![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
The Value of Life
Still really digging these conversations we’ve been having about the end of the world here lately. Another good comment was left by Jacob:
A crash of civilization would probably save a lot more life in the long run. Not just human, of course. Any ways, people who are really fighting the apocalypse mentality seem to be thinking in solely a winner/loser script.
Also: how deeply are we going to identify ourselves with civilization? Is it right that we necessarily feel endangered, when it’s endangered? How much of our being is contingent on it?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: this idea of the value of life being used in arguments like this. What exactly is the value of life? How do we measure it? There’s no objective way to do so. All we can do is blindly cling to the idea that life is better than death, simply because we believe ourselves to be alive (are we though?). We attach to the idea of “life” that it is more natural or sacred. But if we look around at the natural world, it is simply teeming with death. In fact, we could rightly argue that is actually more natural than life because at any given moment the ratio of things that are dead to things that are alive is astronomically high. Way more things are dead. Life may actually be an anomaly.
Or else, we are just thinking about things wrong. And it wouldn’t be the first time we have done that.
So let’s unpack Jacob’s argument again: “A crash of civilization would probably save a lot more life in the long run. Not just human, of course.” In what way would a crash of civilization save life? The uber-liberal argument would most likely be that civilization equals empire, and empire is responsible for spreading death across the earth. But it is not. Death (or nature, if you want) is responsible for death. Death is more natural than life - if only because quantitatively, there is more death than life. Death is also guaranteed for all things that are alive. Life, on the other hand, is not guaranteed for all things that are dead.
So does that mean then that life is precious simply because it’s scarce, fragile, and dare we say - unnatural?
People will die with or without civilization. Civilization does not cause death. Unless you want to argue that civilization enables people to reproduce in greater numbers. In which case, you could say that civilization causes greater numbers of people to die, but then you would also have to admit that it also causes greater numbers of people to be born. In fact, it “causes” the exact same number of deaths as it does births. Thus from a life versus death perspective, it is perfectly and utterly neutral. It leaves the balance sheet completely untroubled. Everything is accounted for.
So why would a crash of civilization save lives? It might prevent people from being born in greater numbers. But that is not saving lives, that is actually preventing lives. Isn’t it?
I realize I haven’t touched on the quality of life issue though: the one in which certain people will argue that a life lived under civilization is worse than one lived outside of it. But is it really better to “go native”? In certain ways we could argue that it is. But in other, just as valid ways, we could argue for certain benefits of modern civilization as well. Jacob, I think, rightly asks us how deeply we should identify ourselves with civilization, with the situation in which we find ourselves in modernity. What’s the answer? If we believe (erroneously, I think) that civilization causes death, and we believe that we ourselves stand for life, then it’s little wonder that we would deny our involvement in civilization. But if we look deeply at the issues of life and death and how they play out in the world, I believe we’ll see that it’s nowhere near so black and white as that.
That doesn’t yet answer, of course, what we ought to do with our lives though. It doesn’t tell us if we need to take a stand against death, or if it’s in fact even remotely natural to try to do so. Nor does it tell us how to decide if one person’s life today is or greater or lesser value to another person’s life a hundred years from now, possibly living under vastly different circumstances…
September 10th, 2006 at 7:32 pm
Who cares how many people would live if civilization crashed? They’d all wish they were dead.
September 10th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
So let’s unpack Jacob’s argument again: “A crash of civilization would probably save a lot more life in the long run. Not just human, of course.” In what way would a crash of civilization save life?
I’ve racked my mind on this one for some time, and the idea that I’ve arrived at is, a crash of civilization, depending on how it plays out, could very well be the absolute worst enactment, if one values life. If civilization crashed, wouldn’t that increase the odds that more destructive wars could break out, and dictators set up in order to “motivate” people back into erecting civilization again. Under this dictatorship, would we be using even more polluting energy, over-exploiting more resources, causing more denuded landscape, thus increasing the fragility of life?
