The SNL University of Westfield Online sketch

Unfortunately, Blogger can't load the link (or I can't figure out how to load it) that will take you to the Saturday Night Live "University of Westfield Online" sketch of two weeks ago. It's a thinly veiled reference to a university that you may recognize.

The fake advertisement says or implies a number of things about online education: that one can get one's degree in one's pajamas, that employers are not keen to hire graduates of an online college, that what one "learns" there is how to cover up one's education, and that it only takes four months to graduate.

As friends of mine have pointed out, none of these statements is necessarily true. But that's not the point, any more than CNN fact-checking SNL's sketch about President Obama's lack of accomplishment is relevant. It's not the truth of the statements, but the perception that they represent that should interest us, and that we should listen to.

Basically, why people laugh is because they tend to believe that 1) online education is easier, 2) online education is less rigorous, and 3) that because of these two things, online education doesn't take as long. If one believes (as I do) that online education can be as rigorous and interesting as campus education, then one should ask where these perceptions have come from.

The university being parodied now has hundreds of thousands of graduates, many from online programs. How many of them are talking about the quality (or lack of it) of their education? Intel has discontinued financial aid for MBA students from this university--why is that? Now it's not as though the players and writers of SNL are actually academics; some of them probably haven't even gone to much, if any, college. They may be the voice of the East Coast, but they are in touch with the urban culture there. Maybe they're like Gary Trudeau, a social liberal but educational conservative, who for years has decried what he sees as slipping standards at Yale (parodied in Doonesbury as Walden College).

It might just be the case that it's the real-life experience of online college students, and the experience of their employers, that's giving the material here. As in any educational situation, it's all in the execution, not in the medium. If those of us in online education do it right, then these satires will go away (or at least change their form).

Ken Burns, on The National Parks, America's Best Idea

Chris and I got hooked a couple of weeks ago on the Ken Burns multi-day special The National Parks, America's Best Idea. The photography was stunning, and since we're both national park fanatics, the early episodes were (to me) very interesting. I believe that I missed the last night or two.

It's interesting that some things never change: America in the late nineteenth century was as acquisitive and ecologically unaware as most people in America are today. Arizona and its rapacious water and development industry was, if anything, worse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Grand Canyon almost didn't become a national park because of some developer/miner from Arizona who became a senator. I don't remember his name, but that's OK, because he doesn't actually deserve mention. What an exemplar of a type that still exists in this state--someone who thinks that all we need is more water and development, that the landscape means little, except the view.

Anyhow, it's also interesting that Niagra Falls was used through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the poster child for how private development and tourist exploitation can wreck scenes of superb natural interest and beauty. The watchword seemed to be "don't turn Yosemite or Yellowstone into Niagra Falls." It was this attitude on the part of the public that was certainly a catalyst for the development of the national parks.

It was also a lesson in the way that individuals can move the national conversation and will in such a way that good things happen. Of course, John Muir was that spokesperson for Yosemite and Yellowstone, and interestingly, became the patron saint of most of the early national parks. Also, the first National Park Service director, whose name I can't now recall, used his advertising and promotional sense to popularize the parks to the nation at the critical time.

Finally, the early twentieth century also saw the birth of use-conservation as well as the classic Sierra Club environmental movement. Gifford Pinchot, the force behind the National Forest system, had a different, multi-use, idea, that probably saved much more acreage of wilderness than the National Park system did. So, are the National Forests America's second best idea?

Silent Sundays at South Mountain Park

In preparation for the MS 150 in March 2010, I've tried to get out with other GCU people on some rides. So far, the most consistent has been the Silent Sunday rides for the past two months. From the parking lot to the San Juan Lookout is 6.3 miles, by odometer. So, to the lookout and back is 12.6 miles, while it's a 3.4 mile climb to the intersection of the two summit roads, one to a lookout pavilion, and the other to a group of antennas. So far, 19.4 miles total round trip.



Once upon a time (1990 or so), I (in an incautious moment) mountain biked up the National Trail to the antennas with a college student. It was hard, and more acrobatic than I actually was.

Since then, I've never been back to the antennas. Last month, I made it partway up the climb. (That's the trash can picture.) This month, I've made it to the intersection split (pictured). Next month, maybe to the lookout or the antennas.




I really like this trail, winding as it does through high Sonoran desert landscape. It also gives a good workout.

The Duchess

Of course, a movie starring Kiera Knightly is always going to be visually interesting, but this film ended up being surprisingly dissatisfying. It may be that I'm not a fan of the genre of modern Romance, which is what this movie ended up being. In Northrop Frye's terms, Romance has the structure of comedy (disorder to order), plus exotic settings and interesting noble characters.

This picture, instead, played up the "modern Romance" conventions one sees in such books as Shogun, Gaijin, and the Thorn Birds. The "main characters" have lives that never turn out well; it does not end in relationship, but in a kind of stasis. In the Thorn Birds, for example, the great lovers are torn apart by the calling of the male character, having only one night together. In Gaijin, the putative hero dies of his wounds relatively early on in the novel, leaving no character focus.

In the same way, The Duchess not only compresses the heroine's love life into a few weeks in Bath, it falsifies history as well. In history, the duchess's affair lasted for years.

I'm beginning to believe that there's something to Frye's (and Aristotle's) contention that the actual structures and archetypes of literature carry a special meaning.

The Dark Knight

A couple of days ago, I watched Batman: The Dark Knight, at my son's suggestion. It is different. It's more noir and "realistic" than the others; Christian Bale is the same, but they had to replace Katie Holmes with Maggie Gyllenhaal. One of my friends yesterday said that she hated the movie because, among other things, she felt that Heath Ledger's depiction of the Joker was over the top, and not at all funny. I, on the other hand, found it to be an intriguing look at the incipient anarchy of humor, and the way that unrestrained humor becomes horror.

