Below is my brother, Joseph’s tribute to my Dad, who died November 21, 2016. (My own tribute to my Dad appeared November 27, 2016. My brother Chris’s tribute appeared December 11, 2016.) Joseph is a big contributor to this blog behind the scenes with his discerning eye for interesting articles to flag here.
My father grew up in a home that had a well used dictionary
by the table, and continued that practice in his own home. We used that dictionary often to look up
definitions and pronunciations. He used
language in his professional life making lessons for law students and writing
books about law. He used language in his
church service. He had a file full of
talks he had written through the years on many different topics, and could pull
one out and adapt it to whatever needed to be said in a meeting. He also spent time writing biographies and
other works on church topics.
I remember him working on the Teachings of Spencer W.
Kimball book. He had typed up all the
quotes he was going to use, and cut each one out so he could shuffle them
around on the pages as he worked out which went where. This was in the days before word processing
was normal, so there were an awful lot of little slips of paper. He was willing to talk to me about many of
the quotes.
After he completed his large biography about his father, he
wrote a biography of his grandfather, Andrew Kimball, which his father asked
him to do when the presidency meant he no longer had time to do it. I was very pleased that my father let me take
a draft of the biography and make comments and editing suggestions. He listened to what I had to say, and I
believe he used a number of my ideas in the book.
When he was in charge of punishing me, his method was to use
reason and come to a mutually agreed arrangement to minimize the probability of
future transgressions with self administered consequences if that failed. He controlled his temper exceptionally well–I only saw him lose his cool a very few times.
His use of language wasn’t all serious though. His sense of humor came through in his word
choices. He was very fond of word play,
and particularly puns. My own children
have learned to endure puns from me since I learned them at my father’s knee. He also liked to do crossword puzzles, and
regularly completed them until his eyesight got bad enough he was unable to
read.
I will miss his reasoned and kind words that helped me many
times in my life.
I was pleased to be included in Feedspot’s list of Top 20 Macro Blogs, in the 9th spot. I added their badge to my sidebar.
As one of their inputs, Feedspot used the Alexa rank of my blog site. It took me a while to realize this was a rank, not a rating, so lower numbers are better and higher numbers are worse! Being the 1,168,514th ranked website according to Alexa is something, but it doesn’t sound that impressive! :)
What India’s government did in demonetizing the 1000-rupee and 500-rupee notes was a mess. But it did have the helpful effect of spurring mobile payments, both by the current inconvenience for paper currency and, as people look toward the future, reducing trust in paper currency.
Two quotations from Lauren Razavi’s backchannel.com article linked above flesh out that story:
1. All of this has created a newfound system that practically incentives mobile payment. With so many people queuing up at banks every day — and a lot of Indian bureaucracy to wade through in order to open a traditional bank account or line of credit —the appeal of more convenient digital alternatives is easy to understand. According to a report in the Hindu Business Line, as many as 233 million unbanked people in India are skipping plastic and moving straight to digital transactions.“Cash has lost its credibility and payments are no longer perceived in the same way,” says Upasana Taku, the cofounder of Indian mobile wallet company MobiKwik, which reported a 40 percent increase in downloads and a 7,000 percent increase in bank transfers since demonetization. “There’s chaos at the moment but also relief that India will now be an improved economy,” she says.
2. Before last month, Paytm, a mobile app that allows users to pay for everything from pizza to utility bills, saw steady business—it was processing between 2.5 and 3 million transactions a day. Now, usage of the app has close to doubled. 6 million transactions a day is common; 5 million is considered a bad day.
Most laws and rules are backed up by some form of punishment if not followed, even if the punishment is not fully regularized. When is punishment legitimate? And what kind of punishment is legitimate? John Locke gives an answer to that question in section 8 of his 2d Treatise on Government: “On Civil Government”:
And thus, in the state of nature, one man comes by a power over another; but yet no absolute or arbitrary power, to use a criminal, when he has got him in his hands, according to the passionate heats, or boundless extravagancy of his own will; but only to retribute to him, so far as calm reason and conscience dictate, what is proportionate to his transgression, which is so much as may serve for reparation and restraint: for these two are the only reasons, why one man may lawfully do harm to another, which is that we call punishment. In transgressing the law of nature, the offender declares himself to live by another rule than that of reason and common equity, which is that measure God has set to the actions of men, for their mutual security; and so he becomes dangerous to mankind, the tye, which is to secure them from injury and violence, being slighted and broken by him. Which being a trespass against the whole species, and the peace and safety of it, provided for by the law of nature, every man upon this score, by the right he hath to preserve mankind in general, may restrain, or where it is necessary, destroy things noxious to them, and so may bring such evil on any one, who hath transgressed that law, as may make him repent the doing of it, and thereby deter him, and by his example others, from doing the like mischief. And in this case, and upon this ground, every man hath a right to punish the offender, and be executioner of the law of nature.
John puts down serious limitations on punishment: First, punishment is only legitimate when someone has violated the preexisting “law of nature,” not when someone has violated an arbitrary rule that has been established against their opposition or otherwise without their consent, and without any promise they have freely made coming into play. The law of nature is given a new description in this section as “the tye, which is to secure them from injury and violence.”
Second, punishment should not be in proportion to the extreme anger it is easy to feel when someone crosses one of us in some regard. Third, punishment should be governed by the three legitimate purposes of punishment:
Reparation
Restraint
Deterrence
Although John uses the word “retribute” he seems to be excluding simply “getting back at someone” as a legitimate ground of punishment–a ground or motive that is sometimes called “retribution.”
By contrast, reparation, which improves the condition of the person originally harmed from its low ebb after that injury is an excellent purpose of punishment. It is important to search for ways to punish that accomplish at least some reparation at the same time that they work toward restraint or deterrence.
John’s concern about legitimate vs. illegitimate punishment is clear in his care to make the case for punishment at all instead of no punishment: those who violate “reason and common equity” are “dangerous to mankind,” and “every man upon this score, by the right he hath to preserve mankind in general, may restrain, or where it is necessary, destroy things noxious to them.” The concern to justify punishment that John exhibits here is a model for all of us. A minimum (though often far from sufficient) requirement for justifying punishment is this: Whenever one argues for punishment of an individual, or executes punishment on one’s own account, one should be prepared to point to some significant bad consequence that would occur if there were not a policy of punishment in a situation like that. That bad consequence needs to be “bad” in a reasonably objective sense, and greater than the badness of the punishment itself. If nothing bad would happen in the absence of punishment in a given type of situation, punishment should not be undertaken. (Note that this is a different standard than “absence of punishment in this one particular instance would do no harm, taking people’s expectation of the probability of punishment in similar future instances as fixed.”)
