COURSE


COURSE

HEROES FOR OUR TIME

1. Barbara Marx Hubbard: Design for a Positive Future.  Host Barbara Marx Hubbard gathered together a multi-disciplinary Design Team that proposes an action agenda for solving society’s dilemmas, such as an “Office for the Future” and a “Peace Room” in the White House.

2. Buckminster Fuller: Grandfather of the Future.  Geodesic dome designer Buckminster Fuller gives a concise summary of his key ideas, like building design science, using new materials to do more with less, and investing in livingry rather than weaponry.

3. The Patch Adams Story: Creating a Model Health Care System.  Mike Farrell describes Patch on stage as “a giant, a revolutionary, a medical doctor who believes in the healing power of love and attention.”  Clips from the hit 1998 movie with Robin Williams summarize Patch Adam’s early career.  Patch sketches his vision for Gesundheit! Institute, a comprehensive health care delivery facility planned on his land in Pocahontas County, West Virginia.

4. Mikhail Gorbachev: A Man for the Ages.  This program covers Mikhail Gorbachev’s background, rise to power, and animating principles.  As Premier of the Soviet Union, he changed the face of the modern world, by helping to end the Cold War and liberating Eastern Europe.

5. The Dalai Lama: Tibet as a Zone of Peace.  Spiritual leader of the Tibetan people and former head of its government in exile, the Dalai Lama has proposed establishing the entire Tibetan plateau as a zone of peace and non-harm.  This status could protect its ecology and the monsoon patterns of the surrounding watersheds in China, India, and Bangladesh, home to over two billion people.

6. Action Agenda for the Earth: Strengthening the United Nations for the 21st Century.  A comprehensive peace-sustaining UN system would reduce armed conflict.  A self-financing planetary development program can eradicate poverty, civilize transnational corporate globalization, and secure human rights universally.  Instituting at the U.N. an ongoing Global Civil Society Forum could focus world attention on meeting every earthling’s needs.  Part I: “Transforming the United Nations.” 

 Background Readings

Marshall McLuhan The Medium is the Massage
R. Buckminster Fuller Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
Teilhard de Chardin The Phenomenon of Man

For part of each session, members will read aloud their selected passages from the assigned books.  Texts will have sufficient time for review to permit a deep immersion in the author’s transformative vision.  The instructor poses three questions in response to the main themes of the work for pairs and foursomes to consider.

The general idea of the course is to expose participants to alternative views.  Class members’ sharings revolve around what they are used to thinking, and whether they are willing to consider evolving their customary understanding.