The word ‘values’ has taken on some unfortunate baggage. That happens to a lot of words. They go in and out of fashion. They become associated with Us or Them. They go from praiseworthy to pejorative and back again.
It’s a pity about values, though. I just rewatched a movie, Pleasantville, that I hadn’t seen for quite a few years. It’s a charming and moving fable about a town trying to grapple with change. The protagonists in the movie are the people who felt hemmed in or smothered by the old ways and embraced the new. The antagonists were those who liked the old ways, for whom the change was scary, and who clung doggedly to the old ways. The word Values was dragged out to the town square and tarred and feathered, metaphorically, by virtue of being uttered by the chief antagonist, and by being the thing that stood in opposition to the change at the heart of the movie.
The reason it’s a pity is that we do ourselves a disservice in a couple of different ways. First, we tend to get political about values, ignoring their downsides if they’re “Ours”, or dismissing their benefits if they’re “Theirs”. And second, some people tend to turn their guns on the mere fact of having values at all.
One of the problems is freedom. In this nation, we give freedom total carte blanche. We sacrifice anything and everything on the altar of freedom, no matter what the cost. One of the great casualties is practically all of the shared values that we once held. The problem with freedom is that we make it a primary virtue, something of intrinsic value, and an end unto itself. We feel that any abridgment of our individual liberty, however slight, is totally unacceptable. On one side of the aisle, freedom means unrestricted “Guns, Religion and Alcohol!” On the other side, freedom means unrestricted “Abortion, Sex and Pot!” Yet despite loudly lauding freedom and individual liberty on every possible occasion, neither side would hesitate an instant to abridge the freedoms of the other side if it could only manage it.
Both of the extremes are absurd abdications of reason and common sense in favor of ideological dogma. And both sides sacrifice important values on the altar of freedom, to the great detriment of us all.
You see, freedom cannot ever be a primary value because it is not an intrinsic good. Every degree of freedom we confer on a physical or moral system has costs and benefits. For example, in most grocery stores, the shopping carts have two fixed wheels in back and two swivel wheels in front. Occasionally, one comes across a cart where all four wheels swivel. These carts have more freedom — they can go sideways and slantways, and rotate in place — but they’re also much harder to steer. The extra degrees of freedom are neither desirable nor beneficial for navigating the store aisles. This is what I mean when I say that freedom is not intrinsically good in and of itself. To be useful and beneficial, things have to have the right kinds and degrees of freedom to work properly. And, by extension, some aspects of a system or society must be limited or restricted entirely in order for the whole to function.
Another example: our bodies have a combination of stiff unyielding bones and flexible joints with very specific degrees of freedom. To be able to move, we need both the leverage of bones that don’t bend and joints that flex. Too much freedom — no bones — and we’re just a puddle of goo. Too little freedom, or freedom of the wrong kind, and we’re too stiff to move.
So how DO we decide where freedom is beneficial and necessary, and when it is harmful and limiting? This is where our values come into play. Standards, virtues, principles, and values are all ways of saying that some things are better than others at making things work.
Dishonesty is a degree of freedom that allows truth to bend. But truth loses its main virtue when it is bent. Wherever lying and deceit become a norm, nothing can be relied on. There can be no trust, no confidence, and no cooperation. Honesty is an inherent good and thus a good candidate to serve as a societal virtue. That means that no matter where you go, or what age you are, you should expect to be penalized for dishonesty.
From Talking Hands, by Margalit Fox: “To most native English speakers “shtr” at the start of the word sounds simply un-English. It violates the rules of English phonology, which they unconsciously internalized is very young children. Without constraints like these, human language would be pure anarchy. Constraints circumscribe the borders of the linguistic system, and without a linguistic system there is no way for meaning to be encoded.” (p. 103)
Without constraints, where else can anarchy prevail? What kinds of constraints do we have?
Laws
Social norms
Moral rules
Religions
Peer pressure
Authority figures
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