Which currencies count?
One answer that is that any Republic, any relationship, is held up (at least in part) by the currencies it trades in.
By “currencies” we mean not just monetary currencies, like dollars and euros, but all the things that parties to a bargain widely decide have value. Such things are more commonly called “virtues” or “norms”, but it can be helpful to think of these things as currencies instead, because — like money currencies — they only have value when we buy into them. But when we talk about them as norms or virtues, sometimes people mistake them to be hegemonic rules of behavior: restrictions imposed upon us without our approval that therefore limit our freedom.
When certain pundits and politicians deride “political correctness” (e.g., saying Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas), they’re invoking this latter way of thinking, so that audiences chafe at the constraint. The pushback is to tell audiences, “No, no, no — inclusive speech is a political currency, and it has as much value in your pocket as it does in mine. Unless we all stop using it, in which case we’re both poorer.”
In ancient Rome, one of the major currencies in use was civic honor. If you were a good Roman citizen, you accrued civic honors, and you could trade that political currency in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of public situations, to your benefit. In the book , the historian Ed Watts traces how that political currency became devalued. A virtue-rich political culture in which citizens had the habit of asking “Why?” before performing any public action eroded into a virtue-poor, permissive culture that had a habit of asking “Why not?”
As it turned out: civic honor was a vital currency that helped hold that particular society — the Roman Empire — together. Oops.
I suspect that the list of vital currencies is specific to each society. Say there’s a marriage whose main currency is honesty. If one partner cheats on the other but then admits it, maybe that crisis will ultimately lead to some kind of renewal to the couple’s original bargain. If instead fidelity is the primary currency they trade in, then maybe their crisis ends in collapse because one party has stopped in it.
Maybe one way to judge whether we, too, are headed for collapse or whether we instead can trust that we are somehow on a path of renewal is to take a good look at our currencies in use. We can try to determine which ones matter most to our social bargain, and ask: are those currencies being devalued, or revalued, or holding their value steady, as a result of this upheaval?
Published at Sun, 27 Jan 2019 03:05:26 +0000
