我是个说书之人。在这里，我想和大家分享一些我本人的故事。一些关于所谓的“单一故事的危险性”的经历。我成长在尼日利亚东部的一所大学校园里。我母亲常说我从两岁起就开始读书。不过我认为“四岁起”比较接近事实。所以我从小就开始读书，读的是英国和美国的儿童书籍。

我也是从小就开始写作，当我在七岁那年，开始强迫我可怜的母亲阅读我用铅笔写好的故事，外加上蜡笔描绘的插图时，我所写的故事正如我所读的故事那般，我故事里的人物们都是白皮肤、蓝眼睛的。常在雪中嬉戏，吃着苹果。而且他们经常讨论天气，讨论太阳出来时，一切都多么美好。我一直写着这样故事，虽然说我当时住在尼日利亚，并且从来没有出过国。虽然说我们从来没见过雪，虽然说我们实际上只能吃到芒果；虽然说我们从不讨论天气，因为根本没这个必要。

我故事里的人物们也常喝姜汁啤酒，因为我所读的那些英国书中的人物们常喝姜汁啤酒。虽然说我当时完全不知道姜汁啤酒是什么东西。时隔多年，我一直都怀揣着一个深切的渴望，想尝尝姜汁啤酒的味道。不过这要另当别论了。

这一切所表明的，正是在一个个的故事面前，我们是何等的脆弱，何等的易受影响，尤其当我们还是孩子的时候，因为我当时读的所有书中只有外国人物，我因而坚信：书要想被称为书，就必须有外国人在里面，就必须是关于我无法亲身体验的事情，而这一切都在我接触了非洲书籍之后发生了改变。当时非洲书并不多，而且他们也不像国外书籍那样好找。 不过因为！和！之类的作家，我思维中对于文学的概念，产生了质的改变。我意识到像我这样的人---有着巧克力般的肤色和永远无法梳成马尾辫的卷曲头发的女孩们，也可以出现在文学作品中。

我开始撰写我所熟知的事物，但这并不是说我不喜爱那些美国和英国书籍，恰恰相反，那些书籍激发了我的想象力，为我开启了新的世界。但随之而来的后果就是，我不知道原来像我这样的人，也是可以存在于文学作品中的，而与非洲作家的结缘，则是将我从对于书籍的单一故事中拯救了出来。

我来自一个传统的尼日利亚中产家庭，我的父亲是一名教授，我的母亲是一名大学管理员。因此我们和很多其他家庭一样，都会从附近的村庄中雇佣一些帮手来打理家事。在我八岁那一年，我们家招来了一位新的男仆。他的名字叫做FIDE.我父亲只告诉我们说，他是来自一个非常穷苦的家庭，我母亲会时不时的将山芋、大米，还有我们穿旧的衣服送到他的家里。每当我剩下晚饭的时候，我的母亲就会说：吃净你的食物！难道你不知道吗？像FIDE家这样的人可是一无所有。因此我对他们家人充满了怜悯。

后来的一个星期六，我们去FIDE的村庄拜访，他的母亲向我们展示了一个精美别致的草篮----用FIDE的哥哥用染过色的酒椰叶编制的。我当时完全被震惊了。我从来没有想过FIDE的家人居然有亲手制造东西的才能。在那之前，我对FIDE家唯一的了解就是他们是何等的穷困，正因为如此，他们在我脑中的印象只是一个字------“穷”。他们的贫穷是我赐予他们的单一故事。

多年以后，在我离开尼日利亚前往美国读大学的时候，我又想到了这件事。我那时19岁，我的美国室友当时完全对我感到十分惊讶了。他问我是从哪里学的讲一口如此流利的英语，而当我告知她尼日利亚刚巧是以英语作为官方语言的时候，她的脸上则是写满了茫然。她问我是否可以给她听听她所谓的“部落音乐”，可想而知，当我拿出玛丽亚凯莉的磁带时，她是何等的失望，她断定我不知道如何使用电炉。

我猛然意识到“在他见到我之前，她就已经对我充满了怜悯之心。她对我这个非洲人的预设心态是一种充满施恩与好意的怜悯之情。我那位室友的脑中有一个关于非洲的单一故事。一个充满了灾难的单一故事。在这个单一的故事中，非洲人是完全没有可能在任何方面和她有所相似的；没有可能接收到比怜悯更复杂的感情；没有可能以一个平等的人类的身份与她

沟通。

我不得不强调，在我前往美国之前，我从来没有有意识的把自己当做个非洲人。但在美国的时候，每当人们提到”非洲“时，大家都会转向我，虽然我对纳米比亚之类的地方一无所知。但我渐渐的开始接受这个新的身份，现在很多时候我都是把自己当做一个非洲人来看待。不过当人们把非洲当做一个国家来讨论的时候，我还是觉得挺反感的。最近的一次例子就发生在两天前，我从拉各斯搭乘航班，旅程原本相当愉快，直到广播里开始介绍在”印度、非洲以及其他国家”所进行的慈善事业。

