What am I reading: The Audacity of Hope

Obama 的書，我才看到第一章，就有一句我感同身受:

.... I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it
the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to
reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandmother had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into cant: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized.

我在大學時也有過這一段，我猜念社會科學的都會有這類的問題。因為我們的學科挑戰傳統思維的意味很濃，而經濟學理的一些推論是有違社會上的一些規範，這一切都在於我們對於市場的信賴，也刻劃出我們所在意的東西 : 效率。所以我年幼的時候時常以我從一些基本的教科書上學的，批判社會的制度，或是道德的規範，從來都沒有懷疑果經濟學，更沒有問說當初這一些規範是如何演變而來的。然而，學了多一點之後，我發現經濟學理的不足的部分，更看到比效率更重要的一些目標。但是，發現了這個學科的盲點以及缺失，我更熱愛了這個學科，因為他不完美，表示他還有容納我的空間。

Obama 的書裡面有一堆這類的段落，讓你想，讓你體會，讓你感同身受。有一些人說 Obama 只會講一些好聽的話，寫一些感人的文字，但是我覺得若他沒有真材實料，他不可能寫出他寫的這一些東西。非常佩服!