What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

Recently, I have noted a contradiction: an awareness of the beauty around me and a simultaneous upsurge in my levels of negative speech and thinking regarding the world and its sorry condition. (Perhaps some of you have, too.) I see the sun is shining, spring flowers are blooming, little children are tugging their parents’ hands as they head for the park. The world is almost forcibly raising my spirits from the dust where gravity has let them settle. And then I latch onto another news item regarding the job market or the rise in inflation, or read another study about the dire effects of AI on education, or I glance at a news feed full of worldwide death and destruction, or hear more mutual name-calling in the spheres of politics, religion—you name it—or (sigh) I catch a glimpse of my neighbor, the father of a young boy, emerging from his house in one of his recently acquired dresses, and I lapse back into brooding. To elevate my thoughts to more exalted regions, a friend suggested I should try reciting to myself a song of praise or one of the Psalms, composed when things were going well for David, whenever I find myself descending into a psychological sinkhole. Surprisingly, that has proved somewhat helpful. In the course of rehearsing candidates, snatches of poems have also come to mind, including Hamlet’s famous meditation on man quoted at the beginning of this article.

The character Hamlet opens his monologue by rejoicing in humanity’s position at the pinnacle of material creation, singling out our capacity for reason and understanding. But the dominant note is awe before the marvelous heights that human beings have been created to attain. Hamlet is not evaluating so much as admiring. We do not need all the exclamation points to tell us that this is a panegyric rather than a scientific treatise on human biology or neuroscience.

Appreciating, admiring, wondering at, marveling to behold—these are ways of attending to someone in a manner that does not seek to exploit or restrain or disable or reduce that person, but to comprehend and enter into a kind of relationship with him or her. Something similar occurs when we marvel at a sunset or a flower or a tree, or delight in a cathedral. Both the natural world that we inhabit and the things we make or buy for our use—the clothes we wear, the chairs we sit upon—can arouse something of that same delight.

I was reminded of this human reaction of appreciation when the photo of a colleague’s newborn baby arrived in my email inbox the other day. The natural, unpremeditated response to the image of that newborn was wonder and awe: “How beautiful! How wonderful!” Immediately we are back with Hamlet’s superlatives and exclamation points. To respond to such a photo by detailing, in an effort to determine the baby’s ontological status, the characteristics the newborn shares with more mature human beings would strike most of us at such a time as, well, inhuman.

Likely, the minority reacting differently would include Princeton ethicist and animal rights philosopher Peter Singer and his cohort, who don’t seem to think babies are much to marvel at, arguing that higher mammals more clearly qualify for personhood status than a human newborn. Singer exemplifies how, in William Wordsworth’s words, “Our meddling intellect/Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—We murder to dissect.” This is a good de-scription of the misuse of reason we are drawn into if (against healthy human instinct) we succumb to weighing the pros and cons of babies, like those women we see in social media and up-market articles defending their choice to remain childless. Okay, they concede, babies are cute when they are sleeping or smiling, but they cry a lot, they need near-constant attention, they are expensive, they tie you down, they wake you up at night, and so on.

It is not that their list of “cons” is untrue. But the whole exercise is inadequate to the decision. After all, it isn’t as though the baby-lover needs to compile a competing list of benefits even longer than the loudly proudly childless influencer’s list in order to “win.” Rather, reducing the worth of a baby to a cost-benefit analysis or a set of bullet points in a PowerPoint slide presentation is wrongheaded from the start, because it considers the wrong sorts of things in the wrong sort of way in determining the baby’s worth. It fractures the observed experience of caring for a child and the perceived benefits of having a child into a seemingly unrelated assortment of items, and that is not a method that can succeed in conveying the goodness of the child. As the makers of the old Mastercard commercial would have told you, that baby’s value is “priceless.” It cannot be grasped by accountant’s methods, and it cannot be broken up into bits and pieces. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

This Solomon also knew, as did the true mother in the story exemplifying Solomon’s wisdom in the first book of Kings: Two women lived together, each with a newborn baby. One baby died in the night, so the mother of the dead baby snuck the live one from his sleeping mother and left her the dead one instead. Both women came before the king to claim the remaining baby as her own. “Cut the baby in half,” decreed Solomon, knowing that the true mother would reveal herself by her willingness to relinquish her claim to save her living child.

