A Childhood Memory (two, actually)
When I was six I used to pop tar bubbles in the summer. The sun would bake the tar that was laid on the streets to prevent cracking. Under the hot sun, black blisters formed on the surface, and I would sit in the street popping them. This was on a residential cul-de-sac half an hour north of Seattle.
Around the same time as the tar bubbles, we took a road trip from Seattle to San Diego in a pine green Toyota Corolla. My dad was stationed there on the USS Constellation. As we drove, there were hitch-hikers along the I-5 corridor. Mostly young men trying to get to San Francisco (or so I presume from this vantage point some 50 years later). I mention this because the feeling I had while popping tar bubbles was similar to the one I had as we passed hitchhikers on the road to California. I sat in the back with my brother. My mother drove. The hitchhikers were there too, but only momentarily as we sped by. In both memories there’s a feeling of “separateness,” a kind of watching myself as if I were not myself. Or maybe that is the nature of memory itself which is, after all, to not-be there any more.
Why I begin a series of essays on the hypocrisies of everyday life with two personal anecdotes is a mystery to me. They just came to me as I began typing. I think everything, at the deepest level of human meaning, begins and ends with a feeling. It’s not what you know, not what you’ve done (or have not done) but how you feel about your life that matters most. (What’s a well-packed CV to a dead man?) The events I describe above are long gone, and I probably have half the details factually incorrect. What I do know is that these memories evoke certain feelings which are associated with that past and this present. Whether they will continue to some distant future is not for me to day. The events themselves–tar bubbles and hitch-hikers–are nonetheless connected to “today” not because of any reason of which I am aware but because of how I felt and feel…today. A feeling, however apparently unrelated to its context, is probably not to be ignored. It may prove to be of little or of great importance. Who can say? Despite their age, one can at least show them respect enough to welcome them to the ball (with or without an invitation). They are, after all, your feelings.
Human = Values
I take the adjective “human” to be a synonym for “has values.” I’m not pronouncing myself on whether a specific value is “good” or “evil.” It is simply my contention that “to be human” means “to have values.” This makes human being a moral-ethical affair. This can be contrasted with the world of animals. There is no hypocrisy in animals because they are not moral-ethical beings. A predator in the wild cannot commit murder or be untrue to its word. As for the larger concept of “nature,” it seems that the whole of nature is preoccupied with nothing other than perpetuating itself as such. It’s “just there,” so to speak, and despite the many attempts to humanize it in print or film, we’re always kind of horrified when we see it eating itself to stay alive.
It’s between these two ways of being (the “just there” of nature, and “there with values”) that “human being” seems to play itself out. In our attempts to explain ourselves to ourselves, we tend to lean too frequently on the concept of nature. How often does one use it as both explanation and justification? “It’s only natural, no?” One cannot deny that we share aspects of our way of being with that of other animals. Nobody is immune, present company included. There is an animalistic “selfishness” that sometimes characterizes our behavior. At such times I try to recall the following from The African Queen: “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.” Forget about whether or not we were “put” here. The fact is that we are here, and referring to “nature” to explain ourselves to ourselves is a bit too convenient. It strikes me as more of an excuse than an explanation. Examples of how human behavior overlaps with animal behavior are too abundant to provide here. (Go find your own examples.) This does not mean that the overlap should be taken as constitutive of what it means to be a “human being.” It’s the difference that matters. My focus in this essay is on how the human can potentially “exceed” the animal to accede to something that can potentially be understood as “distinctly human.” This “excess” I currently refer to as “has values.”
Distinctly and Uniquely Human
Values, then. If a computer solves a complex mathematical equation and spits out a “value,” this does not mean that the machine has “values.” Machines don’t have values. If you put a marble on a track, and then watch it roll down the path, however complex the track may be, when the marble finally arrives at its predetermined end, are you going to claim it did so because it valued getting there? If there’s a “value” here, it has been built into the structure of the track. (And who is responsible for that?) The marble itself is simply subject to the force of gravity and to its placement on the track. It values nothing. And although for us, who watch the marble roll down the track, we explain why it does so and call these explanations “reasons,” the marble itself knows nothing of them. It will never know anything of them: it can neither evaluate nor alter its course as a result of evaluation. For the marble rolling down the track, there are neither reasons nor values.
