“The one stage in the process that
you couldn’t quite get your head around was the singing of the national anthem,
which took place at a brief, informal memorial service for the bereaved
families, after their dead had been formally placed in the coffins. It was also strange to see the Taegukgi, the
national flag, being spread over each coffin and tied tightly in place. Why would you sing the national anthem for
people who’d been killed by soldiers?
Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi?
As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.” – Han
Kang, Chapter 1: The Boy, 1980, Page 23
“I found out later that the army had been provided with
eight hundred thousand rounds that day.
This was at a time when the population of the city stood at four hundred
thousand. In other words, they had been
given the means to drive a bullet into the body of every person in the city
twice over. I genuinely believe that, if
something had come up, the commanding officers would have issued the order for
the troops on the ground to do just that.” – Han Kang, Chapter 4: The Prisoner,
1990, Page 100
“Before, they’d tortured us in order to extract the
particulars of actual crimes. Now, all
they wanted was a false confession, so that our names could be slotted neatly
into the script they had already devised.” – Han Kang, Chapter 4: The Prisoner,
1990, Page 101
Review
Is This An Overview?
Before 1980, South Korea had an authoritarian government. South Korea was industrializing quickly, but
the people suffered repressive conditions.
During 1980, the leader was replaced, by another authoritarian leader. The people were under attack by their own
government. This is a story of those who
were repressed. Those who had to take
care of the dead. Those who are tortured
for a narrative. Those who are censored.
Those who have to live with the memories
of what has been done. The human acts
responsible for the violence. The human
acts involved in maintaining courage in spite of the violence.
Caveats?
This is a gruesome tale, of a collective trauma. The book can be difficult to read due to the
despair of the human acts, and the writing style. This story provides glimpses into the
atrocities, not a detailed history and explanation for the events.
Questions to Consider while Reading the Book
•What is the raison d’etre of the book? For what purpose did the author write the book? Why do people read this book?
•What are some limitations of the book?
•To whom would you suggest this book?
•What was the situation in South Korea before the 1980s?
•What happened circa 1980?
•What was the outcome of the demonstrations of 1979?
“To ask whether a society is just is to ask how it distributes the things we prize – income and wealth, duties and rights, powers and opportunities, offices and honors. A just society distributes these goods in the right way; it gives each person his or her due. The hard questions begin when we ask what people are due, and why.” – Michael Sandel, Chapter 1: Doing the Right Thing, Page 20
“One way of understanding what Kant means by acting autonomously is to contrast autonomy with its opposite. Kant invents a word to capture this contrast – heteronomy. When I act heteronomously, I act according to determinations given outside me. Here is an illustration: When you drop a billiard ball, it falls to the ground. As it falls, the billiard ball is not acting freely, its movement is governed by the laws of nature – in this case, the law of gravity.” – Michael Sandel, Chapter 5: What Matters is the Motive / Immanuel Kant, Page 96
“As voluntary acts, contracts express our autonomy; the obligations they create carry weight because they are self-imposed – we take them freely upon ourselves. As instruments of mutual benefit, contracts draw on the ideal of reciprocity; the obligation to fulfill them arises from the obligation to repay others for the benefits they provide us.” – Michael Sandel, Chapter 6: The Case for Equality / John Rawls, Page 124
Review
Is This An Overview?
For anyone seeking justice, justice can be based on
different competing methods. Using a
different method to identity how to obtain justice, provide vastly different
outcomes. What defines justice, defines
how society allocates resources. What is
justice to someone using a specific method, can be injustice to others using a
different method. Each method has value,
but each has its limitations. Justice
can be based on welfare, freedom, or virtue.
A utilitarian approach is to find what provides the maximum
utility, that which produces happiness and limits pain. But a collective utilitarian approach can
enable harsh individual treatment. A
market solution to justice provides welfare, as markets enable incentives for
people to supply what others want. But
market prices do not always reflect voluntary exchanges. A libertarian approach is meant to provide
the most freedom, by limiting state activity to enforcing contracts and
protecting people. But that means
limiting collective action. A virtue
approach is meant to provide for what people morally deserve, cultivating
decisions that support actions based on autonomy and reciprocity which promote
the common good. But there are decisions
that take choice away from reciprocity.
Caveats?
This book expresses the complexity of each method of
justice, the ways that each method can improve society and the
limitations. The explanations for the diverse
methods of justice have mixed quality. Having
a background in philosophy is not necessary, but can improve an understanding
of the claims made about justice.
Questions to Consider while Reading the Book
•What is the raison d’etre of the book? For what purpose did the author write the book? Why do people read this book?
•What are some limitations of the book?
•To whom would you suggest this book?
•Should justice arguments be based on welfare, freedom, or virtue?
•What is utilitarianism?
•What is liberaltarianism?
•What is the virtue approach?
•What is freedom?
•What is heteronomy?
•What does it mean to be morally responsible?
•What is an imaginary contract?
•What is a social contract?
