Liberation of integration in governance

Freedom, Democracy, Justice: Isolated Nouns or Interwoven Verbs? (Part #13)

The contrasting images above highlight dramatically the challenge for any science through which values are embodied in governance. The images are provocatively indicative of contrasting appreciations of democracy, freedom and justice.

As previously discussed, reflection on possibilities of fruitfully integrative governance could well be informed by taking seriously the insights into "harmony" from music -- given the extent to which "harmonisation" is a prevailing refrain in international discourse, especially within European institutions (Liberation of Integration through pattern, oscillation, harmony and embodiment, 1980; Using Research in the Participative Orchestration of Europe, 2004; A Singable Earth Charter, EU Constitution or Global Ethic?, 2006; Harmony-Comprehension and Wholeness-Engendering: eliciting psychosocial transformational principles from design, 2010).

Values like democracy, justice and freedom are then more appropriately understood as implicit. Using dance as a metaphor, it is through the style and elegance of movement that the values can be recognized. It is the dynamics of dance which embodies values. They cannot be "grasped" or "possessed" any more than a dancer can "grasp" the values embodied in the movement. Similarly, it is the dynamics of government which embodies the values by which its style is recognized -- irrespective of the well-spun formal declarations and skillfully arranged photo-opportunities by which it endeavours to disguise its style and intentions.

Can the dynamic quality of the evocation of values be more appropriately clarified by the following description by philosopher Antonio de Nicolas (Meditations through the Rg Veda: four-dimensional man, 1978, p. 57) of the four complementary conceptual languages of the Rg Veda that are considered necessary to hold the complexity of insights and experience:

Therefore, from a linguistic and cultural perspective, we have to be aware that we are dealing with a language where tonal and arithmetical relations establish the epistemological invariances.... Language grounded in music is grounded thereby on context dependency; any tone can have any possible relationship to other tones, and the shift from one tone to another, which alone makes melody possible, is a shift in perspective which the singer himself embodies. Any perspective (tone) must be 'sacrificed' for a new one to come into being; continuity, and the 'world' is the creation of the singer, who shares its dimensions with the song.

The challenge has been articulated otherwise by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Philosophy In The Flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought, 1999).

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Liberation of integration in governance