Abstract:

Advancing globalization puts an homogenizing and reductive pressure on cultures, economies, life styles and themes. During our pre-Information Age "time" was an insulating factor which afforded thoughtful personal and social reaction-space during which to encounter, accommodate, adjust and respond. This "time for acclimation" has been diminished with the communication revolution around us. This means that there are increasing pressures on persons, societies, organizations and governments. The integrity of each - which includes the ability ‘to cope’ - is affected by the process needs of the others. Before formalizing specific doctrines or ‘rules of access and conduct’ between and among the diverse yet integrated systems, it would be helpful to specify a "style" that such doctrines should embody. Overarching thematic criteria which can go towards encouraging and enabling concordance, rather than creating competitions which only erode or preclude fruitful outcomes. The utility and integrated purposes of distinct systems need to be evaluated in context with all other companion systems. Only then can choiceful deliberations be made and mechanisms set in place to monitor, control or encourage the free run of just how much access or intrusion such systems (and their membership) have on one another.

Keywords: evaluation, ethics, priorities, Integrity, respect

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Stories of common experience

A young man was running the cash register at his father's company for the first time, learning the business. After a shopper left, he suddenly realized that he had short changed her by $20.00. Now he knew that the business was doing poorly lately so he turned to his father and asked, "Dad, should I go after her and give the money back or keep it because we need it?" "That's a good question, son. But the more important question you'll have to ask yourself as a businessman is, "Do you tell your partner?"!".

When I heard that joke recently I thought of this pending conference. Our world is rife with concerns about ethics, and sometimes the most palatable way to deal with it is through humor, because ethical questions don’t wait for conferences to arrive. Insights and truths can be found in many formats. My father, Benjamin , told me the next two stories. The first, an event from 1910, stayed with him through the second situation a decade later, and until he told me, in 1960.

A quiet elderly lady - she never ate much - walked into his Butcher Shop one day and asked for some roast beef for a special dinner she was preparing. "I want it should be just right," she commented. He took a roast and put it on the slicer. After the first slice, her usual purchase, he glanced up and she just gave a hand motion, 'more'. A few more pieces shaved onto the pile. 'More', said her hand. More dropped onto the stack. He looked up. Now there was a wave, meaning, "keep going". Well, he suddenly anticipated a rather special sale of roast beef to this usually thrifty lady, and his arm rocked the meat faster through the slicer as he imagined the money his register would soon hold. This went on for a minute or two more, when he heard her say, "STOP, that will do nicely." And as he reached around to wrap paper around the stack, he heard her continue, "I'll take THAT slice."

I’ll always remember my father’s uninhibited laughter every time he told that story. He loved the idea that as an intense young man getting established in the world, it was all too easy to become so concerned with his own agendas that he got tripped up by someone else’s equally as valid point of view, concerns and values.

When the financial collapse occurred in 1929 some 20 years later, my father had matured from being that new young butcher in the previous story, to becoming a savvy businessman capable of not only understanding but also dealing with other people's concerns and points of view. The national economy was grinding to a halt because money had stopped circulating and no one could pay their bills. Right at that time a shipment of fresh meat had rolled into Philadelphia, but was sitting sidelined in train cars on the verge of rotting. My father saw the situation as an opportunity to help people and to help himself at the same time. He contacted the meat shipper, Armour & Co. and offered them 5 cents on the dollar for their whole trainload. At first they balked, but after some persuasion they took the deal on a hand shake. My father said, "Look, there are hungry people out there who need this food. And in a few more days it's going to cost you to dispose of a health hazard. Then everyone loses. This way you get something for it, I can make some money and the people can eat." As it turned out, that deal was one of the things that helped Armour & Co. survive the depression. To the end of his business career in 1959, contracts between my father and Armour were only a formality. Common interest, respect and trust guided their business dealings, not the sharpness of company profits. It was only after the "personalities" had retired or died, that purchase orders and bid contract competitions became the style of business.

Common experience to Codes of Ethics

Life up until the 20th century had been mostly a brainstorming seat-of-the-pants intuition-ridden process. There was an art to organizational management and people handling. Automatic subcognitive understandings were the successful way of things. In today's world, that's not enough. But, neither are the supra-mathematical models used by wall street and financial analysts. Lives are at stake, even though they are manipulated like so many numbers or toy figurines which embellish or clutter up virtual playboards. As these three stories illustrate, the essential difficulty in systems dynamics is not just empirically evaluating dynamics of systems interrelationships, but also removing narrow concerns and judgmental components, while re-instilling tolerance and respect. Only then can we attend to juggling and encouraging the necessary diversity of symbiotic values, beliefs, concerns and acts.

Systems ethics center on whether we recognize the integrities and importances of people and of communities, of cultures and of lifestyles, of companies and of nations, of animals and of industries. Each has a "health" that has to be maintained. For the most part they are co-supportive, but there are unavoidable conflicts which put us on notice and force not-so-easy decisions, and stress our value systems. Health care insurance companies for example. In an earlier day and age broad actuarial tables ruled the day. Everyone paid into a general financial pool. knowing that not everyone needed medical attention at the same time. Financial reserves were available to benefit all subscribers, and the financial burden shouldered equally, avoiding isolated catastrophic financial loss.

