…but we don’t.
In a phone conversation, a friend of a friend invited me to an event in the Spring. I said that it would depend upon a vaccine for Covid-19. Since our mutual friend and I are both high risk, neither will be traveling before then. She then volunteered that she thinks people in nursing homes ought not to get the vaccine because they are “useless.” A perfectly ordinary retired nurse, has no problem with people already denied liberty and mostly denied the pursuit of happiness, being denied life as well. In her view, equality, held to be ‘self-evident’ in the Declaration of Independence, doesn’t exist.
When I recounted this conversation to our mutual friend, she recounted a similar conversation she’d had with her brother. He had maintained that the virus only kills “the unproductive.” That is, until a good friend of his died.
The truth is that the history of human civilization is a tension between two positions: hierarchy of value and equity of value. Either we value all human lives equally or we don’t.
Many ideologies defend hierarchy, Divine Right to Social Darwinism to Utilitarianism have tried to normalize the rejection of equality. Of these, Social Darwinism and Utilitarianism seek to ‘perfect’ humanity by killing those they consider ‘useless.’
We come down on the side of hierarchy at our peril. There is real peril of becoming a victim, because those who have gone down the hierarchy rabbit hole have never been able to put limits on the devaluation of lives. They see society as a pyramid with themselves at or near the apex. When you cut off the base of a pyramid, you have a slightly shorter pyramid and new victims at it’s base. That retired nurse may well find herself being called “useless” by more privileged people at some point.
Niemöller wrote “First They Came,” as a warning to future generations, and make no mistake, in reality they came first for the disabled. We refuse that warning at peril of becoming monsters. Consenting to the deaths of others, even considering others ‘useless,’ causes us to lose something of our own humanity, something we can ill afford to lose.