The old science made comparisons and measurements
What’s important to you, and what’s important to others, shapes the world. But never exactly how you want it, or when you want it; and others may seem to have more influence than you, or more control. It takes time to shape the world, and that is where the new Science of Values comes into play.
The old science of the last 300 years was a ‘science of quantities’. According to this old science, if it can’t be measured by making comparisons, then it isn’t ‘real’. That is the belief that scares many people now. It is clearly incomplete, because so many dehumanising and harmful consequences have accompanied the disproportionate power it makes available to people who are morally bankrupt.
People know that their life is real. It may not be pleasant, but it doesn’t go away unless you take drastic and tragic action. The old science, however, excludes ‘what is important to me and others’ from reality, even though these personal values clearly do shape life (take, for example, the law of supply and demand). Personal values are discarded in the old science as a figment of imagination, a side effect illusion that the physical brain is functioning, or is playing at self-reflection.
Beyond materialism to the story within…
Reality, the old science claims, is that your body and its DNA is a material process that automatically takes your life along the route of least resistance towards comfort (which means ‘publication in a reputable journal’ for a professional scientist). This claim follows logically but narrow-mindedly from a research method based on controlling ‘it’. The primary reality of matter is assumed in the old science! The new Science of Values, however, is a way that people can resist this over-focused lie. A Science of Values reasserts the ancient truth that people have the power of choice to decide what ‘comfort’ means for them, and for how long they will put up with discomfort to achieve a purpose.
This New Science approach to life can identify personal values in behavioural patterns recurring over time. This type of comparison of dynamic patterns empowers people to take back life process as the central starting place for ‘what is important’ in human lived reality, not assuming it is matter. Measurability compared between past and future is the narrow-minded lie. Comparing ‘real lived patterns’ as they transform within different timeframes is a narrative skill, not measured by comparing them with some external inanimate material ‘standard’.
That old dehumanising stance has twisted its way into the education of young people, against which many of whom are reacting, as evidenced in their obsession with IT and gaming. Observing only material omits the two other core processes that influence behavioural patterns, and could keep life balanced: Participation and Creativity. A science of values includes those in its descriptive narratives from within. To get inside IT and gaming, we shall need a Science of Values, not merely assume its linear cause is an IT business model that grooms addictive behaviour.
Observation; Participation; Creativity: the New Science of feedback
Surprisingly, values are real feedback processes in the human brain that reverberate over time and emerge in feedback conversations. Detecting patterns in communications of any subtle type reveals personal values – pre-verbal, body language, you name it. Values can become behavioural habits; but that means that inside any observable habit is at least one value. Naming that value, or those values, transforms everyone’s lived experience from a bland and merely material observation of behaviour, to being an intelligent participator in a continuously interactive creation.
When people’s values are challenged, unpleasant loss emotions are generated that are the observable evidence of personal values. They need to be named if participatory conversations are to become creative. Personal values are not just ‘what I want’. They are the very ‘stuff’ of personal identity, the reality of intelligent human life. Those values are the inner human being, emerging as a personality ‘doing its thing’ in an observable way. Free will choice comes in then as character and maturity, to balance the expression of those personal values with other people’s and the ecology we share.
Values are not ‘all in the mind’. We need to listen to others, clearing a way through the old science dust cloud. When conversations shape up around naming values and agreeing actions, a story shapes up also that manifests them. The matter of the physical world shapes up around personal values, not the other way around. How to promote that, to improve the quality of life as the environments deteriorate, is a New Science of Values. It’s tools and instruments are listening, then feedback learning and story-sharing by participating in creative activity.
