1、Man in the Realm of NatureHuman beings live in the realm of nature. They are constantly surrounded by it and interact with it. Man is constantly aware of the influence of nature in the form of the air he breathes, the water he drinks, and the food he eats. We are connected with nature by "blood" ties and we cannot live outside nature.Man is not only a dweller in nature, he also transforms it. Humanity converts nature's wealth into the means of the cultural, historical life of society. Man has subdued and disciplined electricity and compelled it to serve the interests of society. Not only has man transferred various species of plants and animals to different climatic conditions, he has also changed the shape and climate of his environment and transformed plants and animals.As society develops, man tends to become less dependent on nature directly, while indirectly his dependence grows. Our distant ancestors lived in fear of nature's destructive forces. Very often they were unable to obtain the merest daily necessities. However, despite their imperfect tools, they worked together stubbornly, collectively, and were able to attain results. Nature was also changed through interaction with man. Forests were destroyed and the area of farmland increased. Nature with its elemental forces was regarded as something hostile to man. The forest, for example, was something wild and frightening and people tried to force it to retreat. This was all done in the name of civilization, which meant the places where man had made his home, where the earth was cultivated, where the forest had been cut down.But as time goes on mankind becomes increasingly concerned with the question of where and how to obtain irreplaceable natural resources for the needs of production. Science and man's practical transforming activities have made humanity aware of the enormous geological role played by the industrial transformation of the earth.At present the previous dynamic balance between man and nature and between nature and society as a whole, has shown ominous signs of breaking down. The problem of the so-called replaceable resources of the biosphere has become particularly acute. It is getting more and more difficult to satisfy the needs of human beings and society even for such a substance, for example, as fresh water. The problem of eliminating industrial waste is also becoming increasingly complex. Modern technology is distinguished by an ever increasing abundance of produced and used synthetic goods. Hundreds of thousands of synthetic materials are being made. People increasingly cover their bodies from head to foot in nylon and other synthetic, glittering fabrics that are obviously not good for them. Young people may hardly feel this, and they pay more attention to appearance than to health. But they become more aware of this harmful influence as they grow older. As time goes on the synthetic output of production turns into waste, and then substances that in their original form were not very toxic are transformed in the cycle of natural processes into aggressive agents. Today both natural scientists and philosophers are asking themselves the question: Is man's destruction of the biosphere inevitable?The man-nature relation – the crisis of the ecological situation – is a global problem. Its solution lies in rational and wise organization of both production itself and care for Mother Nature, not just by individuals, enterprises or countries, but by all humanity. One of the ways to deal with the crisis situation in the "man-nature" system is to use such resources as solar energy, the power of winds, the riches of the seas and oceans and other, as yet unknown natural forces of the universe.But to return to our theme, the bitter truth is that those human actions which violate the laws of nature, the harmony of the biosphere, threaten to bring disaster and this disaster may turn out to be universal. How apt then are the words of ancient Oriental wisdom: live closer to nature, my friends, and its eternal laws will protect you!2、Technology and HappinessIn the 20th century, Americans, Europeans, and East Asians enjoyed material and technological advances that were unimaginable in previous eras. In the United States, for instance, gross domestic product per capita tripled from 1950 to 2000. Life expectancy soared. The boom in productivity after World War II made goods better and cheaper at the same time. Things that were once luxuries, such as jet travel and long-distance phone calls, became necessities. And even though Americans seemed to work extraordinarily hard, their pursuit of entertainment turned media and leisure into multibillion-dollar industries.By most standards, then, you would have to say that Americans are better off now than they were in the middle of the last century. Oddly, though, if you ask Americans how happy they are, you find that they are no happier than they were in 1946 (which is when formal surveys of happiness started). In fact, the percentage of people who say they are "very happy" has fallen slightly since the early 1970s – even though the income of people born in 1940 has, on average,increased by 116 percent over the course of their working lives. You can find similar data for most developed countries. The relationship between happiness and technology has been an eternal subject for social critics and philosophers since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. But it's been left largely unexamined by economists and social scientists. The truly groundbreaking work on the relationship between prosperity and well-being was done by the economist Richard Easterlin, who in 1974 wrote a famous paper entitled "Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot?" Easterlin showed that when it came to developed countries, there was no real correlation between a nation's income level and its citizens' happiness. Money, Easterlin argued, could not buy happiness – at least not after a certain point. Easterlin showed that though poverty was strongly correlated with misery, once