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Values in an Ecology of Tensions
Motif
People value
People have values
People exchange value
People choose by weighing values
People account value
People are accountable for values
People act and reveal value
People act and reveal values
People reason about greater and lesser
value
People reason about values as more or
less valuable
People share value and values
This weaves social fabric
A fabric of choices woven by reasoning
Enacted in tensions and integrity
A fabric of that is, develops, sustains
and evolves
Through institutions of conversation
Culture, language, conversation make
humans deeply social. At the core of our social nature is an embodied sense of
moral accounting. We hear from every child (from the moment they can express it
in words) a ‘claim’ of ‘that’s not fair’. Our sense of moral, emotional, social
accounting is biologically embodied. One could argue that when primates groom
each other they are paying debt or establishing credit enacting a homeostasis
within a dynamic social fabric.
How humans account and take into
account the discernment of values and value - are all forms of technology.
These technologies can include culture and language. What they do is extend memory
beyond individual recall, and enable an external recording of accounts that can
be publicly verified. As McLuhan and other have noted human shape technologies
and technologies shape humans - technology is the most human thing about us.
The human-technology dyad is complex, entangled and evolving. It both shapes
the boundary conditions that in turn shape the attractors of our ideas, our
memes and experiences of moral fabric which in turn change the boundary
conditions nudging the human environment toward new attractors.
This short paper will set the stage for
a longer paper that will explore the confluence of Values and Value in the
emerging digital environment. In turn, the digital environment is enabling
unprecedented capacities to account for value, value creation in all domains of
social and individual life and accredit the enactment of our values.
Key Context
The idea that science provides
Value-Free – Objective, Self-Evident-Fact which equals TRUTH (in itself - or is
the foundation of TRUTH) has always been scientifically inadequate. This
inadequacy acted as Science’s Shadow (in a Jungian sense) as it fought the
culture wars against the corporate organizations of Religion (defined as
arbitrary Dogmas of beliefs and faith).
Religious dogma and Science dogma are
competing forms of certainty. Both types of dogma are inherently
self-referential. We trust science because it can establish verifiable facts –
which in turn are trustworthy because science establishes the facts by framing
them within a theory. We trust religions because they establish beliefs which
in turn are established by how religions can frame them within a dogma.
Although a century has passed since
Einstein destroyed the ‘objective frame of reference’ and proposed that space
and time were really a unity of space-time, our socio-cultural frameworks still
haven’t come close to integrating that realization within daily life. It is
curiously hard to grasp how many of the previous pillars supporting our
worldviews have been shattered in the 20th century. For example some basic
science breakthroughs that shatter the concept of a clockwork universe include:
- Einstein – that there is no objective frame of reference,
- Bertrand Russell – the inconsistency of mathematic (essentially of all formal systems of logic)
- Godel – that even if a system of logic were consistent –it would inevitable have unprovable (e.g. blind-spots) and thus the fundamental incompleteness of systems of formal logic,
- Quantum Mechanics’ – uncertainty principle (how we observe changes the observed – inability to know position and momentum simultaneously) and entanglement,
- Turing’s stopping/halting problem – adding to Godel’s incompleteness.
- Chaos – the fundamental unpredictability of deterministic systems due to sensitivity to initial conditions,
- Freud, Jung and many others revealing the unconscious determinants of behavior – more recent cognitive & social science such as George Lakoff, Kahneman and Tversky and many others, demolishing the notion of the ‘rational actor’
- Complexity sciences – and the unpredictability of emergent phenomena – non-reducibility of wholes and inability to model some phenomena (e.g. some complex systems can’t be reduced).
- The displacement of a ‘physics worldview’ by biology-complexity science framework including the unpredictability of emergent properties
- More and Moore….
This short list of breakthroughs has
shattered the pillars of certainty – ushering in the 21st Century as the
century of complexity and uncertainty. Even the concept of evolution is evolving
– among numerous possibilities one recent article in Nautil.us by Philip Ball
discusses some of the work in this area:
This short list of breakthroughs has
shattered the pillars of certainty – ushering in the 21st Century as the
century of complexity and uncertainty. Even the concept of evolution is evolving
– among numerous possibilities one recent article in Nautil.us by Philip Ball
discusses some of the work in this area:
Exactly which genes you have may not
matter so much (within reason), because the job they do is more a property of
the network in which they are embedded.
This suggests that evolvability, and
the corollary of creativity or innovability, is a fundamental feature of
complex networks like those found in biology.
