Final Humanities 202 Lecture

hi everybody and welcome to the final lecture of humanities 202 the summer edition uh I hope you've enjoyed uh the class I hope you've uh you have some things that you can take away from it and congratulations you have completed the full circle of course uh not until you've actually turned in the final reflection but and done all the discussion for her but theoretically you are done with your obligations in Humanities so that warrants congratulations a few parting thoughts today that I thought I would make and then we will be on our way um I think we should probably begin with the USSR because uh it is one of the it's collapse is one of the big markers in our contemporary recent history it really establishes the political economic and cultural dynamics that we know and live with today so uh I just wanted to pause a little bit obviously the book will explain some of that too but to highlight things uh the leader of the USSR becomes prior to its collapse Mikhail Gorbachev who is institutes a number of policies and precipitates a number of changes in the USSR that will lead to its eventual collapse uh the parastrika is his effort to decentralize things of course in the Soviet Union much of the economy and the politics are very centralized as it has been throughout the 20th century Gorbachev takes significant steps to decentralize at least parts of the USSR in an effort to uh free up some of the mobility and allow for some of the commercial success that is seen in the west along with that glasnost is another policy that must change and that is a an increased amount of openness and ability and willingness um to critique the leadership of the USSR prior to this of course you ran a significant risk if you were to um criticize the government if you were to come out against it and say something uh particularly sharp or incisive about it glasnost allows people within the USSR to feel comfortable to a degree in their criticism of the government glasnost and parastrika are the two big changes that the USSR the Gorbachev helps um to precipitate and as a result in 1989 1990 we have the infamous fall of the wall when President Reagan uh asked him to tear down this wall meaning the wall that divided Eastern Germany and Western Germany from one another Eastern Germany of course was part allied with the USSR and Western Germany allied with the West so important to note of course that President Reagan while not an unimportant figure during the the Cold War years of the 1980s certainly did not his request to tear it on the wall was not actually what achieved the final effect of the wall being torn down in reality the wall was torn down because of internal corrosion within the Soviet Union corruption when it became clear to the people that the leaders had been exploiting power and living in the lack of luxury of course a big tenet of socialism is that the wealth is shared among the people that it is not um hoarded by the wealthy or the elite few when people began to recognize that their leaders were not holding True to this uh there was this significant um uptick in mistrust of those in power in the USSR likewise it became um more and more clear and this is not uh unintentional it became more and more clear that Western countries had more things they had more material Goods at their disposal they had fancy cars that they that people could see in Hollywood movies they had nice clothes they had big houses the American dream as it was packaged and sold to the rest of the world inspired some of these people um within the USSR to Aspire to that kind of material success they learn to redefine success according to material Goods we could of course debate whether that is a good or bad marker of happiness but in any case the people did view that and say we want some of those big cars and some of those big houses a place like Poland for instance is going to jump full force into the arms of the West it's going to be just rip off the Band-Aid of socialism and embrace the materialism that is viewed in the west and they were particularly successful because they just completely adopted many of these forms of government and economy however of many and this is still true to this day many countries within that region struggled to try and comp find a common ground to compromise their principles uh which stand for justice and economic equality for all um the inability for the wealthy Elite to hoard their money um with the kind of mobility and flexibility that Western the Western economy and the Western model had to offer if you could find some kind of bridge between the two uh theoretically you could be successful at this so with the fall of the wall and the unification of Germany began what has been called in some circles the end of History um basically what it what it has what that means when we say an end of history is that there was there were these premature uh declarations that the battles of history for which form of government which form of economy um would be the one to rule them all that battle is now over by 1990 it is clear that capitalism and democracy are the way of the future at least according to the people who were proclaiming that on the side of the winner you would think perhaps that that would bring great happiness and contentment um for the for the world if in fact that is what was meant to happen unfortunately as we've seen uh increasing uh discrepancy the gap between the wealthy and the poor has only grown exponentially since that time um so we have yet to see the kind of um widespread wealth and prosperity that was promised