Whenever human societies evolve culturally, they build cohesive and coherent systems of values to guide them. Building these value systems is influenced by the prevailing affective and linguistic experiences of each nation.
People articulate their values based on the terminology that is available to them and forms part of their cultural repertoire, using the idioms and terms that are broadly adopted in their discussions and deliberations. They thereby favor this or that value and give it primacy over others.
For this reason, we must somberly contemplate the nature of these values that guide societies on how to manage their affairs, revitalize their communities, and invigorate their role in building comprehensive universal values that promote solidarity within human civilization as a whole.
Questions about the divergent views on these guiding human values are among the most dangerous the mind can conjure. Should we assume that there are sharp differences in these values, which themselves derive from three central great principles on which human existence relies: safeguarding human life, striving for human dignity, and following reason?
I have mentioned life, dignity, and reason then. However, we could also add other central values that have been solidly laid down by international human rights law, like freedom, equality, fraternity, and justice. We enrich our discussion once we add traditional values that form part of societies’ heritage and have been adhered to for centuries. They include valor, pride, honor, integrity, honesty, patience, and munificence, as well as the religious principles that accompany spiritual awakenings, such as forgiveness, solidarity, peacefulness, hospitableness, gratuity, sacrifice, empathy, and hope.
I know that some of these values are simultaneously placed at the rank of noble values or are tied to the core of personal affect. Nonetheless, people consider patience, magnificence, and hope to be values. In any case, an array of noble human meanings that people in all societies advocate are laid before us. However, they are imbued with definitions, details, and practical implications, rendering them controversial and problematic.
Here, I am concerned with elucidating three forms of civilizational dilemmas.
The first civilizational dilemma is tied to how to prioritize different values. A famous Latin phrase popular during the Middle Ages equates the values of unison, truth and goodness (unum verum et bonum convertuntur). That is because medieval philosophers believed the good, truth, and unison are convertible - everything true is good, and everything good is true.
There is no doubt that this metaphysical vision of the world maintains the unity of intellectual constructs and ensures logical soundness. However, it is severely and dangerously reductionist, nullifying the diverse ways in which these values manifest themselves in different historical contexts.
Although ancient Greek philosophers insisted on the inherent unity of the values of truth, goodness, and beauty, gave primacy to absolute divine goodness (Agathon), and saw it as the foundation of all values, the diversity and contradictory nature of humanity’s cultural experiences are not consistent with this conception of unison.
Is goodness the value of values? Is it truth? Is it beauty? Or is it the unison from which their multiple historical manifestations are derived? If a nation agrees on prioritizing beauty, should we accept the subordination of truth and goodness to the needs of beauty? And what is beauty? Is it in form or content? Does it manifest itself in our bodily material senses? Or does it manifest itself in intellectual, psychological, moral and spiritual forms?
This line of questioning leads us to the second civilizational dilemma that emerges from the contradiction between human values within a single society and culture. Every member in any given society struggles to find a balance between two forms of faithfulness: faithfulness to the values of their society and faithfulness to their personal values or the convictions they have adopted from their society’s values.
Teachers, for example, are guided by the values of spreading knowledge and treating all their students justly and equitably. Nurses are guided by the principle of bodily and psychological health. As for those running productive institutions, they are guided by the principles of efficiency, proficiency, and competitiveness. Meanwhile, political officials adhere primarily to the values of guile and street smarts, which safeguard states’ supreme interests and make politicians’ power sustainable.
Sharp contradictions could also arise between the value of individual freedom and the values of national duty and discipline in the public sphere. The threat posed by contradictory values is often exacerbated when we look into the ethics that guide everyday behavior. People become conflicted in choosing between different medical solutions, neither of which can alleviate all of the patient’s ills, physical, mental, psychological and spiritual.
It is clear that values derived from one’s personal convictions are not the same as the values associated with one’s duties to broader society and that the plurality of lived experiences necessarily entails contradictions among the values drawn from them.
As for the third civilizational dilemma, it stems from the most dangerous contradiction between the values that nations rely on to decide their fates and manage their affairs. True, all nations respect human freedom. However, some societies subordinate personal freedoms to traditional values linked to safeguarding national pride, solidifying social solidarity, and preserving their shared heritage. It is also true that all nations advocate equity. It seems, though, that some cultures remain committed to ontologies that maintain that there are natural and legal differences between men and women, ruling families and their subjects, white men and black men, believers and nonbelievers, missionaries and members of the clergy who carry the torch of the faithful and regular people, the fully-abled and the disabled, and those who recognize the differences between the sexes and those who accept homosexuality.
On top of these dangerous divergences between the various sets of values that guide different human civilizations, there are other kinds of contradictions that have implications for what it means, at the core, to be human. That is because not all people do not agree on a single definition of what it means to be human.
It is from the core of this anthropological difference that contradictions between the divergent values guiding human life are derived. Are human beings biological creatures whose consciousness can be reduced to the functions of the brain’s neural cells? Or are they spiritual beings whose existence cannot be explained by merely referring to brain functions; here, life is envisioned such that it is rendered part of an invisible timeless realm that humans enter after having finished doing their work and making their pilgrimage during their moral life?
In summary, human societies cannot satisfy themselves with merely rhetorically agreeing to a set of human values alien to their cultures, sentiments, lived experiences, and histories.
We should be aware that, today, no culture would accept the dictates laid out in Ibrahim Al-Shatibi’s "The Reconciliation of the Fundamentals of Islamic Law", in which he argues that the cultures of the world agree on the five essential objectives of Islamic Law: religion, human life, progeny, material wealth, and human reason. Everyone knows that Western society does not consider religion to be an essential existential need. Some
Westerners believe that they no longer prioritize progeny, as Western people’s lives are not actualized through their offspring but through themselves and their personal achievements.
I say all of this to demonstrate that the principle prerequisite for peaceful societies is the sensible examination of the values they agree to, avoiding bold inspections of the dangerous divergences in how they conceive of the world, which hinders the reconciliation among them needed for universal solidarity.
I am pleased to refer, in this context, to the conclusions that Lebanese philosopher Rene Habshi (1915 - 2003) drew from comparing the three monotheistic religions. He attributed hospitality to Judaism, gratuity to Christianity, and forgiveness to Islam, and he called on them all to build a Mediterranean value system that incorporates the heritage of the Mediterranean Sea with spiritual coalescence that reinforces the spiritual complementariness of these values.
I think that such serious research helps us pick out the ethical jewels that human civilizations are endowed with. However, these efforts do not exempt us from our responsibility to prudently distinguish between the richness of different interpretations and disruptive, empty claims. By this, I mean that freedom, to take one example, is enriched by the interpretations of civilizations and the experiences of nations. However, it is undermined and its capacity for invigoration is negated if a society empties it of the implications tied to the essence of the concept.
Moreover, we should not hear divergences in our understandings of human values, but we should also safeguard the capacity for progress inherent to these values. After all, everything that emerges from the laboratory of human existence comes together in the skies of the perfections we desire.
