What do we do about social values? This is a very difficult question. We see that there is a problem, but many intelligent people are uncertain about what to do about it. Perhaps this uncertainty is more of a reflection on the uses and limitations of intellectuals (they’re not great at execution, they’re thinkers) than it is something unconquerable about the problem. Nevertheless, it’s a very tricky question, and one that can leave you feeling helpless and overwhelmed.
Although it might seem impossible to enforce new (or old) norms, or to create or restore taboos, it really isn’t. There’s nothing arcane about it; it’s a perfectly natural part of the business of being human. The instinct to assign taboos is innate. It doesn’t go away, it just gets redirected. So it isn’t gone, it’s just gone somewhere else. Which means that it can be found.
We have all kinds of different positive and negative prejudices today in our country that differ in their details from those of other generations and cultures, and they are changing constantly with the situation and with history, and they can be changed deliberately. That’s how we got to where we are now, how everyone got to where they are or were, now and at every point in the past.
The question is merely one of wisdom and leadership, teaching people to fear what is fearful and love what is loveable. Defining social values all comes down to where you decide the danger and the safety are and where the profits and the costs lie. And then you explain that story to people in some compelling way and they get on board. Those arguments can be made and they are being made and they will be made and they have always been made. So we don’t need to create or recreate social values and virtues and taboos ex nihilo, only to transmute them or redirect them. We need to find them and restore them. We need to craft a treasure map that new generations will want to follow.
We do face the problem of the sinful preacher, the problem of hypocrisy and moral authority. How do you impose a rule that you yourself have broken and benefit from ignoring? How can you extoll a value that you yourself have violated, without being guilty of hypocrisy? Who are you to tell anyone what they should do, you throughly flawed and imperfect bastard?
This problem is greatly overstated in its complexity. But just because the answer is very simple–value isn’t valuable and virtue isn’t virtue because I’m so great, but because it is–doesn’t mean that it’s easy to practice. We all make a bargain to hide from virtue, lest it shine a poor light on our own deeds. So we escape our shame by avoiding raising any ideal higher than our own lives.
But that’s the point of an ideal. To learn to be better than what we happen to be. You can hate it for how it judges you, but you’ll never be anything else, and no one will, if you won’t admit that there’s some limit to virtue greater than your own life and deeds. Avoiding the challenge it would present to your ego saves you from judgment and responsibility, but all it purchases you is a life of immaturity that forgoes reflection or aspiration.
Until a people are willing to be judged, they will never be transformed. Any good parent knows this about their children. And a good parent helps their child to understand that although it is disagreeable, judgment must be faced, and that it is for their own benefit and understanding; an act of love, not an act of cruelty. But that act takes a kind of terrible courage, and is very hard to do alone, and it is hard to balance love and judgment in one heart. Which is another reason why we have two parents.
Any good parent also knows that it’s virtually impossible to maintain an ideal for your children that you won’t submit yourself to. In order to have any validity, your ideal must be as applicable to yourself as it is to your child. But as childish adults who want to have our own way now that we are grown, we don’t like being put in that position. But you can’t maintain any household rule if you won’t apply it consistently.
People often make the mistake of thinking that we can’t risk having any values that we don’t perfectly personify. And that’s just foolishness. If you read Berenstain Bears you will notice that the father often proves the value of the rules by his example, not because he follows them so well, but because he runs afoul of them so often and is willing to admit it.
We can make mistakes, even terrible ones, and survive, and so can our ideals. When King David slept with Bathsheba, he violated his own ideal. But it wasn’t the end of David or of his ideal. He was called out for his hypocrisy, repented, and his deeds were recorded and remembered by his entire culture for the rest of time. His sin and his admission of sin.
David didn’t try to eliminate his ideal. He didn’t try to write a new verse that said stealing other men’s wives and murdering them was a valid social behavior. He reinforced his belief in his ideal by admitting that he himself had violated it. And he was still regarded as a great and wise king, a man after his God’s heart. Not because he was perfect, not because every action he took reflected God’s heart. But when the chips were down, when it reflected very badly on him, he was on God’s side, even against his own actions and short-term ego interest and identity. It was ultimately more important to maintain the glory of God’s law than it was to maintain his own. And that is what God demands, not perfection.
We often overstate the value of our own sins. They’re not really so rare and creative as we give them credit for. Often they’re quite ordinary and ubiquitous and common. They’re just the sort of things so many people have done, or would like to but haven’t the guts or the means to do. There’s nothing particularly special about them. They’re not even specially dysfunctional.
But there are things that are specially, creatively functional and productive, states we aspire to even if we don’t embody them except in our obvious inadequacy. Those things are worth holding up. Plenty of us would like to steal our neighbor’s treasures and remove our enemies and competitors. That’s nothing unique. Admitting that we want to do something, or even have, but shouldn’t or should have because we believe in something better, that’s worth talking about.
Few people drift into or are easily seduced into virtue and accomplishment. Everyone knows how easy it is to fall into degeneracy and fall short of your goals and ideals. It’s so common as to be completely banal. And yet we like to paint a dramatic picture or make elaborate excuses for why we ended up doing the most obvious and easy thing. Anyone can fail. It takes some real skill and creativity to hit the target, and some real courage to admit then we’ve aimed and missed.
You don’t have to be a religious believer to take in the lesson from David’s story. God represents the highest ideal, a standard of good that exceeds ourselves. And you can’t honor an ideal that you won’t submit yourself to or pursue any goal if you won’t risk your own skin in the endeavor. That doesn’t mean that you have to perfectly achieve or embody that ideal, or that you are worthless and craven if you don’t. You just have to be honest about its claims on you, and even about your own shortcomings.
For any ideal worth pursuing, it will always be a bit further away than you can reach, so there’s always something to aspire to and learn from. It just needs to be clear enough that you can move toward it from any position. In this kind of system, trajectory matters more than position, and your relationship to the ideal matters more than your particular list of successes and failures.
If you won’t have any relationship to the ideal, then you reap the cost of losing whatever it could have taught you and made of you. You lose what you could have been and secure forever what you are. And for many people that’s a worthy victory, and a loss that lacks much sting.
The question is, how much of who we could be can we really afford to give up? And how much of who we are is really so precious that we’re willing to pay the price of carrying forever the burdens of our own immaturity? Are we really willing to bear the weight of all our childishness forever just to spare ourselves the harshness of assuming adult responsibilities and judgements?
Moreover, what happens if the world pushes back on us and we aren’t everything we could be? What happens if others come for us who have more courage and fire in them than we do? The world isn’t a static place, nor only a cradle. It is littered with the bones of a thousand dynasties. In this kingdom, everyone must run as fast as they can just to stay in one place. If you won’t even allow yourself to see what it means to run and to fall, what hope do you have to keep up?
In the end, the failure to maintain an ideal, or to have a sufficiently high ideal, is a self-correcting problem. When enough pain and failure piles up, people rediscover the source of their strength where it has always been. But the price you pay in learning the lesson is steep.
To put a fine point on it regarding the subject of the video listed above, no one needs to be forced into marriage to make this problem better. People just need to learn to love it again and to appreciate what it was doing for us. You can learn that positively, by seeing and responding to its beauty and strength, or you can do it negatively, by losing it. But it can be learned. And it will, one way or another.
Making Nobody Happy 