Michael Lloyd: Where does value come from?

Yesterday was my 50th. birthday, and my sister-in-law very kindly gave me a book entitled Old Git Wit. Amongst my favourite entries so far are: ‘Time may be a great healer, but it’s a lousy beautician’. And ‘As you grow old, you lose interest in sex, your friends drift away, and your children often ignore you. There are other advantages, of course, but those are the main ones.’

What a lot of people comment upon is how, as they grow older, the number of things that they are sure about decreases, but they are more and more sure about those increasingly few things.

One of the things that I am most sure of – and increasingly sure of - is that people have value. We all know that. We all believe that. We don’t always treat people that way – we don’t always accord them the value we know they have. But we know we should, and we feel shoddy when we don’t. That seems to me to be common ground. Everybody except the psychotic would agree with that.

What we often don’t notice is that value is a personal quality. You can only be valued by a person. You can’t be valued by an impersonal force. You can’t be valued by electricity, for instance. You can’t be valued by gravity. (Well, some would say you can, and that some people are more valued by gravity than others, but that is anthropomorphism, and an offensive one to boot!) You can only be valued by a person.

So by whom are we valued? Where does our value come from? What is the personal source of our worth? If we matter as human beings, to whom do we matter? And how much?

The first and most obvious answer is that we are valued by our family and friends. They are the people who most tangibly mediate our sense of value to us. When I get a tranche of cards on my 50th. birthday, albeit mostly referring to Zimmer frames and false teeth, I feel valued. I feel as if I matter because I matter to these people – my family and both my friends.