Introduction to Humanities

1.0. "THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE" and "THE HUMAN PROSPECT" are a pair of general-education courses at Texas Wesleyan University. They represent a special aspect of education that emphasizes the "humanization" of human beings. The courses aim to make people think about their humanness and what it means. To accomplish this aim, the courses encourage students and faculty to consider their own values in the light of some larger-scale set of values.

"The Human Experience" and "The Human Prospect" are about human values.

1.1. To establish a context for a personal consideration of values, we look to selected "cultural matrixes" of the past. They will show us how some fundamental human values have developed. With this knowledge, each of us can use our own experiences to assess the potential, both positive and negative, of these values. The essential data of the courses comes from the past; the goal of the courses is to consider ways in which our own values reflect or reject the heritage of the past.

1.2. The 2017/2019 Undergraduate Catalog makes some statements that help us expand our notion of the courses' goals. On p. 24 we read that the mission of Texas Wesleyan University is to create a learning environment in which each student has the opportunity to:

· pursue individual excellence,

· think clearly and creatively,

· communicate effectively

· and develop a sense of civic responsibility and spiritual sensitivity, with a commitment to moral discrimination and action.

These four "opportunities" give some starting-points in thinking about "humanization" or "humanness."

Pages 115-116 of the Catalog elaborate the contribution of the General Education Curriculum to Texas Wesleyan's mission. Here we find a statement of "competencies" students are expected to achieve. Among these competencies are:

· language literacy,

· analytic literacy,

· cultural literacy,

· social literacy.

"The Human Experience" and "The Human Prospect" address these competencies by providing a plan for connecting them. "The Human Experience" and "The Human Prospect" provide Texas Wesleyan students and faculty the opportunity to interact with their own values through analyzing relationships and perspectives of values derived from "primary" sources of the Mediterranean Cultural Matrix from its origins to the present.

2.0. WE COULD RESTATE the mission of "The Human Experience" and "The Human Prospect" by saying that the courses:

· provide an analytical framework for discussing values

· in light of the story of the Mediterranean "Cultural Matrix"

· by emphasizing students' encounter with "primary" sources rather than secondary explanations

An analytical framework for discussing values

3.0. THE COURSES PRESENT a model for engaging in values-analysis. We use values to connect the past and the present. Our values shape our lives as we act on them. These values come from the past, as we either accept or reject the influence of the past.

3.1. Exploring some enduring values of the past can raise our self-awareness if we learn how to form a systematic view of values, and if we use our knowledge to analyze things that we have done. To form a systematic view of values, we need to know something about how values relate to each other, how values and their relationships form value-systems, and how value-systems provide people with basic perspectives on themselves and others.

3.2. In the process of exploring values inherited from the past, we can examine our own appropriation of these values by applying techniques of analysis to actions we have taken, actions which accept or reject certain values handed down from the past. To initiate this project, an integrating value will be identified for each cultural matrix encountered during the courses. The integrating value is the most important value of a cultural matrix, and it is the value that unites all the other values in a cultural matrix to form a value-system. With the integrating value as a starting-point, we can then locate other values in the system and find their meanings by determining the relationships that govern the system.

In light of the story of the Mediterranean "Cultural Matrix"

4.0. THE COURSES VIEW the past as a chronological sequence of "cultural matrixes," with the "Mediterranean" as the overarching matrix. With this sentence we express three thoughts about the way the courses are packaged.

First Thought. The idea of "chronology," or sequence in time, plays a fundamental role in the composition of the courses.

4.1. Using the idea of chronology represents the belief that looking at the past through some disconnected view -- say by collecting significant "themes" from various places -- cannot give useful explanations of values that allow students to form critical opinions.

4.1.1. Each course begins by introducing students to the two essential skills they will need: analysis of values and analysis of "primary" sources. Then the course picks up its place in the sequence. "The Human Experience" begins with the start of human civilization and continues to the mid seventeenth century, when events in Europe would set the world on its present path. "The Human Prospect" resumes the story with the advent of the contemporary world and continues through the present.

