J o u r n a l of Religion and Health, Vol. 25, No. 2, S u m m e r 1986
Editorial
In Search of Values A value is the property by which a thing attains intrinsic worth. Everybody, therefore, is looking for something of value practically all the time, or trying to preserve something of value. We talk a lot about values today. E v e r y generation deplores the fact that the next generation has departed from the values of the previous one which presumably made the members of that generation the wonderful people that they are. In the realm of ethics and religion, values are guiding lights, ideal goals, personal fulfillments that lift us out of the ordinary life of self-seeking, competition, and acquisitiveness and present us with truths and satisfactions that are their own reward. There is a lot of phony value-serving in our contemporary life. We are always trying to convince ourselves and others that what we are thinking, saying, planning, or doing is for the good of others, or for the community as a whole, or even for God's sake. But, actually, we are pretty grubby little souls most of the time, and in thoroughly modern fashion we are "looking out for number one." Having done that, we do not mind if something nice happens to other people in the process. The best situation, one might say, is when we can manage, in Tom Lehrer's phrase, to be "doing well by doing good." The formal name for this kind of activity is enlightened self-interest. It is based upon the theory of Adam Smith and other classical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economists that if everyone seeks one's own welfare and that of one's immediate family, that will produce, by a strange chemistry nobody claims to understand, the welfare of the whole community. This appears to be the theory on which our government and society operate today. There is nothing new in the so-called revolution. It is an a t t e m p t to return to nineteenth-century economic liberatarianism, in which there are as few limitations as possible on the fulfillment of individual greed and self-love. You are not allowed to maim or kill your neighbor while you are getting rich; but if what you are doing results in making him or her poorer, that is not your problem or society's. It simply proves the individual who does not or cannot compete successfully to be unworthy or incompetent. This theory ruled in the thinking and the faith of most Americans during the nineteenth century. It was modified in the middle years of the twentieth by a shift of concern toward the social responsibility of each person for the community as a whole. It was embodied in the idea of "the welfare state," a notion much derided now. But we have never understood what is so wrong with the idea that a people should be concerned for the welfare of the whole community and a government dedicated to seeking the welfare of all its people, including the poorest and most unfortunate and underprivileged, as well as the most able and the most fortunate. Such a concept seems to be in harmony with the ethical values of mutual aid and social responsibility which have been important factors in the evolution of the human race. Also, of course, these values have been taught by the major religious and 91
O 1986 Institutes of Religion and Health
92
Journal of Religion and Health
ethical traditions the world over. To love God and one's neighbor as oneself is the most common summary of the Jewish and Christiamtraditions. These commandments have their counterparts in all the major religions and philosophies that have sought to define the basic human values. What is going on today is a retreat from these values as practical guides of life, while they are at the same time affirmed in formal, ritualistic, and dogmatic ways. For the new fundamentalists the teachings of Jesus shall not reign here but in the heavenly kingdom that is to come. We shall all be friends and neighbors in the heavenly mansions, but not in the towns, cities, countries, and continents of this world. We are to be guided not by our consciences, our reason, or our human hopes and plans, but by the authoritative words of an old book and the arbitrary commands of a tyrannical god whose major concern is with being properly worshipped by his followers. Perhaps the problem is that mutual aid, social concern, equal justice, and equality turned out to be too difficult. Hence, we have settled back into the illusions of nineteenthcentury economics which tell us that looking out for number one will take care of us best and solve the annoying ethical problems of community life, equality, and human obligations, too, at least as long as unlimited material expansion continues. But the difficulty is that expansion is faltering. We can no longer look forward to indefinite increase in wealth for all. We must deal with problems of scarcity, fairness of division of earth's limited resources among its increasing inhabitants, and sharing rather than acquiring as a way of life. The situation has been thoughtfully studied in a book by a group of American sociologists under the direction of Robert Bellah of the University of California at Berkeley. Bellah and his associates have called their book Habits of the Heart. The title is from one of the most perceptive students of American ethics and culture, Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in 1830 and after exhaustive discussions and observations with many Americans wrote his masterpiece, Democracy in America. Tocqueville