50. The hierarchy of value
My objective in this post is to summarise the conclusions of the first 49. It also marks a transition from almost exclusively theoretical concerns to more practical and policy-based posts.
Although this definition has appeared in more than one post already, it is so important that I repeat it again:
“We define ecological value generally as the level of benefits that the space, water, minerals, biota, and all other factors that make up natural ecosystems provide to support native life forms. Ecological values can accrue to both humans and nonhumans alike.”
Conclusion 1.
Value resides in survival and improvement. But Whose survival? and Whose improvement? Naturally, we take a relatively selfish view of this: our own, and friends and family first at the personal level; and, anthropocentrically at the species level. We are too complacent about survival. We know what our forebears felt; we have a bond with nature, with the ecosystems of which we form part, that ought to be unbreakable. We are testing that relationship to its limits.
Conclusion 2.
Evolutionary value is life. High value is indicated by biodiversity with good prospects for more of the same, a diversity of options. Value is a living organism that has options or has something that gives it the ability to ‘choose' in its environment. Value is in existence and in the creation, commitment and consumption of options, immediate or deferred. Real value, ecological value, depends on having options forever. Options to create, options to commit and options to exploit. We are so good at exploiting, it appears that in a few generations we may eliminate our children’s options to create.
Conclusion 3.
The abilities to harvest, store and consume energy are basis of life and organismic success. All organisms rely on light and water. The hierarchy or energetic organisms starts with photosynthesisers, adding, successively, herbivores, omnivores and carnivores. Humans are the apex predator. But we should not be complacent. We rely on decomposers to return all deceased life to dust and we may not be at the top of the pile forever. In competitive terms, human numbers demonstrate great success. The real definition concerns not only quantities but qualities; continued biodiversity is the real manifestation of success of life on earth.
Conclusion 4.
Value is in being and becoming. It is in states and in relationships. It is in parts of systems, whole systems and in systems of systems. To say that “we are born alone and we die alone” is one of the greatest lies ever told. Whether David Cameron meant what he said or not, “We are all in it together”.
Conclusion 5.
The most valuable solution to populating the planet must be a sustainable one, and from our anthropocentric position that needs to include us. As we consume upwards of 13/4 of the earth’s replenishable resources every year, we are repeatedly overshooting the budget. If we don’t cut back, we will be cut back.
Conclusion 6.
There are three levels of value: ecological; social, or interpersonal; and, the individual or personal. In the West, especially, the long-term trend has been towards the personal and away from the social and the ecological, although there are stirrings to reinvigorate them. We often treat them as though they were separate but they are inextricably linked. All are important, but without ecological value, there is nothing. All of the most important indicators or ecological value are heading in the wrong direction.
Conclusion 7.
If value resides in survival and improvement, what is improvement? We can all make progress as individuals and in our groups but there is no Progress. If we’re ill, we hope to get better. Doctors hope to improve their treatment of patients and even be able to treat them in new and more effective ways but, although the improved methods will live on, you and the doctor will surely die. Progress in ecological terms is merely a sequence. If progress has meaning at all there, it is in continuing to offer conditions for life and for biodiversity in which options exist for a wide range of species. Life always has its joys and its tribulations. Yes, where we can, we should generate good things and improvements but our grasp of what is bad is generally surer than our understanding of what will be good. The best we can do may be to prevent the bad, remove misery where possible, and reduce it where not. And then, allow individuals and communities to get on with their lives.
Conclusion 8.
Our institutions matter. They have been defined as “the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction” which, you will note, omits ecological interactions. They consist of both informal constraints (sanctions, taboos, customs, traditions, and codes of conduct), and formal rules (constitutions, laws, property rights). In ideal circumstances, our informal institutions work well and enable us to build trust through lasting relationships. How do you conduct exchanges with people you don’t know? if you cannot trust enough, protect or threaten; if you cannot trust with these safeguards, contract; if the contract fails, sue; and, if you cannot sue, regulate.? The institutions become more formal the further up the scale you go. On the whole, we have not given a very high priority to the institutions that could protect ecological interests. The focus is on people. And I don’t rate our efforts with people too highly either. If many people in the world remain in poverty despite our riches, if many countries remain at war, and some even suffer the indignity of being pawns in the proxy wars of more powerful nations, what chance do you give to ecosystems that we don’t (and cannot) fully understand and which cannot declare their interests to humankind?
