In a hotel in Farmington, Missouri, after swimming in the pool outside and having a breath-holding competition with my brothers, we come inside and see a small statue of a Catholic saint. I recognized it because I’d seen statues like it growing up. I recognized the woolen brown robes with the ropes at the waist and the bald head on top with hair on the sides. Only as I describe it now do I recall that the statue must have been a saint of the Franciscan order. But more than that, I write this because I am continually shocked by how people are inevitably products of their time and place.

First, I think of where I grew up. People are conservative and Catholic mostly because they were born in northeastern Kansas in the late twentieth century. I couldn’t have had this thought early in my life, because I myself was a product of the only time and place I’d ever known. When I traveled, I saw different places and cultures and read their histories to imagine different times. And those places have statues too, but instead of Franciscan monks, they are Buddhas or political leaders or animal idols.

The people I met while traveling were, almost without exception, consistent with the presumed effects of their respective times and places. This makes me wonder: who are the people that resist their time and place? And what are they determined by? These people who look for influence outside of what they are born into. Maybe they are born into the wrong environment, so they rebel against it and travel and explore until they find the right time and place. For the people who cannot access the time and place their heart desires, do they travel and search to no avail and then die feeling lost?

Are there some who exist who do not feel comfortable in any time and place, because it is so human, so physical and base? Are these demigods and prophets, or maybe even real and actual gods, or small slices of actual gods. I know I shouldn’t, but I am inclined to think less of people who are determined by their time and place. I think they are lazy and lack agency in their own lives. I think they float along like a piece of driftwood in the river and never really do anything but get pushed along by the current in whatever way. I think some very successful and famous people have even existed this way. And they were applauded and respected for doing nothing but floating along, just the same as other unsuccessful and poor and wretched people who have been punished and thrown out for the same exact spatiotemporal forces that aided the more fortunate.

The great irony is that, as you might have already assumed from my writing, I consider myself to be one who lives free of determinism, or at least rages against it the best I can, when in reality I am mostly likely determined just like everyone else. Even all my raging for freedom is likely determined. So that all my raging that I find so romantic and noble is no different from the determined lazy bum that never does anything in life and always takes the easy way out and even steals and kills. If he is determined by the same forces, he and I are the same, no matter what I achieve.

No different than a tree will grow tall when planted in good soil and watered, and a plant without will not. But is this any fault of the plant without? That it has not grown tall. And a star shooting in dark space at the edge of the galaxy will not light any planet. While our sun brings life and activity to so many creatures. But is this any fault of the distant shooting star? This starts to raise the question: how are we valuing these beings?

How are we determining that one is successful, right, and good while the other is failed, wrong, and bad. For the stars, for example, I’ve arbitrarily valued them based on the light they give to living beings, but is this an objectively true way to value a star? And for the trees, we value them by how tall they’ve grown, but is this an objectively true way to value a tree? And humans, we value based on wealth and fame, but is this an objectively true way to value humans?

This is another argument for why the study of aesthetics is more interesting to me than the study of ethics, because all value judgments reduce to non-truth claims. So not only are living creatures seemingly not responsible for the their choices and values that result from their determined conditions (except for those godlike humans who seem to have gained control of their own will), but even the values that do result from determined conditions, if we were to judge them and ascribe their good or evil to an agent, we have no standards for what is good or evil.

So this is my argument for art, for aesthetics over ethics. Because life is like a film or a game, where we can experience and appreciate and express gratitude and enjoy, but as far as responsibility and justice and morality—these all arise artificially, mostly via social controls, from our base needs for survival.