Bookworm - Big Ideas for Busy People

Hotel Rwanda

I've been flattened by the latest super-virus. What is it with these recent colds? I was OK with the seven day variety but these tend to drag on for weeks . . .  It's given me a perfect chance to watch movies, however, and I've missed so many great ones at the theatre that I've had plenty to choose from.

Hotel Rwanda is an incredibly important movie. Based on a true story, the film depicts the heroic actions of Paul Rusesabagina, who risked his life to save over a thousand Tutsis and Hutus marked for death during the Rwandan massacre. Using his connections as a four-star hotel manager, Paul cajoles, bribes and blackmails military and government officials in his frantic efforts to rescue 1,200 people.

As I watched what was essentially genocide unfold (over a three month period 800,000 Tutsis were murdered by the Hutu majority), I wondered what I was doing as this was happening, and the painful answer is . . . nothing. My daughter was a baby and I'm certain I was completely swept up in her young life. I don't even remember being aware the massacre was taking place, beyond some very vague awareness of Hutus and Tutsis. It makes me wonder what is happening right now that I will look back on later and wonder how I could be so unaware.

I just started reading a book about Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch called We Wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families - Stories from Rwanda. It was the Non-fiction Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Scott Sutherland writes a fabulous review of the book in Salon. Check it out here.

Moral Politics - How Liberals and Conservatives Think

by George Lakoff

Everyone’s writing about politics. What is unique about this book?

Lakoff says contemporary American politics is about worldview. Conservatives simply see the world differently than liberals, and both often have a difficult time understanding accurately what the other’s worldview is. He uses cognitive science to illuminate the unconscious thinking behind these differing worldviews.

Cognitive science, Lakoff’s area of expertise, studies how people conceptualize the world. It is a broad discipline, covering everything from vision, memory and attention to everyday reasoning and language. One of the most fundamental results in cognitive science is that most of our thought is unconscious – not unconscious in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but unconscious simply in that we are not aware of it. We think and talk at too fast a rate and at too deep a level to have conscious awareness and control over everything we think and say. We are even less conscious of the components of thoughts – concepts. When we think, we use an elaborate system of concepts, but we are not usually aware of just what those concepts are like and how they fit together into a system.

 
How did this book shift my thinking?

Lakoff gave me the missing key to understanding the political landscape and especially political rhetoric and positioning. His book Don't Think of an Elephant, which is a highly condensed version of Moral Politics, has become very popular since the 2004 election.

What’s his main idea?

To conservatives the positions taken by liberals seem inconsistent and immoral, and liberals view conservative politicians as cynical and self serving. Yet each group thinks of themselves as trying to do what is right, what makes common sense.

Lakoff suggests that the answer to these apparently contradictory positions lies in the moral underpinnings of conservatives and of liberals. Lakoff’s recent work has centered on two components of conceptual systems: conceptual metaphors and categories. A conceptual metaphor is a conventional way of conceptualizing one domain of experience in terms of another, often unconsciously. He maintains we use the conceptual metaphor of the family and in-family based morality as the basis for our political worldview and that we do this because we use the common, unconscious and automatic metaphor of the nation-as-family in which the nation is seen as a family, the government as a parent and the citizens as children.

His thesis is deceptively straight forward. Conservatives, Lakoff explains, tend to a view that favors what he calls the "Strict Father Model" of the family. Liberals, on the other hand, prefer the "Nurturant Parent Model." Each model implies a system of beliefs that determine how conservatives or liberals judge the morality of a situation. When the models are applied to the nation, the conservative and liberal politics result.

For the full summary Download moral_politics.doc