Whose Lives Matter?
I reckon it starts with ourselves. We are rather sure our life matters. At least it does as long as we are alive and things aren’t so bad that we seek suicide. My life sure matters to me, and I have spent a lifetime seeking contentment, avoiding danger, and seeking to stay healthy. In terms of the evolutionary process, individuals don’t really matter that much. If we have a trait which inches the process forward that’s ok. But if we don’t, some other human will have that trait down the line and it will inch forward then. One thing the evolutionary process has—is Time, billions of years so far, and no end in sight. As is always the case, WE go TIME stays. If particular individuals are not essential to the process, then does the life of any individual of any species matter? There is no evidence that the Creator of this evolutionary process, God if you wish, ever intervenes with the laws which govern the evolutionary process. That doesn’t stop most of us—we pray anyway, with this self serving belief that yes, God will help us get a better test score, win a football game, win a war, save us from cancer, etc. There is, however, no statistical evidence that God saves any particular religious sect from any of the dangers we pray to escape. It seems that God doesn’t give a damn about any of us individually. Why God even allowed ole Abraham Lincoln to be assassinated. Some gratitude.
So doesn’t God help us personally at all? Well, yes he has helped us. The evolutionary process has led to a human species with an inherent sense of ethics. It is this inherent sense of ethics which enables all of us to be helped via the Golden Rule. Now wait a minute, does this mean that the rest of us are the only hope for those who die from curable diseases, that have poor schools to attend, that have poor health care available? Actually, that’s about the short of it. Until we collectively take care of each other, a lot of lives end up not mattering. It always boils down to ethics vs greed. Like who wants to have higher health insurance premiums so that everyone gets good health care? I have other things—for me of course—that I want to spend money on. Like who wants to pay more for commodities so that all workers earn a living wage? If I have to pay a just and fair price for things I purchase, how am I going to purchase everything that catches my fancy?
Whatever society we live in, it is we, collectively, who determine which lives matter. If we are born into a good environmental situation, then our prognosis skyrockets. If we are born with a better set of genes than most, then our prognosis skyrockets again. We will then prosper, declare our prosperity a self earned one, and get increasingly annoyed with those whose disadvantages makes life difficult for them. They really begin to get on our nerves. If they complain quietly, gated away out of sight, that’s one thing—that’s their right, but getting up in our face about it in public places, well—that’s another matter altogether. Who let them out of their cages?
When blacks march in the nicer parts of cities or towns, our first impulse is to demand they go back to their ghettos and tell their fellow blacks to quit killing each other if black lives matter. After all, far more blacks kill blacks than any other ethnic group kills blacks. We have the stats to back up our feelings. Then again, more white people kill white people by far than blacks kill white people, more Muslims kill Muslims than any other religious group kills Muslims, more Christians kill Christians than any other religious groups kill Christians, more poor or less fortunate people kill people than affluent kill people (excluding govt armies).Those black kids who grew up in a ghetto environment didn’t choose their environment or genes, or their poor schools, or poor health care, or no safe neighborhoods to play in, etc. I suspect it is hard for any us to imagine what our attitudes might be like had we ourselves grown up in such an environment. Look, it is not civilized, enlightening, safe, motivational, or emotionally secure to live in such environments. For decades we have looked the other way as such communities deteriorated to the concrete jungles they are today. Well, we really didn’t look the other way as much as we just kept these kind of communities gated off, out of sight, and out of mind. We don’t lose sleep about young kids in downtown Detroit or Newark or Los Angeles who don’t exactly have an emotionally uplifting community atmosphere. Then we wonder why, after decades of neglect, so many have a huge chip on their shoulders, simply put “You don’t like me and I don’t like you because you don’t like me” Of course we would retort that “I have never done anything personally to you, so put the knife down.” That is true, of course, how could we have personally mistreated any of them—these ‘people’ are normally nowhere in sight, let alone have any interaction with us.
On the other hand, if some politician proposes we not use property taxes to pay for education and spend the same amount of money for education on every child, we would never vote for that politician. Few people really believe that all of us, collectively, have any responsibility to level the playing fields for the less fortunate, or make sure everyone in our society has a chance to work at a level of their talent and make a living wage doing so. Of course we don’t. We basically believe in the survival of the fittest—in capitalism with no limits. This fittest contest has worked so well that today 2-5% of the people own 90% of the wealth in America. Boy are they fit. And rich. The vast majority of people see nothing wrong with this and just daydream, wishing it could be us instead of these others with all this wealth.
