Now concerning food offered to idols: we know that “all of us possess knowledge.” This “knowledge” puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. —1 Corinthians 8
Values are ephemeral, anastomosing idols.
Men struggle to practice virtue, succeeding, failing and improving, but can easily “hold” values at no such personal cost. The confidence-man values honesty and innocence in his marked victim. One can value art, literature, music with the most selfish intents yet practice no virtue.
Values are by definition performative claims, espousal, therefore prideful, a conceit, a vanity. What good is a “value” unless one can tell somebody? Values are many times removed from first principles and are rarely hindered by constraints.
Values are held to account in Allen Bloom’s, The Closing of the American Mind. He writes:
Value relativism can be taken to be a great release from the perpetual tyranny of good and evil, with their cargo of shame and guilt and the endless efforts that the pursuit of the one and the avoidance of the other enjoin.
…One need not feel bad about or unconformable with oneself when just a little value adjustment is necessary. And this longing to shuck off constraints and have one peaceful, happy world is the first of the affinities between our real American world and that of German philosophy…
Values fail a man, called White, in The Sunset Limited (based on a Cormac McCarthy play). I must warn all of you not inoculated against McCarthy’s powerful dialogue: this is troubling stuff. Put on the armor of the Lord if you watch the movie.
The film starts in a grim apartment. A sad looking man, White, sits. A grim Schopenhauerian academic with Chomsky’s snark and Richard Dawkins’ disdain.
Across the table from him is his Christian savior, Black, who has just prevented White from jumping in front of a train. Black is a reformed convict and Christian dedicated to saving souls where he can. Or is he an angel? The movie gives us reason to think he may be from its beginning to its end.
During the play, Black calls White “honey” which eventually gets on White’s nerves. “That is just the South talking,” Black replies… as though he long ago once floated down the Mississippi on a raft.
But White is certainly no Huck Finn and recoils when Black calls himself a much more blasphemous word, a word so foul to white liberals that its utterance even in jest makes them blanch.
Bloom writes:
“Thus our use of the value language leads us in two opposite directions — to follow the line of the least resistance, and to adopt strong poses and fanatic resolutions.”
Eventually White gets around to speaking the truth of his mind which is a distillation of all the dark, Germanic spirits imported from black forests. “Western civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys of Dachau...”
Here Cormac McCarthy did not mean that the Holocaust proved Western Civilization was always a tyranny or hypocrisy. No.
What he meant was the west’s Weg der Intellektuellen, the path worn by Rousseau-Comte-Schopenhauer-Nietzsche, led inevitably up that chimney, thus the word “finally” as in “they finally did it.” They finally followed their own trail to its inevitable end.
Once on that dark path one can only go one direction, no side-tracks, into the fire. Enlightenment unleashed, unconstrained by the moral fence of faith, leads men to judge the VALUE of their fellows: their utility, their purpose, their cost and their worth.
Again Bloom:
“Values are not discovered by reason, and it is fruitless to seek them, to find the truth or the good life. The quest begun by Odysseus and continued over three millennia has come to an end with the observation that there is nothing to seek.”
The cynical character White, explains to Black that in all religions there exist myriad paths, all wrong, and only one path, a narrow one, to righteousness. White believes in the “primacy of the intellect.” White’s god is his own mind. His values are his idols, to which he sacrifices so much, perhaps expecting them to one day grant him a form of omniscience.
White thinks as all atheists do, as I did, that hope is a ridiculous notion and there is no salvation because none is needed. If there is no hope of salvation, then there is no need for redemption. If no redemption is needed, then the virtue of humility is dead.
But White is wrong. His is the narrow path, an easy one to follow despite the fading light. White’s lonely path, lined with the idols of his values, leads him only to despair. After a lifetime of walking on this thin trail, he finds himself at its end, with a broken spirit and lusting for death. No family, no friends, no hope, his values long departed.
McCarthy’s play is full of ironies and quiet metaphor. White uses “God” as an epithet several times. While begging Black to let him go, he presses his hands in prayer. He prays for death.
White’s idols, his values, took his life as an offering. All his ephemeral entertainments, his many readings, his deep study, his erudition, gave him nothing in the end. As White finally runs away to smash himself against the Sunset Limited, Black asks God why He did not give him, Black, the same eloquence of speech as White had. “Why did you send me down here if you weren’t going to give me the words?”
Even angels do not know God’s purpose.