Human Worth and Human Survival

(Also, love your pets but love people more...)

Once upon a time, many years ago, I wrote a column about how are pets may be lovable but just aren’t people and mustn’t be treated as such. Now, in all of the nearly 30 years that I have been a writer, I think that was the most hate-mail I received. I recall one particularly angry woman who loved her animals and assured me that she knew where I lived. I suppose she planned to send attack cats…

(If you’re interested here’s the link where it still lives on my blog: https://edwinleap.com/animals-are-wonderful-but-they-just-arent-people/)

Jan and I have animals and our kids have (and had) animals. We have taken in creatures, raised them, loved them, mourned and buried them over the years. I have so many fond memories of our assorted critters. I also have some particular things to say about finding and digging the right animal grave. (I’ll save that for later.)

I do understand that pets have enormous value to their humans. They are helpers, they alleviate loneliness, they are a form of therapy, they entertain. Our dogs kept the yard free of coyotes, wild hogs and rattlenakes. I get it.

In fact, I think we all get it now. If you didn’t get it, all you had to do a few years ago was watch that animal adoption commercial with Sarah McLachlan singing ‘Arms of an Angel’ to see probably some of the most pitiful creatures on earth, expertly presented to tug at your heart strings and credit cards.

My great-grandfather was an honest to goodness, old school teamster who built roads in West Virginia with mule-drawn heavy equipment. My grandfather told me that when one of his dad’s treasured gray mules was near its end, he always paid a veterinarian to put it down. He never killed them himself but wanted their deaths to be peaceful.

The funny thing about our love of our beasts is that in the process of loving them we seem to have somehow decided that they deserve a bit more compassion than humans. It’s not really surprising I suppose. Creatures often seem so helpless and sweet. (Until they aren’t; I started to post a horrible cat-bite photo but thought it would be too disturbing.)

Or maybe we just love animals so much because we’ve been told for about 50 years that unlike our pets, humans are a virus on the planet and that we need to decrease the population in order to survive. A thing we have done with dangerous, likely devastating success.

Intentionally or not we taught several generations of young people that having children of their own will short-circuit careers, shackle them to home and cost them money that could be far better used for travel and brunches. (Even as they become shackled to high maintenance pets which, while not as costly as small humans, can consume a fair amount of money.)

While we love our animals more and more, our distaste for humans seems to have grown. Admittedly, dismissive attitudes towards human life are not at all new. The history of the world is one of brutal wars, enslaved peoples, intentional famine, and genocide.

Lately our attitude towards other humans may well be due to our steady march back to tribalism, whether political, cultural, sexual, racial or religious. This gives us the dark, self-indulgent luxury to abandon centuries of progress so that we can learn, yet again, to hate people different from us and assign their lives lesser value.

As if we needed to learn…

Modern life leaves also us rather numb to killing and death. You’d think that our ability to watch violent crime and natural disaster real-time would shock but I think that media and the Internet have made such horrors seem like so much wallpaper, or a background soundtrack.

For instance, while we know that war is sometimes necessary, it is an awful feature of the modern era which we celebrate and embrace far too passionately. It now has a kind of video game quality, as we sit on safe couches and watch tanks and aircraft, ships and buildings explode on distant battlefields or seas, heedless of the fact that inside them, human beings suffered, died and never went home to their families again. Moved by military cemeteries we now seem callously unmoved by witnessing actual death.

In another spin on death, assisted suicide is increasingly available, not only to those with intractable suffering but to those with mental illness. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64004329

Or perhaps homelessness: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/canada-maid-assisted-suicide-homeless (That wasn’t on my 21st century Bingo card but there you are…)

Further, that old monster, slavery is alive and well. There are reportedly more slaves worldwide today, and they cost less per slave than at any point in history. Slavery, on the ‘wrong side of history,’ continues to grow apace.

When we talk about threats to our survival as a species, climate change and its implication seem near the top of the news cycle. What this has often meant is ‘we’ve got to do something about all of these human beings!’ (Although lately we’ve also begun to think again about the ravages of nuclear war, and not without reason.)

