问答题
Like other forms of life on this planet, human
beings confront a basic task: to deal satisfactorily with their conflicts and
thereby secure the advantages of community and cooperation. {{U}} {{U}}
16 {{/U}} {{/U}}{{U}}Unlike other forms of life, human beings are endowed
with a capacity to reflect on this task and to search for better solutions by
conscious thought and deliberate choices.{{/U}} The task of
overcoming conflicts and achieving community and cooperation arises because
human beings are unable and unwilling to live in complete isolation. {{U}}
{{U}} 17 {{/U}} {{/U}}{{U}}The advantages of cooperation and community
life are so numerous and so obvious that they must have been evident to man from
earliest times.{{/U}} By now, our ancestors have closed off the choice; for most
of us the option of total isolation from a community is, realistically speaking,
no longer open. {{U}} {{U}} 18 {{/U}}
{{/U}}{{U}}Nonetheless, however strongly_ human beings are driven to seek the
company of one another, and despite thousands of years' practice they have never
discovered a way in which they can live together without conflict{{/U}}. Conflict
exists when one individual wishes to follow a line of action that would make it
difficult or impossible for someone else to pursue his own desires. Conflict
seems to be an inescapable aspect of the community and consequently of human
being. Why conflict seems inescapable is a question that has troubled many
people: philosophers, theologians, historians, social scientists, and doubtless
a great many ordinary people. James Madison held that conflict was built into
the very nature of men and women. Human beings have diverse abilities, he wrote
in The Federalist, and these in turn produce diverse interests. {{U}}
{{U}} 19 {{/U}} {{/U}}{{U}}"As long as man has irrational ideas, and
he is at liberty to exercise it," Madison wrote, "different opinions will be
formed."{{/U}} Whatever the explanation for conflict may be, and
Madison's is but one of many, its experience is one of the prime facts of all
community of life. Yet if this were the only fact, then human life would fit the
description by the English political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, in his
Leviathan (1651). Hobbes describes mankind in a state of nature-a condition
without government-having little in the way of agriculture, industry, trade,
knowledge, arts, letters or society. {{U}} {{U}} 20 {{/U}}
{{/U}}{{U}}"And which is worst of all," he concluded in a famous sentence, to exist
without government would mean "continual fear, and danger of violent death and
the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty and short."{{/U}}