日如何去科学？！如何去安全？！

倘若金正日他不科学、不安全，首当其中的受害者就是中国的东三省！乃至全中国！

朝鲜的核泄露、核污染将必定顺着东边海洋的气流毫无遮拦地，避天盖日地落到中国的东三省！乃至全中国！

且不说中共当年的“保家卫国”实际上是“保金家卖中国”。今天颟顸贪腐的中共还再想和美国和西方国家玩朝鲜这张牌呢，什么不要动不动就制裁吧，什么都要用和平谈判的方式解决问题吧……。

颟顸贪腐的中共政府：

今天，远不是什么金小弟不听话的问题了，而是天大的核灾难已经逼进中国的家门口了，你们还把假想敌订为远在西半球的美国；朝鲜的核灾难一旦降临到中国人的头上，破产的不仅仅是朝鲜的金家天下，破产的也必将是中共的党天下。

可是，受巨灾巨难的将是我的祖国的中国人民！

可是，一旦伊朗的核灾难也爆发，最大受害国也必定是中国，那一东一西夹击的核灾难，我的祖国——中国，何存、安在？！

其实，稍微有一点历史常识的人现在都应该知道，在几次重大的历史关头，美利坚都是大大地有恩于中国，且不说这二十多年来给予中国经济发展最多的资金输入、技术支持、管理经验的是美利坚；也不说二次大战真正在亚洲击败日军给予最多的人力物力支持中国抗战的是美利坚；当年八国联军入侵中国，唯一拿“庚子赔款”为中国人办医院、开学堂、接纳幼童来北美留学、这些幼童日后回国大大地促进了中国社会发展的也是美利坚……。

诚然，美国人自要维护他们自己的国家利益；在现代的贸易战中，它自要维护自己的商业利益。这远不该成为中共继续把美利坚作为中国假想敌的理由，更不应该成为一些糊涂的中国人，特别是一些糊涂的年轻的中国人把美利坚作为中国假想敌的理由。

说来也怪，人类的通病就是：谁对他好，他欺负谁；谁对他不好，他敬畏谁。

通病总是难治的。

尽管通病难治，朝鲜制造的核危机，已经迫在眉睫，逼进国门了，中国该猛醒了！

（完稿于2006年10月6日0：18）

Homme plume

Victor Brombert

Frederick Brown
FLAUBERT
A biography
628pp. Heinemann. £25.
0 434 00769 2
US: Little, Brown. $35. 0 316 11878 8

Flaubert maintained that a writer should never celebrate himself, that he should in fact pretend not to have lived. He claimed to be an “homme plume”, a pen man, and that the only adventures in his life were the sentences he wrote. Yet he was not always tied to his desk, quill in hand. He travelled to Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Greece. In Paris, in 1848, he witnessed the street fighting and the violence of the mob. He frequented some of the most notable people of the period: the sculptor James Pradier, the brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt, the critic Sainte-Beuve, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, George Sand – with whom he developed a tender friendship – Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, and Maupassant, who considered himself Flaubert’s disciple. He had a turbulent affair with the writer Louise Colet, one of the most flamboyant women of the century.

Despite quasi-monastic vows pronounced in the service of the religion of Art, Flaubert’s life was not as withdrawn as he would have us believe; it is full of encounters and events – a most interesting life in fact, especially when told by as gifted a biographer as Frederick Brown, whose thorough, colourful, intelligently paced book never fails, over close to 600 pages, to hold the reader’s attention.

Many of Flaubert’s claims must be approached with a dose of scepticism. At some point, for instance, he expressed the desire to write “un livre sur rien”, a book about “nothing” – an ideal book that would hold up through sheer force of style and structure, without any concern for subject matter. This metaphor of a godlike artificer’s detached creation has been much quoted by critics eager to enlist Flaubert among the early postmodernists. But the fact remains that Madame Bovary, thoroughly grounded in the daily realities of his native Normandy, contained enough precise subject matter to have made his fellow Normans scream with anger. Emma Bovary, oppressed and repressed by a mediocre society, is a carefully described clinical case. She is also a quixotic figure in pathetic quest of the unattainable, and in that she remains superior to the environment that crushes her. Certainly no one thought at the time Madame Bovary appeared that it was merely a stylistic tour de force. Flaubert’s notoriety in 1857 was largely due to a well-publicized trial for affront to public and religious morality, and to plain decent behaviour.

