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.

The Arts and Humanities, Again and Always

By Lael Ewy, MFA, CPS

In some ways, the arts and humanities are the only endeavors in which “lived experience” has always been privileged. So it’s no wonder they’d be marginalized or actually argued against in an essentially technocratic age. But the arts and humanities are also what’s missing from the current “job oriented” educational realignment. These programs may prepare people for specific jobs (although that’s questionable), but they do not prepare people for work in a future in which the nature of specific jobs is constantly in flux.

That, however, is not why we should keep them around.

The argument against lived experience is also an argument for process over understanding, the idea that through research and evaluation processes alone we will be able to gather all of the data we need to make the decisions we need to make. This is ridiculous; without “real life” understanding of something, you can’t even create meaningful criteria for evaluation. In this sense, the movement away from lived experience is a power play by those in charge and their academic lackeys to replace what they cannot control, direct understanding, with what they can control, processes and policies—in terms Bakhtin might use, to replace the novel with the epic.

This is the same attitude that privileges supervisory structures and administrative processes over the work itself, the executive summary over the full report, the report over the voices from the field, the data over the principle—if, that is, the principle is even addressed at all. It’s the driving force behind dismissing all truly new thinking as “theoretical” and all real world information as “merely anecdotal.”

In this sense, both “street smarts” and “book larnin’” are being marginalized in favor of the kinds of evaluative processes that exist for the sake of controlling the terms in which ideas are discussed (again, if they’re discussed at all) and for the sake of reinforcing power by those who already have it. “And we have the numbers to show it,” or “researchers say” are statements that seem unassailable, and so few question where those numbers come from or the assumptions upon which their gathering and interpretation are based.

When we lose an art, we lose a way of understanding the world. Consider that for a minute. What other realm of human endeavor would allow itself to just die, to be told by wealthy and powerful and supremely ignorant and unimaginative people that it should simply go away, that there is no place in the future for how it knows and what it has discovered? Yet that is exactly what academic institutions and their rich donors are doing to the humanities and the arts.

When its critics level against the arts and humanities that they aren’t practical or don’t prepare people for “the real world” or “real jobs,” what these people are actually saying is “The only thing that’s important is what I believe I can immediately sell,” or “The only thing that has any value is what I believe the market wants.” Nobody ever asks these same people to back up what they’re saying or to defend the principles they’re using to make the claim. So the debate about the value of the arts and humanities isn’t even about practicality at all but about a very narrow view of what’s important to human beings, a view that almost all of us accept without question because it’s the view of rich and powerful people. When the actual pettiness and ignorance of their position is revealed, it’s easy, or at least easier, to see why it is wrong, yet because of the positions of those who share this view, we are still collectively afraid to confront it.

So we try to justify what we already do as preparing people for jobs, as having practical components. We repackage arts programs as graphic design, drop studio arts majors for career programs in video game design, shrink studies of poetry for badges in advanced tweeting. Some of this has merit: studying the arts and humanities will make you a better communicator, and it will improve your critical thinking skills. When you see, as I have, respected scientists making basic errors in logic, when you see tech company executives utterly unable to imagine the negative experiences of their users much less dystopias they are busy creating, when you see presidents unable to understand why calling immigrants “animals” is wrong, you can begin to see why these people might need a few more novels and poems and paintings in their lives.

But the value of the arts and humanities is inherent, and that’s not something those currently in power, who understand “value” only in the most basic of monetary terms, can even begin to understand.

When we look back at the great cultures of antiquity, we don’t marvel at their technology except in the most patronizing of ways, amazed at what such “primitive” people could accomplish. But when we read their literature, when we hear their stories, meditate on their holy writ, when we analyze their design and witness the world from the perspective of their visual art, we experience something that a patronizing attitude never could: recognition, an understanding of the experiences they, and we, live every day.

When we encounter their art, their literature, their philosophy, we recognize something that we can learn from: we learn more, and more deeply, about being human. And that is continually new.