Humans alone have values. Values may have apparent “causes,” “preconditions,” or “historical contexts,” but they have no reasons. I know that’s a broad and blanket statement, to which one might object by citing the many reasons why one does what one does, using words like “better,” “more productive” or even “more humane.” None of these words means anything in the absence of a pre-existing value structure. This becomes obvious when one observes that the word “better” in the minds of Aryan supremacists is a synonym for “worse” in the minds of many others. It’s the phenomenon of value (notions of good and evil, right and wrong, better or worse) that gives meaning to these words. What differentiates “better” from “worse” lies in the antecedent value structures of anyone who uses such words in a given context. It’s hard (likely impossible) to “get behind” these antecedent value structures to get a good look at them. How does one evaluate a value without first having criteria of evaluation? For better or worse, it seems we exist inescapably “in front” of our own values.
If you still believe, on the contrary, that your reasons are in fact reasons (and very good ones at that), take the time to ask yourself: Why? Because of… Then ask yourself why again. Because of… If you keep asking, I think you’ll eventually find that your reasons ultimately abut against a previously unacknowledged value–be it the most elementary value of self-preservation. “Self preservation” clearly does not allow us to distinguish between humans and animals. If I were to roughly sum up the “overlap” between human and animal motivations, the only “natural values” (oxymoron?) one can speak of are three: “continuance,” “avoidance of pain,” “pursuit of pleasure.” And even then, some humans pursue pain and eschew continuance. Go figure.
If we’re getting closer to a distinction between the animal and the human, without having yet found one, how far away are we from what one can easily refer to as a non-problematic human “reason”? And if one refuses to acknowledge that one’s reasons rest on three non-reasons (continuance, avoidance of pain, pursuit of pleasure), to what extent is this refusal simply a cover story for still more unacknowledged values? Take something as simple as: “I want this, and not that.” This clearly does not mark the presence of a reason, but it certainly marks the presence of a value. Leverage that value with power, and suddenly one arrives at something that seems to describe a great deal of human history understood as an exercise of force (“Westward Movement,” European colonialism, the creation of the State of Israel). How about “invasive species” taking over another animal’s or plant’s habitat? Ant wars? “Conquest” characterizes both animal and human behavior. It’s one of the “overlaps.” In the case of animals and plants, it’s just nature “doing its thing.” Although humans also “invade,” I’m not confident that this is just “humans doing their thing.” There are “values” mixed in there somewhere. For instance, once you’ve won your war of conquest, you then do something that animals in nature never do: you write the history of this conquest, at times in order to portray it as “glorious” and other flattering things. Animals in nature never do this. At other times, humans will portray their conquests in ways that make them seem morally right. (God will often step in to help here.) This selective re-telling of the past happens in part because one does not want to be guilty of anything. Rationalization? Denial? In any case, guilt itself is not possible with some underlying value that nature does not seem to possess. If I sail across the Atlantic with superior weapons (and a few invasive microbes) and then proceed to exterminate entire cultures in order to take the land for myself, there is potential for guilt which “nature” will never feel. Stories are needed because values are at play here. The ethos you perhaps want to avoid is that of “might makes right.” Although the rule of might does characterize much human and animal behavior, it isn’t very flattering in moral-ethical terms. The point is that humans care about the latter; animals do not. It is this preoccupation with the apparent “rightness” of one’s actions, of one’s “history” (both individually and as a culture) that differentiates us from animals. To be human is to have values.
Ethics
The points I’ve been lining up thus far add up to this: reasons, when examined recursively, seem to mutate into feelings, emotions, preferences or desires. To get there, it suffices to keep trying to define “better” until one goes a little crazy. The rabbit hole of human values goes down forever. Ethics is not the arrival at a definitive answer, for there is none. Just imagine if there were (42?), and we were to find it; what would we do then? Just…sort of…stop? Stop what? If there were an “absolute value,” the act itself of evaluation would become nothing more than a measurement of conformity. Worse even: “non-conformity” itself becomes unthinkable. To me, this is a world of machines, or a world of marbles rolling down their tracks. A mechanized world can be a very busy place (it is indeed a very busy place), but it doesn’t actually value very much in human terms. It just carries out its programming. And if, like in so many post-apocalyptic movies, it boils down to machine survival VS human survival, we’re back to “continuance”–which does not make the cut for a distinctly human value. In the world of the Terminator, the machines “want” to survive too. Though “want” when speaking about a machine is little more than a convenient misnomer.
