VALUATION AS A SOCIAL PROCESS
THE NATURE OF VALUATION—HUMAN-NATURE VALUES AND INSTITUTIONAL
VALUES—RELATION BETWEEN THE TWO—VALUES ARE PHASES OF AN ORGANIC
WHOLE—AN OBJECT MAY HAVE MANY KINDS OF VALUE—VALUATION MOSTLY
UNCONSCIOUS—DEFINITE VALUATION BY INSTITUTIONS
The idea of valuation, familiar to all of us in the buyings and sellings
of every-day life, and to students in its elaboration as the science of
political economy, has been extended beyond this field of tangible
exchanges until we hear discussion of values with reference to almost
any kind of human activity. Painters use the word in connection with
light and color, moralists in questions of conduct, and so on. Any man
or group of men, in any sphere of life, it appears, may be presumed to
act according to a scale of values.
This broad use of the term seems to rest on the feeling that the
judgment of worth is of much the same character, whether you apply it to
a choice between a dozen eggs and a pound of beef in the market-place,
or between shades of color or lines of conduct: it is a matter of
ascertaining how much the alternatives appeal to you.
In short, a system of values is a system of practical ideas or motives
to behavior, and the process of valuation by which we arrive at these
ideas is presumably that same process of social and mental competition,
selection and organization that we have all along been considering. Take
a simple example: suppose I wish to drive a nail and have no hammer by
me. I look at everything within reach with reference to its
hammer-value, that is, with reference to its power to meet the special
situation, and if the monkey-wrench promises more of this than any other
object available, its value rises, it fits the situation, it is
selected, it “works,” and becomes a more active factor in life. And it
is by analogous processes that men, nations, doctrines, what you will,
come to have various degrees and kinds of value.
It would seem that the essential things in the conception of value are
three: an organism, a situation, and an object. The organism is
necessary to give meaning to the idea; there must be worth _to_
something. It need not be a person; a group, an institution, a doctrine,
any organized form of life will do; and that it be conscious of the
values that motivate it is not at all essential. Anything which lives
and grows gives rise to a special system of values having reference to
that growth, and these values are real powers in life, whether persons
are aware of them or not; they are part of the character and tendency of
the organism. The growth of language, for example, or of forms of art,
is guided by valuations of which the people concerned in it commonly
know nothing. The idea might easily be extended to animal and plant
life, but I shall be content with some of its human applications.
The organism, whatever it may be, is the heart of the whole matter: we
are interested primarily in that because it is a system of life, _our_
system so long as we attend to it, and in the values because they
function in that life. The situation is the immediate occasion for
action, in view of which the organism integrates the various values
working within it (as a man does when he “makes up his mind”) and meets
the situation by an act of selection, which is a step in its own growth,
leading on to new values and new situations. Valuation is only another
name for tentative organic process.
The various classifications of value are based in one way or another on
that of the objects, organisms, or situations which the general idea of
value involves. Thus, taking the point of view of the object, we speak
of grain-values, stock-values, the values of books, of pictures, of
doctrines, of men. Evidently, however, these are indeterminate unless we
bring in the organism and the situation to define them. A book has
various kinds of value, as literary and pecuniary, and these again may
be different for different persons or groups.
As regards the forms of human life to which values are to be referred,
it seems to me of primary importance to make a distinction which I will
call that between human-nature values and institutional values.
The first are those which may be traced without great difficulty to
phases of universal human nature. The organism for which they have
weight is simply man in those comparatively permanent aspects which we
are accustomed to speak of as human nature, and to contrast with the
shifting institutions that are built upon it. The objects possessing
these values differ greatly from age to age, but the tests which are
applied to them are fundamentally much the same, because the organism
from which they spring is much the same. A bright color, a harmonious
sound, have a worth for all men, and we may also reckon the more
universal forms of beauty, those which men of any age and culture may
appreciate through merely becoming familiar with them, as human-nature
values.
