The eCrozier

Virtues aren’t values we hold. Values are mutable because they represent commitments we hold in relationship to other ones. Values have a price tag. We always weigh the cost of holding one value in relationship to another. Virtues, however, are ways of being we hold immutably. Virtues like generosity, compassion, and gratitude thus can’t be values we hold. They’re ways of being in the world. For example, we can’t “value” compassion. We either live compassionately or we do not. Christianity then is less a set of beliefs we hold as it is a way of being we embody. Church doctrine, therefore, isn’t put before us so we’re challenged to believe it. Rather, it’s the truth of the faith we Christians live.

This short primer on virtues and values is a necessary a priori step before we can reflect upon and examine the value of choice, because in our culture it seems we have elevated having choice to a virtue. The ability to choose whatever we want has become a de facto right. This in part explains certain shopper’s reactivity during the “Holiday Shopping Season” when they aren’t able to choose the product they want to buy because someone else got there first. They see it as their right to get what they want.

This “season” we’re in has its own set of bumper sticker scriptures like “born to shop,” “shop until you drop,” and “the one who dies with the most toys wins!” These secular scriptures represent the great invitation for choice during this “Holiday Season.” Yet, we don’t stop to question such things because we’ve already bought (that particular verb used intentionally) into the assumption that choice is a virtuous right. By challenging such contentions I’m open to the charge that I’m somehow against “our very way of life,” whatever that means. Consider me guilty as charged.

Our capacity to choose has expanded exponentially as the breakfast cereal aisle at our local grocery store has grown longer. We now have more choices than my parent’s generation had and they certainly had more choices than the generation before them. But is that expanded choice necessarily a good thing? Is having choice more important than we what we actually choose? Who will make us wise in the choices we make? Can choice alone be a virtue if there is no guide for us to make virtuous choices?

Just as self-fulfillment can become more highly valued than self-sacrifice, having choice can be become understood as being just as virtuous as what we, in the end, actually choose. And when anxiety over not getting to choose what we want or resentment over what we don’t have becomes our self-definition then virtues like generosity, compassion, and gratitude are crowded out of our hearts and lives. When that happens we reap Black Friday stampedes for consumer goods, the political insistence that we must get all of what we demand, and familial and other relationships that are measured by the plumb line of how my needs are being met and served.

I urge us all to take a deep breath and get quiet. Try modesty out for a season. Look to our neighbor’s needs before our own. Examine our own motives before we impugn another person’s motives. Be grateful for what we already do have.

+Scott