by this end of History likewise the Soviet Union um immediately began to dismantle many of their nuclear weapons at a rate that is four times faster than the United States so the United States though it promises or that it wants very much for the end of the Cold War to the end of this arms race the ends of this buildup of nuclear weapons uh the United States far slower and far more unwilling to part with its nuclear weapons than the Soviet Union which is now of course of Russia and if you believed that perhaps this whole Soviet Union Cold War uh polemic would end with the fall of the wall um and that somehow the ideology of capitalism and democracy would wash over the world uh this is not the case certainly you can look at the recent um unsettled disputes between Russia and the Ukraine Russia and Ukraine Russia and Crimea uh we see the kind of ghosts of the Cold War back again and maybe we were a little bit uh we were a little bit quick to declare the end of History perhaps there's still some of that some of those battles left to be fought um as a result of this end of History moment um we could maybe survey and the lecture by Dr Hoover and as well as my lecture on Angel will explain um the kind of discrepancy between um when in a post-colonial world in a world in which the center cannot hold to once again go back to an earlier 20th century reference um with William Butler Yates the center cannot hold and we have all of these split identities beginning to emerge um and perhaps they have been really formed throughout the 20th century the 20th century to a large extent is A Century of divided identities within these countries that are now moving towards materialism and away from their socialist principles you have this internal division the pro-western side which comes along with all kinds of imaginary benefits like Civilization material success a sense of superiority um but you also have this side of the self that is linked to Native customs and Native Traditions that continues to only gain power as it becomes a nostalgic a kind of relic of the past and this of course should remind you very much of um William Butler Yates uh and his sense of modernity is always being a tension between the future that is pressing upon us and the past that is weighing us down these are two things that are kind of opposed that tear the modern identity in two uh it is certainly true in women's rights as Dr Hoover explains with the the sense that women must be hold held into these traditional roles and held a kind of prisoner to these old expectations and stereotypes versus The Liberation that would that will theoretically come at some point in the future of course we're not there yet if you read okotatek's uh postcolonial poem um which I think is uh an extremely important poem you see this division between the husband and the wife the husband who is uh brainwashed for lack of a better term in favor of the West which teaches him to actively try to sever all ties to his former life and his community and the wife who wants desperately to continue to love her husband but feels uh the bitterness of his tongue feels the the shame the embarrassment the guilt of her husband in their relationship um and this is much this occupies much of our attention in the 20th century and it still hangs with us today this tension between the future and the past of the modern which is imagined to be the West and everything else which is imagined to be the past they're always diametrically at odds with one another uh speaking back and forth to one another in this state of Perpetual unrest and there's something that you can probably take away from that in regards to the entirety of the 20th century so um I want to leave with some parting General thoughts here about um the world today of course many of you are products all of you are products of the 20th century I think is mathematically impossible that any of you are a product of the 21st century so we have a vested interest we are uh we are what the fruit that were born the fruit that was born of all of these events that we've been charting in Humanities 202 the world today as we know it we're going to just take a brief uh pause to ask a couple of brief questions about it how are we going to address the issues of terrorism and terrorism presents all kinds of new paradigms be it philosophically um economically culturally terrorism um in many ways raises the question of uh have we in fact is history not over uh does this a very vague and uh poorly defined entity called terrorism does that uh tell us that the battle for history continues that there are still people and forces that are hoping to stop the materialist engine that is the progress from the west or does it tell us that the West perpetually needs an enemy against which to fight perhaps it needs to fuel and to imagine to always be dreaming of some other some force that is not within its Gates already because without a force to fight against um the West what would that mean for society or a sense of progress does the West depend upon defeating others endlessly can we ever reach a point in which um everything would be this kind of utopian world where nobody was fighting against the values of the West to go along with that we might consider the rise of the internet of course I'm speaking to you through if you have the capability of accessing this video it is thanks to the technological advances is this a good thing or a bad thing um it would it be better if we were face to face in the same room but for some people that's impossible they're trying to work they have children they're