Professor Clifford Christians Receives Research Awards

July 21, 2004
by: ICR

Clifford Christians has received the Paul J. Deutschmann Award for Excellence in Research from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. This award for distinguished research in journalism/mass communication will be presented at the AEJMC Convention in Toronto on August 6. Christians will address the Deutschmann Award Session on "Ethical Theory in Communication Research."

Dr. Christians was also the James A. Jaksa Communication Ethics Scholar-in-Residence for the National Communication Ethics Conference at Duquesne University from June 10-13. His keynote address was entitled, "The One-and-Many Problem in Communication Ethics". The text of Dr. Christians' keynote address follows.

The One-and-Many Problem in Communication Ethics


Communication ethics has been largely Western, patriarchal, and monocultural. The field of the future must be international, gender inclusive, and multicultural. The comparative ethics we seek places occidental and oriental societies, and those North and South, on a level playing field. As a new axis for normative discourse is constructed, the perennial philosophical problem of the one-and-the-many must be resolved. Hence this paper in metaethics.

Ethical rationalism has served as the prevailing paradigm. Explicit conceptual processes created basic rules of morality that everyone is obliged to follow and against which all moral obligations can be measured.

Philosophical rationalism is harassed from every side these days and has lost its authority. A post-Newtonian age no longer supports a metaphysics of good and evil or right and wrong. Theories that depend on a direct correspondence between true statements and reality are unsustainable on this side of Darwin, Freud and Wittgenstein.

The ethics of rationalism has presumed neutrality for itself, but is now recognized as only one range of ideas, and not a meeting ground across cultures. The traditional ethics of reason actually enjoins its own logic, fueled by a colonialism of self-imposed superiority.

Communication ethics as a subset of applied ethics is bilingual. It combines theory with actual events and real-life dilemmas. As a field of philosophy with its own identity in professional ethics, theory construction is interactive. Principles and practice build on one another dialectically.

Our intellectual challenge internally is formidable enough in itself; with Enlightenment canonicity gone to seed. But developing a credible, normative communication ethics faces external demands of Himalayan proportions too.

Unique to this complicated age is technology on a worldwide scale, with today's two most powerful tools in fundamental contradiction. Information technologies have created international communication networks that potentially involve us all in one another's business. But its opposite, military technology, threatens the human race with annihilation. Our fragile planet has the technological sophistication dialectically to destroy humanity while binding all nations into a worldwide information system.

Global technology is built in counterpoint. The only two technologies with global reach are yoked together. As information increases, we presume to facilitate global understanding. When the nuclear arms race is successfully curbed, these two technologies are thought to follow their proper trajectory. Open information unfettered, and destructive technology restrained, is a working formula for sustaining the planet.

However, the external issue is not globalization per se, but globalization and multiculturalism.

Indigenous languages and ethnicity have come into their own in the twenty-first century. Religious and ideological fundamentalists insist on recognition. Culture is more salient at present than countries. Muslim immigrants are the fastest-growing segment of the population in France, and long-standing policies of assimilation are no longer credible. Thirty thousand Navajos live in Los Angeles isolated from their home nation and culture. The nomadic Fulani search for pasture throughout the sub-Saharan West Africa, held together by clan fidelity but their political future hangs in the balance. 37 distinct languages survive in tiny Burkina Faso. More than 30 percent of the information technicians working for mammoth Microsoft in North America come from India. At the turn of the twentieth century, 80 percent of immigrants to the United States were from Europe. Since the 1960s, the majority has come from Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and developing countries in Africa. And rather than the melting-pot Americanization of the last century, immigrants now insist on maintaining their own cultures, religions, and languages. Identity politics have become dominant in world affairs since the Cold War, and ethnic self-consciousness these days is considered essential to cultural vitality.

Communication ethics at this juncture has to respond to both the rapid globalization of communications and the reassertion of local identities. It is caught in the apparently contradictory trends of cultural homogenization and cultural resistance.

Transnationalism has tribalism's ferocity.