Nor is Salammbô, which resuscitates ancient Carthage, a novel about “nothing”. Flaubert went to the trouble of meticulous historical and archaeological research, and even travelled to Tunisia in the spring of 1858. As for L’Éducation sentimentale, Flaubert’s great novel about the moral and political history of an entire generation straddling the Revolution of 1848, it focused on precisely documented historic moments, as well as keen personal memories. Brown never loses sight of Flaubert’s grounding in his own time. He does so with a historian’s sensitivity to the changes in mood and manners during an agitated period, uncommonly rich in upheavals and political transformations.

Flaubert was born in 1821 into an affluent and well-respected family. His father, Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, was the revered chief surgeon of the Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Rouen. Gustave was a boy under the Restoration that marked the return of the Bourbons after the fall of Napoleon. He grew to be an adolescent after the Bourbons were chased out once again, and France became a constitutional monarchy under Louis-Philippe. Flaubert was twenty-seven years old when the Revolution of 1848 got rid of that king too, and a Republic came into being. That Republic was short-lived, however. Only three years later, a coup détat by its President transformed France into the Second Empire, and Louis Bonaparte became Napoleon III. Flaubert lived to see the end of this regime also, when Prussia defeated France in 1870, and Prussian soldiers occupied the Flaubert family house in Normandy. The violence of the Commune in 1871 and its brutal repression, which were not soon forgotten, gave way to the apparent stability of the Third Republic. Flaubert died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1880, after years of overeating and excessive pipe smoking, and no doubt also from the long-term effects of epilepsy and syphilis. Daily bouts of indignation surely also affected his blood pressure.

From the first paragraph of Browns Flaubert, where we glimpse his subject dreaming, in his prosaic Normandy, of distant deserts, we know that we are in for a treat. Elegant and well articulated, Browns narrative illuminates the complexity of Flauberts inner contradictions. Jealous of his independence, frequently misanthropic, taking pride in his monk-like withdrawal, the hermit of Croisset, as he came to be known, was in fact thirsting for friendship, affection and encouragement. In later years, despite his grouchiness and iconoclasm, he was flattered to have become a friend and protégé of Princess Mathilde Bonaparte, to be a regular in her salon on the Rue de Courcelles, and to be invited to parties at the Imperial Court.

Brown is especially good at detailing the physical and moral portrait of the novelist: his sense of the comic, his bluster and vituperations, his pet dislikes, his erotic fantasies, his loud laughter and stentorian voice, his fascination with imbecility, his jowls and increasingly drooping moustache, his scatological lexicon. Behind the vigorous façade there was, hidden from public view, a vulnerable being who sought refuge from every form of unwanted involvement (such as choosing a career) by welcoming the epilepsy that surfaced when he was in his twenty-third year. Above all, he needed friendship, and in that need he was well served. His friends included the brilliant Alfred Le Poittevin, his early mentor who introduced him to philosophy; Maxime Du Camp, his travelling companion to Egypt; Louis Bouilhet, his literary adviser and confidant over the years; George Sand, late in his life, for whom he felt a special and reciprocated affection that is reflected in their prolific correspondence; and Ivan Turgenev, on extended sojourns in Paris, with whom he formed a strong bond.

Stimulated and encouraged by his history teacher Adolphe Chéruel, Flaubert might have become a historian. His early passion for history is attested by numerous texts and fragments of texts he wrote while still in school. He never lost his appetite for research and erudition. In preparing to write his books, notably La Tentation de Saint Antoine, Salammbô and Bouvard et Pécuchet, he would indulge in encyclopedic readings to the point of indigestion. This obsession with documentation, especially if it had to do with exotic regions and antiquity, was for him a form of travel in time and space. His yearning for exotic thrills was fulfilled when he set out in 1849 for a year-and-a-half-long voyage to Egypt and other Near Eastern countries. He visited the Pyramids and the Valley of the Kings, travelled in a cangia up the Nile, spent a steamy night in Esna with a heavily scented Egyptian courtesan: these experiences would feed his novels. He was mesmerized by the bazaars, the brothels, the bathhouse, the camels, the lewd male dancers (though he found their art somewhat vulgar). But while daydreaming during the slow river journey towards the cataracts of the Nile, he also began to consider liteary projects that would lead back to the realities of Norman boredom and to Emma Bovarys own dreams.

