POLITICS AND “VALUES”

Modern politics, as we have seen, begins with a sphere of secular authority whose concerns are distinct from the search for religious truth and moral virtue. For those who accepted this modern politics, it seemed axiomatic that increased diversity would require a progressively more rigorous distinction between the goals of politics and the human good. Under what John Rawls called “conditions of reasonable pluralism,” public political discussions cannot be directed toward agreement on the good. The possibilities of agreement are too remote, and there are many urgent questions that need to be answered first. Disagreements between reasonable people about the human good are a fact around which politics must be structured, not a problem that modern politics can resolve.

Nevertheless, it seems that one result of the growing diversity in contemporary society is an unanticipated public interest in “values.” The more people see that their neighbors shape their lives in unfamiliar ways and follow different religious and cultural traditions, the more they want to know exactly what these neighbors think a good life would be. How do they think about their families? How do they see work in relation to the rest of their lives? What role does religion play in their choices?

When new immigrants flow into a community, the old residents and the new alike become amateur anthropologists, trying to understand the world as others see it in relation to the world of their own experience.