Scott’s expertise is the history of the people living in the hills of Southeast Asia. This people have been in contact with the largest state-building project in history (China) for thousands of years. They have arranged their societies to be anti-legible: to make it as hard as possible for the state or any large institution to establish itself.
Seeing Like A State is the best political book I have ever read. I have long had tendencies along these lines, but could never put them into words. Scott expresses himself beautifully and cites numerous examples.
The Bible is the most read book in the world, with an estimated 5 billion copies sold. Scripture has been read and reread, interpreted and reinterpreted countless times. However, reading the same scriptures does not that we understand them the same way. It is an extremely helpful skill to be able to understand when people think differently than you. Even if you say the same words, those words might have such different meaning to you that you do not understand each other. You should practice being aware of when people are talking past each other. Perhaps this is nowhere more common and more important than in religion.
Indo-European is by far the most successful language family. Of the 15 most commonly spoken languages, 10 are Indo-European. This is not just a result of European colonialism: through most of history, including today, the largest Indo-European state has been centered in either India or Persia. Who were the original Indo-Europeans? How did they come to such dominance?
We scientists like to think that information follows from the observations upwards through various intermediate steps to the theories we use to describe, predict, and control our world. Our ideas are determined by our observations; our observations are not determined by our ideas. If there is a disagreement between our observations and our ideas, the ideas must change, not the observations. This isn’t entirely the case. Our ideas can also influence our observations. What we see is influenced by what we think exists. I will present one example of how our observations are influenced by our ideas.