…it seems likely that the answer lies
beyond biology. Karthik Raman, a former postdoc in Wagner’s lab, now at the
Indian Institute of Technology Madras, has studied much the same issues of
functional equivalence of different circuits not for genes but for electronic
components that carry out binary logic functions. By randomly rewiring circuits
of 16 components and figuring out which of them will perform particular logic
operations, Raman found that they too have this evolvable topology. But
crucially, this property appeared only if the circuits were complex enough—if
they had too few components, small changes destroyed their function. “The more
complex they are, the more rewiring they tolerate,” says Wagner. Not only does
this open up possibilities for electronic circuit design using Darwinian
principles, but it suggests that evolvability, and the corollary of creativity
or innovability, is a fundamental feature of complex networks like those found
in biology.
Manrubia agrees that complexity is the
key. “It seems clear that efficient navigability can only be achieved in genotype
spaces of high dimensionality,” she says. That simply puts more options in
reach—because you have more directions to reach in. “As the number of possible
neighbors of a sequence increases, the likelihood that some of those neighbors
has a viability comparable to the original one grows.” One consequence, she
says, is that there could be an adaptive imperative favoring larger genomes, at
least for organisms inhabiting varying environments: That way, you gain more in
robustness than you lose in the labor of replicating and maintaining a lot of
DNA.
These ideas suggest that evolvability
and openness to innovation are features not just of life but of information
itself. That is a view long championed by Schuster’s sometime collaborator,
Nobel laureate chemist Manfred Eigen, who insists that Darwinian evolution is
not merely the organizing principle of biology but a “law of physics,” an
inevitable result of how information is organized in complex systems. And if
that’s right, it would seem that the appearance of life was not a fantastic
fluke but almost a mathematical inevitability.
And that’s the rub - there is no clear,
pure, uncontaminated, unmitigated TRUTH about Values.
However, the legitimacy of any ‘truth’
arises from trusted social institutions – which are how human enact forms of conversation.
For example, the conversations represented by the institution of science are
shaped by rules and processes (ever evolving in rigor) that enable participant
to come to agreement on evidence/facts that support theories. It is the quality
of transparent institutional conversations that is the source of legitimacy –
not the appeal to ‘authority’ but to evidence-supported-by reasoning (theory)
tested through methods and technologies of rigorous ongoing conversations.
A complex society has many institutions.
A very useful definition of an institution (to distinguish it from an
organization) is provided by Douglass North (a Nobel Laureate in economics)
which I paraphrase as: ‘Institutions are the rules of the game and
organizations are the players in the game’. For example, the institution of
marriage could be understood as the rules of publicly committed relationships,
while the players in the institution would include: religious organizations,
civil organizations, private sector enterprises involved in the ‘marriage
business’, narratives of romantic love, individuals wanting a committed
relationship, etc.
I would add a nuance to North’s
definition of institutions. Rather than seeing them as ‘rules of the game’ I
think they are better conceived as ‘rules of the conversation’. Rules that
enable honest conversations and keep conversants honest.
In his 10 January farewell speech,
President Obama made the point that democracy is most fundamentally a system
for conversations – about ideas, values, means and ends. Conversations that we
engage with in order to achieve a more ‘perfect union’. It is only through
engaged and honest conversations can a democratic society and culture,
establish any form of shared reality. An open and democratic society that enables
the production of a shared reality enables people to align values. To do this
requires many types of transparent institutions – structured to steward
generative conversations, including institutions of science, law, politics,
religion-spirit, health, political-economics, civil engagement and many more.
Without legitimate institutions of conversation, we have no hope of generating
the requisite trust for sustaining social and human progress.
It seems that most of the current
preoccupation with the state of our institutions if almost entirely focused on
the political institutions of conversation. However, the decades of assault on
government – haven’t only been about anti-science but also about anti-religion,
and most importantly - about anti-institutions.
What seems to be left out of the
current debate about ‘fake news’ and the ‘post-truth’ era – is the many decades
of corrosive, coercive and ubiquitous influence of advertising and marketing in
shaping media institutions and content. It is a truism that mainstream media
delivers viewers as their real product to their real clients – the marketers.
Main stream media has been – of-for-by Big Business. There is a significant
body of thought that is concerned with the transformation of the citizen into
the rational consumer - end-user. This is deeply worrisome. A shift from
citizen as equal participant to consumer-end-user is a shift in the rules of
power in the conversation.
