Читать книгу The Nature of College - James J. Farrell - Страница 10

College culture and consumer culture aren’t just sociological issues. They’re ethical issues, which we can explore by examining the moral ecology of everyday life. In Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah defines moral ecology as “the web of moral understandings and commitments that tie people together in community.” In this book, moral ecology also includes the web of social values that ties people and the rest of nature together. To untangle this web, though, we first must understand the difference between expressed and operative values. Put simply, expressed values are the ones we say and operative values are the ones we do. Sadly, too often the operative values of our lives aren’t the same as our expressed values. We say we believe in conservation and efficiency, freedom and fairness, equity and justice. But what we do is who we are, and when we look honestly at our lives, we basically buy into different values. In practice, our operative values include cheapness and novelty, fun and fashion, comfort and convenience, “cool” and conformity. When push comes to shove, we’d often rather look good than be good. We’d rather have “low, low prices” than high environmental standards. So “the good life” of American culture isn’t nearly as good as it needs to be for people or the planet.

By uncovering our implicit morality, we’re not only exploring the habits of our hearts, but also the more mundane habits of our days. Studies show that about 45 percent of daily behavior is habitual, which means that we don’t really choose almost half of what we do. It’s also true that many of our habits are things we don’t do. Thoughtlessness is a habit, for instance, as are silence and apathy and inactivity.

Environmental Values of College Culture (and American Culture)

Individualism	Fun	Resourcism
Instrumentalism	Sociability/Friendliness	Remote Control
Credentialism	Sex-ability	Ignorance
Comfort	Materialism	Passivism
Convenience	Cheapness	Sitizenship
Cool	Fossil Foolishness	Presentism
Conformity	Indoor-ance	Anthropocentrism

This is a book of ordinary ethics. It focuses on the stuff that everybody does every day, exploring the significance of the seemingly insignificant. It investigates the culture of college by probing the underlying ideas and assumptions of student life, trying to figure out why people act the way they do and why it matters to the global community. In the process, this book creates a space for reflection and conversation about some big questions that sometimes slip under the radar. If it works, readers will get to compare their expressed values and their operative values, and decide if they’re leading a good life after all.