I'm always intrigued by the rejection of the "hero" concept. The movie also provided an interesting definition of it: "A hero is someone who plays by the rules--always--and saves society." Given this, Batman can't be a hero, because he doesn't play by the legal rules. But he is a hero because he covers up Harvey Dent's descent into madness, in favor of Dent's image as a hero. So, the concept is exposed as a lie, and the Dark Knight becomes a new definition of the term: self-sacrificing for the society when he instructs Gordon to "tell them I killed those people," since people need an heroic image to believe in. In the same way, Alfred burns the last letter from Gyllenhaal's character because Bruce Wayne still needs something to believe in.

Thus, the traditional concept of the hero is deconstructed-- it's not following the rules, it's one's motivation for action that becomes heroism.

I was also intrigued by the incipient apologia for waterboarding and harsh interrogation methods in the questioning of the Joker in the city jail.

I saw the new movie Knowledge, starring Nick Cage. (Note: there may be plot spoilers coming, so if you want to see the movie, stop reading.) On principle, I have a problem with apocalyptic movies. Armageddon (Bruce Willis) was good, at least in part because the threatened apocalypse did not come about. The Left Behind series of movies was problematic because there's just a generic problem with apocalypse movies, as there is with the "evolutionary" kind of science fiction (you know, when humanity transforms into something other, with concomitant millennial consequences). I think the issue is that in general, audiences identify and sympathize with the hero, and when the hero dies, it produces the tragic effect. However, when the whole of humanity is wiped out, it goes beyond tragedy, as sci-fi goes beyond romance when humanity changes beyond recognition.

I am, however, interested in the repackaging of religious themes in contemporary movies, and Knowledge had that in abundance--Left Behind meets Erich von Daniken meets Armageddon.

So, why am I intrigued, though not completely sold on, Knowledge, while dissing the Left Behind series? I don't really know, if one leaves out better CGI. I suspect that apocalypse is a problem because there's an end to all tension if everyone's dead. Even if a new Eden or millennial existence results for a few, there's something inconceivable about humanity, essentially as we know it, suddenly coming to a complete end (maybe more than 5 billion of the earth's 6 billion being wiped out in an instant, with maybe a few thousand saved? There's a Schindler's List for you). Plus, for Left Behind, if one reads biblical prophecy, there's a millennial existence and Heaven at the end. John struggled to describe it, and such an existence would almost certainly be impossible to describe adequately by an earth-bound human. Literature is based on tension and conflict, so it's not clear where that goes.

Charles Darwin at the Cambridge University Library

I just went to see the exhibit of manuscripts, letters, and specimens from the voyage of the Beagle, a trip of almost 5 years (1831-36) from which Charles Darwin derived the data that would result in the theory of evolution 20 years later. One tends to think of theorizers as people who sit in laboratories or libraries and write, but it's clear that Darwin used what the exhibit called his "gap year" to exhaustively examine the botany, biology and geology of especially South America, but also the Pacific. He managed to understand the importance of the ecosystem as environment.

When one considers the tensions arising from the theory of evolution through natural selection, it's interesting to think that it stands on such a wealth of observation, maybe the most comprehensive in the history of biology. And to see family letters, drawings, and specimens, as well as travel diaries, gives a sense of the richness of this episode in Darwin's life (as well as a sense of richness and complexity for the viewer of the exhibit). It's especially interesting that he almost didn't go; his father, a doctor, was against the idea at first. Darwin himself also saw it as a large and perhaps fruitless investment of time.

Merry Wives of Windsor

Sorry no pictures, but we did see the Merry Wives of Windsor last night. This was my first night of garden Shakespeare this year, because of the nasty way the weather has of downpouring at right about the start of the shows (7:30 p.m.). One student, Amanda Rowe, met us in Kings College garden, which I had never been in before.

The college gardens are one of those hidden traditions that make Cambridge colleges different than those of the U.S. Normally, these gardens are closed to non-college members. When gardens are opened, they evidence the British genius with this art form--lush, manicured lawns, bordered by a profusion of colorful flowers and manicured woodland. As a further surprise, one of the Kings buildings that borders the garden was a rather daring modern block of rooms, with plenty of glass block and metal railings. One can't even see this building from any public thoroughfare. Actually, in a correction, one can see the back of this building from a public road, but the back is completely conventional.

Anyhow, the production was excellent. In many ways, it's Shakespeare as it should be seen--outside, with minimal props and an exuberant cast that is also doing other productions of other Shakespeare plays at the same time. Now Merry Wives is extremely topical--after the success of Henry IV parts 1 and 2, Elizabeth commanded another play with Falstaff in it. Here are the topical bits: it's set in Windsor, the site of one of Elizabeth's palaces, and it's placed in the present time (that is, Elizabethan present time). It's city comedy, in that it deals with social relationships and sexual mores of smart, "sophisticated," urban folks. Absolutely a puff piece, with Falstaff taking center stage, and at least two characters from the Henry IV sequence appearing (Mistress Quickly, Justice Shallow, and maybe the innkeeper, though I'm not sure about this last).

The playing was right where it should be: lots of burlesque, overacting, making a big point of jokes and puns, and so on. Again, the acting fitted the structure and content of the play.

A final word about Shakespeare as he "should" be seen--I just mean that in an "historically authentic" kind of way. We'll never be able to experience what an Elizabethan audience did in the way they did (we have too much subsequent media history, for one thing), but it's nice to see how it's done with many of the same strictures as the 1590's--few props, no real scenery, good costumes, a small acting company, gender bending. Of course, no spotlights in Shakespeare (we had those), and the gender-bending was all the other way, with women taking some of the men's roles, as opposed to the other way around.

