Valentines and Sentiment — Particularism vs. Universalism

February 14, 2022
Posted by Jay Livingston

For Valentine’s day when I was in kindergarten, we had to bring a Valentine’s card for every other kid in the class. Many years later, in my intro classes, I often used this as an example of universalism and particularism. We usually think of love as particularistic, something that depends on the particular people involved. We treat the other person according to the special aspects of the person and the relationship, not according to some universal rules that apply equally to everyone. But in Miss Carmen’s kindergarten, everyone said Be My Valentine to everyone else.

Maybe the same rule applied in first and second grade or beyond. I can’t remember. But at some point, we learn that a Valentine’s card and the sentiment it represents is for “that special someone,”

With friendships and friendliness however, we Americans are still kindergartners. Or at least that’s how non-Americans see it. When they come to the US they are often pleasantly surprised at how friendly and welcoming Americans are. Perfect strangers treating you so warmly. But after a while they are frustrated, for what passes as a friendship here seems superficial and temporary, so unlike friendships from their native countries. As a student from France told anthropologist Cathy Small,

Sure I have friends. It’s so easy to meet people here, to make friends. Well, not really friends. That’s the thing. Friendship is very surface-defined here. It is easy to get to know people, but the friendship is superficial. We wouldn’t even call it a friendship. In France, when you’re someone’s friend, you’re their friend for life

The other way I had of explaining particularism and universalism hinged on the idea of what something is worth. Usually, we measure that in the universalistic terms of money. A dollar is a dollar no matter whose wallet it’s in.  But I would glance around the room looking for a girl wearing a ring or necklace, one that looked special. An engagement ring was the ideal. “Where’d you get that?” I would ask, and often the answer was the kind I was looking for. “My boyfriend gave it to me,” or “It was my grandmother’s.”

We would come to some assessment of what its dollar value might be, and I would then ask if she would sell me the ring for double that. The answer was always No. I would then ask others in the class, “If you had bought this ring for $200 and I now offered you $400, would you take it.” Yes, of course. You could go back the store, buy one just like it, and pocket the extra $200. But to the girl wearing that ring, its value is particularistic, based on the particular people involved.

I would sometimes bring in the example from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” — the ring from a box of Crackerjacks, worthless to everyone except the two lovers — even though I knew that most students would not be familiar with it.* But it’s such a good example.


I was reminded of this by a segment of the Valentine’s episode of the Planet Money podcast. One of their economics reporters, Mary Childs said that she would give a Valentine to her favorite website, where entire estates are auctioned. She loves it because it is a perfect example of “price discovery” — finding out how much money something is worth. She also seems pleased that discovering the price has the sobering effect of deflating the particularistic value.

It turns out, a lot of this stuff is basically worthless. There’ll be a lot of lots that go for like two dollars or five dollars. . . . .When we’re alive we imbue all our possessions with all this importance and all of this meaning. . . But in the end it turns out that all this stuff — your precious stuff — is just stuff.

As Oscar Wilde said, “What is an economist? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” (OK, he didn’t say “economist”; he said “cynic.” But the difference may be hard to perceive here just as it is with the economic view of the “deadweight loss” of Christmas presents )

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY

To Everyone

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* Not all students were unfamiliar with it. One semester, when I referred to “the movie based on the Truman Capote short story,” I heard a girl off to my right mutter sotto voce, “novella.”