Innocents Abroad: Two Novels by Graham Greene

Graham Greene is known for his novels about expatriates with hazy moral values faced with situations that require them to make a stand.  Two Greene novels, "The Comedians" set in Haiti under Duvalier, and "The Quiet American" set in Vietnam in the period between the French and American wars allow us to contrast the different settings and characters and the choices they ultimately make.  They also illuminate Greene's views about the relationship between poor countries and the developed world and his ambivalent feelings about Americans in the world.  

We will read each novel and follow it with a screening of the related Hollywood film(s).   The films are "The Comedians" (1967) and the two versions of The Quiet American (1958 and 2002). The two Quiet American versions are far, far apart, showing the evolution of Hollywood's attitudes about America and her place in the world.

In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States

In 2012 the cities of Los Angeles, Quebec and Mexico City joined forces to create a stunning retrospective about "The Women of Surrealism".  This show would travel to all three cities over the course of 2 years.  The curators of this travelling show knew that these women have been overlooked, undervalued and even disdained by the established "Art World."  So they set out to rectify this glaring oversight by creating one of the most comprehensive and educational exhibits focussing solely on the women of Surrealism. Our course in deeply indebted to the foresight of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and the Musee National des Beaux-Arts in Quebec.

My goal for this SDG is to illuminate the passion, vision and intensity of these women who created art that explored their own dreams, their own personal fears and their own prophecies.  Surrealism for these women was their chosen path to explore self-knowledge and identity.  Some of these artists are well-known in America, while some are cultural icons in their country of birth.  We will travel through North America and Europe; meeting such artists as Remedios Varo, Dorothea Tanning, Lee Miller,Toyen and Leonora Carrington.  Our studies will cover the painters, photographers, and mixed-media artists who showed us their visions "In Wonderland".

The Ongoing Problem with Rights in the United States

Professor of Law Jamal Greene thinks we are living through an explosion of claims of rights, which he labels "rightsism." Rights claiming has become, he writes, a vital national pastime. He argues that the Founding Fathers did not intend for there to be such a flood, and that they did not intend for the judiciary to become the arbiter of what is a right and what is not. They intended for state and local institutions to protect the few "inalienable" rights that were then recognized. But slavery and Jim Crow laws upended that vision and introduced the concept of absolute rights as a way of protecting minorities from the tyranny of the majority. Greene believes that there are no absolute rights and that actual non-absolute rights require negotiation and mediation to resolve. Greene reinterprets the meaning of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, reviews key court cases, and critiques judge-made rights, which decree who holds rights rather than asking what holding a right means. Judges play a zero-sum game, dividing people into those who have rights and those who do not. Greene examines the effect of this concept of rights in the areas of race, gender, disability, abortion, affirmative action, and campus speech. By pretending that one right or another is or is not of constitutional significance,"rightsism" avoids the natural state of conflicting rights and the need to mediate between them.

The Capitalist Culture That Built America

Brown Brothers Harriman. Never heard of it? In the firm's first hundred years, it helped to make paper currency standard in the US, underwrote the easiest railroad and trans-Atlantic steamship companies and created the first foreign exchange system between the US dollar and British pound. It went on in the 20th century to shape the global economic and security systems that remain the world's institutional architecture. As the US faces the challenge of reinventing itself in the post-pandemic future, the story of Brown Brothers Harriman offers crucial lessons. In this SDG we will explore how to take the power of money so that it builds up rather than tears down; how to ensure that those who have benefited greatly from American capitalism serve and contribute in return; and how the US might once again play a global role to increase the prosperity and security for all. Brown Brothers Harriman grappled with those questions for more than 200 years. Now we all have to do the same.

Great Debates

Beginning with Satan’s dialogue with Jesus, sharply contrasting ideas have permeated human history. Though only a few are actual head-to-head debates, all such clashes provide much food for thought about perennial conceptual differences. In this s/dg we will read or view seven of these “debates” (three, Lincoln/Douglas, Kennedy/Nixon, and Baldwin/Buckley are head-to-head). They cover free will, human nature, miracles, slavery, the role of African Americans in the United States, the 1960 presidential election, and civil disobedience. They involve some of the greatest minds of Western Civilization: St. Augustine, David Hume, Thomas Hobbes, and C. S. Lewis, inter alia.

Surprises! Films with the Greatest Plot Twists

Attention, movie fans!

What better way to maximize your PLATO experience than to join us  for 14 weeks, discussing the most memorable movies of all time,  involving the most surprising plot twists?

We scoured the lists to come up with an assorted array of the most acclaimed films of various genres - all easily available on major streaming networks.  Watch them first at home, come to class, learn why these films have so captured our collective imagination.  The best writers, directors, actors, cinematographers have collaborated to  produce works of lasting impact.

Surprise us and join the fun!

Science and Technology in World History

The bestselling core book traces the relationship between science and technology from the dawn of civilization to the early twenty-first century.  The authors argue that technology as "applied science" emerged relatively recently, as industry and governments began funding scientific research that would lead directly to new or improved technologies.

McClellan and Dorn identify two great scientific traditions:  the useful sciences, which societies patronized from time immemorial, and the exploration of questions about nature itself, which the ancient Greeks originated. They examine scientific traditions that took root in China, India, and Central & South America, as well as in a series of Near Eastern empires in late antiquity and the Middle Ages.  From this comparative perspective, the authors survey the rise of the West, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, the Industrial Revolution, and the modern marriage of science and technology.  In the process they raise provocative questions about the sustainability of industrial civilization.

The core book was written as an introduction for general readers and students to provide the "big picture" that an educated person might wish to have of the history of science and technology.  A bit of math and astronomy might be helpful in a few places, but the SDG requires no technical background as a prerequisite.

Global Trends Shaping Humankind

This SDG is motivated by a 90-minute video interview of Daniel Kahneman and Yuval Harari entitled “Global Trends Shaping Humankind.” It will be supplemented by a recent article Harari wrote on the Ukraine invasion and a global trend it challenges. Kahneman is a psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment, decision-making, and behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He is a best-selling author of books such as Thinking, Fast and Slow. Harari is a professor with several best-selling books such as Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. 

The key trends they discuss are issues such as computers increasingly making judgments that affect humans and whether humans will be able to control such powerful challenges.

The video will launch the SDG, with most sessions based on Kahneman’s latest book Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment. The last few sessions will draw on other sources for alternative opinions on humankind’s future and how we can shape it.

The Teacher in Cinema

We examine the relationship between students ant their teachers in fourteen seminal films. Students lean, rebel, are inspired, reject, and mature. Teachers and professors try to promote education using various methods with varied success and failures meanwhile trying to achieve something in their personal and professional lives. These are strong representations of education over a 75 year period of movie making. With each film we will discuss how the profession and art of teaching have changed, both in representation and in perception, as well as the merits and success of each film