The Value of Valuable Values

What a slippery and sneaky notion! Values are valuable, and we surely value them, else we would not call them values. Things of value that we value must be good, else why would we value them so highly? So a person who shares our values, as a matter of tautology, agrees with us about all those things that are, as the founding fathers put it, self-evident in their goodness, desirability, and moral dependability. Moreover, if people share our values, that means that the things we agree about must perforce be good and valuable.

But why are they ‘values’ rather than conventions, or laws, or customs, or traditional ways of doing things, or cultural norms? I’ll admit that all of these alternatives sound emotionally neutral and unappealing – boring - beside the enfolding and uplifting comfort of values. But that is a fraud. Just calling them values does not make them good, desirable or benevolent. The thing that makes them ‘values’ is that they are not offered up for criticism, not put into the arena of ideas; they are a matter of emotional faith, often quite belligerent. And faith is not as innocuous as those who praise it suppose.

There are many people who hold to their faith, and believe it comes from the Church, and thus from Jesus Christ, and thus from God himself. But often there is not much examination to see if there is actually any support for the details of their faith either in scripture, or in revelation, or in the theological history and development of the church. Nor is there any rigor among many of those who claim scriptural authority. (I shall comment on the damage done by sacred texts another time.) It’s an overused point, I know, but the Bible does recommend the stoning of women and selling them into slavery under certain circumstances, so if Christians choose not to do that, then the door is open, and the choices they make between the scripture they obey and the scripture they ignore is something they must take personal responsibility for. You cannot hide behind scripture as a matter of selective convenience, then, when convenient, say you have no choice and are compelled to do what scripture tells you. Not if you choose not to stone adulterers.

I’ll take responsibility for my own values. I do think it is important to raise children safely and with love, to care for our families, to obey the law and be kind, honest, ethical and generous. I do not consider it a valuable value to be homophobic, to execute people as a state enterprise, to enrich the rich at the expense of the poor and to assure the rich that this is a gift from God, to use sophistry to impose an inviolable division between ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’, (All ‘pro-choice’ people are pro-life too) to be racist, sexist, gun-toting and contemptuous of animals. Yet all these attributes can hide under the protection of un-spelled-out ‘values,’ protected, if push comes to shove, by selective reference to the two sacred texts: the Bible and the Constitution. Best not to mention the Koran, the Upanishads, the Vedas. Maybe we’ll kind of turn a blind eye to the Book of Mormon too.

So what does it mean when Ralph Reed says people vote for someone because he “shares their values?” It means that they vote for him because they think he holds the same good and Godly beliefs that they do. Exactly what those values are, it is best not to ask, in case you find out that they are not good, or Godly, or wise, or even that he does not in fact share them. It means you can rest assured that your attitudes will not come up for scrutiny, whether your attitudes are generated by anger, or are those of a saint, a wise man, a wise woman, a person of true spiritual depth, or, more probably, an uncomfortable mixture of both.
©2004 AJM