当我以一名非洲人的身份在美国读过几年之后，我开始理解我那位室友当时对我的反应。如果我不是在尼日利亚长大，如果我对非洲的一切认识都是来自于大众流行的影像，我相信我眼中的非洲也同样是充满了美丽的地貌、美丽的动物，以及一群难以理解的人们进行着毫无意义的战争、死于艾滋和贫穷、无法为自己辩护，并且等待着一位慈悲的、白种的外国人的救赎，我看待非洲的方式将会和我儿时看待FIDE一家的方式是一样的。

我认为关于非洲的这个单一故事从根本上来自于西方的文学。这是来自伦敦商人John Locke的一段话。他在1561年的时候，曾游历非洲西部，并且为他的航行做了翻很有趣的记录。他先是把黑色的非洲人称为“没有房子的野兽”，随后又写道：“他们也是一群无头脑的人，他们的嘴和眼睛都长在了他们的胸口上。”

我每次读到这一段的时候，都不禁大笑起来。他的想象力真的是让人敬佩。但关于他的作品极其重要的一点是它昭示着西方社会讲述非洲故事的一个传统，在这个传统中，撒哈拉以南的非洲充满了消极、差异以及黑暗，是伟大的诗人Rudyard Kipling笔下所形容的“半恶魔、半孩童”的奇异人种。

正因为如此，我开始意识到我的那位美国室友一定在她的成长过程中，看到并且听过关于这个单一故事的不同版本，就如同之前一位曾经批判我的小说缺乏“真实的非洲感”的教授一样。话说我倒是甘愿承认我的小说有几处写的不好的地方，有几处败笔，但我很难想象我的小说既然会缺乏“真实的非洲感”。事实上，我甚至不知道真实的非洲感到底是个什么东西。那位教授跟我说我书中的人物都和他太相近了，都是受过教育的中产人物。我的人物会开车，他们没有受到饥饿的困扰。正因此，他们缺乏了真实的非洲感。

我在这里不得不指出，我本人也常常被单一的故事蒙蔽双眼。几年前，我从美国探访墨西哥，当时美国的政治气候比较紧张。关于移民的辩论一直在进行着。而在美国，“移民”和“墨西哥人”常常被当做同义词来使用。关于墨西哥人的故事是源源不绝，讲的都是欺诈医疗系统、偷渡边境、在边境被捕之类的事情。

我还记得当我到达瓜达拉哈拉的第一天，看着人们前往工作，在市集上吃着墨西哥卷、抽着烟、大笑着，我记得我刚看到这一切时是何等的惊讶，但随后我的心中便充满了羞耻感。我意识到我当时完全被沉浸在媒体上关于墨西哥人的报道，以致于他们在我的脑中幻化成一个单一的个体---卑贱的移民。我完全相信了关于墨西哥人的单一故事，对此我感到无比的羞愧。这就是创造单一故事的过程，将一群人一遍又一遍地呈现为一个事物，并且只是一个事物，时间久了，他们就变成了那个事物。

而说到单一的故事，就自然而然地要讲到权力这个问题。每当我想到这个世界的权力结构的时候，我都会想起一个伊傅语中的单词，叫做“nkali”,它是一个名词，可以在大意上被翻译成”比另一个人强大。”就如同我们的经济和政治界一样，我们所讲的故事也是建立在它的原则上的。这些故事是怎样被讲述的、由谁来讲述、何时被讲述、有多少故事被讲述，这一切都取决于权力。

 

第二篇：TED演讲稿《敢于质疑》 精简标注版 BY JIM

DARE TO DISAGREE

by Margaret Heffernan ALICE AND GEORGR

In Oxford in the 1950s, there was a fantastic doctor, who was very unusual, named Alice Stewart. And Alice was unusual partly because, of course, she was a woman, which was pretty rare in the 1950s. And she was brilliant, she was one of the, at the time, the youngest Fellow to be elected to the Royal College of Physicians. She was unusual too because she continued to work after she got married, after she had kids, and even after she got divorced and was a single parent, she continued her medical work.

And she was unusual because she was really interested in a new science, the emerging field of epidemiology n. 流行病学；传染病学, the study of patterns in disease. But like every scientist, she appreciated that to make her mark, what she needed to do was find a hard problem and solve it. The hard problem that Alice chose was the rising incidence of childhood cancers. Most disease is correlated with poverty, but in the case of childhood cancers, the children who were dying seemed mostly to come from affluent adj. 富裕的 families. So, what, she wanted to know, could explain this anomaly n. 异常?