The solution is clear enough. Blacks should go back in their own neighborhoods to bring the message that black lives matter to each other. Whites, or more precisely and correctly, ALL affluent people, of any ethnicity, ought to start supporting politicians of the Bernie Sanders type. The world doesn’t come to an end with democratic socialism. People in places like Denmark, Sweden, and so on, live longer, are happier, and less quarrelsome. Of course they are, their citizens don’t have to worry about having a good school, decent paying jobs, enough vacation time, good health care, good retirement benefits, going to college IF they can pass the entrance exams, etc. Most of the things the average Americans, and all the poor worry about, are not matters of concern in a democratic socialist society. Ok, they don’t produce a small cabal of extremely wealthy individuals like we do. But with like everything else, wealth included, enough is enough. It isn’t just those kids from poor schools who are stupid, but most Americans are too—they consistently vote against their own best economic interests. And almost always out of prejudice against this group or that group. The wealthy are smart, they cater to people’s prejudices to get their votes and then with victory, ensure even more laws are passed which will make it even easier for them to get even richer. Let the ‘common folk’ go after each other for their economic or societal status and spend their anger on ethnic groups, religious groups, cultural groups, immigrants, sexual orientations, etc. It’s a trade-off—the wealthy support/encourage the prejudices of the ‘common/poor’ folks and the ‘common/poor’ folks vote for their prejudices. Kind of an interesting symbiotic relationship.
The game, however, is about up, and the consequences are likely to be total chaos, the likes of which Americans have never seen before. Electronic gadgets enable all sorts of groups to be well organized today and when the dam breaks, the police can’t be everywhere and the wealthy, with so much to protect and so little means to do so, will pay the usual historical price when it ends up being the have not’s vs the halves.
This kind of conflict is not necessary. When the Golden Rule is the common basis for ethics, all levels of society prosper, conflict is avoided, greed is curtailed, people support responsible reproduction and people become pro-life for all citizens after birth, not have their ethics end at birth.
The trouble with using the Golden Rule as the basis of ethics in a society, rather than religious sects of various ilk, is that the Golden Rule is so basic and so simple, that it is hard to escape the realization of being unethical. If we don’t want our own kids to go to a poor school, then no one’s child should be attending a poor school; if we want good health care for ourselves, then everybody else should have good health care also; and so it goes, case after case with obvious enough answers. With inherited religions and ancient scriptures written thousands of years ago, we can dodge ethical bullets, when needed, and concentrate on self serving objectives. With religious sects we have prayers, we have rituals, we have forgiveness by a merciful God, we have confessionals which let us start over, we have scriptures—with so many outdated and confusing or contradictory statements— that we can pick and choose which ones to pay any attention to; we have inspiring and glittering cathedrals and pompous ceremonies with endless inspirational oratories and costumes; we have an actual God who is personally committed to giving us safe passage through life, and if he doesn’t——well, God acts in mysterious ways and has different plans to make us a success in life; and finally, we have ‘family values’. These ‘family values’, a cornerstone of all religious sects, enables us to justify breaking the Golden Rule since the more we take care of ourselves and our immediate family, the closer we come getting into Heaven. ‘Family values’ answers the question as to whose ‘lives matter’.
Whenever any society allows ghettoes to proliferate in that society, or creates a society where 43% do not even make enough money to qualify to pay federal income taxes, that society is self destructing, and self destructing inanely in an attempt to endorse the right of 2-5% of people to own 90% of the wealth. There is little sense getting mad at the behavior of these ghetto residents. How many of us might behave after growing up in such an environment is beyond our best guesses. We can pass ‘stand our ground’ laws, we can all arm ourselves to the teeth, we can increase the number of police, we can pass mandatory sentencing laws, we can tolerate 60% unemployment rates in our ghettoes; we could, I guess, increase the number of people we put in jail so that our prisons contain even more than 25% of the people in prison across the whole globe, we can continue to spend vast amounts of money (borrowed money no less) to invade weak and poor countries, one after the other in the name of freedom and national security——all of these things can be done, but violence will beget violence—always has and always will continue to do so. If we ever, by mistake or necessity, ride quickly through any of our huge ghettoes, we are puzzled why the streets are so empty, no people sitting on their porch steps, no kids all over the sidewalks and streets riding bicycles and playing games, like in days long since gone. Where are the people and the kids? Today, in poor ghettoes, they are all locked up inside in order to be safe. When these kids become teenagers and emerge into our society, we will not like the kind of mental state many of them have acquired. They all have electronic gadgets which portray how the affluent live. Many of them are mentally and emotionally unstable as a result of the environment in which they spent their formative years, as well as very angry. When they explode and assault us or others like us, it doesn’t do much good to plead “why are you doing this to me, I have never done anything to any of you personally, put the knife down, take the money and let’s call it even.”
