One World, One People
S07
Eileen Scully
Are you a cosmopolitan “citizen of the world”? Do you anticipate that a unitary world government will bring more freedom for more people, promote universal tolerance, ensure greater equity of resources and opportunities, facilitate rapid and effective global responses to natural disasters and man-made atrocities, while generally staying out of your way, leaving you to do and say what you please? Absent the territorial boundaries, sovereign governments, and national identities that together historically demarcated “them” from “us,” how might individuals be held to account, bound by law, conscripted to serve, dunned for taxes, moved to share, drawn forth from the self? This structured, open-ended, sustained inquiry is an opportunity to think through such questions, while developing and testing individual and collaborative projections about what might, could, and should come. Anticipated multidisciplinary readings offer breadth and depth, engaging works in history, international relations, law, politics, psychology, sociology, literature, drama, art, philosophy, and futurism. Assignments and opportunities are tailored to strengthen capacities in each student to understand, explicate, analyze, refine, refute, defend, and advance ideas, both one’s own and those of others.