</a>Incompatible value frameworks: token agreement vs bloody disagreement

Topology of Valuing: dynamics of collective engagement with polyhedral value configurations (Part #15)

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The most fundamental reality with respect to the universe of values is the degree of disagreement engendered between value frameworks and the manner in which this drives and justifies value-based conflict, especially through the inspiration of faith-based systems of governance. Such intractable disagreements are only feebly addressed in practice. The Global Ethic presented at the Parliament of the World's Religions (Chicago, 1993) remains a "draft" with little indication of the emergence of any articulation responsive to the value-based bloody conflicts since then.

This situation is matched by an obsessively simplisitic quest for "agreement" in international discourse, epitomized by "consensual decision-making". The most evident consequence is the token nature of such agreement and the superficial initiatives to which it leads, avoiding the challenges of incompatibilities between value frameworks. This is most evidet in the manner in which authorities renege on formal pledges -- as is evident in the commitments made by the G8 to developing countries. It is more tragically evident in the cynical promotion of "equality" as a fundamental value -- despite the evident pretence in the face of inequality, epitomized by the emergence of a superclass (David Rothkopf, Superclass: the global power elite and the world they are making, 2008) and the vain pursuit of identity values through luxury (Hari Kunzru, The expensive search for what money can never buy, The Guardian, 14 August 2008).

Given the manner in which philosophy and epistemology underpin the methodology of scientific inquiry, this would suggest the need for more radical explorations of the possibility of structures built on (value) incommensurability (Beyond Method: engaging opposition in psycho-social organization, 1981; Using Disagreements for Superordinate Frame Configuration, 1992). Given the conflicts to which they give rise, the pathetic incapacity of religions to process their disagreements confirms the inadequacy of approaches dependent on "coalescence". A similar point might be made with regard to the natural and social sciences and the manner in which various "sciences" are marginalized, as noted above in the exploration of Paul Feyerabend (Against Method: outline of an anarchistic theory of knowledge, 1975).

Understandings of "agreement" vs "disagreement" have become confused with the obsessive pursuit of "positive" and rejection of "negative" -- both polarities being simplistically conflated with that between "good" and "bad", with the latter typically demonized as "evil". This is systemically dysfunctional as argued elsewhere (Being Positive Avoiding Negativity: management challenge of positive vs negative, 2005). Problematic consequences include:

• efforts to occupy the moral and ethical high ground (at the expense of "losers")
• the "with us or against us" framing of intervention in Iraq by the Coalition of the Willing and subsequent security measures in the "war against terrorism"
• marginalization and demonization of those who do not share fundamental values (as "unbelievers")
• inability to frame disagreement using conceptual tools emerging from the subtler insights of new disciplines (complexity sciences) or old "wisdom" traditions, as was only too evident in recent primitive debates in the UN Security Council
• inherent contradiction in the fact that disagreement, rather than agreement, is what attracts media coverage and audiences
• problematic inititiatives to "harmonize" different perspectives within a simplistic "universal" framework, eliminating expression of diversity except in token form
• promotion of "our values" as norms against which the behaviour of "others" is to be judged in terms of their potential threat

There is however a simpler "vehicle" metaphor, widely understood, that merits careful consideration as a means of responding to the seeming incommensurability of value frameworks in practice -- even when they apply in the same geopolitical or cultural context. The metaphor is the process of walking and the alternation of perspective it implies. Rescher (The Strife of Systems,, 1985), as quoted above, concludes

But the time has come to put this behind us -- not the strife, that is, which is ineliminable, but the felt need to somehow end it rather than simply accept it and take it in stride.

This said however, Rescher's argument does not necessarily preclude the possibility of new ways to take the strife "in stride". Indeed it has been argued elsewhere that new forms of transdisciplinarity may effectively emerge from "striding" (Transcending Duality as the Conceptual Equivalent of Learning to Walk, 1994; Walking Elven Pathways: enactivating the pattern that connects, 2007). This points to the merit of animating the value "pillars" of institutions as "feet", as noted above and illustrated elsewhere (***).

The cultural historian William Irwin Thompson (From Nation to Emanation; Four Cultural Ecologies of the West, 1985) has approached these issues from a quite different direction and has articulated most intriguing possibilities. For him: "Values are not objects, they are relationships. When you overlay one pattern with another, a third pattern emerges, a moiré pattern" (p. 38). He argues that: "Truth cannot be expressed in an ideology, for Truth is that which overlights the conflict of opposed ideologies....The Truth cannot be known in an ideology, but it can be embodied in an ecology; anything less does violence to human nature and to human culture." (p. 36).

In discussing the possibility of an enantiomorphic polity, Thompson argues:

In a polity that has the shape of opposites, an enantiomorphic polity, the prophetic wisdom of William Blake's 'In opposition is true friendship' will be finally understood and not just poetically....If one does have an appreciation of the phenomenology of opposites, in which we become what we hate, then a politics of compassion, as contrasted with a politics of violent conflict, begins to become a cultural possibility. (p. 37-39)

Thompson quotes an articulation of this enantiomorphic polity from E. F. Shumacher (A Guide for the Perplexed, 1978):

The pairs of opposites, of which freedom and order and growth and decay are the most basic, put tension into the world, a tension that sharpens man's sensitivity and increases his self-awareness. No real understanding is possible without awareness of these pairs of opposites which permeate everything man does...Justice is a denial of mercy, and mercy a denial of justice. Only a higher force can reconcile these opposites: wisdom. The problem cannot be solved, but wisdom can transcend it. Similarly societies need stability and change, tradition and innovation, public interest and private interest, planning and laissez-faire policies, order and freedom, growth and decay. Everywhere society's health depends on the simultaneous pursuit of mutually opposed activities or aims. The adoption of a final solution means a kind of death sentence for man's humanity and spells either cruelty or dissolution, generally both. (p. 127).

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