To Value Human Life

The Failure of the Survival of the Fittest

When they write the story of American collapse, just a few short decades from now, they will probably say something like: the survival of the fittest may be a good principle for evolution. But it is a poor principle by which to run human societies. Why? Because, just as in evolution, it only produces better predators with sharper teeth.

Let me explain what I mean.

To value human life. It’s the essence of leadership. One of the high human arts. Not just a childish analytical game, but a moral endeavour. But America forgot how to value human life.

I’ll give you a very simple example. American conservatives want to take healthcare away from 50 million people. That is not just a tragedy — it is a foolish mistake. But let us prove it. Let us value human life for a moment. They want to take healthcare away from 50 million to save $100 billion. Those are the costs. But what are the benefits of healthcare? Let’s assume that 10% of those fifty million people die ten years younger. The value of a life year in America is about $130k. Therefore, the benefits are about $650 billion. American conservatives are in fact only destroying value for society to the amount of $550 billion.

Now. You can and should object to my childish analysis above. It is Vox liberalism at its worst: I am reducing human life to numbers in a formula. And yet even in that most childish of ways, American cannot value human life accurately any more.

Nevertheless, let us proceed. What is a still wiser and more mature way to value human life?

America is a Nietzschean society. Probably the perfect Nietzschean society. What I mean by that is that America values uber men, super beings, tycoons and billionaires, above all, so much so that everyone else holds negative value. To the average American, life itself holds less than no value at all — only the lives of uber beings do. How do we know? Because they themselves deny themselves public goods, healthcare, education, transport, and so on — but vociferously support tax cuts and privileges for the super wealthy. That is why more than 100% of national income goes now to the super rich, and the middle class implodes.

It is a complex and subtle point, so I hope that you see it — but if you struggle with it, you can just reduce it to: the survival of the fittest.

The survival of the fittest is another way to say: America doesn’t value human possibility. It only values actuality, or “self-actualization”. If I have “actualized myself” by becoming a super person, then I am valuable. But if I am just an average person, I am not valuable at all. The strong survive, the weak perish. Nietzsche smiles.

In that toxic mode of thinking and seeing lies everything that we really need to know about the damaged, wounded, broken American psyche. It’s pain and self-loathing and despair and rage. It itself sees itself as worthless, weak, a liability. How can such a mind be happy, positive, full of grace and curiousity and love? It is too full of hurt. The hurt of the abandoned.

To genuinely value human life is to value possibility, not actuality. That is most mature and sophisticated way of valuing life at all. Let me prove it to you with a simple example. Do you love your child any less because he is not as perfect, smart, athletic, good looking, and so on, as the next child? Of course not. You value your child precisely because you do not value his objective actuality, only his subjective possibility. That is, what he accomplishes, wins, possesses matters to you less than whether he is always becoming a good and kind and decent person. Or at least it should. In that sense, it is a child’s genuine possibility that matters to you — what he is capable of becoming, as a human being.

We cannot assign numbers to human possibility in the truest way. We cannot say that a kind and loving person is worth this much, and an unkind and bitter person is worth that much. Why not? Because, ultimately, to value human possibility is to embrace the possibility of redemption for every human heart. And that is the greatest way in which America has failed. There are no second chances in that broken country, because there are none in its broken mind. If you get sick, or poor, and so on, you will die young. There is no redemption, in other words. And that is the truest value of human life, isn’t it? The fact that every life can be redeemed, and become one that is worthy and noble and beautiful.

Human beings are not here to be selected according to their fitness. That way we only produce predators with sharper teeth. And that is the story of American collapse in two sentences.

To value human life. It is the highest human art. And yet, curiously, also the simplest. Life itself is priceless. American think that is a cliche, and yet their distant irony reveals the moral failure that has ripped the future away from them.

Every heart holds redemption in it. Not like the seed, but like the soil. The humble dirt from which the mighty sky is born.

Umair
May 2017