Chapter One: Course Pedagogy and Course Overview
Dilemmas to be Investigated in the Following Chapters
- How much do I choose my identity and how much does my social group determine my identity?
- If we internalize more than one identity, how do we navigate the conflicts between these identities?
- Can connection between people be both real and an illusion?
- Expressing strong emotions is important because one should have a full range of emotions, and emotional communication helps us understand each other; however, expressing strong emotions can be experienced by others as abusive, retraumatizing, and/or a micro-aggression.
- Is it possible to genuinely think together with others, or is any perception of connected thinking just an illusion or a coincidence?
- Does Heidegger’s advice concerning “meditative thinking” depend on us giving up the notion that each individual is radically isolated from others?
- Can we resolve the conflict between abstract value (money) and the real values of human community and the collective generosity that it requires?
- Given human nature, as we know it, is economic justice possible, and can class conflicts be resolved?
- Sometimes punishment can be transformative, and sometimes atonement can be transformative; how do we know which one will work in a specific case?
- Is punishment or atonement required for those who have benefited from oppressive systems; or can they be forgiven?
- Is knowledge solid or liquid or both?
- Is it possible to reconcile science with mysticism?
- Can the fundamental worldview conflict between indigenous and civilized people be resolved, and is such a resolution necessary for global sustainability?
- How do we reconcile individualism with commitments to the common good?
- How do we know when interpersonal violence is justified?
- How do when know when military violence is justified?
- How should we distinguish between goodness and evil?
- Are professional ethics necessarily culturally biased?
- Can dominating cultures overcome their cultural biases that undermine the power and autonomy of dominated cultures?
- If we can create a universal global ethics, how can we motivate and enforce it; or must we give up the project or a universal global ethics?
- How do we reconcile the forces of “power-over” with the forces of “power-with”?
- Given that all of us may have used manipulative games for personal gain or to protect ourselves, how can we avoid this practice when it is so deeply engrained in our mainstream culture?
- Abundance and diversity are indications of public ecosystem health. However, economic wealth is correlated with the private accumulation of resources that increase their value with scarcity and demand. Can these two seemingly opposed values be reconciled?
- Modern civilization had created an industrial-technological dream world for some people, while keeping others in a real world of utter poverty an ecological collapse. Can these conflicting worlds be reconciled?
- When environmental policymakers use conflict resolution processes to find consensus between those who profit from environmental destruction, and those who want to stop these practices, doesn’t conflict resolution become a tool for putting a happy face on continued environmental destruction?
- Is anarchy self-defeating by trying to create a collaborative society amongst people whose identity depends on having power and privilege over others?
- How can egalitarian collaborative processes gain acceptance, when so many contemporary conflict resolution practices are enmeshed in corporate, judicial, and bureaucratic institutions that are dedicating to maintaining their domination over large masses of people?
- How can we personally enjoy the benefits of the virtual technological world, without aggravating our connection to the natural world?
- Contemporary mainstream cultures increasingly adopt abstract and virtual modes of framing the world and its elements; do these world-framing devices encourage us to reduce our view of the world and others to generalized categories and stereotypes?