However, equally true, if civilization continues, life, at least on this physical plane of existence, could be radically altered. Global climate change, of course, would probably be at the top of the list. However, stepping back even more, …even if civilization somehow manages to become a completely sustainable closed-loop manifestation, …there’s always the chance that the continuation of our species could lead to catastrophic collapses for the earth, or even the universe. What would happen if we’re in the lab monkeying around with the smallest bits of quantum matter itself, and we all of a sudden stumbled into a situation where we’ve created a self-replicating, nearly indestructible, material goo. Because, in fact, the human race is actually trying to create this, in case you didn’t know
IE: …biomimicry &/or nanotechnology leading to self-replicators converting all carbon matter into self-replicating goo; with the “intention” that the goo could be used to print matter itself as if physical reality was the ink… Which could be much much much worse than the crash of civilization ever could be, …that would have made that potential possible.
Self-replicating goo, in which keeps expanding & expanding, eventually blanketing the entire earth and continuing on into outer-space, where it rapidly begins to multiple itself until it fills up the entire observable universe… Or what if one of these times in the particle accelerators, we smash the wrong things together and create a black hole, which then wipes the planet out of material existence in a flash instant… or what if we build time machines, like Doctor Who; go back in time to monkeywrench a single event thus obliterating an entire history out of existence. I could go on listing more & more, but this should be enough for anyone to scare themselves: http://www.exitmundi.nl
However, if civilization collapsed, and dictators erected, and the fragility of life was enhanced with more denuded landscapes, propelled by the dictatorship itself; …how would free energy technologies, such as Steorn’s potential magnetic energy invention, flourish? Steorn placed an advertisement in The Economist (IE: Dead flattened trees) …. (IE: within civilization) …. (IE: could that’ve happened in a dictatorship?)
I’d postulate that it’s impossible to judge wether or not the immediate collapse of civilization would be beneficial to the long-term sustainability of life, because there are way too many factors at play. Anyone who says differently is either lying to themselves, or are actually psychics able to read the future. Though, psychic readings of the future may well be psychokinetics masquerading as future predictions (IE: the belief in a particular future could be feeding/propelling it into existence).
http://www.steorn.net
http://www.steornwatch.com
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8567528697573826342
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/story/0,,1858134,00.html
As for free-energy nay-sayers; as a philosopher, I never did understand the so-called limitations of “free energy.” Physics’ most basic law, the principle of conservation of energy, that says “~energy can be neither created nor destroyed, it can only be converted from one form into another,” doesn’t have to be violated in order to get free energy.
I can prove this with one extremely simple experiment… Jump up and down… where does the energy of the impact go? Yes, silly, but we need to consume food, in order to live, in order to jump up and down. However, there’s this stupid assumption that many physicists hold for some reason, that the earth has no freely available energy… Isn’t the earth awash in gravity as it spins ~65,000 mph, within a galaxy that’s spinning ~489,600 mph. Didn’t some of the earliest “free energy” systems that were developed use waterfalls (water which uses gravity, which hits an object to make it move). The energy isn’t being created from nothing, but it is creating “free energy,” by utilizing gravity that otherwise would not be utilized… So too can pressurized dynamo floors be used to capture unutilized energy from our footsteps hitting the ground, propelled by gravity, in busy cities; or anywhere… So too we can capture still more energy from various other energetic forces, like magnetics going about it’s magnetic day to day fluctuating interactions with it’s surroundings, while using gravity.
and just think, that’s not even getting into the undetectible energy that supposedly makes up over 80% of the universe that is wrapped up into one gigantically vague term, “Dark Matter,” which supposedly needs to be in existence in order for gravity to work at all… As a philosopher, if I were a physicist, I wouldn’t understand how I could be so sure of the theoretical idea that free energy is impossible, especially without having done any scientifically rigorous experiments to prove such a concept…
September 10th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
Wow. I have a lot of catching up to do here. Good stuff.