Ethics is accepting to take the dive into the phenomenon of value, however dark and scary it may get, and then to keep going. Yeah, it can get a bit nauseating at times, and in matters of life and death, it’s probably not the right thing to do. (Kill or be killed?) However, it’s equally important to acknowledge that most of us spend very little, if any time at all on the frantic edge of life and death situations. Notions of fight or flight are not at stake here. (Although how some people drive in rush-hour traffic may make it seem that way.) This means there’s time to examine the values of what one too quickly glosses over as “normal” or “natural.” It is this ex-traction (this ex-valuation?) of values that I place at the center of ethics. Figuring out what’s “right” and what is “wrong” is what human being is about. It isn’t what animal being is about, but that’s exactly the point. Is there anything here that one can comfortably identify as “distinctly human”? Do animals re-write history? Do they judge or evaluate?
I cannot approach these questions from the perspective of an animal because I am not an animal. Given the spectacle that nature presents us with (opportunistic without conscience, unconcerned with the existence of any one individual), it doesn’t seem to “value” anything at all. The spider that eats the fly is nature. Nobody cares about the fly. Perhaps even the fly doesn’t care about the fly. I have never been a fly and cannot say. (Does a fly have a sense of self?) I am still going to claim, however, that this behavior is not to be taken as the model for behavior that is human. Humans can and do behave like animals, true enough; but they can and do also behave very differently. This “difference” is for me synonymous with the notion of “has value(s).” Human being is as far from nature as one can get, while still also being a part of the natural world.
Human Values, Group Values
If “human” means “to have values” then delegating ethical questions to institutions (church or state) or to allow large, impersonal forces (the market, social media) to dictate their terms in the resolution of difficult human questions is to take a first and very large step towards the de-humanization of the human. In such circumstances, it becomes difficult to take personal responsibility for any value. The individual is (potentially) in perpetual conflict with “the state,” or “God” or “the anonymous mob.” This latter is particularly troublesome. The power of “mass communication” is today more than ever a structural component of modern culture. The “mob” is everybody and nobody in particular. The market, social media, the internet…These structures will tend to promote their “values” in the individual’s place by virtue of what they make and don’t make possible. And they do this according to their own structurally leveraged logic–like the track on which the marble must roll because there is no other option. Do social media aficionados not see the inanity of reducing “evaluation” to the “likes” or “not likes” of social media posts? (There really ought to be a “Don’t give a shit” option, which might at least prod users into asking themselves: “Just what the hell am I doing here? Especially if ‘I don’t give a shit’?” If you’re okay with and contribute to this degree of evaluative over-simplification (TLDR), I can’t force you to do any better (no matter how generally harmful the practice may be). At which point the marble, rolling blissfully (or tortuously) down the track exculpates itself of personal responsibility by pointing to the track and claiming: “See! It’s only natural!” Or effacing its own individuality behind that of the mob: “Any other marble on this track would do the same! See how many Likes it has!” In the minds of many, this “abundance of likes” somehow makes what marbles do inherently “right.” After all, we do live in a “democracy,” no? What they forget to ask is simply this: “Who is responsible for the track I’m on; what ‘values’ have been built into this track, and what is the track itself doing to me?”
Lastly, some will argue that taking personal responsibility for ethical human being is asking way too much of people in general. It is demonstrably the case that to do so is actively discouraged or even maligned as a “waste of time.” (“We’re not going to talk about God again, are we?”) Taking responsibility is certainly not very financially rewarding. Ethical thinking is doubly discouraged when we have “self-preservation” (nature, again) conveniently at hand to put an end to this interminable pursuit of the right thing to do: “It’s quite simple really: It’s all about competition for finite resources.” To this grossly unreflective conflation of the human and the animal, I’d like to respond: “Precisely!” (That’s sarcasm, in case you missed it); to which I will append a rather childish: “But dad, I thought we were more than just animals?“
A Silly Allegory
A scarcity of lifeboats on a sinking ship is going to bring out the “best” and the “worst” in us. This is a conundrum for which there is a low probability of finding a universally satisfactory solution. Here are some options.
