Creating a Brotherhood: Melinda Gates Duke University’s 2013 Commencement

原文: https://today.duke.edu/2013/05/gatestalk

视频: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEWMAyY-e7A

中文导语：那些抽象的头像很难激励你，但是每一个具体的人都能让你重新燃起希望。梅琳达盖茨在杜克大学毕业典礼上，向同学们传达了一个重要的概念：连接。所有的科技都只是工具，而只有你真正和一个个具体的人产生连接的时候，你才能真正感受到这个世界的魅力。

注：本文选自杜克大学官网的演讲稿。梅琳达盖茨的现场演讲虽然遵循了原文的内容，但是在措辞上加入更多口语化的表达。这也体现了一个演讲者不拘泥于原文，能够自如表达自己观点的能力。这一点会在当天的课上给大家作比较分析。

[1] President Brodhead, Trustees, members of the Duke University Community, thank you for inviting me to come back to my alma mater for this important occasion. I am grateful for the honorary degree, and moved by the opportunity to address the graduating seniors.

To the Class of 2013: Let me start by saying congratulations ...

... and by reminding you to thank your mothers and wish them a happy Mothers' Day ...

... and by admitting that I'm still bitter about the Louisville game.

I was a student here in 1986 when Coach K took the team to the finals for the first time. We lost to Louisville then, too, so you and I share that particular agony. However, you had the good fortune to be here on campus when Duke won its fourth national championship.
I never got to see us cut down the nets, but I did see us beat UNC, in Chapel Hill, when Michael Jordan was the star of the team.The fact that Michael Jordan recently turned 50 years old tells you how long it's been since I was a student. No matter how much time passes, though, I always feel connected to Duke. I love visiting my favorite landmarks, especially the Duke Gardens, where I used to go when I was stressed out before exams and needed to clear my head. I went yesterday, because I wanted to make sure I was centered before giving this speech.

trustee (学校、社团等)理事，评议员；理事会，董事会

alma mater 母校；校歌

例：He has fond feelings for his Alma Mater.
他对自己的母校有着深厚的感情。

address 作演讲

例：He is due to address a conference on human rights next week.
他下周要在一个人权会议上发言。

bitter about 痛苦于......

例：She was still bitter about her failure.
她对于自己的失败依然痛心。

agony 极大痛苦

例：It was agony not knowing where the children were.
孩子们下落不明，真让人揪心。

landmark 地标

例：The Empire State Building is a familiar landmark on the New York skyline
帝国大厦是人们熟悉的纽约高楼大厦中的地标。

[2] There’s also my feeling of deep connection to the community my classmates created during our four years, and to the lifelong friends I made here -- in short, to the people. I doubt there is a word that captures the combination of experiences and places and people that we summarize under the label "Duke." The best one I can think of is "connected." And this is a word I'd like to talk about for a few minutes on your Commencement Day. In August, 1982, I left my home in Dallas, Texas, to come here to Durham. To mark this rite of passage, my parents gave me a terrific present: the cutting-edge Olympus B12 portable typewriter, with a carrying case included. One of its best features was how light it was: Amazingly, the whole bundle weighed just 12 pounds! It was during my time at Duke that the personal computer displaced the typewriter as the technology of choice on campus. Those of us in the computer science department actually resented the change. There were so few computers available, and all of a sudden the humanities majors were hogging our machines to write their papers. We had to do our programming in the middle of the night, usually in the creepy basement of the old biological science building. We'd set up contests -- who programmed the fastest or made the fewest mistakes -- kind of like a prehistoric hack-a-thon. The punishment for the losers was a trip to the biology lab at the end of the hall, where they had to touch the scariest mutant frog specimens. The personal computer -- and later, after I'd graduated and taken a job at Microsoft, the Internet -- started a communications revolution. My kids are a few years younger than you, but raising them has proved to me that the way you communicate is the single biggest difference between you now and me a generation ago.

commencement 毕业典礼

例：Did you attend the commencement yesterday?
你昨天参加毕业典礼了吗？

rite 传统仪式

例：This festival descends from a Chinese rite.
这个节日源自一个中国的仪式。

cutting-edge 前沿，尖端的

例：What we are planning is cutting-edge technology never seen in China before.
我们正在筹划的是中国前所未见的尖端技术。

bundle 包; 捆; 束

例：He pulled a bundle of papers out of a folder.
他从一个文件夹中拉出一叠文件。

displace 取代

例：I'm trying to displace him in his job.
我在试图取代他的工作。

resent 憎恨

例：She resents her mother for being so tough on her.
她恨她的妈妈对她如此苛刻。

hog 独占

例：Are you done hogging the bathroom?
你要霸占浴室到什么时候？

creepy 诡异的；令人毛骨悚然的

例：There were certain places that were really creepy at night.
有些地方到了晚上真吓人。

mutant 突变体

例：New species are merely mutants of earlier ones.
新物种不过是早先物种的突变体。

specimen 标本，样本

例：He is a fine specimen of the type you want to know.
他是你想了解的那类人的一个很好的样本。

[3] One popular way of describing this aspect of your lives is to say that you're "connected." Some pundits have even started to refer to you as Generation C.