The-One-and-the-Many

Globalization and multiculturalism are hot, taking the academy by storm, just as postmodernism did earlier. They are not just sociological and academic fads, but signal fundamental shifts of historic importance. And as we theorize communication ethics, it is the integration of globalization and ethnicity that is today's extraordinary challenge. For those of us specializing in intercultural communication, we need to reorient ethnicity in global terms. For internationalists among us, where is the pandemonium of cultural recognition in our work?

All of us across the communications spectrum are in this together. Media communications has a major role, of course. But in interpersonal communications of various venues, we're concerned with world citizens. Multiculturalism is big from rhetoric to mass communication. Proactivists in all areas of communication act locally but think globally. In stark and inescapable ways, the enduring philosophical problem of the-one-and-the-many is on our common agenda, and we need to confront it and learn from it, before our theorizing in communication ethics can more forward constructively.

Whether the world is one or many is among the oldest questions of philosophy. Is there an underlying unity behind the multiple ways in which the world appears to human observers, or are things really as varied as appearances suggest? (Kekes, 1993, p. 17). In this conundrum, the one dominates the many, or either side is absorbed in the other, or the proliferation of the many destroys their particularity, or the concrete is evacuated of any universal significance. The logic of their relation dictates that one domain must be abstracted from the other or that either is made disposable (Cavanaugh, 2001).

The one-many problem has a long tradition in Eastern philosophy. The Hindu Vedas discuss the composition in the 8th century B.C. In the Vedas, truth is One but has many appellations. "God" and "the Buddha," for example, are only sign names pointing to the same ultimate reality. The Indian Upanishads, in the following centuries, debate one-many hotly, and fall on both sides of the problem. In East Asia, the Neo-Confucianists, Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, contended there was a fundamental pattern li to the universe. Each thing has its own li, but also contains the li of all other things. Many in the Confucian tradition work from that argument even today.

The earliest Western breakdown of the One/Many problem is with the Greek Presocratics, at the end of the 6th century B.C. Parmenides was the classic defender of the Oneness side of the argument, but ultimately concluded that if so, everything must be static and unchanging, which contradicts common sense. Parmenides' contemporary, Heraclitus, is the original defender of the Many side, contending as he does that even in everyday experience we do not step in the same river twice. Plato in the Republic and Parmenides argued for the "One-over-Many" solution. In Platonist realism, universals exist independently of things. Aristotle agreed with realism, but contradicted Plato by arguing that universals exist in things, but not independently of them.

Over against realism, Boethius of Rome in the late 5th century translated Aristotle's logical writings for the Latin West, with his Platonic sympathies formulating the one-many problem into nominal universals. Do genera and species actually subsist or are they found in the mind alone? For a thousand years to William of Ockham, some version of nominalism established the medieval debate, that is, universals are constituted only in the mind. Realism as its alternative believes that material objects and theoretical entities are more than the experiential content of our minds. For realists, universals are not reducible to the particulars of which those universals are true. But if real objects transcend experience, how is knowledge of reality possible?

Translated as it has been into the nominalism/realism dichotomy, the philosophical debate over the one-and-many problem continues to reflect different dimensions of this dualism but has not fundamentally reconceived it.

Monism/Relativism in Ethical Theory

In ethical theory, the one-many conundrum is translated into monism versus relativism. Monism is the view that there is one and only one reasonable system of values, the same for all human beings, always and everywhere. Human lives are good to the extent to which they conform to this system, and particular values are better or worse depending on their standing in the system. Relativism in ethical theory represents the "many" side of the equation. For relativists, "ultimately all values are conventional.What values people accept depends on the context in which they are born, on their genetic inheritance and subsequent experiences, on the political, cultural, economic and religious influences on them" (Kekes, 1993, p. 8). In short, what they value depends on their subjective attitudes and not on values' objective features.
Monism has been pre-eminent since the 18th century. The idea of a common morality known to all rational beings had its detractors, or course, from within the Western tradition itself. But such opposition was of limited influence, until now the curtain has come down on 300 years of Enlightenment modernity (cf. Paul et al., 1994).

Societies feeding from this worldview face a crisis of validation. What still counts as legitimate knowledge for them? Moral principles are generally presumed to have no credibility outside the societies within which they are constituted.

