“What are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them?” (Psalm 8:4 NLT)
“Look around and be distressed. Look inside and be depressed.” (Corrie Ten Boom)
“Existing, if this is to be understood as just any sort of existing, cannot be done without passion.” (Soren Kierkegaard)
“All you need is love.” (The Beatles)
We all assume, every moment of everyday, that the fragile, invisible ghost called “value” really exists. Even the depressing philosophers who claim it doesn’t betray themselves by their outrage at its absence! It is the unseen gravity of purpose and worth that holds our souls together. Its existence is most necessary and it is impossible to escape. Try to imagine what your world would look like without any concept of “worth” (value, usefulness, purpose, necessity, etc.). Imagine yourself and everyone you know and everything around you completely valueless and equal in this one-dimensional vacuum of estimation where there can be no difference between an empty potato chip bag and your mother. Now, how did I know you would have to work to even try imagining such a scenario? But this really is the world we live in if there is no God.
Value is a tricky word because it is used to communicate extremely different, and even contradictory, concepts. The line between intrinsic value (the value of something in itself and for itself) and extrinsic value (the value of something relative to how much good we can get out of it) gets blurred as we look at them through our culture’s relativistic lenses. Without the dignity of a meaningful and purposeful existence, intrinsic value becomes entirely subjective. For us that means our individual values as people only exist in us and in others as we provide positive effects in these subjective realities. One thousand years from now, when we and everyone we know is dead, we will be worthless. This worthlessness existed in eternity past before we were born and it will never end as the universe slowly expands and dies and eons pass and pass again, stretching toward infinity. Without God, intrinsic value disappears. It is the loss of God’s love. Intrinsic value itself is a function of the very unscientific and anti-clinical, often emotional and irrational, evaluation process we call love. And, as you know, science admits no “love” into the laboratory.
When I first started pulling the thread of value, unraveling this mysterious sweater, I had no idea that someone as intimate and emotional as love would be the one wearing it. Instead of getting easier to define and analyze, this topic became vastly more difficult as it dove into the heart of our personal existence! Put simply, the secret to intrinsic value is love. For it to exist there must be a lover.
If there is no God, then there is no higher lover- no more knowledgeable, comprehensive and understanding evaluator- than myself. This means that my intrinsic value equals the value of me to me! Now, bad self-esteem is not good but neither is complete self-esteem. When my worth entirely rests on my evaluation of myself, I find myself spinning into a black hole of despair. I am not the perfect version of myself that I would love to be (intrinsically) and I can’t provide myself with the things I most urgently need (extrinsically). I understand that there will be people who argue that they are the perfect version of themselves and that they can provide everything that they need. Stay away from those people! They are deluded, short-sighted, and they won’t hesitate to sacrifice you for their own pleasure and self-aggrandizement. Oh, and they are liars.
The best analogy I can imagine of love establishing the intrinsic value of anything involves a baby. When I drove my pregnant wife to the hospital to give birth, she had our son with her but he wasn’t exactly real to me yet. I drove carelessly and nervously to the hospital with my coffee in one hand, speeding whenever I had a stretch of clear road. I vaguely remember running a red light and thinking, “If I get pulled over I’ve got a great excuse for the police right now!” The drive home from the hospital was completely different. I pulled away from the hospital with extreme care, checking all mirrors multiple times. I didn’t speed (I didn’t dare try to drink anything!) and I was careful to stop gingerly at all red lights. I even tried to soften all the bumps in the road and avoid every pot hole. Why? Coming home I had a new passenger in the back seat with the highest intrinsic value I had ever known! My son became real to me. This baby couldn’t do anything for us- in fact, we were required to do almost everything for him- but his value was literally beyond the comprehension of my former baby-less self. His value was entirely in his baby-ness, in his son-ness. And this is part of the intrinsic value we lose without the God who describes Himself in the Bible as our heavenly Father. It is a value that is difficult to put into words but that every normal parent in the world understands. It does not come from what the one loved can do for or provide to the lover at all. This oddity of intrinsicity brings to mind the great challenge of Henri Nouwen and Brennan Manning to understand that God loves us simply because He loves us! And it is the heart of Christianity’s message- that God loves you more than you are able to comprehend. It is the divine establishment of human worth and dignity; the very foundation for a proper, meaningful “humanism.”
But this chapter is about value without God in the picture and so we must leave intrinsic value behind and dive into the world of secularly understood extrinsic or instrumental value. Now, several people will argue that intrinsic value still exists without God. For example, humanists will say that humanity as a whole places intrinsic value in individuals and hedonists will claim that pleasure is the ruler measuring a sort of intrinsic value out. But all other systems either create another “god” that magically distributes internal value or they disguise meaningless subjectivity with fancy words. However, I believe the most honest and consistent god-less philosophies are pragmatism and nihilism which admit no intrinsic value at all. For them, real value only exists insofar as something or someone is useful. Value equals currency.