The days dwindle down . . .

I almost forgot--I went to the Pepys Library in Magdalene College yesterday. I've been in Magdalene's first court before, and I think I found out where C.S. Lewis's rooms were there, but I've forgotten. Anyhow, it turns out that Pepys was a naval administrator during the Restoration, and his collection includes Hakluyt (both the Principal Navigations (2nd ed.) and the Divers Voyages), as well as Purchas's Pilgrimage and Pilgrimes. But, perhaps more importantly, the library has a manuscript book (illustrated) about the shipwright's art from the mid-16th century. I note that the National Maritime Museum claims not to have any real sense of ship plans from before the mid 1600's, so I wonder if the manuscript contains any important illustrations. If I could get my students into that library, however, we'd have a rich printed manuscript and printed book trove there. I also didn't check to see if Pepys had a de Bry of some type. I'd better look at the catalog.

Last night, the farewell dinner and reception, in the pouring rain. We ended up in the Old Combination Room for the reception before dinner, and in the Senior Combination Room for the dinner itself. The students have been great this year, and the faculty members the most involved in my experience. We just had a couple of issues that just came up last night: one student managed to lose her keys down a grate in the sidewalk, and confronted the porter in tears about it (thinking that she'd have to pay a lot of money to replace it). However, the grate she lost the keys down was actually college property, so the next morning we had one of the maintenance men get it out.

Tonight, The Merry Wives of Windsor, if the weather holds. I don't think I've ever seen a rainier summer here.

The Cotswolds and Ancient Books

Fighting a cold took up much of my weekend. We did, however, get out to the Cotswolds on Sunday, with Roots Tours out of Cambridge (consider this a true plug for the company). These 14-person van tours get one into out-of-the-way places of scenic beauty. The Cotswolds are, in fact, a true beauty spot, with the added advantage of being convenient to London and Oxford. Though the hills rise only about 3000 feet above sea level, the effect is still startling when one sees signs for 17 percent grades on paved roads. Even so, we saw many touring bicyclists on our route.

Trout streams, old mills (above), Upper and Lower Slaughter (which is actually derived from the term "Sloe Tree," not the term for butchery), the highest point in the Cottswolds, and the spa town of Cheltenham. It was a great day.
























Yesterday, we had the annual chance to get our hands on (literally) items from Saint Catharine's collection of rare books. My personal favorite is a 1625 copy of Samuel Purchas's Pilgrimes, a collection of travel narratives. But I also like the Ptolemaic atlas from 1511 and the Mercator atlas from 1623 (yes, I know he was dead by then, but I mean his maps). This is always a highlight of Cambridge, and a unique opportunity that Paul Hartle has arranged for us. There's no other library or museum in the U.S. or U.K. where we could do the same.

Liverpool

Today (Saturday) is a quiet day. After coming down with the sniffles that the students had come down with earlier in the program, Chris and I have elected to keep quiet until tomorrow, when we take a trip to the Cotswolds with Roots Travel. It's amazing to think that we have reached the last week of the program. It is even more amazing to think back on the "non-summer" that we have experienced here, as opposed to the record-breaking warmth and dryness of Phoenix and other parts of the West. But I look out of my window here at the cloudy sky and the saturated colors of the garden.

We had great luck, however, in one of the longest trips that the program has ever taken, to Liverpool, to the Museum of Slavery on Albert Dock. This visit has relevance both to Eddie Mallot's class on post-colonial Shakespeare, and to my Early Modern exploration class, which treats the beginnings of English involvement in the African slave trade of the Portuguese and Spanish with America.



This is our guide, Stephen, with Professor Mallot. We had arrived maybe a half hour later than we'd intended to, having driven through the pouring rain and having had one maintenance stop. This caused some lack of focus, as students rushed to get a bite for lunch during our tour. The museum is small enough that we needed to split our group into two smaller units, one led by Stephen and one led by another guide.

But there is, of course, an irony in Liverpool; besides being the largest slavery port in England by a number of measures, it is also the birthplace of the Beatles. The Beatles Experience Museum, which Chris and I had a chance to tour, was in its own way very culturally informative. For the most part, the exhibits were both interesting and accurate. The complex nature of the Beatles' early career, their beginning popularity in Germany, and their roots in the Mersey folk music, Skiffle, were well explained.

Their years of popularity corresponded with our grammar school and teen years, so some of the history prompted personal memories and cultural comparisons between British Beatlemania and American. Things got a bit poignant and political at the end, however, with commemorative exhibits of the last years of, especially, John Lennon and George Harrison. Among one of the interesting political things was the way both Paul's first wife and Heather Mills had been "disappeared" from his biography. Only Linda remains. By the way, who was the "5th Beatle"? I don't know, since they changed personnel during their time as the Quarrymen, were associated with Brian Epstein as a manager, and changed a drummer before Ringo. So--6 Beatles? 7? I don't know.

Down the dock from the museum and free if one went to the museum was the Fab 4-D Beatles Show, a "Smellovision" extravaganza, by which I mean, we got 3-D glasses, the chairs tilted, shook and dropped with the bus ride, and when the bus became a yellow submarine, water was sprayed on us. Actually, it was fun. In addition to the show, John Lennon's first wife and his son Julian had put up an alternative exhibit of his life to support their charitable endeavors. This exhibit idealized Lennon less than the Beatles Experience museum, and gave the experience of the time from an alternative point of view.

We finished the day with a walking tour to The Cavern, a rebuild of one of the early clubs in which the Beatles (and Quarrymen--go see the museum) played. There were lots of tourists young and old, there for the experience, and we got one of those serendipities--a cover duo playing Beatles tunes. Since it was a pub, some of the audience had lost their inhibitions (and their ear for pitch), and there was an enthusiastic sing-along. I do have video of the students singing along, but haven't included it here, for privacy reasons. But here is Chris at The Cavern (by the way, her favorite Beatle was Paul. I think that's supposed to mean something.).

