Against Values: How to Talk about the Good in a Postliberal Era. By Philip J. Harod. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2023. Pp. xv, 221. 121. 00 (HB) / 40. 00 (PB).

Over the past several years, I have become increasingly aware of the number of times people speak in terms of values. This is particularly true of students in my classes who attempt to dodge my questions about moral relativism by saying that they would never murder an innocent person because it contradicts their values. When I ask them if they think murder is wrong, they repeat themselves and say that according to their values it is. I wondered where they picked up this trick. The answer: it's all around them—it's in the very air they breathe. Everywhere I look—television, mail soliciting donations for one cause or another, Eagle Scout ceremonies—people are hesitant to speak in terms of truth and hedge anytime they speak, even favourably, about a basic ethical standard. 'John helps the needy because he honours his values.' 'Susie's values prevent her from lying.' 'Frank considered his values and chose to be loyal to a friend.' Normally, the people who speak this way do so without fully understanding the implications of their words. Most mean well. Most haven't thought much about it. They are just talking the way that other people talk. I teach at a Benedictine college, which I love dearly. But every spring at graduation I cringe when speakers, including some of the monks, praise something they call 'Benedictine values', or 'the values of the Benedictine Catholic tradition', or sometime, in their prouder moments, 'our values', assuming them to be shared by most of the audience. Something seems to have changed since I was in school. I don't recall anyone speaking that way at my undergraduate institution, which was also a small, Catholic, liberal arts college. I recall all the speakers at my graduation praising us for the strides we made in the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty—and it was taken for granted that these things are part of transcendent reality, or better put, together they constitute reality. We can speak of them having opposites, but really the false, the evil, and the ugly are not things in themselves but the absence of that which is real. To be false is to lack truth. To be evil is to lack goodness. To be ugly is to lack beauty. And to lack is to be without something real. My guess is that many of the people at the college where I now work would agree with this, and yet for some reason they have adopted the language of values. Philip J. Harold, who is the academic dean at that fine institution of which I am an alumnus, has written a book entitled Against Values that confirms my suspicious and prejudices against values-talk. He does more than confirm, for he also has persuaded me that I have been far too kind to those who surround me and insist on using this language. Their habits, however innocent or naïve, do far more harm to the community than I had thought. And not only this, Harold has also made me suspicious of other words used to prop up the values regime that is increasingly pervasive in contemporary America. Chief among these is 'morality', which I admit to having quite liked prior to reading this book. Maybe I have been guilty of the very same thing I have accused my colleagues of doing with the word 'values' by using the word 'morality'. Maybe, like them, I too am contributing to the nihilistic gas that fills our intellectual atmosphere. Or, maybe I am not guilty. To be honest, I am not yet convinced that morality needs to go. I shall return to this point presently. Before doing so, I want to praise much of what I found in Harold's book. It does everything a thoughtful academic book should do. It has a serious thesis about an important topic. It is provocative and fair. It forces readers to consider closely their own preconceptions, as I have already admitted to doing. The argument against values is set within the context of the history of political and theological ideas. And yet there is much to the argument that I would not have predicted before I sat down to read it. Too often, when authors turn to the history of political thought, the contours of the arguments are so predictable that the book becomes too easy to accept or reject. But not so in this case. At every turn, I have found myself forced to think, and think carefully, about the argument. Of all the chapters, I found that on Martin Luther to be the most revealing and helpful. Harold's insights into Luther's theology and its implications for politics are excellent. He shows that Luther replaces the virtue of justice with the idea of public esteem—a tremendously useful phrase. Justice, as Harold explains with great capability, allows for mercy and friendship; esteem, by contrast, has less to do with natural relationships and more to do with personal choice. Thus, to love God and to trust in God's mercy is different from choosing to honour God in exchange for esteem. God's reasons are not to be sought. He is inaccessible. He is to be chosen because he is great, or as Harold at one point puts