Marketing has imbued our times and
experience. There is no aspect of modern life that hasn’t been ‘infected’ with
both the behavioral sciences and theologies of marketing. Key to the
institutions of marketing and the manufacturing of consent is a host of
methods, including cherry picking data and sources, or selective or out of
context quotes or comments, presenting false-equivalent views, omitting
genuinely alternative possibilities, conflating correlation with causation,
setting up straw men to attack, insinuating claims and the very careful
selection of metaphors and frames to shape how audience engage in the entailing
reasoning.
However, science also has played a
deeply important role in conditioning collective sensitivity away from the
certainties of Dogmas (whether scientific or religious) toward an apprehension
of uncertainty. Science has introduced the humanity to an inevitable
uncertainty that imbues our realities. This will be covered later in the paper.
The elemental context of exploration in this paper is summarized in two ‘sound
bites’ below. I ask the reader to suspend disbelief in order to follow trails
of reasoning shaping a exploration about value and values entailed by these paradoxical
probes.
The TRUTH is Dead – Long Live Honesty
Ethics are Dead – Long Live Social
Fabric
Reasoning about
Paradoxes of Value and Values
Value - Values
Often we begin a conversation about
Values with a focus on abstract concepts - things like justice, fairness,
equity, equality, freedom or more recently the environment, ecology,
sustainability, etc.
Companies, corporations, organizations
of all sorts and even nations try to define their culture in terms of some list
of Values. We seek to define a set of Values that can produce the ‘good life’.
Conversation about Values are
complicated because we often assume that reasoning means relying on formal
systems of logic - and thus that there is a single universal proper form of
reasoning. Further, in any formal system of logic, a contradiction is
considered evidence that there must be an error in one of the binary
proposition. For example one can’t be both, free and enslaved, autonomous and
dependent, fair and biased, etc.
The frame of right vs wrong also nudges
people to view Values as being a set of concrete, unitary, homogenous, pure
concepts - each matched with a binary opposite. For example Love vs Hate,
Equality vs Inequality, Diversity vs Homogeneity, etc.. The tendency to
framing contradiction as a right vs wrong problem rather than as an encounter
with paradox makes substantive conversation difficult. A frame of right vs
wrong nudges people toward argument - rather than conversations regarding
‘honest accounts’ of perceptions and experience. The frame of ‘honest accounts’
will be elaborated below.
Accounting
for Value-Values
In societies evolving toward liberal
political economies, the question of Values is entangled with metrics of
accounting. We accept as natural, efforts to measure Value Creation, exchange,
storage, etc.. We also try to measure how effectively we implement our
Values. Our language of accounting bridges the domains of Value (e.g. Values
Creation) and the systems of our Values that are embodied in our institutions
of conversation regarding justice, equity, loyalty, welfare, etc.
Value creation evokes the experience of
a concrete currency. However, currency is perhaps better imagined as a way to
accounting for information flow - or perhaps more easily understood as
information flow about value flow (creation, exchange, storage).
This might seem logically confusing –
conflating Values with accounting - but accounting is fundamental to social
fabric. For example, primates when grooming are establishing credit or paying
debt and even young children with cry out with claims of what is ‘fair’ (which
may not be inter-subjectively valid). One could easily argue that grooming is a
conversation accounts for the dynamics of the values of social fabric. Without
some form of acknowledgement via a metric of accounting – there is no way to
implement any system of Values.
Languaging
about Value-Values
Accepting that language is a technology
of memory, communication, reasoning and thinking – it is a technology that has
become a natural human-built environment (as McLuhan noted language doesn’t
live in human rather human exist in language) – one that evolves with uses and
in return also evolves the users.
Words act like wild animals: “We
don’t understand that no language could ever sit still”
As we language about and with Values –
we can only enact them in our lives, behavior and social experience through a
personal and interpersonal ‘accounting’ with which we guide our lives.
How do we take account of our enacted values? We do this all the time - who
hasn’t heard the phrase ‘I love you more than you love me’, or ‘You’re taking
advantage of me’. These statements and so many others don’t explicitly state a
precise metric - but they do assume a ‘social-moral’ bookkeeping in all of our
relationships.
Remember the proposition – Ethics
is Dead – Long Live Social Fabric? When we embrace the implications of
complexity and uncertainty – we immediately surrender our capacity to know in
objective or absolute terms - ‘The Good’. We have no way to determine is a
‘good’ action taken now will really produce ‘good’ results in the next step or
several step. In the same way we have no way to determine the corresponding
implications for a ‘bad’ action – will it really result in ‘bad’ consequences?
This determination of what is ultimately ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is the foundation of
Ethics.
