May 30, 2008

Dear Colleague:  

    What is a human being? "A naked and forked animal" is one definition. Another is, "A machine for converting the fine wine of Shiraz into urine." There are countless other similar definitions that recognize, one way or another, our utter insignificance. What does society owe a human being? What should it do to keep one alive? In the sixteenth century, the Church placed the upper limit at partridge's eggs. If you needed them to stay alive, sorry, society couldn't afford the extravagance. In our time, of course, the upper limit has gone way beyond partridge's eggs. What is our upper limit? What expenditure is justified to keep a human being alive? The answer depends on the wealth of the society and on the value society places on a human individual, and that gets us back to the question, "What is man that Thou shouldst be mindful of him?"

    In the West, there are two positive answers, one humanist, the other religious, although it has to be understood that the humanist's answer is thoroughly infiltrated by the religious. As modern humanists, I offer you George Orwell and Arthur Miller. Orwell has given us the dystopian novel, 1984, in which the world was taken over by a totalitarian, perfectionist regime. Perfectionism, Orwell took for granted, inevitably led to totalitarianism. Both are the works of pure minds, and mind is essentially anti-life. So, to counter the anti-life dystopia, Orwell provides us with the image of a woman who "had no mind, she had only strong arms, a warm heart, and a fertile belly. [She] might easily have given birth to fifteen children. She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wild rose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, darning, cooking, sweeping, polishing, mending, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty unbroken years. At the end of it she was still singing." Arthur Miller's hero is a failed salesman. Linda said to her son Biff: "I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person" (Death of a Salesman).

    The elite of society—elite in intelligence, money, and culture—would be tempted to turn up their noses at Orwell's woman and Miller's man. If so, they clearly have forgotten or disowned their religious heritage, which sees every human as cast in the divine image and claims, in the eloquent words of C. S. Lewis, "It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you see it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare." And what weight—and privilege—to know that, "All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelmingly possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics" (Weight of Glory).

    So, dear reader, pay attention—pay respect (the word means "see again")—it is what we owe the mindless woman and the failed salesman, who, after all, are us. Just look into the mirror!

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu