Abstract
This closing chapter explores a framework that recognizes the role of dialectical thinking, “a movement of the head”, and motivational community processes “a movement of the heart”, as an essential dynamic for the collective movement forward. It explores the potential for purposeful dialogical engagement between social scientists and diverse spiritual and philosophical communities toward global integrative solutions.
We women and men from various ethical and religious traditions commit ourselves to the following Universal Declaration of a Global Ethic. We speak here not of ethics in the plural… but of ethic in the singular… We make this commitment not despite our differences but arising out of our distinct perspectives… We believe that conditions in our world encourage, indeed require, us to look beyond what divides us… Therefore we advocate movement toward a global order that reflects the best values found in our myriad traditions.
We are convinced that a just global order can be built only upon a global ethic…, and that such ethic presumes a readiness and intention on the part of people to act justly—a movement of the heart. Secondly, a global ethic requires a thoughtful presentation of principles that are held up to open investigation and critique—a movement of the head.
Parliament of the World’s Religions, September 4, 1993 (see Swindler (1999) pp. 39, 40.)
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- 1.
See discussion of moral love, or the love of truth, beauty, and goodness in Chap. 6 in this volume.
- 2.
We focus here on examples or applications of dialectical thinking that are most relevant to the concerns of this volume. See Basseches (1984) for a more technical definition of “dialectical thinking” as a cognitive capacity.
- 3.
- 4.
In the tradition of genetic epistemology (Piaget 1972, 1974, 1977) levels of equilibrium refer to relative capacities of forms of organization of thought and/or action to create order in two senses. A higher level of equilibrium refers both to greater capacity to organize internal conflict and complexity and to greater capacity to organize the range of possible changes and differences that might occur within one’s relationships with one’s social and physical environment. The meaning of equilibrium thus parallels the idea of sustainability. The establishment of the principle of organization underlying a form of thinking, and the demonstration of how that form of thinking acknowledges and resolves conflicts and limitations in earlier forms of thinking, helps establish that form of thinking as being more mature in the sense of providing a higher level of cognitive equilibrium. Data indicating that individuals move developmentally from the lower level of equilibrium to the higher one, but not the reverse, then supports the philosophical argument.
- 5.
Even in mathematics and logic, the hope that freedom from the constraints of “real world” phenomena could make truly closed and complete systems possible was sullied by examples such as the indeterminable truth status of the sentence “this statement is false” and more generally by Godel’s (1931) proof that no system can be both complete and consistent.
- 6.
Basseches (1984), pp 10–12, contrasts dialectical (D) intellectual sensibilities with both universalistic formal (UF) sensibilities and relativistic (R) sensibilities, and describes the roles these sensibilities have played in various intellectual disciplines. Briefly, UF leads to seeking and embracing powerful orderings (e.g.; Chomsky’s (1957) work in linguistics), and to discouraging the search for differences that challenge such orderings; R leads to seeking and embracing the discovery of profound differences (e.g., ethnographies like Mead’s (1928) or idiographies like Allport’s (1937)) and to discouraging or retreating from efforts to bring these differences together into more complex and integrative orderings; and D leads to defending ongoing processes of inquiry, manifest in challenging whichever perspective (UF or R) has achieved hegemony in a particular discipline.
- 7.
The research program of Kohlberg and Turiel (1971) demonstrated, with respect to moral development, the powerful facilitative role that interaction with others whose reasoning is a stage higher than one’s own can play.
- 8.
See discussion in Chap. 5 of this volume of inter-participation as a characteristic of social health in complex systems.
- 9.
This quote from Fromm dates back to 1941, when language was still predominantly male-centered. This language does not reflect the values of the authors of this chapter or the editors of this volume.
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Mustakova-Possardt, E., Basseches, M. (2014). Processes in the Development of Individual and Collective Consciousness and the Role of Religious and Spiritual Communities. In: Mustakova-Possardt, E., Lyubansky, M., Basseches, M., Oxenberg, J. (eds) Toward a Socially Responsible Psychology for a Global Era. International and Cultural Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7391-6_11
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