Capstone: The Exam, the Bands, and the Sample Questions

This is Unit Nineteen of Western Civilization Two, part two of two, and the last lecture of the course: three drills, the chain of twelve bands, and what the course could not source. Part one worked five of the board's eight sample questions. This part works the last three, a map and two readings of one passage, and it pays off the unit's governing idea: twelve bands make one chain, every link taught in the eighteen units before this one, so that the next question on the exam is one link of that chain. Then the course does what a course built on named sources owes its learner. It names the nineteen names that no anchor, witness or located document carries, and the six items it teaches from the standard record and says so, because its rule is that a fact is voiced only when a source on disk carries it. The rule cost those names; it bought every other claim its citation. By the end you will be able to work the Berlin map. To work the two Locke questions. To state the chain. And to name the gaps and the rule.

Three drills: one city in four sectors, a passage on the mind as blank paper and whose it is, and what that passage means for how humans know.

A curtain divides a continent; sectors divide a city.

WC2 1820 Drill 6: Reading the Berlin Map

The sixth question shows a map of a city divided into four sectors, three marked with the French, British and American flags in the west and one with the Soviet flag in the east, and asks what it portrays: Europe in the Second World War, Berlin during the Cold War, occupied Germany in nineteen eighteen, the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe, or German reunification in nineteen ninety. The feature to read is scale and division: one city, four occupiers. Europe in the war is a continent and had no four-power sectors. Nineteen eighteen saw no occupation of Berlin at all. The Iron Curtain is a line across a continent, and Berlin sits a hundred miles behind it. Reunification in nineteen ninety ended the sectors. Only Berlin between forty-five and eighty-nine was a city cut in four, its western sectors an island inside the Soviet zone, blockaded in forty-eight and walled in sixty-one. The answer is Berlin during the Cold War. The Iron Curtain is the trap, because the flags are the Cold War's.

Find the claim, name the doctrine, match the owner.

WC2 1821 Drill 7: Whose Viewpoint the Quotation Represents

The seventh and eighth questions share a quotation the board's page does not print, and the key tells the course which it is: a passage on the mind as blank paper, written on by experience, the position the course reads from Locke's Essay of sixteen ninety. The seventh asks whose viewpoint it represents, and offers Descartes, Voltaire, Burke, Newton and Locke. Eliminate by doctrine. Descartes held that some ideas are innate, the opposite claim. Voltaire admired Locke and popularized him, but the passage is the source, not the admirer. Burke wrote on revolution and tradition, not the mind's furniture. Newton wrote on motion and light, and his method is Locke's model, not his subject. The answer is Locke, and the method for any quotation question is the same: find the claim, name the doctrine, and match it to the one author on the list who held it. Voltaire is the trap, because he said Locke's things in France; the exam asks for the viewpoint's owner.

Blank means writable, not empty.

WC2 1822 Drill 8: What the Quotation Means for Knowledge

The eighth question asks which statement best reflects the quotation's significance, and offers the traditional Judeo-Christian answer to how humans know, knowledge inherently imprinted at birth, knowledge gained through practical contact with and observation of events, a mind fixed and unshapeable by education, and extreme skepticism about any knowledge. The course's reading supplies the test: if the mind begins as white paper, then everything on it was written by experience, sensation and reflection, so knowledge comes from contact with the world. Eliminate. Imprinted at birth is innate ideas, the doctrine the passage denies. A mind fixed and unshapeable is the reverse of paper that anything can write on; Locke's point made education all-powerful. Extreme skepticism doubts that experience yields knowledge; Locke says it is the only thing that does. The Judeo-Christian answer, revelation, is not in the passage. The answer is knowledge through observation, which the Enlightenment took as its charter. The fourth option is the trap, since blank sounds like empty and empty like limited. Blank means writable.

One capstone entry: twelve bands, one chain, from Westphalia's sovereign states to the Wall coming down, with one word per band in order.

Sovereignty, commerce, method, reason, revolution, industry.