they have credits that they have to take does this democratize the world a little bit more does it make it a little bit of an even playing field by having things like internet classes it certainly changes uh the way we think about art and artistic Endeavor generally we have the whole world at our fingertips or so we're told but at the same time I don't think anyone's going to argue that people are generally more critically engaged more artistically minded uh more enlightened I don't think the evidence points to the internet or these recent changes since 1990 as making the world a more enlightened or better place um so we have to ask ourselves of course why not um and how are we going to move forward with many of these uh forms and ideas moving into the future and make them work for us in a better way what does it mean to be human in an age in which human beings become often secondary to their machines um in some ways this is an extension of the logic that began in the early 20th century with the industrial revolutions but then moves on steadily through the world wars and as we saw in the world wars people became and in the Great Depression people became less valuable their human bodies became less valuable than the Commodities that they owned in The Grapes of Wrath the horse becomes more worth more than the owner um in World War II uh in this way that the gas River ladies and gentlemen um people become less valuable than their shoes and their clothes and so we have these piles of Commodities that are hauled off at the end of the story and the people have disappeared with the rise of the internet and these kinds of things the logic continues that people become ghosts in the machine and that the machines technology and the logic of Technology continues and what it means to be human suddenly becomes less important than what it means to build efficient machinery and what what we do with that is not an easy oh well the answer is that's not a multiple choice question that I could put on an exam it's a question that each of you will probably have to tackle in your own way uh in your own individual lives where are we going you've in the course of the humanities sequence you have probably learned I hope you've learned to look at cycles of behavior cycles of social change and start to make some you could recognize patterns in history patterns in literature of Conformity and Rebellion um not that you can become prophetic but we might learn through the study of the humanities we might learn to avoid some of those uh very serious pitfalls that we have fallen into previously um and the final message that I really want to to impart or to share with you is Milligan's Humanities program of course is an intersection between the humanities and the the Christian values espouse um and at this intersection we might ask well what's the common link because often there's a tension between um critical thinking or presumed to be a tension between critical thinking and the liberal arts and uh religion which has its own set of beliefs and Doctrine associated with it how do these two things come together what can we walk away with I think the tension of course is a healthy one um I think one of the greatest gifts that we have is our ability to to reason to think um to that is the the skill that we have that is our greatest uh gift and another gift that we have is that we can we do not need to be afraid um that that is the message of the liberal arts as well as the kind of Christian message we do not need to be afraid uh we can tackle Injustice we can break free of older ideas that have run their course um and then no longer seem viable we can uh triumph over the materialism over the objectification of human life uh all we need to do is apply ourselves and believe that it is possible and do not fear the future don't be held in check by fear um but move forward with confidence and that to me is one of the threads that runs throughout the religious artistic philosophical all of these things we've looked at in the 20th century um fear becomes ever-pressing Upon Us in the 20th century do I dare and do I dare the famous Elliott quote um that you read earlier in the semester this permeating saturating sense of fear need not hold us down and artists and philosophers and religious figures alike all grapple with this and come to similar conclusions they find ways to transcend Their Fear and to put forward something to produce something better or at least to produce something that does not simply maintain the status quo and I hope that you can take a little bit of that into your future studies and your respective disciplines and hopefully take that a little bit with you uh into your lives your personal lives as well um I'm sure it has felt at times like the humanities is more of a burden than a pleasure but I assure you uh in in time once you have a little bit of time to to think about it and look back on it um My Hope and my belief is that you will look back on the humanities and you look back on some of the things you have read and learned and want to learn more and want to read it once more um and hopefully continue your quest toward answering for yourself what it means to be human all right thanks very much everybody I look forward to reading your final Reflections and if you ever need anything please do drop me a line and I'll be happy to um do whatever I can to help you but thank you for a great semester enjoy the last bits of your summer um and I hope to talk to you all soon

