- Millennium:
On the Brink of a New Age?
Our program aims at promoting inquiry into the shape of the world in the twenty-first century. We will be imparting information, but the information matters less for its own sake than for the way it promotes further inquiry. We don’t know - we don’t literally have ‘information’ about - what’s happening in the future.
We’ll be learning how to ask good questions and how to seek tentative answers to them, answers which are properly called hypotheses, about the shape the world is taking. Hypotheses are the best opinions we can arrive at by examining what evidence is available, and what opinions seem best to fit the evidence. They’re never simply true or false; rather, they’re the best-informed understandings we can reach in the light of our reason and commitments. We need well-examined hypotheses to focus our attention, our inquiry, and our actions. Hypotheses are not simply opinions - that is, not simply any idea or belief we may hold about a subject. Rather, they are considered, supported, and examined ideas. Thus in the context of our inquiry, it won’t do to say everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, until that opinion has been examined with some care. This examination is what will go on in our program meetings, seminars, and writings.
How can we inquire into the shape of the world in the next century,
the next millennium?
- First, we need some background on the shape of
the world we’ve come to inhabit. We begin with inquiry into some of the
given concepts, the "modern certainties," of the twentieth century: the
nation-state, democracy, capitalism, globalism. And we need to know what
it feels like to live in this modern world. To capture this, we’ll
read some novels and view some films that give us images and language of
our transitional modern/postmodern world.
Second, we need to check out, within some boundaries, the scope and depth of the changes that introduce the twenty-first century. We’ll look at one region, one problem-area, which has been a focal-point of change and conflict in the last decade. We begin with the end of the Cold War, dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the precipitous descent of parts of Eastern Europe into violent conflict. If we can wrap our minds around this one specific problem-area and its conflicts, we can see both some promises and some dangers of the opening century.
Third, we need a sense of our own role and capacities
as actors in a world we did not create, but in which we can act with
appropriate consciousness and passion. The issue here is agency, membership,
citizenship, and perhaps resistance: what are the potential roles - active
and passive - of members of past-present-future political cultures?
- Reorganization of knowledge: We are experiencing an "information revolution," a paradigm shift in communication, media, and education. What are our new "information age" patterns of thought, inquiry, knowing, learning, indoctrination?
- Reconceptualization of the person: In the mid-twentieth century, psychologists and laymen knew what it meant for an "individual" to have an "identity." Now, however, our sense of personhood is less clear. What is a "person" - a consumer, a "cyborg," an autonomous agent?
- Restructuring of place and membership: Once upon a time, our myths tell us, a person lived a lifetime in a context of cultural continuity of family, gender role, occupation, religion, community, citizenship. What new patterns of membership and migration are emerging in family, the workplace, the city? What places do people inhabit, how long, and with what commitment?
- Change in our relationship with nature: The allegedly inexhaustible bounty of nature has become problematic, as northern nations consume more and more, and southern nations exploit more and more resources in search of a higher standard of living. What relationships are emerging, and what relationships are sustainable, between humans and what they call "nature"?
You’ll be asked to specialize in one issue, and to read general books about all issues, so that knowledge and inquiry are shared through a program-wide dialogue.