In Which Lies the Value of Life

I live in the greater neighborhood of Lewiston, Maine, where, as all the nation knows, a gunman recently killed 18 people and wounded several others before turning a gun on himself. When I say greater neighborhood I mean the small town in which I live is close enough that we were part of the lockdown order over two days, the church I attend is in Lewiston, and I have friends who had friends numbered among the victims.

There is a pattern to these episodes in our national life that has become all too familiar on both a personal and political level. “Oh, no, not again,” leads to “Those poor people,” becomes “How can this keep happening?” swells to “We have to do something,” beyond which the inevitable divide appears. We can agree that there are serious mental health issues going unaddressed across our culture, but after that the discussion swiftly morphs into a debate about guns, and almost all signs of social comity quickly fade from view.

In principle, on the issue of guns I think there’s validity to both sides of the argument. It’s certainly not unreasonable to recognize the need for a legal structure that will work to keep guns out of the hands of those who can’t or won’t use them responsibly. But it’s also not unreasonable to ensure that that legal system doesn’t excessively impede those who will use them responsibly. The tricky part, needless to say, is reaching agreement on the definition of what is “reasonable.”

But the debate over guns is in many ways a debate over something much deeper and more fundamental; it’s a debate over the value we as a nation will choose to ascribe to human life itself, as well as what we are willing to do about it. It’s tempting to think that the positions in that debate are pretty clear, particularly in the minds of one side of the ledger. Specifically, those who support more comprehensive gun regulations are likely to take credit for placing a greater emphasis on safety, and by extension protecting human life itself, than those who defer to greater freedom for gun ownership.

If we take a step or two back from the gun rights question specifically, however, with an eye toward incorporating debates on other issues that also divide roughly between ideas of life and freedom, it’s telling how quickly the sides essentially switch. The other 800 pound gorilla of “autonomy vs life” issues, of course, is abortion. I haven’t checked any comparisons of recent polling numbers, but it seems safe to assume, at least in political partisan terms, that those who come down on the side of more regulations for firearms are in favor of more personal autonomy on the matter of abortion, and vice versa.

Here again, despite the common default to somewhat generic references to “rights” (on both sides) or “reproductive healthcare,” the question really comes down to how and to what extent we are able or willing to define whether the “product of conception” (to use one of the more starkly reductionist terms) spends some time as a clump of cells or is actually fully human but in the early stages of development. In short, the questions before us are, “What constitutes the essentials of human life, and how do we subsequently balance that life’s value against other competing values?”

A couple more steps back, primarily into the rapidly expanding category of options provided by biotechnology, and the issues may seem less stark than guns or abortion, but nonetheless, one way or another, they all tap into questions concerning those essentials of human life. In vitro fertilization, surrogacy, sperm and egg donation, and, most recently, transgenderism and assisted suicide; these all are phenomena that have emerged via the combination of biotechnology and an insistence upon bodily autonomy. The obverse of that insistence, however, is the contention that a commitment to bodily autonomy alone may not be sufficient to put to rest the array of concerns that arise from the increasingly intrusive manipulation of what not so long ago were considered natural realities or processes.

The questions swirling around these and other technological applications may not be specifically, “What is life and when does it begin?” But they should certainly lead us to wonder the extent to which our bodies are simply fodder for “Meat Lego” manipulation, as the British writer Mary Harrington has memorably put it, and are therefore merely objects to be disposed of or put to use as each of us sees fit. Or, conversely, could there be limits we should identify as necessary to maintain the fullness of our humanity? In other words, what is life, and how are we to treat it as a society and as individuals?

It is fitting that these questions rise to top of the public’s mind after a deadly tragedy such as just took place in my greater neighborhood. After all, it is the inevitability of death that has made us question the meaning and value of life for as long as we have been a conscious species. When death comes so unexpectedly, tragically, and with such sudden violence, it’s natural for us to wonder why in collective anguish. But it is both that very anguish and the collective nature of it that should make us question at least the fervor which many people embrace the idea of bodily autonomy, placing it at or near the top of our list of critical cultural values.

Much of the anguish we share can be understood as a natural manifestation of the connection we feel to loved ones, familiar faces, or even fellow members of a community, however large or small that community may be, and however known or unknown to us individually the victims may be. But can all of our anguish or shock be understood that way? Isn’t there a level, perhaps rarely if ever brought to conscious light, at which we instinctively put ourselves in place of the victim?

In doing so, we are likely engaging a number of questions, some hypothetical, some not so much. For starters, what would I have done in a similar situation? Panic? Run away? Try to hide? Run toward the danger in the name of protecting others?