Second Thought. The concept of "cultural matrix" provides a meaningful device for distinguishing eras of the past from each other.

4.2. We describe a culture as a value-system of a group of people who live at a certain time and in a certain place. We adopt the term "matrix" in its meaning as "web." A cultural matrix is a web of interwoven values.

4.2.1. If you look at a spider's web, you see that it consists of individual strands connected in a complex fashion. And you immediately perceive that it has a center. Likewise, a web of values consists of individual strands connected to each other and to a center, the integrating value. To understand a cultural matrix, we must try to determine how its values relate to each other to form a coherent whole. To learn about the values of a cultural matrix, we must find out what happened in the matrix. What events occurred? What ideas (economic, philosophical, political, religious, scientific, social) of prominent thinkers dominated? What writers, artists, and musicians had widespread influence? Then we must ask: how are these events and ideas connected to each other? how are they connected to past and future cultural matrixes? how are they disconnected from past and future cultural matrixes? The answers to these questions form the data-base with which the course deals.

4.2.2. In building the data-base the courses follow three procedural "rules" that distinguish their study of cultural matrixes from other models of studying the past.

The significance of data is that it provides the raw material for the study of values. The focus on values leads to quest for the past in which data is secondary. That is, we are interested in data not for itself but for its capacity to be translated into values. For this reason, we find "primary" sources to be of greater interest than secondary explanations or syntheses of data.

In practice, we do pay considerable attention to objective "events" in establishing the framework for our study of "primary" sources. For instance, we use major political transitions to establish the general time-frame of a cultural matrix whenever possible. At the same time, we realize that the boundaries, both geographical and temporal, of a cultural matrix are always approximate. As we trace cultural developments, we discover that different aspects of cultural matrixes change at different times. Political events simply provide a convenient point of reference. Transitions in artistic or musical styles, for instance, may occur at somewhat differing times. A cultural matrix is not unified by a certain set of dates; it is unified by a certain set of values.

A second procedural "rule" tied to the idea of cultural matrixes is that we always retain a high degree of self-consciousness about our standpoint in the present. Once we focus on values, we can approach the past in a highly subjective and personal manner by asking how the values we discover play out in our own lives and in our own society. We can learn the meanings and significance of values for people and cultures of the past, and we can compare "their" value-systems with our own. In learning about the values of the past, we gain the opportunity to enlarge our sensitivity to our own values.

A final procedural "rule" that distinguishes the study of cultural matrixes is that such study always takes a long-term view rather than a short-term view. By "always," we mean always. This rule is almost ridiculously simple, yet it seems to be the one most easily overlooked. The rule has the most bite as we think of the connections and disconnections among cultures. The cultural-matrix approach never looks at a culture from some hypothetical point-of-view provided by that culture, and it never interprets a culture on the basis of the surface interests of the culture. Such shallowness fails to satisfy the desire to understand values that is at the core of the cultural-matrix model. It's a matter of time and a matter of geography.

Deep values -- values that constitute driving forces that underlie surface appearances -- take time to develop. Their development may well go back to parts of the world that, geographically, are now quite alien to the cultures that draw on them. For example, we can make the case that one of the most significant values acted out by the United States and its people is the value of achievement. Through the study of cultural matrixes we can trace a line through the ages that leads us back to the first known application of this value. The line leads us to Iraq as it existed five thousand years ago.

Time and geography. They can fool us badly. Or they can lead us to deep insights.

Third Thought. Our courses focus on the Mediterranean Cultural Matrix.

4.3. At the beginning of each unit of both courses, the online information assembled serves as the "textbook" for the course contains a brief set of introductory materials that orient us to a common consideration of particular segments of the past. We center our view of the past on all of the cultures whose origin may be traced back to the eastern half of the Mediterranean basin. We refer to these cultures together as "The Mediterranean Cultural Matrix."

