Smuggling Value into a Value-less World
What in the past in a deficient terminology was called proof for the existence of God, is the expression of the inescapable dialectic of finite and infinite…”Proving” God entails making explicit what we are: finite spirit.
—-Ludwig Heyde, The Weight of Finitude, p. 133
The Issue At Hand
The claim that we live in an increasingly secularized society is hardly new or novel. No one is surprised that the last place we can expect to find acts based on religious belief are in our business or government systems. One must look long and hard to find any policy maker or business manager suggesting that we resolve societal and business problems through a religious value system and those that make such suggestions are likely to be targets of criticism and ridicule.
So thoroughly imbued in our society is the assumption of a secular, value-free system that Scott Adams can build a career on lampooning our attempts to create meaning ex nihilo. A character in a recent edition of Dilbert says, “A deep understanding of reality is exactly the same thing as laziness”. This cynical declaration of meaning and values expressing only the temporal needs of its mortal creator was so popular and so closely aligned with personal experience that it was clipped, pasted and passed along on the web nearly 300,000 times. [1]
Examples in Cultural Institutions
Philosophy
We can turn to other cultural institutions and find this same sense of finite beings weighed down by the responsibility to create meaning. Modern philosophy is thoroughly secular. The philosopher Richard Rorty aggressively articulates a value-less world. His world is thoroughly utilitarian.
He suggests that no unconditional moral obligation exists in human existence. Truth is what wins out in the free market of ideas. There are no appeals to a larger truth, to an ontology of human existence. There is no ground for ideals other than a grinding reality. An overarching universal truth guiding human decisions consists of nothing more than hope. There is nowhere to turn for succor. For everywhere around one are objects to be named and assessed for their utility.[i]
Fiction
Such a stark depiction of a reality upon which we scaffold meaning is reflected in our literature and in our movies. In William Trevor’s short story Of the Cloth a Catholic parish abuts another served by the Church of Ireland. They are both deep in the Irish countryside where congregations have declined and the residents are shedding church traditions. Both parish priests, remembering a time of closer social connections and a church that served the daily needs of its congregants, feel unconnected to their community and adrift in a changing world.
In the towns marriage was not always bothered with, confessions and absolutions passed by. “A different culture”, the two priests called it, “in which restraint and prayer were not the way, as once they had been. Crime spread in the different culture,” they said, “and drugs taken by children…A plague it was and it would reach the country too, was reaching it already.” [ii] As in Rorty’s world of individual negotiators in a free market of values and ideals, the two priests are alone and unable to turn to a community for understanding. What they thought was their life’s purpose was a cruel illusion, an example of Rorty’s criticism of religious faith as an insubstantial hope of something large and powerful to be working on our side.
Cinema
Cinema provides no succor. The Coen Brothers film, No Country for Old Men tells the story of a starkly brutal world populated by thieves, murderers, self-seekers, and a few characters attempting but failing to combat evil. In an unimaginably violent part of south Texas a sheriff attempts to find purpose by searching out and stopping evil men. He cannot and is unable to find even a vocabulary to describe what he sees around him. The sheriff, like the priests in the Trevor short story, has lost meaning and purpose. He struggles to find the source of this increasingly chaotic and meaningless world. “I think once you stop hearin’ ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ the rest is soon to follow….I used to think I could at least some way put things right. I don’t feel that way no more.”[iii] In this post-Enlightenment world he has only his own vocabulary, his own creation of what the world means as an aid.
