"All life is precious" and other idiotic ideas

Dear Hannah,

There are only a couple of people I know who have taken a stand against the slogan all life is precious, and one of them is me.  The good news for me is that the other one appears to be God.

I don't mean this in the sense that Jesus said so somewhere in the Bible; I mean it in the sense that He's obviously decided everyone has to die.  If you believe that the Bible is true and death isn't really the end, then you have to reconcile this with the fact that the majority are probably going to Hell and that God is personally going to send them there.  This suggests in an uncomfortable way that all life isn't only lacking in preciousness, but that a lot of it is downright damnable.  Christians are fond of asking us to do what Jesus would do.  What they are not fond of doing is thinking what Jesus would think*.

What people really mean by all life is precious and all lives matter is that everything matters except your interests, which is another way of saying that everything matters except your own happiness.  For anything to be precious or to "matter" it has to first be helpful to our happiness; and the overwhelming insinuation of all life mattering is that even the most obnoxious criminals are worth it.  The question, which cannot be seriously asked, is to whom?  The answer, which has never been proposed, is to nobody.

In fact, nobody has ever met anybody to whom everyone mattered at any moment.  And the reason isn't only because we're cold; it's because caring about everyone is impossible.  To live means to care, and to care about anything means you can't care about everything.  To ask us to be concerned with everyone isn't to ask us to be concerned with everyone: it's to ask us to change who we're concerned with.  The left has asked this week whether France means more to us than Lebanon.  Our answer should be yes: and it will matter so long as France remains responsible for Montaigne, and Lebanon remains responsible for Hezbollah.

All lives matter is a quack moralist's way of diverting our attention from welfare of the moral majority and getting us to worry about the immoral minority.  It's a way to get us to stop defending the people who make our lives better, and spend our time and resources on men who never did anything for anyone.  It might even be a way to get us to send our time and resources to the men who do horrible things to everyone.  If it says life is precious, what it really means is everyone's lives except our own.  If it says all lives matter, it means the worst matter more than the best.  It denies that civilization is a state of war against every kind of barbarian and criminal and terrorist, and cripples our defenses while emboldening our enemies.

The fact that some men matter and other men don't isn't only necessary to our happiness, but an undeniable fact of morality.  The question of civilization isn't whether we'll love everyone or nobody.  It's whether we'll love good men or bad, useful men or useless, peacemakers or firestarters, trustworthy men or traitors.  It isn't whether we'll riot for everyone or shrug.  It's knowing when shrugging is better than rioting, and when rioting is better than shrugging.  

Those who believe our purpose is loving the unloveable have never done it and never will.  The men who ask us to love without fear and defend without exclusion are the most unloving people of all.  For they aren't really asking whether we'll throw away our criminals.  What they are asking is whether we'll throw away our families.  They ask us to risk everything we hold dear, and grab tight to everything we don't.  They ask us to terrorize our honest cops, and spend our time rallying for rascals.  Their slogans are testaments to either dishonesty or villainy; and if they fool themselves and fools alike and pat themselves on the back and thank God they aren't like other men, there are two of us who see right through them.  And one of them is me.

A man went into a coma and died last week, and although I never knew him personally, he was well acquainted with a lot of my friends.  He didn't matter much to me because I never knew him, but seeing the kinds of things written about him was enough to convince me that he was a man who mattered to others.  He didn't matter because of a slogan or a rally or a riot.  He mattered because he was a blessing to the people who knew him.

Had anyone gone on Facebook and demanded that his life matter to anyone it didn't, it would have cheapened his memory in the eyes of the people who loved him, because it would have made him a kind of a nuisance.  But good men matter -- by the laws of nature known as cause and effect.  Kind men matter.  We know they matter because we miss them.  We miss them because they make our lives better.  Anyone else who says otherwise is missing the point.  Anyone who didn't matter was never really willing to make himself a blessing.

And now a word about the terrorist acts in France and Lebanon and Nigeria.  That every act of terrorism is tragic is beyond dispute, and the just dispensation of government requires a certain blind impartiality to those within our borders.  The cause of humanity also requires a general admission that no innocent should suffer an unjust deprivation of life, liberty, or property.  But the ways in which tragedy affects us should be allowed to fall along nature's lines, and it is only just for certain acts of injustice to take emotional precedence over the others.

Great tragedies come from great beauty, and great loss from intimate familiarity.  To ask us to mourn equally (as the leftists have asked) is never to ask us to mourn equally.  It is to ask us to feel equally.  It's to ask us to neglect a proper attention to a nation which is not only responsible for a long and prosperous and amicable history with our own, but responsible for our very independence, and give equal attention to a nation which has not only given us nothing, but sometimes given us trouble.  What nobody has been willing to say is that the leftists are picketing the funerals of our wives, because we didn't mourn the deaths of our acquaintances.  They think themselves saintly by picketing.  But then again so do the Westboro Baptists.

Your father,
-J