</a>Value-based crisis: values as instruments of memetic warfare

Topology of Valuing: dynamics of collective engagement with polyhedral value configurations (Part #16)

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Much is made of the "clash of civilizations" (Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, 1996) which follows from simplistic approaches to "disagreement" and naive expectations that everyone should be in "agreement" -- appropriately "encouraged" if necessary (as exemplified by European responses to the Irish "No" vote in 2008). The situation is increasingly exacerbated by widespread recognition of double standards by those promoting agreement with particular value frameworks. It is however curious that remedies are sought in terms of a single standard at a time when ethically responsible accounting systems are exploring the remedial notion of a value-based "triple bottom line", if not various forms of a "quadruple" one (as discussed in Spherical Accounting: using geometry to embody developmental integrity, 2004).

The crisis is most evident with respect to values variously attached to "environment", "peace", "democracy" and "respect". It is most dramatic with respect to the "land" or its features ("topos"), with which cultures identify, and their related sense of encroachment and threat (cf Varieties of Encroachment, 2004; Darrell Addison Posey, Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity, 1999, for the United Nations Environment Programme).

The responses to this value crisis are quite extraordinarily "twisted" in their manipulative use of values:

• "truth": as was most recently evident in the UN Security Council debates on the Russia-Georgia crisis
• "agreement": is typically achieved under pressure and through horse-trading divorced from any ethical considerations
• "harmony": is notably achieved by reducing diversity, epitomized by the elimination of species framed as "pests"
• "saving human life": has become the standard unquestionable claim in dubious arguments under which highly controversial policies are justified
• "justice": is increasingly pursued secretively, notably with selective manipulation of evidence; politicization of evidence has now become the norm (Politicization of Evidence in the Plastic Turkey Era, 2003).
• "rights": there is a sense in which non-tokenized truth can only be guaranteed through "torture" of people, animals or materials. In the case of animals, it is reported that some 150 million were used for research purposes in 2007 ***
• "presumption of ethical behaviour": is now used as a value "trump card", by analogy to "innocent until proven guilty", when it is no longer possible to prove that those with the power to conceal unethical behaviour are not in fact enaged in it; incontrovertible proof of problematic behaviour is framed as relating only to exceptional cases rather than being indicative of potentially widespread systemic issues
• "free speech": under conditions in which there is no longer any means of discovering criteria for censorship or what has been censored by creative interpretation of those criteria
• "moral equivalence": the validity of any comparison of incidents in terms of moral or ethical values is now contested, as ably articulated in the case of the US by Jeane Kirkpatrick (The Myth of Moral Equivalence, Imprimis, 15, January 1986, 1) following her period as the first woman US Ambassador to the United Nations. This understanding is clearly relevant to any contextual assessment of the Russian intervention in Georgia.
• "social responsibility": in the case of major multinational corporations, notably those adhering to the principles of the UN's Global Compact, none is taken to task for avoidance of taxation (*****)

As noted above, fundamental human values are now used as a fig leaf to disguise other agendas in a manner that makes it impossible to prove otherwise with any credibility. Some indication of this is evident in the comments of Polly Toynbee (Labour's legacy is a puzzle of moral contradictions, The Guardian, 17 June 2008) to the effect that: "The government's reluctance to challenge culturally destructive forces makes any talk of values meaningless" and "But values or a vision of the good society are meaningless without the confidence to confront cultural attitudes".

It is therefore fruitful to consider how in an emerging global knowledge society "warfare" may well take place "non violently" -- by other means as notably argued by Johan Galtung (Cultural Violence, Journal of Peace Research, 1990) . Beyond the tradition of propaganda, transmogrified into "news management" and "spin" as a basis for "information warfare", lies the as yet ill-defined but already active domain of "memetic warfare". Appropriately arrayed and deployed, values may well be the key elements in the weaponry of memetic warfare (cf Missiles, Missives, Missions and Memetic Warfare: navigation of strategic interfaces in multidimensional knowledge space, 2001; Robert Jensen, The Delusion Revolution: we're on the road to extinction and in denial, AlterNet, 15 August 2008).

Seemingly "ethical warfare" is poorly dissociated in the literature from the "ethics of warfare". "Moral warfare" was notably framed in a much-quoted poem by John Greenleaf Whittier, 1807-1892 (The Moral Warfare), in which the penultimate stanza reads:

Our fathers to their graves have gone;
Their strife is past, their triumph won;
But sterner trials wait the race
Which rises in their honored place;
A moral warfare with the crime
And folly of an evil time.