And in all such questions of the worth of persons or of sublime experiences that are not given us to be exploited, mined for profit, or used in a transactional way, we see a similar elemental mismatch that seeks analysis over appreciation. There are situations in which it is useful and permissible to take a surgical knife to human flesh, but we can only properly see beautiful people and things as wholes, and as wholes with whom we can engage, with whom we can enter into a relationship of some kind. This is true, derivatively, even of beautiful inanimate goods like a sunset or an ocean or a mountain.

These two ways of looking at and responding to people and objects in the world about us have been explored in the writing of British psychiatrist and researcher Dr. Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary and The Matter With Things. In two hefty books, McGilchrist has set out the two basic ways of perceiving that humans (as well as the lower animals) are equipped with and deploy at need, and what happens when we use the more analytical and two-dimensional one (the Emissary of his title) where the Master is needed.

The aspect of McGilchrist’s thesis that struck me most forcibly while I was reflecting on babies and other priceless goods was attentiveness. For we only truly see what we attend to. We’ve all had the experience, once we’ve learned a new term or bought a certain item, of thereafter being bombarded by references to it. We buy a particular model of car and find commercial parking lots full of them. It is not that they suddenly came into being once we purchased our own, but that we only then became attentive to their presence. It follows that, to an extent we are ordinarily unlikely to realize, the world we see partly depends upon what we are willing to see—and how. It is not that the world is a figment of our imagination; it is not “all in our heads.” But the world is so teeming with sensory impressions, all competing for our notice, that we cannot attend to more than a small number of them at one time. And what we selectively attend to, both consciously and unconsciously, builds itself up into the world as we see it. All of it is grounded in reality (unless we ourselves are not grounded in reality—that is, unless we are hallucinating or catatonic or refusing to accept what we see). And partly because, at bottom, human beings have similar needs and interests and vulnerabilities, much of what we attend to matches the kind of thing most other people attend to—a mouth-watering smell, for instance, or the screeching tires of a car. But sometimes an individual is specially primed to attend to particular sensory data because of idiosyncratic circumstances or desires or more narrowly imprinted predispositions, or because of something that once happened to us. Or because we were indoctrinated into doing so.

You may recall from a distantly remembered college psychology class the famous gorilla experiment, featuring research subjects instructed to watch a video of two people tossing a basketball back and forth and told to count the number of times the white-shirted subjects passed the ball. Midway through the video, as clear as day, a person in a gorilla suit walks across the field of vision, beats his chest, and walks off. About half of the subjects of the original experiment failed to notice the man in the gorilla suit, because they had so obediently focused closely on one thing—the ball passes—that they failed to take in the anomalous man in the gorilla suit.

Similarly, when it comes to how we attend to human beings, we lack the observational bandwidth to simultaneously study a baby scientifically while also relating to that baby. This is not a criticism of scientific study, which produces useful results for us all when operating in its proper sphere. We all benefit from the explosion of knowledge about human biology, chemistry, and medicine leading to the prevention, treatment, and cure of so many diseases. Only slightly less significant in its effects was the Industrial Revolution and subsequent scientific and information revolutions. Today we are observing the unfolding of the artificial intelligence revolution, which also promises powerful effects.

The mention of AI, however, and the widespread recognition that it is shaping up as a two-edged sword, raises questions. Consider that the goals underlying scientific and technological research—satisfaction of natural cu-riosity, betterment of human conditions, augmentation of comfort and amelioration of pain, expansion of our choices, greater control over the vicissitudes of life, including birth and death—all instrumentalize the material world, including other human beings. Though scientific studies are typically undertaken in the hope that they will yield benefits to “humanity” down the road, to the extent that they involve human beings, they are using them. As C.S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man, “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.” For “Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.”

