{"id":14220,"date":"2014-11-06T22:20:19","date_gmt":"2014-11-06T22:20:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pressthebattle.org\/?p=14220"},"modified":"2014-11-17T16:14:54","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T16:14:54","slug":"the-reality-of-value","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/the-reality-of-value\/","title":{"rendered":"The Reality of Value"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ideas have consequences.\u00a0\u00a0And not just among those who create, or study, or work with them.\u00a0\u00a0The great John Maynard Keynes said that, \u201cPractical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.\u201d In the same way, I expect that a lot of liberal, educated Americans \u2013 who spend no time exploring issues of epistemology or moral philosophy \u2013 are in the grip of some of the \u201cscientific\u201d philosophy that\u2019s arisen in Western civilization over the past century.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the grip specifically of philosophical ideas that say that values are not really real.<\/p>\n

As a young man studying the ideas of the social sciences, I read and wrote upon Max Weber\u2019s twin essays, \u201cScience as a Vocation\u201d and \u201cPolitics as a Vocation,\u201d wherein the great early twentieth-century social thinker declared that science is incapable of saying what we\u00a0should<\/i>\u00a0do but can only advise about the probable consequences of one course of action or another.<\/p>\n

Max Weber would not have felt he could declare, as a statement of truth, there was anything really wrong about a political force, such as that we see on the political right in America today, that systematically damages and destroys the structures in our society that serve the good.\u00a0\u00a0That\u2019s because the idea of \u201cthe good\u201d lies outside of what can be scientifically known.<\/p>\n

Similarly, the logical positivists declared statements of value to be \u201cmeaningless.\u201d\u00a0They cannot be objectively verified; they are statements of the speaker\u2019s subjective and perhaps emotional opinion, and have no real truth value.<\/p>\n

This is an unnecessarily cramped view of truth, and of what can be discerned from looking at the evidence and thinking rationally about what it shows.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I think science shows about value:\u00a0\u00a0value is\u00a0emergent<\/i>\u00a0with the evolution of life.<\/p>\n

In the beginning, there was the Big Bang and billions of years passed before even the most primitive beginnings of life appeared (at least in our corner of the universe).\u00a0\u00a0For those billions of years, one cannot speak of \u201cvalue.\u201d Value is about things\u00a0mattering<\/i>, and that means things mattering to someone. If there\u2019s no one for things to matter, then there can be no value.<\/p>\n

That way of looking at value suggests how wrong-headed it is to declare value not \u201creal\u201d because it is not \u201cout there.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Value can only exist within the \u201cin here\u201d \u2013i.e. within the realm of experience–\u00a0\u00a0of creatures to whom things matter.<\/p>\n

But the creation of such creatures was the inevitable outgrowth of the processes that emerged \u201cout there,\u201d in the evolution of life.<\/p>\n

The first step in the differentiation of positive value from negative value is inherent in the nature of the natural selection that\u2019s at the center of the evolution of life.\u00a0\u00a0It is not, so far as can be seen scientifically, that there\u2019s any \u201cdesigner\u201d or \u201ccreator\u201d who is expressing a preference.\u00a0\u00a0It is just inherent in the process governed by chance operating in a system in which the laws of chemistry and physics are being obeyed that\u00a0the system chooses life in preference to death<\/i><\/b>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Those forms that emerge by chance and happen to survive to replicate their kind are \u201cchosen\u201d over those forms that cannot survive to spread.\u00a0\u00a0That is the essence of the process of \u201cnatural selection.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cpreference\u201d of the selective process for life over death does not by itself create value.\u00a0\u00a0That\u2019s because \u2013 or at least so I imagine \u2013 the very primitive life forms that arose at first cannot be said to have, themselves, any preference for one thing (including life) over another (such as death).\u00a0\u00a0Whether I\u2019m selling those earliest forms short or not, in time this selective process yields forms of life \u2013definitely including, but not only, us\u2014to whom things really do matter.<\/p>\n

The second step in the emergence of value is a direct extension of the first.<\/p>\n

All forms of life are structured to do what has, in the history of its kind, been conducive to survival, and motivated to avoid what, in the selective process, been associated with the failure to survive. But over time the evolutionary process\u2019s \u201cpreference\u201d for life over death molds creatures whose motivational structures are powered by the positive or negative valence of their experience.<\/p>\n

Creatures get put together so that what has served life feels\u00a0good<\/i>\u00a0and what has hindered and destroyed life feels\u00a0bad<\/i>.<\/p>\n

At last, out of a universe in which nothing has mattered to anything or anyone, something matters.\u00a0\u00a0With the development of life, with the emergence of creatures to whom things matter, value enters into the universe.<\/p>\n

Value is an emergent dimension of what (apparently) began as a cold, lifeless, indifferent universe.<\/p>\n

