Beyond Better and Worse: Variation, not valuation, as the root of life

Values. Your workplace probably has five of them and they are probably banal. You have some – you might like the sun more than the rain, or Thai food less than Vietnamese food. Societies can be described to have them; harmony, freedom, fairness come in varying degrees across countries, as a result of ranking. Stacking concepts or foods or people to identify what or who is better and worse than what is a project that has a long history. It’s also a project that needs to end, or at least become overwhelmed by observations of variation. Natural selection implies “survival of the fittest”, but this is a misleading way to represent the reality: many variations happen, some of them reproduce under certain environmental conditions. The lack of reproduction and therefore continuity may means a species or individual’s genes will not be partially represented in offspring, but that doesn’t make the lives lived by the species or individuals whose lines have come to an end any less observable. A variation wishes to be observed, not told that it is good (and certainly not that it is bad). A giraffe wants to be seen, not told that its neck is long in a way that looks bad or weird or ugly. Giraffes don’t have values, but they do eat and avoid being eaten. However, to eat is not to value eating more than being eaten. Both of these activities stand on their own and would be completely absurd to compare: will I eat today or will I avoid being eaten? A choice a giraffe will never have to make, because it just so happens that they can usually do both at the same time. Can you think like a giraffe? Why would you need to rank Thai food and Vietnamese food if you can have either one or both any given day or meal? How could one person be ranked more highly than another, when more than one person can exist, be observed, eat, and avoid being eaten, all at the same time? Philosophers and economists are in denial about the impressiveness of living things. Both archetypes like to believe that they have outsmarted living things and have built systems that are a better fit for life than life itself. Maybe they should try putting a sweater on a tiger that has just the right utility and value for tigers. Tigers, it turns out, know how to eat intellectuals while avoiding wearing sweaters. Be a little more like tigers, but not all the way like them.