对于你们这方面的生活，一种流行的说法是你们都已被“连接”。一些专家甚至开始称呼你们为“C代人”。

One recent report overdid the c-thing by saying you are "connected, communicating, content-centric, community-oriented, always clicking." It went on to say that, for these reasons alone, you will "transform the world as we know it.”

最近的一份报告更是无限放大了这个C（连接）的概念，他说你们是连接的，通讯交流的，内容中心的，社区主导的，并且总是在点鼠标的一代人。文章继续说道，单从这些因素，你们就将改变我们现在的世界。

Of course, all the hype about how connected you are has contributed to a counter-narrative -- that, in fact, your generation is increasingly disconnected from the things that matter.

当然，这样的大肆宣传其实也引来一些质疑之声，他们认为这一代人其实并没有联系得更紧密，反倒正在失去与那些重要事物的联系。

The arguments go something like this: Instead of spending time with friends, you spend it alone, collecting friend requests. Rather than savoring your food, you take pictures of it and post them on Facebook.

相关的论据如下：你们不再花时间和朋友待在一起，而是在网上不断囤积好友申请；你们不再享受食物，而只是喜欢拍照片，然后把它们传到FACEBOOK上。

pundit 权威; 专家

例：...a well-known political pundit.
…一位著名的政治权威。

hype 大肆的宣传广告; 炒作

例：We are certainly seeing a lot of hype by some companies.
我们的确看到一些公司天花乱坠的广告宣传。

counter-narrative 反叙事的

savor 品尝

例：Just relax, eat slowly, and savor the full flavour of your food.
只要放松，慢慢地吃，充分品尝食物的滋味。

[4] I want to encourage you to reject the cynics who say technology is flattening your experience of the world. Please don't let anyone make you believe you are somehow shallow because you like to update your status on a regular basis.

我希望你们不要听那些愤世嫉俗的人的冷言冷语，说什么技术正在毁灭你们对于这个世界的体验。有些人仅仅因为你喜欢经常更新状态就说你变得有些浅薄，不要听他们的。

The people who say technology has disconnected you from others are wrong. So are the people who say technology automatically connects you to others. Technology is just a tool. It's a powerful tool, but it's just a tool.

那些认为科技让你们彼此疏远的人都是错误的。当然那些说科技可以让人们自动联系起来的话也同样不正确。科技只是工具，一个强有力的工具，但它只是一个工具而已。

Deep human connection is very different. It's not a tool. It's not a means to an end.
It is the end -- the purpose and the result of a meaningful life -- and it will inspire the most amazing acts of love, generosity, and humanity.

人与人之间深入的联系是不一样的。它不是工具，它不是实现目的的手段，它就是目的本身。它是有意义的生活目标。它能激发这些最美妙的行为，比如爱，慷慨和仁慈。

In his famous speech "Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution," Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood.”

在那场注明的演讲《在大变革中保持清醒》中，马丁路德金说：“我们通过科学和技术已经实现了‘天涯若比邻’，但是我们仍然缺少让世界充满手足之情的伦理担当”。

With 50 years of hindsight, I think it's fair to say Dr. King was premature in calling the world a neighborhood. Back then, Americans lumped whole continents into something they referred to as the Third World, as if the people on the other side of the planet were an undifferentiated mass whose defining feature was that they were not like us.

根据50年之后的后见之明，我想说的天涯若比邻为时过早。当时美国将许多大陆都归并在了一起，并把它们称为第三世界。就好像生活在地球另一端的人们和我们是完全不同的生物一样。

But as a result of the ongoing communications revolution, your world really can be a neighborhood. So the ethical commitment Dr. King spoke of is yours to live up to.

但是随着这场通讯革命的推进，你的世界真的可以变成邻里的状态，从而让金博士所说的伦理担当在你们这一代人里得以实现。

cynics 愤世嫉俗者；玩世不恭者

例：I have come to be very much of a cynic in these matters.
我在这些事情上已经成了一个颇为愤世嫉俗的人。