was an aristocratic Frenchman, and many of his ideas would not be accepted today, but his basic observations were extraordinarily sound. He was interested in human freedom as a fundamental value and in how this would affect the moral character, the " m o r e s " or "habits of the heart" of a people. He saw a danger in pure freedom, in that people would tend to follow their individual, selfish interests to the detriment of the community. He hoped that the values of family life, religious tradition, and concern for the welfare of all through participation in local and national government would temper and control the innate selfishness of each person. Hence, individual freedom could be disciplined by social responsibility. But he was not at all sure this would happen; and if it did not, he feared that personal freedom itself might be in danger. The argument of Bellah and his associates is that failure to control that powerful force of individual acquisitiveness is exactly what has happened. We have a society within which each of us has made the final test of values the self-satisfaction they provide for the person. We accept family loyalty only as far as it meets our personal needs and satisfies our hunger for self-fulfillment. We accept religious loyalty only if the church is to our liking. If it is not, it is
Harry C. Meserve
93
easy enough to find another church or none. We see public service and political life as means by which individuals reach new opportunities and new levels of personal growth and fulfillment. Even the people whose work is to help others--doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, ministers, lawyers, philanthropists, and all the people who work in all kinds of semiservice jobs--often put their own self-fulfillment first. Hence, nothing beyond ourselves holds us together or unites us with one another. The element of authority, of commitment for better or worse, of loyalty to something we believe to be of abiding value is too often lost sight of. Bellah and his associates have no dogmatic answers for this problem. They do have compassion for "the poverty of our affluence." We have vast wealth as a people, but we are frightened that we m a y lose it or have it taken away from us; and this could happen, by the aggression of others or our own carelessness. We are loaded with weapons t h a t cannot defend us against the threat of nuclear annihilation. A single small terrorist act can stop us in our tracks. In our pursuit of individual happiness we have not achieved communal felicity or even communal equality and justice. The only approach to an answer in Habits of the Heart is to be found in these lines from the closing chapter on "Transforming American Culture": Perhaps life is not a race whose only goal is being foremost. . . . Perhaps the truth lies in what most of the world outside the modern West has always believed, namely that there are practices of.life, good in themselves, that are inherently fulfilling. Perhaps work that is intrinsically rewarding is better than work that is only extrinsically rewarded. Perhaps enduring commitment to those we love and civic friendship toward our fellow-citizens are preferable to restless competition and anxious self-defense. Perhaps common workship, in which we express our gratitude and wonder in the face of the mystery of being itself, is the most important thing of all. If so, we will have to change our lives and begin to remember what we have been happier to forget. We cannot disagree with this diagnosis of our moral condition, our contemporary "habits of the heart" as they are today. Freedom in any community cannot survive without some profound sense of moral responsibility and mutual concern. If t h a t fails, then freedom fails too, because it becomes mere self-love without any larger, guiding value. Many people are beginning to be aware of this situation. Many, it seems to us, are looking for answers in the wrong places. The basic problem with fundamentalist revivals of religion is t h a t they do not touch the consciences of most human beings involved. The revivalists call on their followers to give up thinking, to give up human feeling, to abandon criticism of themselves and the world as it is, and to put their hope in a supernatural intervention ("pie in the sky" is the old name for it}, while abandoning the human need for bread, healing, justice, and love in the world right now. The values of the religious revivalists, together with those of the revivalists of nineteenth-century individualism, are external and claim an arbitrary authority which is to be obeyed but m a y not be examined, criticized, or modified by reason, conscience,
Journal of Religion and Health
94
