Pater Edmund highlighted a great passage from Hannah Arendt where she distinguishes “value” and “worth”. We hear such an emphasis on “values” in our political discourse, but values, which this risks obscuring the real point. We’re not concerned with protecting or advancing subjective value preferences, but rather we want to protect and advance that which has true worth, that which is truly good. What we “value” may or may not correspond with what has true worth or what is truly good. We might “value” in error, prizing that which is, in fact, harmful to us or to the wider political community:

The confusion in classical economics, and the worse confusion arising from the use of the term “value” in philosophy, were originally caused by the fact that the older word “worth,” which we still find in Locke, was supplanted by the seemingly more scientific term, “use value.” Marx, too, accepted this terminology and, in line with his repugnance to the public realm, saw quite
consistently in the change from use value to exchange value the original sin of capitalism. But against these sins of a commercial society, where indeed the exchange market is the most important public place and where therefore every thing becomes an exchangeable value, a commodity, Marx did not summon up the “intrinsick” objective worth of the thing in itself. In its stead he put the function things have in the consuming life process of men which knows neither objective and intrinsic worth nor subjective and socially determined value. In the socialist equal distribution of all goods to all who labor, every tangible thing dissolves into a mere function in the regeneration process of life and labor power.

However, this verbal confusion tells only one part of the story. The reason for Marx’s stubborn retention of the term “use value; as well as for the numerous futile attempts to find some objective source–such as labor, or land, or profit—for the birth of values, was that nobody found it easy to accept the simple fact that no “absolute value” exists in the exchange market, which is the proper sphere for values, and that to look for it resembled nothing so much as the attempt to square the circle. The much deplored de-valuation of all things, that is, the loss of all intrinsic worth, begins with their transformation into values or commodities, for from this moment on they exist only in relation to some other thing which can be acquired in their stead. Universal relativity, that a thing exists only in relation to other things, and loss of intrinsic worth, that nothing any longer possesses an “objective” value independent of the ever-changing estimations of supply and demand, are inherent in the very concept of value itself.« The reason why this development, which seems inevitable in a commercial society, became a deep source of uneasiness and eventually constituted the chief problem of the new science of economics was not even relativity as such, but rather the fact that homo faber, whose whole activity is determined by the constant use of yardsticks, measurements, rules, and standards, could not bear the loss of “absolute” standards or yardsticks. For money, which obviously serves as the common denominator for the variety of things so that they can be exchanged for each other, by no means possesses the independent and objective existence, transcending all uses and surviving all manipulation, that the yardstick or any other measurement possesses with regard to the things it is supposed to measure and to the men who handle them.

It is this loss of standards and universal rules, without which no world could ever be erected by man, that Plato already perceived in the Protagorean proposal to establish man, the fabricator of things, and the use he makes of them, as their supreme measure. This shows how closely the relativity of the exchange market is connected with the instrumentality arising out of the world of the craftsman and the experience of fabrication.

We “value” what we perceive to be good, what has worth. But our “values” are not themselves super important, because they merely gesture to apparent goods. We have to distinguish apparent goods from authentic goods, and then secure those. Securing what’s truly good for human persons is the true work of politics.

Theodore Dalrymple makes the case in City Journal for public virtue as a first order priority in culture and politics. Although he’s writing nearly 20 years ago and about his native Britain, his opening sounds is as relevant in America and in this time:

A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public excess. There is a Gresham’s law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended.

In no country has the process of vulgarization gone further than in Britain: in this, at least, we lead the world. A nation famed not so long ago for the restraint of its manners is now notorious for the coarseness of its appetites and its unbridled and antisocial attempts to satisfy them. The mass drunkenness seen on weekends in the center of every British town and city, rendering them unendurable to even minimally civilized people, goes hand in hand with the appallingly crude, violent, and shallow relations between the sexes. Britain’s mass bastardy is not a sign of an increase in the authenticity of our human relations but a natural consequence of the unbridled hedonism that leads in short order to chaos and misery, especially among the poor. Take restraint away, and violent discord follows.

Curiously enough, the revolution in British manners did not come about through any volcanic eruption from below: on the contrary, it was the intellectual wing of the elite that kicked against the traces. It is still doing so, though there are very few traces left to kick against.

