Depreciating human life: a year-end market report

The cold currency of trading hostages repels George Pitcher, who explores the casual acceptance that some lives are biddable against lives of intrinsically higher value.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Three men huddle around a laptop and talk animatedly.

Israel's Prime Minister monitors the recent hostage exhchange.

Prime Minister's Office, Israeli Government.

There is something peculiarly horrific about the barter of Israeli hostages held in Gaza by Hamas for Palestinian prisoners in Israel. And it isn’t only the unimaginable suffering these innocent civilians have to endure somewhere on an unknown scale between life and death.

It’s also that their lives are reduced to their commodity value. Hostages are assets to be traded in the market for peace, not human beings. It’s difficult to write this, but it’s almost as if three dead hostages, including a 10-month-old baby, said to have been killed in an Israeli airstrike, have lost their asset value. These ones are no good – they don’t work anymore.

Negotiating the release of hostages for peace terms is as old as the Hebron Hills. An Egyptian pharaoh once released his enslaved Israelites to Moses in return for the lifting of the plagues being inflicted on his people. But there is something of the neo-liberal free market in the way that post-modern conflict resolution uses human life as a currency of exchange.

Ryan Gilfeather wrote excellently here how this material valuation offends against the human dignity in which the divine invests. The imago dei that humanity bears, if you like, is not to be reduced to a bounty, a financial liability or an asset value.

As a consequence, human life is tradeable. Yes, it has value, but its share price can fall as well as rise.

I’d want to take that a step further, to ask how that depreciation has come about with such ready acceptance and to note a couple of instances where the mentality of the trade in human existence has become a natural process of marketing.

The attitude, I think, has its roots in the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries. Don’t get me wrong: This is no censure of progressivism. Universal literacy, healthcare, scientific endeavour and the birth and growth of democracy are all very good ideas indeed. But the Enlightenment also brought the capitalist mindset to almost every area of human existence. Our lives, in many contexts, became actuarial.

This is not my idea. The great, perhaps the greatest, Christian mind of the 20th century, C.S. Lewis, railed against how Fascism and genocide were the bastard offspring of our common-law marriage to progressive thinking, in that traditional values of human existence were now only there to be debunked.

I am indebted to Lewis’s biographer, A.N. Wilson, for this. In Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man, he writes of “The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere specimens… begins to affect our very language.’

Lewis was no white-knuckled reactionary, but he did recognise that the values and virtues of ancient religious thought were binned at humanity’s peril. We had begun to understand the price of human life, rather the the value of it.

This is not to suggest for a moment that the ancient world was a nirvana (or even a Narnia). The Garden of Eden was lost at the beginning of time, not at the Enlightenment. Brutality, slavery and cruelty are part of our post-lapsarian world.

It’s just that religious virtue used to be a bulwark against such things. As a consequence, human life is tradeable. Yes, it has value, but its share price can fall as well as rise. By the 21st century, we can look behind us to see how that has played out. Allow me to elucidate a couple of examples of how casual is our acceptance that some lives are biddable against lives of intrinsically higher value.

The first is the almost clownishly implemented government policy proposal to redeploy migrants to the UK to Rwanda. Almost clownishly, because it would be funny if it didn’t involve a trade in human misery, the idea that desperate people endangering their lives and those of their families in small boats can be made someone else’s problem to sort out, simply by looking away. These people are worthless, you see, because they are not us and only we belong here (whoever “we” may be). The idea is that we pay Rwanda per capita to take them, rather as we might send our plastic refuse to China for landfill.

A second example of merchandising human life I would cite are the repeated attempts to have assisted suicide, or voluntary euthanasia, legalised in the UK, rather than enhancing palliative end-of-life care. These proposals depend entirely on the state legislature endorsing that some human lives aren’t worth living and are disposable.

At base, it’s the same principle as the Rwanda policy, other than we’d be killing them, or assisting them to kill themselves, rather than disposing of them in a central African waste-bin.

These are the “anythings” that humans believe in when they stop recognising the sanctity of human life. The value equation used for Gazan hostages is on the same continuum as the human trafficker and the politician who tries to stop him, or the calculation of the cost to the state and their family of a terminally ill patient offered an alternative way out.

It’s just that these equations have become invisible to the naked eye. We don’t see them anymore. But, I’d suggest, for Christ’s sake we’d better start looking.