This sense of isolation and burden of creating meaning is made explicit in a conversation late in the movie where the sheriff confronts his failed attempt to fix what was wrong. He had tried to turn to God but did not have the knowledge or the support of institutions or tradition to help him. He says, “…I always thought when I got older God would sort of come into my life in some way. He didn’t. I don’t blame him. If I was him I’d have the same opinion about me that he does.”[iv] His helplessness turns to despair. His despair turns to the diminution of self. His self-worth collapses under the burden of the responsibility to make sense of the world by himself. The desperation of such an overwhelming responsibility leads to a sense of fatalism and utter helplessness. His companion concludes, “[y]ou can’t stop what’s comin. Ain’t all waitin on you.” [v]
The Coen Brothers’ sheriff tried to find God but possessed no framework to approach Him. He had no guides to help him and nothing in culture around him could help. Bereft in a world he neither recognized nor understood he gave up his authority to the Fates. The same fate awaits Trevor’s two priests. Their own religious training seems unhelpful and irrelevant. They have no influence and are adrift. “They” say bad cultural practices will soon penetrate their rural stronghold and, actually, already has arrived. Coen & Coen and Trevor see a similar world. People are not connected to each other; individualism prevails and so hobbles any attempt to establish a moral communitarianism. Unrestrained violence and alarming behavior threaten to intrude or already have intruded on their increasingly diminished world. The protagonists in both examples fail to cope or even understand what is before them. Because God is not allowed into this post-Enlightenment world they have only themselves to prevail against the threat of chaos and diminution. In both examples the protagonists fail.
Smuggling Values
If what we see in Richard Rorty, William Trevor and the Coen Brothers accurately describes contemporary society then how have we managed to keep a civil society alive? How does civil society make sound decisions if we have no vocabulary to adequately describe moral decision-making, philosophers suggest a values-free competitive market of ideas to guide society, and our cultural explicators create a vision of despair and isolation? Steven Smith believes we smuggle pre-modern values into modern discourse. [2]
Our modern commitment to a secular and rational vocabulary has impoverished rational discourse, leaving us without a language to describe our normative commitments. Just as the characters in our example are unable to articulate their needs or describe how their world had changed, our resources now are too meager. Thus we smuggle in normative contraband from the outside.[vi] Our public discussions focused on our most fundamental civic concerns are composed of a secular vocabulary freighted with an underlying, deeper meaning
The means of transport are words so loosely defined they lose any specific meaning and so are ideal carriers. Smith identifies two families of words: the autonomy-liberty-freedom family and the equality-neutrality-reciprocity family. Invoke either of these two families of words and one will find little resistance. Who objects to liberty and freedom? No one. Family words often are interchangeable. When liberty is inappropriate in a particular conversation, freedom or autonomy can substitute with little loss of utility.
However, how far does a word such as “equality” take us? Not far at all. Equality is entirely “circular”. It tells us to treat like people alike; but when we ask who “like people” are, we are told they are “people who should be treated alike.” Equality is an empty vessel with no substantive moral content of its own.[vii]
Without moral standards, equality is meaningless. With moral standards the word merely stands for what we already know. The word “equality” does not carry any argument forward. If one employs “equality” as the discursive focus of, say, the legalization of same-sex marriage then the discussion is merely a distraction. Another value lies underneath this discussion in which “equality” is the vessel. The discussion does not probe how same-sex marriage is like traditional marriage. It provides no standard upon which to decide the legitimacy of the argument. Invoking the word “equality” and its unarticulated assumptions of positive values is sufficient to carry the argument.
Smuggling Value into Assisted Suicide Court Case Discussions
The 1997 Supreme Court decisions in Washington v Glucksberg and Vacco v Quill outlawing physician-assisted suicide in Washington state and New York, respectively, are good examples of values “smuggling”. Since the Constitution says nothing about physician-assisted suicide the judges’ discussions ranged far beyond legal issues.
Both cases drew intense interest, of course, including an august group of philosophers defending the right to assisted suicide. [viii] For all the commentary and legal discussion, something was missing. The conversation was too arid. Something seemed to be held back by discussants.
Washington and New York allowed voluntary withdrawal of medical treatment but did not allow physicians to administer a drug overdose. But both protocols lead to the patient’s death. Why was one allowed and the other disallowed? The distinction seems arbitrary and incongruous.
