When I die, I want science and medicine to take whatever organs they find a use for — not that I expect them to be useable once I’m done with ‘em — and then I want to be cremated, and I don’t give a shit where they put my ashes. Why would I? I mean, how could I? There won’t be any me to give a shit, and lacking a metabolism there won’t be any shit to give, either. But this touches on something important: why would I care about anything that happens after I’m dead? That question’s in the face of everyone urging us won’t somebody please think of the coming generations, it makes every martyr suspect (not just the ones whose cause we don’t believe in), it questions anything I do now that won’t have an effect until I’m dead.
The answer to this riddle — why care for what cannot affect me — is, I think, that my world does not revolve around me. That is, of course, patently ridiculous. First-grade bullshit. Obviously I am my own fucking world. My thoughts are all about me. Anyone who tells you different is lying. But I like to visualize a particular part of my personality as a ray outwards, a kind of projection onto the world: my values. I think the indefinite future — the post-me future that must come to pass unless 1) I’m in the matrix or 2) happen to live until the heat death of the universe — or, more precisely, my concern for it, is nothing more than the extension of my valuing others. I care for other people, some in particular more than the rest, as part of my value system. I value things like peace, equality (but only of a certain kind and which comes about in certain ways), liberty (ditto), and I wish them for all people; and I value things like happiness, fulfillment, an experience of meaningfulness, love, friendship, etc., and although in the back of my head I might wish them for everyone I most strongly desire them for myself and for the people I’m closest to. These things aren’t tied directly to me.
Everyone has them. Even the most wretched human on Earth has values of some kind. The great thing about them is that they envision a kind of ideal state, or at least suggest an approximation or a limit a series of improvements to the status quo can approach. In this sense, they’re timeless. They’re absolute. What I value now, I value in 2400 and 1400, even if I won’t or didn’t ever live in those times. Hence the picture of a projection: here, now, in one particular instant, I stand looking at the stream of time (an abstraction), and onto the whole of it, I project a framework of values, spanning all ages, places, peoples and times. You’d be rightly skeptical if I told you murder is immoral, but killing a Martian settler in 2400 for fun is alright. If I follow the rules of the values-game, I can’t do that.
That’s precisely why I can say that the future matters to me, even if I won’t experience it. That’s how values work: from here, they project everywhere and everywhen. That isn’t to say you can’t change your values, project other values onto the stream of time from some other time and place; but from right here, right now, my values project to every time and place; and I can’t choose to not give a shit about some particular time and place from right here, right now just because I don’t feel like doing whatever it is making sure the values I project onto the future would demand of me. Everyone’s got values, and values have rules, and that’s how they work. This is very important to remember when it would be so easy and so satisfying to just not give a fuck about the future and burn the planet to the ground. Who cares, right? I won’t be around to experience global calamity anyway. I’ll tell you who cares: your values, which you will be around to experience every day.
Sep 22, 2010