Nexus State Theory

Values

As I was growing up, math was very important to me.  I spent a lot of time reading math books, like Martin Gardner’s puzzle books or like “Mathematics: A Human Endeavor” by Harold Jacobs.  These books made math fun and positive: Jacobs’ book, for instance, begins with a picture of a pool ball bouncing around on a pool table.  He asks: if the ball begins at the lower left corner and bounces around until it reaches another corner, at each bounce making a 45 degree angle with the wall, where will it end up?  These are the sorts of puzzles that most people don’t think of as “math” but that motivate many young mathematicians to like the topic.

Math was (and still is) one of my values; and values are the central forces in our lives.  But what values are we talking about, exactly?  The range of possible values is quite broad.  Here are a few categories of values.  This is certainly a partial list.

1. Academic and scholarly pursuits, such as math but also literature and poetry, history, physics, computer programming, philosophy, psychology, biology, and so on.
2. Moral values.  According to Jonathan Haidt (in The Righteous Mind), moral values come down to just five or six things: care, fairness, liberty, authority, loyalty, and purity.
3. Individual people.  We may value our friends, family, children, co-workers, neighbors, church community, classmates, and others.  I would also include pets in this category.
4. Beliefs.  We may value religious beliefs, political beliefs, and philosophical beliefs.
5. Hobbies.  Skiing, martial arts, knitting, star-gazing, and yoga can all be values.

It’s important to understand our values, because contemplating the contradictions and complexities in our values can help us to orient our lives.  In the case of the math value in particular, over my life I’ve had to grapple with questions like:

• I value human connection.  How do I reconcile math, which can be isolating at times, with my valuing human connection?  What do I do if others don’t share my love of math?
• I value truth.  Does a math-y way of thinking provide the sole path to truth?  In what ways is a math-y way of thinking helpful or limiting?  Can I understand human truths using math-y patterns of thinking?  (This book is, in a sense, an attempt to answer that question.)
• I value compassion.  Does math ever help us care for others, or is it cold and analytical?

These values are not just preferences; they are far deeper than that.  But what, exactly, defines a value as opposed to a mere preference?  And how do we know if a value is a good one?

The Two Core Functions of Values

Values have the following traits:

1. Values must feel positive to the person who holds them
   
2. Values must help—or at least not harm—the person and others

Is math a value, under these terms?  Certainly, math felt positive to my child-self.  It was deeply meaningful to sit with a piece of paper, write down some symbols, and play around with them until I came to an understanding.  I liked the idea that I could know or figure out something on my own.

Math also seemed to help me in concrete ways.  I gained the approval of adults and succeeded in school in part because of my focus on math.  I also got the sense that my society found math to be helpful; my teachers thought it was important.  But whether you think math is or isn’t helpful overall, it certainly seemed that by exploring diagrams of billiard tables, I wasn’t harming anyone.

The positive feeling (1), then, is undeniable and intuitive – one feels it or one doesn’t.  The helpfulness condition (2) is much, much more complex to ascertain.  Is math actually helpful, and if so, how?  This kind of question is so complex that (later in this book) I will invent a whole category for values whose helpfulness can’t be determined, and I will talk about what to do with that.

The Feeling of Values

When discussing condition (1), I will use the phrase positive valence to name the positive feeling that comes from a value.  This could be a feeling of moral clarity, belonging, or commitment.  It could also be joy, boldness, confidence, inspiration, or calm.  For example, I might feel moral clarity through my belief in compassion.  I might feel belonging with my family or commitment to a major goal.  The belief, my family, or a goal could be values.

The word arousal names the level of physiological or psychological activation that a person feels (energized vs. calm). In this book, I will focus on positive valenced emotions – but arousal will prove to be a very important metric for deciding if a value is “hard” or “soft,” as I will explain later.