hi everybody and welcome to the final lecture of humanities 202 the summer edition uh I hope you&#39;ve enjoyed uh the class I hope you&#39;ve uh you have some things that you can take away from it and congratulations you have completed the full circle of course uh not until you&#39;ve actually turned in the final reflection but and done all the discussion for her but theoretically you are done with your obligations in Humanities so that warrants congratulations a few parting thoughts today that I thought I would make and then we will be on our way um I think we should probably begin with the USSR because uh it is one of the it&#39;s collapse is one of the big markers in our contemporary recent history it really establishes the political economic and cultural dynamics that we know and live with today so uh I just wanted to pause a little bit obviously the book will explain some of that too but to highlight things uh the leader of the USSR becomes prior to its collapse Mikhail Gorbachev who is institutes a number of policies and precipitates a number of changes in the USSR that will lead to its eventual collapse uh the parastrika is his effort to decentralize things of course in the Soviet Union much of the economy and the politics are very centralized as it has been throughout the 20th century Gorbachev takes significant steps to decentralize at least parts of the USSR in an effort to uh free up some of the mobility and allow for some of the commercial success that is seen in the west along with that glasnost is another policy that must change and that is a an increased amount of openness and ability and willingness um to critique the leadership of the USSR prior to this of course you ran a significant risk if you were to um criticize the government if you were to come out against it and say something uh particularly sharp or incisive about it glasnost allows people within the USSR to feel comfortable to a degree in their criticism of the government glasnost and parastrika are the two big changes that the USSR the Gorbachev helps um to precipitate and as a result in 1989 1990 we have the infamous fall of the wall when President Reagan uh asked him to tear down this wall meaning the wall that divided Eastern Germany and Western Germany from one another Eastern Germany of course was part allied with the USSR and Western Germany allied with the West so important to note of course that President Reagan while not an unimportant figure during the the Cold War years of the 1980s certainly did not his request to tear it on the wall was not actually what achieved the final effect of the wall being torn down in reality the wall was torn down because of internal corrosion within the Soviet Union corruption when it became clear to the people that the leaders had been exploiting power and living in the lack of luxury of course a big tenet of socialism is that the wealth is shared among the people that it is not um hoarded by the wealthy or the elite few when people began to recognize that their leaders were not holding True to this uh there was this significant um uptick in mistrust of those in power in the USSR likewise it became um more and more clear and this is not uh unintentional it became more and more clear that Western countries had more things they had more material Goods at their disposal they had fancy cars that they that people could see in Hollywood movies they had nice clothes they had big houses the American dream as it was packaged and sold to the rest of the world inspired some of these people um within the USSR to Aspire to that kind of material success they learn to redefine success according to material Goods we could of course debate whether that is a good or bad marker of happiness but in any case the people did view that and say we want some of those big cars and some of those big houses a place like Poland for instance is going to jump full force into the arms of the West it&#39;s going to be just rip off the Band-Aid of socialism and embrace the materialism that is viewed in the west and they were particularly successful because they just completely adopted many of these forms of government and economy however of many and this is still true to this day many countries within that region struggled to try and comp find a common ground to compromise their principles uh which stand for justice and economic equality for all um the inability for the wealthy Elite to hoard their money um with the kind of mobility and flexibility that Western the Western economy and the Western model had to offer if you could find some kind of bridge between the two uh theoretically you could be successful at this so with the fall of the wall and the unification of Germany began what has been called in some circles the end of History um basically what it what it has what that means when we say an end of history is that there was there were these premature uh declarations that the battles of history for which form of government which form of economy um would be the one to rule them all that battle is now over by 1990 it is clear that capitalism and democracy are the way of the future at least according to the people who were proclaiming that on the side of the winner you would think perhaps that that would bring great happiness and contentment um for the for the world if in fact that is what was meant to happen unfortunately as we&#39;ve seen uh increasing uh discrepancy the gap between the wealthy and the poor has only grown exponentially since that time um so we have yet to see the kind of um widespread wealth and prosperity that was promised by this end of History likewise the Soviet Union um immediately began to dismantle many of their nuclear