societal values by aj4s

SOCIETAL VALUES  

We must now return to our previous distinction between horizontal and vertical freedom. In the dialectical movement of freedom through the interpenetrating spheres of work, language, and power, vertical freedom makes manifest the values that adhere to the historical situation; these are justice, truth, and love or care. Each of these belongs to all three of the spheres of liberation we discussed in the last section, but in an interpenetrating manner.

1. Justice is often said to be the overriding value of the social order. Too often, however, it has been mistakenly identified with the legal order. Debate over economic systems betrays a misconception of justice as identified with equity or with an isolated just demand.⁴³

What is legal obviously is not necessarily or always what is just. We revise laws and make constitutional amendments precisely to meet the demand of justice, but legalism can be a great source of injustice. The identification of justice with a chart of punishments of some sort raises the question, how just are our laws and the authority that imposes them? In many developing countries the demand for justice is overwhelming in the face of massive arrests of persons without charges, in the savaging or massacre of persons suspected of subversion, in the hamleting of communities away from their land–all in the name of law and order. Clearly, justice has to do with respect for the rights of persons.

Nor can justice be equated with equity or equal distribution of goods. The mother dividing the cake into equal pieces among her children is a classic example of justice misconceived as equity. What if one of her children due to hunger and malnourishment needs a bigger slice? Could it not be the case that dividing the cake into equal parts betrays her fear or playing safe, rather than a genuine spirit of concern? In the social realm, would the socialist system of equal distribution of basic necessities at the expense of individual initiative be, as it claims, more just than the capitalistic system? Would the welfare system in a society meet the demand of justice? On the international level, is it just for a highly developed nation to give economic aid to a developing country in the interest of getting cheap labor and raw materials, or of dumping junk surplus products on their market? These questions among others point to another essential quality of justice–genuine justice is inspired by non-partisan interests.

Nor can justice be equated with the satisfaction of an isolated just demand. To give in to the demand of workers striking for a higher wage in the long run may lead to a greater injustice such as massive lay-offs, higher prices of commodities or foreclosure of the firm. Justice to be genuine cannot remain abstract, but must take into consideration the total existential situation–the concrete relationship of a person with other persons. The relationship of person and physical nature becomes an issue of justice only in the light of this inter-human relationship.

The value of justice, thus, has three features: respect for the rights of the human other, non-partisanship, and consideration of the total existential situation.

2. Truth as value is not simply the equation of judgment with reality, but truth for which one is willing to live and die. What does it mean to live and die for the truth? Marcel offers us an enlightening description.

To live according to truth means not to live according to one’s moods. How so? Moods are variable, even for the individual who lives his whole life according to them. But when we use the word `truth,’ no matter how we define it, it always refers to something that shows consistency and absolute stability. In any case, living according to truth means bringing oneself into agreement–but not only with oneself (as this would perhaps mean only a formal coherence). No, it means bringing ourselves into agreement with a demand which has to express itself in us and cannot be stifled. While experience shows that we can stifle it if we want to, it nonetheless resides in the very nature of this demand that it should be clarified. This does not necessarily mean that the demand must press forward into consciousness in entire universal character. Most probably it will only take shape when a particular situation demands it, or when an action is required, regardless of the personal risk involved.⁴⁴

Marcel gives as an example the taking of an oath or the act of freely coming out into the open to testify to something that one has seen, at the risk of death or torture or of harm to one’s family.

Truth is not the same as opinion. In opinion, I do not stake my being; but in truth I participate in the act of understanding. This presupposes that truth is always against a certain background or horizon, perhaps aptly conveyed in the metaphor of light. No one has the monopoly of truth, just as no one possesses light. There is always an intersubjective quality of truth that is irreducible to the quantification of Gallup polls and the counting of heads. The search for truth is a communal search, a “fusion of horizons.” But it will always remain a search, for truth is aletheia, according to Heidegger, and therefore includes a mixture of darkness, and perhaps of pain. Still, truth as value liberates: “the truth shall make you free.”

3. Love as value is care, in the Heideggerian sense, under the aspect of solicitude. As dasein or man is a being-with (mit-sein), caring by no means involves only incidental acts of kindness towards one’s neighbor. Caring is being-ahead-of-itself, while being-already-in-the-world and being-alongside-entities-which-we-encounter. To care is to be continually creatively responsible for the other in time. (In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Samaritan did not stop at picking up the victim; he deposited money at the inn and promised to pay for any extra charges.)

