Amidst the tyranny among us, let us not forget the terrible toll that SARS-COV-2 is having on the world and the United States. Click on the link for the most current data and information.
Lesson 9: Be Kind To Our Language
“Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing that you think everyone is saying. Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.”
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder, 2017.
(Note: Don’t leave the internet until you’ve read my Blog)
Dr. Snyder’s point in this lesson is to read. Read good novels to keep broadening your vocabulary and think about “ambiguous situations.” Novels that help you to “judge the intentions of others.”
Digital media moves too fast and doesn’t allow the viewer (us) time to think about what we just saw before the next story pops up. Watch too much of it and you’ll find it harder to explain ambiguous concepts because it is taking you away from the reading that builds the vocabulary that makes it possible to express those ambiguous thoughts.
Some of you will recognize two classic novels on authoritarianism from the last century. Two novels meant to direct you back to books: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 published in 1953 and George Orwell’s 1984 which first came out in 1949. The intention of both authors was to alert us to the suppression of books, the diminishment of vocabulary that is needed to express current concepts and ideas and the overage of screen time.
I’m pushing my luck on copy write here, but I will go ahead and list books mentioned by Dr. Snyder:
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
- It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
- The Plot Against America, Philip Roth
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling (central theme is tyranny an resistance)
- Politics and the English Language, George Orwell (1946)
- The Language of the Third Reich , Victor Klemperer (1947)
- The Origins of Totalitarianism , Hannah Arendt (1951)
- The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951)
- The Captive Mind , Czeslaw Milosz (1953)
- The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel (1978)
- How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist, Leszek Kolakowski (1978)
- The Uses of Adversity, Timothy Garton Ash (1989)
- The Burden of Responsibility, Tony Judt (1998)
- Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning (1992)
- Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev (2014)
- The Bible is the guiding textual foundation for Christians. In it’s New Testament, Jesus preached on wealth (“it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God; on modesty (“whoever shall exalt himself shall be abased and he that humble himself shall be exalted”) and on true an false (“And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”)
So, in short, it helps one to remain free from the clutches of a tyrant and tyranny when one reads books that go beyond the black and white and delve into the complexities of being human.
Incidentally, I have read the Bible, Fahrenheit 451, 1984 and about a third of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I have lots of work to do.
Happy Reading and, speaking of words, remember the name Amanda Gorman. A little more about Amanda Gorman.