it, because he is a superstar! The best we can do is be part of his entourage. We can be groupies, but not really family. Being a part of some kind of entourage goes along with values-talk. For example, some people are Swifties, some people go to Comicon, and some people are Jesus Freaks. Toe-mate-o, Toe-mot-o. You have your thing. I have my thing. You choose Buddha, I choose Christ. It's all a matter of preference; it's all a matter of values. They are inscrutable because they are not anchored in reason, but rather taste. And I acknowledge that I can't question your values. You do your thing, and I'll do mine. I had never thought so deeply about the relationship between the Reformation and value talk today. As persuaded as I was by the chapter on Luther, I admit to being a bit perplexed by parts of the other chapters. What I found surprising in the Hobbes chapter, for example, was what I took to be a sudden shift to the nomenclature of personalism. I started tripping over the argument here and there, and wondered why people like Stanley Fish and Martin Heidegger were being cited with approval. Derrida is later cited with similar approval. These guys are not typically my go-to guides for reasoning through early modernity. My own experience reading Heidegger, Derrida, and Fish put me on my guard. More than once they have led me through an argument that undermines the very possibility of truth, or at least the ability for us to know truth—even scientific truths. While I would admit that all three understand what is going on when people speak of values, I am not sure that they give us the best alternatives. In fact, I think their alternatives are quite dangerous. But I am even more surprised by what I don't find in this book than what I do find. I'll put the question very frankly: where is Thomas Aquinas? Did I miss him somehow in this book? I don't mean, where is the analysis of the Summa, I mean where is the line of argumentation that builds from a Thomistic basis that could easily be used to show the shallowness of values language in our world today? It is completely absent. I want to be careful not to say or give the impression that I am saying that I can't accept the book because it goes against my Thomistic values. But I do wonder if I am right in saying that there seems to be something of a rejection of Thomistic thought in these pages. And I further wonder if the subtle rejection of Thomistic thought is related to the argument that 'morality' is a bogey word, like 'values'. The personalism argument, leaning as it does on Heidegger, Derrida, and Fish, cuts strongly against Thomistic reasoning. The postmodern trio defend a view of relationships that are highly dynamic, spontaneous, and creative. They are not wholly wrong, but they separate human relationships from any transcendent conception of truth, including moral conceptions of truth that claim to be universal. A transcendent moral truth puts limits on the types of relationships that are publicly acceptable. The trio are embraced by many today precisely because their writings undercut the traditional moral view that some relationships are improper. As such, I am not sure what they really have to give us to push back against values-language, other than useful tools for winning, or getting what you want, in environments that care not for truth. And so, I worry about some of the implications of the book. I worry that the line from Luther's theology to modern liberalism is maybe too neat, too easy. I worry that in throwing out Luther, we also throw out all thinkers who defend transcendent morality. Once you throw out transcendent morality, you must throw out the American Founding, which is premised on the principle of the Declaration of Independence, which takes certain moral ideas to be given by nature and nature's God. But if you throw that out because it runs afoul of philosophical personalism, or because Stanley Fish can show us how it manipulates language for its own ends, then I am not sure what we are to do going forward. Put differently, and more abstractly, I am not sure we can have politics without transcendent notions of morality. Or, at least, I am not sure we can have forms of popular regimes—republics or democracies. Which is perhaps why I always get the sense that many postmodern thinkers, whatever they say, tend to favour some form of aristocracy. Harold's book, then, has had something of a paradoxical effect on me. It has persuaded me twice over. I am persuaded that values-talk belies an easy-going relativism that can lead to nihilism. But upon reflection, I am also prepared to admit that if I want to stand by modern republican politics, I may have to be willing to put up with a little bit of values-talk. So long as we do not lose the capacity to question one another's values civilly and hold them up to standards of truth, goodness, and beauty, then we are probably not in much danger. I may not like it when I hear people explain their moral positions in terms of their values, but my republican bones are willing to put up with it if it means keeping the new aristocrats far from the seats of power that they crave.