weapons at a rate that is four times faster than the United States so the United States though it promises or that it wants very much for the end of the Cold War to the end of this arms race the ends of this buildup of nuclear weapons uh the United States far slower and far more unwilling to part with its nuclear weapons than the Soviet Union which is now of course of Russia and if you believed that perhaps this whole Soviet Union Cold War uh polemic would end with the fall of the wall um and that somehow the ideology of capitalism and democracy would wash over the world uh this is not the case certainly you can look at the recent um unsettled disputes between Russia and the Ukraine Russia and Ukraine Russia and Crimea uh we see the kind of ghosts of the Cold War back again and maybe we were a little bit uh we were a little bit quick to declare the end of History perhaps there&#39;s still some of that some of those battles left to be fought um as a result of this end of History moment um we could maybe survey and the lecture by Dr Hoover and as well as my lecture on Angel will explain um the kind of discrepancy between um when in a post-colonial world in a world in which the center cannot hold to once again go back to an earlier 20th century reference um with William Butler Yates the center cannot hold and we have all of these split identities beginning to emerge um and perhaps they have been really formed throughout the 20th century the 20th century to a large extent is A Century of divided identities within these countries that are now moving towards materialism and away from their socialist principles you have this internal division the pro-western side which comes along with all kinds of imaginary benefits like Civilization material success a sense of superiority um but you also have this side of the self that is linked to Native customs and Native Traditions that continues to only gain power as it becomes a nostalgic a kind of relic of the past and this of course should remind you very much of um William Butler Yates uh and his sense of modernity is always being a tension between the future that is pressing upon us and the past that is weighing us down these are two things that are kind of opposed that tear the modern identity in two uh it is certainly true in women&#39;s rights as Dr Hoover explains with the the sense that women must be hold held into these traditional roles and held a kind of prisoner to these old expectations and stereotypes versus The Liberation that would that will theoretically come at some point in the future of course we&#39;re not there yet if you read okotatek&#39;s uh postcolonial poem um which I think is uh an extremely important poem you see this division between the husband and the wife the husband who is uh brainwashed for lack of a better term in favor of the West which teaches him to actively try to sever all ties to his former life and his community and the wife who wants desperately to continue to love her husband but feels uh the bitterness of his tongue feels the the shame the embarrassment the guilt of her husband in their relationship um and this is much this occupies much of our attention in the 20th century and it still hangs with us today this tension between the future and the past of the modern which is imagined to be the West and everything else which is imagined to be the past they&#39;re always diametrically at odds with one another uh speaking back and forth to one another in this state of Perpetual unrest and there&#39;s something that you can probably take away from that in regards to the entirety of the 20th century so um I want to leave with some parting General thoughts here about um the world today of course many of you are products all of you are products of the 20th century I think is mathematically impossible that any of you are a product of the 21st century so we have a vested interest we are uh we are what the fruit that were born the fruit that was born of all of these events that we&#39;ve been charting in Humanities 202 the world today as we know it we&#39;re going to just take a brief uh pause to ask a couple of brief questions about it how are we going to address the issues of terrorism and terrorism presents all kinds of new paradigms be it philosophically um economically culturally terrorism um in many ways raises the question of uh have we in fact is history not over uh does this a very vague and uh poorly defined entity called terrorism does that uh tell us that the battle for history continues that there are still people and forces that are hoping to stop the materialist engine that is the progress from the west or does it tell us that the West perpetually needs an enemy against which to fight perhaps it needs to fuel and to imagine to always be dreaming of some other some force that is not within its Gates already because without a force to fight against um the West what would that mean for society or a sense of progress does the West depend upon defeating others endlessly can we ever reach a point in which um everything would be this kind of utopian world where nobody was fighting against the values of the West to go along with that we might consider the rise of the internet of course I&#39;m speaking to you through if you have the capability of accessing this video it is thanks to the technological advances is this a good thing or a bad thing um it would it be better if we were face to face in the same room but for some people that&#39;s impossible they&#39;re trying to work they have children they&#39;re they have credits that they have to take does this