The bottom line is, life is sacred to the person who has it. Therefore no one has a right to take it away without that person’s consent with a fecklessly insouciant action.
by Ruwantissa Abeyratne
writing from Montreal
“Human progress isn't measured by industry; it's measured by the value you put on a life.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Time to Save Medicine
Once upon a time, a wise young man - Seth Adam Smith – said “every life has immense value”. Another valuable saying is by Thich Nhat Hanh: “Life is precious as it is. All the elements for your happiness are already here. There is no need to run, strive, search, or struggle. Just be.”
With these profound and incontrovertible truths have I pondered over life in these pandemic times. As a result, I have made a futile attempt at trying to mesh these sage truisms with the fact that as of 23 July 2020, according to global figures, 623,897 had died from the Covid-19 virus. Polemically, one could argue that the fundamental platitude that, if one is born, one has to die one day, is rendered destitute of meaning on the ground that these deaths have been caused by exogenous causes where, if not for the devastating and deadly effect of the virus, all of the aforesaid deceased could still be alive. They are gone forever, for no fault of their own: they who wanted to live. Life was just stolen from them.
Many of those now dead (if not all would have had the zest to dance; to party with their friends; to study and join learned professions and lead exemplary lives. Others would have looked forward to their children’s’ graduation, their grandchildren. Whatever it might have been, it follows that all these people who lost their lives lost the most precious thing they had – their life. Or did they?
The first stop in the conundrum is the fusion between religion and philosophy. The Holy Quran says: “whoever kills a person not in retaliation for a person killed, nor (as a punishment) for spreading disorder on the earth, is as if he has killed the whole of humankind, and whoever saves the life of a person is as if he has saved the life of the whole of humankind… (5:32). On this basis, the learned Mawlānā Muhammad Saleem Dhorat says: “As Muslims, we value human life irrespective of geography, race and gender . We do not distinguish between the poor and the wealthy, women from men, the less able from the able bodied, as a life is a life, hence sacred and precious. Therefore, a loss of life in any corner of the world is a cause of grief and sorrow for every true Muslim”.
In the Gospel of St. Mathew (10.31) Jesus says: “Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows”. Along similar lines The Buddha said several centuries before Christ “Life is very precious. Those who want to destroy it should know that once it is destroyed, it is gone forever”. Turning to theoretical philosophy, one is struck by what Plato said: “Life is a gift: wake up, everyday, and realize that”.
On the other side of the coin were those who espoused nihilism or a nuanced concept of nihilism. Friedrich Nietzsche (1854-1900) – arguably the most admired and followed philosopher of the 19th century said: “To live is to suffer; to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering”. In his Twilight of the Idols he goes on to say: “ Every belief in the value and dignity of life rests on false thinking; it is possible only through the fact that empathy with the universal life and suffering of mankind is very feebly developed in the individual. Even those rarer men who think beyond themselves at all have an eye, not for this universal life, but for fenced-off portions of it… thus for the ordinary, everyday man the value of life rests solely on the fact that regards himself more highly than he does the world. The great lack of imagination from which he suffers means he is unable to feel his way into other beings and thus he participates as little as possible in their fortunes and sufferings. He, on the other hand, who really could participate in them would have to despair of the value of life; if he succeeded in encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind he would collapse with a curse on existence - for mankind has as a whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair.”
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) argued that it is death that makes life possible. In a bizarre ontological sense, this has some legal legitimacy. With all this philosophical theorization and moral relativism, the law remains clear and unequivocal. The 623,897 who died had their lives taken from them. The legal definition of theft is that when a thing that one possesses is taken away from them without their consent such an act constitutes theft. This brings to bear the issue of whether life is a thing and a tangible possession of the person who enjoys life. This can be answered deductively when we refer to a person dying as having “lost his life”. Of course, one has to commit the theft and in the Covid-19 context the culprit if there is one, has not been identified yet. However, this does not detract from the fact that absence of the miscreant or identity does not presuppose the fact that there has been no theft.
The bottom line is, life is sacred to the person who has it. Therefore no one has a right to take it away without that person’s consent with a fecklessly insouciant action. This boils down to the fundamental question as to whether a person (or persons) was responsible for introducing the virus to the world. The multifarious conspiracy theories that abound aside, one cannot deny that life is sacred. I would conclude with fictional wisdom. Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his monumental work The Brothers Karamazov cites the instance where one brother (Ivan) asks the other (Alyosha) whether the latter would, if it were in his power, build an edifice of human destiny that brings happiness to all mankind, but for that he must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, a child and build the edifice upon the unrequited tears of that child. Alyosha vehemently says he will not agree to such a condition. The right to life is sacrosanct and those 623,897 people were unjustly denied that basic human right.
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