September 10th, 2006 at 11:58 pm
Given the fundamental inconsistency of eternal growth and finite resources, and that having a civilization without growth is a problem that appears to be insoluable, the collapse of civilization seems to be an inevitability. by postponing this collapse you only increase our population overshoot which means the correction will also overshoot by a greater amount. In addition the damage to the biosphere will be increased. therefore by “fighting the apocalypse” we may in fact increase the ultimate carnage.
On the other hand by acquiescing to the collapse we all but eliminate the possibility of the miracle solution.
As to the question of the value of life you seem to be attempting to find some objective platform from which to judge it and have chosen a characteristic of (imho) rather dubious relevance: their relative abundance. as I lean toward a more relativist perspective I would suggest that no such objective perspective exists but that life increases the chaos in the universe and that makes my life more interesting. I value life, I don’t care whether the universe does or not.
September 11th, 2006 at 12:29 am
Yeah, just like all those who lived before civilisation. And every other living creature. They all wish they were dead. Like those poor wretched dolphins, with no economy to speak of, doing whatever they want. I don’t know why they keep breathing.
Quality of life is subjective.
The psychological glue of civilization is nothing more than Stockholm Syndrome.
September 11th, 2006 at 5:50 am
This isn’t the law that is violated by free energy. It’s the second law of thermodynamics. The issue isn’t creation/destruction of energy. It’s the creation of usable energy that’s the problem. Energy is only useful to a given end if it’s organized in some way. Disorganized energy is useless to us. It takes energy to organize energy.
We usually “use” energy in its mechanical form, obtained from electromagnetic energy. Mechanical energy is lost (i.e. converted to unusable heat) through friction. Most generators involve mechanical energy. I think the newer “free energy” ideas involve using generators that are almost purely electromagnetic (in a way that I don’t really understand) so that no energy is lost through friction.
By the way, just because something is moving doesn’t mean it has “energy”. Energy is defined as relative velocity (sort of). So energy is used or gained when you change the velocity of something.
On the issue of life: life is a boundary state between states that represent death. Life is homeostasis, an extremely fine balance between competing systems, any one of which would “kill” the body if allowed to dominate. In my view, civilization (in its current form) is a system that has come to dominate the larger “body” and now threatens to destabilize the homeostasis of the planet’s ecology. We may find a way to a different homeostatic state where human culture is once again in balance with its environment, but we’re not in it now.
I agree that if civilization crashed (at least right now) the ensuing chaos would engulf the world, spreading misery and destruction far and wide. So I’m not really looking forward to a civilization-destroying apocalypse. But the alternatives (fascist, genocidal “management” of the earth and its organisms) don’t look so great either. What to do?
September 11th, 2006 at 10:56 am
Tim I think you’ve got a chicken vs. egg thing going. Nothing which is dead could be so unless it was first alive. Life IS(was) guaranteed for the dead, being a preexisting requirement for death. Perhaps Life IS “more natural” since life replicates. Can death replicate? No. Score 1 for Life.
Both share common underlying pinnings of existence vs. non-existence. Does non-existence = death? Who knows (but I doubt it)? Perhaps Death has the upper hand since while death = absence of physical life, the reverse is not true. Death is present amid life. Score 1 for Death. Tie game…
But on to the crash of civilization … same thing. Does Civilization equate with polluting, industrialized corporate-run global destruction? Yes and no.
Would humans benefit from all the captains of capitalistic civilized industry suddenly going away? Perhaps the jihadist muslims would!
I figure, like death vs life, that civilized suffering vs. non-suffering is a wash. Does the individual benefit more by being a part of, or not part of, human culture/society/civilization?
I dont think there’s an answer. Unless it’s for sale…
September 11th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
I’m not in favour of civilisation. Primitive societies, ancient and modern, seem more in harmony with Nature than civilisation: “an advanced state of human society, in which a high level of culture, science, industry, and government has been reached.”
