by Todd May
If there is to be involvement, it should take on the lessons of the values of dignity and equality. This is the second point. Treating others as having lives to live, however much one disagrees with them (and with exceptions at the extreme, like self-defense or defense of others), acting in a dignified manner (which, recall, means acting like a model for political action, not walking around stiffly attired and with eyes pointed straight ahead), and recognizing the equal worth of everyone can frame political action, particularly in a time of polarization and political indecency. Dignity and equality do not tell us what to do, but they can guide us in our attempt to do it.
Finally, as with the benevolence we discussed in the third chapter, urgency matters. Just as there are environmental urgencies, there are political urgencies. (As many will immediately notice, environmental urgencies are also political urgencies.) Where racism is on the rise, as it seems to be in the US as I write these lines, confronting racism becomes more urgent. Political action, to the extent that it can, ought to privilege more urgent issues over less urgent ones. This is not to say that there shouldn’t be other determinants as well. I am more likely to act effectively if I work on an issue that emotionally grips me than on one that does not. Urgency should be an important consideration in forming my political decisions, but it need not be the only one.
Having invoked the concept of benevolence, however, we might ask the question raised at the end of the third chapter regarding the balance between benevolence and political involvement. We saw there, and again briefly in this chapter, the conflict between those who seek to ameliorate current conditions and those who seek to change the structure of those conditions. This division, of course, is a little too neat. Certain kinds of benevolence might change the structure of a set of political conditions. Providing schooling for young women in countries with an egregious history of sexism would in effect challenge that sexism. Alternatively, changing the structure of a set of political conditions can ameliorate the effects of those conditions. In fact, that is often the goal of political change.
The deeper point to recognize here is there is no question of benevolence versus political action, since benevolence is a form of political action. Benevolence intervenes in our common space (or in the common space of another group of people), and in doing so has effects. These effects might not always be positive, as when benevolence comes in the form of patronizing help. (But then is it really benevolent?) However we act, whether through seeking to be benevolent or through political involvement for change, we are always affecting the common space in which we conduct our lives.
The question for us, a question that is necessarily political but also can be one of benevolence, is not whether to ameliorate current conditions or change them, but rather how we might act decently to improve our common space. This question need not lead us to extreme altruism. We do not have to ask it as a question of what the entirety of our lives should look like. But to one degree or another, each of us should ask it of ourselves and answer it in our action to the degree that is reasonable for us. Decency can ask no more but should ask no less of us.
[ CONCLUSION ]
Our Stories and Our Values
It is sometimes said that we live stories. Each life, we are told, follows a story line, one that can be recounted by the person living it or by others. But what does this mean? Does it mean that each of us is consciously creating a narrative for our lives, a story according to which we then act in order to realize it? That seems unlikely. I don’t live like that, and I don’t know anyone who does. Alternatively, does it mean that each of our lives can be rendered in terms of a particular story? Is the idea that there is a story there that characterizes each of our lives, a story that we may not know but that can be discovered through self-reflection, investigation, or perhaps by others? However, there are many different but adequate stories that can be told about a particular life. These stories may focus on different aspects of a person’s life, or emphasize different events or facts, or bring forward different themes, or rely more or less on a person’s self-understanding. Human lives are too rich to be reducible to a particular narrative that must be said to be the only one adequate to capturing its essence or its trajectory.
There is a different and more plausible way of approaching the issue. We might think of our lives as, in the term introduced by the philosopher Adriana Cavarero, narratable.1 Our lives can be rendered as stories, but that rendering can happen in different ways. On the one hand, there isn’t a single story there waiting to be told or discovered. On the other hand, however, not just any story can be told about our lives. There are, we might say, facts that constrain the kinds of stories through which our lives can be rendered.2
In this last chapter, I want to address the issue of our relation to stories, but from a different angle. Regardless of whether and how we live stories, we all tell stories about ourselves. Rarely are those stories about our lives as a whole, but just as rarely do we go a whole day without telling some story about what we’re up to, if not to others then at least to ourselves. But why turn to stories at this point?
In the previous chapters we sought to understand moral decency in what we might call a centrifugal way. We have moved outward from ourselves toward others, close to us or distant in space, time, species, or beliefs about our common space. We have been looking toward others and asking about our moral relationship to them. In this concluding chapter, I would like to start by switching our angle of vision. Rather than gazing outward, let’s turn our gaze inward for a bit, looking at ourselves before returning to an outward gaze. Throughout this book we have oriented ourselves around the theme that others have lives to live and that moral decency involves respecting that in our interactions with them. Taking a look at ourselves as storytellers, and particularly as tellers of stories about ourselves, will allow us to see this orientation in a different light, starting not from those to whom we are morally related but from ourselves as beings of—sometimes uncomfortable—moral complexities.