or creative thought. Go to church, obey the commandments in the book, do all t h a t you legally can for yourself and your family, be patriotic without question or dissent, work hard, and you will prosper. So will your family, your church, and your country. Very impressive, except t h a t things are not t h a t simple. These are the very values against which the present generation, the generation of self-love and self-fulfillment, have rebelled successfully. They have a right to seek growth and fulfillment for themselves, but this growth and fulfillment come from a different kind of value system. Values are not external absolutes t h a t we accept or reject. To be real and powerful they must have an inward assent from individuals. This assent must be wholehearted and genuine. It must come from the mind with all its critical faculties working. This assent must come from the heart with a discipline so deep and natural t h a t it has become, in Tocqueville's phrase, a "habit of the heart." Above all, this assent must not be fixed and frozen in verbal or legal forms. It must be capable of change and adjustment to the conditions of a changing world and changing human needs and capacities. This assent may be traditional, in t h a t it springs from age-old verities, but it must be as fresh and new as this morning in its relevance to present experience and need. Especially, this system of values must bring together the individual's selfinterest and the common interests each person shares with all others. It must make clear t h a t we really are happier when we are useful, responsible, contributing members of the human family than we are when we are merely getting what we can from the family, exploiting it for our own needs, and using other people and social institutions as means to our own ends. Alfred North Whitehead, philosopher, mathematician, and teacher of wisdom, once said: " T h a t religion will conquer which can render clear to popular understanding some eternal greatness in the passage of temporal fact." The poet Blake put the same principle differently when he said: To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour. If there is one golden thread running through the great religious and ethical traditions, it is this one: we are happiest when we are most alive, and most alive when we find our ultimate values in the midst of the daily human encounter with other people, with nature, with the larger concerns of society, and with the m y s t e r y of Being itself. What religion has called God, revelation, holiness is not a fixed condition but a process. God is a verb, not a big fellow out there who pulls the strings. God is the love that makes us whole and frees us from self-interest. We ought to be "godding about," expressing the most important values in the way we talk and work and deal with other people and live with and for them. If we could put out of our minds the images of the old
Harry C, Meserve
95
t y r a n t in the sky, we might begin to find the traces of the divine spirit in the midst of ordinary human experience. There are numerous formulations of the ultimate values of our human condition. The best ones involve something people do for themselves. Surely the traditional Judeo-Christian commandments to love God and neighbor as oneself involve continuous activity in which each one seeks and in some measure finds the best ways of obeying these two commands in the midst of life. The Chinese sage Laotzu says t h a t the three essential values for the enlightened person are: to care, to be fair, to be humble. When one is caring, one need not fear; when one is fair, one leaves enough for others; when one is humble, there is room to grow. When the Buddha achieved enlightenment, his disciples gathered around and asked him who he was. He replied, " I am awake." And when they wanted to worship him as a god, he told them to follow the path with its eight steps: right understanding, right motive, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right discrimination, right concentration, right meditation. In short, as Laotzu also said, "The way to do is to be." The classical definition of friendship, which was stated by Aristotle but taken over into Christian ethics, is another example of a terse but penetrating statement of basic values. Friendship, said Aristotle, involves three qualities: friends enjoy one another's company; they must be useful to one another; and they m u s t share a commitment to the common good. Only when they have all three qualities can they enjoy, help, and strengthen one another as friends should. Tocqueville, it seems to us, was not far off the mark when he defined the essential values as those of the family, the community within which one worked and for whose general welfare one was concerned, and the place of worship where one found with others the spiritual meanings and fulfillments t h a t gave energy, insight, and enlargement of heart and mind. The contemporary sociologists in Bellah's book have not told us a n y t h i n g new, but they have restated the old verities, the abiding values, in contemporary terms. Most of us today can accept the fact of basic loyalty to our families. We know we can choose our friends, but there are others to whom we have unconditional commitments. These commitments can be broken and sometimes are, but only when the necessity is so great t h a t survival itself is in some real way involved, if not physically, at least morally. We know the claims of the community on our work and our fulfillment. We know we are happiest when we are useful both to ourselves and to others. We know we hunger for some kind of inner light t h a t gives meaning and direction to our loves, our labors, our social commitments, and our personal fulfillments. It would be possible to put these values into theological language. But we leave this task, admittedly an important one, to the faiths of the varied readers of this journal. Values are essentially active principles and guides for living. If we find ourselves united on basic values, we can survive and profit from considerable differences in theological formulations and beliefs. It is, as Paul said, the spirit, not the letter, t h a t gives life, and values are "habits of the h e a r t " and matters of the spirit. Harry C. Meserve
