THE INTEGRITY PAPERS Genre Group - Buchanan ceptualinstitute.com Assessing Human Values, Part Two - by Dr. Bruce Buchanan
The implications of such systematic consideration tend to confirm and reinforce empirical lessons of history that have sometimes been dismissed as matter of speculation or mere opinion. Firmer intellectual foundations may be seen as possible as well as desirable on the basis of systems science.
But for this purpose it is important to recognize that systems, as we select and describe them in relation to specified outcomes and purposes, are indeed primarily conceptual structures. They are data selected and related for particular purposes and benefits but have limitations and a price accordingly.
No science provides absolute knowledge, but it does strive for consensually validated observation and interpretation of evidence. An understanding of questions of value in relation to human capabilities and needs may similarly be sought in the form of shared data, and perceptions of patterns selected for attention, and some provisional agreement on possible interpretations. Inclinations to speculation may in this way be replaced by refutable conjectures (Popper,1976).
For example, systems for the study of how societies operate will select out what investigators of the time see as important. The data selected will already influence what can be found. Inquiries into current political power will seldom have access to decisive data and processes, and will often be limited to unimportant data much delayed, which usually suits those in power. Economists who study the role of money run risk of convincing themselves (and others) that only money matters. In general, the perspectives taken will determine some findings as well as eliminate some possibilities. Criteria which give a place to curiosity and serendipity will be more open to possibilities than those which simply serve the existing order and its values.
Societal values may limit what can be identified and discussed. In primitive societies the individual may be treated only as a function of the social group. Such authoritarian societies tend to be built on abstract conceptions of social order. Such ideological aims may appear to have concerns for the individual, but in practice often frustrate primary human needs by subordinating individual to social needs. Such societies tend to lack the creativity to be found more often in autonomous individuals.
More advanced societies value the aim of developing the individuality and potential creativity of its members (Frye,1991). Such a free society meets primary human needs as its first priority. (By this description most so-called free societies are incompletely developed, still in thrall to the ideologies of special groups.
Questions of power often involve issues of freedom as seen from the perspective of particular persons, who seek authority (prestige, money, legal sanctions, etc.) as a means to more personal freedom. This is not the civilizing freedom identified in this essay. The feedback which directs and legitimizes those with social power will, by definition, be structured on the basis of performance, as assessed by those affected.
Such feedback is also, in principle, quite different from notions of control by rewards and punishments. The latter are really no more than more arbitrary instruments for use in social manipulation (Powers,1973). Information shaped by propagandists and spin doctors is no longer useful feedback, but may be misleading, confusing to both leaders and everyone else, perhaps concealing what both citizens and governments need to know. For most citizens, like it or not, the price of freedom has always been eternal vigilance.
History provides much evidence that the ambitions of individuals must be controlled by higher level considerations and values, as embodied, for example, in constitutions (Artigiani,1992). The structure of authority is simply a function of those who support it. If citizens are ill-informed, or understand their common goals too narrowly, their potential for freedom will inevitably suffer. Almost all societies to date, including, as Frye says, communist, Thomist, fascist or the American way of life (Frye,1991),
have been primitive in the sense of fostering ideology and dependency.
Since social institutions are a reflection of values, a change in values is likely to involve changes in institutional processes, and these may be unpredictable. This poses problems to ready acceptance. But the hazards of delay in accommodating to unavoidable changes bring even larger problems to the fore.
In an open society all social goals are subject to reconsideration. No values, even those considered sacred, can be exempt on the grounds of their absolute status or divine origins. In the past, man has sought security in many creeds and beliefs which were fixed in their time, but not in the fullness of time.
Effective security is only to be found in a willingness to reassess what we think we know, including historically conditioned and limited values. The values we require include the recognition that the capacity to reevaluate values must win out in the long run. It is the humility and willingness to realize that life is fulfilled in many ways that will endure. Humility in the face of the unknown is the highest symbol of the sacred. Living values will in the nature of things always prevail over idolatry, whether of ideas or objects.
The actual problems confronting all countries, and particularly democratic nations in a new and historic sense, may be described in terms of the values and compromises which appear to be required among (1) wealth creation, (2) social cohesion and (3) political liberty (Dahrendorf, 23). It may seem desirable to try to maximize each of these, but it is clearly impossible if one considers the constraints on a unified system. It appears that the promotion of any one of these values may be at the expense of the others.
The common assumption that a kind of social Darwinism is acceptable is self-serving and not objectively grounded. Such an interpretation of success provides no guidance of real social value. The problems which stem from such views, which contribute to intractable conflict, are growing in public awareness.
