155. THE IMPERMANENCE OF VALUE - Fluctuating Perspectives on Worth
As I filed in excitedly with the rest of the record-breaking crowd of over 77,000 to Wembley Stadium last week to watch Chelsea vs Manchester United in the Women’s FA Cup Final, it was hard not to reflect on how odd it was that this was something I was doing out of choice. That I was there because I wanted to be, and had actively bought a ticket for an event I had never cared about before in a sport I had spent most of my life claiming to despise. That if you had asked me just a year ago if I would like to attend an FA Cup Final at Wembley – either men’s or women’s football – I would have told you to offer the tickets to someone else. The only football stadium I attended in 2022 was Tottenham Hotspur Stadium – and that was to see Lady Gaga perform, not Spurs. Yet here I was, climbing the steps to my seat at Wembley, and this wasn’t even my first football match I’d attended that month, let alone this year. Football has, miraculously, become important to me. A regular part of my life. Since the start of the season in September I have watched every single match that Aston Villa’s women’s team has played and attended every home game in person. But it is more than that. Support for the single team is impossible to do without paying attention to the whole sport. The Women’s Super League in general, the Championship below it, where teams vie for the chance of promotion and where our teams in the WSL fear relegation to. The Champions League in Europe, where the top three teams in the WSL go and prove their worth in Europe and, yes, the FA Cup. We had bought the tickets back when it seemed possible Villa might make the finals, but even when they didn’t, we still chose to go. About 12,000 who purchased tickets for the sell-out match and found their teams knocked out didn’t, but we were invested now. Intrigued to see who would win it all if it wasn’t going to be us and happy to cheer on any team who might defeat the dreaded Chelsea who had knocked us out in the semi-finals.
The experience has made me think about value, and how transient and ever-changing it is. That Sunday I valued a silver cup which the year before had meant nothing to me. Wembley, the stadium which is synonymous in this country with footballing achievement, was always, to me, merely a place of curious interest rather than a place of pilgrimage. The site of WWE’s SummerSlam 1992 and nothing more. Yet now I valued football and its history, the significance of playing there, and the sell-out crowd, felt important. Another wrestling company I support – AEW – is having its own event at Wembley this summer, and their decision to use the venue added to its personal value to me. To sell 60,000 tickets in their first week of releasing them for a company who didn’t exist five years ago is a sign that this relatively new promotion is valued by many wrestling fans here in the UK and is no longer a niche interest. As I sat there watching Sam Kerr dash the dreams of Manchester United, I imagined what the stadium would look like in August, packed with wrestling fans from all around the country cheering on wrestlers who, just a few years ago, would have been unknown to them, and supporting a company which didn’t exist until 2019. Before AEW, events in WWE held great value to me. Nowadays, I barely watch the WWE product. My time is more valuable than the hours of programming they put out each week demands – but I’ll gladly give up a whole evening of my time to sit down and watch some AEW. Value, like I say, is transient. Value changes.
This is not a new observation. Our economies constantly fluctuate as the value of our currencies rise and fall with the whims of the markets. Internationally, my pound may buy me less or more on any given day when converted into the local currency than it would on another. And domestically we have seen with the latest “cost of living crisis” that even at home, our pound is worth less today than it was even a year ago.
Commercial value has long been recognised as a construct. This is why we have sales. Goods which last week were valued highly can suddenly be bought at rock bottom prices. Were they ever really worth the inflated original price? Well – so long as people were willing to pay it then maybe they were? This is the philosophical problem of the counterfactual. We can never know for sure what happened in an alternative world where the product was offered for more, or for less, because the world we live in is not those other possible worlds. Could the product have been worth more? Would more people have bought – and thus valued – it had it been sold for less? We’ll never know. And we don’t need to know because we already know that the value is a construct. An alchemy of clever marketing, good branding and timing which can allow people to value highly something which doesn’t even necessarily meet a single need. Creating wants and desires to help someone make a profit.