Together, valence and arousal form the Circumplex Model of emotion. Some examples of the combinations are as follows (https://www.morphcast.com/blog/circumplex-model-of-affects/):

Positive and high arousal: Excited, self-confident, triumphant

Positive and low arousal: Content, relaxed, calm

Negative and high arousal: Afraid, disgusted, angry

Negative and low arousal: Sad, bored, ashamed

I cannot always pin down or describe the positive feeling for a given value.  I am not sure that it is always a conscious feeling, and it certainly is not exactly the same for all values.  “Happiness” comes to mind as a generic positive emotion; but positive valence isn’t always happiness.  For instance, having a belief about care or compassion is a kind of value. but this value doesn’t necessarily make you happy.  It can provide a certain kind of comfort.  You can get comfort from caring – and you can get comfort simply from believing that caring is important.  It’s good to know that the world makes sense, and that you know how things are and how they ought to be – that people ought to care for one another.  This feeling of moral clarity is not easily noticed or put into words.  But being confused about whether compassion is good or bad can be extremely unpleasant or demoralizing.  Moral clarity has positive valence while moral confusion is unsettling.

Likewise, thinking about math doesn’t always make me happy.  Sometimes, it is frustrating.  And when it does make me happy, I don’t think it’s the same kind of happy feeling as valuing connection with other people.  They’re quite different types of positive valence.

Does this mean that people who value compassion – or any other moral value – are just looking for some moral clarity as a kind of security blanket?  Do people want moral comfort so much that they’ll believe in almost anything?  Yes and no.  Positive valence can be a kind of security blanket, and it’s comforting to know that compassion is a good thing.  But values also matter by helping ourselves and other people.  It’s important to decide whether compassion is helpful, not just whether it feels good.  Almost any moral belief can feel good, but not just any moral belief will help people.

The Impact of Values

Regarding condition (2), values have impact.  They can be helpful or harmful – both for ourselves and others.  A value of compassion often helps others – but it’s complicated!  If I donate to a charity, I might help others.  But in other situations, compassion could be patronizing and could harm others by hurting their feelings.  Compassion could also harm ourselves if we give so much that we have none left for ourselves.  Compassion could also be harmful if we try to help others without knowing what they truly need.

Almost any value can be messy in this way.  Justice, for instance, is an important value.  But overly rigid justice can be unnecessarily punitive.  And justice can favor a group that the decision-maker belongs to, or a group that has power.

Another example would be valuing boldness.  We’d all approve of a bold firefighter entering a building to save a child.  But boldness can also be reckless or arrogant.  Most values are conditionally helpful – they are helpful in the right quantity, at the right time, and in the right context.  On the other hand, that doesn’t mean that all values are equally good.  Some values could usually be less helpful or more helpful than others.  Valuing war, for instance, seems to be particularly dangerous – although there have been past societies that valued or even deified war.  I will have more to say about this particular case in a later section.

Valuing is universal

Valuing is universal to all humans.  I don’t mean that all humans have the same values – just that all humans have values.  These values differ enormously; they may be more individualistic or more communalistic.  They may be more religious or more scientific.  They may be moral in a philosophical way or moral in a hero-worshipping way.  They may involve valuing whole classes of people or they may involve valuing individual people.  The same value may mean something different to each culture.  The meaning of “justice” to a modern American might be different from its meaning to a citizen of ancient Greece.  In fact, it can mean something different to different Americans!

To many Americans, “impermanence” sounds scary – a reminder of death.  To a Buddhist, impermanence – while still a reminder of death – is also a sacred value.  This shows how the same thing can be feared or valued by different people and by different cultures.  Likewise, for some people, solitude is felt as isolation, while for others, it is felt as self-reliance and therefore valued as a strength.

What’s happening here is that positive and negative valence, as well as high and low arousal, are basic human experiences.  Again, it’s not that particular experiences are always positive, but that all humans are capable of having positive feelings.

Our values shape our worldview.  They are like gravitational centers, organizing other beliefs and commitments.  Values likely filter our experiences prior to our conscious perception.  That is, if we look at a scene, our values may automatically highlight features of the scene and influence what we attend to.  Someone who values physics might look at a flying arrow and notice its parabolic trajectory, while someone who values archery might notice the archer’s technique in shooting the arrow.  Values, then, are intimately tied up with our knowledge.

We can understand our values through self-reflection, and this understanding is critical for us to live with integrity.

