The Measure of Human Worth

by Rebecca Bynum (May 2012)

There may be a certain danger to having talks like this with one’s children (or writing it up as a column or giving it as a speech) if one does not convey a deeper spiritual reality transcending the genetic code and its mundane, corporeal effects. Only the awareness of a higher reality (the values, God and his Love) can mitigate the harsh logical consequences of seeing human beings as genetically determined material objects. How do we measure human value? What determines a life’s worth? If it is one’s contribution to society, then a man who alleviates suffering or enhances the lives of his fellows in any significant manner must be in possession of a life that is worth more than the lives of others. Napoleon thought his was such a life: “A man like me troubles himself little about the lives of a million men.” He was not the first, nor the last to have such thoughts. We instinctively recoil from such thinking and feel it is immoral, yet it is not illogical.

All true religion involves the understanding of man’s ultimate equality in relation to higher reality; each human being has equal standing before God whatever our inequalities in the flesh may be. Indeed when we separate man from transcendent reality, he is reduced to a genetically determined machine and therefore, eugenics, taken to any extreme , can be fully justified. If man is animal and no more, he may be bred for desirable qualities and prevented from procreating undesirable ones. When human worth is reduced to social utility; there are no higher criteria and no higher authority to which appeal may be made and certain groups of human beings may for various reasons become expendable.

Turning to the issue of human races, we know no more about the skin color of prehistoric man than we know about the dinosaurs and yet modern anthropologists are following a disturbing trend to portray all primitive ice age humans as black (including the Neanderthals). The thinking is that the first humans (Homo erectus) migrated out of Africa (and were therefore black) and only afterward did they differentiate into the other three modern racial types, broadly speaking, the yellow, red and white peoples. Of course, this is pure speculation – we have no idea what the skin color of Homo erectus was.

We know that early humans were spread over Europe, the Middle East and Asia during the Pleistocene ice age when glaciers were advancing and contracting over the continents, creating various land bridges and then covering them with water when the glaciers contracted and the seas rose. And since we’re speculating, if one is looking for a representative of “early man” we might better look to modern Eskimo populations as representative of the type of human being that eventually dominated (and/or absorbed) the Neanderthal population in ice age Europe. Perhaps it was this type of brown-skinned aboriginal human which migrated around the world and then, as populations became isolated, the races differentiated. However, if Carlton S. Coon was correct and the Asian Islanders (including the Japanese) are the result of the mixing of the red and yellow peoples, then the Amerinds existed in Asia as a distinct race before migrating to America across the Bering land bridge. We have no way of knowing whether the black race likewise existed in Eurasia before migrating southward into Africa (there may have been a substantial land bridge across Sicily) or whether they never left Africa to begin with.

We don’t know, because we don’t know where or when the races originated and it is impossible to tell from the fossil record. But the assumption that black African equals “primitive man” is just that – a wholly unsubstantiated and, I must say, rather disturbing assumption. But observe any recently produced television program depicting primitive man today and he will invariably be represented by black Africans playing the part of the “hunter-gatherer.”

A good example of bias is this reconstruction (right) made on fragments of a 35,000 year old European skull (relatively recent in the overall sweep of human evolution) which may say as much about the scientist’s underlying assumptions as about mid-Paleolithic European reality. There is evidence of human habitation in Britain dating back 900,000 years and in Spain dating back at least a million years, yet this reconstruction was touted in the press as “The First European” looking like he just stepped out of Africa yesterday.

Again, perspective is to be found by including higher reality. For God, if he measures human souls at all, takes into account our closeness to him, our progress toward greater reality.  How could a human being’s intelligence, artistic ability or athletic grace compare with the creator of the universe? God is no respecter of persons. There is nothing we can do to impress the source of all creation, but we can grow closer to God and in this, the black race seems to excel in innate capacity for spiritual growth. Of course, this is my own personal impression. No one sees the world as God sees it and that is why we cannot measure it properly. We must judge men by their actions alone, but God judges men by their inmost hearts' intent.

The great temptation in the rise of science is that human beings will believe their measurements to be the true standard of value. And while it would be fanatical to oppose all manner of eugenics (many terrible diseases can be prevented by not being passed down to subsequent generations) it is also important to remember that the source of human value lies beyond the human body and ultimately, no man can judge the value of himself or his fellows. 

Likewise, the struggle for equality will be an unending source of social strife unless man begins to view his fellows as brethren – human beings to whom he owes love and loyalty and for whom he is willing to sacrifice. The brotherhood of man cannot be realized without an awareness of higher reality – a god who is not king or master, but rather a loving father, the source and center of reality. Perhaps this worldview is quaint and old-fashioned, but without it, society degenerates into opposing factions, each insisting on its own set of rights and the duty we owe each other as brothers and sisters is quickly forgotten as the Darwinian struggle reasserts itself. The inevitable result of radical secularization and Islamization will be war, destruction and death on an unimaginable scale as each opposing group makes its claim on the measure of human worth.

 

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Rebecca Bynum contributes regularly to The Iconoclast, our Community Blog. Click here to see all her contributions, on which comments are welcome.

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