‘We need a more humane and flexible approach.’ Photo: by Remy Gieling on Unsplash
For what it’s worth: Barbara Pensom on value
‘When the time comes to review our fractured society, how do we devise new ways to assess the “worth” of our fellow humans?’
How is ‘value’ to be assessed? I was recently amazed to read that an Old Master painting sent to auction was ‘worth’ a staggering number of noughts. Its ‘value’ apparently had been further enhanced by having been briefly owned by a modern painter.
The painting, even in the reproduction I saw, was stunning in its immediacy and simplicity, and radiant in the tenderness with which the subject – a scene from the Nativity story – was depicted. Its message is priceless. It would be possible for experts to analyse and describe the technique used to create the effect, but not to account for the enduring value, in the eye of a beholder, of the event the picture shows. Sadly, when the painting has reached its price, it is likely to be locked safely away in a bank vault as an investment, where its value as an inspiration is subordinated to financial worth.
So, what do I value? I value the clumsy cards, homemade with love, still up on my mantelpiece. I value the books on my shelves for the ideas they contain; family photographs and souvenirs of past journeys, for the memories they evoke and for a precious sense of continuity in our disjointed world. My spirits are lifted by a letter or phone call because these express my value to the caller and the precious gift of their time.
We all value the first inklings of spring, green spears of bulbs piercing the soil; or the purr of a cat on your lap. These things cost nothing; they are free to those who receive them.
My most valuable asset is the house I own, but it is as my home, within which I am free to order my own life, that it is of greatest worth. But this is a freedom not shared by all and raises an important question. When life settles and the time comes to review our fractured society, how do we devise new ways to assess the ‘worth’ of our fellow humans, other than, as now, by financial security, by quantity of material possessions or by worldly position? Are children who, as yet, contribute nothing to the national income, or old people like me, a drain on the national resources? Are we intrinsically of less ‘worth’ than others? Is it right that such people are adequately fed, housed and cared for at the ‘expense’ of others or is the very giving of charity a humiliation?
Even the earliest Christians (remembering Ananias and Sapphira) found it hard to live entirely ‘in community’, probably not for the creature comforts their wealth represented but for the pleasure of autonomous beneficence: it is not always as easy to receive as to give! But our system of ‘values’, based as it is on ownership –which implies denial to others of what ‘belongs’ to me – is not working. We need a more humane and flexible approach based on something other than evaluation of the unquantifiable. Do Friends see this as ‘worth’ attempting?
