Value Systems

 There is a scene in Jack London's memoir of vagabondage, The Road, in which he recalls a time he was cadging money from a businessman. The latter was willing to offer him work tossing bricks, but only at the price of having to listen to one of his sermons. He proceeded to lecture London on how he too could one day be prosperous and successful, if only he and the other tramps would apply the same bourgeois virtues the businessman embodied: prudence, diligence, temperance, and the rest.

London recalls that he listened to this for a good while, then couldn't refrain from pointing out a logical flaw in the businessman's advice. "[I]f we all became like you," he said, "[...] there'd be nobody to toss bricks for you." This fair point promptly sent the businessman into a rage. "Get out of here, you ungrateful whelp!" he roared.

The author in his satirical vein had touched a nerve, precisely because what he said was in large part true. The businessman didn't really want everyone to achieve the same level of success and prosperity as himself, because then no one would left to work in his operations, let alone be condescended to. "Pity would be no more/ If we did not make somebody poor," as Blake once put it; and, more to the point, neither would sermons and lectures on the bourgeois virtues.

What the businessman really wanted, rather than emulation, was for people to acknowledge their inferiority according to his own scale of values. He wanted his humble supplicants to admit that his virtues were the correct and proper ones, that the system of rewards and punishments that advantaged them was only a fair recognition of merit, and that their own poverty was the just and fitting punishment for having failed to apply the same principles to their conduct. 

What the businessman couldn't stand—and what enraged him in London's response—was that someone might posit an entirely different system of values: one according to which they were not inferior for being poor, they were not flawed and immoral for being in the position of the supplicant. He believed in a linearly-ranked hierarchy in which the only possible escape should be up the ladder, and that only for a chosen few. The thought that London and people like him might be effecting a sideways escape was intolerable to him. 

I was reminded of all this the other day while taking my car into the dealership. Now, you may have noticed that there are a few areas of public life in which people still take it upon themselves—with the best of intentions, but still wholly against your will—to entertain you. The first time I donated plasma, for instance, I made the horrible mistake of failing to bring an audiobook to listen to while my blood was being drawn. I was therefore forced to watch a video tablet that blared daytime broadcast TV at me for the hours it took to complete the operation. 

Likewise, a growing number of gas stations have started to assault you with thirty-second advertisements at the very same time you are trying to navigate the payment screen. It is as if they were deliberately trying to preclude you from finishing even the humble mental operations it takes to extract a credit card from one's wallet, swipe it, navigate the menu options, and so on. 

And, to my dismay, dealership waiting rooms likewise generally insist upon leaving a TV running at full volume, whether you wish it or not. Thus, the pleasant morning I had imagined for myself, in which I would quietly read a book while the work on my car was being done, proved impossible. I would try to concentrate on a paragraph, but the voices on the TV would invariably find some way to invade my awareness. 

Looking away or trying not to focus on the screen was not an option. I'll say this for daytime television: its makers may not have figured out how to create something you actually want to see; but they do know how to assail you with enough images, sounds, and advertisements pandering to your deepest weaknesses and insecurities that you can't possibly be in its presence and not pay attention. 

This mid-morning line-up seemed a hell specially prepared with me in mind. First, there was some sort of quiz show involving couples. "How did you meet your spouse?" the host asks. A braying jackass of a man replies, "I thought she was the hottest member of my team at work, so I looked her up online." "That could border on stalking," said the host. "It's a fine line!" says the jackass. Dear God! I thought with horror. So... this is what people are like out there in the TV world? After all we've been through as a society, the most baseline kind of feminist consciousness has still not penetrated? 

Then there was a segment featuring a couple who had started a podcast about... being a couple. Then, as if this weren't enough, we were treated to a talk show in which the guest was a couples therapist/relationship counselor. He was there to talk about how to make your intimate partnership succeed (guess what? the secret advice turns out to be indistinguishable from that which is heard on every episode of The Bachelor: "open up," "be vulnerable"). 

What bothered me about all this wasn't just that it was forcing me to contemplate problems and concerns alien to my life; it was that there was running throughout these conversations a weird undercurrent of aggression and hostility toward all those who weren't interested in the same subjects, who didn't share the same aspiration to be part of a couple.

The relationship therapist in the segment began by positing a human universal: "we all need intimacy," he said—for which in this context read: romantic intimacy; romantic partnership. But both he and the host interviewing him are clearly aware that in fact, not everyone experiences this same need, at least not consciously; there are people out there who claim this need is not universal; and so they immediately felt the need to go on the attack. "I tell people this all the time," the host said. "Maybe not everyone needs to get married," she was willing to grant, "but you know that you want someone to go to the movies with sometime..."

Okay, sure, I thought, it was fun seeing Dune in IMAX with a friend. 

"And you know you want someone to hold your hand..."

Error, negative. That's where she lost me. I do not in fact want that. 

And what's weird is that she plainly refused to believe me, or people like me, on this point. She felt compelled before all the world to assert that I do want it, no matter how much I protest otherwise. She seemed to sense that people like me were out there listening, in the great unwilling TV audience of innocent members of the public stranded in doctor's waiting rooms and state vehicle inspection stations and car service centers, and she felt the need to insist on this point for our special benefit: You know that you want this, she said. Even if you say or think you don't. How do I know you want it? It's a universal fact. 

