All posts by anomalogue

Pluralism, education, competition, and brand

Brand, Pragmatism

Some forms of competition support pluralism, and some forms of competition undermine it. This fact has become conspicuous to me looking at the issue of school competition.

If K-12 schools were to compete like universities, creating areas of distinction, basing their claims of excellence on the accomplishments and reputations of faculty and alumni, that would be a form of school competition that would generate diverse approaches to education, suitable to a wide variety of adult destinies. But if school competition were to become a matter of who produces the highest standardized test scores, I think it would have the opposite effect. The differences would center around pedagogical techniques for approaching as closely as possible a predetermined ideal.

*

I wish I could find the source, but years ago I read an article that claimed that what was different about the American business culture — the very secret of its flourishing — was its nearly-reckless environment of forgiveness, which encouraged risk, experimentation, optimism and consequently innovation. In Japan, if you took a risk and blew it, that was it for your career. In America, you were admired for your daring.

My question is this: Is our educational system encouraging or undermining this kind of inventiveness. Historically, how much has America’s success rested on technical proficiency — math and science — and how much on sheer confidence? Maybe those ludicrously high self-esteem scores of our students, so frequently ridiculed (most recently in Waiting for Superman) are actually a success indicator.

My fear, to put it in brand terms, is that the USA has turned its back on its brand, and has committed itself to becoming and international commodity. Our educational system is part of our unconscious national brand activation.

*

And to circle this whole mess around to the start, I think what attracts me to brand is that competition between brands, to the degree that the brands really are positioned against one another, is a pluralistic mode of competition. Multiple standards of excellent compete against one another for business.

Research: intuition transference

Ideas

I’m trying to develop a thought, and I suspect it’s already been worked out and articulated somewhere, but it sure isn’t present in the business world. It’s related to a point a friend made to me recently, that much of anthropology (and of qualitative research in general) is over-focused on language and ignores much of the pre-/non-linguistic concrete reality that constitutes our private and cultural lives.

As designers, language is a big part of what we work with, but as most people will admit, the best designs are great because they relieve us of the necessity to think in language. We just use our tacit know-how and accomplish what we wanted, without ever verbalizing the means or the ends. Designs that require users to stop and verbalize everything as they go are inadequate to varying degrees, based, I think, on the temperament of the user. I am convinced some people live their lives in verbal self-dialogue on most matters, oscillating between verbal thought and execution of what is thought, where others lose themselves in tacit activity, and every requirement to think verbally is an unwelcome interruption. This has serious UI design implications, because the former wants things spelled out explicitly, where the latter is feeling for intuitive cues largely invisible to many users.

I’m the second kind of temperament, and it really is why I don’t like to look at clocks, lists or timesheets, because it destroys the continuity of my activity. Even when I’m working in words, the words are not explicit questions and answers, but more like blocks I’m mutely playing with. I think this is a Wittgenstinean thought: I’m developing a tacit know-how in the use of language to do some particular thing that I can’t yet verbalize, not entirely unlike building a house using a command language.

I think language is a very flexible instrument, and based on how well developed it is, it is able to justly articulate much of what goes on in the tacit practical world, and once it is able to do this, it becomes instrumental, capable of being used in planning and executing. My real question is this: how valuable an investment is the development of language in design projects? What are the possible tradeoffs?

  • We can inadequately describe the worldviews of our designands (sorry, experimenting with a coinage), and save time, and money at the expense of articulate understanding and design quality.
  • We can adequately describe the worldviews of our designands, and gain articulate understanding and design quality at the expense of time and money.
  • We can dispense with description of worldviews of our designands, and gain design quality for less time and less money, at the expense of articulate understanding.

Here’s a thought: when we write an ethnography, what we are really doing is designing language and models to help some particular audience cultivate some particular relationship with people of some culture. This sounds functionalist, but I think it sort of protects us from mere functionalism in the way that phenomenology protects metaphysics precisely by setting it outside the domain of its inquiry. This approach protects the dignity of informants by throwing out every pretense of comprehending them as people, and instead comprehending what is relevant to relating to them.