The Supreme Court attempted to distinguish between “killing” and “letting die”. Withholding treatment lets the patient die but is not the cause of death. Rather, some other natural cause – starvation or dehydration, for instance – led to death rather than termination of treatment. On the other hand, assisting in a death is actually killing the patient. The distinction was justified through “double effect”, a concept that isolates “foreseen” from “intended” consequences of actions.
These arguments seem arbitrary and superficial, completely inadequate for the deliberation undertaken by the court. Smith argues that in such a case we find normative values smuggling.
In the courts’ discussions a distinction was made between terminally ill patients seeking assisted suicide and those who simply did not wish to continue their lives in pain or discomfort or helplessly connected to medical devices. For those judges distinguishing between killing and letting die often talked about withholding treatment and “letting nature take its course.” They appeared to be invoking a standard by which to judge the appropriateness of withdrawing treatment: “actions are distinguishable by whether they artificially interfere with that natural course or instead respect and defer to it”. [ix]
Judges made a distinction between those who were at the end of a natural course of life, a natural life span, and those who wanted to end their life before the natural course had taken them to the end. For this group an early termination of life was “a cosmic shame.”[x] Behind these assumptions is a definition of “nature” and what complements and what contradicts it. For all the focus on intent and causation and other discussions on autonomous decision-making and liberty, an unspoken set of norms at work was unexplored: what is the character of “nature’s course”. To short-circuit this course evokes shame.
At the bottom of the various judge’s discussion were unspoken normative values of at what point in a person’s life is assisted suicide appropriate. The nonsensical distinctions of intention and causation, the casuistry of double effect, allowed the invocation of an “intrinsic normative order” of what was assumed, perhaps subconsciously, of a natural course of life.[xi] At some level these elusive notions of autonomy, causation, and intention were the vessels.
Conclusion
We are not the infinite gods of antiquity, creating order, meaning and values on a value-less earth. We bend and snap under the weight of this terrible responsibility. Just as the characters in Trevor’s short story and the Coen Brothers’ film, words cannot encompass what is before them. They are powerless to change what lies before them. The vocabulary open to the participants in these assisted suicide court cases also suffered an inadequate vocabulary to describe the normative values underlying the discussions. They were able to smuggle in meaning through the empty vessels of the two word families, a resource unavailable to our fictional characters.
Pope Benedict XVI suggests that “secularity” means freedom from religious strictures and the exclusion of Christian values from public life. [xii] Certainly our cultural artifacts seem to show that exclusion and the devastating impact this exclusion has on man’s actual freedom. However, if values smuggling is an actual activity to deepen an otherwise inadequate vocabulary for solving complex issues then the most fundamental impulses of humankind restore in some form these fundamental values regimes. The examples offered in this paper show an inchoate, unsatisfactory methodology to utilize these pre-modern values. Restoring religious values to public life could bring order and reason to what seems to be an unrestrained and perhaps unconscious impulse to invoke a values-driven order on decision-making
Bibliography
Benedict XVI, Pope. “Letter to Marcello Pera.” Benedict XVI, Pope and Marcello Pera. Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, Islam. New York: Basic Books, 2006. 107-136.
Coen, Joel and Coen, Ethan. “No Country for Old Men Script.” 28 November 2005. The Movies of Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. September 22 2010 <http://www.youknowforkids.com/nocountryforoldmen.txt>.
Dworkin, Ronald, et al. “Assisted Suicide: The Philosophers’ Brief.” 27 March 1997. The New York Review of Books. 1 March 2011 <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/mar/27/assisted-suicide-the-philosophers-brief/>.
Heyde, Ludwig. The Weight of Finitude: On the Philosophical Question of God. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999.
Rorty, Richard. An Ethics for Today:Finding Common Ground Between Philosophy and Religion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Smith, Steven D. The Disenchantment of Secular Discourse. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Trevor, William. “Of The Cloth.” Trevor, William. Selected Stories. New York: Viking, 2010. 167-177.
Westen, Peter. “The Empty Idea of Equality.” Harvard Law Review 95.3 (1982): 537-596.
Footnotes
[1] Google count of pages created with cartoon text.
