Wednesday, March 28, 2012

DAY 33 Viet Nam, Cultural Change, Sub-Cultures at School.

We continued and finished today with my lecture on How Cultures Change.


Included here is a link to a James Burke, "The Day the Universe Changed" episode wherein a Scottish Witch Trial occurs 300 years ago.  The events in the clip are easy to understand, a suspected witch is tortured, tried and then burned alive at the stake.  What we see is quite barbaric and meaningless because we (tend not to) do not believe in witches or such crude means of holding a trial and certainly we do not think it's right to burn people alive any more.  But what the people involved in this trial saw was something entirely different - a witch who needed to suffer and then be burned alive so that her soul could be saved and then sent heavenward on the smoke of the fire.

This raises the question of how two groups of highly intelligent people, one group from the 16th century and our modern group, could possibly see the event so differently?  The answer, of course, is in our belief systems - if the common belief is that it's a good thing to catch a witch and then torture and burn her to save her soul then people will certainly follow that belief.  If your belief is that witches do not exist and that torturing people is not acceptable behaviour then you will consider such behaviour unacceptable.

This idea of creating a reality (set of truths) based on beliefs, customs, teachings, values, etc. and then living your life accordingly has great implications for all societies.  In fact, that is exactly how societies and cultures operate - whether or not the set of "truths" are correct or not!


We ended up with a fine example of a changing modern technology and how it swung the debate against the US involvement in the Viet Nam war in the early 1970s.  Here's a link to that slideshow.  Viet Nam War Portrayal in the Media.

I will be away for the next six classes (April 2 - 11) so I'll post one blog entry for those days - it will be called DAY 34 - 39.  There are two projects for you to work on in there - Mrs. Boychuck will be with you for those classes, mostly held in the Library Lab, so please work well for her, she's a wonderful teacher and person.

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