Brown himself seems to have an impressive capacity for documentation. We learn about the French school system, the professional conflicts between surgeons and physicians, the Paris law-school curriculum, the treatment of epilepsy. He provides colourful evocations of Rouen, with its medieval streets and modern textile manufactures; of Paris in the 1850s, when Baron Haussmann demolished large slums and created broad new arteries; of Vichy as it was being developed into a fashionable spa. He leads us on excursions into various French institutions, including literary gatherings such as the Magny dinners, which featured rich food and cacophonic exchanges (when they could hear each other) between such luminaries as Sainte-Beuve, Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, the Goncourt brothers, and Flaubert himself. (It was at one of these dinners, every two months, in a restaurant on the Left Bank that Flaubert met Turgenev.) Brown also provides economic information about the earnings of domestic help, the wages of unskilled labourers and the daily diet of the working class, as well as the flow of capital and the fever of speculation in the heyday of the Second Empire.

Every biography of Flaubert must rely on his abundant correspondence, and Brown makes especially good use of the extraordinary letters that Flaubert wrote to his mistress Louise Colet during the years he was labouring on Madame Bovary. Their vividness and allure, their variety of moods, their exuberance, their almost spoken quality as Flaubert unbuttons, make of them one of the truly exceptional correspondences in the French language. Through these letters, it is as though, without the benefit of a recording device, we were able to hear Flauberts personal voice. But there is also much substance in them. They communicate the novelists stylistic concerns, his worries about the structure and the rhythm of his book, his strivings and doubts, his theoretical preoccupations. The cult of Art (a word he habitually spelled with a capital A) is at their centre, and this cult, together with an almost religious belief in the writers vocation, is grounded in a deep-seated pessimism about the inadequacy of existence and the instantaneous decay of all things. The letters also help to dispel some hazy notions about Flaubert-the-realist (he in fact detested reality) and ferocious debunker of Emma Bovarys romantic readings. He never ceased to proclaim his allegiance to Romanticism, calling himself an old troubadour. In his craving for the unattainable, the creator of Emma Bovary seems himself afflicted with bovarysme.

Brown has shunned the all too frequent temptation of biographers to psychologize and invent states of being. He does not follow Jean-Paul Sartre who, in his massive LIdiot de la famille, conjured up intimate scenes (for instance between Flauberts father and mother in bed) for which there is not a trace of evidence. Sartres study of Flaubert, the result of years of a love-hate relation with him, is a brilliant tour de force, especially in its analysis of the novelists juvenilia. But it is tendentious in its emphasis on an authoritarian and repressive father, and in its insistence that young Gustave willed his epilepsy in order to justify his passivity and thus become, through writing, a Knight of Nothingness. Brown judiciously gives a different picture of the father who, it would seem, was loving, tolerant and open-minded in his dealings with an often difficult son. He is also fair to the mother (though she was no doubt possessive and given to sentimental blackmail), as he is to Louise Colet, who has in the past been much maligned.

Along the way, this new biography of Flaubert provides lively sketches of some famous and not so famous peole who crossed the novelists path. And there are portraits that amount to mini-biographies. At times Brown appears to overindulge in digressions. Do we need to learn that Pope Pius VII refused to allow gaslight and smallpox vaccination in papal territory? But these digressions usually turn out to be relevant, such as the striking one-paragraph analysis of Alexandre Dumas filss theatre which illustrates societys hypocritical moral values at the time of the Madame Bovary trial.

Frederick Brown has received deserved praise in the past for his biographies of Jean Cocteau and Émile Zola. In his Theater and Revolution (1989) he proved to be an excellent cultural historian, as he did in his illustrated study of the Père-Lachaise cemetery (1973), the great necropolis of nineteenth-century Paris. Even higher praise is now due for his Flaubert. Written with literary flair and restraint, graced by many a happy turn, this biography is sustained by patient build-ups. It covers considerable ground and takes the reader into many side alleys, but never loses its sense of focus and continuity.

Theory in particle physics: Theological speculation versus practical knowledge

When I began graduate school, I tried both theory and experiment and found experiment to be more fun. I also concluded that first-rate experimenters must understand theory, for if they do not they can only be technicians for the theorists. Although that will probably get their proposals past funding agencies and program committees, they won’t be much help in advancing the understanding of how the universe works, which is the goal of all of us.

I like to think that progress in physics comes from changing “why” questions into “how” questions. Why is the sky blue? For thousands of years, the answer was that it was an innate property of “sky” or that the gods made it so. Now we know that the sky is blue because of the mechanism that preferentially scatters short-wavelength light.

