Values

Computer-aided Visualization of Psycho-social Structures (Part #15)

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The multiplicity of species making up the psycho-social system leads to a multiplicity of value systems -- to the point where each species may be expected to have its own value system. The suggestion is that it should be possible to extract common elements and formulate a set of universal values -- plus occasionally the implication that this could be a useful foundation for thinking about a world government.

There is undoubtedly no insurmountable difficulty in getting together people with similar perspectives and producing a set of values. The problem is whether these are of relevance and significance to those who did not participate in their formulation or whether they will merely irritate and stimulate counter value production. Values are formulated in response to experience which may have been modified in the time for a new set of values to permeate to the "distant" points of the psycho-social system.

One aspect of the thrust for a unified set of values is to provide society or government with guidelines for decision -- society is seen as a giant rational "decider" whose decisions are communicated and implemented. This center-periphery model ignores the insights of those studying social change which show that: the innovation evolves during the diffusion process; there is generally a plurality of sources formulating related and reinforcing innovations; and the innovation must usually be intermeshed with new needs comparable in force to the dynamic conservatism of the established system. [2] If organizations and society are treated as learning systems, the relationships between the formulations and those who are supposed to subscribe to them becomes much more subtle. In fact it is more useful to think of the psycho-social system as a value generating system -- in which values are generated at all points as a result of experience and interaction with the past values which have diffused to those points.

A more fundamental criticism of any attempt to generate a universal set of values is the implication that this would in some way supply the answer to society's troubles. If the psycho-social system is a value generating system, then any one set (which would be rapidly institutionalized) would be a stultifying constraint and a block on creativity -- there would be nothing more to be said, and the evolution of new values would cease or be viewed as disturbing the status quo. New circumstances, requiring modified values, would catch the psycho- social system by surprise -- unless a "value pool" was available. Differences, fragmentation and complexity arise within the psycho- social system to provide behavioural niches which protect variety and provide resources to keep the system as a whole viable in response to any crises.

An interesting study has been made which indicates the probable difficulty, if not the impossibility, of arriving at a universal set of values. W. T. Jones suggests that at the base of every personality, there is a set of pre-rational temperamental biases which are reflected in an individual's (or a society's) aesthetic and theoretical productions and his value preferences. He suggests the following (non-exhaustive) list of axes of bias along each of which individuals will tend to position their value preferences:

1. Order/Disorder: range between a strong preference for fluidity, muddle and chaos and a strong preference for system, structure and conceptual clarity;

2. Static/Dynamic: range between a strong preference for the changeless and eternal, and a preference for movement and for explanation in genetic and process terms;

3. Continuity/Discrete: range between a strong preference for wholeness or unity, and a preference for discreteness, and plurality or diversity;

4. Innter/Outer: range between a strong preference to "get inside" the objects of one's experience and experience them as one experiences oneself, and the preference for a relatively external relation to them;

5. Sharp focus/Soft focus: range between a strong preference for clear and direct experiences, and a preference for threshhold experiences which are felt to be saturated with more meaning than is immediately present;

6. This world/Other world: range between a strong preference for belief in the spatio-temporal world as self-explanatory, and a preference for belief that it is not self-explanatory. Alternatively a contentement with the here-and-now as opposed to a focus on other- time and other-place.

7. Spontaneity/Process: range between a strong preference for chance; freedom, accident or creative evolution, and a preference for explanations subject to laws and definable processes.

Jones points out that in the long run every particular theory will have limited appeal. It will structure experience satisfactorily only for those whose range of biases is approximately the same as that of the framer of the theory. This should also hold for value preferences. (Such biases may be at the base of choice of lifestyle, discipline preference, and mode of action -- experimental, methodological, theoretical -- within a discipline. They may determine preferences for the manner -- graphic or otherwise -- in which new information is presented for optimum understanding. They may carve up the psycho- social universe into major sectors within which certain role species are characteristic -- communication between such sectors is poor and values travel badly. This feature may protect essential psycho-social variety by affecting a role's tolerance to particular combinations of limits in Table 2.)

In a dynamic psycho-social system, any emergence of invariants which tend to change the balance of biases represented is likely to excite production of counter-actants. One reason is that the predominance of one value system may tend to reduce value diversity which is probably of importantepsycho-social survival value. The proponents and opponents of a universal set of values, and even of emphasis on abstractions such as "peace" and "values", are embedded in homeo- static psycho-social processes.

In these circumstances, it mould seem that a significant "within-system" proposal for a set of values is

1. the maximization of production of new improved values -- by continually exposing people to weaknesses in existing values. This would ensure refinement and clarification of the "conventional" values represented by the terms absence of violence, social justice, etc. and avoid any "hardening-of-the-values". An ideal society might be one in which value generation was maximized.

2. maximize the rate at which individuals are exposed to situations in which the consequences of their values are represented so that they can realize the need for improving them and then be shown alternative versions of such improvements, etc., until they will accept no further improvement;

3. maximize the dynamic maturity in the psycho-social system namely the generation of many species of entity with a high degree of interdependence.

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