Assignments for Week Twelve Are Posted.

Enjoy.

In the first week of most literature courses I teach, students play musical chairs.  It is a fun way for the class to get to know one another; but, being a teacher, I have a more sinister purpose in mind.  People can learn a lot from kid's games and children's literature.  Of all the texts constructed by a society, those meant for children give the most clear views of values, social roles, and fears of a society.  Musical chairs is no exception.  It is the perfect capitalist game.

Think about it.  It is a game where a community of people, usually children, calmly compete for limited resources; indeed, as each round completes and the loser leaves the circle to watch from the sidelines, another chair is removed to ensure the game continues its focus on smaller-and-smaller resources and the group of losers gets larger and larger, until there is only one "winner."  It is about this point that I introduce the concepts of cultural knowledge and zero-sum games.  Cultural knowledge is that body of knowledge and conventions you can pretty much count on those in a community having.  The range of "stuff" or, to borrow Sherlock Holmes' term, "the ineffectual furniture" we carry around is enormous, but it is part of our cultural identity and part of how we make sense of the world. 

Early in our culture, we are given the cultural knowledge of how to play musical chairs, and whether we use it or not we carry this knowledge around for most of the remainder of our life.  Since musical chairs is a game, and games are by definition in our culture fun, we don't worry about what our three and four year old selves absorb alongside of the knowledge of how to play the game; however, musical chairs taught us a number of lessons people need to know about how capitalists look at resources and establish and maintain power among ourselves. 

Think about it: In  the cut throat world of the business world and that of musical chairs, resources are always limited.  One must compete for these resources and take them from others to succeed.  There can be only one winner.  Competition is fun.  The winner should be honored.  One must learn to win and loose gracefully.  For there to be a winner, there must be a looser.  ...I could go on. 

In the classroom, I change one rule in the second game of musical chairs which we play.  In specific, I make it a rule that no one can be eliminated, and every one must find a seat on an other's lap if a chair isn't present.  As resources get scarce, soon there is a lot of laughter, and there's a lot of negotiation, especially as we get down to two, then one, then no chairs, and the rules remain in force. 

This exercise is meant to teach college students the difference that critical thinking, interpretation, and even the simplest of revisions can make in how a text is used in society--that is, the cultural work a text--like the game musical chairs--is allowed to do.  More important, it is means to show students that we control how texts get used and interpreted, and interpretations matter.  We need to fight to establish and circulate the best and most useful.  Changing a single rule in how to interpret a text, like changing one rule in musical chairs, changes the cultural work a text does from teaching rather sinister lessons in cut-throat competition in a world of win or loose and dwindling resources into a text which can teach kids lessons in group problem solving and the fact there are always ways around problems of dwindling resources, that is, if people are willing and able to talk, negotiate, and think outside the ways things have always been done.

Last week, you got a little taste of all of the power of revision and taking the time to work critical documents through multiple drafts and readers.  You looked at how the Declaration and the Constitution came into being as drafts, were discussed, revised, and then sold to the American people.  Think how different our lives would have been if Franklin hasn't have been on the committee which drafted the Declaration.  An article on Franklin's role describes his work as:

   " He crossed out, using the heavy backslashes that he often employed, the last three words of Jefferson's phrase "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" and changed them to the words now enshrined in history: "We hold these truths to be self-evident."
    The idea of "self-evident" truths was one that drew less on Locke, who was Jefferson's favored philosopher, than on the scientific determinism espoused by Isaac Newton and the analytic empiricism of Franklin's close friend David Hume. In what became known as "Hume's fork," the great Scottish philosopher had developed a theory that distinguished between "synthetic" truths that describe matters of fact (such as "London is bigger than Philadelphia") and "analytic" truths that are so by virtue of reason and definition ("the angles of a triangle total 180 degrees"; "all bachelors are unmarried"). Hume referred to the latter type of axioms as "self-evident" truths. By using the word "sacred," Jefferson had implied, intentionally or not, that the principle in question—the equality of men and their endowment by their creator with inalienable rights—was an assertion of religion. Franklin's edit turned it instead into an assertion of rationality."  (http://www.time.com/time/2003/franklin/bfdeclaration2.html)

