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Throughout the month of November we’re looking at civility – how trusting God can help us cultivate a disposition of the mind and heart that has the potential to revolutionize our culture and ourselves.
Let’s suppose you’ve been given an unusual task this week.
You get to whip up, from scratch, a fully functioning human being.
Let’s further imagine that all the assembly issues will take care of themselves. All you need to do is procure the right number of elements from the periodic table.
So, how many bucks is this going to set you back? In other words, what’s the price tag in our inflationary economy for the fundamental components of an average human being?
According to Britain’s Royal Society of Chemistry, you’ll need to shop for 59 different items at the Elements Store. Save plenty of room in your cart for six of them – carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and calcium – since they make up 99.1% of a typical human body.
Then add in a sprinkling of copper, tin, vanadium, cobalt, thorium, and chromium. Stay well back from the thorium, by the way, since it’s radioactive. And don’t forget the selenium. Every cell in your body has something like a million selenium atoms. Until recently, biologists had no idea why. Now we know they’re crucial components in a pair of enzymes that help regulate human health.
Oxygen needs to be at the top of your shopping list, since it accounts for 61% of body mass. How is that possible, since it’s a gas? Oxygen combines with another gas, hydrogen, to make water, which accounts for more than half of what makes you “you.”
Back in 2012, the long-running PBS science program Nova, taking current costs into account, tallied up the elemental components of a human being. They arrived at a figure of $168.
Think about that. For about the same amount of money that a family of five might spend at Red Lobster after church next Sunday, you can finance the construction of a human being.
As cultural historian Bill Bryson observes in his book The Body, “unquestionably the most astounding thing about us [is that] we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt.”
Maybe that’s why it sometimes feels as if other people keep treating us like a pile of dirt.
In the end, civility comes down to one essential: What do I think – what do I really think – about other people?
Is every person a uniquely crafted work of art, deserving of my time, attention, and respect? Or are other people nothing more than competitors in the game of life – obstacles to my experience of happiness, means that I can use to accomplish my chosen ends, or disappointing drains on the public coffers?
What we conclude about the inherent worth of others – the price tags, so to speak, that we imagine hanging on everyone we’ll meet today – is the key factor that will determine whether we will treasure those meetings or consider them a colossal waste of time.
And that will determine whether or not we become those who help our culture move from incivility to a more hopeful way to live.
But there’s a problem. And it’s a big one.
If civility is defined as a disposition of the mind and heart – a way of treating others as persons of inherent dignity, who therefore have ultimate value – where in the world do we get the idea that that’s what human beings are really like?
The United Nations International Bill of Human Rights identifies 30 rights that belong to every human being just because they are alive. They include the right to a fair trial, freedom of religion, and the right not to be enslaved. But a number of nations choose not to recognize such rights. Where did the UN ever come up with this stuff, anyways?
Perhaps human dignity has emerged from modern science. But scientific research has tended to reinforce the conviction that people are merely the end product of various natural processes – and that each of us is just an assemblage of 59 periodic table elements.
How about Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries? They are often credited with inventing the idea that “all men are created equal.”
But as historian Tom Holland (who is not a person of faith) asserts in his monumental work Dominion, the idea that people matter – and matter eternally – is a legacy bestowed by Jewish and Christian thinkers who have spent centuries pondering the pages of Scripture.
Some materialists decry “speciesism,” the arrogant assumption that somehow the human species is more significant than slime molds or stink bugs.
It’s not a shock that when people are declared to be animals or machines, we start treating each other like animals or machines. And that, from the get-go, strikes a serious blow against the dream of civility.
The character of a civilization is revealed by how it treats its weakest members. If there’s nothing special about human life, then the weak, the frail, and the unproductive among us will inevitably be compromised. They will slowly but surely be pushed away from life’s table.
The Judeo-Christian understanding of the Bible’s first book has led to a profoundly different take on reality.
Looking to Genesis 1:27-28, we find the Bible’s assertion that human beings are made in God’s image. Most agree that while that statement is inherently mysterious – we cannot fully comprehend the depth of its meaning – its ramifications are remarkable.
Because God has specifically endowed human beings with the stamp of his own character and personhood, our lives have infinite value.
Which means that people are valuable even when they cannot contribute.
It makes sense that followers of Jesus have historically resisted both abortion and euthanasia. They have opened hospitals, tenaciously battled diseases, pioneered ministries to the incarcerated, cared for the physically challenged, and loved those who are mentally and emotionally broken.
Human lives matter. No human life is trivial.
Every time we see another human being, we are gazing at someone who bears the stamp of God’s own being.
The ultimate scriptural vindication of that high view of human existence emerges in David’s words in Psalm 139:13-16:
For you [O Lord] created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
Civility begins with the conviction that every human being is worth more than 168 bucks. Every person you meet today is worth your time, your attention, and your care.
Not because we will find those individuals to be useful, helpful, or worth keeping around.
But just because they, like us, are eternally loved.