I was thinking about baths this morning. I don’t know why. But you’ve got to love sitting in hot water, reading a book, zoning out. A bath isn’t about getting clean, it is about pure luxury, and even if it means eating my knees the whole time, wedged in as low as I can get, it still feels wonderful.
It always makes me laugh, how many people say they don’t like baths because they end up feeling dirty, but it is all a matter of perspective. If you aren’t thinking about a bath as getting clean but rather as a pleasant diversion, the criteria by which you evaluate the experience changes. In some ways, that is reflected in a lot of things about modern life.
Eating is another prime example; eat to live or live to eat? Depending on how one answers that question, paying $100 for a plate of food becomes a very different decision. What got me off on this train of thought, however, wasn’t the idea of personal choice, but rather evaluating the choices of others.
If someone felt like baths were for getting clean, they might consider me crazy for enjoying one. With regard to something like baths, it is not a big deal. But consider war, or another political issue. Or even sticking with baths, let us suppose there were a shortage of water, and we had enough water to allow kids to take baths or run in the sprinkler. One or the other.
By whose standards do we make that decision? It is obvious that people value things different, but not at all clear what we are supposed to do with that, as we struggled to become better people. Certainly if you know how someone else values something, and how you value it, you can at least try to make some sort of rational choice about how much you are willing to compromise. But what about when you are making decisions for people who can’t communicate their preferences (and the levels thereof) to you? This is true of babies and large populations, but it’s also built into the way we communicate.
Even between two adults with a good grasp on the language, the problem of trying to balance levels of importance is truly a difficult one. Lets say we had each person rate what was important to them on a scale of 1 to 10. But how would we get them to use the same scale?
Even if we say “ten is great, one sucks”, it is not as though those are terms that are universally applicable. Frankly, given these obstacles, it is starkly amazing that human beings manage to have relationships at all, to negotiate a give and take.