[lit-ideas] Re: Suggestions for class I'm teaching????

Not being a philosopher, I feel quite unencumbered responding to this post. The heart of the question is how do we judge the customs and mores of other cultures except through the premises of our own customs and mores? I assert that as to judgment, there is no other basis, we are, alas, our culture. But judgment is an ethical-moral thingie of our culture. What is wanted here is observation without judgment -- an observational, disinterested thingie. A thingie I call: 'how-odd'. I can sit out on my verandah any day of the week and observe behaviors that I react to as how-odd. That would be a legitimate observation considering the source, I believe. Bit I don't stop there. I also make moral judgments and that is my downfall. I know that such judgments are the judgments of a white, working-class, Catholic boy raised in the South in an overwhelmingly Baptist environment in the latter half of the 20th Century by aberrantly liberal parents, the third among 6 children, educated by mediocre teachers with a strong bent towards authoritarian control over exuberance for learning. That's who I am. One who is as odd to many as the people who walk up and down Belvedere Blvd. screaming their anger, anguish and despair to the whole world are to me.
In short, there's no such thing as better, there's just different. We all deeply believe that our way is the right way, the better way, but then we grow up and find ourselves just as silly as everyone else. It's kind of embarrassing at first. 


Mike Geary
still totally devoted to the rectitude of myself but a little bit more appreciative of you others.
----- Original Message ----- From: "John Wager" <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx> 
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, May 21, 2007 8:21 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Suggestions for class I'm teaching????



A bit of help please.
I'm supposed to teach three philosophy classes next Spring for "Semester at Sea." I know what I want to do, and I've taught parts of the classes before, but I'd really like to make one of the classes better. Here's the course description that I have so far: 


"The Bridge in the Jungle: Judging Other Cultures"
The writer B. Traven said about travel "One becomes a philosopher by living among people who are not of his own race and who speak a different language. . . . A trip to a central American jungle to watch how Indians behave near a bridge won’t make you see either the jungle or the bridge or Indians if you believe that the civilization you were born into is the only one that counts. Go, and look around, with the idea that everything you learned in school and college is wrong." But ultimately the point of international travel is to "learn" something, to be able to make more informed judgments and wiser decisions about the world. This assumes that there are "better" ways to think about other cultures, "better" ways to judge them. How do we make "better" judgements about cultures rather than just express our own prejudices? How do we put our historical and sociological and political knowledge to use in making informed judgements? It’s the traditional role of philosophy to examine the process of making moral judgements and knowledge claims, so we will put philosophy to work in helping us see cultures in a way that is both open to differences and still able to make judgments about them. We will use several classical and contemporary philosophical perspectives to examine this question, as well as try to put those perspectives to use in recording and reflecting on our observations of various cultures.
Since there are so many different perspectives here, politically, academically, and personally, I thought I'd throw this out to see what kinds of ideas people came up with. 


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