As we work out a new diversified comparative ethics, we do so in an intellectual world where monism has been replaced by relativism. What makes a life good is ambiguous. "Just as there is a profusion of conflicting values, so also there [are multiple] conceptions of the good life comprising these values. The plurality of good lives, therefore, is a plurality twice over" (p. 11). We have a conviction now that "witches should not be burned", and take seriously matters toward which our predecessors were largely indifferent, such as ecology, animal experimentation, and affirmative action (pp. 4-5). But we do not articulate other significant moral issues that well: the increasing power of bureaucracy and corporations, the demands of patriotism, vivisection, starvation and torture in distant lands. "We are repudiating racism, but that brings us face to face with fundamental questions about how much we are willing to sacrifice for equality; or what, if anything, we owe to the descendents of people victimized by our ancestors" (p. 5).

In fact, "the conflicts are so numerous, so varied, permeate so many different areas of our lives; the arguments about them are so hopelessly inconclusive, carry so little conviction; and the opponents are so deeply imbued with moral fervor, that the fact of basic moral change is undeniable" (p. 5). "What thinking person in our society can be satisfied with the morality of the compromises we have arrived at, after decades of haggling, about pornography, abortion, death row, the welfare system, or measures taken to ensure the honesty of politicians" (p. 7). We have lost a rational foundation for our moral convictions.

Certainly, on the concrete level, relativism seems to carry the day, but intellectually we're conflicted about it. Relativism is subject to the naturalistic fallacy, that is, "ought" statements cannot be derived from "is" statements since they represent different realms. What exists in a natural setting cannot itself yield normative guidelines. And relativism faces the longstanding contradiction articulated by Karl Mannheim: Those insisting that all cultures are relative must rise above them, and in rising above them they have given it up.

Moving from traditional communication ethics to a comparative model is loaded with good intentions. But the complications are enormous: The internal collapse of the rational canon, ethnic recognition inscribed in globalism, and the one-many predicament in our face.

Theoretical Model of Comparative Communication Ethics

Walking through the landmines of this intellectual terrain, I am brash enough to introduce now a theoretical model of comparative communication ethics. The one-and-the-many enigma has generated some great work conceptually, but is not resolved. Therefore, we could ask, why turn to it even though globalization and multiculturalism seem to make it unavoidable?

The axiological question of whether values are one or many generates in ethical theory the monism/relativism controversy. Again the question, why reiterate it in theory-building for today's communication ethics?

The one-many dilemma need not be reconciled for us to proceed, but understanding the debate is irreplaceable. Ignorance of it leads to unsupportable conclusions. Knowing its broader intellectual history yields concepts for our theory-building. Being schooled in it enables us to avoid relativism.

Three principles from the one-many tradition are especially relevant.

1) Insist on universals but reconceptualize their character. The oneness side of the argument explains the most. The one-over-many solution withstands criticism the best. That is, the argument that even if every snowflake is unique, they can still be described by one term. The most promising way of dealing with one-many has been to consider the many as passing away into the one. In epistemology, empiricism is a "corrective to the devaluation of the particular" but rationalism overcomes the "brute factitity of the particular by locating the deeper explanation of things in the realm of essence" (Cavanaugh, 2001, p. 338). Humans cannot function without generalization.

A theoretical model of comparative communication ethics needs transnational principles, but those of a specific type--universals that are protonorms. Proto means both first and beneath in Greek. In the word "prototype", we think of firstness. Ford Motor Co. builds a prototype and this model is then reproduced as replicas on the assembly line. And this has been the style of categorical imperatives in the Enlightenment tradition.

But instead, think proto as beneath, as in the proto-Germanic language; our reconstruction of a lingual predecessor underlying the Germanic languages as we know them in history. Protonorms as beneath are presuppositions, originating claims that are fundamental to ethical reasoning. As Aristotle made irrevocable, we need a place to begin or we go nowhere; infinite regression makes structure and meaning impossible.

