Column

Culture

1 December 2023

4 min read

Depreciating human life: a year-end market report

The cold currency of trading hostages repels George Pitcher, who explores the casual acceptance that some lives are biddable against lives of intrinsically higher value.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Three men huddle around a laptop and talk animatedly.

Israel's Prime Minister monitors the recent hostage exhchange.

Prime Minister's Office, Israeli Government.

There is something peculiarly horrific about the barter of Israeli hostages held in Gaza by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. And it isn’t only the unimaginable suffering these innocent civilians have to endure somewhere on an unknown scale between life and death.

It’s also that their lives are reduced to their commodity value. Hostages are assets to be traded in the market for peace, not human beings. It’s difficult to write this, but it’s almost as if three dead hostages, including a 10-month-old baby, said to have been killed in an Israeli airstrike, have lost their asset value. These ones are no good – they don’t work anymore.

Negotiating the release of hostages for peace terms is as old as the Hebron Hills. An Egyptian pharaoh once released his enslaved Israelites to Moses in return for the lifting of the plagues being inflicted on his people. But there is something of the neo-liberal free market in the way that post-modern conflict resolution uses human life as a currency of exchange.

Ryan Gilfeather wrote excellently here how this material valuation offends against the human dignity in which the divine invests. The imago dei that humanity bears, if you like, is not to be reduced to a bounty, a financial liability or an asset value.

As a consequence, human life is tradeable. Yes, it has value, but its share price can fall as well as rise.

I’d want to take that a step further, to ask how that depreciation has come about with such ready acceptance and to note a couple of instances where the mentality of the trade in human existence has become a natural process of marketing.

The attitude, I think, has its roots in the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Don’t get me wrong: This is no censure of progressivism. Universal literacy, healthcare, scientific endeavour and the birth and growth of democracy are all very good ideas indeed. But the Enlightenment also brought the capitalist mindset to almost every area of human existence. Our lives, in many contexts, became actuarial.

This is not my idea. The great, perhaps the greatest, Christian mind of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis, railed against how Fascism and genocide were the bastard offspring of our common-law marriage to progressive thinking, in that traditional values of human existence were now only there to be debunked.

I am indebted to Lewis’s biographer, A.N. Wilson, for this. In Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man, he writes of “The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere specimens… begins to affect our very language.’

Lewis was no white-knuckled reactionary, but he did recognise that the values and virtues of ancient religious thought were binned at humanity’s peril. We had begun to understand the price of human life, rather the the value of it.

This is not to suggest for a moment that the ancient world was a nirvana (or even a Narnia). The Garden of Eden was lost at the beginning of time, not at the Enlightenment. Brutality, slavery and cruelty are part of our post-lapsarian world.

It’s just that religious virtue used to be a bulwark against such things. As a consequence, human life is tradeable. Yes, it has value, but its share price can fall as well as rise. By the 21st century, we can look behind us to see how that has played out. Allow me to elucidate a couple of examples of how casual is our acceptance that some lives are biddable against lives of intrinsically higher value.

The first is the almost clownishly implemented government policy proposal to redeploy migrants to the UK to Rwanda. Almost clownishly, because it would be funny if it didn’t involve a trade in human misery, the idea that desperate people endangering their lives and those of their families in small boats can be made someone else’s problem to sort out, simply by looking away. These people are worthless, you see, because they are not us and only we belong here (whoever “we” may be). The idea is that we pay Rwanda per capita to take them, rather as we might send our plastic refuse to China for landfill.

A second example of merchandising human life I would cite are the repeated attempts to have assisted suicide, or voluntary euthanasia, legalised in the UK, rather than enhancing palliative end-of-life care. These proposals depend entirely on the state legislature endorsing that some human lives aren’t worth living and are disposable.

At base, it’s the same principle as the Rwanda policy, other than we’d be killing them, or assisting them to kill themselves, rather than disposing of them in a central African waste-bin.

These are the “anythings” that humans believe in when they stop recognising the sanctity of human life. The value equation used for Gazan hostages is on the same continuum as the human trafficker and the politician who tries to stop him, or the calculation of the cost to the state and their family of a terminally ill patient offered an alternative way out.

It’s just that these equations have become invisible to the naked eye. We don’t see them anymore. But, I’d suggest, for Christ’s sake we’d better start looking.

Review

Art

Culture

26 July 2024

5 min read

Paradise cottage: Milton reimagin’d

Artist Richard Kenton Webb converses with the blind poet in his former home.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A black and white illustration shows a man holding a walk stick standing among tomb-like structures.

The blind poet. Charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Richard Kenton Webb.

‘Waiting to Speak to Milton’ shows the artist Richard Kenton Webb on a rain-swept night waiting in a valley for a car whose headlights can just be seen at the crest of the hill. For this image he has imagined himself waiting for a lift from John Milton to discuss the poems Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. As the opening image to Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles it is appropriately positioned in the porch by which visitors enter the cottage.