But I seem to be making a conflation between economic value (price) and actual value. Perhaps the value of function: products which we require for some specific purpose and genuinely value because we recognise the importance of their function. I’ve never seen any marketing for toilet brands (although I’m sure it exists for those in the toilet business) (and, just two days after writing this, I suddenly saw a marketing piece about bidets in the New York Times, so maybe that counts?) but if my toilet breaks I will be getting a new one immediately, regardless of brand, such is its genuine hygienic value in my day-to-day life.
Even here though, there is a limit to the value given, and the value given will fluctuate. Conflating price and value once again, how much am I willing to spend to fulfil a need or function will depend. Do I get the top-of-the-line highest spec version installed by a master plumber, or do I get the cheapest thing I can find to fulfil the function? The point i keep coming back to: value and price are seldom the same thing. Many will value an FA Cup final or a professional wrestling event at Wembley but still not want to (or even be able to afford to) spend money on the ticket, meanwhile many of our truly most valuable things are free. Currently, for example, my garden pond is ripe with life – tadpoles and newts are swimming excitedly in the waters and feasting on the many insects and plants. Watching this weird and wonderful little ecosystem in my backyard brings both me and my wife great joy every day. I value being able to observe this odd little world, but it cost me nothing. Sure – the pond needed to be built and that cost something to get the materials, but the pond itself was void of life when my wife dug it out and built it two years ago. The things we value in there are not the plants we bought or the stones we laid – it is the nature which has spontaneously emerged within this site. The pond itself might have cost some money to create, but really had little value in and of itself, despite the initial cost. If it had remained lifeless and not attracted any wildlife, we might even have considered it a failure and filled the whole thing in. Value changes.
We see this also in teaching. Whole areas of knowledge you perhaps never gave a thought to before become immensely valuable all of a sudden when someone decides to put it on a curriculum or an exam specification. Meanwhile, knowledge which once seemed incredibly valuable is shed and forgotten once it is no longer needed in class – the names of students who have now left, mark schemes which have been superseded, thinkers no longer taught on a course, the birthdays of colleagues you no longer work with. My experience as an A-level Philosophy teacher has great value if applying for a job as an A-level Philosophy teacher, but it won’t get me on the shortlist for a job as an A-level History or Chemistry teacher. What is valuable in one classroom might have zero value in another.
The class clown might be another great example of the way one person’s value might have negative value to another. A disruptive influence from a teacher’s perspective, their sense of humour might be seen as an albatross – a barrier to their learning and the learning of others as attention is drawn away from the lesson and towards this fool whose unmet needs are manifesting in annoying attention-seeking. But take that student out of the classroom and stick them on a stage in a comedy club, or even seat them next to their friends on the bus home from school, and their fun sense of humour and comedic eye have enormous value to those who enjoy it. Laughter is the best medicine. Perhaps it is the very thing which makes life worth living (imagine a life without laughter in it!) The class clown has ultimate value…but not when the location of their clowning remains the classroom. At least that’s true most of the time – sometimes that class clown might be the thing which makes a dreary period six lesson on a Friday afternoon bearable for everybody in that room including the teacher. Or, if the lesson is particularly dull for the students at any time, the class clown might be the thing which gets them through it. Value changes.
A book on a shelf sits unread for years. No interest in it at all. Doomed for the charity shop. Then one day something new interests you – a new destination you need to travel to, perhaps, or a new hobby you’ve been introduced to? Maybe the author suddenly rises to some public prominence and you want to see what they’re all about? – and you remember that old book you have of theirs. Maybe the book tackles the very thing you now need to know about right now, and suddenly the book is a valuable treasure trove rather than something useless to give away.
