Last updated: 4/14/01
Notes from Saturday April 14
The optional class today was, I felt, very good, and here are a few notes from there.
But first, I was pleased that people felt free to come and go according to their interest
and schedules. So here are the course-related notes:
- Brave New World. There is an important quotation that Huxley attached, the quote
from Nicolas Berdiaeff [Russian philosopher whose spiritual ideals undercut his Marxist
leanings and led to his expulsion from the Soviet Union (1922). His works include The
Spiritual Crisis of the Intelligentsia (1910). The American Heritage Dictionary of the
English Language, Third Edition is licensed from Houghton Mifflin Company.] The quotation
is in French and begins, "Les utopies apparaissent comme..." Here is a rough
translation:
- "Utopias are becoming more apparent as well as more realizable than was believed in
the past. And we find ourselves now before a question that is certainly otherwise
distressing: how to avoid their complete and final realiztion? ... Utopias are realizable.
Life marches towards utopias. And perhaps a new age is beginning, an age where
intellectuals and the cultured class dreams about about avoiding utopias and returning to
a society less utopian, less "perfect" and more free."
- "Realizable" is used here in the sense of capable of being made real. Huxley
is saying in this quote that Brave New World represents a horrible utopia (a
dystopia as Sharon pointed out). He was extrapolating what he saw as the worst trends of
his time (this was written in 1932) and exaggerating them into the future, so that he
could criticize the exaggerated trends and thereby comment on the society of his time.
-
- I had several reasons for making this part of Times' Harvest:
- To show that Toffler's six keys to industrial civilization (all six are present in Brave
New World) lead to a very different kind of future than Toffler and the other authors are
writing about
- To demonstrate that predictions about the future can be wrong, and even very wrong.
Huxley's Forward was written in 1950, I believe, and there he says that the main thing he
missed was nuclear energy. Not a word about the overwhelming social changes to come! True
enough, they were yet to come.
- To show that science and technology, about which Huxley made pretty good predictions, do
not determine the other aspects of society (else one could not be a good forecast and the
other a bad one). True, a fictional account does not necessarily prove ideas about social
science.
- There is still some confusion about exactly what assignments are due. See the Syllabus
for 3360 and 3340, and the Assignment Schedule web pages on the course web site for
the assignments, and the Reading Questions and 3340 Final Exam web page for the detailed questions. Here is a brief
outline:
- AGS 3360:
- Four essays based on the Reading Questions
- Twenty substantive postings on the course computer conference
- Weekly progress reports
- Attendance at required sessions (including next week, April 21)
- Online citizenship
- AGS 3340
- Two Quizzes
- Final exam including team and individual parts
- Ten additional substantive postings on the course computer conference
- Team reports (three plus team section on final)
- I gave my ideas about "stepping back":
- For cloning, I feel that there are people that appear to have the motivation and
determination to do this. We can declare it illegal, but that would probably not actually
stop it. (We can stop people from doing it with government funding.) What will we do when
there are actual clones around? The first ones are likely to have genetic problems. Will
society accept any responsibility, the way it would for "normal" people?
- For organ donation, I see that technology is probably making this a non-issue. Already
we have artificial joints, skin and blood, with simpler organs such as the kidney and
liver on the way.
- The web page creation session went pretty well, I thought. I have put up a gallery of web graphics.
- If you are uploading files to the class section, please put your initials in front of
the name for every web page you make. For example, egname.htm, stfname.htm,
cebbname.htm, where name is any file name and so forth. This will keep
files from overwriting each other. Technically, this goes for graphics files (gif or jpg)
also. Also, my upload tool balks at any blanks in the filename, although they are OK with
the web server itself.
Times'
Harvest Advanced Seminar (online)