The Value of Human Life

We, collectively, have blogged on the impact of culture on perspective and perception. We have explored the up and downstream effects of intercultural transaction, the formation of new cultures (of the diaspora, e.g.), and the impact of these overlays on the individuals caught within them. We do this for the same reasons a madman studies psychology. My own child is transracial, transcultural. When I sit with my grandchildren and pass on to them the great stories of mankind will we be drinking in an Appalachian breeze or being serenaded by the seabirds of the Gulf of Guinea? Yet to be seen.

As I get older, I value my life more. I enjoy both the tactile and the preternatural. I see in others the potential to experience the same depth of satisfaction that I do. I paint them (you) with not my expectations but rather my hopes. I take solace in the belief that at our core we are same bundles of firing neurons able to experience the same things. Any one of us could be the Buddha, we could all be the Buddha.

Rather than "othering" I find it more comforting to "self", which is, I think, to a great degree the point of this blog as a whole. (Crap. Now what will we talk about?)

But here is the thing that makes the me of now shudder- if we could all be the Buddha, then could we all not also be demonic, pursuing with all spiritual and intellectual rigor all of the basest, darkest facets of our humanity? Can we not see this played out time and time again, even in this contemporary age of potential enlightenment? The genocide in Darfur continues. Poverty and disease are allowed to procreate in the land of humanity's birth while the wealthy burn up the very life of the planet. Powerful nations still wield their unilateral might in a manner that would make Niccolo Machiavelli proud.

I have tried to understand how this can be made possible in the mind of an individual. I have considered an individual given the command to kill another person justifying the act by saying that there was no alternative to obedience. That argument is the conscious or unconscious devaluation of human life to less than worthless, to harmful if allowed to persist. I can't get my head around it.

In my youth I was privileged with the opportunity to travel in the rural northern regions of Ghana by tro-tro and on foot. I had a magnificent time laughing with the different peoples I met there, marveling at their tenacity and generative capacity to pursue life through their relationship with the earth, admiring the beauty of the water carriers silhouetted against the setting Sahelian sun. If anyone could love and appreciate life, I thought, then it must be these people who often lose it to the capriciousness of nature. I left the flat shimmering heat and went back to the hissing, steaming forest with the impression that cooperation, hard work, and a collective good attitude could overcome any adversity.

How horrified I was only months later to learn of the brutality and ruthlessness of the war. A good friend of mine, the "hippie from Mississippi" was unfortunate enough to be in his posted village when it was razed to the ground. Though he didn't talk about it for a long time he eventually related the butchery of all of the males and the taking of the young females for the slave trade in the Sahara. We let him talk because we knew it was therapeutic for him, but my stomach turned over and over as he went on. At this time I was not naive; I had seen corpses dealt a violent death at the hands of others. What upset me greatly, I think, was that I had come to the conclusion that these people were the salt of the earth. I was completely unable to detect the capacity for such inhumanity during my visit. I was, and to some degree still am, aghast.

I see in everyone I meet the capacity to realize the pinnacle of human consciousness and existence and I recognize in myself the possibility of falling short of my potential. What would happen if each of us, as individuals, did the same?