history
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Eduardo GaleanoGood book by a kind person. Galeano tried to tell the story. And I understand all the suffering Latin American countries had over the centuries.
However. There is one big “however.” I am coming from Eastern Europe. Galeano, in 1970, was pro-Soviet Union. I checked GDP for Ukraine and Argentina in 1991. Just after the collapse of the USSR. The difference is huge. Almost all countries of Latin America have higher GDP per capita. Argentine GDP is six times higher now than the Ukrainian one (population is the same)! So I don’t know. Of course, Latin America could be way better. But Eastern Europe was screwed over way harder!
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Neil PostmanManifest of humanity for humanity from Neil Postman. He shares his few big with ideas us.
The first one is the idea of introspection and reflection; that is the idea of being mindful when evaluating life, decisions, tools, words, behaviors of ours and others.
The second idea is the idea of finding the new narrative; that is a meta-purpose to our lives and the existence of humankind. He hints that idea of continuity of human race, which can be achieved through understanding of oneness between not only human beings but between humans and Nature, may be the answer. Idea of continuity should transcend one’s life (everyone should become \“smaller\“) and time (we should be fill continuity with the greats of the past and future).
The third big idea is the idea of importance of history. Postman demonstrates by example how history might have not only origins for our problems but also ideas how to solve them. History is a tool that scales down time, that is making us smaller, and allows us to see bigger picture and have bigger ideas.
The fourth big idea and hope from Postman is to show us that we can change things. He shows that ideas were created and implemented by real people. He suggest that we shouldn’t blindly follow the flow of history, because there is no such flow. We should alter it (at the capacities available to humans) based on the values and idea we believe in.
The final idea is the idea of choosing correct tools and frameworks. He suggest Scientific method to us. In his book he tries to provide us with good tools that help us evaluate everything else. Neil Postman’s book is a work of ultimate importance in the post-modern world. The absence of the Narrative, forgetfulness of smaller good ideas and lost of ideals causing some lack of belief in the bright future. Postman, as a true philosophe, tries to use his intellect, following the tradition of Voltaire, Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Jefferson, and others, to give us practical examples how we can change things for the better.
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The historian Carl Schorske has, in my opinion, circled closer to the truth by noting that the modern mind has grown indifferent to history because history has become useless to it; in other words, it is not obstinacy or ignorance but a sense of irrelevance that leads to the diminution of history.
Neil Postman -
We have been left with the idea that progress is neither natural nor embedded in the structure of history; that is to say, it is not nature’s business or history. It is our business. No one believes, or perhaps ever will again, that history itself is moving inexorably toward a golden age (Editor: it seem that this idea is already partly forgotten, mostly because of our ignorance). The idea that we must make our own future, bend history to our own will, is, of course, frightening and captures the sense of Nietzsche’s ominous remark that God is dead. We have all become existentialists, which lays upon us responsibilities that once were shared by God and history.
Neil Postman -
… the thought that our dead parents or friends would have approved our conduct is scarcely less powerful motive than the knowledge that our living ones do approve it; and the idea that Socrates, or Howard, or Washington, or Antonius or Christ would have sympathized with us, or that we are attempting to do our part in the spirit in which they did theirs, has operated on the very best minds as strong incentive to act up to their highest feelings and convictions.
John Stuart Mill -
“Every culture”, Lewis Mumford once wrote, “lives within its dream.” But we often lose our dream, as I believe happened to us in the twentieth century. And we are in danger if we cannot reclaim one that will help us to go forward. What else is history for if not to remind us about our better dreams?
Neil Postman -
I regard history as the single most important idea for our youth to take with them into the future. I call it an idea rather than a subject because every subject has a history, and its history is an integral part of the subject. History, we might say, is meta-subject. No one can claim accurate knowledge of a subject unless one knows how such knowledge came to be. I would, of course, favor “history” courses, although I have always thought such courses out to be called “histories” so that our youth would understand that what once happened has been seen from different points of view, by different people, each with a different story to tell.
Neil Postman -
The science curriculum is usually focused on communicating the known facts of each discipline without serious attention … to the history of discipline, the mistakes scientist have made, the methods they use and have used, or the ways in which scientific claims are either refuted or confirmed.
Neil Postman -
Brooks was making a kind of prophecy … that the producers of American culture will increasingly turn our history, politics, religion, commerce, and education into forms of entertainment, and that we will become as a result a trivial people, incapable of coping with complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty, perhaps even reality. We will become, in a phrase, a people amused into stupidity.
Neil Postman -
Doubtless every family archive that perishes, every account book that is burned, every attachment of the past reinforces classifications and ideas at the expense of reality. Afterward, all that remains of entire centuries is a kind of popular digest. And not one of us today is immune to that contagion.
Czesław Miłosz -
Americans accepted their society as if it had arisen from the very order of nature; so saturated with it were they that they tended to pity rest of humanity for having strayed from the norm, If I at least understood that all was not well with me, they did not realize the opposite disablement affected them: a loss of the sense of history and, therefore, of a sense of the tragic, which is only born of historical experience.
Czesław Miłosz -
A country that finds itself at a historical crossroads must have an idea of what it is, of its possibilities, of what it wishes to be, of what role it wants to play, of what it will put its money on, and, on the contrary, what it will try to avoid. This view must be partly the outcome of the very broad and practical discussion that draws on a variety of expert analyses, and it must reach beyond the limits of individual political programs or electoral mandates.
Václav Havel -
When I said that we would no longer be a satellite but a partner, Gorbachev had an interesting reaction. He said that “satellite” was a very strong and inaccurate word, but that he would forgive me for using such a colorful expression because I was a literary man. And I said to myself, so this is how history is made.
Václav Havel
