Of Eggs and Embryos
There is a saying that an egg is only a chicken to another chicken and to everything else it’s breakfast. This may be a humorous observation on natural selection in the animal kingdom but the assumptions behind the statement deserve reflection and investigation. There are two points being made in this aphorism:
• A thing has value only in relation to another thing.
• The value of that thing is relative to the other thing.
The illustration provides a rationale for a post-modern anthropology. What this is saying is an object, any object, is only valuable if someone or something says it is valuable. Things may have extrinsic value but intrinsic value is an illusion. Extrinsic value statements say things like, “Life is ultimately meaningless, but my life has meaning because I give it meaning.” An intrinsic value statement exclaims, “Life has (ultimate) meaning.” The first statement makes a claim that life has no value apart from what we bring to it. The second statement says life has value even if one denies that meaning. Extrinsic value can be separated from the object without damage, intrinsic value cannot be separated without damage. If that is clear we can make an observation as to why extrinsic value statements are a part of post-modern language. (The term post-modern carries with it a lot of baggage but for our purposes we mean post-modern to be a denial of absolute statements.) Modernism is characterized by the rejection of God. Post-Modernism is characterized by the destruction of man. Because we, as a culture, have rejected the notion of a Moral Law-Giver, values derived from that notion are jettisoned at the same time; albeit this is maybe not realized or acknowledged by some. The value we are most concerned with at present is the origination and installation of dignity.
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