What Are American Values.docx

1、What Are American ValuesWhat Are American Values?For more than a decade, the name “Institute for American Values” has been primarily an albatross around our neck, signaling to some that we are right-wing nuts, and to others that we are watering down the meaning of virtue by using a namby-pamby, ever

2、ything-is-relative word such as “values.” So either way, we usually lose. But perhaps, in our ignorance, we were building better than we knew. For in the post-September 11th world, a serious discussion of American values is about as important as any discussion can be. These values largely incited th

3、e attack against us and were arguably the ultimate targets of the attack. The best of American values are also the organizing principles upon which we must fight back. Indeed, it seems crucially important, for both practical and principled reasons, to fight back only on the basis of core American va

4、lues. Seldom has the vocabulary of materialism - the assumption that material and especially economic interests are fundamental, whereas philosophical and especially religious ideas are essentially reflective and derivative - been more of an impediment to understanding human behavior. Few of us, I s

5、uppose, have much real knowledge of the inner lives and motivations of the people who attacked us, but based on their actions and public statements, it seems clear enough that they did not attack New York and Washington merely because of U.S. policy in the Middle East, U.S. ties to Israel, the econo

6、mics and politics of oil, the activities and influence of the U.S. military, or the U.S. role in the world economy. These are but some of the rough outgrowths, partial by-products, of something else. That something else, fundamentally, is our values, our shared ways of living.Let us be honest. For m

7、any people, including many Americans, some of these values are unattractive, especially in their pure form. Consumerism as a way of life. Crass commercialism. Rising secularism. Sexual libertinism. The notion of freedom as no rules. The notion of the individual as utterly sovereign, what John Rawls

8、calls a self-originating source of valid claims. Plus an enormous, money-making entertainment and communications apparatus that relentlessly glorifies many of these ideas and parachutes them, whether they are welcome or not, into nearly every corner of the globe. Just as it is obscene for terrorists

9、 to believe that people living in a society that is flirting with these values should be murdered en masse, it is naive for us to pretend that these norms carry little weight in our society, or that they are benign, or are irrelevant to how others view us. But core American values are different from

10、 these, and they are quite attractive, not only to Americans, but to people everywhere in the world. These more foundational values - the ideals that most define our way of life - were among the primary intended targets of our attackers on September 11th. At this institute, we wrote about these valu

11、es in a 1998 public appeal, A Call to Civil Society. Let us briefly consider four of them: First and foremost is the conviction that all persons possess transcendent human dignity, and that consequently each person must always be treated as an end, never as a means. The U.S. Founders, drawing upon t

12、he secular reasoning of the Enlightenment as well as upon the fundamental religious claim that all persons are created in the image of God, affirmed as “self-evident” the idea that all persons possess equal dignity. The clearest political expression and result of the belief in transcendent human dig

13、nity is democracy. Second, following closely from the first, is the conviction that universal truths (what the Founders called “laws of Nature and of Natures God”) exist and are accessible to all people. Third is the belief that, because our individual and collective access to truth is imperfect, mo

14、st disagreements about values call for civility, openness to other views, and reasonable argument in pursuit of truth. And fourth is freedom of conscience and freedom of religion - the twin freedoms which many people, from George Washington to todays finest historians, believe to be the foundation a

15、nd precondition of all individual freedoms. What is most striking about these values is that everyone can participate. Because they apply to all persons without distinction, they cannot be used to exclude anyone from recognition and respect based on the particularities of race, language, memory, or

16、religion. This is not ordinary in human affairs. For example, it makes little sense to talk of someone “becoming Japanese” or “becoming French,” since identity as Japanese or French is a status that is largely independent of choice. But anyone, at least in principle, can become an American. And in f

17、act, anyone does. Muslims do it every day. People come here from everywhere with a yearning to breathe free, and soon enough they are as American as anyone whose family came over on the Mayflower. We are the only country in the history of the world defining itself and organizing its affairs principa

18、lly on the basis of an abstract and universally invitational philosophy. No other fact about this country is more amazing. It is the thing about America that I am most proud of. The power of core American values is also the reason why millions of people who do not live in the United States identify

19、with them. In the days immediately following the September 11th attack, I got calls from several friends who live in other countries. They told me about the mood, the feeling, in those cities. The whole place is pretty much shut down, they said. People are very subdued and quiet. A bit stunned. Watc

20、hing everything on TV. Hardly any shopping or eating out. People are being very kind and considerate with one another. I said, thats exactly how it is in New York. Just why the mood in Toronto and Frankfurt and Melbourne would so closely resemble the mood in New York on September 12th and 13th is a

21、question that I cant fully answer, but here is one possible explanation: an attack on the symbols and citizens of the United States is widely viewed as a world-scale transgression, an attack on all people of good will. I recognize that those in the world who hate us, hate us for reasons that are mul

22、tiple and complex. But here is one proposition. This network of terrorists, along with their sponsors, financial supporters, and (sadly, many) cheerleaders in the Muslim world, emphatically deny the equal dignity of the human person, emphatically deny that truth is accessible to all, and unequivocal

23、ly reject the principle of freedom of conscience and of religious expression. Indeed, these rejections are the foundation of their current case against us, the philosophical rocks upon which they are building. Moreover, this repudiation of human universals in the name of religious particularism is o

24、penly violent, frequently involving state-sanctioned and religiously authorized calls not only to individual murder (as in the case, for example, of the novelist Salmon Rushdie, who wrote a novel mocking the Koran) but also to the mass murder of innocents.Perhaps these facts point to some of the way

25、s in which intellectuals and think tanks can contribute to our new, post-September 11th national mission. First and foremost is the need clearly to define, both morally and as matter of strategy, who is the “us” in this conflict and who is the “them.” This struggle is not between two societies, or t

26、wo coalitions of societies. It is not a struggle between Islam and the West. It is ultimately a contest between all people in the world who would embrace certain universal human values - lets call them transcendent human dignity, natural moral truth, civility, and freedom of conscience - and those w

27、ho, in the name of an exclusivist and highly repressive theology, would carry out or support mass murder in order to destroy those values.A related possible contribution from intellectuals is to help us as a society to clarify the ways in which fighting back effectively is consistent with, and in la

28、rge part dependent upon, fighting back in ways that embody rather than violate our basic values. For example, acts of violence against Arab Americans (there have been many since September 11th) and expressions of contempt toward Islam as a religion, or Islamic culture as a whole, make us weaker, not

29、 stronger, since such behavior flatly contradicts our reasons for prosecuting this campaign in the first place. Another example is our level of concern about civilian casualties in the armed conflicts that appear to be imminent. Since the indiscriminate murder of non-combatants is the primary method

30、 of our enemy, we are under a special obligation, it seems, both morally and as a matter of building world support for our mission, to wage war justly, confining our killing as strictly as possible to the terrorists and their immediate sponsors and collaborators. A third possible intellectual task i

31、s to engage and even seek out the battle of ideas about the nature and justness of our cause. We all need to know why we fight, and why we must fight. Moreover, notwithstanding our current sense of national unity, there are genuine disagreements among us on these matters. Some people, perhaps dispro

32、portionately represented among those who have never attended graduate school, may view the conflict as “American” versus Arab, or as the true religion of Christianity versus the false religion of Islam. Others, perhaps disproportionately represented among those who have attended graduate school, wil

33、l view both September 11th and our national response to it as yet more evidence that the United States is a bad country that does bad things in the world. The former is old-fashioned chauvinism, another version of ethnic and religious particularism; the latter is another expression of the anti-Americanism that is well-represented in U.S. higher educat