Ow, my brain.

These advances in human cognition

Might have met with Homeric derision

To part body from mind

Might be thought unkind

But it’s worthy of great recognition

As one might expect considering the subject matter, I had a lot of thoughts about this reading... and I really enjoyed it, but I had serious difficulty articulating all the concepts effectively. So I'm going to give it a shot, but I feel very scattered about this one...

For as long as human beings have been able to conceptualize their own mortality and speculate about what happens after death, they have been looking for language to define abstract concepts. However, expanding language to incorporate these concepts led to people changing their thoughts about things that they had previously taken for granted, like the relationship of their limbs to the rest of their bodies.

The crucial cultural invention that accelerated the articulation of abstract concepts was the development of religion. In starting to conceive of an invisible divinity and attribute to it causation of events and concerns beyond their ken, humanity began to need the language for things they could not see and touch. The necessity of imputing supernatural (or as Snell would articulate it, in fact, quite natural) powers to these divine beings started humanity on the path to finding a concept of their own individual spirits, which led to language to distinguish the ‘self’ from the ‘spirit’ and the ‘body’.

In observing the transition from Homer to Heraclitus and how this articulation evolved, it was particularly insightful to read the Snell, who forced a re-examination of basic ideas that the reader would take for granted because of the filter of culminated Western thought. As Snell says, “It has long been observed that in comparatively primitive speech abstractions are as yet undeveloped, while immediate sense perceptions furnish it with a wealth of concrete symbols which seem strange to a more sophisticated tongue.” In translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, readers are given a text that has been translated for literary beauty and readability more than literal accuracy, so many of these sense perceptions as articulated by Homer are read with all the implied abstraction of contemporary English rather than the intended meaning of the author for that meaning would be almost indecipherable to the modern reader, so it becomes very difficult to imagine how the abstractions we take for granted were foreign to Homer.

One of the most crucial evolutions in thought between Homer and Heraclitus can be defined here: “[Heraclitus’] rejection of external guardian spirits (F60) has profound consequences: we make our own destinies. In a world of flux and hidden stability, of war and hidden peace, we choose to be one of the sleepers or to wake up.” In moving past externalized guardian spirits and focusing on self-determination and self-awareness, Heraclitus begins to create both accountability and sovereignty and internalize the rich unseen outer world. People are not just reactive in action, but proactive, and it is in proactivity that we push civilization forward.

Wait, you mean the Iliad's NOT a textbook?

Plato’s against memor’zation

Insisting on deliberation,

For without analysis

You risk pushing fallacies

In teaching to each generation

There is a lot of great stuff going on in the Havelock and in the Homer. By way of context, I’ve read the Iliad in whole or substantial parts at least three times in my academic career—once in high school and twice in college for different courses on literature and philosophy—so I am pretty familiar with the text and decoding it. That said, it was a pleasure to read it again bearing in mind Havelock’s points and the discussion question.

Not being very familiar with the Greek educational system, it was absolutely fascinating to view the Iliad as a means of passing on a cultural history, albeit one meant to be memorized rather than analyzed. On its surface, Plato’s antipathy towards Homer’s lack of absolute expertise seems absolutely bizarre. However, when total memorization and empathic absorption is the only way to effectively incorporate information, deliberation is less important than reaction and rote recitation. Or as Havelock put it, “He asks of men that instead they should examine this experience and rearrange it, that they should think about what they say, instead of just saying it. And they should separate themselves from it instead of identifying with it; they themselves should become the 'subject' who stands apart from the 'object' and reconsiders it and analyses it and evaluates it, instead of just 'imitating' it.” Plato is attempting to completely overthrow the pedagogical norm, and has quite a challenge ahead of him.

Within the context of the Iliad itself, the question of deliberation in action is a fascinating one. Characters don’t actually deliberate or analyze situations—they act. Gods act regardless of consequence and men act in response to situations set up by the gods or their baser impulses. The only time any character demonstrates a moment of deliberation in his action (lines 90-215), it is represented by the appearance of the goddess Athena. Athena is recognized as the goddess of wisdom, to be sure, but the important thing to note is that Achilles did not deliberate on his actions of his own accord—he was swayed from an impulsive decision by divine counsel. Had he even been remotely tempted to act counter to Athena, doubtless he would have learned from the humbling decimation the Greeks had just suffered at the hands of Apollo. So what is Homeric deliberation then? Is it action without critical analysis? Is it a mark of a hero that they act solely based on either instinct or divine decree?

