I had an interesting
conversation with an Evangelical Christian a couple of years ago. He was very
interested in talking with me upon learning that I was a former Mormon. He
immediately asked if I was an atheist. He had met a lot of former Mormons and
found many of them had become atheists. When I told him that I was indeed an
atheist, he contradicted me and informed me that I was not an atheist. Needless
to say, I was perplexed. I was speechless. He continued to explain that I
believed in God because I held onto values. If I was truly an atheist I would
not accept values like truth, justice, and freedom. All of these values come
from God and cannot exist without God as their source. Thus the existence of
values proves God’s existence and even reflects that deep down I still believe.
Such was his claim. Beyond his circular logic, fallacious thinking, and flat
out lack of respect, he was wrong. Values have a much more complex and rich
origin. Values, like emergent properties in chemistry, arise out of the
interest, interaction, and shared experiences of lived communities. Real people
striving to live lives of meaning and substance share those values. What we do
with them determines whether they become virtues that are a part of us or not.
Of course my Evangelical acquaintance was simply
employing a rhetorical strategy to refute my atheist position. But, his view
does illustrate a common understanding of values among many believers. Values
such as honesty, kindness, compassion, and justice exist independent of human
nature. Moreover, they exist dependent on God. For such faithful, one can best realize
these values in his or her life by approaching and worshiping God. As such,
many of this mindset see our contemporary society as in a state of crisis when
traditional values like sexual purity become less accepted generally. A
plurality of religious views can also appear very threatening to this
demographic because only the true worship of the true God will yield the
benefit of realized values in our broader society. Such religionists also
bemoan this lack of shared values because it undermines the communal effort to
cultivate the right virtues in the lives of individual members of society. This
mistaken view fails to accurately account for how values emerge, transform, and
recede in our civilization.
Values are coded shortcuts for desirable behaviors,
feelings, and relationships in our shared life-world. They are primarily shared
and transcend many of the boundaries that divide up the various aspects of our
world. The value of kindness has a desirable place among individuals, families,
and even professional settings. In short, values are the goods that we desire.
The more extensive and deep the desired for good, the more prominent and
powerful the value.
Virtues then are the habituated realization of such
values in our everyday lives. Virtues are values so ingrained into our
character that even our impulse reactions are in accordance to that value. Of
course moralizers preach virtues as though there is an essential list all of us
should cultivate and possess. In truth, the emergence of virtues in us comes
from a complex cultivation of thoughts and actions in concert with the
experiences, relationships, and predispositions we have. A virtue is far more
complex than a simple ideal or some code one selects to live by.
In short, values are emergent properties of the
communities in which we live. An emergent property is a property that emerges
from the collection of constituent parts. An emergent property cannot be found
in any one individual member of the constituting parts. More importantly, an
emergent property does not have any manner of existence independent from its
constituent parts. For example, in chemistry, salt has the property of
saltiness when we taste it. Saltiness is an emergent property of Sodium
Chloride, the chemical compound for salt. Yet, the property of saltiness is not
present in Sodium or Chlorine separately. Also, one is hard pressed to find the
ideal form of saltiness floating around in the Ether somewhere. Put some salt
on your baked potato and it tastes salty. The sociologist Emile Durkheim first
developed the idea that properties of social systems emerge from social
interactions in the early twentieth century and Talcott Parsons expanded the
concept. Lived communities that stretch through the ages produce these values.
As emergent properties, values ride on a tide of history, contending interests,
and shared desires of real people but not independent of them.
Once values and virtues have emerged they do have a
guiding force. They become a foundation for action. They give us motivation,
direction, and a strong sense for the way the world ought to be. How we live in
proximity to these values even gives us a sense of worth and a measure of self-esteem.
Values and virtues present us a way to matter in the world. Hence institutions
and organizations of many types have sought to establish a monopoly on what
values and virtues count. These institutions also create mechanisms to
disseminate their values and inculcate them into others, children and youth in
particular.
Our task then is to explore these powerful features of
our life-world. The world is far smaller than it has ever been before due to
the exponential explosion of technological advancement in communication and
transportation. A clash of contending values rages across the land. There are
winners and losers. Values such as honor recede while others like equality of
opportunity expand (as seen in the civil rights movement). There is an ongoing
tension between a longing for unity in the face of pluralism and liberty under
the weight of hegemony. In this context we must come to grasp how we receive
and discover values, many of which date back millennia. Most importantly, by
what criteria could we evaluate a set of values? How does one create a value?
*The foregoing paper
speaks in general and vague terms. Subsequent entries will be rooted in much
more concrete material rife with examples.
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