Part One | Widening Our Thinking | page 3 of 11

The contexts will be broadly drawn because people have different assumptions and backgrounds. Then they will be further defined.

Each context covers a broad area of human capacities and activities.

Here are thumbnail descriptions of each of the contexts:

1. Civic/Political
This is all the activities and capacities for living in communities and mediating our activities; our common creeds and objectives, law, government, civic and political associations, etc.

2. Personal
This is all the ways we are personally involved in or affected by issues, including personal, situations, needs, feelings, relationships and psychological processes. The point is to recognize how personal inclination and experiences affects how we think about issues and deal with them.

3. Ethical/Philosophical
This is the capacity for having or not having ethics, and whether or not we take ethical stands. Philosophy is an inquiry into fundamental meanings and reasoning. We generally don't need to answer or ask all the questions when deliberating issues, however, we do need some basic knowledge of philosophies which tend to support or chip away ethical and civil standards.

4. Cultural
This is how we perceive and express various contexts together as a culture; our over-all style; the things that unite or divide us and prepare us or blind us for changes. It's also the meeting of cultures and subcultures.

5. Factual
These are the physical and factual aspects of issues, the down-to-earth conditions, viewed independently from our personal or political leanings. This includes how we understand, investigate and communicate facts. Accurately gathered and understood knowledge can open a wealth of resources for solutions, or it can divide people into those who know and from those who don't know how things really work.

6. Spiritual
These are activities and capacities of perceiving, believing or disbelieving in ultimate causes and truths, along with the inspirations, principles, guidelines and rules which affect our responses to issues.

7. Economic
These are the private and public activities of assigning, creating, and exchanging values in material ways. Sometimes we say, "it's just business," when we're actually expressing our personal, philosophical or ideological standard. And sometimes it really is "just business." The hope is to mutually agree about which is which.

8. Ideological
This is where all different contexts and standards get "bundled together" in world views. Ideologies tend to form opposites, but they also can enhance our capacities to work together for a purpose. The more we know the contexts and standards, the more we can see how they're "bundled and unbundled" to bring out the best and the worst.

9. Historical
History is a context where problems and solutions play out in real time. For the sake of simplicity History will be included in other contexts.

News programs tend to group issues into contexts such as "foreign policy," "the economy" and "culture." This is a useful shorthand for reporting, but a cultural issue may be as much about political, personal, ethical, scientific, or religious matters. And a foreign policy issue is often as much about economics, ideology, history and technology. So we want to apply all the contexts to get the full picture.

Next we'll look at the standards of how we evaluate issues in contexts.

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