[2] The “smuggling” argument generally follows Smith, pp. 42-69 and 211-226.
Endnotes
[i] Rorty
[ii] Trevor, 176
[iii] Coen and Coen, 106
[iv] ibid, 114
[v] ibid, 116
[vi] Smith, 215.
[vii] Westen, quoted in Smith, 30.
[viii] Dworkin, et. al.
[ix] Smith, 54.
[x] Dworkin, et. al.
[xi] Smith, 68.
[xii] Pope Benedict XVI, 116
Richard,
I was struck by your analysis of the current culture. It is scary. As I was reading your paper my mind kept drifting to Nietzsche. Have you read Nietzsche on values? I can’t help but think that our culture has been highly influenced by Nietzsche. Sometimes I feel that as a Christian my biggest task is to take on Nietzsche.
On a different note, you talk about “The nonsensical distinctions of intention and causation.” However, don’t you think this distinction makes sense in moral reasoning? Think about a hypothetical example of a pregnant woman who experiences severe complications. With no medical intervention mother and child will both die. However, if you choose to save the baby then the mother will certainly die as a direct result of the medical procedure. On the other hand, you can abort the baby and save the mother’s life. It seems to me that the obvious right moral choice is to ”intend” to save the baby with the unintended “cause” of the mother dying. The other alternative is to “intend” to kill the baby so that the mother will live. This is morally wrong and an example of Consequentialism.
Thanks, Anthony, for your comments. The essay is deeply pessimistic, I think. Our public utterances seem incapable of expressing common values without an intent of manipulation. We often blame the Enlightenment for creating a stream in history that carries us all away from God and a value-laden vocabulary, leaving us mute or with a vocabulary excised of language capable of reflecting our deepest moral values, those elements that compose our fundamental human core.Your observation about taking on Nietzsche made me laugh although I’m sure it is an inadvertent mirth. Yes, Nietzsche’s idea of an invented system of values, useful only in its ability to ease our transit through life, fits in here. Honesty, probity and courage in looking at our system of values leads us to its destruction. The act of smuggling values into public policy discussions serves Nietzsche in two ways: 1) the act illustrates that we are not yet strong enough to honestly confront our value system and can only surreptitiously act on those values and; 2) guarantees their evanescence through our failure to institutionalize a value system.
Yes, I take your point about my wording on intention and causation. I confess to an inadequate explanation. My intention in using that phrase was to draw the reader’s attention to the meaningless distinctions made regarding assisted suicide. The lower courts argued that a physician administering or supplying drugs leading to a patient’s death is different than a physician withdrawing treatment or not providing treatment to a patient who would die as the result of that treatment. The courts suggested that a physician supplying drugs killed the patient but by withdrawing treatment the physician was not killing the patient. Rather, the physician merely stopped providing treatment and the patient died of underlying causes. The Terry Schiavo case is an available example of that argument, the political spectacle that enveloped her case notwithstanding.
What if, in Schiavo’s case, some evil person had managed to remove her feeding tube without detection? The tube withdrawal is discovered upon her death and a security camera tape shows that person sneaking in her room and removing the tube. Local police would have hunted that person down and charged them with murder. Yet the physician withdrawing that feeding tube from Terry Schiavo is not seen as a murderer, but rather merely following the imputed desire of Schiavo to not be sustained solely through medical intervention.
The official cause of death was starvation. If the marauder had successfully detached her tube her death would have been murder resulting from the withdrawal of treatment. The distinction is meaningless. The courts attempted to distinguish the two acts on the basis of causation and intention. The physician did not intend to kill the patient. The cause of her death was not the removal of her feeding tube. The doctor is indemnified through his intention and the criminal act is erased through the shift of causation from the primary cause (removing the tube) to the secondary cause (starvation from removing her only mean of receiving food).
This juggling of meaning is necessary to smuggle in the real values — that one has a natural course of life and hanging on to that life when its course is done is shameful, selfish, unnatural.
It is a chilling example of Nietzsche’s philosophy, should we be looking for affirmative examples.