From a pedagogical perspective, the Havelock reading got me thinking a lot about the purpose of rote memorization at all. It has gone in and out of fashion recently, especially in basic mathematics and vocabulary building. It seems that as access to written fact has become the dominant paradigm in the educational environment, it is far less relevant to teach facts than it is to teach how to interpret them and analyze them. In a world dominated by today’s aggressively pervasive technologies, this becomes moreso as the available source materials have increased infinitely. Today’s students have to learn to research, discern and decode the wealth of information at their fingertips and memorization becomes irrelevant in a society with devices that permit portable near instantaneous recollection.

Globalization, Wikitelligence and why the free market isn't so free

When thinking on globalization,

One cannot lose sight of the nation,

So China's priorities

derail Western authorities

Oh, unsuspecting hegemonic creation

Globalization is a hot topic word in media. Depending on who you ask, globalization will solve all the world's problems or sink us into a morass of economic and social inequality, all while ruining our environment. Still, globalization itself is rarely defined, though authors who bandy about it do so with an agenda. The Steger was particularly useful in distinguishing three different globalism agendas: market globalism, left justice globalism and jihadist globalism, all of which take advantage of globalization and advances in technology to further their own needs, they all "articulate and translate the rising global imaginary - notions of community increasingly tied to the global - into concrete political programmes and agendas."

Moreover, there is a lot of tension in the readings between the ideas of globalism replacing nationalism as a prevailing ideology (a la Friedman) and nationalism experiencing a resurgent power and relevance in defiance against a globalist agenda, particularly one that focuses on Western and Americentric ideas. As Gray says, “Nationalism fueled the rapid growth of capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is doing the same in China and India at the present time. In both countries globalization is being embraced not only because of the prosperity it makes possible, but also for the opportunity it creates to challenge Western hegemony. As China and India become great powers they will demand recognition of their distinctive cultures and values, and international institutions will have to be reshaped to reflect the legitimacy of a variety of economic and political models. At that point the universal claims of the United States and other Western nations will be fundamentally challenged, and the global balance of power will shift.” Therefore, paradoxically, it is nationalist motivations that are fueling a movement towards globalization: taking advantage of economic, technological and social opportunities globally to advance a national (or other unifying group—whether religious, ideological, racial, etc.) agenda.

The uncoupling of capitalism, democracy and globalization was a crucial feature of the Gray article and key to understanding the implications of globalist agendas across the world. While most cursory looks at globalization would seem to promote a leveling of the playing field, in reality, political entities all want to be ‘more equal than others’. It is difficult to imagine who would willingly forsake either an existing position of cultural and economic dominance or a chance to achieve it.

One of the things that I found most interesting in the reading was the framing of the fascist movements in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s as responses to unchecked capitalism and economic inequality. Having always looked at the rise of National Socialism through the lens of the failure of the Treaty of Versailles as being the direct cause of hyperinflation and unemployment, it is compelling to consider it through the lens of unchecked free market rapaciousness and draw correlations to modern economic inequalities—particularly as those tendencies manifest themselves right now in both secular and religious ways.

In terms of academic and pedagogical implications, the Lanier felt the most directly relevant. In concerns about collectivism and collaborative references like Wikipedia, the tyranny of the majority would necessitate reducing things to the lowest common denominator and thus diminishing the social intelligence. There have already been studies done that show that modern students accept most of what they read on Wikipedia and other internet sources as factual without stopping to consider the credibility of the source—a source that, as Lanier points out, is becoming more difficult to trace as anonymity and collective intelligence are becoming more common on the web. My girlfriend and I had a long conversation about this article and this very point, where she contested that for Wikipedia to have developed any credibility at all, it had to be mostly factually accurate, otherwise people would not use it and its lack of reliability would have rendered it obsolete. When I countered by comparing it to a physical encyclopedia (considered a legitimate source by most instructors, whereas Wikipedia is not), she pointed out that the masses can serve a similar function to the editorial gatekeepers behind a conventional encyclopedia, and we cannot easily (nor is anyone inclined to) trace the individual identities or biases of authors of Encyclopedia Brittanica articles either. Moreover, Wikipedia and internet authorship opens up a more democratic set of views that, if critically vetted by responsible readers, can be far more valuable than a conventionally published text. Or, as she put it, “History is written by the winners, but at least on Wikipedia, sometimes it’s written by losers”. These considerations will have to be factored in by modern educators who have to re-evaluate their own ideas of source legitimacy and train their students in effective critical evaluation.

