This is my post for day 12 of the Inkhaven writing retreat.

I place a high value on humanity’s cultural heritage. I find the question of what exactly makes it valuable quite interesting and unclear. According to my theory of metaethics, one doesn’t need to justify all of one’s values. But often there are deeper reasons, and it can be very useful to introspect on one’s values.

For me, here are some things that make artifacts valuable;

• They give us information about what, specifically, happened in human history.
• They give us insight into human nature.
• They’re aesthetically beautiful.
• They’re old. I’m unclear how much I value this on its own, but there’s something to it.
• They give us connection to people long gone.

There’s aspect in particular about this type of value that confuses me. It seems to get created at some point, but this point is very unclear.

Almost all cuneiform tablets are the equivalent of paperwork. They were essentially worthless at the time of creation. They continued to be essentially worthless for quite a while; as cool as it is to see your great-grandmother’s receipts from the grocery store, they are not actually rare, sentimental, or insightful about the human condition. But somewhere along the line, we stopped writing in cuneiform, and then lost knowledge of how to read it, and then lost knowledge of its existence, and then lost knowledge of the very civilizations that created it in the first place. So now, cuneiform tablets are highly valuable, despite the fact that we have found hundreds of thousands of them.

This phenomenon is a little confusing to me, but it gets much more confusing to me if we layer it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City contains a large room devoted to displaying a small ancient Egyptian building in its entirety: the Temple of Dendur. This is a straight-forward example of a culturally valuable artifact. But on the side of the temple is graffiti. Terrible! Someone damaged the value of the temple by writing graffiti on it. …or did they? It turns out that the graffiti is 200 years old. It exists because the Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt brought a wave of European tourists into the country. Like it or not, Napoleon’s actions were of enormous historical consequence, and thus have become part of humanity’s cultural heritage.

If some punk visiting the Met used spray paint on the temple, they would surely be harshly reprimanded, the action universally denounced, and the paint cleaned up. …but we if we waited another 500 years? Would the action then be considered an enrichment of the history of the temple?

In Berkeley there is a tendency to call for the historic preservation of houses whose cultural value is highly dubious. If some quirky author lived here for a bit in the 60s, that does not really justify cordoning off that plot of land indefinitely, especially when there are tens of thousands of people who could be using that land to, you know, live.

This tension also exists in a continual way for cities which were of immense importance in ancient times and which, well, never stopped being swarmed with people, because they’re cities. Examples include Jericho, Rome, London, and Mexico city, just off the top of my head.

I want to preserve the cultural artifacts that humans produce. And I want humans to keep being able to live and produce more artifacts. And they should be able to keep living where they have been living. This all feels like a big tangled conundrum to me. I’d like to hear more people talking about it.