a country was solidly middle-class, getting wealthier did not seem to make its citizens any happier.This seems to be close to a universal phenomenon. In fact, one of happiness scholars' most important insights is that people adapt very quickly to good news. Take lottery winners for example. One famous study showed that although winners were very, very happy when they won, their extreme excitement quickly evaporated, and after a while their moods and sense of well-being were indistinguishable from what they had been before the victory.So, too, with technology: no matter how dramatic a new innovation is, no matter how much easier it makes our lives, it is very easy to take it for granted. You can see this principle at work in the world of technology every day, as things that once seemed miraculous soon become common and, worse, when they don't work perfectly. It's hard, it turns out, to keep in mind what things were like before the new technology came along.Does our fast assimilation of technological progress mean, then, that technology makes no difference? No. It just makes the question of technology's impact, for good or ill, more complicated. Let's start with the downside. There are certain ways in which technology makes life obviously worse. Telemarketing, traffic jams, and identity theft all come to mind. These are all phenomena that make people consciously unhappy. But for the most part, modern critiques of technology have focused not so much on specific, bad technologies as the impact of technology on our human relationships.Privacy has become increasingly fragile in a world of linked databases. In many workplaces, technologies like keystroke monitoring and full recordings of phone calls make it easier to watch workers. The notion that technology disrupts relationships and fractures community gained mainstream prominence as an attack on television. Some even say that TV is chiefly responsible for the gradual isolation of Americans from each other. Similarly, the harmful effects of the Internet, which supposedly further isolates people from what is often called "the real world".This broad criticism of technology's impact on relationships is an interesting one and is especially relevant to the question of happiness, because one of the few things we can say for certain is that the more friends and the closer relationships people have, the happier they tend to be.Today, technological change is so rapid that when you buy something, you do so knowing that in a few months there's going to be a better, faster version of the product, and that you're going to be stuck with the old one. Someone else, in other words, has it better. It's as if disappointment were built into acquisition from the very beginning.Daily stress, an annoying sense of disappointment, fear that the government knows a lot more about you than you would like it to – these are obviously some of the ways in which technology reduces people's sense of well-being. But the most important impact of technology on people's sense of well-being is in the field of health care. Before the Industrial Revolution, two out of every three Europeans died before the age of 30. Today, life expectancy for women in Western Europe is almost 80 years, and it continues to increase. The point is obvious: the vast majority of people are happy to be alive, and the more time they get on earth, the better off they feel they'll be. But until very recently, life for the vast majority of people was nasty, rough, and short. Technology has changed that, at least for people in the rich world. As much as we should worry about the rising cost of health care and the problem of the uninsured, it's also worth remembering how valuable for our spirits as well as our bodies are the benefits that medical technology has brought us.On a deeper level, what the technological improvement of our health and our longevity emphasizes is a paradox of any discussion of happiness on a national or a global level: even though people may not be happier, even though they are wealthier and possess more technology, they're still as hungry as ever for more time. It's like that old joke: the food may not be so great, but we want the portions to be as big as possible.3、The Rainbow of KnowledgeFor more than 3/4 of my life – 39 of my 50 years – I've either studied or taught in a school or a college in New York.You might think, then, that after all this time I'd have some grasp of the situation, that I'd actually know things – that I'd have some positive sense of assurance, of certainty, about knowledge and about life. But I don't. In fact, the more I know, the more I know I don't know.To say that the more I know, the more I know I don't know is, of course, contradictory. But then, modern physics tells us that reality itself is contradictory. The more scientists look into our physical reality, the more it slips away from them. In a way, the more they learn, the less they know.Knowledge itself is contradictory. For example, picture your knowledge as a dot, as perhaps the period at the end of this sentence. Notice the tiny circumference of that period, and let that represent the interface of the known with the unknown – in other words, your awareness of what you don't know.But now imagine that little period growing, its blackness consuming more and more of the page. As it grows, so does its circumference. And if that growing blackness represents knowledge, then as it grows, so does the awareness of what remains unknown. In other words, the more you know, the more you know you don't know.No doubt you have experienced this yourself in your own personal quests for knowledge. At first, you don't even know a field of learning exists. It's been there all along, of course; you just haven't noticed it before. When I got my first computer in 1988, I walked down to the magazine store, hoping to find something about computing and was amazed at the number of choices. Likewise, when I lucked into an opportunity to teach film analysis, I found myself dazzled at the sheer number of books devoted