chatroulette

i just learned a out this the other day

i have no idea what to think about it

here is a times article about it

The onion

The onion

Yay for Glenn Beck

The Optimism of Uncertainty

In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy?

I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning. To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world.

There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.

What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. A revolution to overthrow the czar of Russia, in that most sluggish of semi-feudal empires, not only startled the most advanced imperial powers but took Lenin himself by surprise and sent him rushing by train to Petrograd. Who would have predicted the bizarre shifts of World War II--the Nazi-Soviet pact (those embarrassing photos of von Ribbentrop and Molotov shaking hands), and the German Army rolling through Russia, apparently invincible, causing colossal casualties, being turned back at the gates of Leningrad, on the western edge of Moscow, in the streets of Stalingrad, followed by the defeat of the German army, with Hitler huddled in his Berlin bunker, waiting to die?

And then the postwar world, taking a shape no one could have drawn in advance: The Chinese Communist revolution, the tumultuous and violent Cultural Revolution, and then another turnabout, with post-Mao China renouncing its most fervently held ideas and institutions, making overtures to the West, cuddling up to capitalist enterprise, perplexing everyone.

No one foresaw the disintegration of the old Western empires happening so quickly after the war, or the odd array of societies that would be created in the newly independent nations, from the benign village socialism of Nyerere's Tanzania to the madness of Idi Amin's adjacent Uganda. Spain became an astonishment. I recall a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade telling me that he could not imagine Spanish Fascism being overthrown without another bloody war. But after Franco was gone, a parliamentary democracy came into being, open to Socialists, Communists, anarchists, everyone.

The end of World War II left two superpowers with their respective spheres of influence and control, vying for military and political power. Yet they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence. The failure of the Soviet Union to have its way in Afghanistan, its decision to withdraw after almost a decade of ugly intervention, was the most striking evidence that even the possession of thermonuclear weapons does not guarantee domination over a determined population. The United States has faced the same reality. It waged a full-scale war in lndochina, conducting the most brutal bombardment of a tiny peninsula in world history, and yet was forced to withdraw. In the headlines every day we see other instances of the failure of the presumably powerful over the presumably powerless, as in Brazil, where a grassroots movement of workers and the poor elected a new president pledged to fight destructive corporate power.

Looking at this catalogue of huge surprises, it's clear that the struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold on to it. That apparent power has, again and again, proved vulnerable to human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience--whether by blacks in Alabama and South Africa, peasants in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Vietnam, or workers and intellectuals in Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union itself. No cold calculation of the balance of power need deter people who are persuaded that their cause is just.

I have tried hard to match my friends in their pessimism about the world (is it just my friends?), but I keep encountering people who, in spite of all the evidence of terrible things happening everywhere, give me hope. Especially young people, in whom the future rests. Wherever I go, I find such people. And beyond the handful of activists there seem to be hundreds, thousands, more who are open to unorthodox ideas. But they tend not to know of one another's existence, and so, while they persist, they do so with the desperate patience of Sisyphus endlessly pushing that boulder up the mountain. I try to tell each group that it is not alone, and that the very people who are disheartened by the absence of a national movement are themselves proof of the potential for such a movement.

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don't "win," there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope.

An optimist isn't necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

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classes spring 10

First-Year Seminar

Quaestio mihi factus sum: Self and Society in the Liberal Arts

One of the few common denominators in the history of the arts, humanities, and sciences has been the quest—through creative, rational, scientific, and spiritual approaches—for understanding the relationship between the individual and the larger world. Fittingly, the very root of the word used to describe both the private and public self, identity, has always entailed a tension between “sameness” (in Latin, idem) and “difference” (if I am x, then I am not y). Whether through philosophical inquiry into what constitutes the person, scientific debates about when life begins, theological disquisitions on the nature of the soul, or the literary construction of the autobiographical persona, thinkers and artists throughout history have explored the moral and ethical dimensions of self-representation while gesturing toward its unsolvable mysteries and productive tensions. In the words of the theologian Saint Augustine, “mihi quaestio factus sum” (“I have become a question for myself”; Confessions 10.33.50). The search for the role and purpose of the human being can serve a powerful epistemological function. In “becoming a question for ourselves,” we establish a position of wonder and critical inquiry vis-à-vis the world.

In First-Year Seminar, we will ponder the relationship between private and public narratives and forms of representation in a range of texts and cultural traditions. While it is impossible to reduce a matter of such complexity and breadth to a set of goals and procedures, we will read core texts that, individually and collectively, engage in a vigorous dialogue over such questions as: What are the claims that political and social responsibilities make upon an individual’s quest for self-understanding? At what point should the conscientious citizen sacrifice such a quest in the name of a collective identity? How does scientific inquiry into the nonhuman natural world connect with what are felt to be deeply human issues? How does the link between a private and public understanding of the self also implicate a spiritual exploration, especially the question of the eternity of the soul or the lack thereof? Finally, how do study and close reading, the foundational activities of First-Year Seminar, shape those personal and public narratives that are the focus of our attention? Together, we will explore these and related questions during a yearlong conversation about singularly demanding texts—texts defined as much by their differences as by their common drive toward fathoming how individual narratives can move beyond the self and into the realms of citizenry, community, country, even identification with humankind writ large.

Texts for spring 2010:

Locke, Second Treatise on Government

Rousseau, Social Contract

Shelley, Frankenstein

Marx, Communist Manifesto

Darwin, Origin of the Species

Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk

Freud, Three Case Histories

Woolf, To the Lighthouse; or Achebe, Things Fall Apart; or Levi, Periodic Table

PHYS 142 Introduction to Physics II

Part II of a calculus-based survey which will focus on electricity and magnetism, light, electromagnetic radiation, and optics. The course stresses ideas - the unifying principles and characteristic models of physics. Labs develop the critical ability to elicit understanding of our physical world.

MATH 142 A Calculus II

This course, a continuation of Calculus I, reinforces the fundamental ideas of the derivative and the definite integral. Topics covered include L'Hopital's rule, integration techniques, improper integrals, volumes, arc length, sequences and series, power series, continuous random variables, and separable differential equations.

REL 286 Science and the Sacred: Exploring the Intersection between Religion and Rationality

This course will examine a number of important, contemporary issues at the intersection between religion and science. Scientific thinking about God, religious responses to cosmology and evolution, and the writings of both scientists on religion and religionists on science will be included. We will focus on attempts to learn about religion from science, and about science from religion, and on the different methodologies, assumptions, and entailments of the two disciplines.