WC2 1823 Twelve Periods, One Exam: The Threads That Run 1648 to the Present

Twelve bands, one chain, every link taught in the eighteen units before this one. Westphalia left Europe's states sovereign in sixteen forty-eight, and the first band asks how they ruled: Louis the Fourteenth built the absolutist model and bankrupted it; the Dutch and the English showed that a state could grow stronger by limiting its king; Prussia, Austria and Russia built absolutisms on serfdom, Peter's by a Table of Ranks. Commerce reordered their power, sugar, slaves and companies, and Utrecht made a balance the century fought to keep. Meanwhile Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton taught Europe to read the world by method, and Locke taught it that the mind is paper experience writes on. The Enlightenment turned that reason on the society of orders, and enlightened despots borrowed it while partitioning Poland. In seventeen eighty-nine bankruptcy became revolution, revolution became Terror, Terror became Napoleon, and Napoleon exported the Revolution to a Europe that defeated him and rebuilt the balance at Vienna. Britain meanwhile turned coal into industry and industry into class, and the four ideologies of the next generation fought it out in eighteen thirty and forty-eight and lost to the old order. Then the old order took nationalism for itself: Cavour and Bismarck built Italy and Germany by war, Austria compromised, Russia freed its serfs into debt, and Bismarck's alliances kept an armed peace while science remade life, Darwin remade thought, and Europe took four-fifths of the globe. The alliances, the armies and the resentments met at Sarajevo; four years of trenches took twenty million and three empires; Russia went to Lenin, Versailles satisfied no one, and the democracies of nineteen twenty despised themselves by thirty-three, when a Depression handed Germany to Hitler as Italy had been handed to Mussolini. The second war took sixty million and six million by timetable, and left Europe divided at Berlin between two outside powers. It lost its empires in sixteen years, built a welfare state and then a Union, and watched the other half of the continent freed in eighty-nine when Gorbachev let go. That is the exam, and the next question on it is one link of this chain. Sovereignty, commerce, method, reason, revolution, industry, ideology, nation, empire, war, dictatorship, division and union: one word per band, in order. The chain is the course's arrangement of the anchor's chapters, not a thesis the anchor states, and it claims nothing an owned entry does not claim. Use it to place a question in its band, then the unit's capstone for the chain within it, then the entry for the fact.

One disclosure entry: the names no source on disk carries, the items taught from the standard record, and the rule that cost the one and bought the other.

No source, no claim.

WC2 1824 What This Course Could Not Source: The Disclosure Entry (W-2)

A course built on a named anchor and named witnesses owes the learner a list of what it could not find in any of them, and this entry is that list. The following names appear in the course only here or as marked disclosures, never taught as facts, because neither the anchor, nor the four witness texts, nor a located primary document carries them: the Dutch regents and the De Witts, whose republic the course teaches through William the Third instead; the Reform Act of eighteen sixty-seven, the second British franchise; Magenta and Solferino, the battles of eighteen fifty-nine, taught by their year; Königgrätz, or Sadowa, the battle of sixty-six, taught by its year; Boulanger, taught as a general unnamed; Nietzsche and Einstein, absent from every source, so that the century's turn is taught through Freud; Planck, Röntgen and Bergson, likewise; Livingstone; Brusilov, whose offensive of sixteen the anchor describes without his name; Erzberger, taught as the delegation's leader; Kronstadt, the sailors' rising of twenty-one; Matteotti, taught as a deputy unnamed; the Lateran Accords of twenty-nine; Watson and Crick, whose double helix is taught as DNA in fifty-three; Beethoven; the asiento; and Mesmer. Beside them stand the items the course teaches from the standard record and says so: Britain's entry to the Community in seventy-three and the enlargement of two thousand four, the Constituent Assembly's dispersal, the expulsions' scale, Britain's franchise of twenty-eight, and the recognition of the Soviet Union in twenty-four. Every one of these is exam-plausible, and a learner who meets one on the exam should treat it as a name the course chose not to invent a source for. The reason is the course's rule: a fact is voiced only when a source on disk carries it, and the source is named. The rule cost these names; it bought every other claim in five hundred eighty-four entries its citation. This is not a list of things the course thinks unimportant; several appear in standard textbooks and may appear on the exam. It is a list of where the course's knowledge stops and where a review book must take over. The owner may close any item by adding a source, and the list is amended when that happens. Until then, the course would rather name a gap than fill it from memory, and this entry is the proof.

Look at what you can now do. You can work the Berlin map by scale and division, one city and four occupiers, with the Iron Curtain the trap. You can work the Locke questions by finding the claim, naming the doctrine and matching its owner, with Voltaire the trap in one and blank-means-empty the trap in the other. You can state the chain in twelve words, sovereignty to union, and use it to place any question in its band, then its unit, then its entry. And you can name the nineteen names the course could not source and the six items it teaches from the standard record, and say why: no source, no claim. That is the course. Unit one begins it again.