1 Framing the thesis of this book
Introduction
The primary purpose of this book is to be a knowledge-building document which includes the knowledge that knowledge itself can never be enough to address its subject.
That subject is policy development at all scales from personal to global, and in particular our land-related policies, laws, institutions and valuations.
Furthermore, I here argue that what I term âThe Machineâ is not only insufficient to address the performance of the International Valuation Standardâs definition market value. That definition is fundamental to this book, particularly in its emphasis on willing buyers and willing sellers, because machines do not have wills:
Market value is the estimated amount for which an asset or liability would exchange on the valuation date between a willing buyer and a willing seller in an armâs-length transaction after proper marketing wherein the parties had each acted knowledgeably, prudently and without compulsion.
(IVSC 2016)
As explained later, we require organisms to find âwillingâ existents â holons, not artefacts, complex, not merely simple or complicated. They have to be so in order to value in the first place, and to address wicked problems. But they also create wicked valuation problems, particularly in the contexts of the North meeting the South, and the East meeting the West, because they employ heuristics called ideologies, and âideologies exist spatiallyâ (Emerson 2005), as tracked by Arredondo (2013) via his focus on the history of the USA.
As an example of ideologies existing spatially from the area of particular focus in this book, that of land policy, I note that âLand surveys in the 19th century began to help divide the country for settlement and political division by drawing patterns on the land. The notion of âland ownershipâ invades the West with devastating effects on Native Americansâ (Rumsey 2005, 10:19â10:26): âThis is sort of the American experience: everything is rationalized, surveyed, containedâ (ibid., 10:55â10:57). The process Rumsey described in the North American context was repeated globally, and goes for out mental maps as well as our paper and digital ones. Yet there is a difference between them. As Lewis Mumford stated in The Myth of the Machine:
Unlike an organism, which is an open system, subject to chance mutations and to many external forces and circumstances over which it has no control, mechanisms are closed systems, strictly contrived by the inventor to achieve clearly foreseen and limited ends. . . . By contrast, even the lowest species of organism . . . has remarkable potentialities that no machine can boast: it can alter its speciesâ character and re-program itself, so to say, in order to seize new opportunities or resist unwanted external pressures. That margin of freedom no machine possesses in its own right.
(Mumford 1970, p. 97)
I am asserting that ignoring or undervaluing how crucially important this difference is, and thinking exclusively inside the framing of âthe mechanics of thisâ and the âmechanics of thatâ, is a requisite gullibility for one to be confined within the myth of the machine. With Arredondo (2013), I contend that it was preconditional to man-induced climate change and the potential extinction of our species by that and other means (including nuclear war), and similarly the past and ongoing extinctions of thousands of other species on our planet.
That is because markets involve not only fact perceptions, but also value judgements, with value judgements actually directing the search for facts through framing what one seeks and finds in the first place (McGilchrist 2009, pp. 9 and 29, Lakoff 2004): âValues come first, facts and policies follow in the service of values. They matter, but they always support valuesâ (Lakoff 2016). Once the basic needs in Maslowâs hierarchy have been met (see Box 5.2, p. 202) there may be great differences in such value judgements between cultures, and therefore great differences in what constitutes a market value agreement within and between them (Henrich, Heine and Norenzayan 2010).
For that reason, in the context of framing our searches for facts and values and their inter-relationships it is necessary to include references to philosophers and scientists, including physicists. Philosophers are of central concern, but we are not to limit ourselves to philosophy: the central quest here is that of addressing wicked valuation problems. However, many philosophers provide useful guidance in that quest. One such, Charles Taylor, made a core perception in the context, that of a social imaginary (Taylor 2001, 2002, 2004). Using reductionism in what I consider to be its legitimate function as a highlighting device, rather than its illegitimate function as a cutting-off device, the âtruth about stories is thatâs all we areâ (King 2003), meaning that the âweâ thus defined is a social imaginary.
Physicists are important not only because they have been the most influential in framing machine thinking, but also because many of them are at the forefront of revealing its limitations. Poets, politicians and activists are also important to reveal framings and value judgements. However, it is not only philosophers, physicists, poets, politicians and activists who are important to reveal framings and value judgements. In fact, everyone is, starting with oneself, particularly in relationships. Hence my emphasis on identity here, and the provision of my own identity construction as my best-known example of that process.
