Defend Our Values: By Embracing Changes We Hate

One of the clearest signs that the Enlightened Values which I hold so dear are working is that the society in which I live embraces something that I dislike or even despise. For every man’s utopia is every other person’s totalitarian state.

Writing this is a challenge. I am overwhelmed by having moved to a new country, starting a doctoral program, facing health challenges, working on other projects, and the news. It is such a bizarre time to pen a defence that can be misconstrued as defending the indefensible.1

At a time when people seem ever more polarised, and where conversations are hardly possible.

At a time when different groups of people are fighting to preserve ways of being and living or impose new ways of thinking, I think it is the process rather than the outcome that is really important.

The essence of that which I want to conserve is process. I, like you, gentle reader, have preferences. But my preferences are mine, and they may not be the right ones. Heck, they have changed, and while I may be reticent to change them, I also welcome such changes.

I want to suggest that the Enlightenment was mostly good not only because it advocated for certain outcomes, but because it provided a process through which we could make decisions.

Decisions that respected each other’s autonomy. Decisions that were well-intentioned. Decisions that were based on ideas (however flawed) about how the world is.

So far, this is probably boring and obvious. The area where I think I can contribute is to suggest that the process works precisely if it generates bad values!

Much of what we value today was once seen by our very own societies as irredeemably bad, dangerous. Some even forestalled doom. Consider the following cases where we have made progress: inter-racial dating, premarital sex, the exchange of ideas, questioning religion, questioning politicians, and overthrowing despots.

All of these were, at one time or another, condemned. There should be no need to clarify, but this does not mean that every idea perceived as bad will eventually be celebrated. It does not mean that every controversial act will be normalised. But, we must recognise that the process that has generated much of that which we value seems, at its very core, about generating ideas, values, and ways of being that a significant portion of the population sees as bad. The process may be slow, and it is most definitely not linear, but one hopes it trends in the desired direction.

On occasion, you will be among those who condemn such shifts. Some of the shifts we (you?) condemn will come to be important to our descendants. In other cases, you (we?) will try to stop certain shifts. Our descendants will abhor some of the positions we take, just as many of us are horrified by some of the positions taken by people in the past. They will also be horrified if we do not try to stop certain shifts. To put it simply, our ancestors did not know which of their positions we would come to abhor. It is scary not knowing which of our ideals and values will be discarded.

Our societies have been changing at an alarming pace. My grandmother was born in a world without planes, radios, and other technologies. Even more striking than technological change has been the cultural shifts. When she was born, she had fewer rights because of her sex.

We have mostly come to see women’s involvement as an immensely positive change. Their right to vote is rather recent, and even before their academic contributions were fully recognised, women were doing all kinds of silent and hidden labour. Such changes were not always welcomed.

Our ancestors made assumptions about different kinds of people, and these assumptions curtailed their liberties. Heck, even the idea of rights is relatively recent. We certainly are making mistakes, and if we knew better, we would likely make different decisions.

Western societies have had a remarkable ability to assimilate ideas, cultures, cuisines, and others. In doing so, they’ve changed. Does this mean such systems, by their nature, appropriate and exploit? Even in cases where more powerful societies sought to dominate other groups, these more powerful groups changed as a result of exchanges. We remain understandably anxious about change.

Recent concerns about immigration in many ways echo historical ones. Commentators across the political spectrum are concerned and eager to preserve this or that.

My confusion is about what we choose to preserve. Why is the world as it is now and not as it was five years ago, twenty years ago or how it will be ten years from now worth preserving? The only aspects we can seek to preserve are processes, and processes, regardless of their goodness or robustness, will occasionally fail. Some processes are better than others, and processes can also change.

Here, it may be worth thinking that there is a core of non-negotiable values. This core should really be narrow. Super narrow. More narrow than what I would be comfortable with.

Then there are concentric circles growing farther and farther from the core. The first circle ought to include a lot of what we would be tempted to throw into the core, but does not really belong there. The boundaries between most of these are rather permeable. We should determine the core, and my suggestion is that it is certain processes.

Historically, there has been plenty of intolerance.

Much of what I like, and much of what you like (which, admittedly, could be wholly distinct from what I like), shares two features.

First, it was likely contentious at some point. Secondly, it came through certain processes. The Enlightenment radically shifted the kinds of processes available to us, though one could argue that these changes and processes slowly and meekly arose from older traditions.

My position is that we need to engage with ideas and defend values, policies, and fundamentals, and we should not surrender. But we must also accept that we are wrong and, like our ancestors, whose views we condemn, so our descendants will condemn some of our views.

We should embrace some of the changes we hate because these show that the system is working as it should. And that is something worth celebrating.