4.3.1. If we look for "The Mediterranean Cultural Matrix" in our time, we find it in both of the Americas, all of Europe, northern Asia and the part of Asia we now call the Middle East. We also find it in parts of Africa and south Asia. It assumes a variety of forms because it is often mixed with the values of local cultural matrixes. As a practical generalization, we might say that we find "The Mediterranean Cultural Matrix" anyplace in the world where values predominate that are inherited from the Persian Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic Empire, and the kingdoms and nations of Europe. Another way of expressing the point is to note that "The Mediterranean Cultural Matrix" is -- and has been for a long while -- the largest cultural matrix of humankind.

4.3.2. It is not "western," and it is not "eastern." It is "Mediterranean" -- rooted in the meeting-place of Africa, Asia, and Europe. From the cultural-matrix point-of-view, eastern and western are virtually useless concepts. The use of "east" and "west" to identify geographical areas is confusing and ethnocentric. There are no fixed reference-points for the concepts east and west.

A Comparison

5.0. THE CULTURAL-MATRIX APPROACH to the study of the past can explain some things that other approaches cannot explain. Likewise, other approaches can explain some things that the cultural-matrix approach cannot explain. Each mode of study has its own value. To illustrate the difference among modes of study, we may turn to an influential work by a political scientist. In 1996 Samuel P. Huntington published The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, Inc., November 1996), in which he pulled together an immense amount of data to present a framework for understanding global politics after the end of the Cold War. Eminent people from all over the world have applauded the explanatory power of his model -- a model that, for instance, essentially predicted the events of 9/11. A capsule comparison of the "civilizational" model with the cultural-matrix model will show similarities and differences between the two.

5.1. Huntington emphasizes that his is a short-term approach: "While a civilizational approach may be helpful to understanding global politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, this does not mean that it would have been equally helpful in the mid-twentieth century or that it will be helpful in the mid-twenty-first century" /p. 14; see also p. 37/. The utility of the model is immediate: it provides a paradigm to understanding current developments and for making predictions about the near future.

As a long-term approach, the cultural-matrix model focuses on deep, underlying values that continue to motivate human activity. Another way of expressing the gap between the two models is to say that Huntington's model has great predictive power because it emphasizes the current differences among civilizations in their political ambitions, while the cultural-matrix model the appeal of allowing people to explore their own values as they come to understand the values of others and find deep similarities.

5.2. Both approaches carefully draw boundary-lines without taking them too seriously. Huntington literally maps out the civilizations he depicts. We also provide an extensive network of maps in order to achieve precision about cultural matrixes. At the same time, we strongly agree with Huntington when he says that: "Civilizations have no clear-cut boundaries and no precise beginnings and endings" /p. 43/.

5.3. Huntington /pp. 50-68/ identifies two "central elements" of any culture or civilization: language and religion. Language follows power, so that conquest expands the use of a given language. Religion may be the central force that drives people.

In response to Huntington, we can say two things. First, language plays an important role in the identification of cultural matrixes, but the verbal languages that are used are less significant that what they are used for. The difference between Spanish and Russian is important but it is less important than the fact that Spanish and Russian are used to tell the same "stories." That is, as far as Spanish and Russian are used to express similar worldviews and similar aspirations of human beings, they demonstrate a common bond that outweighs their differences. Secondly, religion ultimately plays the crucial role in the identification of cultural matrixes if religion is considered at a macro level where details are not allowed to cloud one's view. From a religious standpoint, the world may be divided into three broad and diverse cultural matrixes: the world of Mediterranean religions, the world of Asian religions, and the world of primal (that is, location-bound) religions. The differences within the first two of these religions play a crucial role from the civilizational standpoint. The differences between the two are more important for the identification of cultural matrixes.

5.4. A final difference between the civilizational and the cultural-matrix approaches may be found in the essential way they divide the world. Huntington /pp. 45-48/ finds seven major civilizations in the contemporary world, with an eighth possibility: Sinic, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Western (Europe, North America, and European settler countries such as Australia and New Zealand), Latin American, and African (possibly).

