Week 14--Finale!

Vice Presidential Debate between Walt Whitman and Charles Darwin

Moderator:  Hello and welcome back to the  Presidential debate between the Republican candidate, Charles Darwin and the Democratic candidate, Walt Whitman.  Our next topic is death and its societal implications.  As little as 100 years ago, death was simply when you stopped breathing.  Things have changed a lot since then and some very public cases, including Terry Schiavo, have raised the issue of what death is and how we should handle it.  Charles, you’re up first! How would you define death in the modern age?

Darwin: Well, Joanna, in order to understand death, we need to be able to define life.  And as anybody knows, who has read my book, the point of life is to pass on your genes to viable offspring.  If you are no longer able to pass on your genes then you are evolutionary dead whether or not you are still walking around.  

Moderator: How about you Walt?

Whitman: Well, Charles, I would have to disagree.  I would like to ask you a question-What is life?  To me, life is the experiences we have and the people we know.  It is so wonderful to look around us and see the flowers blooming and the sun shining and experience the world.  It does not matter if you have no kids, ten kids or octoplets.  You just need to sit down and have your cup of coffee and mull over life, what it’s all about and that is TRULY being alive.  And well Charles, you are getting on in the years.  Would you not say  that you get joy out of living every day of your life fully because us on Long Island-we live every day to the fullest! Do you suspect death?  If I were to suspect death I should diew now.  Do you think I could walk pleasantly and well-suited toward anniihilation?  Pleasantly and well-suited I walk. 

Charles: But Walt, it looks to me like you contradict yourself.

Walt: Very well then, I contradict myself.

Charles:  Well Walt, you do raise an interesting point though about the elderly contributions to evolutionary fitness.  While I don’t think running around chasing butterflies has any effect at all on evolutionary fitness, the elderly do have important contributions.  They contribute by passing down their life experiences and cultural knowledge onto their grandchildren.  Grandparents help to produce more worldly and societal well adjusted persons who are better able to succeed in the modern world and experience heightened reproductive success.  

Moderator: Interesting thoughts.  Walt, you have one more chance to speak if you like.  

Walt: Heightened reproductive success? That’s not what I want them saying about me at my funeral!.  To judge life by only what you leave behind when you’re gone does great disservice to the wonder of the world around us. It’s not all about you Charles-It’s about how you interact with the world around you.  

Moderator: Thank you both for your responses.  It’s time to move along and our next topic is gender.  The boundaries between genders are getting more and more blurred and there has been a lot of work done in terms of seeing gender along a spectrum. It has become more accepted for women to take on roles traditionally associated with masculinity and for men to take on roles traditionally associated with femininity.  How do you feel about this decline in the traditional boundaries between the genders?  
   
Walt:  We need to love each other and we need to love ourselves and if your self is not loved and if you can’t love your physical self, then I think you should do what you need to do to be happy.  I need not define myself- I contain multitudes and who is to say which of these components of me deserves the physical reflection of my emotional self?  Do you love yourself, Charles?  

Charles:  Frankly, Walt I’d love to know what you’ve been smoking.   Gender isn’t a societal  imposition.  It is a biological necessity for the exchange of hereditary factors.  This exchange renews the variability that is crucial to our species' continued health and success.  I have no problem with what people choose to identify themselves as, as long as it does not interfere with their ability to effectively reproduce and contribute to the next generation.  

Walt:  Well, you have a point there Charles.  In the age of technology that we live in, one would not need to worry about this interference that you speak of.  We have blurred these boundaries with the use of technology in the creation of life in the test tube.   

Charles Darwin:  Test Tube??…..

Walt: Shut it Charles! As I was saying, we have blurred these boundaries and it is time that we continue to move forward, accept each other and rejoice in our freedom to choose among the multitudes present within us.  Oh gosh, isn’t life so beautiful! That’s why I plan to start a new Vice Presidential Initiative-it will be called FLF-The Free Love Foundation.  

Charles:  Well doesn't that just want to make me hug a tree. I do not know how to respond to this.  I am appalled!  If you choose to remove yourself from the gene pool, that is your own prerogative and I will not stand in your way.  But before we were a society, we were a species and we cannot neglect that.  

Moderator:  Thank you for your interesting contributions.  We have to move on to our next topic.  Technology might be the underlying factor contributing to the  blurring of these boundaries that we have been discussing.  One of the current arguments is that technology is very isolating and has resulted in a disconnect between people.  Where do you see technology going and where is it taking society as a whole? Charles, you’re up!  

Charles:  I see technology as a form of evolution.  The most fit individuals in modern society are those that are best able to exploit technology for their own means. It is now just another factor along with physical strength and mental acuity that determines our evolutionary fitness.  