Stratford, Dunwich, and Southwold

We did the annual trip to Stratford and Warwick on Thursday of last week, then Chris and I took the bikes to Southwold, on the Suffolk coast for Friday and Saturday nights, coming home Sunday evening.

Warwick is an under-rated town, I think. I spent some time in the churchyard of Saint Mary's College Church, which I think is the largest parish church in England, though I may be wrong. I'm especially interested in this church since it is the place where Robert Dudley, the first first Earl of Leicester (yes, that should be two "first"s because I've seen another first Earl of Leicester that wasn't him). One thing that began to strike me, as it struck me also in Dunwich and Southwold, is that these parish churches were centers of their communities in ways that modern churches aren't. Each church has an attached graveyard, with stones dating back two and three hundred years. (In another off-the-wall observation, outside gravestones seem to only remain legible for about 300 years without special cleaning. I've not seen one yet whose inscriptions I can read that dates from before the 18th century. That's not the case with inside markers.) Oh, another difference--people are actually buried in the church: under the floor, in the walls, in the crypt below. Not only is Robert Dudley buried there, but there's also mention of his secret ex-wife Douglass Sheffield, who became Hakluyt's patroness of Wetheringsett. Anyhow, one gets the sense that churches were actually about the end, as well as the beginning, of life. One gets less of a sense of that from modern churches, at least in America.

The Shakespeare production, The Winter's Tale, was well done, but I can't say that I really like the play itself. As well, some of the scenery and costuming (making the pastoral landscape out of fallen books, for example) had a kind of ambiguous symbolic significance. Before the production, we had dinner with Paul and Wendy Hartle, and Diane Facinelli. Ginny Grainger from the RSC also stopped by to see us, in the interval of a conference with some Ohio teachers. The play ended at about 11:15 p.m., then we walked back to the bus. We didn't get into Cambridge until 1 a.m.

This made getting up, packing and getting out to the train station by 8:45 kind of a chore. Because we hadn't bought tickets in advance, we had to wait until 9:45 anyway. It was raining as we left, and rained more fiercely all the way into Suffolk. After a final burst, it stopped at about the time we got off the train to ride to Southwold. We rode to Southwold with a British family group that has a house in the town. I'll primarily give some pictures here to show the town, but it's generally unspoiled and more upscale than Brighton. We were some of the few non-Britons in town, you know, the "odd Americans" that one of the service staff at a pub where we ate said the town gets. ("We get mostly British people here; just the odd American.") So I said that he was right, that we are pretty odd. He was embarrassed. Anyhow, I'll paste some pictures below, which will describe better than anything I can say. We visited Dunwich, which had been an important medieval town before it began crumbling into the sea. I think some early Romantic woman sonneteer wrote about this town and the poignancy of its crumbling, but I can't remember her name. I (though not Chris) went up in the lighthouse in the center of the town, and got a good panorama.





















































Besides the panorama from the lighthouse, there are two views of Southwold from the pier, one of which shows our B&B, the Avondale (good place to stay). The gravestone is right on the edge of the sand cliff in Dunwich, and that's me with my feet in the North Sea, and Chris at the ruined priory in Dunwich, now being used as a horse pasture and chicken shelter.

Oh, I forgot to mention that we had great weather during our stay in Southwold, and did a loop out to some nature preserves by Dunwich on Saturday. As we got about half-way back to Cambridge, it began to rain. We got home at about 9 p.m. after pedaling in rain to get there.

The Concept of Worldview in the Natural and Social Sciences

Here are a few titles of books about how the concept of worldview has been incorporated into both the physical sciences and the social sciences. It is worth noting that the physical sciences have paid less attention to the perspectival nature of knowledge than have the social sciences, philosophy and the other humanities.

The most important book, really for both the social and natural sciences: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Also, Michael Polyani, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy.

For the social sciences, Jurgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests.

Also, Paul A. Marshall, Sander Griffioen, and Richard J. Mouw, eds., Stained Glass: Worldviews and Social Science.

Freud wrote about worldview (weltanschaaung), as did Jung. In sociology, Karl Mannheim explored the topic; Berger and Luckmann have already been mentioned. Marx and Engels wrote on the interface between worldview and ideology.

In anthropology, Robert Redfield contrasts what he calls the "primitive" and "modern" worldviews.

Just one more quotation from Naugle, in regard to worldview and ideology as analyzed by Marxists: "Marx and Engels identified dialectical materialism as the true scientific Weltanschauung, and pointed out the role of ideology in class warfare and cultural combat. . . . Christian thinkers must recognize the total implications of the biblical vision under the all-encompassing sovereignty of God. Christianity is more than a church polity, theological system, or pietistic program, but is in fact a view of the entire cosmos with something significant to say about everything" (251).

Week 3 and the SPRI

Week three has begun auspiciously--no real computer problems, good media in the classroom, and a visit to the Scot Polar Research Institute library. This year, the institute museum is being completely refurbished, so we looked at our materials to the accompaniment of hammer drills. It was still great, and it is exciting to see some of the students get excited over the historical and archaeological materials. One student began to ask more general questions about the institute and evidenced a more general interest in things polar. Here we are with the materials, and here I am with one of Frobisher's returned samples.





This will also be my first real post about the weather; the weekend ended up rainy, as did most of the day Monday and Tuesday morning. This has now been the coldest summer we've spent here so far (I've worn few of my short-sleeve shirts), all the more ironic because until we got here, it was unseasonably hot and dry. Between rain and wind, there's been little temptation to set up badminton.

