Continental Drift

I’m constantly reminded in the course how deep things can go if you care to follow them. There is bedrock of ideas, experience, biology and culture that some of our most basic assumptions about how the world works are built upon. In some ways there are universals, but in many ways in class I noticed how difficult it was to get rough agreement on the edges of many topics. I was struck by something when trying to present my research: there are thoughts and modes of thinking that are by degrees inaccessible to me because of my experience. I think this is an important way to think about the course and the content are the imperceptible changes in how we are able to think about the world as we become more experienced and embedded in it.

We float on continents built of ideology. After this course I think much more about how we conform and evolve within that space and I think it shapes us far more than we shape it, at least when we fail to notice. I think part of the reason we have such a difficult time figuring out these science and culture issues, both in class and in the culture at large, is that we often don’t notice or can’t acknowledge how we are being shaped by our surroundings and the events taking place too broadly and too subtly to announce themselves to us. I want to keep reminding myself that the ground underneath us is moving, that tectonic changes are always taking places, and we are along for the ride whether we like it or not.