Values

As far as I can tell, the major news events of the past year--from health care, to financial reform, to the recent BP oil spill--have all revolved around a central question that few people in the mainstream media (right or left) or blogosphere (right or left) directly address: what are our national values? Instead, discussions of each of these affairs has centered around the two major poles of modern political discourse: economics and partisanship. Generally, the former has outweighed the latter in these discussions, leading to what I consider to be ancillary questions to the issues at hand becoming central: Is health care reform affordable? Is financial reform "good for the economy" (whatever that means, given the manifold metrics that anyone can use to to basically prove whatever he or she wants)? Does the government have the right to assume control of a private company's materials, machinery, and men (e.g., the U.S. government finally warned BP on May 23 that it may "push them aside" and take control of the situation--more than a month after the leak began)?

At their cores, each of these issues are not economic or partisan: they are value issues. I believe that few people have addressed the value questions that must necessarily be placed at the center of discussions regarding health care, financial reform, and the oil spill because, in our culture, science and measurement have become the de facto gold standard to which all policy decisions are measured. As Max Weber said 1920, discussing "Science as a Vocation" (for him, "science" referred to specialized "scholarship"), value judgments are, in the final analysis, subjective. No one can ever demonstrate that his or her value system is objectively more "correct" than another individual's. Fear of this uncertainty, that is, the uncertainty of being unable to bolster a given argument with "scientific" facts, many of which are just as subjective as the value judgments people are afraid to publicly offer, has resulted in the deterioration and cowardice of our public discourse. When value judgments are discussed, it is often in revanchist terms of re-seizing "American" values; funnily, everyone, from Rand Paul to Andrew Cohen, seems to have special access to what the Founding Fathers "really" meant.

The recourse to Jefferson, Adams, et. al. serves to underscore the necessity of allowing value judgments to be made openly and explicitly in our public discourse. If this were so, the questions asked at the beginning of this post would transform into: Does every American citizen, or individual living on American soil and contributing to American life, deserve access to health care? Is it right that financial professionals earn far more than other Americans? Do we let millions upon millions of gallons of oil seep into the ocean for fears of overstepping an invisible and ever-changing line between "public" and "private"?

These questions could, of course, be recast in partisan terms: a strict adherent of a laissez-faire philosophy may declare that he or she would of course like to give every American access to health care or stop the BP oil spill, but that the best way to do so is through private enterprise. This is, however, an answer completely divorced from any real commitment to a given value (in this case, the right to healthcare and the necessity of stopping an environmental catastrophe): using a philosophical argument to attempt to block health care reform or prevent the government from assuming control of the BP oil spill is just an indication that one values philosophical coherence more than making a difference in people's lives. That is to say, theoretical rationality--the desire to have a coherent, abstract logical system--outweighs practical rationality--the desire to effect reality. In my own value judgment, in the political realm, practical rationality must outweigh theoretical rationality.

In this era of extreme partisanship, however, the latter always seems to triumph.