The role of design researcher

Design, Ideas

In most places I’ve worked, design research is conducted primarily or exclusively by people playing a researcher role. The researcher’s job is to learn all about the users of a system a team is preparing to design, to document what they have learned and then to teach the design team what they need to know to design for these users. Often the information/experience architect(s) on the project will conduct the research then shift from the researcher role to a designer role. Often content and visual designers will (optionally) observe some of the sessions as well. But it is understood that in the end, it will be the research findings and the testimony of the researcher that will inform the design in its various dimensions (IA, visual, content, etc.).

It is time to question this view of research. When a design feels dead-on perfect and there’s something about it that is deeply satisfying or even moving, isn’t it normally the case that we find that rightness defiant of description? Don’t we end up saying “You just have to see it for yourself.” And when we want to introduce two friends, we might try to convey to them who the other person is by telling stories, giving background facts or making analogies, but in the end we want our friends to meet and interact and know for themselves. Something about design and people — and I would argue, the best part — is lost in descriptions.

My view is that allowing researchers and research documentation to intercede between users and designers serves as a filter. Only that which lends itself to language (and to the degree we try to be “objective”, to the kind of unexpressive and explicit language least suited to conveying the je ne sais quoi qualities that feed design rightness) can make it through this filter. In other words, design documentation, besides being half the cost of reseach not only provides little value, it subtracts value from the research.

What is needed is direct contact between designers and users, and this requires a shift in the role of researcher and in research documentation. The role of researcher would become much more of a facilitator role. The researcher’s job now is to 1) determine who the users are, 2) to ensure that research participants are representative users, which means their screening responsibilities are increased, 3) to create situations where designers can learn about users directly from the users themselves, not only explicitly but also tacitly, not only observationally but interactively, 4) to help the designers interpret what they have learned and to apply it appropriately to their designs.

In this approach, design documentation does not go away, but it does become less of the primary output of research, and more of a progress report about the research. The primary tangible output of the research should be design prototypes to test with users, to validate both the explicit and tacit understandings developed by the design team. But the real result of research is the understanding itself, which will enable the team to produce artifacts that will be indescribably right, seeing that this rightness has been conveyed directly to the team, not forced through the inadequate medium of description.

Having a place

Ethics, Judaism

Reading Gilbert Ryle’s explanation of the expression “in my head”, I reflexively asked a Nietzschean question: Why would we be satisfied with understanding thoughts to be located in our heads, as if they occupied a space? Certainly, a thought process could lead us to that idea, and (collective) intellectual habit could preserve it, but could there be something satisfying or comforting about the idea that has made us more hospitable toward it? I recalled a passage from Hannah Arendt’s Human Condition:

The profound connection between private and public, manifest on its most elementary level in the question of private property, is likely to be misunderstood today because of the modern equation of property and wealth on one side and propertylessness and poverty on the other. This misunderstanding is all the more annoying as both, property as well as wealth, are historically of greater relevance to the public realm than any other private matter or concern and have played, at least formally, more or less the same role as the chief condition for admission to the public realm and full-fledged citizenship. It is therefore easy to forget that wealth and property, far from being the same, are of an entirely different nature. The present emergence everywhere of actually or potentially very wealthy societies which at the same time are essentially propertyless, because the wealth of any single individual consists of his share in the annual income of society as a whole, clearly shows how little these two things are connected.

Prior to the modern age, which began with the expropriation of the poor and then proceeded to emancipate the new propertyless classes, all civilizations have rested upon the sacredness of private property. Wealth, on the contrary, whether privately owned or publicly distributed, had never been sacred before. Originally, property meant no more or less than to have one’s location in a particular part of the world and therefore to belong to the body politic, that is, to be the head of one of the families which together constituted the public realm. This piece of privately owned world was so completely identical with the family who owned it that he expulsion of a citizen could mean not merely the confiscation of his estate but the actual destruction of the building itself. The wealth of a foreigner or a slave was under no circumstances a substitute for this property, and poverty did not deprive the head of a family of this location in the world and the citizenship resulting from it. In early times, if he happened to lose his location, he almost automatically lost his citizenship and the protection of the law as well. The sacredness of this privacy was like the sacredness of the hidden, namely, of birth and death, the beginning and end of the mortals who, like all living creatures, grow out of and return to the darkness of an underworld. The nonprivative trait of the household realm originally lay in its being the realm of birth and death which must be hidden from the public realm because it harbors the things hidden from human eyes and impenetrable to human knowledge. It is hidden because man does not know where he comes from when he is born and where he goes when he dies.