Now, often enough those studied human specimens are quite willing to be studied on others’ behalf. So the point is not whether people are used and studied willingly or unwillingly, but what kind of attention is directed towards someone being analyzed somewhat as an object instead of related to as a subject—a person. Again, Lewis captures something important in Chapter 3 of The Abolition of Man.

The regenerate [reformed] science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation. . . .

Lewis concludes this chapter (and the book) with these words:

You cannot go on “seeing through” things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be trans-parent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque: How if you saw through the garden too? . . . To “see through” all things is the same as not to see.

So, though there will be a temporary or limited need to “see through” the patient to the source of a medical problem, this still entails a kind of flattening of vision for a select, though worthy, purpose. The difference between the two ways of seeing is beautifully expressed by an exchange in Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader between the prosaically brought up Eustace and a star that once inhabited Narnian space: “In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”

In the case of the unborn child, however useful and necessary it is for medical researchers to properly study the phases of human development and prenatal biology to determine how to medically intervene when things go awry, they should not blind either the researcher or those enlightened by his or her discoveries to the marvels of human development and the sensitive interplay between the mother’s body and that of the developing child over the course of nine month’s gestation. And switching back and forth between these two ways of seeing is quite possible—many scientists have groped for words to express their awe before the material world.

However, if the distancing necessary for scientific analysis is weaponized to inhibit recognition of the unborn as fellow human beings, then its effect is more harmful than helpful. It has distorted a necessary but temporary “for-getting” of the human connection between the unborn and those who have passed through the birth canal in favor of a willed blindness, a kind of voluntary amnesia toward the youngest of us.

Depersonalization through distancing oneself from the object of analysis often occurs in the social sciences as well. Economics, demographics, political science, sociology—all acquire the information pertinent to their varied subject matters by flattening the distinctions between individual human beings and breaking up their lives into subtopics of study they label political, economic, or social.

These two modes of viewing people, then, are both necessary for our thriving and developing but are ordered to different purposes. To devise taxon-omies of species, you must deal in wholesale generalizations. To make a friend, fall in love, or enter into the mind and heart of your child, you must take in and respond to the particular gift of this one-of-a-kind person. And these friends, lovers, or children are not only particular human beings but, so to speak, human beings in the round. They have depth, they encompass contraries; on different days or in different moods of the same day they can overwhelm us with their insight and self-forgetfulness or repel us with their insensitivity and egotism. This is what it means to relate to another human being, as opposed to studying one aspect of a great many human beings with large-scale goals such as curing illness or organizing just policies.

For the study of humanity in the aggregate cannot be undertaken safely without first having known and loved and bumped into the sharp corners of individual human beings. Without such deep and contoured relationships with this person and that person and the other person over there, we are tempted to make or accept reductive statements about people-in-general and to accept to a greater or lesser extent a valuation of human beings according to their usefulness, cooperativeness, health, or even productivity. Without such relationships, for example, we might be tempted to believe in Economic Man, instead of employing the concept as a schematic tool with limited application and a tendency to lead us astray if overly or exclusively depended upon. In fact, without cultivating and bearing in mind those person-in-the-round relationships, we will fail to understand the full meaning and purpose of work itself, and what our human relationship to it is.

Of course, in one sense the relationship to work could not be clearer: We work to eat (that is, to provide for ourselves and our families). If our species had stopped there, we could have abandoned further human development after achieving the most basic level of subsistence. But even Stone Age man, with his cave paintings and ornamental statues and simple musical instruments, gives evidence of greater ambitions. Otherwise, why the artwork? Why, later on, the wealth of Bronze Age artifacts—including painted pottery and jewelry? Why did ancient cultures bother feeding and housing their bards and poets, instead of telling them to find a real job?