We did have an interesting lunch with the Bjorks and Robert Wardie (Classics professor at Saint Catharine's, and a fellow bicyclist), along with a number of Mary and Bob Bjork's students. We went to a sandwich shop off the market square at 12:30, and faced a 45 minute wait for an inside table. Sensing a letup in the rain, we decided on some umbrella-covered outside tables. Of course, as soon as we got our sandwiches, the downpour began again in earnest. Oh, well.

To Brandon and Thetford Forest

Today, Chris figured out a great trip to Brandon and Thetford Forest (above see her by a mausoleum built by one of the estate owners. He's not buried there any more). We started late in the morning, and only needed to take 20 minutes by train. The forest itself is bisected (kind of) by one B road (B1106), which separates the Brandon Country Park from the forest proper. I just tried to upload the PDF map, but it didn't work. For some reason I can't get a link to work either. Just try Thetford Forest bicycle map, if you're interested.

Anyhow, we took the green and blue trails around the perimeter of the High Forest Lodge section, and the Brandon Country Park section. It was all good double-track, not too muddy. Judging from the mountain bikers we saw (we were on hybrid bikes), there are some really muddy spots. Chris saw one red deer, and we read that this used to be heath grassland that they actually warrened rabbits on part of. In the early 1800's, the land was enclosed and planted with pines. The picture below lets you know what the forest was like. The ferns in the undergrowth were almost shoulder-height.


















This is the home of flint, since mesolithic times, and for a time was the gunflint capital of Britain (they made flints for flintlock pistols and rifles). Maybe that's why there are so many gun ranges around this part of the country (called the Brecks). This is me, on the right, two feet into the danger zone.

The other interesting thing--the weather. The weather was slated to be cloudy today, with intermittent rain, but nobody said we'd be sleeted on in the middle of July. But it was all good; we had our rain jackets. Then it was sunny. Then it rained a little more. As we crossed through a mountain bike racecourse, it rained hard again. When we got to tea at the Brandon Country Park pavilion at 3, it was sunny. I had my sunglasses out and back in maybe 20 times. A great ride. Brandon (the town) was quiet on a Sunday afternoon, so we waited for the train, and got back to Cambridge in 20 minutes. It took us almost as long to buy groceries for tonight and tomorrow and pedal back to the flat as it did to take the train back from Brandon.

As I began to write this entry, a sudden torrential downpour drenched Cambridge. Lucky it didn't happen 45 minutes earlier.

The End of Week 2: Our Trip to Glastonbury

The week ended interestingly, with a trip to Glastonbury, with a side trip to Stonehenge. At the top is a panorama of the ruined abbey of Glastonbury. Glastonbury itself is an interesting town, in that it has a syncretistic conglomeration of Christian, pagan, and New Age elements. The accretion of legends surrounding the sacred well (probably Druidic, appropriated by Christian pilgrims), the Arthurian legend (pre-Christian, Christianized in the Middle Ages), and the Abbey itself (disbanded with extreme prejudice under Henry VIII) actually validates further something I wrote about in my doctoral dissertation about the accretion of significances to holy sites in pilgrimage narratives.

As a rationalist, I tend to look somewhat disparagingly at uncritical outpourings of mystical feeling, of which there were a lot at Glastonbury. I've got a picture of myself at Arthur's grave, which I didn't mean to be entirely disrespectful to him, but the whole legendary, people-laying-on-Arthur's-grave business got to me a bit.



We climbed a hill above town after seeing the Chalice Well, where the Holy Grail is supposed to be interred (lots of explanation for why the water runs kind of red). The Tor has a tower at the top and supposedly housed a pre-Christian shrine. While we were up there some pretty sickly-looking hippie kid was lying on one of the (possible) sarcophagi up there. Lots of Sedona-like psychic energy vortices, apparently.



Compared to this, Stonehenge was relatively tame, with only one creative anachronism kind of guy keeping vigil. I didn't ask him why, but the National Trust intends to do some significant work at the site, routing the major through road and the access to the site in tunnels, so that the original topography and space can be recreated. I don't know why that was bad, and didn't ask him.

I guess people have gotten out of the idea of Stonehenge being an ancient observatory, as I learned as a kid. Instead it's now thought to be a sacred site of some type, maybe a seasonal temple designed to commemorate the winter and summer solstices and equinoxes. In a book I have about time as a concept (sorry, no title, but it's not here in Britain), the authors talk about the importance to agricultural pre-Christian religion of being in the right place at the right time for celestial happenings. It dovetails very well with the exhibit at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, which points out that until the advent of atomic clocks, the concept of time was very much tied to the movement of heavenly bodies and the cycle of the seasons. Something interesting, I think, to be written on the uses of time in human culture.



Also interesting was the carved glyph by the sacred spring at Glastonbury, which looks like some Native American pictographs I've seen.

The speculative explanations of Stonehenge put me in mind of Circlestone, in the Superstition Mountains. Though the scale is nothing like Stonehenge, the same agriculturally-based orientations obtain, and Circlestone probably had the same function.

"Worldview" Cognates and the Philosophers Who Go With Them

Hegel: not just worldview (weltanschauung), but “infinite world-intuition” (unendlichen weltanschauung) and “a moral outlook on the world" (moralische weltanschauung). Hegel seems to connect worldview largely with moral experience, somewhat with religious experience, and less with academic philosophy, which is more conscious, and structures worldviews and religion. He also points up the cultural specificity of worldview. I believe he also popularized “zeitgeist,” or "spirit of the age," which roughly aligns with worldview at the cultural and historical level. The issue here is that worldview is not only personal, it also encompasses cultural and (academic) disciplinary narratives and assertions.

Kierkegaard: Both worldview and its cognate for him, "lifeview," are basic to his existentialist philosophy. These are both about the individual knowing him- or herself, and thus knowing how to act. In fact, he says that the goal of existential philosophizing is to actualize a lifeview, giving meaning to existence.