If the Golden Rule suddenly became the standard for ethics in our society, there would still, for years, be millions of people who were raised in our ghettoes and have huge chips on their shoulders. Right now we are faced with too many people on this planet, too much family values and patriotic fervor, we are trapped in a global society without minimum wages which are living wages, no enforceable responsible reproduction, and sectarian warfare as our ethics—-rather than the Golden Rule. We have a ‘Holy Mackerel Andy, we’s done got ourselves in a terrible mess’ situation.
I reckon we all matter when we collectively decide all lives matter, and as a consequence, level the playing fields so that even the least fortunate amongst us can achieve reasonable contentment in their lives. That’s called win-win. The way the global game is being played now—nobody wins, and everybody loses—as like lemmings, we rush closer and closer to an evolutionary cliff/correction.
Not to worry, evolutionary Time, measured in millions of years, will work things out like it has for billions of years. Ethics will evolve, like it already has been evolving, and all of us, caught up in the vortex of modern ethical shortcomings, will not suffer the future anymore than we suffered not existing for the billions of years which preceded each of us. How can our death be something to fear since when we are dead there is nothing to fear, just like before the spinning wheel of fortune gave us birth, we suffered no feelings or thoughts about the billions of years prior to our birth. After death, Buddy Holly had it right when he sang “it really doesn’t matter anymore.” Death is the great equalizer in that nobody’s past life or the future matters anymore to them when dead.
P.S.Even assuming it is correct that the basis for human ethics is a genetic component expressed via the Golden Rule, this does not make the whole issue cut and dried. Human laughter has a genetic component, human reasoning has a genetic component, human personality has a genetic component , and so on. We are not all equal in this genetic component anymore than we are all equal with other genetic components. Part of the trouble here is that we always like to view ethics as a contest between right and wrong, whereas the evolutionary process views progress via most useful and less useful. There is no contest between a Devil and a God.
The next caveat here is that no one always treats others as they do themselves. Things get relative here. And we need remember that the reward for ethics is personal contentment—not Heaven, wealth, power, control, etc. And what are we to do when someone does not follow the Golden Rule? The answer here might seem to be that we need concentrate collectively on getting as many people as possible to follow the Golden Rule and just punish those who engage in criminal behavior. Hitler certainly didn’t follow the Golden Rule but then no one ever could possibly view Hitler as a contented man. Donald Trump could care less about the golden rule—his compulsive behavior is all about money, power, fame. Now who could possibly view him as a contented person?
When the Golden Rule fails for lack of collective action, we get the products of our collective failure to level the playing fields for others. Let’s take a product of one of our ghettoes—a hardened criminal thug who does bad things to a lot of innocent people whenever given the chance. Does his life matter? While perhaps in some abstract way it matters, punishment for criminal behavior trumps hypothetical considerations. What about someone raised in a good environment with ample genetic advantages who does not follow the Golden Rule? They had level playing fields and turned out bad. Again, criminal behavior must be punished. What about the 2 million Vietnamese who were killed by Americans in a senseless invasion, who pays for this massive carnage? I supported that war. Should I have been jailed? Most would probably agree this was a collective failure to practice the Golden Rule and the result was tragic for many people, including 35,000 American soldiers. All that can be gleaned here is that the goal is always to maximize the Golden Rule by collective individual support. Future tragedies can be avoided, but the damage already incurred, most often cannot be undone. The 35,000 American soldiers and 2 million Vietnamese are dead. Because the Golden Rule here was a collective failure, innocent people died. Despite ethical failures the evolutionary process moves on, just as it moved on when there was no human species with a genetic ethical component. Just because my life matters to me (as long as I am alive) doesn’t mean I am protected from all the factors in life that potentially can end my life. Hell, I could inadvertently be run over in a car driven by Mother Teresa. While ethical behavior can bring personal contentment, our lives can be ended, by chance, thousands of different ways, and—in any case—our lives will all be ended one way or another. TIME stays, WE go. So which lives matter? As many as we collectively manage to make matter.