Morality on the other hand is the relative
assessment of action taken in terms of social judgment. For example in Adam
Smith’s 'Theory of Moral Sentiment’ he elaborates that everyone in making a
choice of behavior asks themselves ‘what will others think’. He makes the case
that all of us – want to be ‘praiseworthy’ and ‘blameless’. It is in thinking
about moral sentiments that Adam Smith used the term ‘the invisible hand’ for
the first time – suggesting that when he used the same term in discussing
market systems – the regulation of such as system also depended on social and
‘moral fabric’ (not just the price mechanism). Thus, he also suggests, that moral
‘values’ accounting is fundamentally implicated in social fabric.
Since we’ve come to understand
relativity (no objective frame of reference), quantum phenomena (observer
changes what’s observed), chaos (sensitivity to initial conditions - hence
unknowability of how small a difference will make a difference or how large a
difference won’t make a difference at all), complexity (where new phenomena can
unpredictably emerge beyond a mere addition of components) and more and Moore.
What is in fact before us, as the reality of our survival, is the experience of
eternal wayfinding.
Wayfinding describes the process of
making our way when there is no map. Navigation is only possible when we have a
map and can plot a path from ‘A’ to ‘B’. For example – 99% of the time that a
regular airplane is travelling to its destination, it is off-course. But
because we have precise maps we continually determine precise destination -
‘the there’ and the precise locations ‘the here’. In this way, a continual
course correction enables the plane to arrive precisely at the right place. But
when the terrain is unknown, and even more – when it is always changing - then we
are immersed in a situation of wayfinding - making paths as we explore.
We live in a reality where each step we
make – changes the conditions of the next step we ‘can’ take. A continually
changing environment requires different types of choices.
The capacity to establish a dynamic
homeostasis of values in a robust and flourishing society-in-environment
is vital. But enacting such is a complex endeavour where values exist within an
ecology of tensions is very difficult and even more so within a ‘conversation
of paradoxes’.
It may seem strange to mix concepts of money-as-currents/currencies-of
exchange-of-value with conversations-as-wayfinding-negotiations-of-Values.
However, both are shaped by the attractors of value-creation. The problem is
that money is a highly constrained flow of highly constrained measures of
value. Whereas conversations of Values are widely open ‘ink-blots’ of
projection - current-seas that we negotiate in our wayfinding,
languaging and behavior.
The challenge, arising from this
structure of reasoning, points to the notion that a list of Values (as abstract
concepts) is less useful than an engaged conversation of values as they must be
negotiated and accounted for in our lives. This leads us to consider the idea
of a conversation dedicated to Value Creation, exchange, storage, etc. must be
developed - one that helps us address evolving networks of technology,
education, culture , collective memory and Language.
 |
| One data set - two hypotheses Occam's Razor is no help |
Another fundamental shift arising in
the 20th century and at the core of the 21st - is the notion of truth. As noted
at the beginning – the proposition for the 21st century could well be “Truth is
dead - Long live Honesty”. What does this proposition mean?
For example:
Science doesn’t ever ‘prove’ anything -
what it does do, is provide an honest account of evidence to support an honest
theory (one that tends to be accounted for as pragmatically useful). Science is
much more about ‘know how’ than ‘know why’. Or, all models are wrong, but some
are useful. This honest account is held accountable by the institutions of
conversation that we call peer-review.
A lawyer is not concerned with TRUTH of
justice, but should be concerned with an honest account of the legal means to
pursue or support a legal purpose. The honest account of lawyers is held
accountable by the institutions of conversation that include law review and
precedent.
A religious advocate (in the age of
science enabled reasoning) is concerned with an honest languaging that enables
an honest experience of faith (distinct from a simple intellectual or emotional
cleaving to a belief or dogma).
A politician’s work is not about the
TRUTH - but rather about an honest languaging that enables people to align with
an honest implementation of Values toward a common purpose.
By understanding that TRUTH (as an
absolute, incontestable reality) is impossible in conditions of the 21st
Century - we can focus on creating conditions for an engagement of
conversations about honest accounts of experience. This paradigm also enables
us to grasp how vital institutions of conversation are to an open democratic
society. Rather than being structured by an inadequate paradigm of formal logic
that presents only the possibility or right or wrong. Conversations focused on
‘honest accounts’ present a structure of evidence and reasoning based on
experience - including a more holistic inclusion of emotions, intuitions and
sensibilities.
Furthermore, is the fact that all
knowledge is always partial knowledge – the impossibility of complete knowing –
if only because any knower – can only know from a particular perspective and in
the act of knowing cannot know its process of knowing – similar to the eye not
being able to see itself seeing. Conversation is another way to frame what
Foucault defined as ‘Veridiction -production and circulation of truths that are
established, rather than foundational - but importantly govern.’
