Thoughts on the Question of Value
Emanuel Pastreich
October 16, 2013
I am sure that you have noticed the disturbing trend in our world to evaluate just about everything in a materialist manner and to take pleasure only from material objects. Oddly, we find highly educated people, people who have read literature and philosophy, wasting their time talking about how expensive food they have eaten was or how big the car that they drive is. This trend is getting worse, especially as the previous generation that knew something of frugality is dying off. Some of our friends want to calculate the value of the entire world in monetary terms. How much the dinner cost? How much did you pay for the house?
The consequences of such thinking based entirely on a monetary equation, this object has this much value, are profound. Not only is food, housing and daily experience evaluated in monetary terms (which is to say numerical terms), but in that process people also are assigned monetary values. There is a powerful trend to determine how important people are to us in terms of how much money they possess, or how much money or power they control through organizations. We favor the uncle who can pay for an expensive meal or drive a Lexus over the uncle who is a kind and thoughtful man. I have frequently had the experience that someone initially is very warm to me when they learn I am from Yale, but then cool off when they learn that I am a poor professor and not of the proper class that they assumed.
We are bothered by this constant need to evaluate everything in terms of its monetary value. Although we make the calculations of “value” naturally, somehow that behavior just seems wrong to us in some fuzzy ethical manner. But the habits are so deeply engrained in our society. For example, art is given a value, a price, and that price then determines how the art is appreciated. A beautiful hand-woven dress made by an old woman in the mountains has limited monetary value, but a designer dress sold at a boutique in downtown Shanghai will be extremely expensive—and most people will readily accept that norm. If you compared the two dresses carefully, it would not be clear that the designer dress was in any means superior to the hand-woven dress. But the price comes first, before any aesthetic appreciation. Most people would show great appreciation for the designer dress regardless of its actual quality—not to do so would seem abnormal.
Even those of us who denounce such thinking and who advocate a greater concern for the environment often find ourselves falling into exactly such a mode of thinking in daily life. It seems to be an inescapable part of our culture that impacts everything we do, if we are not reducing reality to dollar value, we are measuring it in meters or kilograms. Even if we do not want to assess the world based on monetary value, everyone else around us is doing so and we feel as if we have no choice. Once we hear that a dress cost $2,000, the dress simply looks different for us.
But it is more than just social pressure that drives us into this sort of monetary thinking. There is something else out there that drives us to fall back on monetary assessments, a force that draws us to these primitive price categories for assessing the value of our possessions and of our experiences.
Part of the problem can again be traced back to the end of the Cold War and the unexpected impact it has had on every aspect of our lives. Previously, there were large parts of our economy, of our society, that were government owned and did not belong to anyone. That was true in the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China and in Eastern Europe, but it was also true in places like the United States in which there was a strong demand from the public to maintain public institutions and lands.
There was a strong sense of the nation and the common interest in the United States, for example, that derived in part from a need to counter the constant attacks from the Soviet Union that suggested that workers were terribly exploited in capitalist nations. Although the United States constantly criticized the Soviet Union for lacking freedom, the United States still had to show itself to be committed to supporting some level of
