We have been talking about values. So, let’s turn our attention to the most fundamental of questions: Why are values essential to civilization? How can shared values provide stability, sanity and safety, as society passes through major disruptions and change?
Most perplexing, why do our own personal values sometimes conflict with each other?
Human values grounded in religious teachings have remained relatively consistent for thousands of years. The great majority are still accepted as valid today despite a society that is largely indifferent or even hostile to religion.
Since ancient times the history of ideas has been dominated by the assumption that society, and indeed all of human reality, is an integrated and coherent whole, governed by rules that are consistent and rational.
Consequently, it has been assumed that every genuine question must have a single correct answer and that the true answers to all questions must be compatible.
To put it another way, all truths were assumed to be harmonious, and when accurately understood could be expected to conform in consonance with one another.
This thinking is certainly logical, and it is reasonable that people would wish to believe in it.
However, as the human world has become more complex, we have been confronted with uncompromising evidence that reality and truth are not so simple.
We find ourselves increasingly challenged by choices that are incommensurable – that is, impossible to compare or measure against one another. And, our most cherished values can come into direct conflict with one another, despite each being entirely good and reasonable in its’ own right.
This in no way questions the facts or the validity of the values. Rather, it challenges us to make difficult moral judgments in complex circumstances.
Clearly, increasing complexity and morally perplexing choices will be present in our lives from now on.
Even science, the realm of endeavor most closely associated with reason and logic, is confronted with problems that present moral dilemmas – choices between evils. And, the nature of complexity has proven mathematically impervious to predictability and rational expectations.
I do not deny an ultimate holistic conception of reality as an all-inclusive functional domain – one true Reality.
However, I suggest that its’ character requires us to mature – mentally, emotionally, spiritually – by engaging with ambiguity, paradox, and logical incongruities, all of which are intrinsic aspects of the world we are given.
I believe that to a limited extent such adversities can be addressed in similar ways by religious and non-religious people alike. All of us face the daunting challenge of distinguishing between true reality and the myriad alternative realities imagined by the human mind.
Unsurprisingly, the earliest historical references to conflicting values and moral dilemmas appear in religious literature.
An incident I find most compelling is Jesus’ confrontation with a crowd of people who brought accusations of adultery against an unidentified woman.
Her accusers ended up walking away from Jesus (and from her) confounded by the rationality of His response to conflicting values. (John 8)
The letter of the law was not good enough. It was a moment which I believe to be a turning point in human history.
The Apostle Paul describes an agonizing mental and spiritual ordeal in which he confronted insoluble choices. His may be the earliest written account of the dilemmas presented by the two-fold nature of the human Will. (Romans 7)
Augustine, the philosopher and theologian of the 4th and 5th centuries, confronts the same problem in his “Confessions”, and “On Free Choice of the Will”, without resolution.
He finally reports his conclusion in “The City of God”, close to the end of his life. And it is not what many would expect.
Augustine says we can only engage effectively with the conflicts and incongruities in life by means of love.
Yes, love, the ultimate law of unity and understanding that transcends diversity and differences, which prepares the way for problem-solving, and which aligns all aspects of our lives in a functional whole.
The way has been prepared for us in this world with severe tests of intellect and soul that will change us as we must be changed.
Tom
Dear readers: Watch for the next post on or about August 23.
