Swimme Slide Show

HMXP 102Dr. Fike

Vocabulary

• Promulgate (par. 6) • cosmology (par. 11)• recalcitrant (par. 12)

• Note that we must stop at 23 minutes before the end of the period to make sure that we can view all of the film.

Introduction

• My former students thought that blacks are not disadvantaged, that women are pretty much equal to men, and that their own relationships were not dysfunctional.

In other words…

• They saw themselves as exceptions to the situations described by DuBois, McIntosh, Gilligan, Belenky (in a previous ed.), and Hemingway. 

• They also thought that ads had not affected them.

Writing in Class

• Do you believe that ads affect you? • If not, are you like the white people whom McIntosh

talks about (affected but unaware of the effect)? • How many of your are WEARING ads today?• Are you here at Winthrop University to enable yourself

to get more stuff? • Do you feel dissatisfaction?• Write for 5-7 minutes about your personal connection

to the reading for today.• Discuss your answers with the class.

Group Work

• Work in small groups to identify main points and key passages on one of Swimme’s pages.– What is his thesis statement?– What are his main points?– What passages did you mark?

• Each group takes one page of Swimme’s text.

Question

• Why is consumerism so effective? Many answers are possible. What do YOU think? What does Swimme think?

Possible AnswersMain Answers• We are intellectually lazy ().• Consumerism is a religion/cult ().• Americans are spiritually empty. Consumerism fills the void ().• Consumerism affects our unconscious minds ().• We are alienated from ourselves and from objects of production

().• We have lost a sense that consumerism has environmental 

consequences ().

Other Answers• Advertising saturates our culture.• And once we embrace consumerism, we are never satisfied with

any thing. Dissatisfaction.

Intellectual Laziness

• "We learned to accept it [consumerism] so long ago we hardly ever think about it anymore" (par. 2).

• "The fact that consumerism has become the dominant world faith is largely invisible to us..." (par. 14, right).

Consumerism AS Religion?

• Is consumerism really a religion or cult? • What are the implications of claiming that it

is? • Do you agree with Swimme's definition of

faith? "Faith is that which a person holds to be the hard-boiled truth about reality" (par. 11).

Spiritual Emptiness/Alienation

• Are you really not alienated, or are you just passive and not self-aware? Or are you self-aware without having experienced alienation?

• When you watch the following Superbowl ad, do you enjoy it? When you really think hard about the ad, does its appeal suggest that you are emptier than you may have realized? What “assumptions” (par. 3) about the good life does the ad convey?

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuZ2POqYRys

Amplification: More on Jesus

• Do you agree that there is no authentic spiritual development today? Many of you consider yourselves to be Christians, but does consumerism becloud your commitment to Christ? Consider Jesus's statement to the guy who asks what he has to do to be saved:

Mark 10:21 GWT: “Jesus looked at him and loved him. He told him, ‘You're still missing one thing. Sell everything you have. Give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then follow me!’”

Homology

• If Jesus conveys religious/spiritual truth, who in the realm of material consumption conveys the message that we cannot be happy with what we have?

• Jesus is to Christianity as ______________is to consumerism?

The Unconscious Mind

• “The last thing we want to think about as we’re lying on the couch relaxing is the philosophy behind the ad. So as we soak it all up, it sinks down deep in our psyche” (par. 8).

Possibilities

• The Bible states that one cannot love God and Mammon (wealth).

• Is it possible to embrace consumerism and still be a good person?

• Can one still be an "ideal human" (par. 12)?

• Do you agree that consumerism distracts us from goodness, love, wisdom, and justice?

Transition

• So far, we have examined the bad news.

• Let’s look now at the good news.

Good People: “ideal human”?

• Whom does Swimme admire?

Good People

• Rachel Carson• Jesus• Socrates• Martin Luther King• Confucius

• What do these people have in common?• Does Swimme put himself in the same category?

Swimme’s Solution

• What does it mean to say "that we live within a sacred universe“ (par. 15, last sentence)?

• In other words, what is "the new cosmology" that Swimme advocates in his final paragraph?

• What does this mean for YOU?

Environmentalism

• http://www.storyofstuff.com• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gorqroig

qM (22 minutes)

• What points arise from this little presentation?

END