While McGilchrist and other recent researchers (for example, Nielsen et al. 2013) dismiss several popular hemispheric/personality lateralisations dating from the 1970âs, they equally confirm that genuine lateralisations remain. McGilchristâs work still results in framing the right hemisphereâs domain being that of all value judgements but the extrinsic/utilitarian ones (McGilchrist 2009, pp. 72 and 93). In turn, value judgements frame and power the philosophical, propositional and analytical choices of all peoples everywhere, whether they realise it or not. In this work, I am not mainly concerned with which hemispheres or neurons do what, but with McGilchristâs and Lakoffâs insights into the relationships between fact perceptions and value judgements as they may apply in arriving at market agreements, particularly inter-cultural ones.
Many such culture-shaping value judgements are expressed through myths. As Diamond points out:
A myth is one way we give meaning to our existence â no myth, no meaning. What we have come today scientifically to call models or paradigms are actually myths: cognitive constructs we create in an effort to better comprehend our universe and ourselves.
(Diamond 2006, p. 186)
As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, âMyth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythologyâ (2002, p. xviii).What I term The Machine is born through the myth of mechanism, and comes into reality via the Thomas Theorem â âif one defines situations as real, they are real in their consequencesâ (Thomas and Thomas 1928; Merton 1995).
Those two terms, âmythâ and âmachineâ were brought together decades ago by Lewis Mumford, on his above-quoted two-volume work, âThe Myth of the Machineâ (1967, 1970). The implementation of this myth â via the Thomas Theorem â has been and is still prompted by âa series of intentional choices made in the pursuit of power, power over nature and power over other humansâ. These engender âan increasing tendency towards mechanization that often [comes at] at the expense of humanenessâ and leads to the machine becoming âan end in itselfâ and being âtreated as if it were the creative principle instead of just one possible creationâ (Carlo 2013). The myth enacts âthe social consequences of increasing physical powerâ without necessarily having any âcommensurate increase in intellectual insight, moral discipline, social awareness, and responsible political directionâ (Mumford 1970, p. 232).
This myth, a philosophical expression of which is machinism (Merleau-Ponty and SĂ©glard 2003, p. 162) developed what Mumford termed the megamachine, driven by what he termed âThe Pentagon of Powerâ, that pentagon being power, profit, productivity, property, and prestige (Mumford 1970). Via that pentagon, machinism provides an enboxing of complexity which provides a comforting closure and power-rush for its employers. That emotion of dominance is gained irrespective of its truth value. As such, is a facilitator of left-hemisphere dominance for some of the processually less aware. While this book concentrates on property, the other four ends of the pentagon remain inseparable throughout.
I also argue that the Myth of the Enlightenment (a sub-myth of the myth of the machine for knowledge, too, is power) â in particular, its deliberate disregard of intrinsic valuation â highlights weaknesses of The Machine in both its sources and its drivers.
While of vast extrinsic value in a myriad of contexts, the megamachine, which I shall hereinafter term âThe Machineâ, is of no more intrinsic value than any other machine, such as a stapler, because as explained below machines are never complex, only simple to highly complicated. McGilchrist claims that âNot only does the right hemisphere have an affinity with whatever is living, but the left hemisphere has an equal affinity for what is mechanicalâ (McGilchrist 2009, p. 55). While not referring to brain geography but to the mental phenomena McGilchrist addressed over 60 years later, Lewis Mumford noted of mechanist mindsets that âtheir failure is due to the fact that they are seeking to discover, by abstraction and definition, something that is a complex product of varied, never-ending natural and human processesâ (Mumford 1946, p. 161). Living holons are wickedly complex; inanimate machines are simple to complicated: âBiological and social systems are open, therefore understanding them in mechanical terms will not workâ (Sardar and Abrams 2004, p. 69). As stated by Cobb:
The entire issue serves to illustrate what I believe to be the central intellectual challenge of our age: We live in complex systems, but we do not understand them. Just admitting this might help us find our way forward on so many problems that now plague us.
(Cobb 2011)
As distinct from just an intellectual problem, Arredondo (2013) considers what Mumford described as Myth of the Machineâs âtotalitarian triumph of scientific megatechnicsâ (Mumford 1970, p. 312) to be âthe greatest problem that we faceâ, with its âregression toward primitive forms of total domination and the nihilism that underlies itâ.
