Count yourself lucky if you understand ‘values’

Published: 7 April, 2011

• AS our papers are full of public expressions of appreciation for family homes, day centres, libraries, rural areas and more (albeit in the form of protest at the prospect of cuts and closures), and as people are demonstrating their understanding that “qualities” have significance and purpose in daily life, are redemptive austerity measures necessary? 

Or is a new mathematic requisite?  

One that accounts for these increasingly evident human values. When physicists identify new knowledge they alter mathematics accordingly (curved space etcetera) to support their understanding, allowing them to move on appreciatively. Nowadays they are not punished for previously unestablished truths.

How can we grow sanely and effectively in the qualities of relation and understanding without the qualitative means to do so?  

Symbolic numerical measures have become the primary condition of our social culture and from their inception numbers were symbolic of quantities. When used as a common currency we are obliged to ensure they duly reflect qualities of intelligence, appreciation, effectiveness.

We are the functionaries. Money has no understanding, it cannot do anything.

What other species would be disadvantaged by its own innovations?  

The buildings are there, the books and equipment are there, the staff and families are there, so what is unaccounted for in our actuality?  

And where are the mathematicians who can, through their art, give dimensional shape to joy and other vital expressions of “humanness”?

Conceptually we can change our position in relation to currencies of time and money –  after all, centuries ago the position of Earth was “changed” in relation to the Sun!

Some time back it was given out on the news that biologists were to name another sense, but to my knowledge no more was said publicly.  

It would be a real advantage to employ the vibrant practicability of another sense, especially in relation with a new means of measuring. 

My suggestion is to articulate “a conscious sense of symbolic communication” – and be enriched by its corporate arts.

SHEILA KNIGHT
Downshire Hill, NW3