A week ago I provided a values
self-test, and asked for your help creating a complete list of human
values, ranked in order of importance. I also promised to provide my
own list and rankings. The chart above is the composite of the
responses. It suggests that there are nine facets to our happiness:
Health, Home, Connection, Discovery, Work, Peace, Play, Awareness and
Self-Esteem. Each of these has aspects that vary depending on our
culture, and their relative importance varies from person to person.
I've shown Family as an aspect of Connection, but for some it may be
inseparable from Home. I've shown 'Work' in quotation marks because I
mean it in the broader sense of 'making a living', rather than the
narrow sense of employment. Again, for some people, self-styled
'home-makers', this may be inseparable from Home. And I've grouped
Personal Values and Beliefs under Discovery because they're part of
self-discovery, making meaning of our lives. You may quibble with my
terminology and groupings, but I'm reasonably confident that this
schema represents a set of Universal Human Values. In fact, I'd say it
represents the values of all sentient life -- from my readings and
personal study of birds, I think ravens, at least, share these nine
values and strive, consciously or unconsciously, to maximize their
achievement. These are the things that drive us all, that motivate all
activity, and because they're all essential to survival of the species,
they're probably all coded into our DNA.
Alas, just because we may have a shared set of core values doesn't make
it any easy to achieve agreement on how to maximize and achieve them.
The answer to "How Do We Best Achieve These Things" is a function of:
- The information we can bring to bear
- The frames through which we filter and assess that information
- Our culture: Accepted and preferred behaviours
Let's consider the sixth value, Peace, for example. Some of us believe
it is appropriate or even necessary to take aggressive action to
'secure' peace, while others believe in passive resistance to
peace-threatening actions. Some of us, because of the frames through
which we process information about acts of violence, believe that force
(forces of 'evil') must be met with force (forces of 'good'), while
others with different frames believe we are all good, and that the
solution to violence is to address the inhuman circumstances that give
rise to such unnatural and desperate acts. Some of us believe the role
of the collective is to secure peace, to protect the community from
hostile outsiders, and everything else is the responsibility of the
individual. Others believe we are all responsible for each other in
every sense and aspect of our lives, and that our collective agents
(like governments) should exercise that responsibility extensively and
diligently.
So, if we cannot agree on How to achieve these values, is there even any point to agreeing on What they are?
I think there is, for two reasons. First, and most obviously, it helps
us to better understand and find common cause with those with different
frames, since, at bottom, we're all looking for the same thing.
Secondly, it can help us look rationally at our beliefs and behaviours,
to assess whether they really make sense in light of what they are
intended to appreciate and achieve.
Here's an interesting example of the latter: One thing most liberals
and most conservatives seem to agree on is the value, at least in
theory, of globalization. Liberals don't like the way globalization can
cause massive social and environmental damage, or how it's been abused
to force third world countries to adopt Western political and economic
policies and give up control of their economies, land and resources,
but most believe that it is quite possible to mitigate these negatives
and still reap the benefit
of free movement of goods and services at market prices as a mechanism
of humanitarianism and eventually economic, social and political
improvement. Conservatives see globalization as the ultimate
manifestation of a 'free' (unimpeded by government) economy, and as a
means to export 'good' Western values, but even they are more than a
little worried about a global government that they don't control (hence
their loathing of the UN).
What is implicit in the both the liberal and conservative worldviews of
globalization's benefits is that cultural homogenization is a good
thing. To the conservative, one world adhering to American values would
be free of terrorism -- if we're all brought up with the same values
and beliefs (and believing in the One True God) the only crime that
would be left would be crimes of sloth and similar individual
moral weakness, universally abhorred and 'nipped in the bud' by a
uniform global 'spare the rod and spoil the child' criminal justice
system. All believing the same, growing up the same, with the same
'opportunity' -- what better way to achieve World Peace? To the
liberal, one world adhering to an agreed-upon consensus of laws,
standards and values would be the 'UN done right', where with only one
government, there would be no 'other government' to wage war on, and
with a global meeting-place for sharing ideas and resolving
disagreements, there would be limited support for civil war as well.