Values of this kind are as various as human nature itself and may be
differentiated and classified in a hundred ways. There are some in which
particular senses are the conspicuous factors, as auditory and gustatory
values. Others spring from the social sentiments, like the values of
social self-feeling which underlie conformity, and those of love, fear,
ambition, honor, and loyalty. Of much the same sort are the more
universal religious and moral values, which, however, are usually
entangled with institutional values of a more transient and special
character. The same may be said of scientific, philosophical and ethical
values, and lasting achievement in any of these fields depends mainly on
the creation of values which are such for human nature, and not merely
for some transient institutional point of view.
The second sort of values are those which must be ascribed to an
institutional system of some sort. Human nature enters into them but is
so transformed in its operation by the system that we regard the latter
as their source, and are justified in doing so by the fact that social
organisms have a growth and values that cannot, practically, be
explained from the standpoint of general human nature. The distinction
is obvious enough if we take a clear instance of it, like the
distinction between religious and ecclesiastical values. Such general
traits of religious psychology as are treated in William James’s
Varieties of Religious Experience, give rise to values that we may call
values of human nature; the values established in the Roman Catholic
Church are a very different matter, though human nature certainly enters
into them. In the same way there are special values for every sort of
institutional development—legal values, political values, military
values, university values, and so on. All technical values come under
this head. Thus in every art there are not only human-nature values in
the shape of phases of beauty open to men at large, but technical
values, springing from the special history and methods of the art, which
only the expert can appreciate.
This distinction, as I have remarked, rests upon the fact that there are
forms of social life having a distinct organic growth, involving
distinct needs and values, which cannot be understood by direct
reference to universal human nature and the conditions that immediately
influence it. I am aware that it may be difficult to make in particular
cases. It resembles most psychological distinctions in offering no sharp
dividing-line, being simply a question of the amount and definiteness of
social tradition and structure involved. All human values are more or
less mediated by special social conditions: they might, perhaps, be
arranged in a scale as to the degree in which they are so mediated;
some, like the taste for salt, hardly at all; others, like the taste for
poetry, a great deal. In dealing with the latter kind we come to a point
on the scale where the social antecedents take on such definite form and
development as to constitute a distinct organism, which must be studied
as such before we can understand the value situation. In moral values,
for example, there are some, like those of loyalty, kindness, and
courage, which spring quite directly from human-nature; others, like the
obligation to go to church on Sunday, are evidently institutional.
I need hardly add that human and institutional values often conflict, or
that reform consists largely in readjusting them to each other. Nor need
I discuss in detail the familiar process by which human-nature values,
seeking realization through a complex social system, are led to take on
organization and an institutional character, which carries them far away
from human nature and in time calls for a reassertion of the latter,
through the initiative of individuals and small groups. Any one may see
such cycles in the history of the Christian church, or of any other
institution he may prefer to study.
The various human-nature and institutional values differ among
themselves as the phases of the human mind itself differ: that is,
however marked the differences, the values are after all expressions of
a common organic life. There is no clean-cut separation among them and
at times they merge indistinguishably one into another. An organic
mental-social life has for one of its phases an organic system of
values. For example, the æsthetic and moral values may seem quite
unconnected, as in the case of a man with a “fair outside” but a bad
character, and yet we feel that there is something beautiful about
perfect goodness and something good about perfect beauty. It is agreed,
I believe, that the best literature and art are moral, not, perhaps, by
intention, but because the two kinds of value are related and tend to
coincide in their completeness. Alongside of these we may put
truth-value, and say of the three that they are phases of the highest
form of human motive which often become indistinguishable.
The institutional values are also parts of this organic whole, and merge
into the human-nature values, as I have suggested, so that it may be
hard to distinguish between them. An institution, however, seldom or
never corresponds so closely to a phase of human nature that the
institutional values and the immediately human values on the whole
coincide. An idea, in becoming institutional, adapts itself to the whole
traditional structure of society, taking the past upon its shoulders,
and loses much of the breadth and spontaneity of our more immediate
life. There are no institutions that express adequately the inner need
for beauty, truth, righteousness, and religion as human nature requires
them at a given time: no church, for example, ever was or can be wholly
Christian.