Questions (and Answers)

1. What defines something as helpful or harmful?

Ethical frameworks vary.  To a utilitarian philosopher, what’s helpful is whatever brings the most happiness to the greatest number of people.  To a Kantian philosopher, what’s helpful is whatever you can reasonably want everyone to do.  For example, a Kantian might say, you can’t reasonably want everyone to lie – perhaps because then no one would trust anyone else, and speech would be pointless.  Therefore, you should never lie.  Although the utilitarian and the Kantian have quite different perspectives on what is helpful, I suspect that their visions are not too far off from each other.  An absolutist utilitarian or an absolutist Kantian would probably come across as very weird (and interesting) people who might disagree a lot; but moderates of either type would get along fairly well with one another and could collaborate pretty easily.  The Kantian tells the truth for the reasons mentioned before, while the utilitarian tells the truth because it leads to happiness – but they both usually tell the truth.  We might conclude that there can be a certain amount of consensus without our having to agree perfectly on a moral philosophy.

2. Aren’t positive-valence feelings sometimes harmful?

Yes, they are often harmful.  For example, power can be a positive-valence feeling, yet when pursued without limit, it becomes tyranny.  Joy can be positive-valence, but in some contexts it becomes escapism.  And of course, escapism itself isn’t always bad!

3. What about negative-valence feelings?  Aren’t they sometimes necessary or even valuable?

Yes.  Fear, sadness, and guilt can be valuable.  Fear can tell us what to avoid; sadness can tell us to seek help or support; guilt can tell us that we made a mistake.  But these are unlikely to be values unless they are transformed in some way.  One might value sadness in movies or fiction, or one might value the ability to learn from sadness.

4. Is it realistic to expect people to live in positive-valence values all the time?

No: humans cannot always experience positive valence.  My child self could not do math all the time, and could not even enjoy math all the time.  Sometimes a problem was too hard in a way that was frustrating.  Sometimes I wanted a less intense experience.

The Distilled Definition

The succinct summary is this:

A value is something that feels good to hold, and that does good to hold.

Hard and Soft Values

Values are positive in valence, but can be high or low in arousal. This can give us a means to categorize values. Those that are high in arousal are “hard” values while those that are low in arousal are “soft” values.

High arousal is important because it can distract us from other thoughts and feelings. A major theme of this book will be the ability of high arousal states to distract us from death anxiety, using the idea of Terror Management Theory.

(An aside about death-related discussion: I think that mortality discussions can propel people to distract themselves with arousal; but discussing death in the right way has an immunizing effect. It is my hope that, in discussing mortality in this book, I am immunizing rather than triggering.)

Hard values may prefer strength, clarity, and action.  Soft values may prefer empathy, humility, and restraint.

I can identify all kinds of conflicting hard and soft tendencies in myself.  When I recently read a news article, I at first enjoyed it.  Later, I read some of the comments that were angry at the author.  I felt what the comments were saying, and I thought, “they are right; this anger is the correct interpretation of the article.”  This was a hard tendency in myself – I wanted clarity: was the author right, or were the comments right?  But then, I realized that the author had knowledge that the commenters didn’t have – so perhaps the author was right after all.  And yet, the author is a human capable of bias, just as the commenters argued.  Thinking of these things together led me to a kind of restraint or humility about whether I’m capable of knowing the true and correct interpretation of the article.  This restraint is a soft value.  It doesn’t feel as exciting or clear as the angry reaction, but it is often more helpful.

Hard Values

Hard values are often defined by strength and assertiveness.  Examples could include boldness, discipline, status, or national pride.  The emotional tone can be energized or confident.  Arousal is high.  I suggest that hard values often serve as a distraction from other, unwanted thoughts or feelings. This, however, does not mean that hard values cannot also be helpful. For example, a firefighter’s courage may be a distraction from fearing the fire; this courage is surely helpful.

Hard values come with risks, such as the potential to harm, exclude, or dominate.  If I were running an online community, and I developed an excess of “clarity” about which posts were good and which were bad, I might cease to be an effective moderator of the forum.  I might delete posts just because they conflict with my preconceived views, even if they are consistent with the community’s standards.

Soft Values

Soft values are lower in arousal. As such, their function is less about self-distraction, and they may have a gentler role. Soft values are often defined by sensitivity, restraint, and selflessness.  They may include compassion, mercy, forgiveness, empathy, or relativism.  Their emotional tone is oriented toward care, healing, and non-harm.  Soft values also come with risks – for instance, we can become indecisive or overly self-effacing.  Returning to the example of the moderator – if I were so “restrained” that I couldn’t enforce the rules of the community (because I feared causing harm to the authors of the posts) then in that case, too, I might be ineffective as a moderator.