Well, times changed, the profit motive came to drive the health care industry, and people’s needs came to be diagnostically predictable - "pre-existing conditions" were taken into account, and genetic tendencies too. Some people were marked as "higher risk", and so were made to pre-pay higher premiums. The companies were therefore beginning to focus on the "financial health" of the company as well as the medical health of insurees. They had to maintain reserves to cover anticipated pay-outs. They had to pay salaries and operating costs. They had to pay dividends to investors. They strengthened their financial base by diversifying financial reserves, investing in revenue generating commercial real estate holdings. Compounding this whole milieu were rising medical costs, new technologies, new pharmaceuticals, higher salary expectations of health care professionals, more hospitals, higher utility costs et al. So, what we are now experiencing as a crisis in our health care system is really a conflict between maintaining the financial health of different businesses and management systems and all the people involved at that level (including their medical concerns too) versus the physical (and financial) health of persons the systems were enacted to care for in the first place. A true "healths" conflict - plural - between integrated symbiotic systems. And a true systems dilemma of Ethics.

Decisions about which goals are more important than others have to be made every day and everywhere in human society. Each culture tries to set up moral and behavioral codes, social mores, systems and rituals and methods that work to preserve what we are because of the efforts of those who’ve come before us. Cultures try to maintain "today" and provide for "tomorrow" and future generations, even in the midst of phenomenal population growth, scientific, industrial and intellectual creativity, and productivity that is changing the physical world we have to live in.

The challenges to our coping skills, cultural values, day to day survival abilities, and to styles of life that served previous generations well but may now be questionable, forces us to adapt new strategies, because system’s life-spaces are being squeezed in ever increasing ways. Furthermore, "consideration time" is reduced, while the number of factors to be considered increases and any choices made have more far reaching repercussions. Ethics takes on the proportions of having to constantly re-evaluate what is important to us - personally and socially, moment by moment. It becomes a non-stop and increasingly fast paced effort to hold on to values that give all aspects of human experience their deserved dignity.

Languages and subtleties, arts and pacing, emblems of historical memory and the time and space reserved for future contributions. More and more it seems that "fate accompli" is the rule of the day. More and more it seems that people must accept the effects of steward groups who were republicanly given assigned powers or who took those powers by force or through default, and let the leadership’s local visions of priorities guide what our world will become. Alternatively, people can recognize that even with requisite divisions of labor and decision making authority, that no one in the general populace is completely un-obligated from voicing opinions, and using social mechanisms to encourage or even modify or stop already enacted plans. Social systems are so vast that we are obligated to designate a few individuals or groups to concern themselves with the "health" of various sub-system or supra-system aspects. Unfortunately, that focus of attention to one area and its "health-criteria" typically pushes the leadership into ignoring the extended impacts on other areas, systems and people. For systemic health in all venues - persons, families, communities, corporations, regions, Gaia - communication and participation are the only effective techniques. A "blended territorialism" you might call it, where everyone looks out for their own welfare while contributing to the welfare of other parts of society - by honoring alternative points of view.

Ethics as Dynamic Systems Architecture

The key isn’t so much the "power-struggle" or tensegrity between component or nested systems as it is using and maintaining flexible ethical concerns - for the health of the parts as well as the health of the whole. In the very first Noetic Journal, Bruce Buchanan described the technique for accomplishing this balance as the "review of alternatives of ... effective concepts of value" (Buchanan, 1997).   Balanced compromise is a requisite attribute/dynamic/process in maintaining and supporting broad systemic health.. And that requires the openness to say, for example, " I choose to live according to one set of edicts. I demand of myself that you have the same right. And we do not impose what is our choice on anyone not willing to take up the mantle freely, and so have the right to reject and seek recourse on any imposition that detracts from mutual respect. The one obligation we share is to communicate, to develop the skills for comprehending each other’s vision of meaningful satisfying existence, regardless of what paths or forms we pursue. Respect, anticipation and comfort levels will regulate the on-going creation of societies, and we will shelve arrogance and manipulation in favor of the preservation and growth of human spirit."

Ethics is a "valuation" architecture - an extensive interpretive dynamic architecture. It assesses, monitors, and reacts to "system health" over time...systems such as: people, families, communities, social organizations of all sorts. The only way assessment works - in real time - is through constant communication - inclusive of outward- transmission and of feed-back - questioning "How are things now?" and asking "What are the chances of maintaining or improving/diminishing those conditions in real and opportunistic ways?".   Ethics is the now-and- future welfare of an organization. Its status and its opportunities.

All systems are fluxuals in that sense (adapting Isaac Newton's term as it were), with the simplest reductionist model being the Yin/Yang. "Cause-effect" being a simultaneous responsive "effect-cause". In every system’s chain-of-process "effects" are the "causes" producing subsequent events and so on, and in systems that are intricately interconnected (being holistically competent) no event or act goes un-reflected back to its point of origin. Better expressed - "mutual mitigatings, inseparable because of their engaged communication". We are never isolated in our ‘being’. Every act somewhere, some time, some way re-affects the "enactor".

