日本新干线（2）

日本新干线在半个多世纪中，时速从最初的200公里到目前的320公里，只提升了120公里。而我们中国的高速铁路从日本和德国等国家引进才10多年，“复兴号”已经跑出了350公里，为什么日本的新干线跑不出350公里的时速呢？

其实，在中国还没有引进高铁的1997年，日本新干线955系列就已经跑出了443公里的时速。日本为什么硬是把速度降下来，始终控制在300公里左右呢？我采访了JR东海铁道公司的技术部长，他告诉我几个原因。

第一是出于运营安全的考虑。因为日本是一个岛国，大部分地区是丘陵地带，许多新干线线路是不断地穿越隧道的，当列车高速穿越隧道时，车头会产生压缩波，车尾会产生膨胀波，乘客坐在新干线列车上，耳膜会有一种压迫感，影响坐车的舒适度。因此，日本的新干线不宜开到时速350公里以上。

第二是为了防止地震导致的交通事故。日本各地经常发生地震，如果列车速度过快，在地震波来袭之前不能有效减速停驶，那么很可能会飞出铁轨，酿成重大灾难。

第三是出于经济利益的考虑。日本铁路公司经过测算，新干线时速控制在300公里以下，其轮轨的磨损率处于最经济、最合理的区域。如果时速超过300公里，磨损率会出现大幅提高，运营成本也会因此大大增加。

“我们不能因为早到十几、二十分钟而去冒这个险。”这是这位技术部长最后跟我说的话。

- 徐静波，《日本的底力》，2019

日本新干线（1）

日本的新干线诞生于1964年，许多读者朋友可能还没有出生。这一年，日本承办了第一次东京奥运会。为了显示日本战后复兴的成果，日本用了4年的时间，建造了这条从东京到大阪的高速铁路的新干线。当时新干线的时速是200公里，对于还在乘坐时速30公里的绿皮火车的国家来说，日本的新干线已经属于“子弹列车”了。

为什么日本当时能够造出世界上最高速的列车？原因其实很简单，虽然日本在第二次世界大战中战败投降，而且日本列岛还被美军炸得一塌糊涂，但是人还在，技术没有灭亡。因此，在20世纪50年代开始进入经济复兴时期的时候，日本人首先想到的是，如何将东京首都圈和关西经济圈这两大日本的经济核心地区建立起最为紧密的联系？于是想到了建造高速列车。东京到大阪的距离有515公里，当时坐夜行列车需要一个晚上。新干线建成后，东京到大阪只需要4个小时，提速之后，现在只需要2小时25分钟。

从1964年开通东海道新干线以来，到目前为止，以东京车站为枢纽，日本已经建造了8条新干线，从东京始发，可以穿越海底隧道，直接登陆北海道。也可以从东京出发，直接抵达最西南端的福冈市。现在除了冲绳县还没有新干线外，其他大部分地区都已经覆盖了这一高速铁路网络。

日本是一个多灾多难的国家，地震和台风频繁袭击日本列岛。但是半个多世纪以来，日本的新干线创下了两大奇迹：一是没有因为列车自身原因死过一个人；二是准点率以秒计算，东海道新干线的全年平均晚点时间在八秒以内。

为什么日本的新干线能够创下这两大奇迹呢？

日本的新干线从车辆技术到运营管理系统，都是日本自己研发并逐年提高的。长年的技术积累和坚定的安全经营意识，使得日本新干线始终以“安全”为第一考量，“速度”排在第三位，第二位是“经济利益的平衡”。

- 徐静波，《日本的底力》，2019

Constructivist Education: Inventing Your Own Reality

One of the trendiest fads today is called constructivist education. If knowledge is a social construction, as Dewey said, then the goal of education should be to teach students how to construct their own knowledge. Read this description by a proponent of the method: Constructivism does not assume the presence of an outside objective reality that is revealed to the learner, but rather that learners actively construct their own reality.

That’s a pretty tall order: Before kids are big enough to cross the street, they’re supposed to learn how to “construct their own reality.” Teachers are not to tell students that their ideas are right or wrong, either, but merely to encourage them “to clarify and articulate their own understandings.” After all, there are many different possible ways to construct the world, and constructivism cannot rule out any viable theory that encapsulates personal experience.

As one prominent constructivist writes, “To the biologist, a living organism is viable as long as it manages to survive in its environment. To the constructivist, concepts, models, theories, and so on are viable if they prove adequate in the contexts in which they were created.” Notice that the passage speaks of ideas being viable, not true. Constructivism is based on the assumption that we are merely organisms adapting to the environment, so that the only test of an idea is whether it works.

  - Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, 2004.

