Photo Credit: Frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, by Abraham Bosse
What would Thomas Hobbes say about Covid-19 lockdowns? Would John Stuart Mill approve of the restriction on speech in the form of Twitter and Facebook banning Donald Trump from their platforms after the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol? How have arguments employed by Augustine in The City of God influenced Christian sexual ethics today? These are just a small handful of the questions I remember discussing in my Contemporary Civilizations class as we attempted to bridge the wide gap between our present moment and the syllabus spanning from Ancient Athens through the Enlightenment up to twentieth-century thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Two years later, these are also some of the most memorable debates that come to mind when I think back to the class. An easily overlooked but valuable element of the Core Curriculum is the insight the ideas from these courses offer to some of the most pressing political and social questions of our present day.
I took Contemporary Civilizations during the entirely remote 2020-2021 school year, and what I took away from the class was thoroughly informed by the exceptional national and global events that occurred over that year. The constant reminders that we were living through “unprecedented times” were juxtaposed by the deep range of connections between the texts we were reading and the present issues in the world. In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, we read Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses on Livy and considered what advice a twenty-first-century Machiavellian political strategist would offer each candidate. Discussing whether we needed a Leviathan in 2020 as the second wave of Covid-19 infections hit that winter provided a perspective on the world I didn’t expect to find in a class on Zoom.
As someone who majors in political science and philosophy, connecting what I study to contemporary events is a practice I’ve repeated continuously throughout my time at Columbia.
However, I still think the way the Core facilitates these conversations is valuable in ways my more specialized major courses have not been because of the way it brings together all Columbia College students, not just those particularly committed to studying politics. The Core allows Columbia students of all disciplines to come together to discuss texts and ideas of enduring importance. Considering essential issues of humanity in a group with different perspectives and academic priorities creates a special environment where many students get to think about fundamental issues that they otherwise would not have another space devoted to doing so.
While my time in Contemporary Civilizations happened to coincide with a global pandemic and an attempted coup, the Core Curriculum creates a space for meaningful contemporary political discussions at any time. That’s the beauty of it. I envy the second-year students currently taking Contemporary Civilizations who get to connect their conversations to the world in 2023. For example, a class today could discuss how Foucault’s writing on the Panopticon Effect connects to the new viral social media platform BeReal. The premise of the app is simple—once a day at a random time, it prompts users that it’s “time to be real,” and they have two minutes to take and upload pictures from both the front and back phone camera of whatever they’re doing at that moment. While I won’t unpack my thoughts on the panoptic nature of the app in this blog post, this is just one example of how a Contemporary Civilization text informed the way I think today. As I prepare to leave Columbia next month, I am grateful for the space the humanities-based nature of the Core has offered me and my peers to discuss topics that matter to all of us.