This image of light appearing in the dark night of the soul symbolises the beginning of Webb’s journey with Milton and his late poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. This has been a 10-year journey that Webb began following a conversation with his son in front of John Martin’s mezzotints for Paradise Lost at the Tate. Following on from his son’s encouragement to begin work, over that period, Webb says Milton has been a companion like Virgil to Dante guiding him through the narrative of his own life including the dark nights of redundancy and lockdown. The result has been 128 drawings, 40 paintings and 12 relief prints forming A Conversation with Milton’s Paradise Lost, a commission of 12 drawings in response to Milton’s pastoral elegy, Lycidas, for the Milton Society of America, and the 13 drawings forming this exhibition, A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes.

Milton proved an effective companion because he, too, had passed through his own dark night of the soul. He arrived in Chalfont St Giles to escape the Great Plague of 1665 after the Republican cause to which he had dedicated more than a decade of his life - being Oliver Cromwell’s unofficial spin doctor - had collapsed around him with the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660. He had been lucky to escape with his life following imprisonment and the banning of his books. In addition, he had lost his sight, his beloved second wife, much of his money and all of his influence.

Despite these traumas, Milton was able to express his love for his Creator wonderfully in Paradise Lost, which was completed at the cottage in Chalfont St Giles, and Paradise Regain’d, which was inspired whilst there. In both Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes Milton deploys his rich verses and visions of spirituality and the forces of good and evil to reflect on the Restoration of the Monarchy and the loss of the English republic, doing so by means of Biblical stories concerning Jesus and Samson.

Browse Webb's exhibition

A black and white illustration show a person crouching in the corner and lifting as it was a stage drape.

Modes of Apprehension by Richard Kenton Webb – charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Inside a history cottage, black and white illustrations hang on the wall.

Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles.

A black and white illustration shows a two people close together on a pinnacle.

The Pinnacle by Richard Kenton Webb - charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.

Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles.

In Webb’s view, “Paradise Regain’d is about overcoming impossible situations” while, in Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Redeemer shows “Samson, the blind and foolish man”, “that we can always find hope in our living God even when society does not”. These poems moved Webb out of despair to discover hope because he knew they were heading towards redemption. As a result, he sees Milton as “a great English poet who gives hope, which in itself is a creative act for these difficult times”.

Although the story of Samson pre-dates that of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, Webb’s painting series begins with images inspired by Paradise Regain’d, just as Samson Agonistes followed Paradise Regain’d when both were jointly published in 1671, because Jesus’ resistance of temptation ultimately redeems those, like Samson and Adam and Eve, who were unable to resist.

These are images set against a dark background with the exception of the final Paradise Regain’d image with its white sky depicting a paradise within as Jesus has overcome temptation, is in full communion with God and is about to begin his ministry by calling his first disciples. The images move from the trauma and test of temptation – whether involving hunger, greed, lust, threat, pride or ambition – to a calmness of mind that is equipoise and liberation and which also enables the destruction of false temples.

They are images in which movement is arrested in still moments which form theatrical tableaux. These, like medieval and early Tudor morality plays, involve the viewer in an epic struggle between good and evil, involving temptation, fall and redemption. Webb’s use of charcoal and white chalk on paper emphasises the binary nature of this struggle. Being formed of charcoal and chalk, despite his use of contemporary equivalents for the temptations, the look and feel of Webb’s images also accords well with their exhibition setting, in rooms of low ceilings, uneven white walls, dark beams and furniture.

Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own.

As Paradise Lost was the first illustrated poem in the English language, Milton’s poetry has, as Kelly O’Reilly, Director of Milton’s Cottage, has noted “inspired many of our greatest artists, from Blake to Turner, Dore to Dali”. Webb, who consciously works in the continuing tradition of Blake’s visionary art, is extending the tradition of illustrating Milton’s poems. It is appropriate, then, that, by exhibiting these drawings in Milton’s Cottage, they are placed alongside examples of illustrated editions of the poems, plus other paintings and prints relating to Milton.

Milton’s works are not only a repository of rich verse, which also gifted over 600 new words to the English language, but are also a conversation with scripture, its stories and their interpretation, plus the social and political ramifications of the Reformation in the British Isles. Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own and linking those powerfully to the themes of Milton’s poems.

The key image, in this regard, is the first in the Paradise Regain’d series (‘Modes of Apprehension’), which sees Jesus in the wilderness turning up the corner of the wilderness backdrop, as in a theatre, to reveal another dimension or reality to existence and experience behind it. Hope is discovered in the midst of desolation, resilience found in the face of temptation. In these ways, Webb achieves his own hope for these works, that, “by responding to Milton’s universal themes of creation, destruction, temptation, love and loss”, he “can help new audiences find fresh ways to engage in Milton’s legacy”.

A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Cottage, 3 July – 8 September 2024.

Visit the exhibition web site.