by Edward _
I give a lot of thought to how we, as a society, choose what we treasure. It’s a big part of the art world, where works that don’t end up in museums often end up in landfills, and the process by which they do end up in museums is so complex, competitive, and often seemingly arbitrary it leaves lots to ponder.
Lately, I’ve been expanding this thinking to the world at large. Different societies prioritize what they treasure differently, but most treasure what I’ll call the Big Five: Religion, Culture, Wealth, Nationalism, and Family. Some societies place more emphasis on Family than Wealth, some more on Nationalism than Religion, some more on Culture than Wealth, and visa versa, etc. etc.
Here in the US, Family is the popular favorite of politicians, even when they’re slashing funding for programs that help children or protect workers, but if forced to rank the Big Five, I’d say collectively Nationalism is our overall first priority. I’ve thought this since my 7th grade American History class, actually, where it dawned on me that without instilling a sense of Nationalism into the children of immigrants, the US would likely be enduring perpetual civil wars. For the nation to move forward in relative harmony, Nationalism had to take priority over Religion, Culture, and even Family, because there’s no way these other things could continuously unite peoples from every corner of the world. And "Divided we fall," so….
Where what we treasure begins to get really interesting for me, however, is when it comes to what we’ll do to protect it. The old, "if the house is on fire and you can take one object" scenario usually helps clarify this for me.
Some folks would grab their family scrapbook. Some their important financial documents. Some, like me, a piece of artwork off the walls (or so I say, though if actually faced with the dilemma, I might grab my great grandfather’s sunglasses, knowing there’s nothing else of his I will ever have. But they’re also very old and rather soon will be antiques, so my priority is arguably still Culture with an emphasis on Family).
As I consider these options though, it dawns on me that few folks would grab something that reinforces the notion that Nationalism was their first priority. (Would anyone grab their family US flag? Possibly, but imagining it requires convoluted construction for me.) So while collectively Nationalism may be our first priority, individually, it’s probably not. (Dolly Madison saving Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Washington, being a possible exception. Although, it might have been more a Cultural thing for her as well…it was priceless art.)
Admittedly, this makes me wonder how sincerely we treasure Nationalism.
Maybe Nationalism isn’t a personal thing, though. Maybe it’s only in the context of being a group we can intelligently treasure it (and a fire in one’s house doesn’t provide such a context). I can be highly patriotic, but on my own, that’s really somewhat idiotic (picture only me on the Mall at an inaugural address, waving a flag…even the new President is embarrassed for me).
I think this is why there’s often a disconnect between folks who feel "Shut up! There’s a war on" is idiotic and those who see the wisdom of it. Those who see the wisdom of it are considering the ramifications of dissent from a group point of view; those who feel it represents an abandonment of reason from an individual point of view. And before anyone offers that it’s selfish on the latter’s part, consider how much emphasis the "ownership society" places on individualism (a great paradox of the conservative/liberal divide, if you ask me).
I guess what I’m looking for here is a legend to how choices are made. So many of them seem silly to me at times. And artificial. Even when they involve family (I’m thinking about someone who will risk life in prison to defend really just the honor of a family member sort of scenario here…how does one get to that place?).
I realize this is becoming one polluted stream of consciousness, so I’ll work toward an end now, but I’m fascinated by who chooses what to treasure, how sincere they are about it, what it says about them as individuals, and what it says about them as part of this or that group. Often, it seems, they choose what most helps protect them from their deepest fears (whether that be being alone, or having no power in their world, or seeing no meaning to life, etc.), but amateur psychology was never one of my strengths, so I’ll let that be my last thought on the topic and invite yours instead.
I don’t really know how one goes about determining “national” priorities — is it simply the sum of all the individual priorities, or is it something more?
Re the “burning building” hypo, I thought (or was hoping, anyway) that “Bullets Over Broadway” put the final nail in its coffin. I don’t think it’s a particularly helpful way of determining one’s priorities, especially in this case when you’re talking about abstractions.
Saw “Bullets over Broadway” but don’t recall that burning building bit…
Maybe you need to look at this differently. Which would ‘piss you off’ the most and/or cause you to actually risk yourself to stop?
The burning of:
1)a Bible/Torah/Koran,
2)a Monet,
3)a million dollars,
4)the Constitution of the United States, or
5)your Mother?
I think almost everyone would rank #5 first, but after that it gets interesting.
#5 first, yes
Then a toss up between number 2 and number 4 (are there copies of the Constitution? if so, then #2)
Good test.