So, to begin, here’s a (fictional) story:
I was at the store this morning to buy some groceries. The person ahead of me in line had forgotten his wallet and was asking the store clerk whether he could buy his items on credit. After all, he argued, he shops there all the time and they surely recognize him. This discussion went on for five or six minutes.
As it stands, it isn’t much of a story. Really, it is just a recounting of events. But now let me add another line:
So I offered to pay for the groceries for him.
Or a different one:
So I told him that there were other people in line behind him and that we had lives we wanted to get on with.
Adding either of these lines changes the character of the story. Now, instead of a minimal story about someone else, it becomes a story about me. But there is more. Not only is the story about me; it is a story that reveals me in a certain way. In fact, it reveals me in different ways, depending on which response I give. If I say, “So I offered to pay for the groceries for him,” I am revealed as someone generous, and if I tell this story to someone else, I am seeking to reveal myself to them as generous. However, if I add the other line, things are more complicated. If I tell this story to someone else, how am I seeking to reveal myself? As someone who cares about other people and is irritated by those who don’t? As someone who is willing to stand up to a rude carelessness? As someone who values order and is willing to confront disorder? Or am I just blowing off steam right after a frustrating moment?
And independent of how I seek to reveal myself, in telling the story to others what am I actually revealing of myself? For it might be that although, for instance, I seek to reveal myself as someone who values caring for others (that is, those in line behind me), I am really revealing myself as someone who doesn’t feel that those who can’t get their act together deserve the patience of others. I will return to the question of interpretation in a bit, but I first want to linger over something that might
get lost if we jump right into that question.
In this story, simple as it is, with the addition of either line—the line that makes the story about me—I am revealing an aspect of who I would like to be or at least who I would like to be seen to be. I am placing before others, or maybe before myself, an image of myself that I consider valuable. I need not be aware that I am doing this. In fact, as we will see, it is sometimes the case that my stories about myself reveal aspects of what I value that I would not acknowledge if they were presented to me. That is to say, we can distinguish between what I seek to be revealing when I tell a story about myself and what I am actually revealing. However, in the story above the addition of either line presents me as valuing a certain mode of engagement toward the world. I would like to put the point this way: many of my stories (although certainly not all of them) express values of mine.
What is it to express a value through the telling of a story about oneself? To understand this, let’s first investigate the idea of a value and then the idea of expression. It will turn out that they are deeply enough related that to understand either fully requires reference to the other, but we can get an initial grasp of the phenomenon we’re trying to understand if we separate them for the moment. The term value can be used in many ways. There are, of course, moral values of the kind we have been discussing. But there are also aesthetic values like beauty and prudential values like caution. A little farther afield there are economic values and political values. Although my use of the term may overlap with one or another of these, I am trying to capture something here that is independent of them. I might put the matter this way: the values our stories about ourselves seek to express are ways of being in or ways of engaging the world that we endorse, identify with, or seek to embody.
This way of putting things involves three possibilities—endorsement, identification, or seeking to embody. The first is a matter simply of approval. In telling some stories I approve of the way of being I express. (Again, let’s bear in mind a point to which we will return, that I might not acknowledge this approval.) In identifying with a way of being or engaging the world, I see myself as actually embodying that way I approve of. Alternatively, and this is the third possibility, it may be that in telling a story about myself I don’t identify with it but rather seek to embody it. What all three have in common, however, is that the way of being I am expressing through a story (or several ways of being if the story is complicated enough) is something that I find valuable. I may not find it valuable for others, and so it need not be a moral value. However, I do find it valuable for myself. In short, I value it. That is what I mean here by the term value.
If we turn to the idea of expression, we should first steer clear—as we have already seen—of thinking of it as consciously expressing. In telling a story about myself I may be consciously trying to get you to think of me in a way I value, but that is not necessarily the case and, in fact, is probably the exception rather than the rule. We tell stories about ourselves all the time without reflectively constructing them in such a way as to have a particular influence on our audience, even when that audience is ourselves. More often, we tell stories to amuse, to share our lives, to reflect on what has happened to us or what we have done, to form bonds with others, or just to pass the time. Most of our stories don’t so much announce our values as reveal them. It is through our stories that our values can be grasped.
