The Contemporary World

1. The Contemporary World

2. The Cold War • Communist wars • Soviet Union revolutions • North Atlantic Treaty Organization • USA’s anti-Soviet sentiment • End of the Cold War

4. United Nations • Middle East • UN actions often stopped • Unanimous decision from 5 permanent members • Korea • UN stopped N Korean advance • Truce talks still continue

5. Civil Rights • Black segregation • Pro-active federal policies

6. Vietnam and Hippies • Vietnam stopped Soviet advances • War gradually increased • Counter culture (hippies) • Drugs, draft avoidance, demonstrations

7. Women’s movement • Voting • Abortion • Equal rights

8. Literature • Existentialism • Elie Wiesel • Jose Luis Borgia • Viktor Frankl • Man’s Search for Meaning

9. "So we see that even though Sartre accepts many of the same facts about humans that Kant does (that humans are free and autonomous), he draws exactly the opposite conclusion from Kant's. Because we are free and autonomous, we cannot be naturally rational. We are rational only by choice. Or, to put it another way, if we are free, then no moral code can be binding on us." – Palmer, Donald, Does the Center Hold?, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, p. 337.

10. "B.F. Skinner said: 'What a given group of people calls good is a fact: it is what members of the group find reinforcing as the result of their genetic endowment and the natural and social contingencies to which they have been exposed. Each culture has its own set of goods, and what is good in one culture may not be good in another. To recognize this is to take the position of 'cultural relativism'... Anthropologists have often emphasized relativism as a tolerant alternative to missionary zeal in converting all cultures to a single set of ethical, governmental, religious, or economic values.'" – Palmer, Donald, Does the Center Hold?, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, p. 347.

11. Paintings • Jackson Pollock

12. "But for me, the definitive feature of the so-called postmodern era is a deliberate blurring of genres; a defiant ignoring of historical precedents and orderings; a challenge to any effort to be deadly serious; a ready shift among styles, surfaces, and identities; a relinquishing of the effort to find meaning or structure beneath the surface chaos; and a license of 'anything goes' in the worlds of creation and interpretation. There is no moral mooring... In light of the triumph of modernism itself, however, the memory of preceding eras has dimmed; and now an effort to challenge history, tradition, and established canonical forms enjoys virtually free run. Instead of one truth challenging another, the whole notion of truth is abandoned; instead of the contemporary challenging the traditional, any sense of history is ignored; instead of high art being provocatively mingled with low art, no sense of separate arts, cultures, or traditions exists." – Gardner, Howard, Creating Minds, Basic Books, 1993, p.403.

13. Paintings • Andy Warhol • Marilyn Monroe

14. Photography • Ansel Adams

15. Sculpture • Constantin Brancusi • Bird in Space

16. Sculpture • Alexander Calder

17. Sculpture • Henry Moore

18. Architecture • Louis Sullivan and the Chicago School

19. Architecture • Frank Lloyd Wright • Organic design • Falling Water • The Guggenheim Museum

20. “A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.” • Frank Lloyd Wright

21. Architecture • Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe • Le Corbusier • Sydney Opera House • Buckminster Fuller

22. Music • Rock and Roll • Hard Rock • Classical

23. "There can be no art without discipline." – Igor Stravinsky (quoted in Greenberg, How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, The Teaching Company)

24. Films • Entertainment • Defines American society • motivation • Art form • Creating mood • Social commentary • Quiz Show, To Kill a Mockingbird

25. Technology and Science • Space • Computers • Energy • Transportation • Environment

26. “If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port, and the bus is interrupted at a very last resort, and the access of the memory makes your floppy disk abort, then the socket packet pocket has an error to report. If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash, and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash, and your data is corrupted cause the index doesn't hash, then your situation's hopeless and your system's gonna crash! If the label on the cable on the table at your house says the network is connected to the button on your mouse, but your packets want to tunnel to another protocol, that's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall, and your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss, so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse; then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang, 'cuz sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang! When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy in the disk, and the macro code instructions cause unnecessary risk, then you'll have to flash the memory and you'll want to RAM your ROM then quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your Mom!” -- Dr. Seuss

27. The Future • Technology, Science and Art

28. "[W]e find ourselves on the edge of ultimate power over nature–the power to destroy or enhance not only our own lives but also the very existence of every living creature on the planet. This is due in large part to what we call technology. The question we need to ask first...is simply whether technology and all that comes with it is a natural consequence of our humanity or is an artificial construct, separate from the natural way of doing things, and, perhaps, in direct opposition to nature itself... Are we dealing with man fighting against nature? Or are we merely seeing a natural progression of the species along an evolutionary path?“ – Alcorn, Paul A., Social Issues in Technology, 3rd Edition, p.5.