And what if I had been shot? Could I handle the pain? What would a grievous wound feel like? What if I were mortally wounded? Would I be afraid to die if I had time to think about it? What if I didn’t have time? What then? What, after all, is death? And if I die, what has been the purpose, or the meaning — or the value — of my life?

It seems a stretch to suggest that questions like those, at first so inherently personal and then so broadly transcendent, might be successfully hashed out in the public square. Perhaps it is. But what’s not a stretch is to suggest that for most of human history, questions surrounding the meaning and value of human life had a home, so to speak, in the range of religious beliefs that provided narrative context and ethical guidance to how life should be lived and what it meant when it ended.

It’s certainly fair to observe that perhaps as much time has been spent violating those guidelines as heeding them, but either way they played a critical role in the development of law and ritual and, ultimately, culture. In contemporary western society, as survey after survey documents the increase of the so-called Nones, those who have no religion, much of the thinking that has grounded our understanding of life’s value has dissolved into an array of options from which we can pick and choose or decide to ignore altogether.

To take just one manifestation of the impact of this growing smorgasbord of meanings, an increasing number of deaths are marked ceremonially by a “Celebration of Life” rather than by what one would likely consider a traditional funeral. Broadly speaking, funerals, being usually religious in nature, are freighted with numerous traditional implications of what lies ahead for the deceased. They look forward, in other words, even as they offer the living a chance to remember and mourn as they look back on the life just ended. Celebrations, by contrast, tend to look almost exclusively backward, with a focus on mourning, to be sure, but primarily by remembering the love and life that has now come to an end. On what might lie ahead, they remain largely silent.

And yet the question remains: Given its inevitable end in death, what is the meaning of life? If, as an increasing number would apparently claim, there is no meaning that transcends the details of any specific life, how can we ascribe a foundational value to it that might guide us toward a mutual understanding of how life itself should be treated?

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As a later-in-life convert, I have increasingly come to appreciate the Catholic Church’s traditional designation of November as a month of remembrance. In no small part, I am sure this is because with each year more of the people whom I have loved and been shaped by are in the life behind me and not in the life around me or ahead. Thus remembrance occupies an ever greater share of my regular thoughts and prayers.

With the liturgical calendar, the Church offers us what might be called the pinnacle of remembrance, with All Saints Day on the first of November followed immediately by All Souls Day. Taken together, we are called to take a pause from our daily lives to remember the faithful who have passed before us, to pray that God will grant them peace and eternal rest, and to ask them to pray for us as we anticipate in faith the day we join them.

Another liturgical tradition which increasingly occupies my Novembers is the Office of the Dead, a centuries-old part of the monastic Divine Hours. At first, I prayed the Office solely on All Saints Day, which is among its primary designated uses. But increasingly, and again as more of my family and friends have passed on, I have taken to praying the Office throughout the month. Between the psalms for each of the three nocturns and the readings taken from the wisdom books, the Office offers a foundation for those times when emotions are raw, as well as a renewed focus on the Last Things which, the Church reminds us, will one day face us all.

This year, of course, our remembrances take on a significance and sorrow that I’m sure none of my fellow parishioners had ever imagined, as the month of remembrance began just days beyond the tragic events in Lewiston. I have no words that can fully convey the shock and sorrow we feel for the lives lost or permanently altered, nor any that can adequately console the victims’ grieving families and friends or the community of which they were so integral a part.

But if there is any consolation or significance to be gleaned from the close proximity of tragedy and remembrance, it may be in the reminder that the Church, and religion in general, can offer to all who ponder such things that death comes to all who have found themselves participants in this life. Beyond our shared presence in life, death is the other experience we all share. At the very least, then, in this regard we are not discrete individuals wandering autonomously through a medium which brings us in random contact and relationship with one another but, ultimately, still leaves us at root in isolation. On the contrary, we have the fundamentals very much in common.

If life and death, taken as discrete phenomena, are all that we truly share, then it would seem somehow ascribing a shared, if broadly defined, value and significance to them would be essential if we are to come close to finding at least a manageable compromise on the range of issues that can be categorized as “matters of life and death.” If we share life and death, it will not do simply to leave the myriad sticky issues related to the value of life and the meaning of death to the random choice of individuals. Our rapidly growing technological prowess alone makes that path the mother of all Pandora’s boxes.

So, having consigned any transcendent understanding of life’s meaning and value to the realm of private choice, and given the ever-expanding array of options we face in beginning and ending life, it would seem useful, even necessary, to try to develop a shared understanding by some other means. It may well be impossible; it probably is, given the scope of the questions involved. But at the very least, we might learn something if we try. The alternative – leave it to each of us as individuals – could result in our sharing nothing more than our increasingly fractured humanity.