Paul Pangaro building on the work of
Gordon Pask’s conversation theory, offers a powerful model for Conversations.
This model using the acronym CLEAT. Conversation is a process for first
establishing the Context, for the coming to ‘terms’ about the Language being
used (meanings), which then enables the building of Engagement and
trust so that participants can become Aligned. Only then
can participants begin to implement visions, plans, Transactions in a
self-organizing-coordinating way. See Paul Pangaro – An Economy ofInsight Conversations as Transactions in the Future of Commerce
Thus institutions of conversations are
structured processes of aligning and enabling honest accounts - or maybe this
is what we should understand as what their purpose/function should be.
Inevitably such institutions would also include a social-moral licensing of
action. People would be responsible to act both as morals beings and grasp the
each of us exist in a socially constructed identity. As noted above in
reference to Adam Smith’ s ‘Theory of Moral Sentiments’ - the moral question
ubiquitous in all human behavior is measured and accounted for in the question
- ‘If I do x what will people think’).
Change in Conditions of Change
As a result of the shattering of the
pillars of certainty, the 20th
and perhaps even more in entering the early 21st
Centuries we experience a looming zeitgeist of a sort of immanent looming
transformation – the wars to end all wars, the rapture, nuclear Armageddon, the
digital Y2K apocalypse and the acceleration of change into the ‘Singularity’.
The twentieth century began with utopia
and ended with nostalgia. Optimistic belief in the future became outmoded,
while nostalgia, for better or worse, never went out of fashion, remaining
uncannily contemporary. The word “nostalgia” comes from two Greek roots, nostos
meaning “return home” and algia “longing.” I would define it as a longing for a
home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of
loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.
Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic
image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of
home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. The moment we
try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.
The word “nostalgia,” in spite of its
Greek roots, did not originate in ancient Greece. “Nostalgia” is only
pseudo-Greek, or nostalgically Greek. The word was coined by the ambitious
Swiss student Johannes Hofer in his medical dissertation in 1688. (Hofer also
suggested nosomania and philopatridomania to describe the same symptoms;
luckily, these failed to enter common parlance.) Contrary to our intuition,
“nostalgia” came from medicine, not from poetry or politics. It would not occur
to us to demand a prescription for nostalgia. Yet in the seventeenth century,
nostalgia was considered to be a curable disease, akin to a severe common cold.
Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a journey to the Swiss Alps
would take care of nostalgic symptoms. Among the first victims of the newly
diagnosed disease were various displaced people of the seventeenth century:
freedom-loving students from the Republic of Berne studying in Basel, domestic
help and servants working in France and Germany, and Swiss soldiers fighting
abroad. The epidemic of nostalgia was accompanied by an even more dangerous
epidemic of “feigned nostalgia,” particularly among soldiers tired of serving
abroad.
Nostalgia and Its Discontents - Svetlana Boym
Modern nostalgia is paradoxical in the
sense that the universality of its longing can make us more empathetic towards
fellow humans, and yet the moment we try to repair that longing with a
particular belonging—or the apprehension of loss with a rediscovery of identity
and especially of a national community and unique and pure homeland—we often
part ways with others and put an end to mutual understanding. Algia (or
longing) is what we share, yet nostos (or the return home) is what divides us.
The promise to rebuild the ideal home lies at the core of many powerful
ideologies today, tempting us to relinquish critical thinking for emotional
bonding. The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home
and the imaginary one. In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland, for
the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed
monsters. Yet the sentiment itself, the mourning of displacement and temporal
irreversibility, is at the very core of the modern condition. While claiming a
pure and clean homeland, nostalgic politics often produces a “glocal” hybrid of
capitalism and religious fundamentalism, or of corporate state and Eurasian
patriotism. The mix of nostalgia and politics can be explosive.
Nostalgia and Its Discontents - Svetlana Boym
The digital environment favors a
trajectory of near zero marginal cost and increasing network enablement - which
has been linked with an exponential increase in the value of a network. For
example, Metcalf’s law - the value of a network is the number of nodes squared
- n2. However, the value of a network has also be defined as a derivative of
‘group forming possibilities’ which would suggest a value of 2 to the power of
the number of nodes - 2n (Reed’s Law).
This suggests a real potential for new
forms of value creation (also exchange, storage and accounting) including
possibilities of participatory democracy - new means of engaging citizens and
assembling their knowledge and creativity as and when needed in a transparent
accounting of the Values involved.
