this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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So our values can change over time? How do we know which values to live up to?
What a strange question. Of course they can and they do, all the time.
Then what makes a value an American value?
Usually "country's values" are something the state or the population publicly (claim to) hold. Another perspective is what others view as their values.
It's not a clear cut thing at all. Americans often use terms like "freedom, liberty, democracy", stuff like that so I'm thinking from their pov those are their values.
Money.
Money is the only truly American value, everything else can be discussed about depending on how much money is involved.
I use the Declaration of Independence's preamble as a good baseline:
I see. So one of our values is given to us by a god. That's what we have to live up to? A god's values? That's American? I don't even believe in a god.
And why is the Declaration, something that happened before America existed as a nation, the thing to look to and not the Constitution?
You have a lot of catching up to do in school. The declaration and constitution heavily pull for Locke’s Treatises of Government and even older texts. It is not necessarily speaking to a god. In fact Locke brings up Spinoza in making this point. It is moreso that we exist in a universe that functions with certain parameters that are the baseline for our current situation. It’s very generalized. Basically, Locke’s philosophy, which was inherited by the framers of the declaration/ constitution/BoR was that civil society only exists as an agreement among people in order to better their quality of life. If it does not live up to these expectations, people can abandon government and go back to less civil times. Government helps prevent the breakdown of discourse with war being the ultimate opposite of civil society. Basically, the government exists by the people and for the people. The Declaration of Independence is an important founding document in US history for many different reasons, but one of them that is of importance is that is marks the foundation for a unified set of values that would be further codified in the follow-up documents. It was made very clear to all present that when the Constitution was drafted, it would have fast-follow amendments and then continue to in order to reflect the basic foundational values as society and technology progressed over time. This flexibility was intentionally added. The founding documents don’t speak much about the financial system. That came later.
I already asked this and insults won't change it- If values change, what makes them American values? If the founding documents are where we get our values from, then our values include believing black people aren't fully human.
That wasn’t an attempt at an insult. It was an observation that this stuff is usually covered in school. I should not make that assumption since I pulled my old textbooks many years later and finally got around to paying attention and reading through them thoroughly. From the get-go many of the founding fathers were very much against slavery and explained at length that that it totally did not satisfy the values laid out. Locke unfortunately didn’t fully rid his narrative of the institution either, claiming that certain situations called for it; mainly prison systems. The 3/5ths compromise happened at the constitutional convention because the south was too dependent upon their slave economy and actually was more afraid of what it would look like to set them free, realizing at the time that slaves were actually less economically viable than day laborers. You are correct that this is a contentious issue that should not have been a values at the time. Hence why there was a whole war fought in large part to abolish it. To solidify that these documents serve our needs and values as they evolve, there was literally an amendment post-war. Abolition. The values in the core documents are intentionally vague. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They are guideposts.
Jefferson was an athiest too, and he wrote that text.
The Declaration of Independence is a statement of values, a list of the ways the Crown had violated those values, and a list of the ways they felt were proper to address those violations, up to and including armed revolt.
The Constitution was an attempt to make a goverment based on those values. It was and is flawed, and should be changed to better reflect those values. That's why "What about the 3/5 Compromise?" isn't a gotcha. It's wrong, everyone knows it's wrong, schoolchildren are taught it's wrong by the government itself.
So it's an American value in a founding document unless we think it's wrong?
You're just being deliberately obtuse at this point
No I'm not. That's what you appear to be arguing. Either the founding documents are what we derive American values from, in which case we have to accept the bad things as well as the good things, or they are not, in which case we need a different way to define our values and what makes them American.
Then go back and reread my comment three up in this thread where I said that the DoI was a statement of values, and the Constitution is an attempt to make a goverment based on those values
Then, again, what makes a document written before America existed where we get American values from? They would not be American values if they were written before there was an America.
America didn't begin with the signing of the Constitution.
It absolutely did. Those states still operated as independent entities. They were united on the issue of declaring independence. Until the Constitution was signed, the states were not united as a nation.
Do you think Rome didn't exist before Caesar Augustus took power?
Did England spring from William of Normandy's forehead fully formed, clad in a wool coat and singing Rule Brittania?
Neither of those were multiple independent nations.
Neither were the 13 colonies
What's your point? It wasn't one country yet either. I mean that seems to support what I was saying...
Of course, they change overtime, do you want to respect the rules written in the Old Testament?
We educate the people to free thinking, and then we ask them to vote, that's how democracy is supposed to work. It's not perfect, and it has ups and downs, but we do have made some progress considering the past centuries.
No, I want to find out what American values we're supposed to live up to, not what Iron Age Jewish values we're supposed to live up to. What are they and what makes them American values?
I think they come from the European Humanism and Enlightenment, they are not American specific. Equality in rights and opportunities, social liberalism, economical liberalism, religious/origin tolerance, rationality, democracy.
What makes those our values? I don't see anything in our founding documents that reflect things like equality in rights and opportunities or social liberalism or economic liberalism.
If you want to acknowledge religious tolerance as described in the Bill of Rights, you also have to acknowledge the 3/5ths compromise.
As far as rationality or democracy, those have never been American values.
Aren't the 18th century human rights part of the early documents or referenced in it?
Sure. And those documents include saying black people are 3/5ths of a person. You can ignore that if you like, I guess.
I'm not ignoring that, I'm trying to answer.
Those documents are major improvements, but there are still not completely extracted from their historical context. For example, the French "Men Rights" willingly ignored the mention of women, despite feminists campaigning for it. Even if some of the influences were impressively progressive philosophers, they were all still pretty damn sexist, which was the norm at this time.
There's no absolute truth for values, people who think there is, are religious people. Best we can do is finding a consensus, the modern Human Rights is the best we have, I think.
Horseshit, you replied to my quote of the Declaration of Independence's preamble where it laid those out
The Declaration of Independence was, again, written before America was a country. It is not a legal document either. And it is religious. So you're saying American values come from a document that was written before there was an America, which expressly was not respecting all religious beliefs but at the same time saying those values can change. It sounds like American values are whatever you believe them to be.
There's some overlap between the two.
I think what makes something some country's values is either the government publicly adopting or enough of the population doing so. That doesn't mean anyone is actually living up to those values. Might not even be trying.
And then there's the question, their values from whose perspective? Americans might say thing X is their value but outsiders might look at them and conclude their value is Y. So there's no one set of coherent values that hold true from all perspectives.
So if Trump wins and the government adopts fascism, those are American values?
Assuming the population adopts those values, yes I'd say so. That's how those values change.