So, Senators Obama and McCain walk into a bar…no wait, Senators Obama and McCain recently engaged in a dust up about talking to Iran, bad guys du jour (and they are. The mullahs suck). It is the whole “let us talk to the enemy” business.
Rephrased, the question is simple: ontology (world view), to merge or not to merge, to merge and how to merge? That is the question. I’ve had to do some reading on Informational Ethics (don’t ask) and came across the work of Luciano Floridi; he’s basically a one man band in the field. But I like him; he uses ‘environ (shape) ment(mind)’ in the way it is supposed to be used…not as a stand in for trees, grass and other such errata. In his paper “Global Information Ethics: The Importance of Being Environmentally Earnest” (link to .pdf), he makes a most excellent point:
Agents can talk to each others only if they can partake to some degree in a shared ontology anchored to a common reality to which they can all refer.
Which is true. The problem comes when mixing the peanut butter of your ontology with the chocolate of someone else’s ontology. Floridi offers a solution when he argues for a base ontology:
The approach to be pursued seems rather to be along the lines of what IE proposes: respect for and tolerance towards diversity and pluralism and identification of a minimal common ontology, which does not try to be platform independent (i.e. absolute), but cross-platform (i.e. portable).
Which is what Obama, an Ontocentrist, earnestly believes is possible. McCain does not, at least not without some fundamental changes in the other guys OS. For Senator Obama to be right, there has to be a shared, minimum ontology with the Mullahs. Unfortunately, instead of enforcing the minimal ontology, as things stand, we default to a sort of cheap relativism in reaching towards, or making up, a shared ontology (with the result that a minimum standard of human rights/freedom being harder to reach when you keep reaching blindly in the dark for your shared ontology). McCain believes a shared ontology can be tried, but that it will not likely work absent the OS change.
Of course, Senators Obama and McCain are merely stand-ins for the basic philosophical differences/preferences we have.
Basically, people are binary; we fall into one or two categories (and yes there are always tertiary categories but those are stressed outliers). Below, you see the two broad categories around which we organize our politics: the two basic ontologies into which you can objectively shoehorn all the adjectives (race, religion, sex, ethnicity…the boring stuff). While there are some crossovers, in the main, folks are going to either prefer agent promotion or structure promotion.
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Agent promotion has a downside of anarchy and an upside of agent mobility and fault tolerance. Structure promotion has an upside of order and a downside of agent immobility and fault intolerance. Obviously, the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. Both are ongoing traditions within Dar al Liberalism.
Problem comes in when you trend towards too much structure promotion; you just set yourself up for a huge crash and burn. Structuralist recognize this; it’s why they tend to be ontologically imperialist (though Floridi would probably be aghast to hear me say that). Structuralism sheds ontological imperialism (colonialism, imperialism, communism, Nazism, jihadism, etc) like nobodies business. Basically, any structuralism has to expand; you cannot have someone out there making a lie of the necessity of your little reality (see East versus West Berlin). Also, structures tend to stave off collapse (and sustain local reality) through expansion: expansion equals more coin, more coin equals a longer lease on life. That is why Iran is regionally expansionist (coin, influence, local power) and Jihad (hard and soft) is globally expansionist. Both Persian and Arab ontologies are, at root, imperialist. But in the end, both are fault intolerant structures that will collapse; either over time or with a shove.
Now, Senator Obama is more or less ontocentric. He’s reaching for that shared ontology Floridi talks about. Unfortunately, because oncentrism is reductive, it lacks the emotional appeal of ontoimperialists philosophies; which is why it gets rolled, time and time again.
Ontocentrism brings with it another factor: disdain for agent promoting ontologies. This is because, by necessity, ontocentrism must tend towards a structural solution. Ontocentrism seeks to devalue other ontologies and requires power (structure) in order to do so; ontocentrism and ontoimperialism are top driven models. To that extent, IMHO, ontocentrism and ontoimperialism are twinned: both initiate rootkit attacks on hostile ontologies. For the ontocentrist, that’s pretty much all; for the ontoimperialists, it’s generally ‘the other’. Though motives differ, the effects are the same.
Back to Floridi; he is correct when he writes:
Not only do we live in a world that is moving towards a common informational ontology, we also experience our environment and talk and make sense of our experiences in increasingly informational ways.
So the question is now designing the root OS or minimal shared ontologies. Look at the below illustration. In the end, agent promotion and structure promotion have some irreconcilable differences. Individualism versus collectivism cannot be reconciled (note, for example, how attacks on ‘white privilege’ are, at heart, attacks on individualism). As thing stands, the trend is towards a structural OS preference; mainly because structuralism, directorial or dictatorial, is easy.
Now I keep harping on macrodecisions, because that is what we are in; and it is important to realize that macrodecisions require compromise between powers before moving on to coalitioning. The compromise will occur between the two basic ontologies (above) and the results will be what we live with for the next X Number of years. We will approach a shared global ontology as Floridi predicts; the question then becomes, of the two broad philosophies, which one dominates: agent promotion or structure promotion?
In the end, the cynic in me bets on structure promotion. Again, it is the easiest. But structure, at all levels of analysis, leads to structuralism: a fault intolerant collapse that’s just best to avoid. We’ve never had a structure at the level of the international system; merely blessed anarchy.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