Wilhelm Dilthey: his pioneering work on theories of the human sciences and hermeneutics cohere with his attempt to systematize a theory of worldview. He wanted as well to formulate “an objective epistemology for the human sciences.” He wanted to get beyond “historicism,” believing that worldview was the form in which the meaning of life was to be grasped. He subdivided worldviews into types: religious, poetic, and metaphysical. He also subdivides these types, gives primacy to the metaphysical version, but realizes the problem of naturalism—the gulf between the subjective and objective. Dilthey attempts an “objective idealism” that attempts to bridge this gap (and thus get behind worldviews to some agreed-upon foundation for meaning). It is useful to quote Naugle (Worldview, 97) here: “Dilthey’s simple recognition of the conflict of philosophic systems and the increasing awareness of the historical condition of humanity led to the skeptical conclusion that there is no absolute, scientific, metaphysical construct which defines the nature of reality with finality. In other words, metaphysics does not have the answers. What are available, however, are worldviews—worldviews which are rooted in the contingencies of human and historical experience and which seek to elucidate the riddle of life.”

Nietzsche: Again, to quote Naugle (106). “For Nietzsche, God is dead, only nature exists, and history reigns. On this basis, he conceived of worldviews as reified cultural constructs and idiosyncratic perspectives on life, artificial to be sure, but necessary for human survival in an ultimately chaotic, unnavigable world.”

Edmund Husserl: he rejected the concept of worldview as foundational, and attempted to establish a rigorous, “scientific,” basis for philosophy. He posited an alternative concept, "lebenswelt" (lifeworld), which is difficult to decipher. It appears to be a pre-rational picture, way of living, or intuition that exists in the mind a priori. How this escapes the historicized relativism of worldview is unclear, except that Husserl believed in a “transcendental substrate” that is accessible universally. (I guess. I’m just throwing something out here.)

Karl Jaspers: attempts a “psychology of worldviews” (the title of his book).

Martin Heidegger: in an attempt at existentialist phenomenology, Heidegger says that “a philosophical worldview is not just the casual byproduct of the discipline of philosophy, but is its very goal and nature. ‘It seems to be without question,’ Heidegger observes, ‘that philosophy has as its goal the formation of a world-view.’” (Naugle, 137) Heidegger also introduced the concept of the “world-picture.” This differs from world-view for him in that it is more of a structural image than a complex of functions. I would explain world-picture as how the world would look to a person who held particular world-view understandings. (Naugle’s questions for Christian philosophers on page 147 bear investigation. The issue here is the subject/object or fact/value distinction that bedevils modernism. By accepting a certain definition of the concept of worldview, Naugle asks, does philosophy then commit itself to accepting the objective/subjective distinction of modernism? What would the implications of that acceptance be?)

See the earlier entry on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Davidson for some detailed discussion on his and Davidson’s concepts.

The post-modernists: one doesn’t know what to say. Deconstruction is a profoundly skeptical project, and in many ways appears to be self-contradictory. It isn’t really tenable as a way to approach either life or scholarship, as witness Derrida himself. Toward the end of his life, he became embroiled in a dispute over the interpretation of his writing. This theorist, who had gleefully deconstructed various other authors, including the living author John Searle (in a series of dialectical articles in Glyph in the 1970's or early 1980’s), was affronted when others attempted to interpret deconstruction in a way he felt was not proper. If others' words are open to free play, as Derrida asserted (so far as he asserted anything) in his writing, then Derrida himself is in the free play language game, and can’t complain about the rules he helped codify.

Michel Foucault is another matter. There are continuing disputes over his scholarly method, and possible falsification of data that he used to construct his theories. However, if God is dead and all there is, is power, then his theories of knowledge formation have real power. But notice the post-modern assumption here, that there really is no reality outside the text. Just because humans cannot achieve epistemological certainty about the world doesn’t mean that the world really isn’t out there.

Peter Berger and Donald Luckmann have a more trenchant critique of worldview, one that’s echoed by gender critics, especially feminist scholars. Berger and Luckmann claim (as I’ve said earlier) that worldview notions are “reified” (treated as objectively existing entities outside of the human inventor) by individuals and societies, and become coercive meta-texts, that purport to explain reality. This is an important critique because of Western culture's history of using ideas and political structures to oppress others. However, I believe that most of these theorists miss the implication of this view: whenever any ideology constructs a coherent narrative and set of assertions that functions as a world view, it coerces (that is, it labels certain acts/thoughts/expressions as “good” or “bad”, “right” or “wrong”). When a meta-narrative/ideology/worldview gets powerful enough to impose social sanctions on discourse, then doesn’t it too become a coercive meta-text? [witness “political correctness."]

Next: a list of thinkers in various academic disciplines who treat the concept of worldview for that discipline.

In the Bowels of Week 2

This is probably not the best time to write about my experiences of the last few days. I've had more than my share of technical difficulties today; I'd meant to be remotely present at a committee meeting, and downloaded Skype for that reason, but network connectivity problems (I think) kept blowing me offline. It's a cautionary tale for those who blithely believe that working remotely is always easy. It didn't help that I was having classroom technical difficulties of the same type as well. Teaching with technology is wonderful when it works, but when you can't get connected . . . no maps, no Google Earth . . .

But enough of that. We also did without computers this week on purpose, and the weather cooperated. The two pictures at the top are of our hands-on navigation exercise. I'm hoping it gave students a better sense of what it might have been like for Early Modern seaborne explorers, who were probably lost a good deal of the time. The risks they ran are almost inconceivable to modern people, yet their lives on land were probably not that much safer, what with risks from childhood diseases, infection, plagues, violence, war, and so on. London's population grew exponentially during this period, even though the city's birthrate was far outpaced by its death rate. Lots of immigrants from the country.