There appear to be no historically inevitable forces for the progress or the decline of civilization (Popper,1950). Yet there are some processes involved which can be characterized objectively. Among these are processes requisite for conflict resolution.
A market economy, in the early stages of development, or to make up for excessive public spending, may ask citizens to delay their hopes and the gratification of their needs. Various system level questions may be properly put to leaders who ask for such sacrifices, to weed out the manipulators from the statesmen. What are the real purposes, and how are they to be assessed? Are the requested sacrifices in fact investments for communal benefit, or are they likely to be wasted by statecraft with a history of incompetence, or worse? Who will benefit the most, and who are making the most sacrifices? What are the tests of an organization effective enough to justify trust of community stakeholders? These questions of systemic import cannot be ignored forever. And to be taken seriously answers must involve performance.
Market forces are of vital consequence, and until these can be entrained in the interests of societal stability as well as wealth creation, problems of political disaffection and environmental degradation can hardly improve. The contributions and leverage of market forces, at present a mixed bag, must be part of any long term solution. Answers may depend upon research which takes account of system complexities, but the first step is openness to all possibilities.
Unfortunately the intellectual climate today is also part of the problem. Western legal and ethical systems are underpinned by notions of individual responsibility that are not always taken into account by psychological and social theorists (Hodgson,1996). On the other hand, corporate responsibilities may be difficult to pin down.
We do need a better account of human causality, which finds a clearer place for intention and responsibility. The problems are made more serious by the lack of a common and coherent intellectual framework, and a view of freedom as unlimited rather than conditional. Sociocybernetics may help to illuminate such so-called teleological processes, and to clarify the complex relations which link the interests of individuals and groups.
It is evident that the benefits of economic development must be universalized if the world is to be stable. And without a coherent intellectual framework no universal agreement would seem possible.
If appeals to totalitarian principles are not to overtake us, a better understanding of problems and possible solutions is necessary. Our common enemy, which is the depreciation of civilizing values, with associated trends of indiscriminate exploitation of the vulnerable, leads to defensiveness and protection of self and family rather than to larger goals, a self-reinforcing process. This has always been a problem for the maintenance of a healthy society, and today the problems grow more acute.
Yet it is obvious that long term management of any society requires appropriate investment in the well-being and education of children (Frank & Mustard,1994). If for no other reason, it is clear that human capital is a key factor in economic growth, and improved education is a prerequisite. The positive values at stake are mutually reinforcing.
In the face of slow growth in productivity and rising poverty, the keys to any solution lie in ideas and innovation. Simple reduction of expenditures, offered in itself as a major policy, is inadequate. More effective (re)allocation of resources is required, which depend upon appropriate values and implementation criteria.
It is clear that the problems posed to well-being and productivity in modern societies require attention to adequate resources and key sectors, primarily mothers and children, education and nutrition. These nourish the only seeds from which future ideas and renewal of civilizations can come. Societies that are able to reevaluate their values and activities in this regard will have the best chances of success (Putnam, 1993) while others will perish.
Approaches to the clarification of complex systems have been prefigured by many distinguished thinkers (Whitehead, 1967; Popper,1976). And an understanding based upon sociocybernetics also has implications for traditional philosophical problems. Some of these antecedents may not be seen as important by the casual reader, but some points may be Indicated briefly for those who may be interested.
Popper (Popper,1950) has described interactions and feedback relationships between the external world and our views and theories about that world. Polanyi (Polanyi, 1972) described knowledge as involving concepts which cannot fully include all the tacit components which they reflect. Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty, 1972) emphasized the primacy of perception and the derivative role of abstract ideas. David Bohm (Bohm,1987) has described life and knowledge as unfolding from deeper structures that form the world and us within the world.
Sociocybernetics has implications which also resonate deeply with humanistic and religious thought. Existential thinkers (e.g. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Tillich (Tillich,1948), Jaspers (Jaspers, 1963), Watts (Watts,1972), have emphasized the dependence of fallible man on deeper grounds of being, the role of anxiety in human perception and thought, and the need to recognize some ultimate human limitations. Metaphysical insights provide grounds for religious beliefs which relate man to the larger universe of which he is a part. The conceptual tools and language through which we construct a human world have reflexive and self-referential aspects which are may be described in terms compatible with sociocybernetics. Northrop Frye viewed literature not as competing with science but as offering different programs for looking at the same reality (Frye,1991). Many such correspondences are systemic and reflect cybernetic structural possibilities, rather than mere verbal analogies, but are beyond our scope to elucidate more fully here.
