The day started somewhat unusually with everyone having to wait outside the classroom while the group set up for their difficultation. To be fair, this is what I was informed of, as I arrived 2 minutes late. Ben wondered where he should sit before proceeding to take attendance.
Ben began by discussing our upcoming writing assignment and fyi, the rough draft will be due two weeks from today. For some background, we did a little review of Ranke and Weber. As we remember, it was Ranke who made the switch from writing history as a story to writing history “wie es eigentlich gewesen”: how it really was, as fact. Weber argues that it is not as easy though, as Ranke makes it out to be. There are charismatic truths which are very influential, but Ranke seems to not take these into account.
But as far as the writing assignment goes, there are four key components. First, we have to find a truth and legitimize it. It can tie into anything that we have studies thus far. For example, Ben was going to make us read a dissertation concerning eugenics and the University of Minnesota. Interestingly, Coffman, Nicholson, and Johnson were all very involved in the eugenics here, yet very people know this side of the U’s darker past. Many of what we consider Nazi ideals of racial purity actually developed here in the Midwest. At one point, U of M students were REQUIRED to take a course on APPLIED eugenics! Anyways, after that short tangent, it was told to us that the “truth” we are going to discuss must be both important and “inconvenient”. This has to be something that people don’t want to be made known.
The second part of the paper involves doing research on our topic, and include four sources, including one book. It was advised to check out Wilson or the CSCL library.
For the third component, we must find an institution that we believe needs to hear this truth we have researched. We must then send them a written piece (or a YouTube video with a 1000 word metacommentary) explaining why our truth is important, and basically to just present it. We should use citations when necessary.
Lastly, we have to write Ben an email explaining how the writing works. The final paper will be due when we get back from break.
Our grades from external writing #1 are coming, and they will be returned before external writing #2. We have one more blog post due before spring break on DeLillo…read part one by Monday!
We had a quick recap of Tuesday’s class before the difficultation, in which two important terms were defined: confirmation bias and circulating reference. A confirmation bias is when you strategically choose and eliminate sources to confirm your pre–determined argument. In terms of a Rankean historian, this is bad. Here Ben also made a quick note on how he has a bit of an advantage over us, because he knows a lot more about the topics then most of us do. So it makes it a little difficult to argue with him. But no worries, keep arguing and sharing your thoughts and opinions J
Moving on, a circulating reference is a given term alive in culture that doesn't have a fixed definition. In other words, the definition of certain terms (eg. Socialism) are always changing depending on who you ask and when you ask. After this, there was a shift towards getting into the difficultation.
For the difficultaion, we each had to be in groups of about three or four, and each group was sitting by a picture of Glenn Beck, Georg Hegel, Theodor Adorno, Ayn Rand,or Howard Beale. The task was to come up with an argument to debate a resolution in the perspective of who we were sitting next to, keeping Hayek in mind. My group had Glenn Beck. The resolution was as follows: “Our current economic system is headed toward socialism. Because socialism is equivalent to Nazism, we are headed toward Nazism.”
In my group, we talked about things Glenn Beck would how he would approach the resolution. He would probably agree with it, claiming that Obama is a socialist wanting to help the poor people, and that we are headed toward Nazism under Obama’s policies. He would also claim, like Hayek, that the government is trying to control our economy, which would entail a total loss of freedom and this is equivalent to socialism. Bottom line: we are headed towards repeating ourselves in history.
15 minutes or so later, we reconvened and each group gave their character’s hypothetical position. Ayn Rand would have agreed with the resolution, that Nazism and socialism are the same in which they both inhibit individual by requiring a sacrifice to the whole. Hegel would have opposed the resolution because we are moving toward freedom, not socialism, because that is how the world has and will work. Adorno would have opposed the resolution. He would have blamed Hayek for using manipulation techniques, more specifically, the one involving the apocalypse, to win his audience. Lastly, Howard Beale would agree with the resolution: we are headed toward socialism, and we should all be mad as hell! Ben concluded that each resolution was pretty accurate of the character we were portraying. We now had a few minutes to get back in our groups and develop an argument against an opposing opinion. My group chose Hegel.
We all engaged in a lively debate, mostly picking apart Hegel. A lot was said but one of the things that stuck out to me personally was how Rand would have argued that the world spirit was based on religion, which is anti reason, and therefore not legitimate. Hegel argued back that the world spirit wasn’t God. Can only an atheist move toward reason? Yes! Was Rand’s emphatic response. Religion and reason, in her opinion, could not coincide.
After the debate, in which many of us got pretty excited, we talked about why it is useful to argue within different perspectives. How does it let us understand Hayek better? We concluded that it helps us to view things holistically from all sides, and it pushes/challenges our own beliefs and biases. We also realized that no one is really ‘right’ because everyone has their own fact base. One of the most important points: there are more than just two sides to a given issue, and sometimes, it is difficult to even pinpoint the issue. As we were running a little late, we ended here with Ben dismissing the class and wishing us all a good weekend.
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