The “saving of life” argument arises from civilisation’s distorted objectives. Technologists and scientists will always seek ways to justify their vocations. They do what they do because governments or capitalism finance them to do so. “Quality of life” arguments are a by-product of the distortions generated by science and technology.
As I write this comment, my wife is watching a TV programme about a child born without and immune system who is being raised in a “bubble” so that he cannot get infections. Lots of pundits and people emotionally attached to this child argued one way or another. I made one brief comment when the programme started: “This is a rich people’s dilemma”. I meant that in any primitive society the child would die early and that would be that.
Without any proof, I tend to feel that civilisation robs those who live outside of civilisation. Of course I am within that boundary looking out. I don’t have a romantic idea of “going native” nor do I think that any primitive societies past or present provide complete role models worth imitating. I just feel that we need to get more in touch with human nature at its best, which is not fostered systematically within civilisation. there are a few pockets of exceptions. I just visited my grandchild whose parents are educating him at a Rudolf Steiner school. I was impressed by it.
September 11th, 2006 at 11:06 pm
But don’t you hear when you say it just how inhuman that kind of thinking is? Do you want your individual life to be judged by such a method of thinking?
And now THAT is a human value! And that’s precisely the door I was wanting to wedge open with my arguments. We have to make a stand somewhere and it seems to me that it ought to be on human values. Which I realize is a tremendously broad statement, right?
September 11th, 2006 at 11:08 pm
Also, Jake:
What if we don’t accept that as a “given”? What if we accept that for what it is: a hypothesis which correlates to certain perceived patterns in the observable world. From these patterns many different intepretations are possible.
September 11th, 2006 at 11:10 pm
GOOD! Thats the kind of attitude I want to hear!
Why not? What’s your evidence? How do we know that what we’re doing, what seems to us like chaos and turmoil isn’t part of nature’s plan? James Lovelock said that we are the nervous system of Gaia or something similar. Why can’t we trust Gaia to use us wisely? Not trusting ourselves is in essence not trusting the planet or the God which spawned us!
September 11th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
Well, of course! It’s called a conversation starter. I’m trying to reframe familiar concepts so that they introduce elements foreign to our thinking in order to allow us to see now possibilities and solutions.
September 11th, 2006 at 11:20 pm
Why only “seem”? What does it mean to be in harmony with nature? What is Nature? What are we?
See this older conversation:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/07/22/is-humanity-unnatural/
Some would argue I think that civilization IS human nature. Seriously though, what is civilization except the careful fostering and management of human nature into acceptable channels. Civilization may just be catching wind in windmills, if you catch my drift!
I have a tentative analogy to share based on some gardening research I have been doing. They talk in certain books about how you need to bring in outside fertilizer, because your garden can’t realistically sustain itself. By that I think they specifically mean if you plant lots of crops and harvest them, you remove with the crops the nutrients they pulled from the soil. But they aren’t very clear on whether you couldnt feasibly strike a balance where you only remove some of the crops and leave or compost the rest. It cuts to the heart of whether or not value is always removed from the system regardless. It may just be a faulty understanding though
September 12th, 2006 at 1:07 am
Thanks Tim for the reference to the older conversation, which is of course a dead one now. I have a href=http://perpetual-lab.blogspot.com/2006/09/knowledge.html”>started one here on certain defining characteristics of civilisation. It is not quite the same conversation but may throw some light on the topic of the actual dominant civilisation that we have versus alternatives that it has cast out on to slag-heaps.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of advanced civilisation is what it throws out to keep its garden neat?
September 12th, 2006 at 1:10 am
No I don’t think civilisation is catching wind in windmills. It is certainly not the imprint of human nature on the world. Civilisation is the effect of power and empire.
September 12th, 2006 at 12:46 pm
we aren`t in harmony with nature……..we are part of nature. nature flows. all things must pass.