Not the interior of this realm, which remains hidden and of no public significance, but its exterior appearance is important for the city as well, and it appears in the realm of the city through the boundaries between one household and the other. The law originally was identified with this boundary line, which in ancient times was still actually a space, a kind of no man’s land between the private and the public, sheltering and protecting both realms while, at the same time, separating them from each other. The law of the polls, to be sure, transcended this ancient understanding from which, however, it retained its original spatial significance. The law of the city-state was neither the content of political action (the idea that political activity is primarily legislating, though Roman in origin, is essentially modern and found its greatest expression in Kant’s political philosophy) nor was it a catalogue of prohibitions, resting, as all modern laws still do, upon the Thou Shalt Nots of the Decalogue. It was quite literally a wall, without which there might have been an agglomeration of houses, a town, but not a city, a political community. This wall-like law was sacred, but only the inclosure was political. Without it a public realm could no more exist than a piece of property without a fence to hedge it in; the one harbored and inclosed political life as the other sheltered and protected the biological life process of the family.

It is therefore not really accurate to say that private property, prior to the modern age, was thought to be a self-evident condition for admission to the public realm; it is much more than that. Privacy was like the other, the dark and hidden side of the public realm, and while to be political meant to attain the highest possibility of human existence, to have no private place of one’s own (like a slave) meant to be no longer human.

*

We will have a place of our own, one way or another. If we cannot have it in physical space, we will create that place socially. And failing that, we will establish it in our own mind and live inside our own private place.

*

Giving a person a place in your own life is an act of humanity.

Designs and gifts

Ideas

In honor of Hanukkah and Christmas, two great gift-giving holidays, this post is about gifts.

*

Agreement does not (only) mean correspondence of belief. More than that, it means compatibility of belief. It means the possibility of relationship in the medium of understanding, activity and purpose. A truly agreeable gift signals agreement in this expansive sense.

*

From Clifford Geertz’s “From the Native’s Point of View”:

…Accounts of other peoples’ subjectivities can be built up without recourse to pretensions to more-than-normal capacities for ego effacement and fellow feeling. Normal capacities in these respects are, of course, essential, as is their cultivation, if we expect people to tolerate our intrusions into their lives at all and accept us as persons worth talking to. I am certainly not arguing for insensitivity here, and hope I have not demonstrated it. But whatever accurate or half-accurate sense one gets of what one’s informants are, as the phrase goes, really like does not come from the experience of that acceptance as such, which is part of one’s own biography, not of theirs. It comes from the ability to construe their modes of expression, what I would call their symbol systems, which such an acceptance allows one to work toward developing. Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem — than it is like achieving communion.

*

“Understanding the form and pressure of, to use the dangerous word one more time, natives’ inner lives is more like grasping a proverb, catching an allusion, seeing a joke — or, as I have suggested, reading a poem…” or knowing how to design for them.

A design that makes sense, which is easy to interact with and which is a valuable and welcome addition to a person’s life is proof that this person is understood, that the designer cared enough to develop an understanding and to apply that understanding to that person’s benefit.

A good design shares the essential qualities of a good gift.

*

A post from an old blog:

When one person gives another person a perfect gift, the gift is valuable in three ways:

  1. The gift itself is intrinsically valuable to the one receiving it.
  2. The fact that the giver knows what gift the receiver will love demonstrates that the giver cares enough to reflect on what the receiver will value, and that this effort has yielded real insights. The perfect gift is evidence that the giver cares and understands.
  3. The gift becomes symbolic of the receiver’s own relationship to the world — an example what they define as good. The perfect gift becomes a concrete symbol of the receiver’s ideals, which the receiver and others can see and understand, and contributes to the receiver’s own self-understanding and social identity.

Great design experiences are similar to gifts. When a design is successful the person experiencing the design gets something valuable, sees tangible proof the provider of the design understands and values them, and receives social affirmation that helps them feel at home in our shared world.