Saw “Bullets over Broadway” but don’t recall that burning building bit…
Beginning of the movie. Cusack & Reiner talking about what they would save from a burning building. Reiner says he would save the last remaining copy of Shakespeare’s plays over an actual living person. Rest of movie explores the ramifications of that philosophy.
I’d probably rank it:
5
2 (surprised, Edward?)
4 (if it’s the original)
3 (depending on whether I thought I could save any without substantial harm to person, and whether I could keep it)
1 (put 2 here as a tie, if it’s not the original)
I picked the original of the Constitution after the Monet (assuming it’s an original) because the value of the Constitution is in what it says, which is amply recorded, while the value in the Monet is in what it is.
Of course, if the Monet is Monet’s signature on his dinner check, I might have to reprioritize.
Really?
How about:
a) A person you don’t know
or
b) a Monet.
I’d like to think most people would pick a. It has more to do with the valuation of human life than categorical priorities.
I’d think there are more significant categories:
Pleasure
Status
Safety
Relevance
Hope
The particular contexts in which they manifest themselves are, I think, less important.
Sidereal, you read my mind.
How about Knowledge, Wisdom, Compassion as categories? (or am I too idealistic?)
I think that part of the problem with fitting nationalism into ‘what would you take if the house were on fire?’ tests is that it’s hard to imagine how you could grab what nationalism is a love of, namely your country, and take it with you. The fact that it’s not the right size is only the beginning of the problem.
And I’m also not sure in what sense I can’t be patriotic alone. It is of course true that if I were alone in the universe, I wouldn’t have a country, but is that the point? I can certainly be patriotic in the privacy of my own home — some (heaven knows not all) of my blog posts )e.g., the one on Paul Cella) are meant to be, among other things, patriotic, whether or not they succeed, and no one was around when I wrote them. But I think I’m just missing something here.
My ranking: 5, 2/4 (in both cases, if the original), 3,1.
To quote an idiot:
What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage
Whose world, or mine or theirs
or is it of none?
First came the seen, then thus the palpable
Elysium, though it were in the halls of hell,
What thou lovest well is thy true heritage
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
I’d take the million over everything but my Mother, then donate it to the fire department.
A million or my mom?
H’mmm….
Cue that old Jack Benny joke here 🙂
The choice between the money and the Constitution (both coming after 5 and 2) is puzzling to me. My instinct is to save the money. As Slarti says, the value of the Constitution is its content, and we have that, so the only value the original document has is as a historical artifact. (I am ignoring its private value to a collector, which would change the situation). This sounds hopelessly mercenary, of course, but the money can be used lots of ways. Would you let the Constitution go if saving it meant that, say, some kids couldn’t go to college, or someone couldn’t get a heart transplant? Notice, by the way, that I don’t even require that it be my money, and I take it we are assuming there is no personal risk here.
On the other hand, if Congress wanted to spend $1 million to improve the facility in which the Constitution is kept, thereby protecting it from decay, I would approve. So that looks like a bit of a contradiction. It arises, I think, because money is not really a thing, in a sense, but an option on a great many things, and until we know how the option is to be exercised we can’t rank it in comparison with items we value for non-financial reasons.
Depends on the Monet. I know “Haystacks in Winter #5” is part of a set, but I suspect we can spare it.
umm, Mother’s already burned, with ashes feeding a very nice garden
My first thought is the Torah. I plead ignorance on the Koran, but if we are talking about the handwritten rolls kept in tabernacles, I do believe they are not only very valuable as works of art, but have a sacredness in themselves in a way not usually attributed to a Christian Bible. The equivalent might be the Chalice in a Catholic Church, or even the consecrated Host.
Am I wrong?
Torahs – any anything with holy words written on it – are supposed to be buried. Dunno about Christianity – it’s probably not nice to toss a bible in the trash.
I’d put “preserving nature” up near the top of my personal values and wish it counted for someting as a national value. There isn’t anything to represent nature on Edward’s test.
A former roommate of mine accused me of loving my cat more than my fellow man. She asked me who I’d save in a fire–her or the cat. Well, my cat, of course. For one thing, my cat didn’t play Beegees records incessantly (this was a long time ago.)
if my house if on fire, i take my wife. after that, a pair of pants, shoes and then maybe i’ll grab my computer (because it has my business on it, and i don’t trust backups), my beautiful Telecaster, and my car keys.
but i really treasure politcial operatives.