She was like Mrs. Ramsay, the ultimate Victorian matron, in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, declaring with insufferable complacency and certainty that "an unmarried woman [...] has missed the best of life." And I, in turn, was like Lily Briscoe, "gathering a desperate courage [to] urge her own exemption from the universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself; she was not made for that[.]" To which pleas the settled convictions of Victorian matriarchs and daytime broadcast TV hosts can only ever reply that there is no exemption from the "universal law." All must be married or at least "partnered," or else face the most dreadful consequences. 

Why should this be their reaction? Why do the happily partnered have it out for the happily single? Why do they resent us? Do they not already have all the weight of settled tradition and social convention on their side? What do they have to fear from us, in our weakness? What is it about us that threatens and alarms them? I can only conclude that what is happening here is something like the reaction that London provoked by his response to the businessman. 

Think about the sequence of programs I was forced to watch. First, a quiz show with couples; then, a podcast about being successful as a couple; finally, a talk show with advice about how to succeed as a couple. Plainly, I was in the presence of an alien system of values; one according to which success in life is measured primarily if not exclusively by the extent to which one finds and maintains a settled romantic partnership. 

Believers in such a system can tolerate the existence of single people; indeed, it even needs singles to exist, just as the businessman needs some poor and desperate laborers to toss his bricks. For, if everyone were already married, then what good would their superiority according to the couples-centric value system be? 

No, singles can exist; but we must show that we recognize our inferiority according to the system of values. We must genuflect before the same idols. We have to be apologetic and shamefaced and say we "just haven't found the one." We have to make constant efforts to better our lot through meeting a monthly quota of "dates." And if we aren't meeting this quota, we are supposed to at least have the decency to feel bad about it. "I know I should get out more." "I really mean to date more, one of these days." 

Above all, we are supposed to invest lots of our income in relationship gurus and tune in for daytime talk shows and podcasts full of couples' advice, in an effort to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. 

What the system of values fears most of all is the possibility of someone instead making a horizontal escape. It can tolerate the idea that some people are single unwillingly, because they have failed to live up to the couple-centric value-system. What the system cannot allow is for someone to simply opt out. 

Or rather, the system doesn't mind if some people opt out, so long as they are duly punished for it. Indeed, it is even beneficial for the maintenance of the system if some of the opt-outs can be made into a salutary example—a warning to others not to dare the horizontal exit. 

In one scene of Jean-Paul Sartre's novel Nausea, the unmarried narrator is wandering through a provincial art collection, and he discovers a painting titled "The Bachelor's Death." It depicts a man forsaken by all his loved ones and left in the company of only a vicious few hangers-on, pawing and squabbling over his last possessions. As Sartre's narrator observes in contemplation of the image: 

"By a harsh and well-deserved punishment, no one had come to his bedside to close his eyes. This painting gave me a last warning: there was still time, I could retrace my steps. But if I were to turn a deaf ear, I had been forewarned[.]" As the same narrator remarks earlier in the book, the bourgeois demand the sort of penalty that befalls the painting's bachelor for all who defy their system of values. They like to relate anecdotes that show the terrible sufferings that await any who stray from the path. "Their best stories are about the rash and the original, who were chastised," Sartre writes. (Alexander translation).

What the daytime broadcast TV system of values cannot tolerate therefore is not so much that someone might opt out of the system, but that they might do so and emerge from it unscathed. It cannot accept that someone might never pursue a romantic partnership at all, might in fact have no interest in such a thing, and nonetheless go through life with a normal career, an unsullied reputation, close family and friends, and all the other blessings of life that were supposed to be denied them as punishment for their choice (even though this benign fate is precisely what the statistical evidence suggests most commonly befalls the long-term single). 

In one of his poems, A.E. Housman—a gay man who lived in a time when many had little choice but to remain mostly closeted and (officially, at least) single—wrote:

...] let God and man decree
Laws for themselves and not for me;
And if my ways are not as theirs
Let them mind their own affairs. [...]
But no, they will not; they must still
Wrest their neighbor to their will,
And make me dance as they desire
With jail and gallows and hell-fire.

It seems to me he is gesturing toward the fundamental mystery we have been considering in this post. Why is it so hard for people to live and let live? Why is it not enough for Jack London's businessman to be rich? Why must be demand that the poor grovel and confess their sins before him too? Why is it not enough for people on TV to be content with their own romantic relationships? Why must they insist that I and everyone else desire the same thing, or else be punished horribly with loneliness and despair? 

I believe we have our answer. They fear that their own success according to their chosen system of values is cheapened if someone finds a way to be happy outside of it. The possibility that there might be salvation outside the church, that someone might decide not to scramble with all the others up the same ladder, but instead step off it—imagine! off the ladder! into space! into the abyss!—and not only do so, but live to tell about it—this calls into question whether their way really was the only way after all, or whether—dread possibility!—the world is in fact a more complex place, with a greater plurality of possible ways of living, than they had always believed. 

They want us singles to exist, but only so that we can toss bricks for their enterprises, confessing our sins and inferiority all the time. We can live, but only on sufferance, so long as we pay homage at their temples. 

But we do not in fact have to do so. We can go and seek after other gods. And we will find them. For the world was in fact not made to be the preserve of only one sort of person and one system of values; it is rather a place where the potential goods of human life are too many for any one person to know and consummate in their entirety—and therefore one in which we have no choice but to realize those distinct values which are nearest and best suited to ourselves.