On Privilege

From my Honors Colloquium II term paper:

“What the advocates of our dangerous and deepening social amnesia don’t understand is how deeply the past holds the future in its grip—even, and perhaps especially, when it remains unacknowledged.” ~Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name

In our society, we are taught that racism, sexism, and classism, inasmuch as they still exist in our modern society, are things that put others at a disadvantage. The interesting corollary to this is for every person put at a disadvantage, someone has an advantage. In an essay on the topic, entitled “The Breeze at My Back”, Dr. Michael Kimmel, esteemed sociologist and author, compared privilege to running in the wind, stating:

“To walk or run with that same wind at your back is to float, to sail effortlessly, expending virtually no energy. You do not feel the wind; it feels you. You do not feel how it pushes you along; you feel only the effortlessness of your movements. You feel like you could go on forever. It is only when you turn around and face that wind that you realize its strength. Being white, or male, or heterosexual in this culture is like running with the wind at your back. It feels like just plain running, and we rarely if ever get a chance to see how we are sustained, supported, and even propelled by that wind.”

On Philosophy

From my Honors Colloquium II mid-term exam, part 2:

1.         In his key piece, Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant posits the idea that all human knowledge falls into two categories: a priori, meaning 'from before', and a posteriori, meaning 'from later'. A priori knowledge is gained independently from experience, is obvious, and requires no real effort to discern. A posteriori knowledge, on the contrary, is gained by experience or empirical evidence. Kant then categorizes our ability to know into two categories: noumena, which are things that can be perceived empirically, and phenomena, which can be discerned only through intuition. 'Real' things, or noumena, are merely representations of unknowns, or phenomena, which are interpreted through our a priori or a posteriori knowledge to reach an understanding, inasmuch as we can understand the universe.

On Education and Language

From my Honors Colloquium II mid-term exam:

“The teacher’s thinking is authenticated only by the authenticity of the students’ thinking. The teacher cannot think for her students, nor can she impose her thoughts on them.”

–Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed: The Banking Concept of Education

Killing Warfare

From my weekly comments for Honors Colloquium:

“Till at last the child's mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's mind too - all his life long. The mind that judges and desire and decides - made up of these suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions... Suggestions from the State." -Director Malthus, Brave New World

This week’s topic was warfare and evil. Our class exercise on Wednesday focused on a replacement for warfare. All of our own attempts to replace warfare have accepted that warfare is a normal part of our society for which we must account; almost as a force of will, or power, because the tendency to war is seen as a part of human nature. But is it?

On Hobbes and Locke

From my weekly comments for Honors Colloquium II:

“As soon as any man says of the affairs of the State "What does it matter to me?" the State may be given up for lost.”                    ―Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The ideas of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes are really very interesting, especially in regards to how different they are, and yet with such similar conclusions. Locke saw Man as a social creature, whereas Hobbes saw Man as a solitary creature. Locke believed in the inherent goodness of man, while Hobbes believes that the natural lives of men would be ‘poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. Locke believed in an intrinsic sense of ethics within the souls of men, while Hobbes saw morality as the will of a ruler, forced upon the people. Most importantly, Locke believed in natural rights, independent of a government, while Hobbes believed that any rights allowed come from the state itself. However different the works of these two men, together they make up makes up one solid set of ideas known as ‘social contract theory’, wherein people implicitly consent to a set of common rules and authority in exchange for protection. Despite the diversity of the ideas of Hobbes and Locke, they are the foundation of our government, which is a very interesting idea.

Dice and Determinism

“God does not play dice with the universe.          –Albert Einstein

On Interdependence

From my weekly comments for Honors Colloquium:

“The first [interpretation] is "this arises because that is," which comes down to saying that things do exist in some way, but nothing exists on its own. The second is "this, having been produced, produces that," which means that nothing can be its own cause. Or we could say that everything is in some way interdependent with the world..” –Matthieu Ricard, The Quantum and the Lotus

The postulate of interdependence in Universe in a Grain of Sand strikes me as sort of the ultimate religious syllogism; if a then b. It is, then, a logical idea; and one of words and language. It is also a religious idea, present in Christianity, in Buddhism, in Unitarian Universalism, and others. It is an economic idea and a scientific one, because all of our actions affect the world, as a butterfly might cause a hurricane vis-à-vis chaos theory. The idea of interdependence, then, is interdependent. I find this idea delightful.

On the Topic of Love (Fiction)

From an in-class writing prompt in Honors Colloquium II:

When I think of love, I think of his taste in music, and bouncing to the same songs while in different rooms engaged in different tasks. I think of him dancing across the living room while I die of laughter on his couch. I think of listening to his thoughts regarding his day and of his interest in amusing anecdotes from my classes, not because he gives a shit about Composition or because I know anything about communications equipment, but because he gives a shit about me and because anything involving him is interesting to me. I think of his appreciation when I make dinner and of his ham-n-Brie sandwiches. I think of lightly scratching his back while we’re lying in bed.

On Multiple Intelligences

From my weekly comments for Honors Colloquium:
 

“If I know you're very good in music, I can predict with just about zero accuracy whether you're going to be good or bad in other things.” –Howard Gardner

This week, we touched upon Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences. Howard Gardner was a developmental psychologist who proposed that we differentiate intelligence by modalities, rather than by primarily linguistic standards. This idea was very interesting to me, and I took several Multiple Intelligence quizzes to see how I fared.

I completed three different versions of the Multiple Intelligence assessment and came up with different answers every time. (See the chart for my results.) In theory, the assessment should identify one to three categories in which I would be the strongest; where my talents would lie, essentially. In practice, no category was a clear ‘winner’, nor was there a single ‘loser’ category. I’m either pretty alright at everything, or this theory needs some work.

While his theory is very interesting, it doesn’t seem like it has very solid criteria. One of the problems that jumped out at me, aside from my mixed results, is that, based on my understanding of the brain, logical thought and mathematical thought shouldn’t be paired. Although the fact that they are paired might serve to explain the contradictory scores that I received in that category. In the end, this theory was interesting an worthwhile to read about, right alongside phrenology.

Slavery Writing Exercise

From an in-class writing prompt in Honors Colloquium II:

Slavery is an institution that weakens our entire society. It is like a virus that sickens all, though many are outwardly asymptomatic. To see another as chattel is to devalue humanity, and thus yourself. We are all worthless while we attach a price to even one.

On Language

From my weekly comments for Honors Colloquium:

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
–George Orwell, 1984

This week’s readings and discussion centered on the idea of language. We did not discuss language itself, which we would call semantics; rather, we centered on language as a concept. What species have it? What forms does it take? Into what form do we shape language and how does our language, in turn, shape our society? It was strange to think of language as an idea, as opposed to a universal constant. Having not considered language before, again rather than semantics, I found our discussion to be interesting and enlightening, and the readings even more so.

Tree Knot Writing Exercise

The actual photo looked significantly
more like an O'Keefe painting, which
is to say suspiciously like a vagina.
Until I get a copy of the original,
this placeholder will suffice.

From an in-class writing prompt in Honors Colloquium II:

 
I see it from an odd direction. Thick oil paint. An O'Keefe? No, it's a tree, solid and uncompromising. Perhaps it suffered a lynching and is filled with the noises of mortal men. Maybe initials are scratched into a hidden part of the trunk. Perhaps small items are hidden in the knot, a testament to children and mockingbirds.

It is literally a tree, with branches, trunk, and knot. It is figuratively a breadth of possibilities.

Photo of the Day

Dr. Thomlinson had us draw 'Iconic 2012' as an in-class exercise. This was mine. It's like a puzzle... Can you guess all the bits? :P