Editorial
In Search of Values A value is the property by which a thing attains intrinsic worth. Everybody, therefore, is looking for something of value practically all the time, or trying to preserve something of value. We talk a lot about values today. E v e r y generation deplores the fact that the next generation has departed from the values of the previous one which presumably made the members of that generation the wonderful people that they are. In the realm of ethics and religion, values are guiding lights, ideal goals, personal fulfillments that lift us out of the ordinary life of self-seeking, competition, and acquisitiveness and present us with truths and satisfactions that are their own reward. There is a lot of phony value-serving in our contemporary life. We are always trying to convince ourselves and others that what we are thinking, saying, planning, or doing is for the good of others, or for the community as a whole, or even for God's sake. But, actually, we are pretty grubby little souls most of the time, and in thoroughly modern fashion we are "looking out for number one." Having done that, we do not mind if something nice happens to other people in the process. The best situation, one might say, is when we can manage, in Tom Lehrer's phrase, to be "doing well by doing good." The formal name for this kind of activity is enlightened self-interest. It is based upon the theory of Adam Smith and other classical eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economists that if everyone seeks one's own welfare and that of one's immediate family, that will produce, by a strange chemistry nobody claims to understand, the welfare of the whole community. This appears to be the theory on which our government and society operate today. There is nothing new in the so-called revolution. It is an a t t e m p t to return to nineteenth-century economic liberatarianism, in which there are as few limitations as possible on the fulfillment of individual greed and self-love. You are not allowed to maim or kill your neighbor while you are getting rich; but if what you are doing results in making him or her poorer, that is not your problem or society's. It simply proves the individual who does not or cannot compete successfully to be unworthy or incompetent. This theory ruled in the thinking and the faith of most Americans during the nineteenth century. It was modified in the middle years of the twentieth by a shift of concern toward the social responsibility of each person for the community as a whole. It was embodied in the idea of "the welfare state," a notion much derided now. But we have never understood what is so wrong with the idea that a people should be concerned for the welfare of the whole community and a government dedicated to seeking the welfare of all its people, including the poorest and most unfortunate and underprivileged, as well as the most able and the most fortunate. Such a concept seems to be in harmony with the ethical values of mutual aid and social responsibility which have been important factors in the evolution of the human race. Also, of course, these values have been taught by the major religious and 91
O 1986 Institutes of Religion and Health
92
Journal of Religion and Health
ethical traditions the world over. To love God and one's neighbor as oneself is the most common summary of the Jewish and Christiamtraditions. These commandments have their counterparts in all the major religions and philosophies that have sought to define the basic human values. What is going on today is a retreat from these values as practical guides of life, while they are at the same time affirmed in formal, ritualistic, and dogmatic ways. For the new fundamentalists the teachings of Jesus shall not reign here but in the heavenly kingdom that is to come. We shall all be friends and neighbors in the heavenly mansions, but not in the towns, cities, countries, and continents of this world. We are to be guided not by our consciences, our reason, or our human hopes and plans, but by the authoritative words of an old book and the arbitrary commands of a tyrannical god whose major concern is with being properly worshipped by his followers. Perhaps the problem is that mutual aid, social concern, equal justice, and equality turned out to be too difficult. Hence, we have settled back into the illusions of nineteenthcentury economics which tell us that looking out for number one will take care of us best and solve the annoying ethical problems of community life, equality, and human obligations, too, at least as long as unlimited material expansion continues. But the difficulty is that expansion is faltering. We can no longer look forward to indefinite increase in wealth for all. We must deal with problems of scarcity, fairness of division of earth's limited resources among its increasing inhabitants, and sharing rather than acquiring as a way of life. The situation has been thoughtfully studied in a book by a group of American sociologists under the direction of Robert Bellah of the University of California at Berkeley. Bellah and his associates have called their book Habits of the Heart. The title is from one of the most perceptive students of American ethics and culture, Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited America in 1830 and after exhaustive discussions and observations with many Americans wrote his masterpiece, Democracy in America. Tocqueville was an aristocratic