Worth and Value

By Greg -
Worth is a word worthy of more study. It's the Germanic synonym for the Latin "value," and both were pulled reluctantly from their original contexts to suit a new world order of privilege and drudgery. The original metaphor for worth was the tropism of plants and the winding of vines toward sunlight. The tending toward and the twisting were conflated so that any deviation from a straight line was an example, or a result, of worth. When we "ward" things off, we change their linear trajectory. Things move inward and converge, or outward and diverge. Verge is a phonetic variation of ward, and "verse" comes from both. Poems turn, while prose marches in a straight line. Worship is derived from worth, and in its earliest usage was probably synonymous with obedience and submission. And so, from ward also came wrangle, wrath, writhe, worry, and wrong.

The conflation of worth with value must have come much later. Value has its deep origins in the imposition of will upon the natural world. It's derivatives are wield and rule, and perhaps "will" as well. Value intervenes against our natural inclinations and "prevails." Valor is the defiance and overpowering of our unconscious instincts and impulses. And so, something has value if it is unnatural in its novelty, and a person has value if they exhibit behaviors outside our natural instincts for self- preservation and empathy. Value and worth are really opposites. Worth is the natural attraction to things which are good for us, and value is an unnatural force, a power, which draws us away from the worthy. And so, from value we have valor and valiant, rule, wield, valid, and invalid.

It's interesting that the modern conservative movement's steady corruption of our ethical sensibilities included the substitution of Christian "values" for what had been the natural and common sense inclinations of communities to care for one another. Values are defined and enforced by power, while the worthiness of the individual was suspect until they submitted to the expressed values of the dominant group. By a simple trick of linguistics, they made religion about our willfulness rather than our worship.

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