The music industry suffered most obviously from the transient nature of value and the disconnect between value and price. Many of us value music – a life without music might be, for some, just as bad as a life without laughter – but music as a commodity is not the same thing as music as an experience. I can hear a song whether I have paid for it or not – perhaps walking past your house as you play it with your windows open, perhaps from a busker playing it on a street corner, perhaps on the radio, maybe even just humming it to myself – but once upon a time the only way I could choose to listen to a song I liked whenever I wanted to was to buy a physical recording of it. A vinyl record, a cassette tape, a compact disc. And because we valued the songs so much, the record labels charged a lot for physical products which actually cost them very little to make. At one point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a CD with twelve songs on it might have cost as much as £20! But once people realised they could share music online, illegally at first, but eventually legally, through streaming services and file-sharing programmes, those price points were unsustainable. Why pay £20 for one thing when I can get 120 things for free? We valued the music, but not the physical product, and not at the prices they were being sold at. The mainstream music industry as we once knew it collapsed with this transformation of values and is still struggling to re-establish itself as a viable economic model to this day, unsure of how to generate the same kind of revenue it once did. We never stopped valuing music, but how what we valued was sold to us was no longer valued in the same way. We’d rather have a library online of a million songs at our fingertips than an expensively curated personal library of physical product. Where once the walls of my lounge were lined proudly with CDs and records of all my favourite artists, today those CDs gather dust in boxes in the attic: reduced to nothing more than an oversized and unwieldly backup drive for if the streaming services one day switch off. The records are mostly in a cupboard, too unwieldily to stick on for a quick listen when everything else is on my phone.
The Friday before I went to Wembley, I was at a theatre in Birmingham watching Tim Key, the poet and comedian, perform his excellent show about the covid-19 pandemic, Mulberry. I was reminded twice there about how value changes. The first time was when Key mentioned “key workers” – those of us whose jobs were deemed so essential, so valuable, during the lockdowns that we were allowed out and able to work while millions couldn’t. Jobs which were never paid highly – public sector jobs like nurses, teachers, waste disposal, cleaners…and private sector jobs like working in a supermarket or any delivery service – but which were suddenly the ones we realised we needed the most, while those jobs which were the highest paid were ones we saw we could live without.
The other transformed value was the simple value of sitting together in a dingy theatre. Bodies too close together. People coughing all around you. Someone needing you to stand up out of your chair so that they can go to the toilet in the middle of the show. God - being out in the world is awful! But because we had it taken from us for so long it is a pretty wonderful kind of awful. One which, in the middle of 2020, seemed like it would be impossible for us to ever experience again. The value of live theatre, of performance, of shows, can no longer be taken for granted the way it was before because, unlike the world without laughter, without music, we have actually lived through the world without live performances and saw how impoverished it was.
During the pandemic, we would watch things as close to a performance as possible through our computer screens. Zoom gigs. As an audience member we valued still being able to have the experience of seeing our favourite comedians, drag queens, musicians and magicians perform for us. On the other side of the camera, however, was only the painful silence of a room without an audience. An unblinking lens as you performed into the void. Some performers chose not to do them. Too painful. No value to them. To others it was a lifeline. Today, no one is doing those sort of online performances anymore. Value changes.
I wrote this piece purposefully as a series of sort of disconnected paragraphs on a theme rather than a coherent line of any particular argument so that as you read it your own perception of its value might change. One section might resonate and make you think – wow, what a great post! Another might make you click off and go somewhere else. I like the idea that even within the words of a single article, the value of something can fluctuate from line to line, paragraph to paragraph. I also like the fact that I know one person’s most valued paragraph will be another’s most unvalued paragraph. We seldom agree on what is valuable, even when we’re seeking the same things. How often have you recommended a movie, or TV series, or book, or song to someone only for them to not really get what the big deal is? I remember taking students to a university open day once and asking them on the way home which of the four lectures had been their favourite. Everyone had a different opinion. One person’s most boring speaker was another person’s most captivating. I told them to remember that when they got to university themselves - find what you love and remember that whatever you don’t love is something someone else thinks is the best. Value changes depending on who is doing the valuing.
Philosophers might ask: if value changes all the time, is there really such a thing as value at all? If we can’t pin it down - define it - then is it really anything? Is there anything eternally valuable and undeniably valuable to all? But even in philosophy value fluctuates based on who is doing the valuing. To some thinkers that question is important. Personally, I see no value at all in finding an answer to that question and would rather set my mind to other things. Indeed, many of the things I think about - how the world might be better without things such as governments, prisons, even schools - are things which many of us value, and couldn’t begin to understand (if they haven’t read my work, or the work of other abolitionists, anarchists or advocates of education over mere schooling) how society would function without them. Value can often be ideological: we value things because we have been told to value them. We value them because they have always been valued. We value them even if others are telling us they have no value at all.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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