Despite increasing efforts to impose
top-down control and ‘surveillance’, the efforts to colonize the possibilities
of emerging digital environment with frames and models of the past, will be
displaced. The economics of the digital environment are a change in conditions
of change that favor greater forms of self-organization for efficient and
effective action . The clockwork universe that promises control has been
shattered as the sciences of chaos and complexity have suggested.
Given the dissolution of a clockwork
and predictable universe we are forced to attend more deeply to an
understanding of language that enables institutions of conversation. Such
institutions facilitate the ability of wayfinding through the evolving and
embodied paradoxes of languaging as participants seek to understand each other.
(See Harry Collins’ ‘Explicit and Tacit Knowledge’ – Collins studies how scientist
actually work and share knowledge).
The context of sharing knowledge and
values must also include the powerful scaffolds provided by frames, metaphors
and narrative in establishing structures that form how people reason. Thus not
only is it an inevitable condition that nothing is black and white but also
that we have to move away from finding binary be-all and end-all Values.
Everything evolves and is emergent. We have no idea where we will end up.
The final page – explores the power of
metaphors to structure how we reason. Metaphors create an entailing logic. By
listing common metaphors people use to describe ‘love’, the entailing logic of
reasoning is illustrated. Another short example – even in math – the initial
metaphor for numbers were ‘points on a line’ until Cantor developed another
metaphor of sets (categories or buckets) with which to imagine and reason about
‘numbers’ (see Lakoff and Nunez, ‘Where Mathematics Comes From’).
Even more profound is that we
inevitably must ‘colonize’ the unknown with metaphors that we are familiar
with. The reason being is that a metaphor is essentially a
‘cross-domain-mapping-of-knowledge’. Thus, metaphors/frames/narratives are
necessary ways that enable humans to initially grasp new experiences, phenomena
or realities.
The challenge of the emerging digital
environment involves the problem of how we can align and account for value and
values. A possible suggestion lies in the capacity to harness shared meaning by
means of various sorts of folksonomy of crowdsourcing of perceptions. We can
see such possibilities in the many ways that various platforms use participant
accounts - such as reader reviews in Amazon, likes in Facebook-Twitter-Google+
and other platforms. These sorts of simple accounts of acknowledgement,
provides a sort of accounting of consensual value, value creation and
accounting of how people perceive Values being enacted.
The infosphere will eventually enable
the accounting of almost all instances of value creation and therefore enable
ways to credit and circulate new forms of value creation as currency. A
currency arising in various forms of conversation of values. For example the
emerging technology of the Blockchain (a massive distributed accounting ledger)
holds incredible promise to disrupt the traditions of currency. However this
sort of disruption faces cultural challenges that are almost mythical in
nature.
Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the
impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an “enchanted world” with
clear borders and values. It could be a secular expression of a spiritual
longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, for a home that is both physical and
spiritual, for the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history.
The nostalgic is looking for a spiritual addressee. Encountering silence, he
looks for memorable signs, desperately misreading them.
Nostalgia and Its Discontents - Svetlana Boym
This modern nostalgia includes a
yearning for ‘moral clarity’ of a binary, right and wrong - of simple concrete
Values with clear opposites. Despite the 20th century’s long list of
destruction of binary paradigms, the challenge of overcoming a binary worldview
seems as difficult as ever. There is also another contributing nuance to
a cultural clinging to this sort of nostalgic perception. We must all contend
with the zeitgeist of immanence - of displacement from our own pasts – the
experience of being ever more refugees from our own childhood.
In the end,
the only antidote for the dictatorship of nostalgia might be nostalgic
dissidence. Nostalgia can be a poetic creation, an individual mechanism of
survival, a countercultural practice, a poison, or a cure. It is up to us to
take responsibility for our nostalgia and not let others “prefabricate” it for
us. The prepackaged “usable past” may be of no use to us if we want to
co-create our future. Perhaps dreams of imagined homelands cannot and should
not come to life. Sometimes it is preferable (at least in the view of this
nostalgic author) to leave dreams alone, let them be no more and no less than
dreams, not guidelines for the future. While restorative nostalgia returns and
rebuilds one’s homeland with paranoic determination, reflective nostalgia fears
return with the same passion. Home, after all, is not a gated community.
Paradise on earth might turn out to be another Potemkin village with no exit.
The imperative of a contemporary nostalgic is to be homesick and sick of
home—occasionally at the same time.
