An old friend of mine criticized my view of life, saying that I live fast, devoid of emotions, oblivious to things around me, and that I focus instead on the general, abstract, and the principles.
My view is, obviously, extreme, and I often fail to live up to it. But what matters is that I think it is essentially the correct way of life as a human being, and it is worth striving for.
Since criticism and discussion make use of thinking and reasoning capacity, I will assume, in reading this,that you have a common purpose with me, which is say that you want to use your human capacity to reason about the desirable way to live as a human being. Those who devalue such capacity, or think that living as an animal is more desirable, can stop reading. Now let me explain why I think the general, the abstract, and the principles are important, and are what we should focus on.
It might seem obvious that love and appreciation of things in nature, and love and respect for fellow human beings require paying attention to each of them. It is part of a wider philosophy of mindfulness with its practice in meditation. But is it the correct way to love, appreciate, and to pay respect as a human being?
Love and appreciation of nature
Love and appreciation are positive feelings, and are good in themselves. But there is more to human love. When I look at a flower, I love its shape, its color and its smell. But can a pig or a monkey see and feel something qualitatively the same? Yes, of course they can. Such capacities for perception and feeling are not in any way specific to human, which shares an evolutionary history with animals, particularly close ones such as mammals and primates. Our brains and sense organs have much in common with them, and in many cases are even inferior to them (a dog can probably smell the flower better than me). Therefore, such kinds of love and appreciation is basic, animalistic, and requires no human-specific capacity.
Human beings are capable of much more than that. We can investigate and speculate about the nature of things, and see through their superficial appearance. We can extend our perception beyond our senses, seeing all the way from the microscopic scale to the edge of the visible universe. We contemplate beyond the immediate moment in time to the origin and future of things. With our imaginative and rational capacity, we speculate about the order of nature, establish laws, and formulate theories. Those objective theories enable not only a single person, but also others to contemplate the beauty of nature.
Why, then, do we keep clinging to our animalistic, subjective senses? What defense is left for such a narrow perspective, such an obsolete way of life, but the stubbornness and ignorance of its proponents?
Love and respect for human beings
It seems that love and respect for human beings require paying attention to them, helping them, and caring for them. But those specific actions are only manifestations of a general attitude of love and respect towards others. And that general attitude is not given, especially in our “natural” state, but is a result of our culture, our civilization, and thousands years of thought and reason about morality, and a good understanding of our similarity contributed by science.
What is our “natural” state? Human history spans several million years, but civilization started forming only a few thousand years ago. But even in those civilizations, wars, slavery, brutality, and consequently, death, were common. We might have loved our neighbors, cared for our children, but we might have also considered other people from other tribes, those with different religious backgrounds or skin colors as subhumans to be enslaved, prevented from breeding, and killed. You might blame our bad nature for that. But what has changed in the recent decades? What has made us more gentle, respectful, and understanding? Our nature has not changed, but our thought and culture have. We have increased our understanding of the similarity between the races and the genders, which are objectives facts backed by natural laws. We have reasoned about equality and morality as general principles, which are convincing and reasonable enough for others to agree, even to fight for them when necessary. Without an objective, scientific view of our nature, and thousands years of critical discussions, our civilized society would not be possible. Without them, love and respect would narrow down to small circles, arbitrarily set by prejudices.
And the feeling of love and kindness alone is never enough. Consider the child mortality rate of around 20-30% of just 100 years ago, and around 50% 200 years ago. Who can say that parents now love their children more than those back then? Such tragic death rates were only improved by the advances in medicine, nutrition and living condition, which are essentially the application of basic science. And basic science deals with the abstract, with general principles, laws, and regularities. Advance in science is the result of critical thought, of reason, of imagination, of the love for the general, the abstract. Those who deal with the specific can, at most, grieve over their own dead children.
Conclusion
Why not doing both, you may ask? Why not love both the specific and the general? Well, my simple answer is that our time and resources are limited. It takes considerable effort to think about abstract concepts, to reason about moral principles, to theorize about the natural world. It has always been the hard thing to do. The easy thing to do is, of course, to look at the specific with imbecile eyes, to stay oblivious to human history and development, to criticize those do the hard but human activities. It has always been a choice, but those who choose the easy one should never claim it as the kind of love and appreciation worthy of human beings.