by Steven Sills
Chapter 27
Three More Values and Beliefs in Determining the Sanctity of Life
Sanctity of Life
Formed as an accidental chain reaction to myriad variables to which, I assert, a god cannot be ascribed or imputed as the cause, life, I must admit, continues to teem forth on and from earth, seed, and egg as though such a deity, He who supposedly wrought life initially, were active even now at cultivating the soil. And yet this so called divine influence is further contravened by the fact that no benevolent deity would deem the small and less able as liabilities that need to be dispensed with in the ultimate aim to make the most fit the most likely to reproduce. But natural selection, vulgar as it is and nowadays vulgarized as survival of the fittest,130 is therein out of the state of nature as in it. All one has to do is open his (not His) eyes.
Aus, who often calls me “Baby dog” for my solicitude toward these other mammals within this human civilization that is jungle to them, as I call him “Little Baby” for his inability to survive well in it any more than most mammals, and to no fault of his own, tends to relish life most when pointing out puppies that he sees on days that we walk together to the sports stadium; but today, instead of fulgurant and animated, he is horrified by one yelping after it was hit by a car at Ramkamhaeng University. We both are, actually. To me this incident today (the rush to a veterinarian in a taxi, when finally finding a taxi driver willing to take us with a dog, and a bleeding one at that, was unsuccessful) is an illustration of natural selection in action, even if the agent was a careless fast moving human, a teacher or student who in one respect or another was one more rapacious predator of money with the dog being collateral damage along the way.
And if desensitized to this, ignoring also the tedious and not so methodical 3.5 billion years of laborious churning that evolution took and mistook in life formations most tortuously to arrive at this latest cognizant and sentient being, flawed as he is, as well as the fact that other animals have special receptors to electromagnetic stimuli and thus other forms of awareness that humans do not possess,131 one is easily susceptible to believe this strange concoction called life to be a work wrought by a divine being. And in this state of innocence, which does engender a more positive outlook on life overall, one can easily reach simplistic and myopic teleological assessments like William Paley’s watchmaker argument that are hard to dispel,132 as errant as the conclusions are.
Still, it is obvious that our particular cognizance and sentience in fairly active and robust frames, although hardly the best in the animal kingdom for physical prowess and altogether untoward and hell bent in rapacious procurement for civilizing the entire world for man’s ease even when it altogether upsets the ecosystem, which is as foolish and erroneous a path as any life form can take, have allowed us to exhibit an often inordinate degree of mastery of life, for good or for ill, and with these intellectual faculties our imaginative musings have caused us to arrive at myriad assessments that have been both correct and terribly erroneous. Any reading of the Odyssey,133 for example, suggests that gods materialized in man’s fear and awe of natural forces, and any viewing of the artwork portraying Akhenaten shows the Egyptian intrigue with the power of the sun,134 and yet man more times than not imagines that God or the gods created mankind instead of mankind creating the gods.
As for life being sacred, certainly it should be, or at least ought to be thought of as such, but what should be, and what ought to be imagined in order to have a safety valve on man’s ingenuity are at times quite different from reality. Adam Smith reminds us (his assessments perhaps to some degree coming from an understanding of the period immediately after the Black Death when survivors of the plague, no matter how indigent, were able to demand higher salaries for themselves, which brought about the middle class for the first time in history,135 as from his thorough study of commerce) that professions are awarded higher wages based upon the rarity of the knowledge and skills by which certain products and services are rendered.136 And likewise, life itself, if it were rare, would have greater innate value at least in human estimations, but its fecundity does not allow that to happen. Furthermore, clarity of life’s inception as a cell, replicating cells, or a multi-celled organism are still murky at best, which explains the ambivalence on the social position as to when a fetus is “viable” and cannot be aborted; and nature itself does not help with its myriad miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, still born births, and the rate of child mortality which although not high in the modern era of vaccinations, once was high and is still high in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, and even now attests that no individual is destined to be on the planet.
Although, on a superficial level, humans easily see in each other what they are blind to in other species, which is how each individual is sui generis in physical traits and personality, the number of human beings on the planet and their dispensable nature have made brute savagery of man to man an even easier occurrence if not an entirely commonplace daily experience. The more, however, we firmly believe that each individual has innate worth, no matter what his or her commercial contribution is, and that every species is part of a treasure trove of life, the more innocuous humans will become, and only this will take us out of our 200,000 year old stagnation to finally evolve, if we have time enough for evolvement.
Individuality
Although humans are to a certain degree unique, they take great efforts in diminishing this as much as possible in their fierce yearning to emulate the same attitudes and convictions of their peers so as to acquire friendships of utility and pleasure, which they see as their only means for survival and happiness. Thus, being as others becomes a paramount concern, if not obsession, in all facets of life. Although one might be labeled as a churlish devil’s advocate if not the devil himself for attempting to be the gadfly of Socrates, or at least opposing a mainstream argument when in the midst of a group of complacent minds so singularly convicted, it has always been my idea that being the agent provocateur jolting complacency even momentarily with an opposing argument of some merit does others a great service, even if it leaves himself without friends. And certainly, wandering lost to oneself, fecklessly needing to be found continually in other people and their viewpoints is a worse fate than wandering alone in the world. To be alone and out of their noise and he enters deeper feelings and thoughts probing into and befriending various tiers of self, and if never stumbling onto an original idea, such an individual will continually stumble on unique nuances to familiar ideas which is satisfying unto itself. I maintain that to go through life avoiding the gravity of self at every turn for the levity of temporary companions and wind up as a stranger to oneself at the end has to be the most futile life there is. Aristotle says that bad individuals cannot live peacefully in their thoughts and find communing with themselves intolerable. These people, he says, tend to be very gregarious.137 But I have no yearning to be with the bad, no matter how good it might appear to be; and for my fulfillment give me my own unfettered self for companionship and a refractory gadfly and sullen introvert --even a glowering gecko—as a friend, and deliver me out of Siam, the Land of Smiles.
Membership in Society
However, we are a nexus to that which is greater than ourselves, and those with time to learn and think, fortunate enough to be saved from menial tasks of enslavement burdening their days in tedium and drudgery are all the more obligated to give back to society to which no level of affluence should allow dereliction. I fully agree with Marx that every individual must give back to society to the best of his ability and that assets and retirement at any age are perversions that distort man from his true essence which is to formulate reciprocal relations for survival.138 And for those who obtain affluence and do nothing but pursue pleasures throughout their years, they will ultimately find them cloying and vapid and that their lives have no sense of meaning whatsoever; for, except in befriending oneself and sharing his inward journey to others, and in pe
rfecting oneself for a more complete nexus to the greater good which is society, doing what he can to contribute the best of himself for the macrocosm, there is no meaning in life—none whatsoever.