reflection week 10

Friday’s class was one of the most beneficial to me probably of the entire semester thus far. This is not to say that the other classes were not beneficial but after Friday’s class I understood embedded and disembedded liberalism much more than I had previously. On Tuesday I came to class thinking I had a vague understanding of the topic but as we got into the fishbowl discussion the conversation would take us into a new arena. At that point what I heard seemed to contradict what I thought I knew about the subject so I kept thinking that my understanding was either incorrect or just incomplete. However, since I had a model with which to place the concepts during Friday’s class I understood the basic ideas about embedded and disembedded liberalism much better. The concepts seemed so easy during that class I could not believe I could not understand it after reading a thirty page article on the topic. This is in no way to say that the article was not useful but I think it shows how learning is much easier when you have a concrete example to accompany the theories. They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I definitely think that is true and it goes even deeper than a simple picture. It extends even to physical models like the candy game that we played in class on Friday. I think I could have read thousands of pages of writing about embedded liberalism but it was one of those things that I needed to see in practice in order to actually understand.
At first, though, I was skeptical about the activity because I did not understand the rules of the game and once the rules changed I was even more annoyed that I had to give up my precious candy to comply with the arbitrary rules set by individuals who possessed no candy and did not have to play the game themselves, in other words, group 2. I would imagine this is how nations, especially wealthy ones, feel when they are expected to comply with the rules set forth by international organizations. They are going along making money, accumulating resources and then all of a sudden they are expected to give up their resources arbitrarily without even the threat of punishment for noncompliance. This happened in the game as well. Our group had candy stolen from it by the ICF over our strong objection, but since the ICF had no concrete authority over us and the ICF’s candy reserves were not well guarded, we stole it back. However, by the end I was very content with what we had accumulated though perhaps others had more because we saw our candy as valuable so we stopped trading. Essentially we were a country that has the resources it needs and believes its own resources are superior to its counterparts and therefore there is no reason to trade.
The activity displayed the concepts of embedded and disembedded liberalism very well and it helped me understand them. I think activities like this are very helpful in understanding the complex philosophies that we discuss in this class. I would certainly like to do more of them in the future.