Where do our values come from, anyway?
Aug. 18th, 2006 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Whan and how did you arrive at your essential political, ethical and religious/spiritual philosophies? Have you always tended in certain directions and simply found the influences that brought you to where you are today, or did someone or something teach you/influence you/make you think about these positions and values?
Last night, I was talking with my partner
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So I was sort of wondering if perhaps, it was all of this stuff I'd read as a child that had started me on the path to becoming a left-wing radical with some very strong feelings about social justice, a pagan animist with some very strong feelings about the unity of all things, and all of those other values that underpin who I am.
But then my partner pointed out that I'd also read everything Heinlein had ever written when I was a child, and a lot of books by other people, some fairly right-wing, militaristic, crypto-fascist, etc., and hadn't been particularly influenced by them, other than to think about what was wrong in their worldviews, from my perspective, anyway.
Having a working mother back in the early 60s when this was not really common for a white middleclass child may have had something to do with my becoming a feminist at a very early age, but my mother was far from being a radical in political terms. I was raised until the age of about 12 or 13 without any continuing religious influences, except for one grandmother who kept trying to put me into Bible classes, but I didn't see her often at all. Then my mother converted to Judaism, but I was old enough that she simply asked my to keep kosher in the house out of respect for her, so while I studied the basic principles with her, I wasn't being pressured to adopt any particular faith, which was a good thing because by then I'd already developed the basic structure of my own beliefs, which were not at all like those of Judaism or Christianity.
So what was it? What made me initially susceptible to a left-wing/socialist and at the same distinctly spiritual and mystical set of perspectives on the world I live in? Sometimes it seems to me as though I have always felt this way, and that I uncovered my core beliefs rather than developed them, as I would read or hear one thing that said to me "yes, of course, that just feels right" and then read or hear something else and feel that there was something basically wrong about it - and that the rest was simply refining my feelings of "rightness" and "wrongness" with evidence and reason.
And how about you?
Re: Books and Values
Date: 2006-09-05 12:46 am (UTC)I strongly suspect you would have been a radical anyway. What you would not have had was the theory behind it and the support of knowing how many other people felt the same way you did.
I say that in part because you said you were a rebellious child anyway (though I don't quite see how you could have been that and not angry, but anyway) and in part because I think if I had read those different books you mention, however much I might have been influenced by the arguments those theorists used, in practice I would have hated the regimentation and conformity that goes along with the fundamentalist world-view.
Re: Books and Values
Date: 2006-09-07 10:18 pm (UTC)About the "rebellious but not angry" thing - maybe rebellious isn't the right word. I simply never really wanted to do what everyone else was doing, or to do what adults expected me to do. So when I could avoid doing those things, I did.
I had some flat-out confrontations with adults, mostly about things that seemed just plain stupid (why can't I wear pants to school, why can't a girl grow up to be an astronaut, why do I have to take a nap in kindergarten when I never do at home, why do I have to do X, Y, or Z?), but my recollection of myself isn't of being angry, more of being totally bewildered.
That still happens, by the way. The bewilderment at various kinds of human behaviour often comes first, and then I get angry once I figure out the nastiness that's often behind whatever I've been bewildered by.