In this list we discover the most dramatic difference between the cultural-matrix approach and the civilizational approach (along with all other approaches, which emphasize divisions along current "fault lines"). The Mediterranean Cultural Matrix encompasses four of Huntington's eight possibilities: Islamic, Orthodox, Western, and Latin American. To comprehend the deep connectedness of these cultural groups requires the perception of human themes that run so deep they are barely noticed any longer. To emphasize the connections does not minimize the differences among these groups. It gives the differences a deep context by acknowledging the similarities that can be traced through time.

5.5. The gap between the cultural-matrix model and the civilizational model is a gap in intention, not knowledge. On p. 49 Huntington reproduces a chart taken from a "historian." The chart traces the development of "civilizations" from their neolithic origins through their Mediterranean, Indic, and Sinic branches. Huntington intends to examine the end result (to date) in order to assess political and economic possibilities. The study of cultural matrixes promotes a quest for human values whose significance endures over time and place.

By emphasizing students' encounter with "primary" sources
rather than secondary explanations

With the chronology and focal-point of the past in place, the courses encourage students to investigate values of the past by listening to music, looking at pictures, and reading various sources that represent the past. To these many voices students and faculty add themselves and their individual values.

6.0. BY ENCOURAGING STUDENTS to encounter "primary" sources, the courses express the conviction that insight comes through some kind of "hands-on" experience -- more than through the study of secondary generalizations.

6.1. To enable such an encounter, the courses provide an analytical model for "Exploring Values in Art, Music, and Writings." This model rests on three insights:

1. guided consideration of the categories of line, color, shape, texture, and design allow students to observe art, music, and writings
2. sound observations support students' own analysis of works, combining the "facts" of a work with their own responses to it
3. analysis leads directly to the determination of the value, or meaning, of a work

6.2. The courses place emphasis on encounter over the study of background information. The background information merely provides a convenient starting-point for students and faculty to conduct their own investigations.

7.0. "THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE" treats early developments in some of the cultural matrixes that together make up the "Mediterranean" cultural matrix. It starts with the beginnings of civilization in the Ancient Mediterranean World and continues through the branching of Mediterranean culture into Byzantine, Islamic, and early European components.

    UNIT #1: ORDER AND CONNECTIONS: The Ancient Mediterranean Cultural Matrix
        Preamble to the Course
        Part 1: ORDER -- The Pre-Amarna Cultural Matrix
        Part 2: CONNECTIONS -- The Post-Amarna Cultural Matrix

    UNIT #2: INQUIRY INTO PERFECTION and UNITY: The Greco-Roman Cultural Matrix
        Part 1: INQUIRY INTO PERFECTION -- The Greek Cultural Matrix
        Part 2: UNITY -- The Roman Cultural Matrix

    UNIT #3: LOYALTY and THE INDIVIDUAL: The Byzantine - Islamic - Early European Cultural Matrix
        From unified loyalty to divided loyalty to the individual

8.0. "THE HUMAN PROSPECT" treats recent developments in some of the cultural matrixes that together make up the "Mediterranean" cultural matrix. We will start with a European-centered cultural matrix known as the Enlightenment and continue through the present time. The last two units of the course concern the twentieth century, divided into the "World War I" and "World War II" Cultural Matrixes. During these units we will spend half the time on a survey of the cultural matrix and half the time on "contemporary concerns," which are trends uncovered in our survey that continue to shape our lives right now.

    UNIT #1: CRITICAL THINKING and PROGRESS: The Modern Cultural Matrix
        Preamble to the Course
        Part 1: CRITICAL THINKING -- The Enlightenment Cultural Matrix
        Part 2: PROGRESS -- The Industrial Cultural Matrix

    UNIT #2: BUREAUCRACY -- The World War I Cultural Matrix

    UNIT #3: TECHNOLOGY -- The World War II Cultural Matrix