These neo-liberal and neo-conservative views, though, both implicitly
see cultural heterogeneity as a threat to world peace. What is
interesting about this 'if we're all the same we'll get along'
rationale is that it is imperialistic and utterly ignorant of the
anthropological reasons why such cultural heterogeneity arose in the
first place. Indeed, most anthropologists argue that man is already
astonishingly culturally homogeneous already, and that cultural
imperialism and cultural homogeneity have grown in near-perfect
lock-step with the scale of human violence and war.
In hunter-gatherer cultures, both human and animal, there is little
cultural homogeneity between communities, and inter-mixing between
communities is rare. Anthropologists are astonished at how tribes
living just a few miles apart had rituals, beliefs, religions and even
diets that were completely alien to each other, almost unimaginably
different. Our civilization culture's expansion, imperialism, and
language impositions have compromised these differences enormously, but
they are still somewhat observable. Even after several hundred years
civilization culture is so utterly alien to North American First
Nations people that they have proved almost impossible to integrate and
assimilate.
Why would nature, and evolution have encouraged this innate
heterogeneity, this xenophobia which almost inevitably leads to
inter-cultural conflict? The obvious reason is resistance to disease.
As AIDS has shown so horrifically, and the Plague before it, movement
of people between cultures brings the risk of epidemics, and the more
culturally homogeneous the species, the greater the risk that such
epidemics will wipe out the entire race. This homogeneity-caused
fragility is not unique to humans -- we've seen it in the Avian Flu,
and the spread of Mad Cow, and the devastation that this fragility
caused during the Irish Potato Famine should be enough to make us think
twice about the desirability of us, and our staple foods, being
increasingly genetically indistinguishable around the world, and the
desirability of our being able to travel around the world and infect so
many others with new exotic diseases so easily.
That's the evolutionary explanation for nature's abhorrence for
homogeneity, and possibly the reason we are inherently so xenophobic
and intolerant of other cultures. But beyond the genetic fragility of cultural homogeneity, cultural homogeneity also brings with it memetic
fragility -- a lack of variety of ideas. You can already see evidence
of this poverty of imagination in corporations and cults where
intellectual and behavioural conformity is strongly encouraged: no
innovation, group-think leading to inflexibility and denial of the
existence of problems, vulnerability to seduction by false comforts,
and brainwashing.
So assuming that cultural homogeneity is an inevitable consequence of
globalization, at least the globalization models we've come up with so
far, is the resultant genetic and memetic fragility that we would get
along with 'world peace' worth all the wars and imperialistic
devastation necessary to achieve it? Is the benefit of increasing
Peace, one of the nine universal human values, outweighed by the
commensurate reduction in Health and Home and Discovery, three of the
other values?
I prefer to take my learnings from nature, which may or may not be as
'smart' as we are but which demonstrated, especially prior to the
advent of civilization, a remarkable resilience and ability to optimize
these nine universal values, not just for pre-civilized man but for all
other life on the planet as well.
Nature would suggest, I think, that the answer is not One World,
homogeneous, a single world political and economic and cultural system,
but instead a rediscovery of community, of diversity, of the richness
and strength of cultural difference, of heterogeneity.
Nature would suggest that community, not nuclear family or 'household'
or nation-state, is the place and level of aggregation where we will
find the true meaning of Home, of Belonging, of Love and Relationship
and Connection and Self-Sufficiency, and that the land and environment
and all the creatures on it that constitute our Home are sacred and
inviolable and belong to no one.
Nature would suggest that Discovery and Learning and Personal Values
and Beliefs are most effectively found by personal exploration, by
trial and error, through all of our senses in the real world, not by
reading textbooks in classrooms.
Nature would suggest that 'Work', making a living, is done most
successfully and meaningfully by cooperatively and collaboratively, as
equals, beholden to no one but one's chosen partners, helping ourselves
and others meet real, unmet needs.
Nature would suggest that Peace comes from respecting the differences
and sovereignty of other communities, in celebrating their diversity as
robust and astonishing communities in the human experiment, and in
trading ideas and goods reciprocally when it is necessary and to the benefit of all.
Nature would suggest that Playfulness and Awareness and Self-Esteem are
part of the very essence and meaning of life and that our modern
civilized world which trivializes and veils and manipulates our
achievement of these things turns a world of joy into a prison and
cripples us as human beings.
But I'm not sure I could convince a conservative, or a radical
Islamist, or even a Third World child captivated by the possibility of
modern American life, of this.
We may share the same universal values, but we see them, and the road to their achievement, through utterly different eyes.
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4:40:58 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