to the subject.Let's say you decide to learn about this topic. You buy one of these books, the best and most complete one you can find (or so you think), or perhaps you borrow it from the library. But you quickly find that your reading, rather than answering questions, only creates more of them.Earlier this year, for example, I not only had no idea that I had any interest at all in the relationship of technology to freedom; I didn't even realize that a connection between them might exist. So I started reading books and became more and more aware of the relationship between technology and freedom. Then, on the one hand, I now know much more about this topic than I did a few short months ago. But on the other hand, all this reading has made me see how little I really know and how much more I need to read and think and write. Once I've finished reading a book, I always feel that I need to read three more to gain a better grasp of the topic. And I think and write at the same time. In fact, it is my writing that has led me into it. We think often that only people who know and who are sure of themselves write. For me, however, it's just the opposite. Writing doesn't close things off – it opens things up.For a long time, I, as a writer, was paralyzed by this paradox – the more I know, the more I know I don't know. I was very aware of the teaching from Taoism that said "those who know don't speak; those who speak don't know." I wasn't sure I should write at all, and, even if I did, I didn't believe that I was qualified to do it. I always felt I had to know more first. It took me a long time not to let this paradox freeze me and to believe that it was my writing that would qualify my knowledge, and not the other way around. I think of my work not as articles or as columns but as essays – a word from French, meaning "to try". I do not know truth. I only try to find it.I don't mean, of course, to suggest that we should not learn, or that we should not read and write and think and talk. I do not mean to suggest that we should not try. An infinite quest is not a hopeless one. I only suggest that an understanding will inevitably and doubtlessly lead us away from the force and rigidity of dogmatism and toward the flexibility and freedom of the individual. As Taoism teaches, "the stiff and unbending is the disciple of death. The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life."We must temper our pride in knowing with the humility of not knowing. The truth, as they say, is out there, but, maybe, like the rainbow, we can never really grasp it, never hold it in our hands and truly know it. We can only, as William James said, "live today by what truth we can get today and be ready to call it falsehood tomorrow."4、Work, Labor, and PlaySo far as I know, Miss Hannah Arendt was the first person to define the essential difference between work and labor. To be happy, a man must feel, firstly, free and, secondly, important. He cannot be really happy if he is compelled by society to do what he does not enjoy doing, or if what he enjoys doing is ignored by society as of no value or importance. In a society where slavery in the strict sense has been abolished, whether what a man does has social value depends on whether he ispaid money to do it, but a laborer today can rightly be called a wage slave. A man is a laborer if the job society offers him is of no interest to himself but he is compelled to take it by the necessity of earning a living and supporting his family.The opposite to labor is play. When we play a game, we enjoy what we are doing, otherwise we should not play it, but it is a purely private activity; society could not care less whether we play it or not.Between labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; what from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his own point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer. Which a man is can be seen from his attitude toward leisure. To a worker, leisure means simply the hours he needs to relax and rest in order to work efficiently. He is therefore more likely to take too little leisure than too much; workers die of heart attacks and forget their wives' birthdays. To the laborer, on the other hand, leisure means freedom from compulsion, so that it is natural for him to imagine that the fewer hours he has to spend laboring, and the more hours he is free to play, the better.What percentage of the population in a modern technological society are, like myself, in the fortunate position of being workers? At a guess I would say sixteen per cent, and I do not think that figure is likely to get bigger in the future. Technology and the division of labor have done two things: by eliminating in many fields the need for special strength or skill, they have made a very large number of paid occupations which formerly were enjoyable work into boring labor, and by increasing productivity they have reduced the number of necessary laboring hours. It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy . When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful. Indeed, the problem of dealing with boredom may be even more difficult for such a future mass society than it was for aristocracies. The latter, for example, ritualized their time; there was a season to shoot grouse, a season to spend in town, etc. The masses are more likely to replace an unchanging ritual by fashion which changes as often as possible in the economic interest of certain people. Again, the masses cannot go in for hunting, for very soon there would be no animals left to hunt. For other aristocratic amusements like gambling, dueling, and warfare, it may be only too easy to find equivalents in dangerous driving, drug-taking, and senseless acts of violence. Workers seldom commit acts of violence, because they can put their aggression into their work, be it physical like the work of a smith, or mental like the work of a scientist or an artist. The role of aggression in mental work is aptly expressed by the phrase "getting one's teeth into a problem ".。