Nostalgiaand Its Discontents -Svetlana
Boym
And choice remains very messy, because
there is always a proliferation of facts. Facts
are innumerable – making the choice of those that matter is more difficult than
we often assume. Many time observations are contested – and/or have
conflicting interpretations. Ultimately every determination of a fact is an act
of choice of an aesthetic perspective. Even if all aspects of an experience or
experiment were fully explicable (e.g. explicit knowledge) – we can’t include
all of the explicit facts available. More importantly we have no way of knowing
which explicable fact may be vital for others in order for them to understand and
replicate an experiment (see Harry Collins – ‘Explicit and Tacit Knowledge’).
We assume that knowing the ‘facts’ is equivalent to knowing the ‘TRUTH’.
… human and
nonhuman interpretations, descriptions, and explanations of the world are very
similar in many respects. They differ in the role of choices, difficult but
possible for us, impossible for many others. Choices are key to driving
scientific conversations forward. The most powerful and difficult choices cause
scientific revolutions. Choices build the edifice of knowledge, beginning with
a description and a question whose answer adds the next brick to the edifice.
Andreas
Wagner - Paradoxical
Life: Meaning, Matter and the Power of Human Choice – p.178
We understand the role of choice in the
domain of quantum physics where observation interacts with matter. We are
unable to know both the position and momentum of a particle because our modes
of observation interferes with what we wish to observe. The questions we ask
via experiment changes the reality that can provide an answer.
After thousands of years of eternal
philosophical debates – fundamental paradoxes remain unvanquished – most often
we simply mathmagically make them invisible. As George Ellis has noted –
mathematics progresses when we get rid of infinity (and thus become
unconsciously vulnerable to sensitivity to initial conditions). The irrevocable
tension at the root of our realities is that which arises between the paradoxes
– of single coins have two separate and co-creating sides (perhaps by
incorporating a quantum based understanding we could include an edge as well as
all three simultaneously).
For any scientific conversation, indeed
for any question one asks, it is necessary to choose one of these perspectives,
so focus either on the whole or on some of its parts. This paradox of whole and
part is as fundamental as the famed paradoxes of physics.
Andreas
Wagner - Paradoxical
Life: Meaning, Matter and the Power of Human Choice – p.193
In this way we see that paradox
presents a necessity of choice and in return enables a perspective for
questioning any aspect of reality. But the cost is that we must accept that the
result of that our choices of queries will always be a ‘partial’ truth – a
one-sided knowledge of what we query.
To accept a paradoxical tension like
that of part and whole as fundamental is to facilitate choice of perspectives
that advance a conversation. Awareness of a paradox breeds the power to choose.
This choice’s power is the power to create, to formulate powerful worldviews.
Choices of perspective truly have power? Yes. Just recall where the choices of
scientist have led in as little as a century: to technology – for better or for
worse – that would have appeared sheer magic to our ancestors.
Andreas
Wagner - Paradoxical
Life: Meaning, Matter and the Power of Human Choice – p.193
Only by being mindful that we must
choose, can we distinguish our questions from the entanglements of paradox
while remaining aware that whatever choice we make, can only lead to partial
truth – rather than any sort of ‘ultimate TRUTH’. By accepting the paradoxical
nature of values, can we appreciate that our ‘laws of nature function as
powerful sometime sophisticated metaphors. With our metaphors we can colonize
the truly unknown – in ways that enable us to grasp what is familiar and
eventually understand what is not. The value, and inherent values within our
choice of perspectives and/or of metaphors, will always depend on the questions
we ask.
Biographies of Newton, for example,
understandably focus more on physics than alchemy or theology. The impression
we get is that his unerring judgment led him straight to truths no one else had
noticed. How to explain all the time he spent on alchemy and theology? Well,
smart people are often kind of crazy.
But maybe there is a simpler
explanation. Maybe the smartness and the craziness were not as separate as we
think. Physics seems to us a promising thing to work on, and alchemy and
theology obvious wastes of time. But that's because we know how things turned
out. In Newton's day the three problems seemed roughly equally promising. No
one knew yet what the payoff would be for inventing what we now call physics;
if they had, more people would have been working on it. And alchemy and
theology were still then in the category Marc Andreessen would describe as
"huge, if true."
Newton made three bets. One of them
worked. But they were all risky.
By accepting the deeply paradoxical
reality of value and values, we are better able to be mindful of the
responsibility and power of our active participation in co-creating of our
world. Wagner notes that ‘Humans become truly human when absolute certainty and
absolute truth dissipate’. The paradox of our freedom is that we can only
embrace it through our active response-able choice and accepting that all
choice results in an imperfect and partial knowledge. Thus we must embrace of
uncertainty.