In our culture, the word “value” conjures up dollar signs. When I ask people to define value, they usually give me answers that fit in a shopping environment. Things like, “When Wacky Taco has a buy-three-get-one-free promotion their tacos are a great value!” or “My car has more value to me than it would to someone trying to buy it.” We understand value as the magic amount that both a buyer and a seller can agree on to make a transaction happen. A good value, from the buyer’s perspective, happens when the seller’s amount is below what the purchaser is already willing to pay. But, generally speaking, the amount of money that it would normally take to purchase something is seen as that thing’s value. It even becomes part of that thing’s identity. The brick house down by the lake is a five hundred thousand dollar house. My friend’s new car is a fifty thousand dollar car. I have a two thousand dollar motorcycle and my daughter has a ten thousand dollar smile! Remember the six million dollar man?
When this is applied to a person, we can judge their value relative to the amount of money their presence is worth. When they are first born, the extrinsic value of babies is expressed negatively. Babies are expensive and they require an insane amount of time and energy from the parents! The Huffington Post reported “The average cost of raising a child born in 2013 up until age 18 for a middle-income family in the U.S. is approximately $245,340… according to the latest annual ‘Cost of Raising A Child’ report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.”[i] If you want to judge the negative value of a toddler’s time, just think about how much you have to pay someone to hang around with them while you are gone. Good baby sitters are always busy and day cares are big business! Once the child becomes an adult, they are worth their intelligence, experience and productivity to employers. Instead of paying someone to take care of them, they get paid to provide their time and skills to a company. Their pay is, ideally, determined by their relative worth to their industry and society. Then, as they age further, once again they become a negative value and people must be paid to take care of them until they die and someone else is paid to bury them in an overpriced plot of land. Once buried, their worth goes back to zero. Or, if you’ve got good tissue and organs left, you could still be worth around $5,000 according to a CNBC report[ii]. At the end of life, all of a person’s money and property goes back into the system that vexed them and their material worth vanishes into the heirs where it is worth one last big fight.
You might say that money is a bad way to look at a person’s value (and I would agree). However, extrinsic (external) constructions of value all look like this though they may replace dollar signs with pleasure points or positive social marks represented on some scale of human goodness or worth. In short, your value is what you are worth to ________ [the reigning ideology in your immediate society]. It doesn’t feel right to think we are only worth the sum total of our positive contributions to the people around us or to our government does it? But that is what these views boil down to. Without God, we have no ultimate value. Forget all that business about being “special” or made in the “image” of God. Our individual worth or value is not inherent, but relative. For the purely pragmatic, individuals are worth their productivity minus cost of production and maintenance. For the hedonistic, individuals are worth the amount of total pleasure they can add to existence. For the humanist, individuals are worth their positive contribution to the human species. The list could go on and on but in each case our worth comes from what we do not from what we are; from our contributions not from our existence.
Value judgements become a very tricky and sinister business in this type of environment. When they have the power of a government or armed militia behind them, we see horrific tragedies emerge. A word we often use for the result of this deadly combination is genocide. This is the godless, inhumane humanism of eugenics in action.
Eugenics, the social philosophy that would attempt to control and improve the genetic traits of humans through selective breeding, sterilization and population purification (“cleansing” our crowd of the sick, flawed, old and unproductive), is one honest look at human value without God or any concept of inherit divine worth. We are worth what we can provide back to society in strength, beauty and intelligence. And, if there is no higher authority to answer to than the government and her scientists, then they are free to make the morality that allows or forbids such a practice. The science of eugenics was actually growing in popularity in the twentieth century before it got the bad press of being associated with the Nazis. Really, though, it wasn’t Hitler who made it evil- if the foundation it is built upon is correct, there is no such thing as evil. G. K. Chesterton was even driven to write a small book, “Eugenics and Other Evils”, confronting this “rabid and despicable persecution of the feeble or the old”[iii] that will probably raise its ugly head again through DNA conjecture. When scientists begin speaking of genetic modification to benefit society, beware!
Another way that value gets pushed aside without much notice is when it gets confused with values. Values, as defined by our culture, are completely relative and subjective. We understand values to be a set of propositions that have value to an individual. Value is what you are worth and values are what you are willing to pay for with your money, time, and energy. The ultimate value of anyone or anything has to be objective to be meaningful but values are the subjective reflection of an individual’s understanding of this objective reality. And, to further confuse matters, when value is viewed through an atheistic lens, it is indistinguishable from values. The fact remains, however, that whether or not we comprehend what is happening with the meanings of terms, we understand in ourselves the difference between what I or anyone else may think is valuable and the inherent value that exists in this world. Our subjective experience assumes and strains toward this objective world of value.