A long time ago, in my first ceramics class, one assignment was to ‘make a container for something precious.’ Defining what was precious, and what would contain it, was up to us.
I mentioned the assignment to my mom (we were still on good terms back then):
Me (musing): What’s precious to me?
Mom (without even a moment’s thought): A dead cat.
I did the classic double take, then laughed. ‘Precious’ was indeed a dead cat, an orange marmalade tabby who had many, many personality quirks; he died relatively young, of a heart condition. (Yes, Precious was a boy cat, so named for his habit of sucking one of his dewclaws like it was a thumb.)
So I wound up making a sarcoghagus, with a little mummy Precious inside. It was one of my best pieces.
I’m the wrong kind of person to answer questions like these, because I place zero value on either religion or nationalism–in fact, I’d be thrilled if both ceased to exist tomorrow. That’s primarily because I think both are diseases which have a powerful net negative effect on the human psyche and a person’s ability to think and evaluate choices rationally.
I would much prefer to value spirituality over religion–the latter being arbitrary and often ludicrously silly dictations about how one should go about having the former.
As for patriotism, I don’t have a pithy phrase for what I’d like to see replace it. Patriotism in the sense of being justifiably proud of the group of which one is part because of its merits, or being willing to sacrifice for the greater good of that group, is a virtue not limited to states. It becomes cancerous when it leads to blindness to the group’s faults, unprovoked aggression and/or xenophobia, and above all a desire to prosper at the expense or irrespective of others, instead of with them. I think nearly everyone places a high value on patriotism, as it were, but far too many are afflicted with the latter kind.
I assume that by wealth you mean something which has no value other than its ability to be exchanged for goods or services, such as a dollar bill. Wealth is a slightly different animal, in that people not only often seek it for its own sake, but also because it is typically a necessity for survival, or for maintaining one’s standard of existence. I could (and have) survive just fine on the street sleeping under overpasses and eating at charity houses, but I’d be pretty unhappy.
Family is paramount to me. Not everyone I’m related to is family, and not all of my family are related to me. Family is the closest circle of association to me aside from my beloved, the people for which I would unquestionably sacrifice my own happiness. They don’t get a free pass on their bullshit, but they do get my love and respect.
I’d have to think about the rest.
Substitute nationalism for patriotism in that, as you might’ve guessed. Somewhere along the line of typing my brain did this /switch/ thing. :>
Edward,
On your hypothetical, I would risk myself to protect any person, my mother or a complete stranger, before I would ever consider any of the other four.
Sorry Edward. When I read the thread too quickly and I made the mistake of attributing things to the wrong guy.
Edward, check out Time to save the world, act 4 of a show a year ago on This American Life. It’s about the Hartman value profile.
The test itself is pretty darn easy to take, and quite frankly, ordering these things really tells you a lot about yourself and is a valuable exercise in its own right.
I would love to see Charles Bird’s test results.
I would love to see Charles Bird’s test results.
I would love for you to explain why.
Mac: On your hypothetical, I would risk myself to protect any person, my mother or a complete stranger, before I would ever consider any of the other four.
Boy thats hard. Seriously, I’d have a hard time passing up a million bucks over protecting the life of some stranger that I’m never going to meet, know, or have anything to do with, and who might be on death’s doorstep anyway (yeah, a cop-out).
Now a million bucks for my mother, I’d have to consider, but really she’s lived a good life, and you’d make it painless, and the bills would be unmarked, and you are very discreet…..
Self interest wins in the end, and that’s the American way, no?
Self interest wins in the end, and that’s the American way, no?
You’re thinking of France.
… I’M THINKING …
(see above, Jack Benny)
Religion, Culture, Wealth, Nationalism, and Family
Family, Family, Family … that’s my choice.
Oh — not in the Don Corleone sense though. No!
Only that everything is measured by the way it serves to increase the spiritual and physical well-being of those I love. That’s what I mean by Family being first.
As was said in Spy Kids 3D – Everyone’s Family.
Anyone for a group hug?
Mac: You’re thinking of France.
Not really. but I think in some ways French society is demonstrably more egalitarian than is ours. I suspect that self interest just manifests itself in different ways.
My original impulse was to make a joke about what Woody Allen would take based on the title of his first movie, but rilkefan’s quotation of Pound really struck me, especially the use of the phrase ‘true heritage’. Apologies that this is all philosophic-y.
