What IS fundamental? What IS Change?

So here we are at week 6, having just (sort of) debated if the international environment can be fundamentally changed. I’m reminded of a Monty Python skit where Michael Palin pays John Cleese a sum of money for a timed argument, at which point John Cleese begins to automatically say “No, it isn’t” to everything Michael Palin says, leading into a disagreement of what an argument actually is at which point the time runs out.

I say sort of because in my opinion, Group One didn’t really make an argument until Group Two defined what their argument was, at which point Group One said “No, not that. It’s really this and here’s why.” Their opening statement, dealing with “growing, adapting, changing and reacting” spoke in the passive-aggressive, soft squishy way that people so often do when they don’t want to be wrong. In debate (rules of the game, right?), you have to take a side and do so by defining what exists in your universe (the ontology) but also by explaining how (epistemology) and why (analysis). To my mind, Group One was initially much less definitive in the how or the analysis, essentially saying, “change is a thing that exists (ontologically), ergo, the international environment can change fundamentally” and they never attempted to articulate what fundamental change is, how it differs (if at all) from “normal” change and how it comes into existence and why.

That is, until Group Two took a pretty hard realist and structural stance, at which point Group One said, “cooperation” is what matters and can overcome the realist argument of competition being the driving factor in the international environment. During class, they seemed to take it as a point of pride that they weren’t the first to make an argument. The phrase “I don’t know what I’m for, but I damn sure know what I’m against” pops in to my head. During class, Blake made the argument that by chopping down a tree, you have fundamentally altered what is. But the counter is no, despite it not being in a tree form, it’s still wood on a molecular level, and so no, it’s not fundamentally different, because what makes it wood, the chemical structure, still exists. As we pointed out, the only to truly change is to destroy it, via heat from a fire or some other method that fundamentally changes its chemical make-up. The molecular bonds that made it wood no longer exist.

But this is where debate and reality bang up against each other. I am much less in the camp of the “hard/impermeable”. I know that existence is primarily gradations of gray, rather than the hard shades of black or white (although those do exist). I know that interests matter, that humans compete for resources, that cooperation can both achieve incredible results and also fail miserably, and that people place great stock in ideas. There are ideas that have extraordinary staying power and which people are willing to die for so that other people can continue to believe in them, be they political, national, religious, economic or some combination. The phrase “I’m willing to die for what’s right”, is both vague and definitive. Death is a pretty definitive but how do you know what’s “right”?  If you aren’t getting those ideas from somewhere and those ideas are in contrast to something else, where do they come from and why?

All those (competition, cooperation, ideas) exist and matter to people and to the countries they live in and all interact with each other in various ways. The international is much more messy than any one theory can account for; people aren’t always rational; they aren’t always moved to cooperate; they don’t all share the same ideas. And all those things matter in myriad ways that many people don’t give much thought to, varying based on personal circumstances. That I am able to sit in my house, writing this, analyzing my thoughts and feelings in an intellectual debate about “fundamental” and “change” rather than worrying about how to acquire and maintain shelter and food and possibly safety shows that my interests and the ideas I have are significantly different than a sizable portion of the world’s population. On Maslow’s hierarchy, I’m somewhere near the top.

I’d still argue that what is “fundamental” is the definition Group Two used in the Con Rebuttal One, but that what makes up that universe is complicated and diverse.