Most values—love, courage, justice, truth—span both domains.  For example, love can be hard (“I love you no matter what”) or soft (loving by being gentle or forgiving.)  Justice can be hard – but if we question the justice of the justice system itself, then it becomes softer.  Truth can be hard if it provides clear and definite answers, but soft if it elucidates how little we actually know.

Ethical maturity involves discerning the balance between hard and soft, and navigating tradeoffs between them.  Real-life choices rarely map neatly to one side.

Universality of Hard and Soft

Just as valuing itself is universal, hard and soft can be found in all cultures.  For example, in Buddhism, the idea of karma can be hard – it suggests that people will be punished for their sins in past lives.  This idea likely has high arousal for many people – it feels energetic to know that bad deeds will be repaid – but it could lead to righteousness or punitive behavior.  At the same time, Buddhism also values soft compassion and non-attachment.  In fact, some Buddhists hold that there is no self from moment to moment, which invites the question: who is to be punished for whose bad deeds?  To combine hard and soft ideas is to invite many contradictions and complex problems; yet if we do not combine hard and soft ideas, we also invite many problems.

Christianity too values soft forgiveness with hard moral boundaries.  I suspect that most religions and philosophies are composed of both kinds of ideas to one degree or another.  It also depends on the particular practitioner.  So a Christian church that emphasized forgiveness would be softer, while a church that emphasized hard moral boundaries and afterlife punishments would be harder.

Question: Can we really say that certain values are always hard and others are always soft?

Answer: No, certainly not.  For instance, there is hard compassion (where we care about the exciting feeling that compassion gives us) and soft compassion (where we experience a calm desire to help others.)  Moreover, it can be hard to disentangle “valuing compassion” from “valuing the person.”  If we get a very positive feeling of meaning and purpose from helping our child, is that because we have a hard compassion value?  Or is it that we have a hard our-child value?  The view that we can clearly disentangle hard and soft is, of course, a hard value.  It is comforting, and brings us clarity, to feel that the world can be divided neatly into a hard-soft binary.  But that’s not necessarily bad.  As I’m arguing in the next section, hardness and softness are interdependent.  Humans who try to live with total softness are likely to be anxious a lot, which is not necessarily a good thing.

Hard and Soft Need Each Other

Some people might be tempted to say: why should we suppress fear using “hard” values?  That sounds like a band-aid. Maybe we should confront mortality directly by contemplating “existential dread” as some philosophers do.

But consider the metaphor of the oxygen mask.  You will hear on a plane, “put on your own mask before assisting others.”  Hard strength enables soft care, because if we aren’t strong enough to take care of ourselves, we can’t take care of others.

Humans need some amount of hard clarity in order to function.  Humans need a guiding compass.  Every value has some hardness, so to live without hardness would entail complete nihilism – the lack of any values.  But this cannot be endured.  If someone were to attempt it, they would either become very anxious or depressed, or they would find themselves possessed by new values that were not of their choosing.  (Or perhaps they would join the local nihilists’ club, which would provide them with some high arousal or positive valence!)

In a future section, I will address the link between values and death anxiety.  In my framing, high arousal values serve as psychological defenses against mortality.  Humans don’t seek high arousal just because they want to feel good, but because it provides a distraction from thoughts about death.  (Which themselves are likely low-arousal and pervasive.). That is the chief reason I have for suspecting that true nihilism is not possible.

For that reason, I think we should care about arousal, as long as we are conscious of what we are doing.  However, we should also be careful to value positive impact highly, not just positive valence or high arousal.  Sometimes, positive impact can itself be a source of positive valence.

We should be careful about identifying people as hard or soft. People have hard and soft behaviors, certainly. The problem with saying that a whole person is hard or soft is the possibility of bias. I suspect that many of us are inclined to identify ourselves as softer (because we can see how perplexed and uncertain we often are) while others are harder (because we base our opinion of them on one or two stereotypical incidents that make their behavior seem to be fixed.)