Or we could swing this round, “The Consistency of Value”. I’ve already discussed the idea of consistency as a “power play”, a mechanism that forces the disempowered into preordained channels, yielding preordained results.
We can also discuss the idea of value in relation to what we are told is the human desire/need for security and safety (a film is said to fulfil this need by giving the spectator a beginning, middle and an end – something they can never attain in “real life”). However, can we think of something we want, or need, as a value? The word has an attached “moral aspect” in that when we talk about a value, our disposition is “I think that this is worthwhile, you should think so too” or “This value distinguishes us from X”. So once again, we have a competitive notion attempting to slide in unnoticed. Values become part of “culture wars”: we are a democratic society with an elected leader, they are fascist state, led by a dictator. Values facilitate separation and tribal identification (take flags, for example, a kind of short hand for “this is what we believe in”, or “this indicates my membership of this group”), therefore, one might say that they facilitate aggression between groups, whether this be county, national or international.
There is also the question of whether the values that we suppose that we ‘have’ (in some sense or other) are chosen by us. One can argue that, in many cases, we simply ‘adopt’ values, without giving thought to what they mean and their implications. Nor do we interrogate the values of our respective nation-states.
On a personal, microlevel, we u se what we class as our values to make statements about ourselves: our beliefs, our moral worth (based on the values we espouse). I’m not going to be diverted by this, but we should be aware of the distinction between the values one professes and the actions one engages in. This wasn’t a problem for the ancients because they drew no distinction between mind and body. One was judged on one’s actions in the world – the values you possessed were ‘distilled’ from empirical data. Only with the advent of Descartes, and the separation between mind and body, does thought begin to take priority. This becomes decidedly more important with the advent of mass media. What, for example, are we to make of someone who, on seeing TV coverage of a Famine, professes sorrow at the sight, and anger at the inaction in alleviating this?
Anyway, personal values. Where do we get these from? Are they static? I think the answer to the second question is “Obviously not”. To argue that values, once formulated, remain static is to deny the influence of others, and of mass media. There’s a few things to be said about the ways in which media influence value-formation, but I’ll come back to that.
Where do personal values begin? Well, usually at home, then in school, then? (it used to be Church, but those days are gone). So, initially, our values are not ours; they come from interaction with parents and grandparents, from the narratives we’ve read as infants, from the schools we attend. So our idea of value-formation is embedded in our consciousness from an early age. This is done by comparison, but not by us, by our parents. We’re told that X is good and that Y is bad…from this we learn to generalise, to create categories which are, at first, little more than guesses: if X is good then Z is good too. So we learn by association. Of course, what this imposed system deals in is binary oppositions, so the framework for reproduction is laid.
One of the headlines today (15/07/23) is “Sunak puts cap on ‘low-value’ degrees”. He means degrees that don’t result in students getting professional jobs that pay well. So, that would be A&H them. Of course, the headline was never going to read “Degrees that indicate motivation by something other than profit to be capped” or “Greed degrees to be given the go-ahead”. The Tories are using every trick they know to enforce the idea that everyone is an individual motivated simply by money; every so often something like this breaks cover – a move so despicable it takes your breath away.
But it does illustrates the point I was making in the paragraph prior to the one above. Binary opposition, profit and individualism: ideological factors that the right combine to shore up their argument that capitalist society is ‘natural’.
What does ‘natural’ mean?
Murmurs from the Forest 