Diebert’s introduction to “Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia” posits some difficult questions about humanity’s relationship to communication technology and how it influences our progress as a society. By presenting an examination of history framed through a medium theory lens, he forces the reader to consider their own assumptions about political authority, the influence of communication technology and even how the world is structured.

Of particular interest in examining the problems of modern society and communication is the collapse of boundaries that modern society has created between discrete political entities. Diebert says “We should not presuppose the "modern" distinction maintained between "politics," "economics," and "religion" in the composition of past or future world orders (p. 10)." This framework is a key analysis tool for comprehension of modern international relations, but is becoming rapidly obsolete. Unfortunately, navigation of this post-modern world order is in its infancy as it is a world of “de-territorialized communities, fragmented identities, transnational corporations, and cyberspatial flows of finance. It is a world in which brokers, cultists, and khalifs are as much in prominent relief as Canadians, Poles, and Kuwaitis. It is, paradoxically, a world made up of plural worlds, multiple realities and irrealities, digital artifacts stitched together in a web of spectacles, cineplexes, and not a single "global village;' and even less a system of territorially-distinct nationstates, postmodern world order is, rather, a pastiche of multiple and overlapping authorities - a quasi-feudal, "multicentric" system. (p. ix)”, which brings us to the question: how do we shift our own concepts of power structures and political entities to meaningfully interact in the new world order?

“While it is far too early to provide a clear outline of that emerging world order, the trends unearthed point away from single mass identities, linear political boundaries, and exclusive jurisdictions centered on territorial spaces, and toward multiple identities and nonterritorial communities, overlapping boundaries, and nonexclusive jurisdictions. (p. 15)”. A few examples that came to mind particularly in reading Diebert highlight the turmoil in the Middle East. The last major conflict that the United States engaged in, Vietnam, was a fight against a regime (and a political ideology with global implications, true), but a clearly defined regime. While this is definitely reductionist, the basic idea holds true. In America’s current conflicts, the enemy is far more nebulous, confined by neither country nor region, and the nature of warfare is adapting rapidly. Likewise, in the recent Iranian elections, global attention came down on Iran, shifting views on citizen journalism and protest methodology as well as raising questions about citizenship and democracy. Why are non-Iranians invested in Iranian elections? Where does the sovereign authority of a nation-state have to be accountable to a global sense of democracy? What does a global sense of democracy MEAN in a world still drawn up into nation-states?

While these are all weighty ideas that I look forward to exploring in great detail in this course, the crux of what got me excited and curious relating to my own studies came from the series of emails. In my program and career, I hope to utilize new media technologies to help secondary and post-secondary educators of the humanities improve their teaching and more effectively reach their students using all the tools available to them, so when I see statements like “The problem in reality is not that some schools are failing schools; it is that schooling, as our only educational strategy and system, fails with a significant portion of the population. Like any institutional system, schooling has its functional capacities and its functional limits. Children stumbling through the process with scant benefit and teachers struggling with miserable results does not mean that the children are uneducable nor the teachers incompetent; it means that the system of schooling has been pushed to the limits of its possible effectiveness,” it gets me very excited to think of how educators will be able to move outside conventional methods of education and re-imagine the process of study in ways that will encourage individual learners to reach the height of their potential.

When the author spoke of how e-learning should not be an electronic delivery system for a conventional textbook based education, but rather the springboard for a whole new look at learning, it made me realize how much my frame of understanding was limited by this traditional idea of education, even though I attended extremely progressive schools. In my office right now, we are working on a Global Classroom initiative with Jeffrey Sachs and the Earth Institute. Every day, twelve classrooms across the world connect through a video conferencing system to participate in interdisciplinary lectures on the problems of sustainable development by leading international experts in the field. Not only would this not have been logistically possible without advances in current technology, it would likely not have been conceived. It is not a very conventional approach to education.

I can’t wait to see what other assumptions will be challenged over this course of study and how it will help me think of my own role in education in a different way.