Because of this organic character, values vary with the time, the group,
and the special situation. Every nation or epoch has its more or less
peculiar value system, made up of related parts; any one can see that
the system of the Middle Ages was very different from ours. Values are a
part of the _ethos_, the _mores_, or whatever you choose to call the
collective state of mind.[63] Each individual, also, has a system of
values of his own which is a differentiated member of the system of the
group. And these various group and individual aspects hang together in
such a way that no one aspect can be explained except by reference to
the whole out of which it grows. You can hardly understand how a man
feels about religion, for example, unless you understand also how he
feels about his industrial position and about other matters in which he
is deeply concerned; you must, so far as may be, grasp his life as a
whole. And you will hardly do this unless you grasp also the social
medium in which he lives. Any searching study of any sort of values must
be the study of an organic social life.
It is apparent that the same object may have many kinds of value,
perhaps all of those that I have mentioned. It is conceivable that man
may turn all phases of his life toward an object and appraise it
differently for each phase. Consider, for instance, an animal like the
ox, of immemorial interest to the human race. It may be regarded as
beautiful or ugly, may arouse the various emotions, as love, fear, or
anger, may give rise to moral and philosophical questions, may be the
object of religious feeling, as in India, and may have a value for the
senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. It has also,
especially among the pastoral peoples, notable institutional values;
plays a large part in law, ceremony, and worship, and, in our own
tradition, has an eponymous relation to pecuniary institutions.[64]
The process that generates value is mental but not ordinarily conscious;
it works by suggestion, influence, and the competition and survival of
ideas; but all this is constantly going on in and through us without our
knowing it. I may be wholly unaware of the genesis or even the existence
of values which live in my mind and guide my daily course; indeed this
is rather the rule than the exception. The common phrase, “I have come
to feel differently about it,” expresses well enough the way in which
values usually change. The psychology of the matter is intricate,
involving the influence of repetition, of subtle associations of ideas,
of the prestige of personalities, giving weight to their example, and
the like; but of all this we commonly know nothing. The idea of
punishment after death, for example, has been fading for a generation
past; its value for conduct has mostly gone; yet few have been aware of
its passing and fewer still can tell how this has come about. This trait
of the growth of values is of course well understood in the art of
advertising, which aims, first of all, to give an idea weight in the
subconscious processes, to familiarize it by repetition, to accredit it
by pleasing or imposing associations, to insinuate it somehow into the
current of thought without giving choice a chance to pass upon it at
all.
If the simpler phases of valuation, those that relate to the personal
aims of the individual, are usually subconscious, much more is this true
of the larger phases which relate to the development of complex
impersonal wholes. It is quite true that there are “great social values
whose motivating power directs the activities of nations, of great
industries, of literary and artistic ‘schools,’ of churches and other
social organizations, as well as the daily lives of every man and
woman—impelling them in paths which no individual man foresaw or
purposed.”[65]
The institutions, we may note in this connection, usually have rather
definite and precise methods for the appraisal of values in accordance
with their own organic needs. In the state, for example, we have
elaborate methods of electing or appointing persons, as well as
legislative, judicial, and scientific authorities for passing upon
ideas. The church has its tests of membership, its creeds, scriptures,
sacraments, penances, hierarchy of saints and dignitaries, and the like,
all of which serve as standards of value. The army has an analogous
system. On the institutional side of art we have exhibitions with
medals, prize competitions, election to academies and the verdict of
trained critics: in science much the same, with more emphasis on titles
and academic chairs. You will find something of the same sort in every
well-organized traditional structure. We have it in the universities,
not only in the official working of the institution, but in the
fraternities, athletic associations, and the like.
It is also noteworthy that institutional valuation is nearly always the
function of a special class. This is obviously the case with the
institutions mentioned, and it is equally true, though perhaps less
obviously, with pecuniary valuation.