Walt:  Why bother with technology? We as human beings are spirit and soul. We do not need technology to reaffirm our position in the world or to better our progression through life.I'd say without it, we are better able to experience those things around us.  These things they call computers are not a real replacement for human interaction.  For instance, I recently learned that a young pretty friend of mine on Myspace was a 60 year old man.  Not that one of my multitudes wasn’t okay with that!, but nevertheless, it was unsettling and underlined the disconnect between technology and reality. The way we are interacting with our human beings is artificial and in my opinion, subtracts from the way in which we come to interact and understand each other.  It removes the human element and it is the human element which makes life worth living.       

Darwin: Well Walt,  you are definitely freaking me out a little bit.  I don’t know what you guys are thinking over there across the pond.  I’ve been on some boats for a very long time and you’re still scaring me.  Shockingly though, I do agree with some of what Walt is saying.  Technology has evolved so quickly and become such a pervasive factor in our lives that we really haven’t had the time to see how this will play out in the long run.  As a society, we are so thoroughly invested in technology that any future human evolution will be inseparable from the evolution of technologies.  Do you disagree?  

Walt:I do agree with you Charles and although I think that technology can be detrimental to the future of society as a whole, I do see the positive aspects of it as well.  For example, technology allows us to be our true selves and allows us to represent any of the multitudes within us.  Even though it can be isolating, it can allow you to connect with others all over the world.  This allows you to get a glimpse into the multitudes of others as well as those within yourself.  The internet allows us to explore these inner selves.

Moderator:  And on that note, a quick word from our sponsors.     

    I just wanted to say that I very much enjoyed our class this semester; I never would have otherwise thought about the deeper meaning of evolution (in the general sense) and its implications, so it was very to discuss it and consider it beyond the biological and cultural contexts. The choice of readings was very broad in scope, and I am grateful that we were able to choose any topic of interest for our webpapers or to lead some of our class discussions. Coming to class not knowing what might happen or what might be said or where we might go would be considered risky in many other contexts, but for this course I think it worked perfectly. Our discussions and webpapers derived from pure personal/class interests, and what is a better way to delve into something than to start with an interest, or at least to have such a broad set of thoughts to choose from or reflect on?

     Many of my reflections and thoughts are not really my own, I just put them together based on what others in the class had said or referred to. In this way, as I wrote and recounted my own stories on and about the various forms/implications of evolution, I knew that I couldn't have gotten there without evolving in thought myself. Thanks to all for a very rich and rare conversation; most people would not think about evolution in this way and may never do so, and that's not necessarily a problem, but it's another reason for us to recognize that no matter what each of us may have liked or disliked about this course, having the opportunity to take it has really been a privilege.

Well I can't really post the content of my group presentation since I was a dancing tree with no lines so instead I will comment.  I really enjoyed watching everyone's presentations and how each one differed from the others.  Especially in each group that used the four different authors, it was interesting to see how they made fun of them or if they only decided to make fun of only one.  The puppet show was a great ending to the presentations especially because it used Professor Grobstein who did well playing Darwin.  After all the presentations I am ready to end my thought process after finals are done, maybe stall the evolution of myself or my thoughts to just rest.  I guess I can only think of getting home and so I am just trying to get as much done as possible.  But I will remain questioning information and myself and now can't wait to write my paper.  Great job everyone with presentations and showing the character of all the authors and happy continuing to evolve.

As said in the script, this class changed my point of view on the world and my way of analyzing things.  I don’t look for a single answer anymore but for a multitude of them and whenever I feel bad, I try to look at the world in a different way in order to feel better!  I believe this class was great even though it was hard to get into it at the beginning of the semester.  However, now I can look back at everything that I have learned and I am very grateful I took this course because it really affected me in a good way!  This class helped me become more mature in my ways of thinking and I feel like it also brought more questions to my mind that I will answer eventually in future classes.

Lillie: The aim of a liberal education…

Katie: is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances,

Erin: to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

L: Is our story not a shared one? You can look at us all as readers. Scientists are trying to interpret and form conclusions about the world, just as readers of poetry are trying to do the same with words on a page.

K: both the author and the critic are similar to scientists. They base new writing/ experimentation upon an older tradition, whether the end result is confirming it or rebelling against it.

L: “When on board H.M.S. ‘Beagle,’ as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past in habitants of that continent.”-Darwin

E: As this class continues I find that the gap between science and literature is rapidly closing. Science is a story, literature is a tool for looking at the world; I can't lie when I say that I find all of this to be quite disconcerting.

L: Poetry is never fiction: there's always an underling truth. The poet writes from observation as does a scientist. No matter how this observation is conveyed, through verse or scientific narrative.

K: Dennet seems to suggest that we create the meaning of our acts by acting.