Hi Richard, Your paper presents an interesting analysis. The examples show secular values as denaturalized ideas based on personal opinion- in which even God is reduced to a preference, not a reality. In this scenario, one can see how words such as moral, good or virtue become nonsense; thus, the nominalist problem. Without standards of communication the resource is to smuggle meaning to address secular values. But before going into theology, your argument brings to mind certain principles of common sense that define us as human beings; what J. Budziszewski describes in his book “What We Can’t Not Know”.
In the case of Schiavo we have resource to the three sources of morality to clarify the issue: the object -in the order of reason – was making a distinction between ordinary and extraordinary care, the intention -in the order of moral principle -was to respect the right and dignity of human life, and thirdly, in the order of material and logical circumstances we must consider the effects and real impact. In Schiavo’s condition, the feeding tube cannot be considered extraordinary care for she was not a terminal sick person in the process of dying but in her physical deprivation she was a living young woman whose parents cared for her. Removing Schiavo’s feeding tube was immoral, an act of omission in feeding the hungry and knowingly killing an innocent.
God has mercy on us.
You are right, Maria, to say that Schiavo’s case was not one of extraordinary care. Her case doesn’t really fit in with the essay’s examples but rather was an example used in my reply to Anthony of a meaningless distinction between causation and intention. Because the real values represented in the Schiavo case were hidden we end up with an arid discussion of a cause of her death and what the physician’s intention might have been.
Of course, these discussions are scaffolded on a faulty view of the case collapse when either an “if but” scenario is introduced or if the 3 sources of morality you mention are included in the discussion. When you included the moral principle as one of the three sources of morality I thought of the court discussion of assisted suicide. The lower courts talked about the loss of dignity by struggling to live when one’s life has reached the end of its “natural course.” Because these values are not openly confronted we see the moral principle turned on its head. The “dignity” of human life is not opposing someone else’s opinion on when one’s life should end rather than the dignity of one’s life as God’s creation. How extraordinarily odd.
Budziszewski suggests that there are a number of basic moral truths humankind can’t not know. My essay and your comments certainly bolsters his argument. The casuistry witnessed in the case history of assisted suicide and in the public discussion of the Terry Schiavo case are witnesses to the empty rhetoric surrounding these issues. The political spectacle erupting around the Schiavo case only muddled the waters and allowed observers to take sides based on political preferences immaterial to the real issues – the moral sources you list – her case brings up.
Rorty, among others, suggest we are discussing a false hope — evidence of the wonderful imagination of the human race — and our false hope chains us to a futile struggle to find an overarching meaning. If he is right (I am not suggesting Rorty’s extreme argument IS right) we are condemned to his grinding utilitarianism, the Consequentialism Anthony mentions in his comment.
Thank you, Richard, for an excellent article. Even if you see it as “deeply pessimistic,” there’s something important in this idea of value smuggling that might be useful as a tool in our efforts to evangelize.
If I understand you correctly, we have a number of “neutral” words in our vocabulary that are ideal carriers of any values – and you provide two specific examples of word families identified by Smith, namely the “autonomy-liberty-freedom family” and the “equality-neutrality-reciprocity family.” The idea, though, behind the value smuggling is that these words are really value-laden because their meaning is determined in a valueless system by whoever happens to be using the terms at any given time. (It’s like those arguments about technology’s being neutral, but you wouldn’t want to risk it on the guy holding the gun.) The chance of equivocation is great, then, and the rhetoric is aimed at winning arguments for the sake of political gain in a world governed by legal positivism.
John Paul II took the first of these families on directly in Veritatis splendor, paragraph 41, where he pointed out the true definition of freedom was not radical autonomy but participated theonomy. We’re most free when we’re most closely aligned to the law of God and most enslaved when we pursue our own will to the detriment of our relationship with God. The word “freedom” as defined by Kant is different from the word “freedom” as defined by Pope John Paul II, and both persons using the term without first clearly establishing its definition for the other would be to not only perpetuate their mutual misunderstanding but possibly also to leave the discussion both satisfied of their mutual agreement.
