Reporting this conference is probably the most difficult challenge I have encountered (how can one do justice to over 30 deeply different testimonies on what local cultural crises means in the deepest human senses?) but here's my attempt at a postcard from Mojtaba Sadria, now a Professor at Chuo Univeristy in Japan, a man born in Iran,
a leading authority on 3rd generation Knowledge Management.

Extract based on (Mojtaba Sadria, Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University Japan) & Others

Gaps (of understanding between peoples) are the main cause of the Collapsing World around us

We are living in a growing gap between our might (technology) and our wisdom, (and this is aggravated wherever there is a surplus of power)

Value creation that could control might is falling apart, with ruptures being exacerbated by:
1) Terrorism
2) War
3) Neo-liberal theories of free-trade which exclude humanity as a variable

One of the great ruptures these 3 factors lead to is monopolising policy/decision-making time.

Another system rupture is quality decision-making defined as how truly local are its contextual inputs and how diverse is the participation in decision-making

We need to prevent that definition of radicalism which is: the capacity for exclusion, including excluding the majority

Our increased connectivity means that every system can be disrupted by a sadly small number of incidents such as the behaviours of a few CEOs and the activities of a few terrorists

Globalisation endangers us all if it becomes a self-legitimised radicalism by a few that justifies exclusion of the majority

We need to renew Knowledge of Democracy championing:
Power-sharing, indeed open participation by all
Drawing boundaries to any power-base whether in the name of a country, industry or other identity
Making a number 1 agenda for change, at ever local party election, knowing why globalisation policy should never be permitted to leave out humanity because those kinds of valuation variables are too messy to be able to computing numerical plans in precise-looking ways.

If we ever devise schemes in which knowledge production fails to invite local participation with systemic openness and energy, then we will have begun a vicious spiral of organising people that we may fail ever to rise out of.

Detailed Notes on why culture is such a rich area of study and how human values are our best chance of mutual understanding
http://www.dialoguecentre.org/complete.htm. Extract:

For present purposes, I would like to define confusion as a sense of perplexity that leaves one uncertain as to what to think or to do. Theoretically perplexity may be of an emotional, an intellectual, or an existential kind. Emotional confusion occurs when one has to choose between two or more good things or between varieties of the same thing. This is confusion of feelings or moods. Intellectual perplexity tends to occur when one cannot decide what criteria should be given priority in the case of choice, when something baffles our understanding or when confronting sheer complexity. This sort of confusion occurs on the level of thought. Finally, existential confusion I take to refer to a perplexity in both heart and mind in feelings and in thought. Most perplexities in real life may fall into this category because things are complex and because humans are endowed with both emotional and intellectual abilities that do not function separately on different tracks or in separate channels.

Confusion in the Arena of Heart and Mind
Few will deny the fact that the world of religion and non-religion, seen concretely or taken as a whole, is one of utter confusion. If one were able to codify the beliefs of all existing religious groups this, no doubt, would amount to quite a collection. The main fare of religious beliefs concerns the ultimate nature of man and the universe, man's search for happiness and the ways to realize it. To the extent that various religious groups envision many ways in which a spiritual reality bears on earthly life, their beliefs, if not mutually contradictory are quite contrary to one another. This is not all. If one would add to this collection folk beliefs and secular views on the same matters, the amount of our compilation would probably double and so would the extent of variance and discord. Whereas religious beliefs assume the existence of a super-empirical, transcendental reality (Robertson 1970:47), secular views reject anything for which empirical evidence is lacking. These two categories, therefore, are not merely divergent but worlds apart. Aside from the cleavage between the religious and the non-religious, all views, which are fundamentally different, tend to be wary of one another and to hinder mutual recognition. One fundamental reason for this incoherence in matters of heart and mind may be found in the fact that they are not only intellectually but also emotionally adhered to. In other words, every view of life tends to bolster itself with a strong sense of subjective certainty or truth. Confronted with the inherent uncertainty of life and its uncertain outcome, or confronted with the large variety of its meanings, humans tend to absolutize certain positions in order to avoid existential confusion or to offset the relativity of it all. Therefore, it is not only religion that formulates “conceptions of a general order of existence, clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic. (Geertz 1973:90)
Thus, the cultural area of heart and mind seen objectively, is an arena of latent conflict, controversy, and mutual dislike which eventually comes into the open as overt conflict -- often disastrous in its consequences.

Mojtaba applies his extraordinary lens on humanity to explaining Iran's wonderful cultural origins here.You can google the extraordinary diversity of human perspectives Mojtaba has studied here.
posted by ..., 4:43 PM  permalink