Is Life the Highest Value?

Recently sent to a radio personality:

I think the world of you and your show. However, I just listened to your, “Ultimate Issues Hour – Is life the highest value?” and in saying that it is not, I have to disagree with you, in part.

There is a subtlety to this question I believe you have missed. In asking if life is the highest value, you are really asking if your life is more important than the obvious set of values we have based our great nation upon. You did not believe, of course, this to be true, which you stated. Who honestly believes their own life is worth more than truth, freedom, or democracy? But the question of whether life is the highest value is more complex.

We take chances with our own lives everyday – we cross the street against traffic, eat foods that are bad for us, and take up habits that can ultimately do us harm. We do so with full knowledge of their consequences and yet continue them. Why? Simple, we take our own lives for granted. You must ask yourself the real question here – are the values of our nation higher than the value we place on the lives of our family and loved ones? Patrick Henry did not say, “Give me liberty or give my family death!” At the moment Pvt. First Class Ross McGinnis dived on a live grenade in Iraq, did he do so to uphold truth, freedom, and democracy? I have a feeling he sacrificed himself for a much higher and nobler reason - to save the lives of his friends, which he did so, magnificently. His belief in American values may have brought him to Iraq, to serve his country faithfully, but at the moment of truth, it was his humanity that protected others.

Around the world, human beings define themselves tribally, where cultural values are relative - not everyone extols freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (even in our own country). But the real value of life transcends any and all cultural value, affirming mankind’s single most important impulse since the dawn of our beginnings, as well as the key to true human equality. This “life value” states unequivocally that people of all cultures and creeds from around the world share one vital instinct - they each value their life and the lives of loved ones the same as we do and will give up their life to protect those they love. Beyond any cultural, relative value, it is man’s single connection to our fellow man and is expressed by the desire to be viewed as equals. I doubt Islamic terrorists actually believe they are out to kill their equals – it is far easier to justify killing an infidel than a fellow human being. The life value is our inherited, sacred, unwritten law - if the Golden Rule is, “Treat others the way you wish to be treated,” then the Life Value’s Golden Rule is, “Treat others the way you wish them to treat your children.”

Early Americans fought against the tyranny of the British and were willing to sacrifice themselves and place their own families in jeopardy from British reprisal, precisely because England violated the life value by not treating us as equals. This nation’s greatest values – truth, justice, liberty, freedom, and democracy - are all life-affirming and expressions of this life value – the desire to be treated as equals, the recognition that your life and the lives of your loved ones are just as important to you as mine are to me. All of this was captured within the spirit of our Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” May we all be so disciplined, as to read it every July 4th.

Those who violate the life value, such as those who seek to kill innocents, violate our basic human nature, alerting the rest of us as to who the bad guys really are. When we activate the life value by treating others as our equal, we cultivate compassion for our fellow man, fine tune our moral compass to live fearlessly, stand up for what is just, and are willing to protect and defend others even if it means sacrificing our very life.

Keep up your great work!

With warmest regards,

James Morganelli
Chicago, Illinois

May I suggest this book: Values for a New Millennium, by Robert Humphrey. It is a brilliant work.