Whilst the literature focuses mainly on the morality of war, the importance of "moral warfare" has been stressed by the US military strategist John Boyd (Boyd and Military Strategy) who defines it as:

the destruction of the enemy's will to win, via alienation from allies (or potential allies) and internal fragmentation. Ideally resulting in the "dissolution of the moral bonds that permit an organic whole [organization] to exist. (i.e., breaking down the mutual trust and common outlook)

Curiously, but perhaps only too appropriately, "value warfare" (as a form of memetic warfare, in contrast with "valuing warfare") first seems to have been discussed by Robert Cooperstein (Some Notes on the Reproduction of Human Capital, 1974):

Growing up is a gradually increasing and forced addiction to value deformation. 'Forced' because the dictates of simple self-preservation in the familial cold war obligates the child to adopt the weapons of his enemies who have already mastered the techniques of value warfare; "gradually increasing" because as in any cold war, the maintenance of the balance of power requires an armaments race in which each contestant must continually improve his weapons (the family attains the moment of détente when it substitutes the trading of covert hostilities for more open attacks, physical or otherwise); "addiction" since the child must swallow ever-enlarged doses of value in order to remain in the same position vis-à-vis his parents, even as it cumulatively drains away his vitality. Value deformation is a remedy which enables the child to bear the illness while aggravating it. It should be remembered that as he comes of age this war of provocations becomes less and less unilateral, which is to say that the child comes to equally characterize his adult masters.

The term "value warfare" is entirely consistent with the anticipation of faith-based communities and their governments of an ultimate battle between the forces of "good" and "evil" as part of the "end-times" scenarios of the three Abrahamic religions. These preoccupations are however more commonly discussed in the extensive literature on "spiritual warfare". This is readily framed as the basis for the ongoing Christian "crusade" against the Islamic world and the corresponding Islamic jihad against "unbelievers". Franklin Graham, son of the Rev. Billy Graham (advisor to a succession of presidents) and one of the USA's most outspoken critics of Islam, indicated that he had relief workers "poised and ready" to roll into Iraq to provide for the population's post-war physical and spiritual needs (Crusaders sending in missionaries after the Blitzkrieg, 2003; Christianizing the Enemy, 2003).

Cooperstein however then notes:

The implements of value warfare, first appropriated in the familial environment, will be found useful later on everywhere, including in the child's relations with his first playmates. Value spreads exponentially.

Values are effectively capable of "bending" knowledge space (as recognized in use of "bent" as a descriptor) and this may even come to characterize any definition of a value in knowledge society. Ironically, the historical association of the value "gravitas" with the phenomenon of "gravity" is perhaps indicative of such an understanding by Isaac Newton (John Noble Wilford, The Man Who Grasped The Heavens' Gravitas, The New York Times, 8 October 2004).

Following Cooperstein, the possible "implements of value warfare" calling for recognition may be readily explored through widely used military metaphors (cf Enhancing Sustainable Development Strategies through Avoidance of Military Metaphors, 1998). These highlight analogues of:

• biochemical weapons, as is already recognized in the terms viral marketing and viral adverstising, specifically recognized to be analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses
• ammunition of any kind, as already understood in "targetting" potential markets and customers
• landmines, as already recognized in reference to "minefields" in interpersonal and intergroup relations, with all the capacity to disable people permanently
• weapons of mass destruction, as possibly to be recognized in the use and operation of "weapons of mass distrsaction" (Destructive Weapons of Mass Distraction vs Distractive Weapons of Mass Destruction, 2003)
• nuclear weapons, might be fruitfully understood as those capable of destroying bonds of relationship in the community and the "nuclear family", appropriately recognized by cultures resistant to cultural violence and spiritual pollution, possibly by comparison with biochemical warfare (Pico Iyer, Battling "Spiritual Pollution", Time, 28 November 1983; R. Beck, Spiritual Pollution: The dilemma of sociomoral disgust and the ethic of love, Journal of Psychology and Theology, 43, 2006, pp. 53-65)
• binary weapons, as seemingly innocuous values (held in isolation) which, when combined, are extremely destructive, perhaps already to be recognized in techniques for destabilizing groups through infiltration by two, seemingly innocent, but destructiuvely conflicting tendencies
• camouflage, smokescreens, decoys, and countermeasures as noted above when honourable values are used to disguise other agendas
• value tanks, as corresponding to strategic think tanks whose implications are discussed elsewhere (Meta-challenges of the Future for Networking through Think-tanks, 2005; "Tank-thoughts" from "Think-tanks": metaphors constraining development of global governance, 2003); some think tanks may already be understood to be operating as "value tanks", if many intentional communities are not to be considered in this light
• armour, truth as token -- depleted uranium ***
• trust certainity >>> values=funding ***
• strategic engagement ***
• values fundamental -- wisdom ***
• anthropomorphic principle / anthropocene -- where else? ***

The non-triviality of the use of such weaponry in "value warfare" is illustrated (at the time of writing) by the assassination as "spies" of unarmed, innocent, western women aid workers seeking to educate girls in rural Afghanistan -- an "unquestionably worthy" initiative by "universal" standards -- against the values upheld in that area by the Taliban, thereby demonstrated to be totally "unworthy", unreasonable, and therefore only "worthy" of elimination.

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