L: To me it is obvious that Dennett is essentially a philosopher… Could the story of evolution, in fact, rid life of its meaning? “I need a reason to live” even if their were no greater meaning, no skyhook explanation for why we are here… should we not find a crane solution?

K: I think that a similarity between science and religion is that they both require this dynamic-- to learn something, to question further, to learn something new.

E: Neither can be refuted, who can say that the world was randomly created or not?

L: poetry can easily be as abstract or non-representational as some art.

K: If art is something new, if its purpose is simply to be something new for you to experience, what good is writing about it? What good is discussing it?

L: have I come up with an answer?

E: What's the use of the subconscious? At the very least it creates beautiful works that enrich our lives and put into words or pictures the very stuff of thoughts.

K: ...writing, unlike painting, must be read in a chronological order. We read a word, then the next, then the next. We can only really "see" one word at a time. I think this is another reason that writing is less abstract than other forms of art.

E:I do see myself as a piano key, constantly being played upon by forces outside my control. The question is, if we still get to enjoy the wonder of this world, if we are still capable of creating beautiful things, does it matter?

L: We may be taking linear tracks, but we have other requirements that help us to make our own personal connections between the courses. This is the way we evolve from our classes.

L: What if the writer were the architect, the book the apartment building, and the reader the apartment dweller?

K: (about Lillie's analogy)This fits both with my experience as a writer of constructing something-- something almost tangible-- and my experience as a reader of being in a new place.

L: an image comes to mind of a wizened man on the deck of a boat suddenly having a moment of epiphany as the wind blows his hair.

E. Imagination, rather than mere intelligence, is the truly human quality" (12). Literature comes up with creative guesses (some absurd but some accurate) while science responds with even stranger theories.

K: Have you worked so hard to be original? Have you pushed away awareness of your own precursors?

E: Leaves of Grass is Walt Whitman, an extremely persuasive Whitman who (in his presentation of himself) makes sure to whisper sweet nothings in our ear in the hope that we will hear him and join in.

K: What you create is new... the combination is new and no one else could have made it and no other time could have made it

And what you create is old... its components are old and they are gathered in you from your parents and from all experience

L: Hustvedt's merging isn't quite the same… the search for answers and meaning as well as the attention to the unconscience are important themes.

E: We have the divergence of languages, the evolution of a language, and the merging of languages

L: Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

-wallace Stevens

E: Either way, this enlightenment is only accomplished by depriving yourself of sights sounds, of input of any kind.

K:”It was snowing… it struck me as a moment when the boundary between inside and outside loosens, and there is no loneliness because there is no one to be lonely.

L: In order to understand the nothing we have to be ready to make our ‘selves’ nothing too.

K: A recent list was published of “new classics”

E: The Road , Cormac McCarthy

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J.K. Rowling

Beloved, Toni Morrison

The Liars' Club, Mary Karr

American Pastoral, Philip Roth

L: Mystic River, Dennis Lehane

Maus, Art Spiegelman

Selected Stories, Alice Munro

Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami

K:Into Thin Air, Jon Krakauer

Blindness, José Saramago

Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

Black Water, Joyce Carol Oates

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers

E:The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez

Rabbit at Rest, John Updike

On Beauty, Zadie Smith

Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding

E: There is such a deification of science in this country that I never would have considered myself to be a scientist before attending this class but now, well, I think I'm beginning to discover that science is simply what you observe and what you get from those observations.

L: Long long ago God descended to earth and made a man and a woman out of clay.

K: The question Darwin sidesteps is whether God first created one form of life, or several, and has very little to do with current arguments over how life could have spontaneously evolved on Earth

L: And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

K; Do we contradict ourselves?

Very well then... we contradict ourselves.

E: Science and religion are both far more similar then some would believe. Two men observe a garden, they both see that it is beautiful, full of flowers, fruit and tangled weeds. Both men declare that such marvels have been created over time by an incredibly powerful, unthinkably immense force. One names this force God and the other evolution.

K: The shift in meaning of the word “skyhook” was not a blind, random process. We as a class selected with a purpose. We selected a meaning or meanings that interested us and that furthered our ongoing discussion.

E: there are always alternative stories to everything. No concept is fixed, no universal truth can point us towards the most accurate story, we must observe the world around us and make the best story we can.

L: Isn’t that something that Evolution may ask us to do? Evolution may take away our meaning or our own singular importance in the world in exchange for an understanding of the world itself.

E: Remember, we are the storytelling species, no other form of life on this planet writes dissertations or sees bulls and heroes in the stars. As long as we continue to gaze in wonder on the beauty of this universe we will write stories. And, as long as we continue to be a dynamic, evolving species, our stories will evolve with us.

K: This lack of a resolution, a definite ending, could also be related to biological evolution in that it is a process without a definite endpoint