Chris also did the program's annual hike to Grantchester, which I had to miss because of my computer work. These are just a few of the students, sipping there. The hikers also managed to find a local youth hangout near the river, complete with informational sign and exhibitionist revelers. No pictures of that, apparently.

To Audley End and Saffron Walden

Today began our mini-adventures this year. Last year, we'd intended to bicycle out to a small medieval market town near Cambridge, Saffron Walden. Since we intend to rent bicycles tomorrow, Chris planned a day trip to the town today by train instead. Just outside the town is a stately home, owned now by the National Trust, Audley End (above). The main wing of the house dates from 1603, with the two side wings later. The grounds were designed by Capability Brown, and include a millrace, what looks like an electricity-generating dam, and faux antiquities. Here are Chris and Diane (who came with us) in front of the Temple of Concord, an important faux viewpoint from the house.



We had walked a mile and a half from the train station to Audley End, about a mile on the grounds and in the house, and then a mile or so into the town, where we saw the market square, the ruins of the keep of a castle, the historical museum, and several historic buildings dating from the Elizabethan period or before.

Audley End itself is probably one of the more beautiful great houses I've seen; what sets it apart are two things: first, cases of taxidermy and other geographical collections (shells, rocks and so on), by a Victorian collector, and second, the excellent windows that generally flood the huge house and its large rooms with light. The 11,000 volume library wasn't bad either. Here are Chris and Diane in the Saffron Walden market square.



After Audley End, we decided to get tea (but really dessert). After touring the town, we stopped in a pub for dinner. The taxi company, very busy, picked us up at 8:15 and we arrived on the platform just in time for the train back to Cambridge. We did walk the mile and a half from the train station back to Chad's, however.

The Globe on 9 July

Interesting trip to the National Maritime Museum and the Globe Theater on Thursday--first, we were treated to an hour-and-a-half of traffic stoppage on the M11, making us very late to the NMM. However, Richard Dunn and Gillian Hutchinson took time out of their busy schedules (and, I suspect, their lunch hours) to present their lectures anyway. Though we were in a low-security part of the museum, and didn't see the instruments and maps that we normally see, the presentations were excellent and the students were interested.

We'd intended to drop the students at the Embankment and let them make their various ways through London to the hostels that some of them planned to stay in over the weekend. However, with the time crunch, we dropped them at the South Bank and essentially guarded their luggage at the Globe until curtain time. Given the size of some of the student bags, it was probably technically not allowed for them to take the bags into the theater (but there was no cloakroom either). But they weren't stopped or forced to leave.

The performance was A Midsummer Night's Dream, a parallel one to last year, but much different. Last year's performance tried for more emotional tension and had more special effects. This one used few special effects and a very small cast, doubling and even tripling the parts. Some of the doublings were standard: Theseus/Hippolyta/Oberon/Titania, Philostrate/Puck; others less so (doubling the mechanicals and the lovers).

The performance was set in a sexy version of the 1920's, which fit at some level, given the general modernist and yet Freudian mood of the period. Puck, played by a woman, was especially--um, how do I say this?--seductive. She did, however, use the kewpie-doll flapper voice for both her rude mechanical character (Snout, the lion), and Puck.

I figure I'll just post a couple of pictures of us in the audience, since we weren't supposed to take pics of the performance . . .

Continuing Thoughts on Worldview

Continuing thoughts on worldview: During the nineteenth century, the concept of worldview was used, under different nomenclature, by both idealists--phenomenologists, who believed that some kind of objective look at the world was possible--and existentialists, who believed that human action created meaning in the world. The phenomenologists-—Dilthey in the nineteenth century, Husserl and Heidigger in the nineteenth and early twentieth century—-wanted to see worldview as subordinate to a “scientific” philosophy, which could put forth an objective sense of what the world was “really” like, apart from particular perspectives on it. Such an approach continues to be attempted, for example by the modern textbook writer Ninian Smart in Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs. The existentialists of the nineteenth century who are more direct precursors of twentieth century post-modernism-—Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche-—both stressed the irreducibility of worldview as a category of thought and action, with Kierkegaard calling it a “lifeview” more often than a “worldview.”

Positivist attempts to construct an adequate epistemology failed in the early twentieth century. David Hume’s critique of causality, which comes down to the challenge to “show me what a cause looks like,” has never really been refuted. All one can assert from an empiricist point of view is that events follow one another with more or less regularity. This makes inductive reasoning merely probable instead of indubitable. Phenomenological attempts to construct an objective “scientific” philosophy failed in much the same way.

The stage was set for Ludwig Wittgenstein, who essentially discarded phenomenological attempts to fix the referent of language somewhere “objective.” In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein attempted a rigorous account of reference, in the vein of what Bertrand Russell was attempting for mathematical reference in the Principia Mathematica. In the Philosophical Investigations, however, Wittgenstein abandoned thinking about reference, and instead began considering language as human action. Languages are structured as games, language-games, in fact (Wittgenstein’s nomenclature), whose rules are determined by “forms of life.” For Wittgenstein, forms of life create “world pictures,” his analogue to worldviews. Since Wittgenstein grounds everything in the human action of language (“meaning is use”), forms of life and world pictures are strongly language-dependent. That has led to questions about whether worldviews are completely dependent on the language in which they occur. But languages are inter-translatable, and people do modify their worldviews without necessarily changing their languages.

Let me just throw one more shrimp on the barbie (wait, no, that's Australian) . . .
I mean, I'm always impressed by the tradition of the Cambridge colleges, and Saint Catharine's (founded 1473) has its share. More of that later, but I did want to post a picture of the globe owned by the college that had been given to them by Sir Isaac Newton (housed in one of the common rooms--the globe, not Newton). This is just one of the close-ups to history that we enjoy here.