However - if the 21st century is the
century of complexity - then it is also the century of paradox. Fundamental
paradoxes enact ecologies of tensions embodied through values that inform our
choices. These ecologies are dynamic. As social beings we make choices that
mediate and wayfind through these ecologies by means of societal institutions
of conversation. Paradoxes which entail choices include:
- There can be no 'self' without the immediate simultaneous arising of other.
- No sense of safety without corresponding issues of risk
- No creation without requisite destruction
- No part without whole
- No selection without censoring/filtering/selection
- No meaning without matter-as-media
These and many more have no objective
'right or wrong' solution. In fact, they have no real solution. They do
however, present us with situations where we faced an imperative - the need to
Choose to choose. With any choice there are entailing structures of reasoning
and consequences.
The Figure here, aims to illustrate a
field of paradoxes creating a possible superposition of all their related
ecologies of values. The need to choose to choose, collapses the superposition
into particular ecologies of tensions. To navi-gotiate (navigate-negotiate)
these ecologies to establish ‘honest accounts’ of value and values, we must
develop and evolve institutions of conversation. Through our conversations we
can become ‘accountable’ for the choices of what we value, how we value and
what values we enact. The institutions of conversation we create and
collectively steward enables us to formulate the conditions of our own
becoming.
Today’s crisis claims we have suddenly
entered a ‘Post-Truth’ era. For most reasonable people this seems self-evident.
However, by scratching the surface we can see this crisis has been brewing for
a long time as our traditional certainties have become ephemeral, and even the
concept of identity has become an open-ended process and experience.
These and many more have no objective 'right
or wrong' solution. The do however present us all with a situation where we are
faced with the need to Choose to choose – and the corresponding consequences
and reasoning entailments.
While it is impossible to 'solve' a paradox
– perhaps we can outgrow certain instances of a paradox we may be confronted with.
In essence, we are faced with an eternal need to wayfind through the ecology of
tension that is both the context and ground that we find ourselves in.
The most import paradoxes today seem to
be the paradox of democracy - where a citizenry can actually elect a tyrant and
the paradox of freedom - where an individual or group can freely choose to give
up their freedom. In the face of the 21st Century, paradox is a deeply embodied
- deeply widespread and integral civil conversation. Our conversations should
proceed as means of probing, then sensing in order to inform our
response-ability in a context of eternal solutioning – as our questions
themselves evolve and adapt.
If we think of classic moral dilemmas
where we are asked to choose a single life to save many lives (there are many
of them – we tend to be misdirected so that we don’t see the choices presented
as:
being asked to choose between saving
more life at the cost of something that makes life valuable in the first place,
or preserving more of what is of value at the cost of more life. When we allow
innocents to die to save more people overall, we are sacrificing some of the
dignity and respect we have for human life in order to keep more humans alive.
When we torture to save life, we allow more cruelty into the world in order to
keep more people in it. When we choose multiple strangers over one loved one,
we reject the special bonds of love so that others can have a chance to
maintain theirs.
That’s why I believe most such thought
experiments are never satisfactorily solved. Indeed, I would suggest that the
best way to use them is not to see them as puzzles to be solved at all. If we
ever face such situations in real life, we will be forced to choose, and will
have to do so based on the very particular circumstances of each case. The only
general lesson we learn from these thought experiments is that there is
sometimes a tragic conflict between life and what makes life valuable in the
first place.
While it is impossible to 'solve' a
paradox – perhaps we can outgrow certain instantiations of a paradox. In
essence, we are faced with an eternal need to wayfind through the ecology of
tension that is both the context and ground that we find ourselves in. Without
the claim of TRUTH to give us certainty we must depend on our institutions of
conversation and faithful accountability to honest accounting of what we value
and how we enact our values.
The 21st Century as the age of
complexity means we live in a non-linear world and our challenge is to stop
reasoning linearly and engage in multiple-forms of reasoning. The fundamental
paradox is that a single human is unable to think non-linearly in a productive
way. However, human collective intelligence mediated by 21st century digital
environment is emerging in many obvious ways. And via collective intelligence
enables us to be more than the sum of us – we become a non-linear, complex,
conscious system for an environment of continual innovation and change.
The challenges of complexity, paradox
and conflict require innovations in our institutions of conversation – ones
that enable collaboration within increasing diversities of perspective,
capability and aims find common purposes. For people to be civilized means
building, safeguarding, evolving our institutions of conversation – it is
through these institutions that people do the difficult work of establishing
and teaching our accountability to shared value and values.
Understanding
that there is no sound to one hand clapping - isn't the answer
The answer is
being able to live in a question
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