Conclusion 9.
Our feelings are invaluable. Our logical selves can reorganise information to reveal new and interesting facts and relationships but they cannot replace the emotions. Some of emotions are selfish, some help us collaborate and others help us to compete. They are the basis of most of our value judgements. The emotions tell us much more directly than words or logic ever can. Their proofs are less rigorous but deeper, more vital. In the world of logic and reasoning:
In the world of the emotions, you can (and do) undertake all of these tasks, even if both your understanding and execution are somewhat imperfect. In David Hume’s words,
“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”
Conclusion 10.
Just as human value is in being and becoming, we can experience value in processes and in results. But human value is not limited to pursuing and achieving goals. We can enjoy the looser pleasures of serendipity, of following a feeling and deciding which way to go, as we go, rather than planning and rationalising. And to continue finding value in being and becoming we need to maintain options. In practice, both serendipity and planning are valuable, but, generally, humanity is removing itself further and further from the real world and into a more abstract and virtual one. Although this started a very long time ago, with language and other ways to share our cognitive products, the development of printing, the industrial revolution and now the computer and internet based technologies have all generated further step-changes in this abstraction-from-life process. Teach your kids the value of a hug, a sunset or a murmuration of starlings; teach them the value of playing real games, of climbing trees and swimming in the sea; teach them the joys of seeing seedlings grow, of picking blackberries and making jam and baking bread. We can enjoy the contentments of simple pleasures, and of pleasures found, we can enjoy the achievement of targets and goals and, if we find a more general calling, we may be truly fulfilled.
Conclusion 11.
A long-standing piece of philosophical advice is “”Know thyself”. Those who wish to live by it are challenged by the frequently changing interpretations of it since it was coined. This mirrors a problem of one of the modern meanings: the self is not a fixed entity to know. The self can be seen in two ways: first, as a device that gives us a real time answer to the question “Am I OK?”; and, the second, as a device that helps us to compare our selves now with other versions of self such as a past self or an anticipated self. The former refers to survival of the (earthly) self; the latter to its improvement or deterioration. The values attached to these evaluations are, respectively, absolute and relative. We’re alive, and feeling more or less OK; that’s good. The thing that we felt good about last week/month/year doesn’t feel so good now; thats confusing. Humans are unique in the extent to which we can make meaning from our environment. To the extent that we can make a pro-social calling from this meaning, it is good. But two words of warning: meaningfulness does not equate to happiness, even if it does make unhappinesses easier to bear; and, you can easily fool yourself - even Hitler thought he was doing good for others, at least for the German nation.
Conclusion 12.
Sartre said that “Hell is other people”. Typical of the existentialists, his world vire was too self-centred, and he was blind to the fact that heaven is other people too. To say that we are essentially social animals is to hugely underestimate the nature of our ties to one another. Yes, we are partial, preferring those close to us in family and by way of other membership signifiers. And, yes, we compete both within our groups and with outgroups and their members. However, our capacities to collaborate are also deeply embedded, probably at the genetic level. Furthermore, this is not just the instrumental version of relatedness that Adam Smith referred to. As David Hume concluded, my value depends integrally on your value (and, more broadly, on the value in our ecosystems). If you didn’t exist, I’d have to invent you.
Conclusion 13.
