Save it for a rainy day
Picture this: A massive typhoon hits the Philippines, causing Manila Bay, the Pasig River, and Laguna de Bay to unleash their fury on the entire city. The downpour is relentless, while the combined force of the rains and winds batter homes, breaking down doors and tearing off rooftops. The entire length of EDSA becomes a raging chest-deep river of cars and buses, soaked sofas, and TV sets, all floating amid the sewage.
No one is spared, not even those in the gated villages. Suddenly, while clinging to your inflatable raft, you spot a baby being swept away by the current. You reach out to try to get hold of the baby’s hand, but just then, bobbing nearby is an elegantly framed painting. You gasp when you realize it is a rare and exquisite Anita Magsaysay-Ho egg tempera work, featuring her signature bandanna-ed women at work in the field, trying to catch chickens.
Now who do you save—unfortunately you can’t save both and must only choose one: the chickens or the child? A human life or an artistic treasure?
The moral dilemma
I based this hypothetical moral quandary with a Filipinized locale on the one posited by the writer William H. Gass in his essay “Goodness Knows Nothing of Beauty,” which first appeared in Harper’s magazine in 1987. His setting is a Venice beset by a terrible storm, with the lagoon overflowing. The kid or the Canaletto, he asks, the baby or the Botticelli?
I came across this essay at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, where I was working at the time, soon after that issue of Harper’s was published. I would often linger at the library on the days when I had no lunch plans and spend the hour leafing through periodicals. This particular essay of Gass’ made such an impression on me then that I photocopied it and kept it with a sheaf of other papers that have somehow moved with me from country to country throughout my peripatetic adult life.
While the real-life chances of finding oneself in the dilemma Gass presents is, I would imagine, extremely far-fetched, the what if-ness of it all was intellectually and philosophically provocative to my 24-year-old self.
Gass contemplates the distance between morality and art, and the hierarchy we assign to “the values men prize,” which he distills down to truth, goodness, beauty, happiness and salvation. He questions the extent of goodness’ utility in society, claiming that “throughout history, goodness has done more harm than good,” citing the moralists’ tendency to be bullies. See Savonarola’s disastrous bonfire of the vanities that saw thousands of books, paintings, sculptures—many of them no doubt fine examples of artistic achievement—senselessly destroyed in a public square in Florence in the name of moral rectitude.
Tangible beauty vs. potential value
Gass compares the inherent value of a work of art, finished, tangible, and pleasing, perhaps even magnificent, with the potential value of a little child’s life, whose personality is yet to be formed and whose future is assumed to be filled with possibility. “It is not between image and infant, then, that we are being asked to choose,” he writes, “but between some fully realized aesthetic quality and a vaguely generalized human nature, even though it is a specific baby who could drown.”
It goes without saying that most people would choose to save the tiny tot over the Tintoretto, if only because most of us like to think of ourselves as moral, good, and caring people, and as such would naturally choose to do the moral, good, and caring thing.
But Gass counters “That attachment to human life, which demands that it be chosen over everything else is mostly humbug,” arguing that we are not so special as to be indispensable to the world and therefore must always be saved, and that, really, not everyone is as good a person as they think they are.
What would the Filipino do?
Perhaps in this imaginary inundated Venice, one might only be able to save just one thing (or person), but in an overflowing EDSA, the spirit of bayanihan would likely spur us all into saving everyone and everything from drowning: man, woman, child, chickens, dogs, cats, the Santo Niño figurine, and the holy water from Lourdes. And our mobile phones, of course, because we’d still need to record those viral dances for TikTok once we are safe and dry.
And then, après le deluge, the angry post-mortems would begin. How did this happen? Why were we yet again so unprepared for this disaster? Who signed off on the official government permits? Who pocketed billions while skimping on quality to build those substandard flood control barriers?
If the choice were between a contractor and an Ang Kiukok, I swear I’d let the fucking contractor drown. The congressman, too.