 

What Do We Teach Our Children

Are we moving toward something, or away from it? Are we teaching our children to march forward, the banner of their civilization in hand, or to back slowly away from it, watching the shining city on the hill receding into the distance? So, what do we teach our children? What must they know to become defenders of the only civilization worth fighting for?
 
1. Your Life Has Purpose. Life is not a bewildering, chaotic mess. It’s a struggle, but it’s a struggle guided by a higher meaning. You were designed to use your reason and your natural gifts—and to cultivate those assets toward fulfillment of a higher end. That end can be discovered by investigating the nature of the world, and by exploring the history of our civilization. That end includes defending the rights of the individual and the preciousness of individual lives; it includes acting with virtues including justice and mercy. It means restoring the foundations of your civilization, and building new and more beautiful structures atop those foundations.
 
2. You Can Do It. Forge forth and conquer. Build. Cultivate. You were given the ability to choose your path in life—and you were born into the freest civilization in the history of mankind. Make the most of it. You are not a victim. In a free society, you are responsible for your actions. Your successes are your accomplishments, but they are also the legacy of those who came before you and those who stand with you; your failures are purely your own. Look to your own house before blaming the society that bore you. And if society is acting to violate individual rights, it is your job to work to change it. You are a human being, made in the image of God, bound to the earth but with a soul that dreams of the eternal. There is no greater risk than that and no greater opportunity than that.
 
3. Your Civilization Is Unique. Recognize that what you have been given is unique in human history.  Most human beings have lived under the control of others, suffered tyranny and oppression. You have not. The freedom you enjoy, and morals in which you believe, are products of a unique civilization—the civilization of Dante and Shakespeare, the civilization of Bach and Beethoven, the civilization of the Bible and Aristotle. You did not create your freedoms or your definition of virtue, nor did they arise in a vacuum. Learn your history. Explore where the roots of your values lie: in Jerusalem and Athens. Be grateful for those roots. Then defend those roots, even as you grow to new heights.
 
4. We Are All Brothers and Sisters. We are not enemies if we share a common cause. And our common cause is a civilization replete with purpose, both communal and individual, a civilization that celebrates both individual and communal capacity. If we fight alongside one another rather than against one another, we are stronger. But we can only be stronger when we pull in the same direction, and when we share the same vision. We must share the same definition of liberty when it comes to politics, and, broadly speaking, the same definition of virtue when it comes to creating and maintaining social capital.
 

- Ben Shapiro, The Right Side of History, 2019.

The Trinity and the Personal Nature of God

Since September 11, we have heard it said again and again that Islam is just another Abrahamic faith—as though it were not really very different from Christianity. So it may come as a surprise to learn that the God of Islam is actually more akin to the nonpersonal Absolute of neo-Platonism and Hinduism than to the God of the Bible. 

Yet it is true, and the central reason is that Islam rejects the Trinity. Without that concept, it cannot hold a fully personal conception of God. Why not? Because many attributes of personality can be expressed only within a relationship—things like love, communication, empathy, and self-giving. 

Traditional Christian doctrine maintains a personal conception of God because it teaches that these interpersonal attributes were expressed from all eternity among the three Persons of the Trinity. A genuinely personal God requires distinct “Persons,” because that alone makes it possible for love and communication to exist within the Godhead itself. Islam denies the Trinity, however, which means there is no way for its conception of God to include these relational attributes. 

This nonpersonal conception of God also explains why Muslims express their faith in near-mechanical rituals: Muslim believers recite the Koran over and over, in unison, word for word, in the original Arabic.

As sociologist Rodney Stark explains, religions with nonpersonal gods tend to stress precision in the performance of rituals and sacred formulas; by contrast, religions with a highly personal God worry less about such things, because a personal Being will respond to a personal approach through impromptu supplication and spontaneous prayer. 

 - Nancy R. Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity, 2004.

Moltmann’s Perichoretic Trinity

Perichoresis is a concept originally appropriated by Moltmann in order to frame his understanding of an intensely relational, communal Trinity. Derived from the teaching of John Damascene and Richard of St. Victor, perichoresis has come to refer to a circulatory, interpenetrating, relational sharing between two realities or forms of existence, to the point where they co-define each other and share attributes.
 
In reference to Christology, perichoresis was traditionally seen as a one-way interpenetration and exchange between the two natures, flowing solely from the divine to the human—the classic image was the piece of iron (the humanity) heated red by fire (the divinity). But much like his trinitarian radicalization of the Lutheran communicatio idiomata, Moltmann posits a reciprocal exchange in his articulations of perichoresis. For him, perichoresis becomes the great binary blurring device; it is, in essence, the supreme form of “both/and” (rather than “either/or”) reasoning. Dualisms dissolve and conceptual dichotomies disintegrate as perichoretic logic argues for unity and diversity to co-participate as mutually-shaping realities.
 