Management and business thought has also been profoundly shaped by systems theory, cf. Peter Drucker (Drucker,1974), Stafford Beer (Beer, 1974), Peter Senge (Senge,1994) and many others. Studies of international relations, the environment, and problems of peace have extensively utilized cybernetic and dynamic systems models.
So sociocybernetics is a perspective which represents a kind of common ground for an increasing consensus about the relationships which join human lives within a universe of which they are only a part. The nature of humankind, and issues of knowledge and truth are all involved in this nexus of common significance.
The purpose of this paper is not simply to reiterate beliefs that have been part of democratic social thought over many years, but to indicate the grounding and support for such beliefs in systems science and cybernetics. These sciences provide the concepts and models which most closely relate the complexities of the world to strategies for dealing with its problems.
As a necessary first step it should be clear the problems involved in the orderly pursuit of multiple goals are challenges to creativity, not to be solve by brute force. And the formulations required for an adequate grasp of values are not primarily theoretical, although considerations of relevance, consistency and operational meaning are crucial. They require freedom for discovery and invention, but the tasks are never complete. Nor can hopeful approaches always be fully justified in terms of formal reasoning alone.
The need for a view both structured and open for further exploration can hardly be overestimated. It defeats the possibility of useful outcomes to demand structure at the price of excessive rigidity. So it may be necessary to challenge those beliefs and methods which are primarily intended to manage anxieties, if they become obstructionist, since they are likely to sacrifice reason based on facts to illusions.
Cybernetic ideas grounded in evidence and reason challenge those without a coherent intellectual framework, those whose views are based on arbitrary absolutes or mere opinion. Such challenges may be suggested by the following observations:
* There are implications for ethical behaviors which have been discussed by von Foerster (von Foerster,1992), who has pointed to the desirability of maximizing options in the light of the whole.
* Faith in a "laissez faire" economic system reflects a mixture of motives. While not actually practised in any pure form, it still carries risk as a basis for rationalization of expediency and self-interest. Truly effective strategies which depend upon freedom with responsibility have been convincingly articulated. American constitutional history may in fact be seen as a feedback process which has through procedural constraints freed behavior to track the shifts that adaptive requirements have always posed (Artigiani,1992).
* A broader view has implications for theories of consciousness, for cognitive sciences, and for research in artificial intelligence, which are beyond our scope to consider in any detail here. Values which prejudge methods and concepts, and inclinations to serve dominant power structures, may make the approaches developed here unacceptable to some. Approaches taken in terms of some current theories e.g. of artificial intelligence, may attract corporate interest and funding, but do not tend to point in the direction of sociocybernetics or have much place for notions of human responsibility (Minsky,1986;Dennett, 1991), although there are perhaps exceptions (Mandler, 1993; Guzeldere,1995).
* Absolute commitments to any fixed religious ideology, whether Protestant fundamentalism, the Roman Catholic church, Islam, insofar as these may demand unthinking allegiance, would appear to entail loss of intellectual freedom, as well as the self-contradiction of accepting views of the universe that are less than whole and restrictive in relation to what may be revealed by time.
* As ideological approaches become discredited they leave a vacuum which is occupied by self-seeking individuals who claim the virtues of untrammelled individualism, but function as no more than exploiters of fragmenting ideals and social disorder.
* It is not the level of wealth in a country that is decisive, but rather commitment to key values, such as the well-being of mothers and children, nutrition and education. Without these, no civilization can continue.
As long as large number of people think they will find their salvation in the faith of scientific technocracy, or any other of these limited faiths, each with its own set of self-supporting but limited and isolating values, modern life will continue to be fragmented, arts and intellectual pursuits will be without a centre of gravity, and politics will not be properly related to the real human problems or to continuing human existence in the long run.
References (Revised: February 20,1997)
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Whitehead, A.N.(1967), Adventures in Ideas (Free Press) ________________________________________________________________________
**Bruce H. Buchanan, M.D., D Psych., is a retired Canadian physician who has had a career in medical practice, public health, psychiatry, and university teaching, with two decades in governmental policy and administrative work, with a lifelong interest in philosophy and cybernetics.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I acknowledge with special thanks encouragement and suggestions received from Robert Artigiani, Stafford Beer, Eric Schwarz, and Gerhard Werner.
Dr. B. H. Buchanan 4690 Dundas St. West Etobicoke, Ontario M9A 1A6 CANADA
Phone and fax: (416) 231-6235 Internet:
Human Freedom & Cybernetic Principles
part 1 of "Assessing Human Values"
part 2 of "Assessing Human Values"