democratize the world a little bit more does it make it a little bit of an even playing field by having things like internet classes it certainly changes uh the way we think about art and artistic Endeavor generally we have the whole world at our fingertips or so we&#39;re told but at the same time I don&#39;t think anyone&#39;s going to argue that people are generally more critically engaged more artistically minded uh more enlightened I don&#39;t think the evidence points to the internet or these recent changes since 1990 as making the world a more enlightened or better place um so we have to ask ourselves of course why not um and how are we going to move forward with many of these uh forms and ideas moving into the future and make them work for us in a better way what does it mean to be human in an age in which human beings become often secondary to their machines um in some ways this is an extension of the logic that began in the early 20th century with the industrial revolutions but then moves on steadily through the world wars and as we saw in the world wars people became and in the Great Depression people became less valuable their human bodies became less valuable than the Commodities that they owned in The Grapes of Wrath the horse becomes more worth more than the owner um in World War II uh in this way that the gas River ladies and gentlemen um people become less valuable than their shoes and their clothes and so we have these piles of Commodities that are hauled off at the end of the story and the people have disappeared with the rise of the internet and these kinds of things the logic continues that people become ghosts in the machine and that the machines technology and the logic of Technology continues and what it means to be human suddenly becomes less important than what it means to build efficient machinery and what what we do with that is not an easy oh well the answer is that&#39;s not a multiple choice question that I could put on an exam it&#39;s a question that each of you will probably have to tackle in your own way uh in your own individual lives where are we going you&#39;ve in the course of the humanities sequence you have probably learned I hope you&#39;ve learned to look at cycles of behavior cycles of social change and start to make some you could recognize patterns in history patterns in literature of Conformity and Rebellion um not that you can become prophetic but we might learn through the study of the humanities we might learn to avoid some of those uh very serious pitfalls that we have fallen into previously um and the final message that I really want to to impart or to share with you is Milligan&#39;s Humanities program of course is an intersection between the humanities and the the Christian values espouse um and at this intersection we might ask well what&#39;s the common link because often there&#39;s a tension between um critical thinking or presumed to be a tension between critical thinking and the liberal arts and uh religion which has its own set of beliefs and Doctrine associated with it how do these two things come together what can we walk away with I think the tension of course is a healthy one um I think one of the greatest gifts that we have is our ability to to reason to think um to that is the the skill that we have that is our greatest uh gift and another gift that we have is that we can we do not need to be afraid um that that is the message of the liberal arts as well as the kind of Christian message we do not need to be afraid uh we can tackle Injustice we can break free of older ideas that have run their course um and then no longer seem viable we can uh triumph over the materialism over the objectification of human life uh all we need to do is apply ourselves and believe that it is possible and do not fear the future don&#39;t be held in check by fear um but move forward with confidence and that to me is one of the threads that runs throughout the religious artistic philosophical all of these things we&#39;ve looked at in the 20th century um fear becomes ever-pressing Upon Us in the 20th century do I dare and do I dare the famous Elliott quote um that you read earlier in the semester this permeating saturating sense of fear need not hold us down and artists and philosophers and religious figures alike all grapple with this and come to similar conclusions they find ways to transcend Their Fear and to put forward something to produce something better or at least to produce something that does not simply maintain the status quo and I hope that you can take a little bit of that into your future studies and your respective disciplines and hopefully take that a little bit with you uh into your lives your personal lives as well um I&#39;m sure it has felt at times like the humanities is more of a burden than a pleasure but I assure you uh in in time once you have a little bit of time to to think about it and look back on it um My Hope and my belief is that you will look back on the humanities and you look back on some of the things you have read and learned and want to learn more and want to read it once more um and hopefully continue your quest toward answering for yourself what it means to be human all right thanks very much everybody I look forward to reading your final Reflections and if you ever need anything please do drop me a line and I&#39;ll be happy to um do whatever I can to help you but thank you for a great semester enjoy the last bits of your summer um and I hope to talk to you all soon

Transcript for:Final Humanities 202 Lecture

Transcript for:
Final Humanities 202 Lecture