In the 1950s we struggled with an ever-increasing number of meson and baryon resonances—all apparently elementary particles by the standards of the day. Then Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig produced the quark model, which swept away the plethora of particles and replaced them with a simple underlying structure. That structure encompassed all that we had found, and it predicted things not yet seen. They were seen, and the quark model became practical knowledge. Why there were so many states was replaced with how they came to be.

A timelier example might be inflation. It is only slightly older than string theory and, when created, was theological speculation, as is often the case with new ideas until someone devises a test. Inflation was attractive because if it were true it would, among other things, solve the problem of the smallness of the temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Inflation was not testable at first, but later a test was devised that predicted the size and position of the high angular harmonic peaks in the cosmic microwave background radiation. When those were found, inflation moved from being theological speculation to a kind of intermediate state in which all that is missing to make it practical knowledge is a mathematically sound microscopic realization.

The general trend of the path to understanding has been reductionist. We explain our world in terms of a generally decreasing number of assumptions, equations, and constants, although sometimes things have gotten more complicated before they became simpler. Aristotle would have recognized only what he called the property of heaviness and we call gravity. As more was learned, new forces had to be absorbedfirst magnetic, then electric. Then we realized that the magnetic and electric forces were really the electromagnetic force. The discovery of radioactivity and the nucleus required the addition of the weak and strong interactions. Grand unified theories have pulled the number back down again. Still, the general direction is always toward the reductionistunderstanding complexity in terms of an underlying simplicity.

The last big advance in model building came a bit more than 30 years ago with the birth of the standard model. From the very beginning it, like all its predecessors, was an approximation that was expected to be superseded by a better one that would encompass new phenomena beyond the standard model’s energy range of validity. Experiment has found things that are not accounted for in itneutrino masses and mixing and dark matter, for example. However, the back-and-forth between experiment and theory that led to the standard model ended around 1980. Although many new directions were hypothesized, none turned out to have predicted consequences in the region accessible to experiments. That brings us to where we are today, looking for something new and playing with what appear to me to be empty concepts like naturalness, the anthropic principle, and the landscape.

Theory today

I have asked many theorists to define naturalness and received many variations on a central theme that I would put as follows: A constant that is smaller than it ought to be must be kept there by some sort of symmetry. If, for example, the Higgs mass is quadratically divergent, invent supersymmetry to make it only logarithmically divergent and to keep it small. The price of this invention is 124 new constants, which I always thought was too high a price to pay. Progress in physics almost always is made by simplification. In this case a conceptual nicety was accompanied by an explosion in arbitrary parameters. However, the conceptual nicety, matching every fermion with a boson to cancel troublesome divergences in the theory, was attractive to many. Experiment has forced the expected value of the mass of the lightest supersymmetric particle ever higher. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN will start taking data in 2008 and we will know in a couple of years if there is anything supersymmetric there. If nothing is found, the “natural” theory of supersymmetry will be gone.

An even more interesting example to an amateur theorist like me is the story of the cosmological constant. Standard theory gives it a huge value, so large that the universe as we know it could not exist. It was assumed that if the cosmological constant was not huge, it had to be zero. Unlike supersymmetry, there was no specific symmetry that made it zero, but particle physicists expected one would be found eventually. No one took seriously the possibility of a small cosmological constant until supernova observations found that the Hubble expansion seemed to be speeding up. Naturalness seemed to prevent any serious consideration of what turned out to be the correct direction.

At the time Sheldon Glashow, John Iliopoulos, and Luciano Maiani developed the GIM mechanism, the naturalness concept was not in the air.¹ They realized that suppressing flavor-changing neutral currents required restoring a certain kind of symmetry to the quark sector. They added the charmed quark to create that symmetry, and the experiments of my group and Sam Ting’s showed the charmed quark was there.

The score card for naturalness is one “no,” the cosmological constant; one “yes,” the charmed quark, though naturalness had nothing to do with it at the time; and one “maybe,” supersymmetry. Naturalness certainly doesn’t seem to be a natural and universal truth. It may be a reasonable starting point to solve a problem, but it doesn’t work all the time and one should not force excessive complications in its name. Some behaviors are simply initial conditions.

For more than 1000 years, the anthropic principle has been discussed, most often in philosophic arguments about the existence of God. Moses Maimonides in the 12th century and Thomas Aquinas in the 13th used anthropic arguments to trace things back to an uncaused first cause, and to them the only possible uncaused first cause was God.

