THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF HUMAN VALUES: FOUNDATIONS, CRISIS, AND RESTORATION

Abstract

"Learn manners, for these will conceal the shortcomings of your lineage." — attributed to Hazrat Ali (a.s.)

Values may be defined as the principles that a society or community is obliged to uphold, to practise consistently, and to apply without discrimination among its members. Values hold, for a society, something like the significance that the soul holds for a living body: just as no organism can meaningfully exist without an animating soul, no society can achieve genuine vibrancy or endurance without a shared and impartially applied system of values. History records numerous instances in which societies, ancient and modern alike, declined once their commitment to shared values weakened or was applied selectively rather than universally; a society that upholds values only partially, or only for some of its members, is a society already in decline. Values might therefore be regarded as a form of social capital, as indispensable to a community's flourishing as physical or financial capital is to an economy. The contemporary world faces a pronounced and prolonged ethical crisis, whose principal cause lies in the manipulation and reinterpretation of values to serve elite interests, at the expense of populations already marginalised. Human conduct leaves a substantial cumulative imprint on the collective fabric of a society's values; inflation, for instance, has become a defining problem of the contemporary world, deepening deprivation among the poor while the wealthy continue to prosper largely undisturbed. It is precisely here — in the gap between privilege and deprivation — that values assume their most urgent social function: a society in which the privileged remain genuinely committed to shared human values, and act to assist the deprived, is able to preserve its coherence and its self-respect. This paper examines the ways in which selective or partial commitment to values aggravates social crisis, explores the mechanisms through which a society might approximate something like a genuinely humane order, and argues that a sustainable, cohesive society ultimately depends on the equal and impartial exercise of human values.