The Opening Dinner

I haven't been able to catch a few minutes on the blog for a few days because I'm still waiting for a wired connection in my flat. Today is the last class day for the week; tomorrow is my excursion to the National Maritime Museum.

We've had a relatively smooth opening, with just a few glitches. The major ones have been lost luggage, and some issues with the small kitchenettes at the main college site. Because we have some students there who didn't want meal plans and had been switched from Chad's, there's some inconvenience with the closed-off rooms. But our common room is taking up the slack.

For now, just some pictures of our opening banquet. Everyone dressed up, and the food was very good. The weather also cooperated, for a nice reception in the main quadrangle.

Nathan's Visit

In a special treat for Chris and me, our son Nathan, who was in England visiting Oxford University (yes, the "other" one!), spent yesterday with us before his flight from Heathrow this morning. It was great to see him, and great to realize that he and his wife Tana are now situated for housing in Oxford (she has been accepted into the Oxford MBA program). In a further "interesting" connection, he and Peter, our student from the 1997 version of the program, had a chance for a little 12-year reunion. Both were younger students on the program, just old enough to be allowed into student housing at St. Chads 12 years ago.

Here are Chris and Nate in our flat. I also thought I'd put in a picture of my desk in Flat 7 of Chad's Old House. Though I haven't caught that many town Cambridge pictures yet, the view into Chad's garden from my office window is always inspiring (and inspiriting, as I just typoed).

The Fifth of July

It's interesting to be in Britain on the Fourth of July for the second year in a row. We have actually heard fireworks both times, so I guess the British don't mind their colonial cousins and their independence as much as they used to. Also, we heard music for most of the night, muted in our bedroom, and hopefully also in the bedrooms of others. I don't think it was coming from Saint Chads.

Students continue to trickle in, while those of us who came in on Friday get oriented. Chris did her practical walking tour of Cambridge yesterday for about 10 students. Since I forgot my camera, I have no photo record of the tour, which I realize I haven't recorded since we started doing the program.

Besides our students from ASU, we have at least two students from NAU, and one student from Whitworth University (that I know of so far). Besides that, we have a graduated returning student from ASU and Boston University who has elected to go on the program once again. I would say "ironically," but instead I believe "interestingly," this student last attended the program in 1997, when both Diane Facinelli and I were teaching, as well as Paul Hartle. So he felt as though little had changed (except my specific subject matter).

England Arrival

Once again, from Cambridge--

Chris and I arrived yesterday afternoon (Cambridge time) in Cambridge, after a flight that was alternately easier and harder than our previous trips. The flight itself was easier because the nonstop BA flight from Phoenix is really the way to go--leave in the evening and arrive in Heathrow early the following afternoon. With coffee and Advil, it can all be easy . . .

Until one gets to the ground to face 1) a student's lost luggage and subsequent complications in the terminal (we got off half an hour late), 2) unseasonably warm British weather, which caused a really uncomfortable time on the coach, and 3) the traffic out of London.

But we got in (maybe an hour and a half after schedule) to Cambridge, to find it as quaint and welcoming as before. Dr. Hartle was on hand with both computer information and preparations for our flat (basically ferrying the kitchen utensils that he had stored for a year to our flat), the porters were great and efficient, and the coach driver even was able to drive us straight up to St. Catharine's.

It looks like a good group of students this year, and our dinner at the Granta pub was less crowded than other years near the market square. Today, Nathan was in town, en route from Oxford, and Chris gave the students a tour of town, focusing on the practical information they would need about food shopping and directions.

We heard Evensong at King's College chapel, always a good way to begin the term. Though I've taken a couple of pictures, I haven't uploaded them yet.

A History of Weltanschauung

A bit on the history of the term weltanschauung: The English term “worldview” is a calque (a direct translation of a term in another language, with the translation used in the same way) of the German word. Though the elements of the German term come from Old German, the term was almost certainly coined in its philosophical sense by Immanuel Kant in his 1790 work Critique of Judgment.

Naugle points out two things: first, the term was only used once by Kant. He refers to it (in translation) in the quoted excerpt from the Critique, as “our intuition of the world,” “the substrate underlying what is mere appearance.”

Second, Wilhelm G. F. Hegel, one of Kant's immediate successors in the philosophy of Idealism, was the first to attempt a thoroughgoing definition of the concept, connecting it to his concept of the Zeitgeist of historical periods.

Now I see Kant's primary contribution to the history of philosophy as follows: he pointed out that we are imprisoned in our heads; we only know phenomena (appearances) rather than the numinous world (the world as it is). Our senses mediate our perceptions, making the contents of our minds radically perspectival. Kant attempted to mediate this personal relativism of perception by positing structures of mind/categories of thought that he thought were universal, and which he called synthetic a prioris.

Hegel pushed this insight farther, and called into question the unified subject. He pointed out that we only know ourselves in relation to our impressions of something outside ourselves. What are we, he asks, outside of our perceptions of something other than we are? Thus, our perception of ourselves is actually a process--the space between the perceiving self and the perceived other.

I figure for this blog, I'll chronicle my activities, and start with some informal musings on the concept of worldview, which I'm creating a faculty training for at my university. It's clear to me that worldview ends up having a particular power in a postmodern context. It's also clear to me that this solves the problem of the "Enlightenment Project," which attempts to construct an indubitable ground of certainty for human knowledge. The message of postmodern epistemology is that it can't be done, and I agree.

But the failure of the Enlightenment Project has consequences for faith-based worldviews like the Christian one, I think. Next, a little history of the term and concept, digesting and restating some material from David Naugle's Worldview: History of a Concept.