How does this revelation occur? After all, our stories don’t come labeled with values. If they did, then the story that ended with my telling the person in line that there were other people in line behind him and that we had lives we wanted to get on with would not be ambiguous between several interpretations. Our stories, then, or at least many of them, reveal values that must be interpreted to be understood. And here is the first overlap of the issue of telling stories about ourselves with that of the question of whether our lives are themselves stories. If our lives can be rendered as stories—if they are, in Cavarero’s term, narratable—then one can ask which narrative or narratives are the accurate ones, or at least the most accurate ones. Just so, if our lives reveal our values, and if those values are not announced in the stories, then how do we tell which values are being revealed?
The broad answer is similar in both cases: it is a matter of interpretation. But we should be clear here and not fall prey to the temptation to think that interpretation is simply a subjective matter. There are a variety of constraints on interpretation that make some interpretations better than others. Of course, there will be cases in which the interpretation is obvious. When I tell a colleague a story about my recent discussion with a famous philosopher and, in relating the story, use the philosopher’s first name in an offhand way, it should be clear—even if it isn’t clear to me—that I value being seen as respected by significant or influential philosophers. And it is a short step from there to the recognition that I value that respect as well. It is unlikely that I would like to be seen to be respected by famous philosophers if I didn’t think that that respect itself mattered.
Of course, there are exceptional cases that would make interpretation more complicated. Let’s take this one. Perhaps I am trying to impress someone I want to date and think that she would find me more interesting if I were associated with well-known figures in the field, even though I don’t really care about that. Then my wanting to be seen as respected by influential figures comes apart from actually wanting to be so respected. What might we say then about the values the story is revealing? To approach this question, I should note first how unlikely such a scenario is. It is a bit hard to imagine my wanting to impress someone with a story expressing a value that I myself don’t endorse, identify with, or seek to embody. Stories told to impress others with values that one rejects seem to me to be more nearly cynical. And that is perhaps where interpretation should go. One value that might be getting expressed through this rendering of the story is that I endorse the value of manipulating others to my own ends. Now that value is likely one that I would not want to acknowledge even if I am in fact expressing it through my story. That would be a matter of self-deception, a point to which we will return.
For the moment, let’s recognize that we have arrived at an important constraint on interpretation: the audience, or perhaps better, my conversational partners, since they may be active participants in my storytelling. In order to grasp the value a story is expressing, it’s important to know the conversational partners for the story. To put the point another way, what I am trying to do with a story will often help reveal which value or values I am expressing, and that trying will, importantly, depend on the audience for the story. This is true even if the conversational partner is myself. For instance, when I tell myself a story about how my insulting a colleague in a way that might have been called rude was actually a bold standing up for principle in the face of his attempt to manipulate us all, I am likely revealing values of integrity as well as social cooperation, values that I would certainly endorse or else I would likely not have told that story to myself.
So far I have argued that many of our stories express values that we hold—that is to say, ways of being or engagements with the world that we endorse, identify with, or seek to embody. However, one might object here that many others of our stories don’t seem to do that. In fact, they do the opposite. Rather than expressing values, they express something else. Take, for instance, the storyteller whose most common theme is how the world is arrayed against them. We all know the person for whom nothing ever goes right because that’s the way the world is. I’m not talking here about people who really are the object of the world’s onslaughts: exploited, marginalized, and impoverished people who, at least in my country, are too often blamed for the social conditions that oppress them. Instead, I’m thinking of people for whom the weather is never right, appliances are never fixed on time, the mail is too slow, their work is unappreciated, and their children never call. Can we really say of these people that they are expressing values in the
stories to which they subject themselves and the rest of us?
I believe the answer to this question is yes. In fact, I think it is clearly yes. These stories express an identification with victimhood. People who tell these stories consistently, while they are perhaps really irritated by the events they recount, are usually stubbornly attached to seeing themselves as helpless objects of the world’s vicissitudes. They can do nothing to make their lives better, because whatever they do it will not work out. The world assures them of this. People like this are attached to their status as martyrs to the world’s unkindness, an attachment that is expressed in the stories they tell.
This is not to say that stories never express disvalues. If someone who does not identify with the role of victim tells a story in which they are the object of injustice, this would certainly express a value with which they resist identifying. Say, for instance, that a normally confident and open person tells you a story about being harassed by a police officer. This person doesn’t identify with their victimization by the police, as may be evident from their history and probably from their affect when they tell the story. They are here expressing a disvalue, a normative position—that of victim—which they do not endorse, identify, or seek to embody. I take it, however, that such an expression of disvalue remains within the parameters of the position I’m articulating here. Through the expression of disvalue, a value is being negatively expressed or at least indicated. What the value is—or what those values are—may be difficult to tell, since it is not the identification but rather the disidentification that is being directly expressed. However, we remain on the same normative register. These stories, when not expressing values we would endorse, are expressing values we reject in favor of others.