29. "[A] democracy must allow the public to decide which risks to consider and how much emphasis to place on each. It is in the nature of engineers to consider only the tangible ones, since that is what they are trained to do, but this is not a country of engineers. If the general public wishes to take into account such intangibles as the threat of nuclear power to democratic institutions or the hazard that rBGH holds for the family dairy farm, that is their right. Engineers can argue otherwise, but when it comes to such matters of subjective opinion, they have no more expertise than anyone else." – Pool, Robert, Beyond Engineering, Oxford University Press, 1997, p.214.

30. "[L]ike regulatory agencies, courts help to legitimize technology. In the modern world, assurances from experts are not enough to make the public accept a potentially risky technology. The technology must also be vetted by the courts or some other institution that is a representative of the public. The scientists and engineers involved in a technology often fail to appreciate the value of legal [and institutional] hoops through which they must jump, since the technology is already legitimate in their eyes, and the extra work seems like a waste of time. But for the larger society to accept it, the people must believe that it is under control in a way they understand." – Pool, Robert, Beyond Engineering, Oxford University Press, 1997, p.241.

31. "Adversity does not make character; adversity reveals character." – Wife of the pilot of Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11/01.

32. The Future • Where is stability found?

33. Thank You

34. "An ideal approach to risk assessment would thus be to lean heavily on science and engineering while keeping their shortcomings in mind. They cannot offer absolute answers, and sometimes their practitioners may not even realize what they don't know. Indeed, it seems part of the engineers' culture to underestimate the challenge of complex systems and to be overly optimistic about their ability to predict and control the behavior of such systems. It is up to the larger society to weigh the engineers' opinions about risk and decide how much faith to put in them. To this end it would be helpful if everyone–engineers and public alike–had a better grasp of the strengths and the weaknesses of the scientific approach." – Pool, Robert, Beyond Engineering, Oxford University Press, 1997, p.213-214.

35. "Some scientists, call them 'builders,' see the world as a place to be explored and manipulated. They trust in the power of human reason and believe that acquiring knowledge and putting it to use are acts of virtue. Others, call them 'conservers,' are less sanguine about human reasoning ability and suspect that, unchecked, human manipulation of the environment will lead to disaster. They see nature as something to be protected and to be respectful of, and they consider unrestricted growth and development not just dangerous but often morally wrong..“ – Pool, Robert, Beyond Engineering, Oxford University Press, 1997, p.187.

36. "You cannot fully understand the relations of choice and time till you are beyond both." – C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

37. "Sartre says that an existentialist is any philosopher who has as a guiding idea the view that, in the case of human beings at least, 'existence precedes essence'... What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself." – Palmer, Donald, Does the Center Hold?, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1991, p. 475-477.

38. "[T]his 'story of the modern era' chronicles the dissolution of conventions, practices, and interpretive frames that grew up over the centuries and became entrenched throughout Europe (and the many regions affected by Europe) during the nineteenth century. Once these conventions came to be strongly challenged in certain artistic and scientific domains, the chances that they would be questioned elsewhere were greatly enhanced." – Gardner, Howard, Creating Minds, Basic Books, 1993, p.17-18.

39. Hierarchy of Needs • "Physiological needs are survival needs. They include most bodily needs such as freedom from thirst and hunger, the need for shelter, the need to continue the species (sexual drives), and other bodily functions. • Safety needs are also survival needs... Safety needs involve security and protection from harm, either emotional, mental, or physical. • Social needs, or belonging needs... refer to the needs to belong to and be part of a group or society... In humankind, this need translates itself into the need to offer and receive affection, acceptance, friendship, and a general feeling of belonging to some group. • Self-esteem needs ...translate into such external needs as status in the group, recognition for achievements, and attention from others. • Self-actualization needs ... represent the inbred need of a person to strive to be all that she or he can be at any given point in time." – Maslow, Abraham (as quoted in Alcorn, Paul A., Social Issues in Technology, 3rd Edition, p.43).

40. In regard to artists, there is something of a dilemma. For example, a painter clearly brings into being something that was not there before. Since this painting is unlikely to be exactly the same as a previous painting, there is something “new.” Yet there may be no new concept or new perception in that painting. The painter may have a strong style and then apply that style to one landscape after another. In a sense there is a production line within a particular style. de Bono, Edward, Six Thinking Hats, Back Bay Books, 1999, p. 110.