For example, the boundless prurience of the British press concerning the private lives of public figures, especially politicians, has an ideological aim: to subvert the very concept and deny the possibility of virtue, and therefore of the necessity for restraint. If every person who tries to defend virtue is revealed to have feet of clay (as which of us does not?) or to have indulged at some time in his life in the vice that is the opposite of the virtue he calls for, then virtue itself is exposed as nothing but hypocrisy: and we may therefore all behave exactly as we choose. The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition—that Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable—is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute—the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures—is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature.

It is in the arts and literary pages of our newspapers that the elite’s continuing demand for the erosion of restraint, and its unreflective antinomianism, is most clearly on view.

“[T]o subvert the very concept and deny the possibility of virtue, and therefore of the necessity for restraint,” might as well be the mission statement of most of the Fortune 100 and many colleges and universities. That needs to change if we want to start again instinctively looking up with noble aspirations and in hope rather than down in despair due to the frustrating inclinations of our fallen hearts.

We have all engaged with “the vice that is the opposite of the virtue” we truly wish to live. If we first need to shout out in anger that virtue is for hypocrites as a condition for admitting that the desire for virtue is nevertheless embedded deep in our hearts—and that we might be the very hypocrites we’re most scandalized by—then fine. We know in a deep and fundamental way “of the necessity for restraint” when it comes to any of the truly good things in life. The natural consequences of our primal fault mean that to varying degrees we’re all hypocrites. But we were made for virtue before we brought ourselves low. Thanks be to God, whose grace makes it possible, we were made for overcoming.

I’m coming back after a two year break and plan to continue on a weekdaily schedule.

God is good all the time, and despite the challenges of the pandemic these past two years have been marked by many blessings—and chief among those blessings has been meeting and marrying my wife! If you’re reading this, no matter the time or place, please pray for us.

I think Geoff Shullenberger is right that “masks and lockdowns are here for good,” but I’m glad that, at least for now, the last visible signs of the pandemic are nearly gone in Washington, DC. The last national mask mandates that remain in effect are on the airlines and public transit. The return to normalcy has made living in Washington worthwhile again, although courtship during the pandemic had its advantages: simple and frequent dates, clear District streets, and a nearly empty hike in Rock Creek Park, as a few experiences of this time.

The U.S. Supreme Court is again considering the issue of abortion, thanks to its choice to consider Mississippi’s law protecting human persons at the age of 15-weeks. We’ll all soon learn what sort of Supreme Court the Trump administration built, and whether new judicial sophistry will thwart America’s recovery of the human right to life. Whatever the decision, there will be lots of work to do.

When I started here in January 2015, I wrote about part of the reason I was starting this practice of daily and public posting:

[D]espite the internet’s pervasiveness, so much of what we write, share, and post seems to disappear into the ether even more quickly than what our parents or grandparents might’ve written with pen and paper. I’m writing in public simply because I think I have a responsibility to try to make use of the ubiquitous tools of our time and to try to set down in writing and for at least my own personal record, or family’s record, some of what I’m reading, or thinking, or experiencing.

I think about how much I wish I could learn about the day to day lives of my own older family members or ancestors—imagining what they would have blogged about life in a war or on the farm or coming here in the first place. We generally don’t have any of that, and given the platforms we have today, it feels right that we should make an effort to write in public.

I think “writing in public” is also worthwhile as a way to think aloud and share perspective and experience. There’s a lot that gets left unspoken in public. That’s as it should be. But I also think that before most substantive conversations happen in private, things first have to be thought through and brought out a bit and that even informal public writing can serve as a jumping off point for that. That’s also what I’m trying to do here.

What I wrote then remains true now and is why I’m back at it.

I started writing/sharing something here every day more than five years ago. I’m taking a sabbatical from writing here probably for the rest of the year, so that streak comes to an end today.

When I started the habit of daily writing, it was as much a commitment to “put pen to paper” or “think out loud” about what I was reading or encountering as anything else. We read, see, hear, etc. so much every day that ends up as ephemera, even if it’s good and true and timeless. Not everything (probably not most) of what I’ve posted here over the past five years has evergreen value, but it forms a record of what I’ve been thinking through, working on, etc. that I’m glad to have.

I had been thinking about ending this daily practice of posting for a few months, but the decision to “pause” for an extended period of time solidified last month during my retreat at Longlea.

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