Review

Addiction

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Film & TV

13 May 2025

4 min read

This City is Ours – truth and lies about the global drugs trade

The drug-dealing family drama reflects the impact of the drugs world.

Henry Corbett

Henry Corbett, a vicar in Liverpool and chaplain to Everton Football Club.

Family saga.

BBC.

I asked a thoughtful Scouser and cinephile “What do you think of This City is Ours? – the crime drama TV series set in Liverpool. I wondered if he would hate all the talk of drugs, the power games, the violence and that the series about a global trade is located in our city.

“Well, it’s true.”

As a priest in Liverpool, I have taken the funerals of drug dealers and users, including one where the family quoted me Jesus’ saying, “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” I have known too many people caught up first in the heroin trade of the 1980s and then more recently with cocaine.

I agreed that the series is truthful, and on many levels. Those involved in the criminal world of illegal drugs are still people.

I remember Peter (not his real name) who I knew when he was a young lad in the youth club I helped with. He was sitting in our kitchen with a mug of tea. He had bruises all over his face because of a drugs debt he hadn’t paid. One of my daughters came in to get something out of the fridge, and Peter apologised to her for the state of his face, explained it was because of being involved in drugs, and advised her strongly against it. He then asked after her interests and what she enjoyed and was ‘made up’ – happy - when she spoke of liking art. My daughter never forgot that conversation. She learned that people in the drugs trade were still people and could be kind, and that the illegal drugs world was to be avoided. People are both made in the image of God, capable of love and concern, and also flawed and able to be drawn into a trade that affects people so badly across the world.

So, the eight episodes of the first series of This City Is Ours show that the global criminal world of illegal drugs is brutal, violent and full of jeopardy. There are chilling deaths, executions, and vengeance. All truthful to that world. There are power struggles and a vicious family succession battle too. But there are also scenes of the same family at the dinner table, of the longing for a baby with a girlfriend who is very much loved. One moment a character is a hard-hearted killer and the next moment a tender partner. That is so truthful to the different compartments that people can live in: someone can be a loving son who cares for their mother and a ruthless power-hungry toxic gangster.

The consequences of that unnecessary “necessary” action are tragic.

A further truth that I see at every funeral is the ripple effect on partners, siblings, parents, the wider family, and friends, and outward across the community. Every episode of the show features family members: some in the gang, some outside the gang, some wanting a cut of the lucrative proceeds, others desperate to get out from this dangerous, chilling world. What we do can massively affect others close to us. So often family and friends, and a community, must live with the consequences of actions taken in a criminal underworld they are often excluded from and fearful of. Even young children can be affected and dragged into a battle for power.

So, there are truths, but what about the lies? Here’s two stand outs:

“Are we safe?” “Yes, babe.”

We know they are not safe. Definitely not. There’s a target on your back, and often on the family’s back as well.

And the second:

“It was necessary”. Or “f***ing necessary”.

No, it wasn’t. He didn’t have to become engaged in a succession struggle for power, money, and control. He didn’t have to kill someone he looked up to, respected, even loved. The consequences of that unnecessary “necessary” action are tragic.

Then there is the third lie about loyalty and trust. That false sense of being in a gang that will look after you and look out for you, that will secure your future and give you a sense of being someone who counts. From early on, this series shows that people are expendable, can be shot and tossed over a cliff, and that person you looked up to may be an informant to the police. That is maybe how they have stayed out of prison.

A fourth lie the series so truthfully nails is the notion that it is easy to walk away once you have seen through the attractions of money, of Spanish villas, of designer gear, of fragile power. It very often isn’t. You may desperately want a worthwhile life that brings good not bad, peace not killings, a freedom from looking over your shoulder and from a troubled conscience. But there may be money demanded by your supplier, there may be enemies you have made along the way. I have known people successfully move away from it all but that has often only been after a spell in prison, and with a sound alternative - whether a job to keep, a daughter to look after, or a move away.

Wisdom is a much-valued quality throughout history. Five of the Bible’s 66 books are often called Wisdom books and Jesus called Christians to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” This City is Ours is beautifully shot, expertly scripted, brilliantly acted, and it truthfully lifts the lid on the world of the drug-dealing criminal underworld and on some of the lies peddled in that world. And I did explain in the funeral service that when Jesus said “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword” he was not recommending that way of life but warning against it.