But let’s get on to the most important question: what am I worth? When applied to ourselves, we must decide where the foundation for value lies. If it is in our power or intellect, we must figure out how to measure our worth. We must find a standard to measure against. And we must settle on an appraisal from some source of authority. But, since we can’t know any of these things absolutely and there is no source of authority that doesn’t change its opinion from time to time, our relative value is nothing more than a guess. We guess what our value is to other individuals and then we approximate their relative value (so we can guess how much weight to give their opinion) to determine our own. This is what makes rejection so difficult even when it comes from people we feel are beneath us. This is also what makes the fact that we will be forgotten so painful. This is what fires the ambition of many great authors and artists to create something great enough to achieve “immortality.” It is the motive behind many charitable donations and foundations created by the super-rich (because they have discovered the bitter fact that money doesn’t give us value). Dr. Dennis Long borrowed Charles Horton Cooley’s idea of consciousness to sum up this relative thinking marvelously: “I am not who you think I am, and I am not who I think I am, but I am who I think you think I am.”[iv] Using Cooley’s formula for being, plug “worth” into the equation and you have the essence of what we’re working with without an objective and eternal evaluator. You are worth what you think other people think you are worth! Your true value is a guess at a guess fueled by rational logic coupled with emotional attachments! And, once the guesses are gone, so is your value. When death claims the players, the game of estimation is over. It is both relative to the point of absurdity and temporary to the point of insignificance in the grand scheme of things.
Because we find ourselves in this situation, we end up forced into hedonism by default because it is most comfortable in the face of our terrifying existence. We take the only tangible essences we have of our temporary and relative value (money, time, energy) and trade them for anything that will help us forget our desperate situation. This comes to us in the form of distraction, entertainment and stupification.
What if a lifetime of entertainment was for sale? What if you could be guaranteed thrills and laughter and curiosities for the rest of your days until death finally catches you oblivious? (There would even be a TV and painkilling drugs in the hospital room to distract you in your very last moments!) What would you pay for such a ticket? What are twenty or even seventy or eighty years of shallow, mind-numbing pleasure worth? Some trade their time and energy as they work five days a week to spend the extra money they earn on a two-day-party. Essentially, for them, this deal is worth 70% of their lives. That’s roughly ¾ worth of work to lavish on ¼ of the waking hours. If there is no God and our souls die with our bodies, then it doesn’t matter. It still looks like a bad deal on paper but, in this way of viewing things, value is completely relative anyway so your time is your business and no one else’s!
In a way, entertainment does not hold a positive value. It’s not even neutral most of the time. It is downright sinister! In the movie, Spy Kids 2, there is a scene where Carmen and Juni freefall for a very long time after accidently dropping into a dead volcano. At first they panic and scream, flinching for the inevitable impact with a surface that’s bound to smash their hurtling bodies any second. Very quickly, however, the panic turns into boredom as they continue to fall at what still seems like a frightening speed. After three or four hours, Juni pulls out a candy bar and tells Carmen that the scary feeling of falling went away hours ago for him. In a very real way, we find ourselves in the same situation. We are born into a freefall of time. We all know that at some point we will crash into the grave but we have no way of pinpointing the exact hour. When we first comprehend this reality, it is disturbing and frightening. Without God it looks like our own personal extinction. Nonexistence. Oblivion. And so, as we hurtle through time toward this tragic moment, we trade everything that falls into our hands for distractions to keep our thoughts on anything at all except our grim fate. Juni’s candy bar represents all that we fill our time with in the middle of this tragic situation. Since the concepts of God and eternal life are not allowed in our thought processes, there’s no sense dwelling on unanswerable questions like: “Why am I here, falling? What happens when I hit the bottom? Who dropped me and why? Is this freefall all there is to life? Why do I desperately want more if this is it? Where would I get the idea that there could be more? Why does this break my heart?”
When we speak of intrinsic value- of art or nature, beauty or essence- I believe we are really groping for proof of our own intrinsic value. We are looking for the proof that we can trade Juni’s candy bar for a soul that exists in goodness beyond the grave. And I believe the only way intrinsic value can exist requires the love of an eternal, unchanging authority.
[i] Emily Thomas, “This Is How Much It Costs to Raise a Child in the US”, The Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/18/cost-of-raising-a-child_n_5688179.html (accessed August 1, 2015).
[ii] “How Much Is Your Dead Body Worth”, CNBC.COM, http://www.cnbc.com/how-much-is-your-dead-body-worth (accessed August 1, 2015).
[iii] G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (London: Cassell and Company, 1922), 64.
[iv] Dennis D. Long and Marla C. Holle, Macro Systems in the Social Environment (Itasca, IL: Wadsworth Publishing, 1997), 57.