EMERGING SHIFTS--Conflict & Communication Between Cultures

Emerging Shifts—Conflict and Communication between Cultures

Speaking to the writ-large arena of cross-cultural communications, then, philosophy is involved in a massive movement that is a combination, first, of drawing on what is authentic that has come down to us in philosophical and other traditions; second, of developing correctives of derailments that are embedded in those traditions; and third, of developing, communicating, and passing on new knowledge--a paradigm shift, driven by a long-term philosophical crisis, involving not only concepts and doctrines, but also our deeply-set assumptions about ourselves and the way things are--and of course our emerging questions. Especially in the West, the shift involves, again, the question of knowledge itself, and includes the hope of forging a better-oriented, more unified, and dynamic view of our selves in the world, and in community with others.

Further, those who live in non-Western cultures are also suffering through their own kinds of crises as avenues of communication between themselves and the West increase—especially with the pluralism that is so essential to Western democratic cultures and their institutions. The introduction of vastly different ways of thinking to those in non-Western traditions continues to raise discomforting questions (which sometimes manifest as violence) against the single-minded sense of seriousness, certainty, and singular religio-political doctrine that still guide many non-Western traditions.

Of course, Western and non-Western movements of thought in history differ greatly from one another; and the conflicting foundational grounds within each of these movements cannot help but come into relation through trade and technological growth--growth that enables the ongoing dialogue and mass communications we find ourselves in at present (King, 2003c). Everyone seems ready for trade and technology, but not everyone is ready for the blast of other cultural changes that such movements bring along with them.

The nuances are great; however, in a general analysis diverse arenas of thought have much to gain from one another. Underneath our topical concerns, some of us are in need of differentiation, others are in need correction, and yet others are in need of putting things back together--well, or at least better. However, the underlying trajectories of thought in Eastern and Western minds are also entirely at cross-purposes and, if unmediated by cooler heads involved in reflective practice, are slated to do nothing but violence to one another. When we are not aware of these underlying differences, we tend to project our own views and assume the same ground in our correspondents as exists in our own. When such a naive disjunctive occurs, communications between peoples is not only difficult in the topical sense, but that difficulty goes “all the way down” to our basic differences in what is commonly called a world view. Instead of walking in a park in our communications with others, as we might think, we find ourselves dancing in a minefield.

Though topical conflicts always need our attention, conflicts at the foundational level are equal to if not more important to understand, and often are the root cause of great comedy as well as tragedy in human events as we work through them in history. Deeper still, however, are our fundaments. We have discovered, and can discover, this core of human being that everyone shares and that we are calling a trans-cultural base. Though knowing about what is most common to all will not solve all of our problems, it provides us with a new basis to understand those problems--in both foundations and in topical concerns--and how we ourselves may be contributing to their exacerbation, and to chart out and develop better communications between ourselves and others over the long term.

Contributing to the problem is that, in many of our educational institutions, rather than sorting out philosophical foundations early in our educational curricula, for many reasons we tend to only hint at or to altogether avoid such issues all throughout our children’s schooling. We do so, however, at the risk of corroding the foundations of our civil discourse in the world, now and in the not-too-distant future. For such issues cannot be brought forward in the condensed heat of a crisis, even with the best of collaborative efforts. Rather, such a dialogue is only effective if it has matured and emerged as a part of a long and comprehensive educational process at the background of those cultures and persons involved. And even then, no guarantee of a rich and dynamic peace is afforded anyone.

With regard to philosophical discourse now and in the past, however, much of what we could misunderstand, we did misunderstand; and the above avoidance in educational arenas of discourse has left us to only pass along in our communications the bifurcated foundations (lack of attunement) that is our philosophical and foundational misunderstanding. Such avoidance does not address, but nor does it hinder, the inheritance of either attuned or ill-tuned philosophical foundations. And the faulty foundations that follow avoidance have deepened, become calcified, and compounded the problems inherent in many crises and shifts of thought as we have moved forward in them. Add to foundations the varieties of common human development in different cultures and we can witness such misunderstandings and avoidances in the set-in-stone polemics described in a myriad of textbooks, in any daily newspaper, and in most of our inter-field and common discourse, e.g., the on-going cross-purposes of the United States, England, and parts of Europe with Middle-Eastern and Eastern religio-political climates.

Nevertheless, at this writing we find ourselves in a philosophical window. On its negative side, the present political climate combines with our ignorance about foundations to produce a kind schizophrenic-hypocritical psycho-drama. That is, for the moment we can all live in the decadence, but also the after-glow, of civil culture; isolated in our suburban, cul-de-sac ethics, or our tribal isolation; alone in our professional disciplines or religious groups, reading our papers from the podium at a conference; and all standing in the midst of institutions whose civic ground still depends on good written constitutions, but where an understanding embrace of their meaning has all but vanished. On the other side, we face a vibrant man with his finger in the air, speaking from the point of view of his God.

The psycho-drama is that, from our temporarily and seemingly safe places, and with few exceptions, we are drawn to, but still avoid communicating with those who differ from us, with those in other fields, and with those who work in the “real world” who are themselves isolated from the “other real world” where little or no civic culture exists. We are, then, not only separated from ourselves and from our own souls (whatever that might mean)—in the same way that the personal is currently separated from science and its true and objective knowledge--but we are also separated in many ways from an ongoing, enlightening, peaceful, and even loving dialogue with others.

On its positive side, most of us still strive for and love peace and civility; and sometimes we even achieve it. And though philosophical discourse is voluntarily and sometimes happily abandoned as irrelevant in many educational venues, it is not yet altogether denied; and perhaps it even flourishes, albeit as an “encamped” species of discourse.

However, such a momentary window of time, and seemingly safe place to live for the moment, is only that--a temporary respite. Such respite can be permanent as a dynamic state only if we can really go on living well in the afterglow, without addressing the deeper and larger issues that confront us all—and we cannot—and only if we can live forever within a vacuum, separated-off from others who share our world—and we cannot. The shock of global communications is upon us.

The window, however, can give us mental space to recognize, to re-consider, to develop our foundational concerns in ourselves and in our academies and teachers, and to look for ways to provide a sane philosophical underpinning for our intellectual-ethical-political-spiritual and common discourse.

Part of the current crisis, and the potential paradigm shift embedded within it, is related, first, to the unquestioned good effects of science of the last four-hundred years and, second, to the short-sightedness that such effects have visited upon the scientist’s imagination, hubris, and sense of wholeness and, subsequently, upon our commonsense thinking about science, and about ourselves in relationship to it, to the scientist, to ourselves and to others in the world.

If we took a picture of where Western thought is at present, we would see that, in some sense, we are momentarily “stalled:” At having rightly reached forward, and to having rightly objectified the world and ourselves in it at the service of our understanding. However, this right reflective-objectification has come at a great price. That is, again, we have wrongly come to view ourselves as somehow standing outside of such objectification, again, as if true and real objectivity means we must erase the personal—we have taken a voyeur’s view of things, as well as of ourselves and other persons, while at the same time we struggle against its implications on what, at a deeper more resonant level, we know is truly appropriate to human living.

We have still to bring the scientist and science back into the folds of human history from which science emerged, first, as a related field in context with other fields; and second, as a singularly emerged part of a “bigger-picture.” And we still need to be assured that we will not lose the critical insights about both data and method that science has brought us over the years. The bigger picture, however, is of a dynamic whole that is human history on the move, and that continues to reach out to what remain mysterious to us.