Political values and private values

Politics is usually about interests, about which group is to get what they want. Politicians constantly appeal to values in their rhetoric (generalities like our values, traditional values, family values, working class values, national values, even “the values of ordinary working people”: or particular values like fairness, equality, social justice, freedom etc.) but it is rare that values actually play a part in political decision making. Usually politics is a more cynical business. Unfortunately that means that our public world, our society, is also cynical and largely value-free. Many politicians like to pretend that values are the difference between their side and their opponents (“We have sound values, they are opportunists”) but nearly always such rhetoric is an attempt to make the majority feel good about pursuing their own interests, for example by rolling out or rolling back the power of the State. Perhaps we should not be surprised when politicians (deniably) sponsor torture, indiscriminate bombing or other acts which in private life would see them shamed and locked up, because values have all but been driven from the public arena.

The lack of values in real politics is nothing new. It was well known in principle and ancient in practice long before Machiavelli dared to put it in writing in pre-Reformation Florence. What was shocking about Machiavelli was that he suggested cynical opportunism in politics in a time and place when Christian values were held up as a model for both private and public morality. There was at least a pretence that the same values were shared and applied at every level and that departures from these values were aberrations and exceptions. Machiavelli, writing to curry favour with princely tyrants, let the cat out of the bag: politics was about power and interests, not values at all.

But is this really what we want? Perhaps bad behaviour is to be expected of tyrants but why should we condone such a lack of public values when we have democratic forms of government? Why do we not expect the upholding of values to be at the heart of politics? In private life of course we often put our own interests and desires above our values, even if we sometimes feel a little ashamed of so doing. But when it comes to public life, to creating the kind of society and indeed the kind of world we want to live in, why do we allow an even lower standard to apply?

One of the problems with public or political values is that we no longer have a clear shared base of private values. Our values are drawn from so many different sources that, although we have bits and pieces in common, there is no shared heart we all understand and can appeal to. A related problem is that we do not even know how to discuss and debate ethical questions. Groups within society may hold strong views about certain questions of value, but they cannot persuade the rest unless, for example, the rest share their religious beliefs or their ideology. Groups can’t really talk to each other (as opposed to shouting at each other) because they are making different assumptions and even using different concepts, different language. However, if there is no commonly accepted way of discussing ethical questions because discussion stops at the boundaries of belief or culture, then in practice society has no values. There is thus a real danger that a free, pluralist society becomes an amoral society, a society without values.

We all recognise that democratic arrangements do not settle ethical questions. No one says, on being outvoted, “Ah, now I see that I was wrong about this issue!” We come to political compromises or we just accept that a vote has gone against us but we can’t find the answers to ethical questions this way. If people share values (meaning they already agree at some level of principles) it’s easy, but if they don’t it just doesn't work. That of course is why it is so difficult to impose democracy on communities fundamentally divided about values. Genuine democracy, something that goes beyond mere head counting and doesn’t leave the minority feeling alienated and aggrieved every time, assumes that questions about values can be discussed. But discussion about values rarely happens now in any society: the best we get even from those who care about values is to label those who disagree as bad or evil or sinful.

The difficulty of taking collective ethical decisions is not, let us be clear, a criticism of democracy. Whatever the form of government, what is done in the public sphere rests on individual choices. In the many forms of modern tyranny (whether it be one-party rule, military dictatorship or theocracy) decisions depend on the particular interests, prejudices and perhaps principles of the tyrant(s). In democracy, people are likely to choose as their rulers those who promise to promote their interests or those whose values seem to approximate theirs. If values are to play a significant role it must happen at the level of the individual. We may suspect that politicians in general will only respect certain values if they believe that the people respect them and thus that to betray those values will end their power. Be that as it may, if there are to be such things as political or social values they have to rest on private values. If we are not clear about our values then no system of government will see them realised. If our personal values are incoherent or arbitrary what is the basis even of our personal decisions, the decisions we make every day and which shape the kind of lives we lead and the kind of people we are? There isn’t one. So how can our collective decisions be any better?

We pay lip service to the idea of values and ethical standards both in our private lives and in politics. We believe that values both shape our individual lives and hold society together. And yet we no longer have a coherent idea about what values are and where they come from. There is a void where our values should be. Or if you prefer a different metaphor, the house of values is built on sand. Quicksand.