In Moltmann’s trinitarianism, perichoresis involves a clear kenotic element. His use of kenosis here bespeaks the necessary limitations inherent in relationship, rather than a divestiture of some attribute or another. Moltmann will speak of the trinitarian persons “making room” for each other; they are three distinct persons, and yet are united in all things, through the hospitable perfection of kenotic love.
 
Each one of [the three Persons] is active and passive, giving and receiving at the same time. By giving themselves to each other, the perichoretic community is also a kenotic community. The Persons are emptying themselves into each other. . . . It is divine love which draws a Person so much out of himself, that it exists “in” the other. It is the self-emptying of the three persons in this perichoretic exchange that Moltmann relies on to deflect the charge of tri-theism, which often assails his social trinitarian outlook.
 
Though many of Moltmann’s more impassioned descriptions of his perichoretic Trinity are striking, some scholars have objected to his sometimes inconsistent employment and qualification of such language. But more directly pertinent to our project is how Moltmann eventually applies the concept of perichoresis to his understanding of the two natures in Christ (which is how John Damascene initially employed it). Explicit affirmation of this perichoretic unity of the natures has emerged in Moltmann’s more recent work:
 

Perichoresis describes the unity of Godhead and humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. This is not a matter of two who are by nature similar being bound together in inward community. Here are two different natures—that is, the one and the other. . . . In Christology, perichoresis describes the mutual interpenetration of two different natures, the divine and the human, in the God-human being Christ.

Perichoresis, as we noted for his trinitarianism, is a kenotic reality for Moltmann. Thus, when we talk about Moltmann’s kenotic Christology, we must recognize that we are dealing with a dual-leveled kenosis. One level is intra-trinitarian and refers to the continued kenotic relating between the divine persons; this is derived by Moltmann from the way in which Christ relates to the Father and the Spirit in the course of earthly life. The other level of the kenosis is the relationship between Christ’s divinity and humanity, and refers to the humiliation and lowliness undertaken by God in becoming human. Both dimensions of this perichoretic kenosis are operative in his understanding of the incarnation, though they are not always explicitly highlighted and much of the specifics of their mutually exchanging interpenetration (especially any kind of specific ontological commentary) are left without speculation. Moltmann is comfortable to simply say: “This is undoubtedly God’s greatest mystery: his closeness . . . Emmanuel, ‘God with us’—with us, the godless and God-forsaken.”
 
Once these themes are balanced, we can see the truth in Gary Badcock’s assessment that “Moltmann’s position is best understood as a trinitarian intensification of the doctrine of the hypostatic union. . . . Moltmann’s point is not to deny the divinity but to affirm its unity with the humanity, on the basis of his understanding of the unity of the economic and the immanent Trinity.” 

- Samuel J. Youngs, The Way of the Kenotic Christ: 

The Christology of Jürgen Moltmann, 2019 

Radical and Revelatory: Moltmann’s Reading of Kenosis

The beginning of Moltmann’s kenotic Christology is thus neither in the concealment nor abandonment camp; his overarching kenotic theology means that his Christology reads Phil 2 as revelatory for divinity itself. Likewise, Colin Gunton (in the midst of a salvo against radical forms of kenotic Christology) writes that “it seems not inappropriate to speak of a self-emptying of God, but only if it is understood in such a way as to be an expression rather than a ‘retraction’ of his deity.” This well sums the trajectory that initializes Moltmann’s kenotic Christology.
 
Thus, we can call the baseline outlook on kenotic Christology that we find in Moltmann a “radical revelatory” model, for it uniquely combines emphases from both the radical interpretation and the revelatory. It entails real limitations applied to the divinity of Christ in his becoming human, but these limitations are extensions and radicalizations of the already existing kenotic patterns of the God-world relationship. The thematic thrust of this is conveyed by Moltmann in the following key passage:
 

[If] the significance of the Son’s incarnation is his true humanity, then the incarnation reveals the true humanity of God. That is not an anthropomorphic way of speaking, which is therefore not in accordance with God’s divinity; it is the quintessence of his divinity itself. . . . His strength is made perfect in weakness. The traditional doctrine about God’s kenosis has always looked at just the one aspect of God’s self-limitation, self-emptying and self-humiliation. It has overlooked the other side: God’s inward limitations are outward liberations. God is nowhere greater than in his humiliation. God is nowhere more glorious than in his impotence. God is nowhere more divine than when he becomes man.

- Samuel J. Youngs, The Way of the Kenotic Christ: 

The Christology of Jürgen Moltmann, 2019.