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Tim Morton being weird, three days a week, two hours a day, in your bluetooth speakers or whatever?
I'm not doing any lectures, so this is your chance to see where my mind is at. In addition to talking about ecology I am very highly trained at how to read things, because of my background in literary criticism and theory. Here's why this is important:
“Global warming” versus “climate change.” “Welfare” versus “social security” (which is what they used to call the exact same thing in the UK). Fake news. Tweets. What “they” think. Propaganda. “Science.” “Art.” These are just individual words and phrases and they have so much power. Power over us. This class is designed to help you extricate yourself from the gravitational fields of these words and concepts. By training you from the ground up in how to read any text at all, and how to write (not fancy stuff, but how to understand what you’re learning by doing it yourself), you will gain some immunity from propaganda and fake news and be able to help build a world based on decent sound facts.
A fact is an interpretation of data. The humanities is pre-science, like pre-med is what you take before medical school. In the middle ages, before you got to make scientific facts, you learned how to have facts at all. You learned the basic operating system of meaning (grammar), how to have meaning that was coherent (logic), and how to convey that to others (rhetoric).
Global warming data is way, way scarier than existing scientific facts. That’s because for years scientists were trying to make facts that would appeal to global warming deniers. This was a losing game. They already lost just by trying to play it. They should’ve taken this class.