First off, I love Pound’s poetry. But it’s a strongly debated question about if and how much of a fascist was Pound (is that what the ‘this idiot’ referred to?). The Cliff notes version is that Pound, entranced by classical literature, went to Italy in the early 30’s and fell under the spell of Mussolini. He did everything he could to stop the US from entering the war and ended up doing propaganda broadcasts that revealed a strong Anti-Semitism. Tried for treason, he was declared insane and placed in an asylum for 12 years and then was deported back to Italy. The wikipedia link notes that he recanted his antisemitism when Allan Ginsberg interviewed him in Oct 1967 (I’ve been trying to find the interview on line, but sadly no luck) (I would also note that I feel almost certain that Ginsberg was not simply asking Pound about his history, but was wondering about his own path. The protests to the Vietnam war were reaching their peak, and becoming more and more violent and I have to imagine the question on Ginsberg’s mind was what should he do now and what if he were wrong. 2 months later, Ginsberg was arrested for the first time for protesting the Vietnam war)
(and since I think there are a number of Science fiction fans here, I would note that Pound was deeply involved in the Social Credit movement, which also attracted Heinlein, whose recently discovered and published first novel describes a social credit economy)
But it’s not simply that loving one’s ‘true heritage’ limns Pounds own politics in a particular way, but it leads me to suggest that a cleaving between liberals and conservatives is that while conservatives treasure the past, liberals treasure the future.
(note: going to talk about fascism and communism a bit, but please don’t take any of this personally)
In the normal course of events, no one treasures one to the complete exclusion of the other, but if we move out to a point where we value one to the exclusion of the other, I think that a treasuring of the past to the exclusion of the future gives us fascism while the opposite gives us communism. We can contrast Hitler’s emphasis on racial purity versus the Communist ideal of the ‘New Soviet Man’. We can think of Lanzinger’s painting of Hitler as a Teutonic knight, while viewing Stalin through the lens of Socialist realism. When Communism fell, I think many Americans were shocked and dismayed to find a virulent anti-communist like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reveal themselves to be a Russian nationalist. I know that the Hitler held that their technology would prove to be the secret weapon against the allies and that Stalin cleverly utilized a traditional love of the Motherland to energize and unite the Soviet people. But it seems that at the heart of it, the conflict is in what is treasured.
Of course, this is not simply a Fascism/Communism divide. We think of Royalists and Republicans in the French revolution. Everyone is probably aware that the metric system comes from that revolutionary ardor, but some may be surprised that a 400 degree circle, a 10 hou clock and a calendar with each month renamed and divided into three weeks of 10 days. I imagine a hunting band of Cro-Magnon getting into a huge row over staying or trying their luck in the next valley over.
So, going to the list of things to be saved, one problem is that all of the things are artifacts, which are treasures of the past. While it is difficult to imagine a ‘future artifact’, but what if one had to choose between a Monet and a Jackson Pollock. If you are going to grant me a Monet, what if you granted me the ability to _know_ that a particular artist was going to be famous? Between that piece or art that you knew future generations would regard as a masterpiece and the Monet, which would you choose?
But this is all determining the heritage of mankind. What if it were between a Monet and the only painting your son/daughter made? What if it were the only thing you had of them? The intersection between what we would save from our personal past and what we would save from humanity’s shared past is worth a thought or three.
Slarti puts another interesting spin on it, noting that saving the Constitution isn’t so important because it is not the document that animates us, but the ideas embodied by the words. There was IIRC a scandal in Taisho (pre-war) Japan. All secondary schools at the time (which were generally boarding schools) had portraits of the Emperor and Empress and a copy of the Imperial Rescript on Education and the scandal was when a fire struck one girls’ school, the principal demanded that the Rescript be saved, and a number of the students perished. However, Bob points out that the Torah (and the Koran for that matter) are regarded as documents to be protected (ex. this very interesting site that was discussed in the WaPo article)
Now, I hope we can agree that the Japanese example is pretty horrific, but we might hold that the effort and resources devoted to preserving a Torah, especially the ones found in the situations described, is probably praiseworthy. But why is the Japanese example so bad? I would suggest that it is because children embody a combination of past and present. We see in children and in our own most keenly the idea that they are both preserving our past and are moving into the future.
At any rate, to answer Edward’s question about how we choose what we treasure, I think that what we need to treasure is a combination of past and future. That balance is always hard to strike but it is essential.
There’s a Hindemith Sonata (for Alto horn in Eb) that has a poem that, when performed, has the horn player reciting the first part and the pianist the second part. The last phrase is on the net a bit, but I think the whole poem is worthwhile and on the topic of Edward’s post
apologies for length.