About a decade ago, a couple I know got a dog. Both the man and woman were of strong feminist views and regarded their relationship as being one between equals and they attempted to share power in all matters equally. They believed that and, as far as they could tell, their friends believed it too. The dog messed everything up. She didn't know anything about ideology or feminism. She decided which of the two was the strong authority figure in her life based on what she observed in their behaviour. She picked the man.
It was rather awkward. Everyone could see it and, while professing not to care, the woman talked about it a lot.
The woman set about fixing the problem by competing with her husband for their dog's respect. She tried to win that respect by showing the dog that she really understood its needs and wants. That had the reverse of the desired effect. The man, who didn't want a dog in the first place, saw the dog as just another thing in his life that had to be dealt with. The dog loved both of them in that unreserved way dogs do, but she developed a deep respect for and trust in the man that she never had for the woman. That this was so was unmistakeable; the dog's behaviour was very different when the man was not around.
I put it to you that this true story can also serve as a parable about why we fail or succeed in living values and, therefore, whether we pass them along or not.
The quote in the subject heading of this post is something my mother said to me when I was in my early twenties. I was quite taken aback by it for two reasons: 1) she was very upset by it (she was crying when she said it) and 2) because it seemed to me to be patently false. If you had asked me which parent had most influenced me up until the moment my mother tearfully challenged me, I would have unhesitatingly said my mother because, as was typical of my generation, she was the one who spent the most time with me as a child. I was raised by parents who came from a generation that took it as absolutely normal that the mother raised the children and the father, at most, was an occasional authority figure. But she was absolutely right. I had mostly rejected her values without even realizing that I had.
Oddly enough, that conversation only served to further that rejection. I'd never really thought about it before then. I loved my mother and I didn't like to think about things that made for differences between us. When I was alone, I tried very hard to come up with a list of values that I shared with her but all I could come up with were values that are nearly universal, such as, for instance, the belief that cruelty is wrong. Although my mother obviously played a huge role in my life, for which I am very grateful, her remark was right on the money: I don't share her values.
Where do my values come from then? A good portion came from my father. My Godfather, Clifford Warner, was a huge influence. My first girlfriend, Ellen Broadhead, had an influence you probably couldn't over-state. Two fathers of later girlfriends—Art Mantell and Ian Webster—were very important in making me who I am (one of the ironies of my life is that both are far more important to me, when seen in retrospect, than their daughters are). Four professors—John Minhinnick. Andrew Lugg and Hilliard Aronovitch, who taught me philosophy, and Linda Sanborn who taught me Romantic poetry—shaped a lot of my values. Add to this some people I never met but whose works I've read obsessively over the years: John Dos Passos, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Joseph Conrad, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh and Benedict XVI.
When I look at that list, the thing that really strikes me is that most people on it had little or no interest in passing their values on to me. Ellen didn't pass on hers so much as she forced me to become responsible for myself in a way that no one else in my life had done. (She was the Joey Potter to my Pacey Witter.) Others either never knew me or didn't think about me as someone to pass anything along to. Most of them rarely, if ever, talked about their values. Benedict XVI, for example, has a lot to say about values but he is actually spectacularly reticent about his own values. He never tells you what they are. He doesn't even set out to show you what they are. You have to dig hard to find them (He is very different from the current pope in this regard.) He passes them along without meaning to. That was true of everyone on that list.
The first rule of values is, you do not talk about your values
The second rule is, you DO NOT talk about your values. The third rules of values is, they are not YOUR values for you cannot own values. (If you try to own your values, they end up owning you.) The fourth rule of values is that values are ways of doing things and NOT ways of becoming a certain kind of person. (Values aren't virtues.)
The last of those is counter-intuitive because it seems to be indisputably true that our values make us. A man's character is his destiny. That seems to open up a direct route. I think I could become the person I want to be (or the person that others would love) by adopting certain values. Someone might also think that raising their children properly is a matter of getting them to accept a set of values and, therefore, spend a lot of time discussing their values with them. As near as I can tell, that is almost universally the strategy that most "good liberal" parents now take. It was certainly a big part of my mother's approach to parenting.
A child who can repeat back value statements about tolerance, love and forgiveness has learned something. But have they learned very much? Is being able to talk this way useful? (In my early twenties, I could describe the values my mother wanted me to have perfectly and, up until she challenged me, I believed that I "had" those values. The reason she challenged me was that she had noticed that I increasingly did not live those values.)
Here's a question that might appear on a psychological test:
"I think it is important to be a tolerant and forgiving person."
- strongly agree
- somewhat agree
- neither agree nor disagree
- somewhat disagree
- strongly disagree
I put it to you that the most important words in that statement are "to be". I'd further put it that once you recognize that "to be" are the most important words, "neither agree nor disagree" is the only rational choice. Anything else is narcissism.
All of the people who strongly influenced my values were like the man in the dog story I started with. They didn't have passing along their values as a goal. It mattered to me, and mattered a lot, that I agreed with their values but they never asked me to. They didn't tell me or try to show me what their values were. They just lived them. The amount of time I spent with them mattered relatively little. I didn't need to be with them at all for the impact of their values could be felt at second hand (most of what I learned from the fathers of my girlfriends came that way). What mattered was that those values were embodied in their behaviour in ways that led me to respect and trust them.
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