书评:激进的快乐

This month marks the anniversary of the global protests following Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president. The Women’s March on Washington and its sister events brought millions of people together and was, for many participants, an extraordinary, all-too-rare moment of collective pleasure.

本月标志着唐纳德?特朗普(Donald Trump)就任美国总统后引发全球抗议活动一周年。“妇女向华盛顿进军”(Women's March on Washington)及类似活动使数以百万计的人聚在了一起，对许多参与者来说，那是一次非同寻常、极为罕见的集体快乐时刻。

“Sometimes, the strength we gain from moments of joyful solidarity lasts a very long time,” writes Lynne Segal towards the end of Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, which unpicks what she acknowledges is the “intangible” notion of joy. Segal’s thesis is that in losing one’s sense of self and self-consciousness, becoming part of bigger political and societal movements, one can achieve both personal joy and hopeful belief in the possibility of changing the world. Subsequent events in 2017, such as the #MeToo movement, suggest that she has a good point.

“有时，我们从欢快的团结时光中得到的力量可以持续很久，”琳内?西格尔(Lynne Segal)在《激进的快乐：集体的快乐时刻》(Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy)快要结尾的地方写道。该书剖析了她承认“难以捉摸的”快乐概念。西格尔的论点是，人们在放弃小我和自我意识、成为更广大的政治和社会运动的一份子后，既可以实现个人愉悦，也可以产生自己有可能改变世界的信念。2017年之后发生的事件——比如#我也是(#MeToo)运动——似乎表明她说得很有道理。

Segal, a professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck College, London, recounts her own experience as a leftwing feminist and activist to back up her wider point about the power of mass movements — which in this book means gatherings of real people. Little space is devoted to social media-driven activism. It feels like an omission but she is perhaps right: young feminist activist thinkers such as Zeynep Tufekci are better placed to offer techno-sociological analysis.

西格尔是伦敦大学伯贝克学院(Birkbeck College)心理学和性别研究教授，她回忆了她本人作为左翼女权主义者和活动人士的经历，来支持她关于群众运动力量的广义观点。在本书中，群众运动是指人们在实体世界集会。没有什么篇幅被用来论述由社交媒体推动的维权活动。感觉像是一个遗漏，但她或许是对的：像泽伊内普?蒂费克奇(Zeynep Tufekci)这样的年轻女权主义思想者更有资格提供技术-社会学分析。

Segal focuses instead on lessons of the past: the British women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, she writes, offered “experiments in collective living and the establishment of many other spaces for everyday resistance such as communes for shared child-raising, women’s centres, squatting advice centres and numerous other collective community spaces, many of which I participated in”.

西格尔更关注以往的教训：她写道，上世纪70年代英国女性解放运动“提供了集体生活的实验，并建立了其他很多抵抗空间——比如共同抚养孩子的社区、女性中心、占屋建议中心和众多其他集体社区空间，其中很多我都参加过”。

This collectivist mindset was once far more prevalent than it is now. Segal reminds us how things have changed by examining the focus on individualism in western societies, and the “markets of misery”, which leave many feeling isolated and left behind among all the consumerism and commodification.

这种集体主义思维曾经比现在流行得多。西格尔通过考察西方社会对个人主义的关注，考察“苦难市场”（在消费主义和商品化甚嚣尘上的世界，很多人感觉孤立和被抛在后面），提醒我们世界发生了多么巨大的变化。

Meanwhile, efforts to measure and promote “wellbeing” — something that David Cameron’s coalition government made British government policy — are focused on inward-facing “mindfulness” and other practices that put the onus on the individual in private spaces. She also laments the loss of street fairs, feasting and dancing, although one might dispute this: there are many organisations fostering community bonds through local events.

与此同时，衡量和提升“幸福感”的努力（曾被戴维?卡梅伦(David Cameron)领导的联合政府列为英国政府政策）关注的是内向的“正念”以及其他一些做法，它们都把责任重担压在私人空间内的个人肩上。她还哀叹街头集市、筵席和舞蹈的风俗不再，尽管有人可能对此表示异议：如今有很多组织通过当地活动来打造社区纽带。

Segal extends her exploration of joy to cover love and desire as well as the long history of utopian movements and all their attendant disappointments. On the latter, she takes an optimistic, pragmatic view. Modern utopian theorists, for example, are not offering us a magic prescription for the future. Instead, she says, they are concerned with rather fuzzier ideas: “The collective longing for ‘the improvement of the human condition’ as well as the opening up of spaces ‘for public debate and democratic decision’.”

西格尔扩大了她对快乐的探索范畴，使其涵盖爱和渴望，以及乌托邦运动的悠久历史以及随之而来的失望。对于后者，她采取了乐观而务实的观点。例如，现代乌托邦理论家并没有向我们提供神奇的未来处方。她表示，相反，他们关心的是更为朦胧的理念：“对‘改善人类状况’、对开辟‘公共辩论和民主决策’空间的集体渴望。”

Radical Happiness is an engaging, enlightening read for anyone who wants to ponder the links between personal dissatisfaction and political disengagement — and possible remedies. The idea of collective happiness as the root of much satisfaction is simple, but deceptively hard to write about, let alone achieve. Segal succeeds in inspiring on many levels, and while she is writing from the political left, and from a feminist point of view, her sources range far beyond her personal history and feminist and Marxist theorists to include citations and references to many writers and thinkers on utopias and on the nature of democracy.

对于那些想探寻个人不满与政治上脱离接触之间的关联（以及可能的补救办法）的人来说，《激进的快乐》既引人入胜，又发人深思。集体快乐是很大一部分满足感的根源，这一观念虽然简单，但是极难用文字描写，更不用说达到这一境界了。西格尔成功地在很多层面起到启迪作用，而尽管她是从政治左翼以及女权主义的视角来书写此书，但她旁征博引，远远超越了个人经历、女权主义者以及马克思主义理论者的范畴，纳入并参考了很多作家和思想家在乌托邦和民主性质方面的著述。

We can all benefit from thinking about, and achieving, collective joy through joining with like-minded fellow humans, whether we are organising a charity jumble sale or marching for women’s rights.

无论是组织慈善义卖、还是参加维护妇女权益的游行，我们都可以受益于携手志同道合的人，思考并实现集体快乐。

Ultimately our political dreams, Segal acknowledges, “can end in disappointment, but are likely nevertheless, to make us feel more alive, and hence happier, along the way, at least when they help to connect us to, and express concern for those around us”. This is an uplifting thought, whatever one’s political persuasion.

西格尔承认，最终我们的政治梦想“可能以失望告终，但尽管如此，至少在帮助我们与周围之人心心相印、对他们表达关心的过程中，这些梦想有望让我们感到更有生气，因而更快乐”。无论我们的政治倾向是什么，这都是令人振奋的想法。