Frenchman, and many of his ideas would not be accepted today, but his basic observations were extraordinarily sound. He was interested in human freedom as a fundamental value and in how this would affect the moral character, the " m o r e s " or "habits of the heart" of a people. He saw a danger in pure freedom, in that people would tend to follow their individual, selfish interests to the detriment of the community. He hoped that the values of family life, religious tradition, and concern for the welfare of all through participation in local and national government would temper and control the innate selfishness of each person. Hence, individual freedom could be disciplined by social responsibility. But he was not at all sure this would happen; and if it did not, he feared that personal freedom itself might be in danger. The argument of Bellah and his associates is that failure to control that powerful force of individual acquisitiveness is exactly what has happened. We have a society within which each of us has made the final test of values the self-satisfaction they provide for the person. We accept family loyalty only as far as it meets our personal needs and satisfies our hunger for self-fulfillment. We accept religious loyalty only if the church is to our liking. If it is not, it is
Harry C. Meserve
93
easy enough to find another church or none. We see public service and political life as means by which individuals reach new opportunities and new levels of personal growth and fulfillment. Even the people whose work is to help others--doctors, psychiatrists, social workers, psychologists, ministers, lawyers, philanthropists, and all the people who work in all kinds of semiservice jobs--often put their own self-fulfillment first. Hence, nothing beyond ourselves holds us together or unites us with one another. The element of authority, of commitment for better or worse, of loyalty to something we believe to be of abiding value is too often lost sight of. Bellah and his associates have no dogmatic answers for this problem. They do have compassion for "the poverty of our affluence." We have vast wealth as a people, but we are frightened that we m a y lose it or have it taken away from us; and this could happen, by the aggression of others or our own carelessness. We are loaded with weapons t h a t cannot defend us against the threat of nuclear annihilation. A single small terrorist act can stop us in our tracks. In our pursuit of individual happiness we have not achieved communal felicity or even communal equality and justice. The only approach to an answer in Habits of the Heart is to be found in these lines from the closing chapter on "Transforming American Culture": Perhaps life is not a race whose only goal is being foremost. . . . Perhaps the truth lies in what most of the world outside the modern West has always believed, namely that there are practices of.life, good in themselves, that are inherently fulfilling. Perhaps work that is intrinsically rewarding is better than work that is only extrinsically rewarded. Perhaps enduring commitment to those we love and civic friendship toward our fellow-citizens are preferable to restless competition and anxious self-defense. Perhaps common workship, in which we express our gratitude and wonder in the face of the mystery of being itself, is the most important thing of all. If so, we will have to change our lives and begin to remember what we have been happier to forget. We cannot disagree with this diagnosis of our moral condition, our contemporary "habits of the heart" as they are today. Freedom in any community cannot survive without some profound sense of moral responsibility and mutual concern. If t h a t fails, then freedom fails too, because it becomes mere self-love without any larger, guiding value. Many people are beginning to be aware of this situation. Many, it seems to us, are looking for answers in the wrong places. The basic problem with fundamentalist revivals of religion is t h a t they do not touch the consciences of most human beings involved. The revivalists call on their followers to give up thinking, to give up human feeling, to abandon criticism of themselves and the world as it is, and to put their hope in a supernatural intervention ("pie in the sky" is the old name for it}, while abandoning the human need for bread, healing, justice, and love in the world right now. The values of the religious revivalists, together with those of the revivalists of nineteenth-century individualism, are external and claim an arbitrary authority which is to be obeyed but m a y not be examined, criticized, or modified by reason, conscience,
Journal of Religion and Health
94