Now, Alice had trouble getting funding for her research. In the end, she got just 1,000 pounds from the Lady Tata Memorial prize. And that meant she knew she only had one shot 一次使用 at collecting her data. Now, she had no idea what to look for. This really was a needle in a haystack sort of search当时很难得到大量数据来做研究, so she asked everything she could think of. Had the children eaten boiled sweets? Had they consumed colored drinks? Did they eat fish and chips? Did they have indoor or outdoor plumbingn. 铅工业；铅管品制造? What time of life had they started school?

And when her carbon copied questionnaire 调查问卷 started to come back, one thing and one thing only jumped out with the statistical clarity of a kind that most scientists can only dream of. By a rate of two to one 三分之二, the children who had died had had mothers who had been X-rayed when pregnant. Now that finding flew in the face of vt. 公然违反conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom held that everything was safe up to a point, a threshold门槛. It flew in the face of conventional wisdom, which was huge enthusiasm for the cool new technology of that age, which was the X-ray machine. And it flew in the face of doctors' idea of themselves, which was as people who helped patients, they didn't harm them.

Nevertheless, Alice Stewart rushed to publish her preliminary findings in The Lancet in 1956. People got very excited, there was talk of the Nobel Prize, and Alice really was in a big hurry to try to study all the cases of childhood cancer she could find before they disappeared. In fact, she need not have hurried. It was fully 25 years before the British and medical -- British

and American medical establishments医疗机构 abandoned the practice of X-raying pregnant women.（it is very difficult to persuade people and organizations to change their existed ideas .It needs time） The data was out there, it was open, it was freely available, but nobody wanted to know. A child a week was dying, but nothing changed. Openness alone can't drive change.

So for 25 years Alice Stewart had a very big fight on her hands. So, how did she know that she was right? Well, she had a fantastic model for thinking. She worked with a statistician named George Kneale, and George was pretty much everything that Alice wasn't. So, Alice was very outgoing and sociable, and George was a recluse隐居者. Alice was very warm, very empathetic with her patients. George frankly preferred numbers to people. But he said this fantastic thing about their working relationship. He said, "My job is to prove Dr. Stewart wrong." He actively sought disconfirmation失验. Different ways of looking at her models, at her statistics, different ways of crunching压碎 the data in order to disprove her反驳. He saw his job as creating conflict around her theories. Because it was only by not being able to prove that she was wrong, that George could give Alice the confidence she needed to know that she was right.

It's a fantastic model of collaboration -- thinking partners who aren't echo chambers. I wonder how many of us have, or dare to have, such collaborators. Alice and George were very good at conflict. They saw it as thinking.

JOE

So how do we develop the skills that we need? Because it does take skill and practice, too. If we aren't going to be afraid of conflict, we have to see it as thinking, and then we have to get really good at it. So, recently, I worked with an executive named Joe, and Joe worked for a medical device company. And Joe was very worried about the device that he was working on. He thought that it was too complicated and he thought that its complexity created margins of error that could really hurt people. He was afraid of doing damage to the patients he was trying to help. But when he looked around his organization, nobody else seemed to be at all worried. So, he didn't really want to say anything. After all, maybe they knew something he didn't. Maybe he'd look stupid. But he kept worrying about it, and he worried about it so much that he got to the point where he thought the only thing he could do was leave a job he loved.

In the end, Joe and I found a way for him to raise his concerns. And what happened then is what almost always happens in this situation. It turned out everybody had exactly the same questions and doubts. So now Joe had allies. They could think together. And yes, there was a lot of conflict and debate and argument, but that allowed everyone around the table to be creative, to solve the problem, and to change the device.

Joe was what a lot of people might think of as a whistle-blower 揭发者, except that like almost all whistle-blowers, he wasn't a crank奇想 at all, he was passionately devoted to the organization and the higher purposes that that organization served. But he had been so afraid of conflict, until finally he became more afraid of the silence. And when he dared to speak, he

discovered much more inside himself and much more give in the system than he had ever imagined. And his colleagues don't think of him as a crank. They think of him as a leader.

So, how do we have these conversations more easily and more often? Well, the University of Delft requires that its PhD students have to submit five statements that they're prepared to defend. It doesn't really matter what the statements are about, what matters is that the candidates are willing and able to stand up to authority挑战权威. I think it's a fantastic system, but I think leaving it to PhD candidates is far too few people, and way too late in life. I think we need to be teaching these skills to kids and adults at every stage of their development, if we want to have thinking organizations and a thinking society.

The fact is that most of the biggest catastrophes that we've witnessed rarely come from information that is secret or hidden. It comes from information that is freely available and out there, but that we are willfully blind to, because we can't handle, don't want to handle, the conflict that it provokes煽动；惹起. But when we dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, and we create conflict, we enable ourselves and the people around us to do our very best thinking.

Open information is fantastic, open networks are essential. But the truth won't set us free until we develop the skills and the habit and the talent and the moral courage to use it. Openness isn't the end. It's the beginning.