Finished The Human Condition

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

I finished Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition this morning.

A passage from the last chapter was especially significant, because it hit several of my own core themes from the last several years (which were, in fact, indirectly implanted by Arendt herself, via Richard J. Bernstein):

  • That humanity is most fully actualized when automatic behavior is transcended in the conscious decision to think, deliberate with others, and  act intentionally.
  • Seeing human life from an exterior position rather than an interior point has ethical consequences.
  • That behaviorism wishes to understand humanity as that which is observed from outside (empirically observed, like science observes its objects), but that only human beings restricting themselves biological-social automatism can be understood in this manner. Fully actualized human behavior requires speech, and it has the power to change the worldview of the “observer”, so that theoretical frameworks and research methods are in question, and the observer is deprived his uninvolved, neutral, outsider perspective.
  • That science is significant as a cultural phenomenon, an extremely effective method of coming to agreements, but that these agreements are not the only kind of agreements possible between human beings, nor are they the highest. (However, they are the easiest agreements to reach, and in a world starving for agreement and its attendant stability, this value can eclipse all others combined. And in fact it has, even in spheres of human activity that call for higher forms of agreement, namely in education, in government and in business. Business defines its goals strictly in terms of quantitative profits largely because this is the easiest standard to set and the hardest to argue against. It makes people feel all hard-nosed and tough to assert it against their inclinations, but in fact this is a cheap and easy move, and it is not a heroic sacrifice, but a cowardly self-betrayal.)
  • That much of commercial life is dominated by behaviorist psychology, and the scientific mode of agreement, both of which eliminate the “revelatory character of action” (which, in Arendt’s definition, includes speech). (“Revelatory character” is antithetical to predictability. Whether predictability is a defense against revelation, or suppression of revelation is a means to predictability, the need to predict and the desire to not be surprised are two of the most powerful, unquestioned and universal corporate values. (This twofold force is singlehandedly responsible for that repellent quality we call “corporateness” (and constitutes the single most obstinate impediment to innovation, which is simultaneously celebrated in word and undermined in action in most groups.)))

Here’s the passage:

Continue reading Finished The Human Condition →

Influence over reverence

Synesis

Quantity of reverence matters less than quality of influence.

To revere someone excessively — to make a person an object of worship instead of a teacher with a relevant, practical and surprising lesson — can even be a defense against influence.

*

It is easy to revere something of one’s own invention, but the kinds of disruptive revelations a teacher can impart to a willing student cannot be invented by any individual.

*

Idolatry displaces involved relationship with an infinite subject with a relationship to a finite object. An object relationship is distanced, defined and possessable.

(In Buberian terms, idolatry relates to Thou in I-It terms.)

A new way to see?

Ideas

The following is not  an argument. It is nothing more than a way to see things, which can be entertained, tried on or ignored. One person can compel another to accept certain facts through use of logic and empirical evidence (under threat of excommunication from the world of the reasonable), but understanding of worldviews is entirely different. Here there is no compulsion, only invitation. Invitations can always be declined (otherwise it is a disguised summons)…

Continue reading A new way to see? →

Embracing blame

Ethics

An active, blameworthy life is worth more than a life dominated by the avoidance of blame.

*

Anaximander’s Maxim:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

*

Arendt, from The Human Condition:

… Trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relation- ships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as that to begin something new.

In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance, which acts in the form of re-acting against an original trespassing, whereby far from putting an end to the consequences of the first misdeed, everybody remains bound to the process, permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course. In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way and thus retains, though being a reaction, something of the original character of action. Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.

*

Humanity is a choice. Dignity acknowledges this choice; respect actualizes it.

*

To be human is to resist automatism. Automatism comes from two sides, 1) the artificial (the demands of life in society) and 2) from the natural (the impulses of our own animal nature). Humanity lives between.

*

The Stanford Prison Experiment was both artificial and natural. The social context was artificial, but it all played out naturally.

Infinity

Ethics

The infinite is not definable, for the very reason that once something is defined it has been bestowed edges and separated out from infinity.