or creative thought. Go to church, obey the commandments in the book, do all t h a t you legally can for yourself and your family, be patriotic without question or dissent, work hard, and you will prosper. So will your family, your church, and your country. Very impressive, except t h a t things are not t h a t simple. These are the very values against which the present generation, the generation of self-love and self-fulfillment, have rebelled successfully. They have a right to seek growth and fulfillment for themselves, but this growth and fulfillment come from a different kind of value system. Values are not external absolutes t h a t we accept or reject. To be real and powerful they must have an inward assent from individuals. This assent must be wholehearted and genuine. It must come from the mind with all its critical faculties working. This assent must come from the heart with a discipline so deep and natural t h a t it has become, in Tocqueville's phrase, a "habit of the heart." Above all, this assent must not be fixed and frozen in verbal or legal forms. It must be capable of change and adjustment to the conditions of a changing world and changing human needs and capacities. This assent may be traditional, in t h a t it springs from age-old verities, but it must be as fresh and new as this morning in its relevance to present experience and need. Especially, this system of values must bring together the individual's selfinterest and the common interests each person shares with all others. It must make clear t h a t we really are happier when we are useful, responsible, contributing members of the human family than we are when we are merely getting what we can from the family, exploiting it for our own needs, and using other people and social institutions as means to our own ends. Alfred North Whitehead, philosopher, mathematician, and teacher of wisdom, once said: " T h a t religion will conquer which can render clear to popular understanding some eternal greatness in the passage of temporal fact." The poet Blake put the same principle differently when he said: To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour. If there is one golden thread running through the great religious and ethical traditions, it is this one: we are happiest when we are most alive, and most alive when we find our ultimate values in the midst of the daily human encounter with other people, with nature, with the larger concerns of society, and with the m y s t e r y of Being itself. What religion has called God, revelation, holiness is not a fixed condition but a process. God is a verb, not a big fellow out there who pulls the strings. God is the love that makes us whole and frees us from self-interest. We ought to be "godding about," expressing the most important values in the way we talk and work and deal with other people and live with and for them. If we could put out of our minds the images of the old
Harry C, Meserve
95
t y r a n t in the sky, we might begin to find the traces of the divine spirit in the midst of ordinary human experience. There are numerous formulations of the ultimate values of our human condition. The best ones involve something people do for themselves. Surely the traditional Judeo-Christian commandments to love God and neighbor as oneself involve continuous activity in which each one seeks and in some measure finds the best ways of obeying these two commands in the midst of life. The Chinese sage Laotzu says t h a t the three essential values for the enlightened person are: to care, to be fair, to be humble. When one is caring, one need not fear; when one is fair, one leaves enough for others; when one is humble, there is room to grow. When the Buddha achieved enlightenment, his disciples gathered around and asked him who he was. He replied, " I am awake." And when they wanted to worship him as a god, he told them to follow the path with its eight steps: right understanding, right motive, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right discrimination, right concentration, right meditation. In short, as Laotzu also said, "The way to do is to be." The classical definition of friendship, which was stated by Aristotle but taken over into Christian ethics, is another example of a terse but penetrating statement of basic values. Friendship, said Aristotle, involves three qualities: friends enjoy one another's company; they must be useful to one another; and they m u s t share a commitment to the common good. Only when they have all three qualities can they enjoy, help, and strengthen one another as friends should. Tocqueville, it seems to us, was not far off the mark when he defined the essential values as those of the family, the community within which one worked and for whose general welfare one was concerned, and the place of worship where one found with others the spiritual meanings and fulfillments t h a t gave energy, insight, and enlargement of heart and mind. The contemporary sociologists in Bellah's book have not told us a n y t h i n g new, but they have restated the old verities, the abiding values, in contemporary terms. Most of us today can accept the fact of basic loyalty to our families. We know we can choose our friends, but there are others to whom we have unconditional commitments. These commitments can be broken and sometimes are, but only when the necessity is so great t h a t survival itself is in some real way involved, if not physically, at least morally. We know the claims of the community on our work and our fulfillment. We know we are happiest when we are useful both to ourselves and to others. We know we hunger for some kind of inner light t h a t gives meaning and direction to our loves, our labors, our social commitments, and our personal fulfillments. It would be possible to put these values into theological language. But we leave this task, admittedly an important one, to the faiths of the varied readers of this journal. Values are essentially active principles and guides for living. If we find ourselves united on basic values, we can survive and profit from considerable differences in theological formulations and beliefs. It is, as Paul said, the spirit, not the letter, t h a t gives life, and values are "habits of the h e a r t " and matters of the spirit. Harry C. Meserve
