Paideia 111: Enduring Questions Summer Community Read Study Guide
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Paideia 111: Enduring Questions Summer Community Read Study Guide This Study Guide is designed to help you prepare for your first class in Paideia 111. For the ancient Greeks, paideia meant education, and that meant more than “learning stuff.” A true education helped the learner grow into a fully developed human being. The term reflects the idea that education should both lead people to the knowledge needed for a flourishing human life and it should cultivate good character. Paideia is preparation for committed membership in a democracy. By coming to Luther College, you have already dedicated yourself to a kind of paideia, since the Luther curriculum is based on the ideals of a liberal education, which similarly stress cultivating the whole person. Liberal education is devoted to broad intellectual development rather than narrow career training. In the liberal arts, students use multiple approaches to a subject in order to reach a deeper understanding of themselves and the world. Our version of paideia begins with Paideia 111 and 112 that lay the groundwork for a liberal education by helping you develop skills of careful analysis and well- reasoned, articulate response. We hope this will help you develop the skills to read and understand challenging texts, and express your views in a way that others will respect. Further, Paideia 111 and 112 invite you to seek wisdom in community by joining with others to explore enduring questions and to share your ideas through discussion and writing. “Paideia 111: Enduring Questions” is the required Fall Semester foundational course for all incoming first-year students at Luther College. The faculty teaching the course have selected important works that offer potential answers to the kinds of big questions humans have confronted in many times and many places. The first questions we will explore this year are: “What makes us human? What does it mean to be human? ” This seems deceptively simple, but consider the questions a bit. Does being human mean belonging to a specific species with certain physical characteristics? Might we be biologically a member of that species and not be “human”? To what extent is being human the result of nature or nurture? Are we, unlike other beings, “made in the image and likeness of God?” What about those who follow different social and religious practices than we do? What would it take to undermine our humanity? You might note that this litany of sub- questions reveals that our query can be answered biologically, cosmologically, and sociologically/psychologically. Your examination of the enduring question begins before you come to campus as you read the Luther community summer reading text. This year we have selected a classic dystopian novel, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Social theorist Erich Fromm, in his 1961 afterword to the novel, claimed that it raised the central political question of the modern era, “[C]an human nature be changed in such a way that man will forget his longing for freedom, for dignity, for integrity, for love—that is to say, can man forget that he is human?” (Plume Centennial Edition, 329) This central theme in the novel fits well with the Paideia goal of exploring enduring questions and we anticipate great discussions of what Orwell has to say on the subject. In 1903 George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair into the family of a British Imperial bureaucrat who was serving in India. His father was responsible for ensuring the quality of the opium being produced as part of the British imperial trade with China. However, most of Orwell’s life was spent in England, where he attended a series of elite boarding schools on scholarship. As a result of pressure from his family, Orwell spent five years as a member of the Burmese Indian Imperial Police before deciding to chuck it all to become a writer. This decision led to a period of living in deprived circumstances where he became intimately acquainted with what it meant to be poor in modern industrial society. He also spent time in his youth fighting with the anti-fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War. These experiences and his work as a cultural writer for the BBC Eastern Service during WWII contributed to his political outlook. He was fundamentally concerned with opposing social class prejudice and preventing the rise of totalitarian government in both communist and capitalist nations. By the time Nineteen Eighty-Four was published George Orwell Orwell was already an established writer of considerable popularity and acclaim. This novel clinched that status. The novel is set in what for Orwell was the near future, when the world had been divided into three geopolitical zones that were in a perpetual state of war. It follows the trials of an ordinary citizen, Winston Smith, who is employed by the Ministry of Truth. In the course of the novel we discover that all mid-level citizens are under constant observation and the very history of the nation is rewritten on a daily basis to serve the needs of those in power. In the end even the resistant heroes of the novel—after repeated torture and brainwashing—submit to the ridiculous claims of the state and betray each other in the process. It seemed to the Paideia 111 and 112 planners that we, too, live in an era where our words can be monitored. We, too, live in a time of global conflicts and military solutions. For these reasons and others, the planners thought that a new look at Nineteen Eighty-Four might be enlightening. We hope that reading this novel will serve to begin the kind of questioning that is essential to a liberal arts education: What does it mean to be human? What rights do all human beings have? What is freedom? Can the powerless and oppressed really be free or realize their full humanity? How does power affect those who hold it? What kind of a society develops among people constantly preparing for or at war? You will meet with your Paideia section during orientation to discuss these and other questions raised by Nineteen Eighty-Four. Because orientation will be a very busy time, you need to complete your reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four before you arrive on campus Saturday, August 30. The book should provide a provocative summer reading experience and stimulate good conversations about our humanity. The Paideia faculty looks forward to talking to you about your response to Orwell’s story. About this Guide Below you will find questions that are based on the specific text of the novel. These questions are intended to help you focus on what might be discussed regarding the book. You are NOT expected to write out answers to all of these questions. They are intended to help you direct your reading and guide your thinking about the work. To use these questions most fruitfully • read them before you read the part of the book they cover and while you are reading keep the questions in the back of your mind; • underline key phrases or ideas in the narrative; • jot a brief note to yourself either at the end of a chapter or in the margin of the text when something strikes you as important; 2 Finally, these are NOT the only things you might notice or discuss about this novel. It is a very richly layered text. Keep track of whatever ideas come to you while you are reading by writing notes in a separate notebook or at the end of each section of the novel. Foreword by Thomas Pynchon and Afterword by Erich Fromm It is a good idea as you try to maximize your study in college to get into the habit of reading the supplementary materials in assigned books. In this case it will help you understand better what is going on in Nineteen Eight-four if you read the forward by Thomas Pynchon and the Afterword by Erich Fromm before you launch into the novel. Thomas Pynchon is a well-known author of post-modernist fiction. His Foreword, written for the 2003 edition of the novel, provides a great deal of detail about Orwell’s life and offers insights about the way in which the novel reveals Orwell’s commentary on his own society. 1. Create a list of the parallels Pynchon makes between Orwell’s life and the characters, plot and devices in the novel. Refer to this list as you read the novel to help you see the themes Orwell may be focusing our attention to. 2. Pynchon claims in his introduction that he is tired of a game that he calls “What didn’t Orwell get right?” Why does he find this a problem? What do you think might be useful in playing such a game? Erich Fromm was born in Germany a few years before Orwell. As a person of Jewish descent when the Nazi’s came to power, he fled first to Switzerland and then to New York City where he worked at Columbia University. Fromm is recognized as one of the leading humanists and social psychologists of the twentieth century. Fromm’s afterword was published in 1961, 12 years after the first publication of Nineteen Eighty-Four. This essay focuses on what Orwell might be trying to say in terms of the way human psychology can be altered by the social order in which people find themselves. 3. List the human emotional states that Fromm thinks are being created or destroyed by a post-World War II bureaucratic state. As you read think about the implication of this for the novel? For what it might mean to be human in such a social state? Are Orwell’s concerns (as Fromm describes them) about human nature justified? Book 1 Chapters I-III This section of the novel introduces us to the main characters and the repressive society in which they live.