flatten 摧毁，推倒

例：Most of the factory was flattened by the explosion.
工厂的大部分被爆炸夷为平地。

shallow 浅薄的

例：I’m not that shallow.
我才没那么肤浅呢。

commitment 承诺

例：We made a commitment to keep working together.
我们作了承诺要继续在一起工作。

hindsight 后见之明

例：With hindsight, we'd all do things differently.
事后想来，我们可能都会以不同的方式做事。

lump 把...归并到一起

You can't lump all Asian languages together.
你不能把所有的亚洲语言混为一谈。

continent 大陆，洲，陆地

例：She loved the African continent.
她热爱非洲大陆。

[5] What does it mean to make of this world a brotherhood and a sisterhood? That probably sounds like a lot to ask of you as individuals, or even as a graduating class. I'm pretty sure none of you will respond to the annoying question "What are you going to do after graduation?" by saying "I plan to have the ethical commitment to make of this world a brotherhood.” But you can change the way you think about other people. You can choose to see their humanity first -- the one big thing that makes them the same as you, instead of the many things that make them different from you. It is not just a matter of caring about people. I assume you already do that. It's much harder to see all people, including people whose experiences are very different from yours, as three-dimensional human beings who want and need the same things you do. But if you can really believe that all 7 billion people on the planet are equal to you in spirit, then you will take action to make the world more equal for everyone.

[6] Paul Farmer, the Duke graduate I admire most, is a testament to the deep human connection I'm talking about. As many of you know, Paul, who's here today, is a doctor and global health innovator. For years, he travelled back and forth from Boston, where he is a professor of medicine, to Haiti, where he ran a health clinic giving the highest quality care to the poorest people in the world. Now, he lives mostly in Rwanda, where he's working on changing the country's entire health care system. I first met Paul in 2003, when I went to see him in Haiti. It took us forever to walk the 100 yards from our vehicle to the clinic because he introduced me to every single person we met along the way. I am not exaggerating. Every single person. As we moved along, he introduced each person to me by first and last name, wished their families well, and asked for an update about their lives. He hugged people when he greeted them and looked them in the eyes throughout each conversation. If you believe love plays a role in healing, there was healing happening at every step of that journey. When we finally reached the waiting area outside the clinic, I saw a lovely garden with a canopy of flowering vines. Paul told me he built it himself, for two reasons. First, he said, it gets hot, and he wants to his patients to be cool in the shade while they wait. Second, he wants them to see what he sees, the beauty of the world, before they have to go into the clinic for treatment.

testament 证明

例：For him to win the game like that is a testament to his perseverance.
他能赢得那样的比赛证明了他的毅力。

canopy 顶蓬，天蓬

[7] The next day, I visited a different clinic in Haiti. The clinic was there for the same reason as Paul's -- to provide poor people with the medical care they desperately need but cannot afford. The doctors worked there for all the right reasons. But I noticed that the patients were waiting outside in the scorching sun. Inside, it felt like the doctors considered themselves health providers, and the patients were recipients. There was no sense, as there was in Paul's clinic, of an equal partnership with the community.Experiencing those two clinics one right after the other showed me that Paul made a moral choice to do the hard work of deep connection. He took the time to do the little things: provide shade, remember surnames, and make eye contact. These small acts were born of a big idea -- the boundless dignity of all people.

scorch 烧焦

例：The bomb scorched the side of the building.
炸弹烧焦了建筑物的侧面。

[8] Of course, not everybody is Paul Farmer. Not everybody is going to dedicate their whole life to connecting with the poorest people in the world. But just because you don't qualify for sainthood doesn't mean you can't form deep human connections -- or that your connections can't make a difference in the world. That's where technology comes in. If you make the moral choice to connect deeply to others, then your computer, your phone, and your tablet make it so much easier to do.

当然不是每个人都是保罗法默。不是每个人都将将他们的医生献身于连接世界上最贫穷的人们。但是即便你当不了圣人，也并不意味着，你不能建立深厚的人际联系，或者说你的联系不能给这个世界带来改变。这就是科技登场的时候了。如果你做出了道德上的选择，决定去和人们建立深入的联系，那么你的电脑、手机都将使这个过程变得更加容易。

[9] Today, there are 700 million cell phone subscribers in Africa. I travelled to Kenya recently and spent a day in Kibera, which many people consider the largest slum in Africa. One image that sticks with me is all the cell phones piled up in a small kiosk where locals paid to recharge their batteries. Most people in Kibera don't have electricity -- even the cell phone charging businesses steal it from the city's power grid -- but everywhere I looked young people were on their phones. And guess what they were doing? Exactly what you do ... they were texting. You and they can share your stories directly with each other, with literally billions of people, because you're all using the same technology. On the Internet, you can also immerse yourselves in one another's lives -- read what the other is reading, listen to what the other is listening to, and watch what the other is watching. You can learn their language, and they can learn yours. You can find out how to cook one another's recipes. And then you can photograph the final product and post it on Facebook!

slum 贫民窟

例：She was brought up in the slums of London.
她在伦敦的贫民窟长大。

immerse 沉浸；使陷入

例：He immersed himself in study during the vacation.
他在假期里埋头学习。

[10] Nobody expects you to wake up tomorrow and randomly Skype someone in Nairobi. And sometimes it's wise to ignore emails from strangers in Nigeria offering to split a large fortune with you!