*

One way to indicate infinity is to create a set that includes every possible discrete — defined — entity. This indication, however, misleads, because it falsely implies that zero precedes infinity and that infinity is somehow built upon it. But zero implies the absence of something. A something must be defined in order to exist as something other than a stretch of infinity — and in order for there to be a quantity of something, that something must understood as an instance of a category of which there can be instances. Only after Zero is a third-order entity derived from abstractions and subdivisions of infinity, not a metaphysical starting-point.

*

To relate to that which is finite as if it is infinite, or to relate to that which is infinite as if it is finite may very well be the root of evil. Two points to consider: 1) The human mind can only possess and master that which is finite. 2) Every human being contains something of one’s own, possessed by no other human being, and therefore, in respect to another, contains a speck of infinity.

*

Other human beings are unacceptable to us to the degree they are alien to us. The infinite contains everything that is us and everything that is alien and it holds them together in an inescapable but deniable unity.

*

Levinas: “The way in which the other presents himself, exceeding the idea of the other in me, we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image. The face of the Other at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum — the adequate idea.”

Chord: mind over matter

Chord, Metaphysics

Some quotes on the theme of divorce of mind and matter:

*

Arthur Eddington:

I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun — a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady; but if unfortunately I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.

*

Hannah Arendt:

…While world alienation determined the course and the development of modern society, earth alienation became and has remained the hallmark of modern science. Under the sign of earth alienation, every science, not only physical and natural science, so radically changed its innermost content that one may doubt whether prior to the modern age anything like science existed at all. This is perhaps clearest in the development of the new science’s most important mental instrument, the devices of modern algebra, by which mathematics “succeeded in freeing itself from the shackles of spatiality,” that is, from geometry, which, as the name indicates, depends on terrestrial measures and measurements. Modern mathematics freed man from the shackles of earth-bound experience and his power of cognition from the shackles of finitude.

The decisive point here is not that men at the beginning of the modern age still believed with Plato in the mathematical structure of the universe nor that, one generation later, they believed with Descartes that certain knowledge is possible only where the mind plays with its own forms and formulas. What is decisive is the entirely un-Platonic subjection of geometry to algebraic treatment, which discloses the modern ideal of reducing terrestrial sense data and movements to mathematical symbols. … Yet even more significant than this possibility — to reckon with entities which could not be “seen” by the eye of the mind — was the fact that the new mental instrument, in this respect even newer and more significant than all the scientific tools it helped to devise, opened the way for an altogether novel mode of meeting and approaching nature in the experiment. In the experiment man realized his newly won freedom from the shackles of earth-bound experience; instead of observing natural phenomena as they were given to him, he placed nature under the conditions of his own mind, that is, under conditions won from a universal, astrophysical viewpoint, a cosmic standpoint outside nature itself.

…With the rise of modernity, mathematics does not simply enlarge its content or reach out into the infinite to become applicable to the immensity of an infinite and infinitely growing, expanding universe, but ceases to be concerned with appearances at all. It is no longer the beginning of philosophy, of the “science” of Being in its true appearance, but becomes instead the science of the structure of the human mind.

*

Jorge Luis Borges:

Like all men of the Library, I have travelled in my youth: I have wandered in search of a book, perhaps the catalogue of catalogues; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, there will be no lack of pious hands to throw me over the railing; my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite.

Constitution of “who”

Ethics, Judaism, Metaphysics, Politics, Pragmatism, Synesis

Peirce’s pragmatic maxim: “In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.”

William James translated this maxim into American, asking of propositions: “What’s the ‘cash value’ of this belief?”

*

If the pragmatic maxim is applicable to human beings, the meaning of “who” is determined by all the practical consequences a person can have. Not all people have related to other people in all possible ways, so “who” has a profoundly different meaning, depending on who says the word.

For me, the decisive question is this: How many ways has one been taught?

To be informed of a fact us one kind of learning.

To be trained in a skill is another kind of learning.

But to experience a change in your worldview under the influence of another mind — to experience a deep transfiguration of reality itself — is a kind of learning which invests the word “who” with meaning, mystery and infinite potential.

*

A face is a gate.