It seems clear that, as far back as we can discern, more was involved in our relationship to work than merely the human version of the wolf pack’s pursuit of dinner—not that work isn’t also that.

In a poem entitled “Mythopoeia,” J.R.R. Tolkien argues that man is (uniquely in the material world) endowed by God with the secondary capacity and desire to be a “sub-creator”:

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light

Through whom is splintered from a single White To many hues, and endlessly combined

In living shapes that move from mind to mind . . . We make still by the law in which we’re made.

Tolkien suggests this sub-creative bent goes so deep that even in Paradise:

Be sure they still will make, not being dead, And poets shall have flames upon their head, And harps whereon their faultless fingers fall:

There each shall choose for ever from the All.

That may strike you as an almost absurdly exalted way of understanding our labors here on earth, which for most of us may more modestly be characterized as “earning one’s keep.” Still, despite the lack of enthusiasm with which most of us greet Monday mornings, we still recognize in ourselves a certain drive toward a life of purpose and derive satisfaction from whatever it is we do, if done well.

Pope St. John Paul II considered work from a somewhat different angle in his 1981 encyclical Laborem excercens, explaining the interplay between the worker and his or her work in these words:

“. . . the basis for determining the value of human work is not primarily the kind of work being done but the fact that the one who is doing it is a person. The sources of the dignity of work are to be sought primarily in the subjective dimension.” He concludes from this that “in the final analysis it is always man who is the purpose of the work.” Read in our own era of an emerging AI -based economy, these lines are startling; they challenge some of our assumptions about what makes work—and the worker—valuable.

Though most of us would not characterize the kind of work we do as a form of “sub-creation,” a notable exception lies in the labors we perform in fathering and mothering our offspring. In gazing upon these living, moving sub-creations whom God has almost recklessly entrusted us with, we recognize their incalculable value and mysterious, ever-developing potential more clearly than we recognize these qualities in ourselves. Those who cham-pion the right to abortion speak dismissively of the unborn as “potential life.” The truth is that we are all, throughout our lives, unwinding the thread of our initial potential. Even the hour of death finds us laden with the potential for eternal happiness, depending upon our final surrender of our mortal life to God. On earth, only that which is dead lacks potential. The unborn at the very earliest stages are growing, developing, unfolding. That’s not potential life; that’s life.

Earlier I reflected on the importance of exercising attentiveness, extending an open and loving gaze upon the world and its inhabitants in order to justly and properly appreciate their value. Over the many decades since its birth in the 1960s, the pro-life movement has enlarged its own expansive gaze in many areas, responding, for example, to threats to the very old and feeble, those with disabilities, and those suffering from severe mental illness.

Along the way the pro-life movement has also come to see ever more clearly the humanity—and the worth, and the potential—of the women who turn up at the clinic doors seeking abortion. We have learned more about the varied stories that bring each of them to this point. They too are human beings with potential—including the potential to recover from a wrong choice. They too need support to bring that potential to actuality. And, however long the road to a change of heart and mind may be, each one of these women re-mains throughout an individual unrepeatable human being—as unrepeatable as their aborted offspring.

Likewise, even the pro-abortion activists who work against us and those who perform abortions have the potential to see the unborn in a different way. We know from the history of our movement that even abortionists have the potential to change. That doesn’t mean we don’t fight these opponents in the courts and the legislatures and in making our case in the public square. It simply reminds us, as C. S. Lewis put it in haunting words from The Weight of Glory: “You have never talked to a mere mortal. it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

Created by God, like us and like each child in the womb, both our friends and our foes are—like every other human being in this most basic sense—sacred ground, not because of what each of us does but because of who and whose we are. All of us are conceived and born and live out our lives with the potential to recognize who we are, and who each one of those we encounter is, and to marvel at the one who made us, stammering in grateful awe, “What a piece of work is man!”

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Original Bio:

Ellen Wilson Fielding, a longtime senior editor of the Human Life Review, is the author of An Even Dozen (Human Life Press). The mother of four children, she lives in Maryland.