Over the last couple of weeks, if you listened through the sound of artillery bombardment and screams, you could hear one word being repeated over and over again: dignity. My ears first perked up when Link TV aired former President Carter’s rebuke of the Bush Administration for insisting that Lebanon assume a posture of subservience. This morning (I believe it was on International Dateline), I heard an impassioned Dr. Amaal Saad-Ghorayeb demand dignity for the Lebonese people. A quick sprint through the blogosphere reveals dignity-based activism here and here and here and here.
There seems to be a certain Machiavellian maliciousness in the way the Bush administration has ignored Lebanon’s repeated assertions of dignity. BushCo practices the all the techniques of Corporate-Fu, which measures power in terms of dignity withheld from others. In the U.S., rankism continues to be rewarded with praise and cold hard cash. Is it any wonder that a President with a CEO background would project our most pernicious habit of thought on the world?
Despite splendid cross-cultural efforts like Mosaic, we tend to think about the problems of Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Israel, Afghanistan, etc. as being “over there”. The violence of war is something that happens on the other side of the TV screen. However, the issue of “dignity” is universal.
This is the key to getting past the “happening somewhere out there” mentality. The deprivation of dignity is happening right here in the U.S. The deliberate deprivation of dignity might be most prevalent in the “bad neighborhoods”, but rest assure, rankist tactics are working their way up the social scale. When you see the Lebonese woman pleading for her dignity, imagine yourself making a similar plea to your boss. What would you do if your plea was ignored or met only with laughter? How far back do you draw the dignity line? I’m willing to bet that for most of us dignity is more important than any amount of pay, and people take their biggest risks in life to try to defend it.
The national toll of indignity was recently covered by NYT’s article Men Not Working. Yesterday I discovered that this was the source David Brook’s pwning all the dignity for the Puritan Elite (my sentiments were echoed by intrepidliberal). The article about Men Not Working is astoundingly sexist. It ignores dignity as an issue for the vast number of women who are viewed as “not actively looking for work”. The suppression of the numbers of unemployed women are just as important as the numbers of men when it comes to analyzing the distortions and lies behind the U.S. “full employment” statistics. Unless we all really do assume that women’s economic problems are solved when they are “married off”, then the concern over Men Not Working is just another way of wheedling for a return to male entitlement.
The salient point here is that as long as dignity is not held to be a universal right, more powerful parties will use it as a bargaining chip. If dignity is only offered as a matter of noblesse oblige, then it’s tempting to make your rival or opponent plead for it – and pleading is itself indignifying. Subordinates plead to superiors. Dignitarians start from the premise that every human being has value and worth, and disagreements must be resolved instead of quashed.
