In terms of values
Making it make sense might not fix anything.
The spring cohort of the Lighthouse Sessions is now enrolling!
Years ago, before the pandemic, I started an online school.
Essentially, it was a custom homeschool program, designed to accommodate a family’s specific needs.
When the pandemic hit, it was very convenient that we were already online. But after we weathered those tough years, I shut down the school.
For one thing, the connotation of “online school” had changed dramatically and unfavorably.
But the more important thing was that I realized that I was not actually willing to accommodate every family’s specific needs.
If they wanted me to teach creationism, I wouldn’t do it.
If they wanted me to teach that vaccines are dangerous, I wouldn’t do it.
If they wanted me to teach that American society must be protected from non-white immigrants, I wouldn’t do it.
These issues expose values conflicts. And a serious values conflict is a dealbreaker when it comes to educating a child.
I could be up front about these lines in the sand, but I knew from experience that no matter how clear I was about what I stood for, there would often be subtler values conflicts that emerged as we went forward. After two decades of that, I was tired and ready for a break from working with people’s children.
In this world of algorithmic feeds and insular communities, it is tempting to believe that your values are universal — or at least, that they would be seen as reasonable and understandable by someone very different from you, if you could just sit down for a friendly conversation.
It’s jarring to encounter the reality that some beliefs can never be reconciled. It’s there every day in the news, and in the truly wild comments I get on the videos of mine that escape containment.
I’ve taken for granted the bounty of living for more than 40 years in a country whose stated values match my own: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness.”
Even so, I’ve been seeing what I wanted to see all along. For one thing, the man who wrote those words, as a slaveholder, clearly had his own definition of “all men.” And was Jefferson saying, “all men” as in “mankind,” or simply “all men”? Because it was well over a hundred years after independence was declared that women were explicitly granted the right to vote.
At least the ideals of the United States are meant to allow people to live by their own values (that whole “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of happiness” part). In practice, that takes a good bit of discernment. It’s all too easy to get caught up in a religious community, school, movement, or company that does not match your values. You don’t always register that it’s happened because the prevailing institutional values become “just the way it is.”
The way out is to begin to see the values underpinning “just the way it is.” That the way things are done is not “the right way,” but “the way that matches our values.”
And if those values don’t match yours, that is useful information even if you can’t act on it right away.
For example, if your kid goes to a private school where he gets punished for walking too close to the wall in the hallway (true story), don’t be surprised if that school doesn’t empower your child to speak his mind or express himself creatively.
If you work at a job where everything is always in crisis and sixty-hour weeks are the norm, don’t expect that a promotion will resolve that.
If your country’s Department of Defense is willing to spend more than seven million dollars of taxpayer money on lobster tails in a single month, maybe it’s not so shocking that they are also emboldened to spend billions of taxpayer money on a war without congressional approval.
It’s especially frustrating to run up against a values conflict when you feel like there’s nothing you can do about it and you have to live with the consequences of someone else’s decision.
I have no solution for that. But I find that framing things in terms of values helps me to come to terms with it. Someone else’s decision may not make sense in terms of my values, but it may make sense in terms of theirs. From there, I can figure out what options I have and what changes I can make.
Are some values “right” and “wrong”? I believe so. I also believe that trying to convince others that their values are wrong is pointless. So then what?
It may be that the contrast between our values and those of another person or group is so extreme that no common ground is possible.
On the other hand, maybe some of us can connect with each other on the values we have in common, and build on that.
Thanks for being here.