For the idea of universal norms, we should turn to our everyday experience in natural reality. The rationale for human action is reverence for life on earth. Purpose is embedded in the animate world, evident in its own reproduction. Ontologically speaking, the natural order has a moral claim on us for its own sake and in its own right. Our duty to preserve life is primal, timeless, and non-negotiable. Nurturing life has a taken-for-granted character.

Reverence for life on earth is the philosophical foundation of the moral order. The sacredness of life is a pretheoretical given that makes the moral order possible. Human responsibility regarding natural existence contributes the possibility of intrinsic imperatives to moral philosophy. There is at least one generality of universal scope underlying systematic ethics. The veneration of human life represents a universalism from the ground up. Various societies articulate this protonorm in different terms and illustrate it locally, but every culture can bring to the table this fundamental norm for ordering political relationships and such social institutions as the media (Christians, 1997).

2) The second principle for comparative ethics is understanding the-one-and-the-many in terms of philosophical anthropology. The one-many problem is in the domain of metaphysics, and monism-relativism in axiology. Its rational/empirical form is epistemological.

But we ought to reconfigure one-many in fundamentally human terms. Humans are cultural beings. As creators, distributors, and users of culture, people live in a world of their own making. Humans are the one living species constituted by language. In traditional epistemology, all acts are monologic, though actions may be coordinated with others. However, when the lingual interpretation of ourselves and our experience constitutes who we are, human action is dialogic. Humans are interactive agents within a language community.

Our meaningful references to moral matters are social. We are at home in the communal. Such protonorms as reverence for life can only be recovered locally. Language situates them in history. Ethical principles such as human dignity are of a universal order; they reflect our common condition as a species. Yet we enter them through the immediate reality of geography and ethnicity.

Universals are worked out within the cultural inflection of the second order. We distinguish beween the first and second orders as with a windowpane; knowing that there is a decisive break, yet both realms are transparent to each other as well. And necessarily these mental processes often occur simultaneously without being diluted; for example, one ordinarily considers activities of the local police force in terms of elementary principles of political justice.

The community is understood to be axiologically and ontologically prior to persons. We are born into a sociocultural universe where values, moral commitments, and existential meanings are both presumed and negotiated. Morally appropriate action intends community. That prevents the dichotomy of the one, and the total many. Now community is irrevocably in between. There can be no longer a category called "the many" without community as a definitive, explicit component.

3) In our model building out of the one-many tradition, first, universals as presuppositional; second, an irrevocable community. And a third conclusion, reconstruct the character of theorizing.

The one-many problem has been constrained by a narrow preoccupation with the systematic construction of philosophical thought. The Greek tradition is prejudiced to a conceptual Logos. Greek philosophy has shaped the whole course of Western intellectual history to privilege the theoretical or rational aspect of life. Philosophical proclivity toward reason--be it theoretical, methodological, or practical--presumes an objective, ahistorical foundation of knowledge (Shin, 1994).

Richard Rorty scourges the Enlightenment version of scientistic knowledge as "the quest for certainty over the quest for wisdom" (1979, p. 365). Modernist philosophers, he says, "have sought to attain the rigor of the mathematician or the physicist, or to explain the appearance of rigor in these fields, rather than to help people attain peace of mind" (p. 394). Science, instead of living, became philosophy's subject, and the rules of knowledge its centerpiece.

In Rorty's view, theories are not a "mirror of nature" and "privileged contact with reality" but "what is better for us to believe" (p. 10). Florian Znaniecki's influential conception of theory, called "analytic induction", insists on generalizing from the data. This is grounded theory, emphasizing the integrative and interpretive character of theorizing without jettisoning natural settings. These are theories that yield meaningful portraits, and not statistically precise formulations derived from artificially fixed conditions. Analytic induction maps out seminal taxonomies and orders empirical instances while unveiling the inner character of complex cultures.

Theorizing is redefined not as examination of external events, but the power of the imagination to give us an inside perspective on reality. Thomas Kuhn calls this revolutionary science; the constructing of paradigms--rather than the normal science of verifying that propositions are internally and externally valid.

