Oxbridge Lecture Series Spring 2008
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Dr. Peter Lawler
Dana Professor of Government
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This course uses the English model of instruction
with public lectures and private tutorials. Students enrolled benefit
from small group, intensive student-faculty interaction, and exploratory
assignments that stimulate inquiry and intellectual growth. The course
is offered once a year and taught by Berry’s best professors. The
content varies with each offering.
Spring 2008 Oxbridge Lecture Series Course Our Technological (and Biotechnological) Republic:
The Modern Metamorphosis from Locke to Blogs
This course will be a moral, political, and even theological
exploration of the ways technology shapes our lives. It will be less
about machines and other inventions than about how the idea of
technology shapes our self-understanding. Do we have the marvelous
ability by thinking abstractly and imaginatively actually to transform
who we are? The course will begin with our country’s partly
technological foundation in the philosophy of John Locke and our
Founders’ choice of a large republic. It will celebrate the progress in
terms of individual freedom and security that come with a technological
self-understanding. But it will also come to terms with the dangers that
arise when a technological self-understanding becomes too complete—such
as a reconstruction of all of human life in terms of meritocratic (or
productive) qualities, nihilism (or the reduction of all
non-technological or moral and political distinctions to nothing),
disorientation and displacement that replace happiness itself with its
endless, futile support, the deformation of language, and the
replacement of real truth with mere effectiveness. We may lose any sense
of gratitude for what we’ve been given by nature and God, as what
appears to us to be impersonal natural evolution is gradually displaced
by conscious and volitional evolution. Specific contemporary issues will
be addressed in detail—such as psychopharmacological mood control, the
ambiguous prospect of indefinite longevity, and the possible emergence
of a postpolitical, postfamilial, postreligious world.
