Available at the UCSD Bookstore. 

This course takes your college motto – toward a life in balance – as inspiration. Implicit in this motto is that life is out of balance, that the scales have tipped, that a counterweight is needed to restore balance.

The evidence of this imbalance is all around us. We see it in the call for renewed fracking as the world burns; in the rise of artificial intelligence alongside declining literacy rates; in increased protections for corporate persons alongside vanishing rights for vulnerable populations; in the fact that eight men own more wealth than 3.6 billion people; in the gulf separating the salaries of financiers from social workers, weapons developers from caregivers, bankers from teachers.

This course will give you a chance to articulate the feelings that come from life out of balance. But we will not stop there, with the scales tipped. Facing this imbalance, we will turn to a tradition that provides a counterweight: Humanism. The humanist tradition tends to those facets of our species atrophied by the imbalance: to our minds and hearts, to our existential struggles and freedom dreams, to art capable of expressing our struggles and dreams. Connecting with this tradition, we will recall and reclaim what it is to be human. We will slow our pace, talk and listen to each other, think critically through existential questions, learn from wise writers, and practice articulating our inner worlds through our written words.

Is our future predetermined? To what degree do we have individual and collective agency over our society as it progresses? How do we evaluate differing interpretations of the world we live in? 

Within this course, we’ll consider these questions inside a critical framework. In Unit 1, we’ll discuss the relationships and intersections between technological innovation and the natural world in the 21^st century. In Unit 2, we’ll look at how sociopolitical inequality and various fields of advanced academic study are both impacting, and impacted by, these two significant components of the modern world.  

In a practical sense, this course is focused on text-based argumentative writing. The final papers and projects in this class will ask you to take a critical stance on at least one of the readings in each unit, either by challenging some aspect of that reading, pointing out ways to expand its ideas using another text, or perhaps by synthesizing multiple readings that are each somehow incomplete or lacking on their own.  

Put another way: each unit asks you to identify problems with how at least one text presents its ideas, and to support your argument with an increasing array of evidence.  

The first unit focuses solely on textual evidence. It is designed both to strengthen students’ use of evidence in other disciplines, and to provide a new challenge to students who may already hail from writing-intensive majors. The second unit combines textual analysis with the use of personal narrative, and invites students to add outside sources to the course readings. In addition, the class offers practice in feedback and revision, reflection, and group work.