Now the system-dynamics model of Integrity puts a lot of emphasis on the behavior of integrated heirachic levels. The primary pervasive relationship which builds complexity in the universe is the entwining of levels into a tensegrity type of strain, where the levels are in constant adaptation with each other betwixt most-stable states and improved-opportunity states.

In this light it means we have to not just allow" for, but must accept and even encourage continuing ethical challenges. Systems are processes conjuncting processes and so there will always be behaviors strains and stresses. It is quite normal and healthy. Just as our intelligence is expanding at an astounding rate, our wisdom is hard pressed to keep up. Evolution - life - is a constant expanding of opportunities. And "ethical" questions will range from "Is it right to force cultures to change centuries revered traditions and belief codas in deference to unifying a global economic systems?" to "Do we surgically remove those 6th fingers showing up on many newborns, or should we not, anticipating that they aren’t aberrant deformations but somatic explorations (!) that will be biologically important 50,000 years from now?"

Do we make it an absolute law and moral/ethical obligation to never ever throw an infant around like a football because it’s child abuse and jeopardizing to the child’s life and safety? Or do we use common sense latitude?... and realize that what is child abuse in one context, could be something else in another situation and environment, such as if the baby cradled in your arms is about to be killed with you because a speeding car is seconds away from running you both over, and you can’t run out of the way fast enough, but you can throw the child away to safety.

Can "ethics" ever be "absolute" when we weigh many contingencies and must remain open to possible paths that can get us to the real goal .... continuation of the evolving stream of creation and exploration of the future?

Ethics as diligence and extended wisdom

It might be comforting if I could stand up here today and say, "Here, here is an absolute guideline and solution for all moral and ethical dilemmas you’ll ever face." But not only is that not possible, such a claim would go against the essence of what makes living sentient systems healthy .... the ability to cope with the unknown. I close with the idea that -- in the quest for an ethics of conduct, setting some standard for which aspects of future human social organizations we give priority to the notion -- that systems perceptions must mirror any enactments they parallel. Everything is dynamic, continually unceasingly processing - - without any specific "goal" except that of continuing. And there is no consistent decision-rule except that of requisite participation. The formats will vary with all the designs tried - such as depicted by Banathy, by Benking, by all the cultural assemblies and social-formed organizations of history.   The Integrity Paradigm doesn't point to what the architecture of the social-gaian-soma system should look like, only to the process relationships it has to concern itself with, locally and globally and how they impact each other: the persistent self-nurturing coordination of "respect", "priorities" and "opportunities".  Our concepts and actions need to be stochastically fixed around the combined health of integrated systems and the streams of factors - known and unknown - we must always strive to have the competency to deal with.

Cultures have identities and dignities as well as people do. There is subtly and richness and wisdom and artistry in every organizational life form. And the future will be poorer for it if we stay the path of winnowing reduction of all these wonderfully evolved embellishments, in misguided deference to the god called Utility.

Everything we attempt will stress and challenge the coping skills, the endurance, the welfare of people and groups and communities and social and economic assemblies and the natural environment too. There is just no avoiding it. We will cloak ourselves in the Hippocratic theme of "First, do no harm" even though it will always remain just beyond our reach, and so we will forever keep it as a goal, prodding us to improve. Our best caveat then becomes "we are not omniscient", and so, even in the midst of forced value judgements that will have positive and negative fall-outs, we will need to nurture all persons, environments and social experiments because we won't know with absolute prescience what skills and abilities will be needed in the future, nor which DNA harbors the special traits that may have no import now, but may be absolutely crucial in a distant future.

And, it will be important to never lose sight of the fact that everything is 'experiential', not mathematically clinical. We are bathed in information patterns, not bit-streams. The quality of life, the ethics of decisions, the living with repercussions of past choices will forever be infused with styles and subtleties which are the essence of meaning. Life is an art form, not a final accomplishment. And humanity is now in the mode of blending the wait-and-see style of millennia of harmonic motion events, combining that with the preparative style of Zadeh logic ... not waiting for a long sequence of results to develop before making adjustments in plans or actions, but, recognizing as best as possible the results of current momentums, and fine tuning before hand in order to reach goals.

The only criteria of systems thinking, the only determination of ethical behavior, is continual diligence to what's going on. Balancing the health of sectors and flows, nurturing the option spaces of each and all, now and in the future.

References:

Banathy, Bela H. 1996. Designing Social Systems in a Changing World. Plenum Press, New York.
Benking, Heiner. URL: http://ww.ceptualinstitute.com/genre/homepageHB.htm
Buchanan, Bruce 1997. "Value, Systems and Consciousness", The Noetic Journal, Vol.1, no.1.
1992. Understanding the Integral Universe.
Theobald, Robert 1987. The Rapids of Change. Robert Theobald Knowledge Systems, Indianapolis.

 

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