Obnoxious as a value (Avril Lavigne)
Sometimes new ways of finding value depend upon the collapse of the old ways and sometimes they are pressed into our lives because so many phenomena are upon us that have no names and aren’t well-enough known to fit them into the old categories. Consider music videos, which began as a sort of kids’ entertainment and has now become not just an art form, but a whole new genre of “writing.” Some colleges have hastened to teach people how to make them, but what do you do with them? They are often too ecstatic and chaotic to mean anything traditional, particularly since we are used to making the oldest people judge the work of the youngest -- which is nonsense in this case. I’m 76 and can’t even “see” fast enough to follow the tachistoscopic contents, much less any context in sex/drugs/rocknroll -- which some people consider demonic. But I'll figure this out.
Consider the emptying of Ph.D.’s to the point where the letters after one’s name mean little unless one knows the institution, the specific discipline, the reputation of those professors, and the current status of the field. A gray area has formed around people who have finished all but their thesis, but find it impossible to get the actual thesis past a committee formed of rivals and graybeards. The past has become a burden. But is that worse than awarding Ph.D.’s for the equivalent of “basket-weaving,” which is code for something worthless? Something similar has developed with professional journal acceptance, to the point where a contingent simply accepts everything online in “open” journals. We end up resorting to “cloud curation”, basically a popularity contest. Or turn to money, the great shared value system. No one asks "is the movie any good"? Instead we ask what was the gross?
Prizes and promotion are susceptible to our great interest in gaming the system and our dependence on friendship or convenience circles can replace serious literary recognition with Oscar award night.
Oscar.
Ideas are insidious. The construction/deconstruction/post-construction thought system that was once as hard to figure out as non-Euclidean geometry, has now slid into our language and assumptions. They have been particularly effective in undercutting status that depends on precedent, dominance, elitism, meritocracy. Our professionals -- doctors, lawyers, theologians -- are now joined by professional manicurists and mechanics while others -- for instance, public school teachers -- get no longer get respect nor a decent paycheck.
In a world where kids are schooled at home, publishing is done by oneself, and music is mostly free, we can often see lasting value only in retrospect. Not very helpful. And yet uncertified, unqualified, off-the-wall, individual nonconformity can be the most effective strategy for value that there is. Follow your star. (It's not on Google.) People talk about passion.
“Value” in the sense of practical usefulness, something that sustains life (food, water, shelter), is a separate matter from what I’m talking about here. But even in that case there are different views. Moral relativity. For instance, few things have more felt value to individuals than their pets, since attachment gives them almost the value of another human life. But the law finds dogs of negligent value unless they can be leveraged into some kind of money through popularity or uniqueness or usefulness.
Competitions and awards supposedly based on absolute value do not just enhance the reputations of those receiving them, but also lifts up the importance of those awarding them. These factors can depart cruelly from what is good for life. Consider prize-winning pugs and bulldogs who have been distorted by breeders into walking sufferers, barely able to breath and unable to give birth without human intervention -- partly because this distortion is seen as desirable in fancier’s terms and partly because a dog with a shoved-in face looks like a human baby -- it’s “cute.”
But this essay is about the values of behavior -- best action, ethics, moral standards. Here’s a list of factors that make “values” problematic and a source of conflict.
God in the cloud. No longer an old man -- and what has He done with His robe?
1. Value is emergent from experience and tradition, not imposed from above (an authority figure or god) but it is often "felt" as a powerful entity said to have the ability to punish or reward humans. This point of view usually assumes the Power controls all human lives, not just believers -- but non-believers might not agree.
2. The values of the group and the values of a sub-group or individual may be in conflict, even between siblings. By definition, one’s values emerge from experience and two children in the same family might be treated very differently. Sometimes a family is so chaotic that no rules can emerge except the ones the child deduces, which may be pretty negative in terms of consequences.
3. For a child, values have sharper edges than for an adult. Shop-lifting candy might seem dubious but barely okay (if you apologize), or cute. Even for an adult, shop-lifting food in order to survive means something different from stealing food as a political statement, maybe not even eating it. Acting in a political way that prevents food from sustaining starving people in a famine might not feel like stealing food at all, but righteous participation in punishment from God.
4. A feeling of entitlement always interferes with justice. If any separate but allied group can feel they are exclusive (because of either superiority or inferiority like drug gangs), that will affect their understanding of ethics. For one thing, the signals they perceive as signs of value -- special clothing, jewelry, privilege of access to social events, identification with beloved people -- become values in themselves. Kindness, generosity, political effectiveness, membership in religious groups, are all value signals as much as tattoos are.
5. Strangely, not caring about value signals is often a value signal in itself!
6. One might not be seen as valuable in one’s own time, either as an individual (a teacher, an artist, a religious leader) or as part of an admired group later. (Consider Vietnam-era veterans.) but not seen as very admirable until after time has passed. So that means that social value is shifty and one might struggle to reach the heights, only to discover that social change means no one thinks the achievement is admirable anymore. Even in practical terms of money value, we are on the verge of respecting plumbers more than philosophers.
7. Even as values shift, some people are left behind with an earlier generation’s experienced feelings, while the youngsters don’t even think the same qualities exist anymore. Think of the deep and consequential changes in our ideas of valued sexual behavior. Marriage is ignored here, yearned for there, irrelevant other places, made into an expensive social marker, seen as a form of capture, or clearly enacted as a violent act of war.
Many people use some form of the “Golden Rule” as a marker for value. Was it Bertrand Russell or George Bernard Shaw who pointed out that such a principle is all very well unless one is a liver fluke -- all situations are not equal and not everyone wants what you want. I think of my favorite counseling joke: “Hurt me,” said the masochist. “No,” said the sadist. In some contexts, NOT being hurt is the same as being hurt.
Dinosaur ethics.
The problem is ambiguity. And the time-context. What is done to a person now might be painful, unwanted, and controversial -- but result in a few years in something beneficial. Or it could be the opposite.
So value systems, besides being emergent from experience, are often a gamble really. They can pit the individual against a group. They can change over time, for the better or for worse. They can be enforced with violence or simply ignored until they are useful. They can make you rich or get you crucified.
"Corpus Hypercubus" by Salvador Dali
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