没有人期望你明天醒来之后就用Skype（国外的通讯工具）随机联系在内罗比的一个人。如果某个尼日利亚的陌生人发电子邮件告诉你，要分你一大笔财产，忽略它也是明智的选择。

But over the course of your lives, I promise you will have many opportunities to use technology to make your world bigger: to meet more different kinds of people, and to keep in touch with more of the people you meet. These connections are important by themselves, but the truth is, I don't want you to connect for connection's sake alone.

但是在你的生命旅程中，我保证你会有很多机会去利用技术来拓展你的世界：遇到不同的人，并且与他们中的大部分人保持联系。这些联系本身就很重要，但是事实上我不希望你们仅仅为了联系而联系

I want you to connect because I believe it will inspire you to do something, to make a difference in the world. Humanity in the abstract will never inspire you in the same way as human beings you meet. Poverty is not going to motivate you. But people will motivate you.

我希望你们联系是因为它会激励你去行动，去做一些事情改变这个世界。抽象的人性无法驱使你行动，而真实的人则可以。那些印象中的贫穷不会激励你，而那些受苦受难的人们会。

[11] When my husband Bill and I started our foundation, we didn't know much about global health at all. I read the academic literature and talked to experts in the field. But most of what I learned was expressed in morbidity and mortality rates, not in flesh and blood. So in 2001, I took my first foundation learning trip, to India and Thailand, to meet with people and find out what their lives were really like behind the veil of statistics. One of my first visits was to a tiny, impoverished village in the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains. I spent most of my day talking to women about the issues we were working on at the foundation: women and children's health, infectious diseases, and sanitation. Late in the afternoon, one of the women who'd been showing me around invited me into her home. We went inside and she produced two lawn chairs that were hanging from a nail in her kitchen. They were the aluminum folding kind with the itchy fabric seat you've sat on a million times, quite possibly when you were tenting in Krzyzewskiville. When I was growing up in Dallas, we had the same chairs. On Sunday nights in the summer, my parents and my siblings and I used to set them up on our back patio and gaze up into the sky together as a family.It turned out my host wanted to show me her stunning view of the Himalayas, and as we sat and contemplated the planet's highest peaks, we talked about our children and the future. Our aspirations were basically the same. We wanted our children to fulfill their potential. We wanted the love and respect of family and friends. We wanted meaningful work. The biggest difference between us was not what we dreamt about, but how hard it was for her to make her dreams come true.

morbidity 发病率；病态

mortality 死亡率

例：The nation's infant mortality rate has reached a record low.
该国的婴儿死亡率已达历史最低。

flesh 肌肤; 肉体

例：...the warmth of her flesh.
…她肌肤的温暖。

veil 面纱，掩饰物

Their work is carried out behind a veil of secrecy.
他们的工作是在秘密掩护下进行的。

impoverish 使贫困

例：We need to reduce the burden of taxes that impoverish the economy.
我们需要减少使经济贫困的租税负担。

sanitation (尤指通过提供排污系统和洁净水源的) 公共卫生

例：We have programs for clean water and sanitation.
我们有清洁饮用水和卫生规划。

lawn (折叠)草坪椅

例：He set up folding tables and lawn chairs in the shade of trees.
他在树荫下搭了折叠桌和草坪椅。

itchy 发痒的

例：I feel itchy all over.
我觉得浑身痒。

[12] Some people assume that Bill and I are too rich to make a connection with someone who's poor, even if our intentions are good. But adjectives like rich and poor don't define who any of us truly are as human beings. And they don't make any one individual less human than the next. The universe is like computer code in that way. Binary. There is life, and there is everything else. Zeroes and ones. I'm a one. You're a one. My friend in the Himalayas is a one. Martin Luther King was not a computer programmer, so he called this concept a brotherhood. His hope was that college students could bring a brotherhood into being. Dr. King thought the world had shrunk as much as it was going to shrink -- in his words, we'd "dwarfed distance and placed time in chains." So the fact that people still didn't treat each other like brothers and sisters was, to him, an ethical failure.

[13] I take a slightly different view. I believe we are finally creating the scientific and technological tools to turn the world into a neighborhood. And that gives you an amazing ethical opportunity no one has ever had before. You can light up a network of 7 billion people with long-lasting and highly motivating human connections.You have spent four years at one of the world's finest universities acquiring the knowledge and skills to succeed at everything you do. So what will you do? I hope you will use to the tool of technology to do what you already had it in your heart to do ... To connect ... To make of this world a brotherhood ... and a sisterhood … I can't wait to see what it looks like when you do.

Congratulations again.

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