We speak as if survival really does matter. Then we forget that human survival requires that we actually cherish and defend humans. We must also come to see humans as essential to the solutions of our problems, not merely as their cause.

I think that we fail to see that humans are not only important, but necessary. And I don’t mean simply that we need people to do jobs, or that only people can make other people. I mean that our very future as a species, perhaps the very future of the natural world, depends far more on what living humans are and can do than on reducing the ‘impact’ of humans on earth.

The thing I keep considering is that as much as we love our cats, dogs, llamas or snakes, none of them will advance the quality of life on earth beyond the families with whom they live (not insignificant, I know, and yet…).

Oh, sure, in a few gazillion years maybe their progeny will create a new and incredible civilization. But for now we tend to neuter them. And in the interim, they’ll just keep standing by the food bowl meowing, barking, hissing or whatever they do instead of working out advanced mathematics and curing diseases.

But in every living human there is something incredible. And there is the potential for life and world changing greatness. To quote one of my very favorite writers, G.K Chesterton:

‘Each time a baby is born, it is as if a whole new world has been created, because the world is being seen for the first time by a new soul as if it were the first day of creation; inside that little head, there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.’

Photo by Jill Sauve on Unsplash

What does each child offer? What do they bring to the table?

It may be the unimaginably important power to bear and raise a new generation in stability and love, providing the foundation, the ‘glue’ for civilization. Stable families solve far more of our societal problems than we freely admit. https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-two-parent-advantage

What else does each human life stand to offer? Well it may be the genius that creates an unforeseen source of energy or travel. The unexpected insight that preserves or speaks with another species, or saves the natural world from our exuberance. It may be the capacity to create far better, safer food; or end diseases we thought would be with us forever. It may be the kindness that eases the suffering of thousands so that they, too, do the same and make room for peace instead of conflict.

Furthermore, and I believe this wholeheartedly, it may be that even in the most apparently damaged humans, broken from birth or by illness or injury, there lies something we cannot yet fathom because we cannot see it or hear it.

I think sometimes that their uncommunicative minds may well be incubators of thoughts and dreams that spill over to others through the ether. Or via RNA, or quantum coupling or pheromones. Or via their prayers. Who can say? Perhaps angels dwell by their side and take their ideas to those who can implement them.

We speak of their poor quality of life and yet we have no way to know what mysteries transpire within them as we treat their bed-sores and clean them to provide some dignity.

(If you think I’m crazy, consider that trees speak to one another through underground fungi and spiders use their webs as extensions of their brains; whales live hundreds of years and coral thousands; the human brain can recover from significant insult due to its ‘plasticity.’ The bacteria in our intestines help determine our mental health. It seems life is vastly more complex than we could hope to imagine.)

Photo by Torbjørn Helgesen on Unsplash

If nothing else, the shattered and incapacitated teach us kindness and compassion. Bereft of the weak and sick we would be a cruel people who tolerated only strength and beauty. This is an essential, sacrificial gift they provide. (And yet one more danger of euthanasia.)

Apparently our Neanderthal ancestors understood the value of the sick and injured. https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/06/17/878896381/ancient-bones-offer-clues-to-how-long-ago-humans-cared-for-the-vulnerable Even ‘cave-men’ cared for the vulnerable to their credit.

When we see humans as uninteresting or unimportant, as problems, as cosmic infections, or as simply one more species that comes and goes, I think we miss the point.

We are more important than we ever believed, and maybe more so than we dare believe. Because to do so would require us to address all of the hatred and cruelty and murder that we so easily imbibe and perform.

This is why we should approach the loss of any human life with trepidation. Whether in war or famine, pandemic or crime, starvation, abortion or assisted suicide.

We simply aren’t capable of fully understanding how remarkable, how charged with possibility and potential, each of those lives are. Especially living as we generally do for merely 70 years or so out of billions, on the edge of a galaxy that is as far as we know empty of life…except for ours.

So love your animals, care for them (they too are miraculous in their own ways). And be concerned about survival. The future is not guaranteed and the times are troubled.

But remember that our hopes and dreams for the future can only be born from the humans we take for granted all around us. That’s worth remembering.

Now go feed the cat. He’s starving.

Photo by Artur Kornakov on Unsplash