We evaluate constantly. We cannot do other. Our bodies evaluate approximately but vitally. They react quickly and decisively to attack from, say, a virus. They react quickly and decisively to imbalances in blood sugars and threats to other vital bodily systems and functions. Our bodies develop along predictable pathways, albeit triggered by environmental stimuli. Our emotions provide us with, alongside other mammals at least, on-the-job evaluation tools to assess the less predictable parts of the environment. This consumes a lot of energy, so if the world proves to be reasonably predictable we adopt habits to save energy. Humans use rationality in a way that is much more precise but also highly abstract. Rationality takes us further from the real world. We may have the choice of following the “approximately right” emotions or the ”absolutely right… or absolutely wrong” reasons. The weak link in reasoning is its application to the real world. Sometimes our reasoning works reliably well, but we can never prove the causal link between our abstractions and the world. We overvalue the application of reason and abstraction to the real world.
Conclusion 14.
One of the most powerful abstractions we have invented is money. Money is an expression of exchange value and consequently of power.? But it is clearly a distinctly human manifestation of value in which nature both succumbs to it and is resistant to it. Money has several functions but its most important are to generate, solidify and exploit options, now or in the future. The pattern mirrors that of other human processes and, indeed, of evolution itself. Money emphasises the value of ownership and possession, of a status based on power, and of materiality and entitlement. It encourages us to discriminate, if not on the wrong things, then certainly not on the right and usually on the less important. Like all abstract measures, money simplifies and often trivialises or debases. More importantly, the arena for money, markets, fail - they do not and often cannot express our real preferences. And yet more importantly, economics, all but captured by market interests as a discipline, trivialises politics, or, more accurately, the 21st century version of economics is the one that political and commercial/financial powers insist upon.
Conclusion 15.
At the personal and small-scale social level, the main focus of value should be in trying to answer the question: “How should we live our lives?” The general answer I propose is the one offered by Alasdair MacIntyre in Rational Dependent Animals. He says that we need to become independent practical reasoners, which in turn requires that we acknowledge our dependence on others in our communities. We also need to be decent, just, charitable and beneficent all at the same time. He is proposing a form of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics presents continuous challenges for individuals and communities, challenges we should accept. It also has some insurmountable problems; it doesn’t scale well, for example. At the macro level, I believe we need a negative consequentialism. If there is risk of ruin or very serious harm, we should avoid or prevent. That leaves a big hole in the middle, one which, to some extent, the philosophies popular since the late 18th century can fill; deontology, rights and responsibilities and utilitarianism. None of them work especially well but sometimes they are the best we have got. Where societies prove incapable of running themselves, either because they can be described as “sick” or because they exceed the working scale of virtue ethics, we need to resort to rules and rights. Where we want exchanges that go beyond the tried and trusted, rules and rights provide the guide rails but utilitarianism takes the brakes off. Economics is not all bad; but it is not all good either and must be the servant of humanity, and the wider world, rather than its master.
Conclusion 16.
Language changed value forever. Our feelings generate a narrative, with or without language. For centuries, and for infants today, the wordlessness is followed by verbality. Once released into the world or words, we cannot go back. For centuries, we have had the written word, in clay, on papyrus and skins and on paper, and now on screens and electronic storage. Each of these carries value of the past, present and future. Each conveys its narrative differently. And we put narratives to different uses. When oral traditions declined and written versions took priority, we gained definitiveness (the one true version) and lost some spontaneity and variety, the challenge comedians face when trying out new material before committing to a something like a final version. But when we can read and write, we don’t lose the value of oracy, or of wordless feeling, we just crowd them out. With each phase, we become more abstract. We gain, but we have to commit our attention. And we also lose, as we cannot attend to everything, we cannot give everything the same commitment. Also, with so many things committed to the memory of a book or a network of computers, we are changing what we feel is important to remember. I propose that we deliberately find time for, and value in, all forms of attention: in being aware of feelings here and now; in the unfiltered (or less filtered) sensory traditions of our cultures (especially the oral and visual ones); and, in our written cultures, both artistic and scientific. They can transport us and bind us together and provide us with some of the most lasting sources of value, personal and shared, that we can have.