Life is precious

As C.S Lewis suggests, there might have never been more than one civilization in all of history. Across time and cultures, there is a shared set of values: human life is precious, private property is to be respected, we must honor our commitments, honor your parents and your nation, be kind to the poor and weak, institute courts and enforce laws, and so on, all shared among different cultures at different times, and places.

There has never been more than one civilization, and yet, civilization makes progress.

Take the shared idea that human life is precious. What it means to be human, to live a proper life, and the idea of what is precious have changed over time. As these notions expand, civilization improves and evolves: racial and gender injustices soften, the minimum standard of living rises, and the benefits of civilization expand for all.

Civilization values life, yet it may also ask for its share of sacrifices. Man and woman are responsible for the life of children, and if a situation calls for the life of one or another, they protect the life of the children. If a town is being attacked, all able-bodied people should stand to defend it, even at the risk of death.

So, life is precious, but at times must be expended for safety or honor. The value of life can also be in tension with other values. Take theft and private property; if someone exercises violence to steal, killing might be the unwarranted result. This applies to all values and their relationships. Civilization is a set of fairly universal human values that exist in tension with one another.

The constant risk to civilization is to take any of these values as existing independently, outside of the tension and trade-offs. To do so debases such values and undermines the whole of civilization.

Back to the value of a human life: To call for honor deaths over every other value, or to value a personal life always and over everything else, is to call, on both accounts, for the debasement of human life, undermining the strength of human civilization.

Sometimes life demands sacrifice, but not always, and at all times. Sometimes our life is the most essential thing, above all else, including family and the collective good, but not always.

The challenge arises when we realize that there are no fast and hard rules to decide how values trade off in any given circumstance. As a result, people may feel that the value-tension is arbitrary, or a mechanism of control by those who benefit most from the current definitions of what is valuable.

The main criticism of this wholesale defense for an interconnected set of values that together comprise one human civilization is that civilization is a form of control, exercised by those who are powerful enough to set the rules of the game, or by an outdated past.

But civilization, as a form of control by the powerful over others, seems a relatively weak argument.

If civilization is mostly one, and this is true across most of human history and across different places, it would be hard to imagine one person or group conspiring to trick us into respecting private property, honoring our parents, and caring for the sick.

I do think, however, the opposite is true: calling for one value over all else, as a mechanism of a powerful man to get others to do their bidding.

Take those calling for people to die for honor over anything else (as an example, suicide bombers attacking the civilian population). When people respond to that call, they transition from operating within values in tension, and within human civilization, to being controlled and manipulated by someone who believes you can do without any tension if you just pick one value and discard everything else.

So, one way you lose control is by doing without the tension between different values.

The other way to lose control - to some degree surprising in this day and age- is by ignoring civilization because it is old and lindy, and in turn doing whatever the hell you want.

Why do we really need to help the poor? Could we simply do without private property? How is our life really more precious than a tadpole? Why shouldn’t I just do as I please? Following my desires and instinct could seem a strong foundation, a more natural one.

Yet, in reality, to follow your Nature blindly is to give up control to someone else over yourself. Here is why: there is no such thing as purely natural and human needs and desires.

Our desires, needs, and instincts don’t flow from within, absolutely original and pure, like some primordial river on the first day the earth was born. They are informed by those who came before us (in acceptance or reaction against), by the current values, fashions, ideas, acquired in the household, through socialization, via the media, made possible by the existing technology and the existing material and cultural wealth. This starts at birth and will continue to happen as long as you breathe.

To do what we want is to do what peddlers of naked values, divorced from how they interact and affect other values, wish us to do, mostly for their benefit. When we say, “I should do whatever I want”, regardless of civilization and its values, we are open to being conditioned by those who profit from people doing whatever they want.

So we should be free of the tyranny of other men and the supremacy of some values over others, but we can’t be free from civilization.

We can’t drive on when the traffic light is red, and expect our lives or the lives of others will be spared. We can’t let others threaten lives with impunity and hope that the lives of those we love will be spared. We can’t expect to see an old man on the floor, trying to get up, ignore him, and expect society to give us the gifts of peace, friendship, and prosperity. All these things are connected.

The primacy of the individual over the collective has been a movement that has ushered in diversity, inclusion, happiness, and prosperity. But we are not an island. And we are not able to produce all the values that sustain us emotionally, spiritually, and materially within ourselves. We live inside our civilization. It is within this framework that the notions of individuality, human dignity, progress, and prosperity have expanded. If we were to pick just one value and discard everything else, it would be like removing one of a thousand tightly knotted pillars, all of which support our home. You pull one down, you pull all others.