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Resilience
Life Deserves Reverence, but Not Worship
Although living things are fragile, life itself is very resilient.
Posted August 15, 2018
Albert Schweitzer was, by all accounts, one of the great heroes of the 20th century. A talented musician and theologian, Schweitzer attended medical school in his 30s, giving up a much-admired professorship in the humanities, after which he opened a hospital in a remote part of today’s Gabon, where he labored selflessly to provide medical treatment for some of the planet’s most depauperate and under-served people.
Floating on a river in Gabon, Schweitzer recounted an important moment when his personal philosophy became crystallized:
"Lost in thought, I sat on deck of the barge, struggling to find the elementary and universal concept of the ethical that I had not discovered in any philosophy. I covered sheet after sheet with disconnected sentences merely to concentrate on the problem. Two days passed. Late on the third day, at the very moment when, at sunset, we were making our way through a herd of hippopotamuses, there flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought, the phrase: 'Reverence for Life' (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben). The iron door had yielded. The path in the thicket had become visible. Now I had found my way to the principle in which affirmation of the world and ethics are joined together."[i]
“Reverence for life” is indeed both an affirmation of the world and an admirable keystone for ethics, directed toward all life, and not merely other human beings. “Just as our own existence is significant to each of us,” wrote Schweitzer, “a creature’s existence is significant to it.” Reminiscing on his early childhood, Schweitzer recalls:
"As far back as I can remember I was saddened by the amount of misery I saw in the world around me. ... One thing that especially saddened me was that the unfortunate animals had to suffer so much pain and misery. ...It was quite incomprehensible to me -- this was before I began going to school -- why in my evening prayers I should pray for human beings only. So when my mother had prayed with me and had kissed me good-night, I used to add silently a prayer that I composed myself for all living creatures. It ran thus: "O heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in in peace...."
One time, as a young boy, Schweitzer went fishing with some friends, but...
"[it] was soon made impossible for me by the treatment of the worms that were put on the hook...and the wrenching of the mouths of the fishes that were caught. I gave it up...From experiences like these, which moved my heart....there slowly grew up in me an unshakeable conviction that we have no right to inflict suffering and death on another living creature, and that we ought all of us to feel what a horrible thing it is to cause suffering and death."
Reverence for life more than justifies restraint when it comes to inflicting pain and death on other living things. It is also consistent with a profound valuation of life (albeit often restricted to human life only), as explicitly developed in several of humanity’s wisdom traditions. Consider this, from Judaism: “Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. Whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5). And from the Qur’an Sura 5032 we read that “If any one slew a person ... it would be as if he slew the whole people; and if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.”
Few would argue with the proposition that life—each life—is precious, although perhaps not infinitely so. Life is definitionally distinct from non-life in many ways, such as responsiveness to stimuli and the capacity to reproduce—with a bottom line being the maintenance of internal conditions that are highly nonrandom and low in entropy.
Unlike, say, crystals or salt solutions, life as we know it can only exist within generally narrow limits, with specified concentrations of nutrient molecules, oxygen and carbon dioxide, as well as waste products. Living things, moreover, can only tolerate a narrow range of acid-base balance (pH), of ambient pressure and temperature, in the osmotic concentration of various electrolytes, and so forth. Individual lives aren’t only precious but also delicate, often painfully so.
The demanding balance required by a living organism is typically achieved by homeostasis, an array of thermostatic control mechanisms that—like a temperature thermostat in a house—increases something if it gets too low, and decreases it if it gets too high. In his now-classic text, "The Wisdom of the Body," physiologist William Cannon detailed the many ways that life maintains itself within a narrow range of parameters, testimony to a pair of conflicting realities, one being that individual lives are delicate in that even small deviations in conditions—especially when it comes to an organism’s internal environment—can be lethal. The other is the contradictory fact that by virtue of having the capacity to maintain such narrow limits despite variations in the external environment as well as the dynamic nature of the internal (e.g., the unavoidable accumulation of waste products), life is remarkably robust.
Homeostasis makes organisms capable of colonizing a wide range of environments—which wouldn’t be possible if their innards were limited to reflecting their immediate surroundings, whether hot or cold, whatever the ambient pH, and so forth. Turtles and snails carry their protective houses on their backs; living things are obliged to maintain their internal houses within narrow limits and accordingly, are able to do so.
This brings us to the subject of the blogs to follow: recent findings that unlike individual lives, life itself is remarkably robust. It is an important insight, consistent with the underlying message of my most recent, just-published book: that although life is indeed special, it is not that special, just as even though human beings are also a special case (species Homo sapiens) of a more general phenomenon (life itself), we are not that special. The fact that we exist, therefore, isn’t a “miracle” in itself, because although life is wonderful and extraordinary, not to mention precious and deserving of reverence, it isn’t in any sense miraculous.
Case in point: extremophiles in general, and tardigrades in particular. More to come …
David P. Barash is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Washington. His most recent book is Through a Glass Brightly: using science to see our species as we really are (2018, Oxford University Press).