So – how might we use this insight to evangelize? If we are aware of the concept of value-smuggling as it relates to the idea of equivocation in terms, would it be possible for us to prepare ourselves to better understand our audiences (whomever they might be) and the ways in which they smuggle in their own values into the conversations we have with one another? Can we help people to discover a truer sense of God by a more authentic encounter with the world in which they live? I’m reminded of a story I read sometime during my philosophy degree – perhaps in a book by Charles Rice – about a Russian atheist who had no religious background or theological understanding, yet he discovered God one day while combing his daughter’s hair and remarking on the perfect design of her ear. Suddenly, the thought leapt upon him – a design implies a designer, and it was a short path from there to faith in God. Before we can get people into catechesis, we have to have that kind of a hook, something within a person that impels him or her to be receptive to Truth, and someone self-satisfied with his or her own definitions that inform his or her own values is hard to bait. The method, perhaps, is to unsettle people from their comfort zones and inspire them to examine the kinds of values they smuggle into their everyday interactions with others. Not a bad thing for all of us to do this Lenten season.
Sebastian
Thanks for your response, Dr. Mahfood. And posting it at such an early time is above and beyond the call of duty!!
The two word-families mentioned are used as neutral words in which to carry other meanings but are manipulated by abusers to distract readers by offering a common meaning but actually communicating a more specific meaning. But the words CAN be neutral.
Yes, I agree with your conclusion that these are freighted terms only because they are used in a valueless system. I immediately look at political expression and the sorts of examples I used in the essay. Empty posturing, wholesale manipulation, equivocation (good word choice, I hadn’t thought of that word specifically but captures the intent quite well) all are characteristics of these domains. I have thought of them as conscious efforts but they can be unconscious impulses to instill one’s values into an argument or policy without those values.
We look for narratives that confirm our unconscious assumptions about narrative structure. Contemporary narratology suggests that we are oriented towards deep structure narratives with beginnings, middles and ends. Well, contemporary narratology up to Derrida, Foucault, et. al. So the judges weighing the assisted suicide cases see terminal illnesses as the conclusion of a person’s life narrative. Attempting to fight against this natural conclusion is a violation of that narrative structure and so is rejected.In the case of the case exemplars used, the lower court judges inserted their own expectations of a natural course of life and decided against New York and Nevada on withdrawing medical support for terminally ill patients who voluntarily wished to terminate treatment. But they used those word families – in this case liberty and autonomy – to smuggle in other values actually in play during their decision-making processes.
Both of our uses of the word “freedom” seems counter to modern usage. I thought of the term in terms of the freedom to actually express one’s values without masquerading, consciously or unconsciously, these values in other, more commonly attractive, terms. I don’t think of it in quite the terms you use in your response but the meaning is the same: one is free only when one is acting one’s true essence. That essence must originate in a source separate from mortal life or we are left with only a diminished vision of human impulses. A mortal essence might be a life rooting in the mud and eating grubs. Not a vision that leads to a sense of a life leading to the Good.
Of course, you say this in the remainder in that paragraph. I note you evoke Kant and John Paul II while I evoke mud, grubs and the Good.
I believe the ear example comes from Rice’s “50 Questions on the Natural Law”. Of course, you are right about smuggling values through language in daily conversations. Unsettling people from their comfort zones would be to expose the values that are unexamined, hidden in these word families but containing a hidden object of personal value. Quite an assignment.
But yes, engaging in such an examination personally is a worthy exercise now.
This program and my pondering whilst writing this essay has certainly prompted such an examination for me.
Good paper, Richard. Very thoughtful, rather pessimistic. I liked the references to popular culture, Trevor and the Coens. I don’t have time for any comments deeper then those. Say hi to Marian for me.
Robert Klein
Hello Bob. I certainly shall say hello to Marian. Thanks for the note although I think the essay is more exploratory than pessimistic. But maybe we are using different words to say the same thing.