Theories are not ex nihilo. They are not conceptually immaculate, arising out of nothing. Theories are not abstract theorems, noncontingent and decontextual. Instead they are oppositional claims about the world. We identify niches and inconsistencies and conundrums over against existing conventions, and theorize how to start over intellectually. Einstein did not formulate E=MC2 in purity, but in opposition to Newtonian physics. Chomsky's transformational linguistics is contrary to Skinner's behaviorism.

Grounded theory finds in the sovereign decision-maker the centerpiece of the one-many problematic. The philosophical tradition of one-and-many holds deeply to the autonomy of human reason, and the locus of morals in individual choice.

And the radical opposite of the autonomous self is universal human solidarity. The total reversal of individual autonomy is homo sapiens as a species. Reverence for life on earth bonds us universally into an organic whole. Our moral imagination is rooted in the universally human, not in an innermost self. One does comparative communication ethics by starting with the universal. Our human livelihood is rooted in the principle that we have inescapable claims on one another which cannot be renounced except at the cost of our humanity. Universal solidarity is the normative core of all human communication. Our obligation to sustain one another defines our human existence.

Universal human solidarity is not a foundational apriori. This universal, in fact, belongs to a different category, philosophically speaking, than that of objectivist absolutes. Cartesian rationalism and Kant's formalism presumed noncontingent starting points. Universal human bondedness does not. Nor does it flow from Platonism, that is, the finite participating in the infinite and receiving its essence from it.

This perspective embeds normative phenomena within culture and history. This intellectual strategy shifts transcendental criteria from a metaphysical and vertical plane to horizons of community and being, but transcendental norms they remain nonetheless. Our common humanity is not inscribed, first of all, in politics or economics, or in overcoming national boundaries by transportation of data. I resonate cross-culturally through my spirit with the moral imagination of others. Our mutual humanness is actually an ethical commitment rooted in the moral domain all humans share (Christians, 2003).

Principled Dialogic Ethics

A semiotics of the one-many tradition provides us three building blocks for theory: a protonorm the sacredness of life, community as ontologically irreducible, and the universally human for orienting the moral imagination.

With these components in place, fashioned over against the one-many debate, a principled dialogic ethics becomes the obvious model in an age of globalization and multiculturalism. In terms of ethical theory, dialogic ethics is an alternative to both monism and relativism.

A comparative communication ethics is dialogical. However, it is dialogic ethics of an unusual kind. We come to community from the universal. We are doing social ethics but entering it from the human race as a whole.

The protonorm, understood as universal solidarity, is an embodiment of what Michael Polanyi called tacit knowledge. The foundations of our knowing are deeply interiorized. As we integrate particulars, we do not understand them externally but make value judgments regarding them. All our knowledge cannot be formalized. Any series of explicit operations presupposes a fund of inexplicit beliefs. As Polanyi summarizes his argument, "Thought can only live on ground which we adopt in the service of a reality to which we submit" (1968, p. xi).

In experiencing a conceptual system as valid, we also tacitly depend upon the ground on which the system rests. It is our reliance on this ultimate which makes comprehension possible. Our thinking begins with core beliefs, but human knowing is not thereby restricted. In fact, faith commitment is the very condition through which human cognition reveals its intelligibility (Christians, Ferre, Fackler, 1993, ch. 6).

The sacredness of human life universally is our ultimate commitment, the core belief of our tacit knowledge. Our common humanness cannot simply be believed; it must be expressed. Holding this protonorm in silence is meaningless. Its content, validity and motivating power depend on the way it is communicated. Given that language recapitulates, the symbols we use create what we view as reality. Representational forms matter. Concepts cannot be isolated from their representation.

The sacredness of life is lingual, and by definition it is also communal. Social relations define our existence as persons. The sacredness of life must, therefore, be understood sociologically. Reverence for life comes into its own through our public language.

As a protonorm cross-culturally shared, the veneration of human life belongs first of all to the general morality. Through our everyday conversations and experience, human sacredness will either flourish or whither. Within the popular mind it can prosper at hospital bedsides; among citizen action groups, at home reading the newspaper about the genius of physicist Stephen Hawking; in churches, mosques, and synagogues; on the school playground when the disabled are struggling to keep up; or among compesinoes as they are learning to read. The ethics of human sacredness is a people's manifesto, calling us to fulfill our duty to the sacredness of life, while insisting with credibility that the big time media symbol makers and government elite fulfill their specialized obligations too.

