Bernie's Blog Week 7: Fordham Futures: A Question of Values

     During the first six weeks of your freshman year on campus, either as a commuter or resident student, you were [are] involved in making more independent decisions than in the previous eighteen years of your life before your arrival to Fordham. Decisions that assist you in discovering the value of your independent existence, and how that independence contributes to the communal good.
      The value and values expressed in your academic, emotional, social, co-curricular, physical, and safety decisions could not be more eloquently expressed than by the words of University President Emeritus, Joseph A. O'Hare S.J. when commenting on the 9/11 tragedy: "We can learn...from the horrors of September 11th important lessons about the fragility of life and the resilience of the human spirit. We can recognize more vividly that each day is a gift full of promise, but we can never take the gift for granted. We can learn again that we must live in our particular moment of history and not retreat into wishful thinking about another time and another place. In other words, we must continue to grow in wisdom and learning about our world and our selves."
      You face the challenge of learning and working in a society and culture in turmoil and you live in a time of great transition. In such times, value conflict is ever-present and complex, and you will need to call upon your creative resources and forces, in both a prescriptive and descriptive manner, to assist in a societal resolution of this value-centric crisis. Your needs, goals, beliefs, attitudes, interests, or preferences are terms that are frequently confused with values. Values represent much more, as they are either explicit or implicit learned concepts of what you desire.
      You attend this great University during a time of great economic upheaval, as well as, during period of dramatic inter-generational transformation. At this critical time, you need to devote more time and intellectual capital in an attempt to define, organize,categorize, and study the personal value choices that you face each day. The study of values might once have been a matter of individual concerns in search of a just and honorable life. Now it is a collective human endeavor that calls each of us to search and seek a valued rich communal response.
      As human beings, you inform, expand, and synthesize your thoughts within a wide-range of cognitive perspectives as you engage in value and ethical decisions and judgments. Professor Hunter Lewis' "A Question of Values: Six Ways We Make Personal Choices" describes six profoundly different cognitive lenses through which you view the world. They are our ways of knowing and believing as you create a framework of complex and diverse human values. Professor Lewis provides you with an excellent vehicle for self-observation as you enhance and expand your self-awareness and self-understanding:

1. Authority - Taking someone else's word, having faith in an external authority. This is actually the most common way that we form our beliefs, and not merely as children, even as adults when we rely on 'experts' of all kinds.
2. Deductive Logic - Subjecting beliefs to a variety of consistency tests that underlie deductive reasoning. Deductive logic is first of all a way of thinking, believing, and knowing; second, a way of the thinking, believing, and knowing about values; third, a dominant value in itself, one that precedes and colors all the other value judgments that we make.
3. Sense Experience - Gaining direct knowledge through our five senses. When we speak of sense experience, we are referring to something narrower and more specific: the knowledge that we get directly by seeing,hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.
4. Emotion - Feeling that something is right. Although we do not usually associate feeling with thinking or judging, we actually think or judge through our emotions all the time. Value systems based on emotion are actually more constant than changing, more alike than unlike. In particular, they all share three features, corresponding to three basic emotional needs. First, they all focus on a particular group of people. Second, they all propound a particular way of life, or a particular way of organizing society. Third, they all require an emotional stimulus.
5. Intuition - Unconscious thinking that is not emotional. Hence most creative discoveries are intuitively derived, and only later dressed up by logic, observation, or some other conscious event.
6. Science - A synthetic technique that relies on sense experience to collect observable facts; intuition to develop a testable hypothesis about the facts, logic to develop the test, and sense experience again to complete the test.

      Each type of value system stands separate and apart, however, the various types of value systems blend and interact with one another. Everyday, you combine ways of thinking, and resulting value systems, without any contextual structure. You are,without exception, multidimensional in your personal beliefs and values. Everyone is influenced by some degree of authority, logic, sense experience, emotion, intuition, and science as you form and shape your value systems. If you think just logically or intuitively or emotionally you will working from a narrow focus. As you become aware of the variety of different cognitive lenses available to you it opens your possibilities that some decisions are emotional, logical, and intuitive. As you find value in creating your unique career narrative, remember to enhance, expand, and integrate.