The cosmological anthropic principle is of more recent vintage. A simplified version is that since we exist, the universe must have evolved in a way that allows us to exist. It is true, for example, that the fine structure constant α has to be close to 1/137 for carbon atoms to exist, and carbon atoms are required for us to be here writing about cosmology. However, these arguments have nothing to do with explaining what physical laws led to this particular value of α. An interesting relevant recent paper by Roni Harnik, Graham Kribs, and Gilad Perez demonstrates a universe with our values of the electromagnetic and strong coupling constants, but with a zero weak coupling constant.² Their alternative universe has Big-Bang nucleosynthesis, carbon chemistry, stars that shine for billions of years, and the potential for sentient observers that ours has. Our universe is not the only one that can support life, and some constants are not anthropically essential.

The anthropic principle is an observation, not an explanation. To believe otherwise is to believe that our emergence at a late date in the universe is what forced the constants to be set as they are at the beginning. If you believe that, you are a creationist. We talk about the Big Bang, string theory, the number of dimensions of spacetime, dark energy, and more. All the anthropic principle says about those ideas is that as you make your theories you had better make sure that α can come out to be 1/137; that constraint has to be obeyed to allow theory to agree with experiment. I have a very hard time accepting the fact that some of our distinguished theorists do not understand the difference between observation and explanation, but it seems to be so.

String theory was born roughly 25 years ago, and the landscape concept is the latest twist in its evolution. Although string theory needed 10 dimensions in order to work, the prospect of a unique solution to its equations, one that allowed the unification of gravity and quantum mechanics, was enormously attractive. Regrettably, it was not to be. Solutions expanded as it was realized that string theory had more than one variant and expanded still further when it was also realized that as 3-dimensional space can support membranes as well as lines, 10-dimensional space can support multidimensional objects (branes) as well as strings. Today, there seems to be nearly an infinity of solutions, each with different values of fundamental parameters, and no relations among them. The ensemble of all these universes is known as the landscape.

No solution that looks like our universe has been found. No correlations have been found such as, for example, if all solutions in the landscape that had a weak coupling anywhere near ours also had a small cosmological constant. What we have is a large number of very good people trying to make something more than philosophy out of string theory. Some, perhaps most, of the attempts do not contribute even if they are formally correct.

I still read theory papers and I even understand some of them. One I found particularly relevant is by Stephen Hawking and Thomas Hertog. Their recent paper “Populating the Landscape: A Top-down Approach” starts with what they call a “no boundary” approach that ab initio allows all possible solutions.³ They then want to impose boundary conditions at late times that allow our universe with our coupling constants, number of noncompact dimensions, and so on. This approach can give solutions that allow predictions at later times, they say. That sounds good, but it sounds to me a lot like the despised fine-tuning. If I have to impose on the landscape our conditions of three large space dimensions, a fine structure constant of 1/137, and so on, to make predictions about the future, there would seem to be no difference between the landscape and effective field theory with a few initial conditions imposed.

Although the Hawking and Hertog paper sometimes is obscure to me, the authors seem to say that their approach is only useful if the probability distribution of all possible alternatives in the landscape is strongly peaked around our conditions. I’ll buy that.

To the landscape gardeners I say: Calculate the probabilities of alternative universes, and if ours does not come out with a large probability while all others with content far from ours come out with negligible probability, you have made no useful contribution to physics. It is not that the landscape model is necessarily wrong, but rather that if a huge number of universes with different properties are possible and equally probable, the landscape can make no real contribution other than a philosophic one. That is metaphysics, not physics.

We will soon learn a lot. Over the next decade, new facilities will come on line that will allow accelerator experiments at much higher energies. New non-accelerator experiments will be done on the ground, under the ground, and in space. One can hope for new clues that are less subtle than those we have so far that do not fit the standard model. After all, the Hebrews after their escape from Egypt wandered in the desert for 40 years before finding the promised land. It is only a bit more than 30 since the solidification of the standard model.

Burton Richter is former director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and former Paul Pigott Professor in the Physical Sciences at Stanford University.

References

1. 1.S. Glashow, J. Iliopoulos, L. Maiani, Phys. Rev. D 2, 1285 (1970) [INSPEC].
2. 2.R. Harnik, G. D. Kribs, G. Perez, Phys. Rev. D 74, 035006 (2006) [SPIN].
3. 3.S. W. Hawking, T. Hertog, Phys. Rev. D 73, 123527 (2006) [SPIN].