Dignity and Cultural Degradation

Shaping a performance in the drama of living, each of us wonders: How am I doing? Am I creating a persona suitable to the human drama, crafting something worthwhile, or am I botching the performance?

This existential concern overarches and embraces all others and manifests itself as the search for dignity.

Guiding that search is an attention that is always both outwardly oriented and inwardly focused, because the performance of existence is at once social and individual. Thus it is a matter of both social esteem and self-esteem.

As social creatures, throughout our lives we look for an estimation of how we are doing in this or that aspect of living, or even in our existence as a whole, and to an extent we rely on the approval, admiration, and affection of others as a measure of our dramatic success. As children we cannot help but uncritically internalize the attitudes and judgments of others about ourselves. But as we mature we become capable of differentiating our self-assessments from those of family members, friends, and acquaintances, as well as from the judgments about style, vocation, and success that are embedded in social customs and institutions—those pervasive, silently functioning evaluations emanating from the anonymous social authority that Heidegger calls “the ‘they’,” das Man. We can, we discover, disapprove of ourselves even when society approves of us, and respect our own decisions and actions even when society frowns.

What we finally seek, though, what we would prefer, is both self-esteem and social esteem—neither disrespect from others nor from oneself: both inner and outer dignity.

Now, both as children and as adults, we depend upon compelling images of dignified human living to guide and assist us in the shaping of our performances. Insights into dignity, like all insights, arise from imaginative presentations, and in this case especially from the images of specific persons whom we admire: concrete individuals who impress us in their ways of life, speech, and deeds. Such images evoke feelings of esteem, delight, respect, love, and awe that inspire and sustain us in our own struggle to embody the types of outlook, emotions, and behavior that we perceive as constituting artistically manifested dignity.

The dignified performances we strive for, in other words, first exist in our perceptions and memories of characters (real or fictional) that excite our sense of “best human possibility,” images of people whom we hope to emulate. And the feelings in us that attach to these images can be so strong that they nullify in advance any reasoned objections to the way of living that they portray.

Therefore, we should emphasize the importance to the search for dignity of culture, which Lonergan nicely defines as the “set of meanings and values that informs a way of life.” Whether we are considering culture in the broad context of a civilizational cultural tradition, or as a matter of “national cultures,” or with regard to the huge variety of local cultures and their ethoi, it remains that one of the key functions of culture is to create, nurture, and promote human achievement by providing compelling images of truly dignified living.

But culture, as we know all too well, can betray this responsibility.

It does this, for example, when it too closely identifies dignity with the accomplishment of merely practical aims, such as the creation and maintenance of wealth; the development of economic power and reach; the expansion of, or prowess in using, technologies; or the attaining of political mastery and control.

In such circumstances, culture’s function of protecting recognition of what dignified living really consists of—against pressures of, say, reductive consumerist images of human success; or ideological, statist identification of human worth with political conformism—is impaired. And even the question of dignity as the conscientious pursuit of self-creation in accord with apprehensions of moral virtue can become otiose, when notions of dignity have been too thoroughly absorbed into images of material success, of technological prowess, of political power.

If it is to truly promote the search for dignity, therefore, culture must perform the critical function of resisting and debunking attempts to reduce the meaning of the human drama to nothing more than a search for wealth, or possessions, or power, or entertainment. It needs to foster an awareness of the higher uses of human freedom and artistry—especially a sense of the existential significance of moral aspirations. And to do this it must address the crucial matter of what used to be called “sentimental education”: the education of the feelings of individuals, grounded in imagination. The effective promotion of dignity requires a culture—the sets of meanings and values that actually in-form ways of living—to enliven everyday life with ample examples of truly dignified achievement that stir and move us: incarnate examples of compassionate action; of reasonable courage; of reproval of narrow-mindedness and bias; of concern for the common good; of self-transcending love both for others and for one’s better self.

Failing in such a function, and to the degree that cultural imagination becomes in its projection of human worth overly practical, it is inevitable that human beings will tend toward being viewed more and more as essentially material beings. Commensurately, cultural imagination will suffer some eclipse of transcendent value and mystery; and the more transcendent value is eclipsed, the more “personal value”—the truth that each human being has an infinite, incalculable worth—will lose its grounding, along with respect for equal dignity and universal rights.

The danger here, to put it in philosophical terms, is of culture becoming imbued with an “anthropological materialism,” the human element of a worldview of philosophical materialism.

Philosophical materialism in cultural imagination always has a corrosive effect on respect for human dignity and rights. Half a century ago, the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel went to the heart of the matter in a description of what he called “techniques of degradation,” techniques that flourished in the twentieth century in all cultures permeated by philosophical materialism: more subtly in the cultures of capitalist democracies, more overtly in those of officially atheist states such as the Soviet Union.

In the Western democracies, Marcel argued (in an analysis that has not lost any of its relevance), such techniques of degradation include the impacts of media organs—organs of communication, entertainment, advertising, and journalism—that constantly produce images identifying human value and happiness both with the pursuit and acquisition of commodities and with the enjoyment of comforts provided by ever more astounding technologies. This entails, Marcel wrote, a destructive banalization of existence: “In our contemporary world it may be said that the more a man becomes dependent on the gadgets whose smooth functioning assures him a tolerable life at the material level, the more estranged he becomes from an awareness of his inner reality”—that inner reality that is the spiritual, inward life of a morally free agent who is aware that the drama of living is a more-than-practical affair, and who is guided (at least some of the time) by compelling images of respect for personhood itself, for courtesy toward others, and for love.

“A materialistic mode of thought,” Marcel further claimed, “is showing itself capable of bringing into being a world which more and more tends to verify its own materialistic postulates [in that] a human being who has undergone a certain type of psychological manipulation tends progressively to be reduced to the status of a [mere psychic thing], a thing which falls quite tidily within the province of the theories elaborated by an essentially materialistic psychology” (emphasis mine).

Marcel is not asserting here that humans can destroy the spiritual component in their makeup; but rather, that in the mirrors of consumerist and gadget-mad culture, in which persons imagine themselves and others as having merely the worth of world-immanent activity and productivity, the behavior of people will tend to conform to mechanist and materialist visions of human possibility. The dramatic artistry of living will increasingly be reduced to concerns about possessions and power; and the struggle for dignity will tend more and more to be regarded merely as a struggle for superiority in possessions and power.

In these circumstances, the vision, always fragile, of human beings as of equal value in their inherent dignity—apart from their place in any such struggle—will have diminishing persuasive appeal.

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