January 23, 2007

Dear Colleague:

    Every year, some 50 million people die. True, many more are born in the same period, but that somehow doesn't make the 50 million dead any less mind-numbing. In the face of so many humans passing in and out of the world, like cattle driven in and out of the corral, one horde on its way to slaughter, another horde quickly replacing it, I can't see how we can maintain the belief that humans are valuable, each one unique and irreplaceable. As a matter of fact, through much of history, ordinary people were not considered either unique or irreplaceable by their superiors. God himself set an example when, dissatisfied with the creatures he made, he simply wiped them out, like an inexperienced author throwing out his first draft. Other Bible stories tell of how God urged the Israelites to destroy their enemies--all of them, men, women, and children.That was pretty terrible, but at least God had the excuse of rage. And so, to me, even more sinister than the order for mass killing was the ease—the nonchalance—with which God, to test Job, took away his children, and then, when in a better mood, gave him another batch, as though he were a cook who offered his unhappy client replacement of day-old loaves with fresh ones from the oven.

    Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century believed in equality. But equality, to them, was confined to the franchised. And who were the franchised? They were those capable of rational reasoning, those who could abandon the superstitions of childhood for the austere exercises of the mind. Outgrowing childhood, outgrowing the petty urgencies of the flesh, outgrowing even the innocent pleasures of the senses, were key to progress and spiritual elevation. The program for spiritual/intellectual elevation inevitably left behind those still enslaved by the body—laborers and the poor. Remember Talleyrand who snobbishly said, "As for living, our servants will do it for us"? What's the big deal about mere living and survival? All animals strive to live and survive. Enlightenment thinkers wanted more; they wanted to be free spirits. And, yes, they also wanted survival. However, for them, survival was immortality; either that, or it was meaningless. And so, surprisingly, for all the vaunted rationality of Enlightenment thinkers, most of them—including the great Kant—believed in a life beyond death.

    In our time, eighteenth-century Enlightenment has fallen into disfavor, and the reason is precisely because it, although it talked a good talk about equality, really accepted inequality (think of America's Founding Fathers). Equality is more seriously pursued by thinkers in our own time. They attempt to include an ever larger population into an ideal world of equality, not just through the device of a legal fiction but actually, by doing three things: upgrading the body with the help of popular culture; downgrading the mind with the help of post-modernism; and renouncing, once for all, immortality, which, by its nature, is selective. While these steps move forward, equality as replaceability is more than ever a threat to an individual's sense of worth. Large numbers—the fact, for example, that I am just one of 50 million who will die this year—do make me feel equal, but also valueless, perfectly replaceable biological flotsam—or, to use a prettier word, star dust.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu