On American Values

 

by EW Wilder

Despite our protestations otherwise, most Americans have few, if any, "sincerely held beliefs." We have a very weak system of values—really, no "system" at all—and a very fluid, if not utterly arbitrary, moral code. Instead of values, we cleave to a handful of rules or, more commonly, to slogans: "family values," "pro-life." Or we rally behind abstractions like "freedom" or "liberty" without much of a concrete sense of what those things mean in the real world.

Decades of messaging from right-wing media and thinks tanks have associated being against abortion as being "pro life," an idea that, thanks to the same outlets, fails to expand beyond birth, into adulthood, or across the nation's borders. It doesn't strike the average American as a contradiction that being against abortion but in favor of the death penalty is in any way problematic; it would never occur to an American as counter to being "pro life" to support killing tens of thousands of innocent people in Gaza in the name of avenging 1200 Israelis, or, indeed, that it might conflict with a "pro life" stance for the US military to cause the deaths of perhaps 100,000 Iraqis for no apparent reason at all.

Americans pride themselves on being "values voters," and our media are happy to use the term, yet getting those same Americans to articulate those values clearly and in detail is next to impossible. We're happy to discuss "the ideological divide," but we're rarely confronted with the notion that an ideology is a coherent system with internal consistency, one applicable across a variety of social and political situations. Note how many of the same Americans who insist upon strict biblical literalism in issues of sexuality happily sport tattoos, wear their hair however they want, eat pork and shellfish and cheeseburgers as well, dress immodestly . . . . When those who dare to identify as leftists point out this hypocrisy, it does not compute; the leftist expects a system where only a rule exists, a principle where there's only a position.

American "values," then, don't exist outside of the individual and the individual's opinions, which, while a fittingly American attitude, makes it hard to thereafter claim divine providence for them. This fact merely makes the American proclaim them more loudly, often accompanied by the threat of extreme violence.

We believe in the divinity of our opinions not because we have much evidence for that, other than a few out-of-context bible passages, but because the opinions are ours, and we believe ourselves to be a Godly people. Because we believe we're Godly, our opinions are sanctified, not the other way around.

This is why people like Donald Trump can so successfully sway so many Americans: he embodies the idea that something is good and right when the individual thinks it or does it and bad and wrong when someone else does it or thinks it, even if it's exactly the same thing. So Joe Biden's justice system (even though, in point of fact, it is independent) prosecuting Donald Trump is bad, but Donald Trump promising to weaponize the justice system against Joe Biden is good.

This is the morality of children who haven't been taught right from wrong, as we used to say at a time when that phrase was associated with actual systems of values, which underscores my point: large numbers of Americans simply don't have a moral/ethical education of any worth.

To suggest a sense of the problem, I'll note how hard it can be to teach Toulmin-style argumentation in my second-semester composition classes. Stephen Toulmin's basic idea is that for every claim we make about the world, we have a warrant that we apply to the data we gather or receive, whether through formal research or sets of informal experiences. The problem is the warrant, the reason we think the claim fits the data.

I often use a very simple exercise in which I look at the price of a gallon of gasoline from, by turns, the perspective of a consumer (a position my students would be familiar with), an economist, and an environmentalist, asking whether or not the price is too high, too low, or just right. Thus one piece of data, the price of a gallon of gas, can lead to three different claims depending on the warrant we apply.

The problem I run into is that many of my students, generally the ones who claim to be conservatives, just don't get it. They either can't move beyond the perspective of a consumer, or, as likely, they simply don't see what the warrant has to do with anything, what weird magic would lead to different claims about a single point of data.

This brief essay is not to call for any sort of "traditional values," another vague term wielded by the authoritarian right. Traditional systems are patriarchal, racist, sexist, and unjust. Rather, it's to say that the American system of governance gives us an opportunity to be explicit and intentional about discussing and implementing systems of values, and we've squandered that opportunity for the sake of gaining and maintaining political power.

So not only do we need deep study of American doctrine—not only the actual text of the US Constitution but what it means and why it was written—but of other political and ethical values systems as well, within contexts in which it is OK to question and critique them in real and practical terms.

Yes, this is "critical thinking," and it may even involve "critical race theory" and other ideas with real weight. And that is exactly the point: if we are to be a nation of laws, or even if we aspire to be a lawful people, we need to understand values and principles, the systems in which they are embedded, and how they are applied in the real world.