One of the paradoxes of love and caring is its quality of being both singular and universal. One never loves humanity in the abstract; one loves concrete individuals in their particularity, and this means giving them the freedom to become themselves. Yet, in willing the free self-determination of the other, one affirms a basic humanity, a common brotherhood (and sisterhood) of mankind. Authentic concern for the other takes cognizance of the uniqueness of the other (whether individual or social) and of his or her own pace and rhythm of growth, which it respects and supports. Love, as Scheler constantly emphasizes, is a movement towards the higher possibilities of a value.

In the language of power, genuine authority flows from an active concern for the total welfare of the community, otherwise authority becomes despotism and obedience becomes servitude. As the abuse of power hides a failure and refusal to take into account the value of the other human person, it is not difficult to see why violence is problematic for the person who is aware of the value of love. Violence may be justifiable at times as an ethics of conviction, but it has to be balanced by an ethics of responsibility.⁴⁵

The notion of responsibility is the key to the link between love and justice–two seemingly contrasting values–and consequently between justice and truth. The cold hand of justice and the warm heart of love can be expressed in the categories of the socius and the neighbor.⁴⁶ The socius is the servant of the institution; the neighbor is the person encountered inter-personally. Justice ought to govern our functional relationships, mediated through structures; love spontaneously colors our direct immediate relationships. But justice is genuine only if it is inspired by a non-partisan interest, if it is a beginning love conceived as responsibility. For there can be as much love “hidden in the humble abstract services performed by post office and social security officials” as between friends and intimate persons; the “ultimate meaning of institutions is the service which they render to persons.”⁴⁷ Inversely, love can easily become false charity if the service rendered does not answer to the real demand of justice, or is made an alibi for a lack of justice. Justice is the minimum of love, and love the maximum of justice. The minimum demanded in justice is the basic dignity of the human person which love enhances. Justice and love then have a common root in responsibility.⁴⁸

The dignity of the human person in turn provides the link of justice to truth.⁴⁹ Justice and truth (and love) are grounded on the value of the human person as sacred and inviolable. Truth as a value is a call to bear witness to some light, a vocation to shed light on what is revealed. Insofar as man as man is given the word, he shares in the sacredness of this revelation and the response-ability to bear witness to it. To refuse to testify is to do injustice not only to others in the community, but also, and worse, to oneself.

What is the ultimate source of this sacredness of the person or the ultimate foundation of the community of persons? Scheler’s hierarchy of values offers us a possible answer in the realm of religion. Because a higher value has the characteristic of founding other values, the highest value is the value of the holy because it founds the other values of the sensory, the vital, and the spiritual. If the value of the holy indeed supports the other values, then the Transcendent is immanent in the human values of justice, truth and love, and historically, in the movement of liberation.⁵⁰ “The dualistic spiritualities of evasion ought to die.”⁵¹ Absolute Value can no longer be thought of apart from the dynamism of man’s freedom in history; the Transcendent stands at the crossroad of the incarnational and the eschatological. This is the Person who can ultimately and deeply unite all our divergent commitments, give meaning to our actions, and value to our individual and social persons.⁵² The movement of liberation rests on this call to bear witness to the Transcendent. Justice, truth, and love are inseparable from faith.

A word must be said on the nexus of the values mentioned above; these values find their “home” in the family. The family is not just the means for the biological perpetuation of the human species, but the seat of the creative transmission of values in culture. The network of relationships in the family reflects in miniature the interrelationships of work, language, and power in society at large. There is wisdom to the words of the ancient Confucian text found in The Great Learning: “If you want peace in the world, you must first have peace in the state; if you want peace in the state, you must have peace in the family.”⁵³ In the same tradition, Confucius says, “The root of jen (or love) is filial piety and brotherly respect.”⁵⁴ Filial piety is the unity of man and man in time, and brotherly and sisterly respect is the unity of man and man in space. As a micro-society and micro-history, we cannot treat the family merely on an animal level as a shelter for our basic necessities. Neither can we deal with it simply in a formal sense as a rational contractual agreement which can be rescinded whenever conditions become unfavorable.⁵⁵ It is in the family as home that “I am”– “I become myself” through “I am with.” The societal values of truth, justice, love and faith take root and develop in freedom and responsibility.

We have traced the movement of liberation of the person–in particular, the social person–and the values incarnate in this movement, but by no means have we exhausted the topic. Perhaps, the important lessons in our sketch are the dialectic of freedom and nature in the different but interrelated dimensions of man, and the historicity of values in this movement of freedom. Concretely, the appeal of freedom is the call to participate in something or someone other and greater than ourselves: only then can we claim to be on the way to freedom.

~ by aj4s on January 6, 2009.