*

It might be productive to re-ask these questions from a pragmatic angle:

  • What kind of being is specifically human being?
  • What is the basis of ethics? What is ‘ought’?
  • How ought a person relate to other people?
  • How ought a person being relate to things in the world, and how should it differ from relationships with people?
  • How ought a human being relate to realities which stand beyond the limits of his understanding?

Proud not to be right

Ethics, Pragmatism

It is easy to see how we are right. It is much more challenging — morally and intellectually — to see how we are not right, or less right than we wish to be.

To see ourselves as right, all we have to do is point our eyes at things, take them in passively in our usual way, and see what we always see.

To see where we are not fully right (or where others who disagree with us are right), we have to attempt to see in new, less familiar ways. To be sure, it requires a certain degree of ingenuity and inventiveness to discover new possibilities of understanding. And of course, it requires humility — preferring being right to merely feeling right. But most of all it requires courage. One must endure temporary but intensely uncomfortable strangeness, resist the constant urge to turn back and retreat to the familiar, and persevere until understanding has been reached. Only through this kind of struggle can a person make considered comparisons based on real insight that addresses an audience wider than those who already see as we see and ditto our opinions.

But it is worth it. The reward is growth and humanity.

*

People who already know everything are unable to learn. To them, that of which they ignorant is nonexistent. Why would we learn about things that are nonexistent and unreal?

*

Few of us believe we know every fact in the world. We can sense the gaps in our knowledge, and are open to filling those gaps with new information, if that information is understood to be relevant.

The same is true for skills. Most of us can see where are practical lives can be improved by learning new skills. We are open to learning new methods or techniques for solving problems we face, if these methods are understood to be important to our success.

What is much rarer is seeing the need for improving one’s own worldview. The reason? Because one’s worldview determines what is perceived as relevant and important. From the perspective of an isolated individual (whether of an individual or a like-minded collective), one’s worldview is the world itself. It requires belief in intelligence beyond one’s own sphere of intelligibility to see any reason to even consider worldview.

*

Most people equate education with the acquiring of facts and skills. Through this process we prepare students for the realities of life. The need for this is well-established, and what else is there to learn?

*

If you think about the worst problems facing humankind, what is their nature? Are they a matter of lacking facts? Or lacking people with the technical skills to resolve them? Or are they the result of people who have no idea how to come to a mutual understanding?

Respect, dignity and honor

Ideas

Respect means to value another person’s worldview.

Dignity is the status of deserving respect.

Honor is the cultivation of dignity and the mutuality of respect.

*

A pluralist respects differently from a monist.

For a monist, the essence of respect lies in the uniformity of worldviews, in agreement on what the truth is. Truth is the intellectual representation of reality, and the intellect is entirely adequate to the task of understanding that of reality a human being ought to know.

For a pluralist, the essence of respect lies in the differences between worldviews, and of the creative potential in overcoming difference in pursuit of truth. Truth is the human relationship to reality, and pursuit of truth is the attempt of a finite being to relate as fully as possible to reality, which is infinite, and not reducible to the finite terms of the intellect.

Both monism and pluralism are self-evident and self-consistent by their own terms.

*

Both monists and pluralists seek unity, but the mode of unity differs.

The monist looks for oneness based in uniformity of ultimate substance. That substance might be the smallest unit of substance, of which everything is composed. Or the substance might be the greatest unit of substance, of which everything is a part. But finally, the self and other (that which is not the self) is made equivalent through the sharing of a single nature. Monism is homotropic.

The pluralist looks for oneness based on integration. The integration consists of establishing various kinds of relationship (material, practical, intellectual, etc.) between the self and other, and conscious participation in that which exceeds the self. The other can be another self, or the material world, or past or future, but the pluralist seeks to extend its participation in the world by seeking otherness and modes of relationship and participation with that otherness. Pluralism is heterotropic.

*

A type of pluralist exists who stresses tolerance over relationship, and who seeks to hermetically preserve its sense of individual unity by simultaneously acknowledging the fact of otherness and discounting the practical importance of otherness. Also, a type of monists exists who asserts a preexisting or preordained unity, but who becomes intensely agitated if anything appears to contradict his conception of this unity by demonstrating inexplicable and undeniable otherness. These types pursue elimination of difference (either through withdrawing from difference or destroying it).