A Summer Assignment Pleasantly Surprising…

This summer I was assigned to read the books The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne) and Language in Thought and Action (S.I. Hayakawa).

The Scarlet Letter was slow at parts, mostly because it was written over a hundred years ago, but I absolutely fell in love with the daughter of the main protagonist, Pearl. Hawthorne was some really vivid imagery and colorful descriptions. If you weren’t already forced to read it in highschool, go for it.

The second book, Language in Thought and Action, was, at first, a lot like an instruction manual for language. However, as the book went on, it started being less about just words and more about the commonalities between language and human nature and philosophy, with references to WW2 and world history. It took a very non-bias approach to commenting on patterns in human nature and society in general. Here are a few quotes I thought were interesting.

First, the book discussed a concept called two-valued orientation. Two-valued orientation is, in other words, tunnel vision, or black-and-white thinking. In discussing how our Democratic/Republican party system leaves no room for multi-valued orientation (or ability to see things in terms of more than two values) during debates, the first quote came up:

“Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way-and the fools know it.” – Oliver Wednell Holmes

I thought it was really true how, no matter whose policy is right for our nation, politics make everyone either a “good guy” or a “bad guy.”

“Although we like to think of ourselves as rational beings, there are few among us who do not exhibit the two-valued orientation when we are stirred up by controversy.”

“We have the peculiar fact that, once people become accustomed to institutions, they eventually get to feeling that their particular institutions represent the only right and proper way of doing things.”

This is cool because it applies to everyone and everyone can learn from it.

“One of the lessons of war is that institutions, while powerful and long-lasting, are often not insuperably rigid if the emergency is great enough….”

I thought the last quote was cool because it makes you think about how everyone, no matter what religion, age, or race, has a belief they stubbornly stick to regardless of its relevance to today’s society, and that belief can only be altered in times of chaos (war or great need.)

“…the problem, then, the world over, is to learn that the emergency is serious enough (in international affairs, in race relations, in preserving the natural environment, etc.) to require modifying or abandoning some of our insitutions.”

“If we as citizens of a democracy are going to carry our share in the important decisions about the things that concern us so greatly, such as the problems of peace and a just world economic order, we must prepare ourselves to do so by coming down out of the clouds of high-level abstraction [or generalized thinking] and learning to consider the problems of the world, whether local, state, national, or international levels, as extensionally [physically acting] as we now consider the [everyday] problems of getting food, clothing, and shelter.”

In thinking in two-valued orientation, (making generalizations and judgements, and seeing people as purely “good guys” or purely “bad guys,”) we “miss entirely the basic requirement of understanding social problems, namely, the initial task of describing the established patterns of group behavior (that is, the instituions) that constitute a society and contribute to its social problems.”

I hope I haven’t bored you all to tears! I thought all the philosophy in this book was really enlightening. I recommend you read it if you’re into this kind of thing. I think everyone can learn from the ideas in the book.

Again, the kind of things this book talked about reinforced my want to go to school for someting relating to international relations, foreign policy, or maybe even philosophy. Who knows!

Adios!