The dialogic ethics I propose is fed by the sacredness of our universal humanity as tacit knowledge. Dialogic ethics of all kinds are community-oriented, the relational by definition entails the communal. But the dialogic rooted in the self and Other is radically different from an interactional ethics initiated by and conditioned always in terms of the protonorm--human solidarity around the sacredness of life. Shifting ethics from the self to a radical otherness, avoids the self-deception, self interest, and moral arrogance of individualism. Other-regarding care in its various inflections open the pathway to intercultural representation, and the many side of the one-many equation. But otherness that begins with individualism does not encompass globalism and oneness, except by extrapolation.

The theoretical opposite of autonomous individuals is not the community, nor a shift from individual rationahsm to narrative ethics. These are only half-way measures. If we move directly from the individual to the community, we still need a standard outside the group by which to assess it morally. Therefore, the dialogic communication ethics I propose starts over intellectually from the universal. While taking on flesh-and-blood in the communal arena, it avoids the monism-relativism polarity and works at the intersection of multiculturalism and globalization.

If we make the universal the ground of the theory, there is a frame of reference for interpreting and measuring communities. Standards are essential for forming the common good. Communities turn in on themselves. Not all communities are legitimate. Matt Hale's white supremacist World Church of the Creator and the Michigan milita are communities for condemnation.

A commitment to universals does not eliminate differences in what we think and believe. Normative ethics grounded ontologically is pluralistic. The only question is whether our community's values affirm the sacredness of life, and are consistent with the ethical principles inscribed in it; human dignity, truthtelling, and nonviolence.

Conclusion

With a comparative dialogic ethics carved out of the one-many problematic, we can make our way constructively at the intersection of the global and multicultural.

Globalization reconfigures space by abstracting human relations from their concrete embodiments in the local. It imbricates the particular into the transnational marketplace. While globalization renders the specific disposable, strident fundamentalisms that combat the universal are also wrong on the one-many interplay. The placeless language of panaceas and instant fixes, of economic and technological discourse, are disempowering people and eroding the efflorescence of everyday life. Noncaucasians generally come through as dependent, with minimal talent and unlimited capacity for self-determining democracy.

With a comparative communication ethics we not only critique the one-way imperialism of Disney, Murdock, Viacom, and the multinationals, but celebrate indigenous resistance in the people's voice. Only by keeping the local and global together, will be go beyond monolithic abstractions, to represent the struggles for justice in children's theatre, aboriginal art, folk tales, local composers, poetry, and community radio.

All applied and professional ethics face the same internal tensions as we do in communication ethics. In this era of multiculturalism and globalization, our colleagues in these related fields must also reinvent themselves in terms of the one-and-many philosophical tradition. With its roots in language, culture, and relational identity, theoretical communication ethics has the opportunity to set the standard for applied and professional ethics as a whole.


References

Cavanaugh, William T. (2001). "Balthazar, Globalization, and the Problem of the One and the Many." Communio: International Catholic Review, Summer, pp. 324-47.

Christians, Clifford (1997). "The Ethics of Being in a Communications Context." In C. Christians and M. Traber, eds., Communication Ethics and Universal Values. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 3-23.

Christians, Clifford, Ferre, John, Fackler, Mark (1993). Good News: Social Ethics and the Press. New York: Oxford University Press.

Christians, Clifford (2003). "The Media and Moral Literacy." Ethical Space: International Journal of Communication Ethics. 1(1), pp. 13-19.

Kekes, John (1993). The Morality of Pluralism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Paul, Ellen F. et al. (1994) Cultural Pluralism and Moral Knowledge. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Rorty, Richard (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Shin, Kuk-won (1994). A Hermeneutic Utopia: H.-G. Gadamer's Philosophy of Culture. Toronto: Tea for Two Press.

Polayni, Michael (1968). The Tacit Dimension. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.