It matters to a baby whether it is cuddled or tortured.<\/p>\n

It matters whether the human world is as in the \u201cBedford Falls\u201d scenario in the movie\u00a0It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/i>\u00a0\u2013 a world in which there is community, and love, and families thriving or as in the \u201cPottersville\u201d scenario, a society ruled by greed and the lust for power, where people are wounded and brutality and meanness pervade the town.<\/p>\n

It matters whether the needs of creatures who experience value have their needs fulfilled or whether they live in misery.<\/p>\n

To say that value is not real, because it\u2019s based in experience, makes as much sense as to say that pain is not real.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0\u00a0[NOTE:\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019m using \u201cpain\u201d and not pleasure or happiness as the exemplar for the undeniable reality of subjective experience for good evolutionary reasons.\u00a0\u00a0Pain is, simply, more powerful and undeniable. Any fool can inflict unbearable pain, but comparable pleasure \u2013 on a second-by-second basis \u2013 is difficult to achieve. We are wired, as the social psychologists say, to have greater motivation to avoid loss than to achieve gain. (Note to Kahneman) Life can be lost in an instant, but the apparatus to sustain life must be developed over time. Pompeii took generations to construct, but only moments to destroy.]<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, without creatures having experience, nothing even\u00a0could\u00a0<\/i>matter, and thus nothing could be better than anything else, and thus there could be no value.<\/p>\n

To say that value is not real because it is a function of subjective experience makes (almost) as little sense as to say that there\u2019s no such thing as human anatomy.<\/p>\n

Subjective does not mean idiosyncratic:\u00a0\u00a0human values are, at their root, just as real and objective and transpersonal as human anatomy.\u00a0\u00a0Indeed, at their root, human values are part of the same evolved blueprint \u2013a design for life\u2014that yields our anatomy.<\/p>\n

But what about the fact that people\u00a0disagree<\/i>\u00a0about questions of value?\u00a0\u00a0Does that not prove that value is merely a matter of opinion?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll answer in two ways.<\/p>\n

First, not all opinions warrant being given the same standing.\u00a0\u00a0Just as a mangled or diseased body does not show \u201chuman anatomy\u201d as well as well as a healthy one, some of the notions of \u201cvalue\u201d that we find in the human world are evidence of a disorder, and not of the system of values that is ingrained in humankind.<\/p>\n

I was a teacher for a couple of years in the 70s, and then another couple of years during the \u201coughts.\u201d Among students I\u2019ve encountered, it was common to hear such statements as, \u201cWhat the Nazis did at Auschwitz isn\u2019t what I would have done, but from within their perspective it was right, and so it was right for them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

(<\/b>It should be easy to imagine that people who look at questions of value \u2013of right and wrong, of good and evil \u2013 in this way will be hindered in responding with passionate intensity in the face of an \u201cevil force,\u201d if they encountered one.)<\/p>\n

Whether it was according to their \u201cvalues\u201d or not, what the Nazis did was not life-serving for humankind generally.\u00a0\u00a0The force that drove the Nazis was one of the darkest embodiments of \u201cbrokenness\u201d that history has ever witnessed. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We\u2019ll be exploring the sources of this brokenness, how it reflects \u2013 and is the fruit of — a profound disturbance in the order created by life. Let it suffice for now to point out that fascists elsewhere had a toast, \u201cVive la mort!\u201d (Long live death).<\/span><\/p>\n

Whereas the evolutionary process that created us itself chooses life over death, and therefore crafts creatures like us to choose life over death \u2013 the most fundamental of choices–\u00a0\u00a0the dark spirit of those Nazis whose values the students would say \u201cwas right for them\u201d had reversed that choice.\u00a0\u00a0What clearer sign of human brokenness could there be?<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s the first response to the question about the reality of disagreement about values.\u00a0\u00a0The second is more complex.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a complex world, and in a species that devises very diverse cultures to deal with that complexity, even in the absence of forces of brokenness there would be differences in values from culture to culture, and within cultures from individual to individual.<\/span><\/p>\n

But what matters here is not that there is a single valid solution to devising a life-serving culture, but that there is a foundational criterion for what is good:\u00a0\u00a0what is good is what enhances life, what meets the needs of and brings fulfillment to living creatures to whom things matter.<\/span><\/p>\n

The values built into us may be more malleable in the hands of culture than our anatomy \u2013the bound foot of the Chinese woman notwithstanding\u2014but their essence is still part of the reality of our kind.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read the next of the Value and the Sacred articles:<\/strong> \u00a0The Meaning of \u201cthe Sacred\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ideas have consequences.\u00a0\u00a0And not just among those who create, or study, or work with them.\u00a0\u00a0The great John Maynard Keynes said that, \u201cPractical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.\u201d In the same way, I expect that a lot of liberal, educated Americans […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14220"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14220"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14222,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14220\/revisions\/14222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abetterhumanstory.org\/pressthebattle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}