Values

The Classic comic books version of the short story “The Man Without a Country” presented Philip Nolan’s staterooms in one or another United States warship, him forever exiled from having said he hated the United States when he had been part of the insurrection by which Aaron Burr tried to wrest the trans-Appalachian mountains from the United States, these later of his staterooms festooned with banners and flags and portraits of Presidents that showed him as forever pining for his country, this a sentiment appropriate when Edward Everett Hale wrote the story in the midst of the Civil War. It struck me then and remains so that flags and banners were not the proper ways in which to display tribute to the idea of the United States. That was because these visual effects were present in all nations and no more than an icon of the team of the National Football League. Every nation has banners and so those are just lapel buttons rather than explanations of why someone would feel worthy of the nation for which it stands. What makes its images, ideas and expressions distinctive? 

One answer is that a nation is identified with what it calls “values”. These are beliefs that seem inevitable and all but ubiquitous to a population.  Conservatives, such as Talcott Parsons, believe that people bind themselves to the abstract concepts whereby they can identify and live. Parsonsians will say that Americans are said to believe in individualism and equality, but it is a long argument to describe what each of these terms mean and most people believe them as just a catchword that has no meaning or that heads off the need to go into what one of these terms may mean. Equality certainly doesn’t mean that we do treat all people equally, regardless of wealth or social status or race. Moreover, treating peoples that way is like being a tourist who wants to summarize a people as sharing a psychological phrase, Italians thought to be romantic, Britishers as statesmanlike and, so, Americans as independent minded. Liberals like Margaret Mead, for their part, think that the customs of a culture abide not so much in politics as in courtship, or as slowly evolving as the habits and therefore beliefs of the japanese or the Americans. But it is not clear how or why a belief takes hold while others fade out or what are the supports for the beliefs of a system by its social structure. Did the life of corporations arise from rugged individualism or did the political legitimation of corporate life lead to the idea of individualism? So how can we say what are the values that abide in America?

I would suggest a different format than the idea of abstract concepts serving as the flags of a nation or briefly termed adjectival abstractions such as loyalty or individualism. Rather, a nation is tied together, symbolized and has distinct content that informs people to believe and act, because of the phrases and catchwords that have been accumulated from history and have transformed the population through these texts that have been learned and examined in schools and through the media. They do not include phrases like “amber waves of grain” because they have no political content, no more than do images of the Grand Canyon or Niagara Falls. They do include such texts as come from the Declaration of Independence, such as all men are created equal, that gradually coming to include women and people of color only after considerable historical reflection. Also included are phrases from the U. S. Constitution, which is chock full of favorite and deeply meaningful expressions, including “separation between church and state” even though this is not in the Constitution but seems to summarize the jist of what seems obscure when it is originally stated as “no establishment of religion”. Other phrases basic to the values of the United States include “due process of law” and, recently, Ben Franklin’s adage that our nation “has a republic, if you can keep it”. 

There are among those perennial adages ones that post date the time of the Revolution and the Constitution. They include phrases from the Gettysburg Address, which speaks of “of the people, by the people and for the people”, and parts of the Emma Lazarus poem “Give me your tired, your poor”, each of these phrases referring to the particulars of their times but taking a part of the cumulative wisdom of America even if there are people who reject the notion for a time, as happened in the Trump Administration, and so the phrases have to get reinforced so that they maintain their traction. The most recent one of these as best I can tell is “to be judged by the quality of your character rather than the color of your skin”. I can’t think of any more recent ones. “Mr. Gorbeshev, pull down that wall” is a fighting motto, such as “Remember the Maine”, rather than one which clarifies our collective consciousness, which is what we mean by our values, that term referring neither to what is unconscious nor inchoate, but, rather, a truth that seems more clearly said than said by others and so to strike a person as bedrock truth.

There are an affiliated set of images and ideas that fill up the adages and moralisms that make up the identity of a nation. People are assigned in school to learn literature less for its aesthetics or its deep moral meaning than because the books are assigned to inform people about American and world history in a way that will make them better citizens. I still remember from “Johnny Tremain” the young hero wandering round the giant wharf in Boston that was owned by John Hancock. Or the aforementioned “The Man Without a Country”. More contemporary versions of such historical images and soundings are learned from “To Kill A Mockingbird”, or “The Diary of Anne Frank”, though “The Catcher in the Rye”, however popular and also read in junior high school, did not have any political clout, as best I could ever see, even if it was awash with the idea that, rock bottom, people were either phonies or not, and I wasn’t sure how to tell whether I was the one or the other. Moreover, because of our common language and literature, many English ideas become part of the American consciousness, such as is clearly the case with Shakespeare, when my junior high school and high school kids learned” The Merchant of Venice” because the students were overwhelmingly Jewish and so might identify with it, and also because “Julius Caesar” and “Hamlet” were plays with which anyone should reckon, though also added were “The Rime of The Ancient Mariner”, an early call to environmentalism and much else. Political accents were also added in junior high school by Whitman’s “O Captain, My Captain”. 

The advantage of tag lines from history and memorable and memories literary images and ideas over the idea of values is that people can reason with and about the phrases and images of a nation, it slowly accumulating a nation’s lore and wisdom, rather than treat whatever its values are as lost in the midst of history or, worse, as totally arbitrary, like the values that motivate an aborigine or pre-literate culture, which can treat as sacred a conch or a ribbon rather than a Constitution whose rules make sense because of how dangerous it would be to abandon its procedures and the ideas that have become associated with them. In that sense, the United States and other nations have entered a social compact not because of being intimidated by magic or custom or fear but because the citizenry have come to believe, however are the grains of salt, that this is a nation worth being part of. Moreover, this moving consensus containing thoughts that make up this national culture are adaptable in that they can come up to incorporate or to find antiquated thee themes and images of other times, as happened when we now find the dress of the American Revolution quaint, even if their thoughts are not, and find “Gone With the Wind” as a vestige of a world better rid of, even as the trappings of the Confederate flag continue to motivate some people so well that it is brought into the Capitol building during the recent insurrection. Culture is very subtle in its many dynamics.

There are other sets of terms and images that can be used to anchor a population to its understanding of what their nation is. Those include religious language which always are at the same time invoking both politics and what is beyond politics, as when Lincoln said that it is less important to be concerned with whether God is on our side but rather whether we are on His. One very different kind of language are those fashioned in political theory. These are those concepts which are regarded as accurately describing the way political systems operate whether or not they are believed by the population to be able to appreciate or enunciate them, and so are just the opposite of what was looked for to describe the ways words help people engage with their political societies. Conservatism, for example, can be identified with the idea and experience of thinking about the validity of custom and the inevitability of hierarchy in social and political life, whether or not the people acknowledge they rely on those two concepts but which theorists can find these inevitable or inescapable even if they sort of make sense to someone of that persuasion and are justified through consulting their famous texts, such as those by Dr. Johnson, Edmund Burke, and even William F. Buckley, Jr. Customs tie people together, so Conservatives believe, and Conservatives also believe that the only way to enforce those very slowly changing customs is through the supervision of some people by others, supervision regarded as an inevitability. That is different from the social order of Liberalism, which also was invented in the Seventeenth Century, where organizational structures are set up by governments and economic enterprises for purposefully direct cooperative efforts to accomplish their ends and to emphasize the equality of people rather than the subordination of individual or collective peoples. People who invent and exemplify this Liberal point of view are Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln and the two Roosevelts, as well as John Stuart Mill and John Dewey. My view that adages and images rather than the majesty of sacred icons inform the national culture is therefore in keeping with the Liberal description of what are the ways by which politics actually does operate.