03/19/07
Origins and value -
Categories: The value of a thing or person does not depend on its origin.
This is the great foolishness at the heart of so much vexation about value. And ethics. And even liberty.
Take a live topic today: To what extent was the United States of America founded
upon Christian principles?
Some conservatives like to lay full credit to Christianity for America. Nonsense, of course; nonsense and poppycock.
But even were it so, it would be irrelevant. The origin of a person is in the union of sperm and egg within the womb of a woman, during or after coitus (or, these days, Petri dish manipulations). Years later, the person's value, morals, legal status . . . not one of these things is dependent upon his parents' continued intercourse. Just so with a human institution. Something may have been created for one purpose — say, crime — but the organization may have evolved far past its original intent, and may serve peaceful and just purposes. And, with a little reform, may put all its criminal nature behind it.
What conservatives in America try to do with the Christian nation
rap is shore up both their politics and their religion. But these can be separated in fact and in theory, and over time have become so separated in actuality. What are the merits of some religious doctrine? Not its attachment to this or that institution.
Basically, constant yammering about origins usually is an attempt to avoid real and substantive argument. It is akin to the argument ad hominem.
It is one thing to try to make institutions conform to this or that notion; that's inevitable, and when the ideas are good, quite beneficial. But it is quite another to set the value of an idea, or an institution, as if either required a particular setting.
Liberty itself is like this. Some people pretend that the story of America is the story of liberty. Or that liberty requires America. And they get all weepy and patriotic.
Similarly with historians, who get amazingly weepy about ancient Greece. Democracy would never have taken hold had not those three hundred Spartans withstood the army of Xerxes.
Well, no. Certain ideas are perennial. Liberty is one. Democracy, another.
If anything, the story of America is the story of the betrayal of this idea, liberty. But you won't hear patriotic people say this truth very often, as salient and easy to prove as it is. Why? Because they are tender-hearted souls with little oomph in the heads. They can't conceive of a liberty without a wave of the flag.
They are fools.
The idea of liberty is distinct from its value. Liberty's value is itself a complex thing, valued by some for itself, valued by those same and by others instrumentally, also. Both the direct value and the indirect value must be given their due.
And the history of liberty is distinct from the evaluations of any existing institution. This is, of course, in large part because liberty has less play in life than usually reckoned in the speeches of men seeking to whip up crowds of cannon fodder. Our institutions are as much instruments of hegemony and tyranny as of liberty. We are just used to them.
The man chained to the rock, who wastes away so that he can easily slip from the shackles, and then slip back in when the guard is looking, is not free. But he's freer than the man still always stuck to the wall.
The shackle is not an instrument of liberty. But because some take liberties with their shackles, they are in fact free enough by their lights. But to wax patriotic about the shackles is an afront to clear thinking.
Whether the shackle has a just origin or not, whether it is just now is what matters. And whether it can be made more just even yet.
We can define as a progressive
those who see value as a subject for the present and the future, and who evaluate the past as a succession of past presents, with conjectured futures branching out, but collapsing into one trunk, as time passes. The past's value for us can be a source of learning. But the story of the past is not determinative of the future.
I think that makes me a progressive, no matter what idiocies the Left attaches to the term. And that distinguishes me from conservatism, which tends to make the same error over and over: that the origin of something determines its value.
Nonsense, I say; nonsense and poppycock.
But, you counter, doesn't the origin of something determine its nature, and thus value? No. The origins combined with its present context lead to separate evaluations, and help determine what we call its value. There is no one origin for anything. There are many causes. And, because of many contexts, many possibilities for changing values.
The desire to make the value of something one thing, and not many, and tie it to an origin, not its present context, is probably at the heart of the conservative error in philosophy.
Interestingly, Nietzsche also believed that value was determined by the evaluated thing's source. This is his great error, as far as I can see. He, too, fought the liberal philosophers of his day — the Mills, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, the economists — because they cast aspersions on the origins of things. Perhaps that's why conservatives so often bring up Nietzsche. They can pretend that he's the ultimate result of rejecting one or two of their favorite ideas. And yet this is a mere illusion, since he has not rejected the most disastrous of their ideas, the idea that value is tied to origins.
Apologies if this is, as I think it is, the least coherent rant I've posted in some time.
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