There’s the “dog eat dog” approach (competition for finite resources): those capable of clawing, bribing or seducing their way to a lifeboat will survive. One must ask in this instance who, or rather “what” gets saved here? The human or the animal? Survival of the fittest, though perhaps viable in evolutionary terms (over tens of thousands of years), doesn’t put much stake in the value of any one individual life: not yours, not mine, not anybody’s. Nature is in it for the species. From a human perspective, this can only be seen as hypocritical in the extreme: if you value your life, or even your “way of life,” should you not extend the same prerogative to others as well? “Yes,” is what most of us say with our mouths, but it isn’t always what we do with our hands, even in everyday situations. If we sacrifice “one” for the good of others, does this not lessen the humanity of all? You yourself might easily be next. I don’t see much humanity going on in that.
Alternatively, there will be those who give up their place on the lifeboats. Why they do this will depend on the individual, but I’m guessing it will be out of values such as self-sacrifice, compassion, love for one’s children (“You go. I’ll stay.”), or perhaps even to spare oneself the shame of depriving another human being of a right to live. In this case, the best of us will probably die. My use of the word “best” points in the direction of the values I tend to espouse. You are free to disagree, but human history–not animal history–is replete with examples of such sacrifices. For these men and women, I have great admiration (which, I remind you, is a feeling, not a reason). They have set the bar pretty high. In this instance (as opposed to the “dog eat dog” solution), one can hope that the survivors carry with them a memory of those who stayed behind (Survivor’s guilt?). This memory may serve as a humanizing force for future generations. Then again, perhaps not (“Suckers!”).
Lastly, we can all go nobly down with the ship (the flip-side of an impossible: “Nobody is left behind!”). In this case, everybody is left behind and none of it matters. There are no survivors, no self-serving assholes but no human beings either. The human-animal and the human-human are both dead. Everybody dies and it’s, “¡Adios amigos!” for all time.
Somewhere among these three options lie lots, lotteries, coin flips, draw straws, random chance, voting and other strategies that fill in a range of possible outcomes. If it’s natural to want to survive (“continuance”), it is in the way we choose to actualize this inexplicable urge that separates the human from the animal. Self sacrifice, when one has the option to self-preserve, seems to approach something that is distinctly human. Not greed nor “competition for finite resources,” not continuance, not flight from pain or pursuit of pleasure; all of these we share with animals. They are all part of being human, but they do not seem to qualify as distinctly human.
Getting back to the Titanic, I don’t know what the ideal outcome in moral-ethical terms is, but I do know we have choices, and I know how I feel about those choices. Asshole or human being? It’s all relative, of course: there are few total assholes or total humans. Each of us chooses, then lives (or dies) with that choice. In keeping with the “everyday life” perspective I have adopted for this essay, I think it’s fair to state that most everyday life situations are not as dramatic as an unsinkable ship going down in frigid waters. This makes our choices easier because it costs a lot less to not be an asshole, and you’re not going to pay for being human with your life or livelihood.
If there is hypocrisy here in everyday life, it isn’t in the fact of manifesting the values that you have. You have the values that you have, period. The hypocrisy lies in pointing to “reasons” (which are actually more values), or to something other than oneself (“God?”) for justification: “It’s only natural,” or worse, “Everybody else is doing it!” We are, each and every one of us, responsible for what a space-faring ethnographer will write under the entry: “Human Beings” (Planet Earth: to be avoided at all costs?) Human “nature”–which by the way does not exist–is abundantly productive of self-selected assholes and self-selected human beings in both small and large ways. In the end, we are responsible for our natures. Nobody and no “thing” else.
I’m not denying that “the animal” is a part of what we are. It clearly is, and there are times when that part of us may be the “right” or dare-I-say the “pleasurable” thing to be. How this plays itself out “in the bedroom” is nobody’s business but your own. In the community at large, however, it is everybody’s business. We distinguish ourselves as human by having human values. Taking personal responsibility for those values is what keeps us human: “No, son. We are not all just animals.”
Thédoc
