SEARCHING FOR VALUES

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

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST -- THEY MIGHT NOT BE WHO YOU THINK

In my ministry years I necessarily worked with kids of all ages.  Because the congregations were small, maybe only a couple of dozen people on a Sunday morning, the hour together was often as much spent in discussion as in conventional services.  The sermon was only the beginning point with interspersed songs (not even necessarily hymns since we were UU) and meditations (resistance to “prayer”).  People attended as families -- except for disruptive little kids who had a program for them elsewhere -- and the teens had good things to say.  They were kids who read books, who were computer-savvy, who succeeded, who would go to good colleges, and so on.  The top three or four percent of kids across the country.  They were generous, sensitive, compassionate, dutiful -- everything admirable.  But when I looked at them I saw vulnerability.

The vulnerability of the entitled.

They think there are answers to life.  They think that adults should present both goals and means and that they should be effective.  They talk about how they “have a right.”  If their assumptions qre challenged -- even by some video exposé -- they’d go tail over teakettle with sorrow and indignation.  They were like those 19^th century sons of gentry in Britain who never hesitated to plunge into the jungle or desert to have adventures, never expecting anything so terrible to happen to them that the power of their status couldn’t pull them out.  On the one hand, they were invaluable explorers -- on the other hand, they were miserable saps.  How about those Portland privileged kids who died in a snow cave, trapped by a storm on Mt. Hood because they doubted the weather forecast?  How about those kids who recently went into darkest Africa to confront an African warlord?  They stood there in their best UN manner while the warlord considered whether it would be better to get money out of them some way or just cook them down for soup.

A guy who works with cult “victims” says that when he started out, most of the people who were sucked in by cults were 18 - 24 year old males.  The assumption was that it was an adolescent thing.  But he says that now the typical cult prey is a “baby boomer.”  Same guys, just older.  Now they are hitting their fifties and the ground is caving under their feet.  Marriage, success, kids?  What was it about this cohort?  Their parents told them they could have whatever they wanted: if you want it badly enough, you’ll find a way, and here’s a check.  Then came the limits -- which felt like failure -- and then came the shame, which was the gateway to cults.  Which is a kind of xenophobia, closing out all the danger, the opposite of the earlier strategy, but one that leads to emotional asphyxiation.

Today’s newspaper suggests that this same demographic group represents a rising suicide rate.  Not alienated teens, but rather baby boomers who can’t handle the disparity between what they thought about the world and what it turned out to be like.  The ones who abandoned their families when the going got tough.

The Good Men Project  http://goodmenproject.com  is lately throwing up all sorts of info about the vulnerability of boys and men.  Priority is given to male issues -- that’s the point of their project.  But what I’m talking about here is not gender-identified vulnerability but about prosperity-triggered vulnerability, the main mechanism being the assumption of entitlement.  The last time I taught (I only lasted a couple of months) I was horrified by the exploitation between the haves and the have-nots.  Kids in high school who “have” try to crush those who do not.  In a small town the dynamics are much clearer than they are in the city.   I wasn’t seeing arousal addiction -- I was seeing arousal aversion.  Insistence on the sure thing: guaranteed, money back.  Only the rebels were after the thrill, the rush, the experiment just to see what would happen.  They will save all the rest of us.

My retirement is in a little village on the prairie because not much happens here.  At least that’s the complaint of the kids.  In the Seventies when I was reading a lot of psych, there was an essay about daring men who took risks.  The idea was that a human being has to have a certain amount of stability to keep from getting their heads scrambled and their example was some guy who did amazing things -- parachuting from outer space or some such -- which challenged even one’s sensory equipment.  Then the writer pointed out that this guy who took risks was repetitious in many ways:  diet, wardrobe, the same old beater car, same modest house, and so on.  That’s me.  It won’t attract many teenagers.   But that’s because they can’t see my mental life, which is sort of parachuting INTO outer space, defying gravity, cruisin' the cosmos.  “Sameness” is the means: risk is the end.  Without it, survival means nothing.

The teens and pre-teens in this country who have no place to sleep, the same smelly dirty clothes to wear, nothing to eat except what’s in dumpsters, infections and conditions that blur together into simple misery, are tough kids.  They’re smart.  They’re hip.  They’re better psychologists than a lot of counselors -- at least when they have enough calories and brain function to think.  Because the ones who aren’t tough have died.  The fantasies in games and movies that the prosperous kids buy with platinum credit cards are the realities for them.

One of the ways that evolution happens is that a population that is geographically separated -- usually by being on an island or in a valley -- develops uniquely because of the pressures on it, both push and pull.  This has historically been a matter of millennia, but that was looking at physical changes.   The Galapagos effect.  Nowadays our populations AND their cultures have been stirred almost to the bottom of the pot.  So what seems to be happening is the chaotic reconciliation of cultures without regard for their location.  The economic bottom is far more able to cope with this than the economic top, which can afford to isolate itself in a way that prevents change -- use violence if necessary.  We can expect the bottoms to prevail.  They know violence. It’s already happening.

My daily newspaper has gone right wing.  It tells me I’m too old to commit suicide.  (Born earlier than the Boomers.)   It’s the media that is driven by arousal addiction, which it tries to impose on all the rest of us because it is the key to advertising profit.  (Look at me, look at me!)  The reporters are practically teenagers and paid almost nothing.  EVERYTHING arouses them, to the point where there is no coherence, only some detail that caught their eye.  They are edited by old people, too old to commit suicide, too afraid of losing control to retire.  NOTHING arouses them.   They are totally vulnerable and they know it, so their whole focus is righteous invulnerability, which means they only will publish what supports that.  And THAT is their vulnerability.  It will get them if simple time doesn’t kill them first.  If they aren’t already “got” by their corporation masters. Their strength is brittle and blind.