I contend that these problems are intimately enmeshed, and that attention to this interplay of value judgements and fact perceptions is core to addressing wicked valuation problems. I have developed HVNâHBA to facilitate wise action in addressing that interplay. That is, I am introducing HVNâHBA as a candidate for being a due diligence protocol in addressing wicked valuation problems.
This book, then, is by a practitioner of real property valuation who believes that the current valuation processes (strongly influenced as they are by mere rationalist economic theory which is, insofar as it is merely rationalist, unreasonable) are inadequate in addressing the complex landscape of property valuation. While my professional field is about reducing all relevant complexities to a market value of real property rights, this work is about addressing wicked valuation problems by respecting their complexities and irreducibilities. As Vandana Shiva puts it, âfor anyone who says itâs too big or too deep, unless we go there even smaller problems wonât be solvedâ (ABC RN 2015a, 53:16).
Therefore I look outwards and upwards from my real property valuation base towards emerging disciplines such as Valuation Studies (Helgesson and Muniesa 2013), environmental psychology (Proshansky, Fabian and Kaminoff 1983), Complexics (Bastardas-Boada 2015), Integration and Implementation Sciences (I2S) (Bammer 2013), Clumsy Theory (Taylor 2015; Thompson 2013), Critical Systems Thinking (Pollack 2013), Post-Normal Science (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1990, 1991; Tognetti 2013) and others such as social identity and self-categorisation theories (Sindic and Condor 2014).
As obliquity is a recommended approach towards addressing complexities (Kay 2011), in so doing I shall introduce the subject with a story about the sea, a machine on it called the Endeavour, and the encounter of the machinism-focussed minds the Endeavour housed with a very different mind. I do so as an illustrative dichotomy towards the idea that there are many approaches to addressing the topic of this book in addition to those of the currently dominant machinist economic paradigm, and that to acknowledge their existence is not to recommend any dominance by any of them, but rather to employ them when optimal in the context.
In 1769, in the Society Islands, Joseph Banks encountered a man called Tupaia. Banks brought him aboard Endeavour, a ship captained by James Cook that was there to observe the transit of Venus as part of an expedition to discover Terra Australis. Later, the Endeavour discovered Australiaâs east coast for the British Crown, which led to the kinds of problems addressed in this work.
A major reason for observing the transit of Venus was that it would help British navigators accurately calculate their longitude: a vital cog for their ships to find their way around the globe. Their reasons for their voyages were centred around trade. Empire was about what Moore terms âthe Law of Valueâ (Moore 2015), which he regards as fundamental to capitalism: to commonalise or otherwise externalise the costs, and privatise the profits â a process of exploitation via capitalisation, and appropriation of that value to themselves. The context of Cookâs endeavour was to find in order to exploit more of a major requirement of that process, Cheap Nature.
By âCheap Natureâ Moore means âthe ongoing, radically expansive, and relentlessly innovative quest to turn the work/energy of the biosphere into capital (value-in-motion)â (ibid., Kindle location 368). It asserts that âthe web of life can be fragmented, that its moments can be valued through calculations of price and valueâ (ibid., Kindle location 1269), the âgenius of capitalismâs cheap nature strategy [being] to represent time as linear, space as flat, as nature as externalâ (Moore 2014, p. 286). Moore sees that approach as the Westâs inflection of what Haraway termed âthe God Trickâ â âseeing everything from nowhereâ (Haraway 1988, p. 581), but which Blake would have seen as the Urizen Trick, passed from Urizen to Newton.
Tupaia was of particular interest to Banks because he could navigate without nailing down longitude. For him, as for other Polynesians, the planet was âa living forceâ (Strongman 2008, p. 72), a view more compatible with that of some modern scientists than that of eighteenth century mechanists: âThe universe . . . is organic . . . a process, not a thingâ (Cole 2001, p. 185). In contrast, the educated gentlemen on the Endeavour, facilitating what their contemporary William Blake described as Single Vision and Newtonâs sleep, navigated by a combination of a (then merely clockwork) astronomy and âMr. Kendallâs watchâ (Sobel 1998, p.150).
One interpretation of Blakeâs âsingle visionâ is seeing merely materially. Twofold vision means seeing not only materially but also the âperception of the human values in all thingsâ, threefold âthe creative stateâ, and fourfold âmystical ecstasyâ (Damon 2013, pp. 469â470). Another interpretation is that they are a âloose hierarchy of psychical conditi...