•What happened after the hurricane?
•What is the justification for financial bailouts?
•What happened to the ship Mignonette?
•Who deserves the Purple Heart?
•What happened with the Ford Pinto?
•How to redistribute wealth justly?
•What is the justice in a volunteer army and hiring people for war?
•Who should be in a jury?
•Who should decide what to do with the human body?
•What is Rawls reference to the veil of ignorance?
“We are replacing books, maps, and
audiovisual recordings with computer code that is less stable than human memory
itself. Code is rapidly overwritten or
rendered obsolete by new code. Digital
data are completely dependent on machines to render them accessible to human
perception. In turn, those machines are
completely dependent on uninterrupted supplies of energy to run the server
farms that store and serve digital data.” – Abby Smith Rumsey, Chapter 1:
Memory on Display, Page 13-14
“What this means for the digital age is that data is not
knowledge, and data storage is not memory.
We use technology to accumulate facts about the natural and social
worlds. But facts are only incidental to
memory. They sometimes even get in the
way of thoughtful concentration and problem solving. It is the ability for information to be
useful both now and in the future that counts.
And it is our emotions that tell what is valuable for our survival and
well-being.” – Abby Smith Rumsey, Chapter 1: Memory on Display, Page 17
“Fundamental to today’s anxiety about the future
of memory is the lurking awareness that our recording medium of choice, the
silicon chip, is vulnerable to decay, accidental deletion, and
overwriting. And we know there are few
institutions – if any – that have the scale and capacity to keep our analog
legacy of knowledge intact at the same time they scale up to acquire the
digital. This is a reasonable anxiety. Without preservation, there is no access.” – Abby
Smith Rumsey, Chapter 3: What The Greeks Thought: From A Counting To Aesthetics,
Page 51
Review
Is This An Overview?
Shared knowledge across generations enables adaptive
strategies to situations. The tools used
to share knowledge were capable of surviving across generations. But technology has made knowledge sharing a
short term indevoured. The code used to
render digital Information, can be overwritten or become obsolete by new
code. People are dependent on machines
to render the digital data into readable formats. The machines are dependent on uninterrupted
supplies of energy.
For information to be valuable, information needs to be
useful now and in the future. Past
experiences shape how people interact, and expect of the future. The fragility of digital data, the fragility
of past experiences stored in digital formats, puts the future at risk. Information sharing and access enable people
to hold their government accountable to the people, and educate people on the
responsibility of the governed and the representatives. Through destruction of the past information,
of history, of cultural information, enables the persecution of people. The past provides alternative ideas, that can
challenge those in power. Without
evidence of the past, corruption has no competitor. By erasing facts, those in power validate
their view of the future.
Caveats?
This book is about validating the need to preserve memory, preserve
information, and the consequences on the future without access to the
past. The references are primarily
historic, with explanations including sociology, and psychology. There are limits to information about digital
technology, other than the expressed fragility.
Questions to Consider while Reading the Book
•What is the raison d’etre of the book? For what purpose did the author write the book? Why do people read this book?
•What are some limitations of the book?
•To whom would you suggest this book?
•How has the cost of information storage changed how people interact with information?
•How has knowledge sharing shaped society?
•How does digital data effect society?
•How does the past affect the future?
•What are cultural differences between homo sapiens and neanderthals?
•What are causes for the loss of information?
•What information should be believed?
•How does information affect government?
•What are facts?
•What is the consequence of a loss of collective memory?
“All we need is conviction. Conviction offers us certainty – or, at
least, the appearance of certainty when we are in fact unsure. Convictions reveal our deepest passions – or,
at least, give us things to be passionate about. Convictions bring us together with other
people through a common and dedicated purpose, creating a loving community out
of mere strangers. How joyful! If all these convictions coalesce into a
worldview that is reasonably coherent, we can triumphantly declare that we have
an ideology: a set of truths and moral principles that we live by and share
with others. It’s easy!” – Leor
Zmigrod, Prologue, Page 7
“To detect the psychological similarities across ideologies,
we need a sense of what an ideology is and what it is not. In its simplest formulation, an ideology is a
kind of narrative. A compelling story
about the world. Yet not all stories are
ideologies, and not all forms of collective storytelling are rigid and
oppressive. There is a difference between
culture and ideology. Ideologies offer
absolutist descriptions of the world and accompanying prescriptions for how we
ought to think, act, and interact with others.
Ideologies legislate what is permissible and what is forbidden. Unlike culture – which can celebrate
eccentricities and reinterpretations – in ideology, nonconformity is
intolerable and total alignment is essential.
When deviation from the rules leads to severe punishment and ostracism,
we have moved away from culture and into ideology.” – Leor Zmigrod, Chapter 1:
Ideological Possession, Page 15
“The people with the most flexible minds are the
people who acknowledge that the intellectual realm can be separated from the
personal realm. They do not viscerally
hate their interlocuters – they may hate their opinions but they do not project
that hatred onto the persons voicing them.
