HUMAN

Near the end of HUMAN Volume 3, Argus says,

Don’t you have an easier question? The meaning of life. . . Sometimes I think of a phrase I heard as a boy, a friend who said, “Life is like carrying a message from the child you were to the old man you will be. You have to be sure that this message isn’t lost along the way.”

I often think of that because, when I was little, I used to imagine fine things, to dream of a world without beggars in which everyone was happy—simple, subtle things. But you lose those things over the course of life. You just work to be able to buy things, and you stop seeing the beggar, you stop caring.

Where’s the message of the child I once was? Maybe the meaning of life is making sure that this message doesn’t disappear.

If you had to come up with a single message from yourself as a child that is worth carrying with you to yourself as an older person, what do you think it would be?

Compose a post on your group blog in which you answer this question and reflect on the following as you do so:

Imagine yourself at 50, What will be the main preoccupation of your life then? Do you think you will be able to keep this message alive?

What does this message say about you as an individual? friend? partner? citizen?

Comment on the post of at least one other person of the blog you are designated as a commenter for.

World Vision

Examine the photographs in the attached New York Times feature “Portraits of Reconciliation.” Which one most clearly conveys a genuine spirit of closeness and reconciliation between survivor and perpetrator. Which one least clearly does so. Compare what the two individuals in each pair have to say. On your group blog no later than Wednesday, March 26, compose a post reflecting on what stands out most to your in both the image and what the people have to say about what happened during the genocide and since then.

Rwanda The Sentinel Project

NYT–Portraits of Reconciliation

HUMAN

It would probably be easy for many Americans with moderately progressive values to tell Walaa, Brahima, and Frezno what is wrong with their outlook on the proper relationship between men and women. What is more challenging, however, is to attempt a respectful conversation with any of them in terms they might at least partially understand.

HUMAN

HUMAN

On your group blog, address a message to your designated individual, attempting to demonstrate your sincere empathy and respect while also trying to help them to see how their views are problematic in terms they might at least partially understand

It may be helpful to use the transcript below in composing your response.

Human Transcript, Vol 1, Pt 2–Gender

Loyola Marymount University

Follow this link to the guest portal for the IAT. Pick one test and complete the exercise in class. In a reply to this post, describe your experience and whether you learned anything new about yourself. If you are comfortable sharing your results, please include this in your response.

Please choose a different test and compose a second response no later than midnight Wednesday, February 5.

Before class on Thursday, February 6, respond to the class member who responded immediately before you.

Moral Foundations Test

Open YourMorals.org website, create an account, and complete at least two surveys. One should be the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, and the other should be your choice from among the following: Disgust Scale, the RWA Scale, or the Big Five Personality Scale. When you are done, include in your substantive response to this post which one you completed for your second choice and how meaningful or accurate you believe the results to be.

Villains Wiki – Fandom

As a reply to this post, please do the following:

1. Copy the aphorism you will be using as the starting point for your essay.
2. Restate the aphorism in your own words.
3. Briefly describe a story or example you might use as evidence in your essay.

Alistair Reid, a writer who was also a translator and close friend of Jorge Luis Borges, developed a list of attributes that he believes represent what Borges believed about meaning and language in the context of the idea of fiction.

Working with one or two others, identify parallels between one or more of these attributes (you will find out which in class today) and what you (individually and collectively) feel Yuval Noah Harari means by “fictions” in his chapter “The Tree of Knowledge.”

1. A fiction is any construct of language—a story, an explanation, a plan, a theory, a dogma—that gives a certain shape to reality.
2. Reality, that which is beyond language, functions by mainly indecipherable laws, which we do not understand, and over which we have limited control. To give some form to reality, we bring into being a variety of fictions.
3. A fiction, it is understood, can never be true, since the nature of language is utterly different from the nature of reality.
4. A fiction is not to be confused with a hypothesis, which poses a fiction as a truth and attempts to verify it from the reality.
5. A fiction is intended principally to be useful, to be serviceable, to be appropriate, to make some kind of sense of reality.
6. Fictions bring things to order for the time being only. Given a shifting reality, they have constantly to be remade.
7. We are physical beings, rooted in the physical cycle of life-and­death. Yet we are also users of language, fiction-makers, and language and fictions are not, like us, subject to natural laws. Through them, we are able to cross over into a timeless dimension, to bring into being alternate worlds, to enjoy the full freedom of the imaginable.
8. Language itself is an irony—while we use it to create systems and formulations that are intelligible, coherent, and permanent, the reality they purport to put in order remains shifting, changeable, and chaotic, making it necessary for us all the time to revise our fictions, to dissolve and re-form them.
9. We are capable of generating the fiction of immortality, yet it in no way exempts us from death.
10. A book is an irony, mocking the person who writes it. By making his fiction out of language, the writer moves it into a timeless dimension, while he must remain rooted in time.
11. Our larger fictions—social theories, political systems, the idea of a Supreme Being—are not inherently true but are sustained for a time by belief. Most of them eventually outlive their usefulness.
12. Works of literature are reliable fictions, our fictions of enlightenment, our solace. Poetry and prose are merely different modes of fictions, poetry attempting to move closer to experience as a happening, prose maintaining a certain lucid distance.
13. The most common of all confusions is to imagine that we have changed reality when all we have done is to alter our fiction of it. It is crucial never to lose the sense that our fictions are in fact fictions, even while appreciating their usefulness, and suspending our disbelief when we choose to.
14. Reality is given to us: making fictions of it is in large part what we do with it.

Dale Richards 2015

Whether you come from somewhere the daily low temperature rarely gets below freezing or somewhere subzero temperatures happen every winter, this was an unusually cold beginning to “Spring” semester 2025. Please describe either (a) something interesting that you did during your semester break or (b) something you are anticipating (with either dread or pleasure) for the weeks ahead.