INSTRUCTIONS FOR FINAL POSC101

POST FULL FINAL (Introduction, 2050 essay, Culture Chart and narrative, Structures Chart and narrative; and Conclusion) as file upload under FULL FINAL Assignment.

The 2050 exercise is a take home final. You should be able to complete it in two days.

First day:

(1) Completed in advance: Imagine your ideal world and paint me a word picture (about five pages) the goal here is to let me see life as it is lived in your best world (essay, short story, poetry, video, illustration, poster or whatever). It is your world; show it your way.

(2) Do the chart for the four cultural paradigms! Radical Liberalism from the Stewart’s text is the culture coded in the template for USA 2017. Code the paradigms for Legitimacy, Organization, Basic Unit and Concept for your culture in 2050. Give your culture 2050 a name. Modify your basic truths with the concessions needed to make them work, as in the Radical Liberal example - HIERARCHY OF MERIT/ELECTORAL EQUALITY. DO IT WITH PENCIL AND PAPER OR USE YOUR COMPUTER: WHATEVER WORKS BEST.

(3) Rough out your explanation. What changed and how? Do a paragraph to a page comparing 2017 and 2050 on each of the four cultural dimensions. WORK FROM YOUR CHART!!!

(4) Do the James Madison thing. Look at your people (Human Nature(s) in 2050 and figure out the kind of government that will work for them. Then, like Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes, devise economic structures that will allow them to produce the things necessary for the good life according to their paradigms. MAKE YOUR CHART FOR THE TWO STRUCTURAL DIMENSIONS.

(5) Write a paragraph to a page for each of your structures explaining how they match up with human nature, as understood in your 2050 culture.

LEAVE IT OVERNIGHT!

SECOND DAY:

MAKE ADJUSTMENTS AND TYPE YOUR CHARTS.
(Make sure that the coding in your chart captures and matches up with your narrative text—you can adjust both the coding and the narrative.)

EDIT AND REWRITE YOUR TEXT
(Five pages for Imagine. Six or seven pages for the paradigms-some will take only a paragraph while others may take 2 to 3 pages. Each of the cultural chapters in Stewart's book provides a model for your analysis.)

WRITE A BRIEF INTRODUCTION (A page or so.)

INSERT YOUR CHARTS IN THE TEXT FOR EASE OF READING

READ THE WHOLE THING

WRITE YOUR CONCLUSION: LOOKING BACKWARD
(A page or two on the revolution (evolution, if your world remains Liberal) that resulted in the new culture and /or way of life.)

Part III

For Part III both Bellamy, Looking Backward and Stewart, Understanding Politics are required reading. You must read Looking Backward independently to prepare the Boston 2000 exercise and to prepare yourself for and the Imagine! Half of the final. That is a full quarter (1/4) of the course grade! We will work through the portion of Understanding politics necessary to prepare you for the second half of the final together.

Bellamy's novel is a model for thinking about/imagining a future or looking backward from that future. He also fits hand in glove with Stewart's analytical framework--it's as if he'd read Understanding Politics, but he wrote about Boston 2000 almost 100 years to the day before Stewart published his book. Looking Backward is a model for you 2050 Imagine essay that is due March 4. We will work through the Stewart text together as scheduled on the calendar. You will do a Stewart analysis of Boston 2000 and submit your correctly coded chart in class on March 6.

Dave Barry, On College

Many of you young persons out there are seriously thinking about going to college. (That is, of course, a lie. The only things you young persons think seriously about are loud music and sex. Trust me: These are closely related to college.)

College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly 2,000 hours and try to memorize things. The 2,000 hours are spread out over four years; you spend the rest of the time sleeping and trying to get dates.

Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:

Things you will need to know in later life (2 hours). These include how to make collect telephone calls and get beer-and-crepe-paper stains out of your pajamas.

Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours). These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in "ology," "osophy," "istry," "ics," and so on. The idea is, you memorize these things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them, you become a professor, and have to stay in college for the rest of your life.

It's very difficult to forget everything. For example, when I was in college, I had to memorize-don't ask me why-the names of three metaphysical poets other than John Donne. I have managed to forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two were named Vaughan and Crashaw. Sometimes, when I'm trying to remember if my wife told me to get tuna packed in oil or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw just pop up in my mind, right there in the supermarket. It's a terrible waste of brain cells.

After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: Be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers.

This means you must not major in mathematics, physics, biology or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts. If, for example, you major in mathematics, you're going to wander into class one day and the professor will say: "Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis, and extrapolate your result to five significant vertices." If you don't come up with exactly the answer the professor has in mind, you fail. The same is true of chemistry: If you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your professor will flunk you. He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have agreed on. Scientists are extremely snotty about this.

So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology and sociology-subjects in which nobody really understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual facts. I attended classes in all these subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:

English: This involves writing papers about long books you have read little snippets of just before class. Here is a tip on how to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying "Moby Dick." Anybody with any common sense would say Moby Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly 11,000 times. So in your paper, you say Moby Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked "Moby Dick" anyway, will think you are enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.

Philosophy: Basically this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.

Psychology: This involves talking about rats and dreams. Psychologists are obsessed with rats and dreams. I once spent an entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a certain sequence, then training my roommate to do the same thing. The rat learned much faster. My roommate is now a doctor. Studying dreams is more fun. I had a professor who claimed everything we dreamed about-tractors, Arizona, baseball, frogs-actually represented a sexual organ. He was very insistent about this. Nobody wanted to sit near him. If you like rats or dreams, and above all if you dream about rats, you should major in psychology.

Sociology [Political Science probably fits in here.]: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away the No. 1 subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into a scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you'll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write: "Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of pre-maturated isolates indicates that a causal relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrymatory, or 'crying' behavior forms." If you can keep this up for 50 or 60 pages, you will get a large government grant.