In contrast, the most cognitively rigid individuals, those who struggle
to change when rules change, tend to hold the most dogmatic attitudes. They hate disagreement and are unwilling to
shift their beliefs when credible counterevidence is presented.” – Leor Zmigrod,
Chapter 2: An Experiment, Page 23
Review
Is This An Overview?
A response to uncertainty, is to have conviction. Convictions offer the appearance of
certainty, and bring strangers together.
Collective convictions that shape the world view, the thoughts and
morals of the members, is an ideology. A
method of categorizing reality for clarity and identity. Ideologies are absolute descriptions of
reality, and provide direction for how to think, act, and interact with
others. Conformity to the needs of the
ideology is a requirement, with deviation punished severely.
Rigid minded people are susceptible to ideological
situations, as they struggle to change when the rules change. Rigid minded people hold dogmatic attitudes,
and do not change their mind when confronted with evidence to alternative
methods. Alternative ideas are a threat
to rigid minded people. Alternatively,
there are flexible minded people, who can separate ideas from people. Flexible minded people learn how to improve
their views through experience and evidence, who have intellectual humility
about what they think they know. There
are many variables that shape what kind of mind a person has, such as culture
and biology.
Caveats?
The research methodology has limitations on its ability to
represent wanted information with the experiments. Even though there is support for flexible
minded people, and shares the mistakes that rigid minded people make, this book
contains an ideological bias. The bias
becomes evident by the way the author creates cultural demarcations of people. The generalizations of others, has a moral
bias.
Questions to Consider while Reading the Book
•What is the raison d’etre of the book? For what purpose did the author write the book? Why do people read this book?
•What are some limitations of the book?
•To whom would you suggest this book?
•How are convictions used?
•What is an ideology?
•How does ideology affect biology?
•How do ideology shape preferences?
•What is the difference between ideology and culture?
“Nur’s shooting skill wasn’t the only
thing that made her highly unusual. She
held a position in the empire never before filled by a woman:
co-sovereign. For more than a decade and
a half, from a few years after their wedding until Jahangir’s death, Nur Jahan
ruled along with her husband, effectively and prominently, successfully
navigating the labyrinth of feudal courtly politics and the male-centered
culture of the Mughal world. She issued
her own imperial orders, and coins of the realm bore her name along with her
husband’s” – Ruby Lal, Chapter One: Queen of Queens, an Introduction, Page 11
“Her husband sought her counsel when he honored and
increased the ranks of deserving officials and noblemen and gave directions for
local administration. Nur was making
decisions having to do with her jagir at Ramsar, about commerce and
taxes, and the concerns of her poor subjects.
She intervened, for example, to protect peasants from harassment or
overtaxation by provincial authorities.” – Ruby Lal, Chapter Ten: Wonder of the
Age, Page 129
“With two formal rites, a Mughal prince moved to
adulthood. The first was when the
emperor gave him an appropriate rank, with or without a significant
administrative-military assignment. The
second was the prince’s marriage. But
these vital signs of a princely adulthood did not make him fully
independent. He had to work in various
offices in order to establish himself as a holder of power and possible
contender for the throne.” – Ruby Lal, Chapter Twelve: The Light-Scattering
Garden, Page 165
Review
Is This An Overview?
The Mughal Empire was a Muslim state, a Mongol successor
state, that controlled much of India.
Within a male dominant political structure, Nur Jahan was able to become
co-sovereign of the empire. The emperor,
Jahangir, trusted Nur to lead. Although
part of a harem, Nur became the favorite, and an equal to the emperor. Earned the ability to lead through talent,
rather than inheritance.
Nur was able to navigate court politics, issue edicts, and made
decisions that were on par with the emperor.
Made decisions on economic policy, property rights, military strategy,
and criminal cases. Nur advised on
official ranks, and gave directions for local administration. Nur was perceived as generous, for Nur protected
the vulnerable members of society, protected people from harassment and over
taxation by officials. Nur was more than
an effective leader, but also had exceptional skill with the musket.
Caveats?
The focus of the book is on court politics, with a lot of
background information on Mughal culture.
Although general effects of decisions were stated, there was not much
information on Nur’s local decisions and administration effects. This organization makes Nur’s influence
appear underwhelming.
Questions to Consider while Reading the Book
•What is the raison d’etre of the book? For what purpose did the author write the book? Why do people read this book?
•What are some limitations of the book?
•To whom would you suggest this book?
•What was the Mughal Empire?
•Who was Jahangir?
•What does the Jahangir mean?
•Who was Nur Jahan?
•What does Nur Jahan mean?
•What skills did Nur Jahan have?
•What political power did Nur Jahan have?
•What did foreigners think of Nur Jahan?
•What effect did the culture have on different perspectives?
•What did the culture think of women?
•What was the marriage age?
•What was the effect of the harem?
•What were Akbar’s beliefs?
•What were children taught?
•How did Bengali landowners treat people on their land?