On reason I build in exercise that encourage you to revise your work is to give you insight into what the phrase, "pursue happiness," means, and a lot of it has to do with revision of your self and how you look at life.  We talk about American being the land of opportunities.  One opportunity is to re-write yourself.  The serf which comes to America no longer has to work all their lives paying rent and their surplus to a rich landowner.  If they don't like the relationship their boss demands, they can "vote with their feet" or they can tell their boss off.  Someone coming from an authoritative nation doesn't have to accept being intimidated or beat up by the authorities,  Here, if police beat you up, you have recourse to laws and procedures which have a reasonable chance of producing justice.  If you come here ignorant, we have schools.  The list goes on, but the point is that one of the often undersold but essential aspects of America is that it is a place which encourages you to revise the text of yourself.

Think back to Emerson and Thoreau.  Both Romantic authors wanted you to "get in touch" with your "best, truest self," and they wanted you to edit your life.  Like most good editors, they wanted you to look at how cluttered your live was and toss out anything which wasn't necessary to your real purpose.  This is a long, long way from Medieval ideas that one is born into a Great Chain of Being, and one accepts one's place in it.  According to this view, if one is born a serf, then one works to be the best serf possible.  One of the main reasons for America's success is that we've encouraged an ever greater percentages of the population to define their selves for them selves.  We tell our kids to reach for their dreams, dream big, and to develop their potential.  We're still riding the last gasps of the economic surges which resulted from opening up the franchise to women, encouraging the working class to get college degrees, and then opening up college to minorities and women.  Make no mistake, in the process of opening up our society to others and helping them to pursue happiness and become their best, we reap the benefit of a hugely expanded pool of talent.  From this talent comes innovation and the scrambling energy to be better which drives our economy.  This is why I always laugh when the current generations--I've lived through three now--trot out the old arguments and rhetorics about immigration. 

Among the old chestnuts is that America is a land of immigrants.  True, but the ramification of this realization is that our economy has been driven by the contributions of immigrants becoming American.  Another of those old, rhetorical chestnuts has those immigrants behaving in "Un-American" ways and "taking jobs and resources" from "Real Americans."  What is odd is that every generation is an immigrant to America, as every generation discovers, re-writes them selves, and gets rewritten by the society and the land they find on their arrival.

American is the land of opportunity, a land where the people are always revisiting the rules in light of new insights,  and the success of everyone depends on the maximum number being given the chance to revise and rewrite their lives as pursuers of happiness.  This is the central reason that our founders spent so much time talking about how to become "healthy, wealthy, and wise." 

The Enlightenment not only revised and rewrote the rules on how to set up government and on the correct relationship between the state and the individual, Enlightenment thinkers wrote and rewrote a host of texts on rewriting and revising the self, so the maximum number of "selves" possible would be ready to become part of the new and improved government, that one which was "by the people and for the people."  America is, hence, also the land of self-help.

This week is about getting your head around the self-help literature of the Enlightenment.  Then, the idea that the common person could revise their own lives was brand, spanking new.  This week is about revisiting the central text of your life--yourself, but doing so using the reason, the careful observation, the communal feedback, and the common sense the Enlightenment so valued.  You make the judgments about what the good life looks like. You make the judgment about what constitutes well-being, but Americans will give you a hard time if you aren't perceived as pursuing happiness and making yourself better. 

Life may be one large game of musical chairs, but in the American version of the game, you get to talk to the other players and decide how you will play the game and by which rules.  In the process, you get to decide what work your life, the game, and your fellow players will do in and for society.   Zero-sum games maximize losers.  They are sucker's games.  The belief that all are created equal and all have the inherent right to pursue happiness is a winner's game.  It recognizes that it is the players  who understand why the games are being played that have the best chance of maximizing winners and human potential.   To maximize human potential--the dream shared by Romantic and Enlightenment Thinker alike--you win by first creating the competition and yourself as the best player possible.