Dignity, Democracy, and Mythos

References to dignity (human dignity, personal dignity) are a constant in our cultural life, especially in journalism and politics. Overuse has unfortunately rendered the term rather shopworn, its value thinned from repetition. To many, it registers now as a cliché: a dependable piety of modern political discourse indicating a general respect for “the value of human life.”

But why each human life is valuable; and in what that value consists—these are almost never discussed or explained.

Apparently hollow rhetorical references to dignity are not an altogether new phenomenon. In the mid-nineteenth century, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was already complaining that the term dignity was “the shibboleth of all perplexed and empty-headed moralists”: a vacant rhetorical first principle.

Still, the ubiquity of the term in general discourse is new. Because of its central role in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (whose authors were indebted, as is widely recognized, to trends in Catholic philosophy) and all the documents and constitutions inspired by it, and the rights-discourse springing from these; and because of the development of mass media and modern communications technologies which have enriched (or swamped, depending on your point of view) mass consciousness with the discourse of national and international politics and law, the term dignity has become an unavoidable, everyday cliché.

But why, after all, did the concept move so quickly to the center of modern Western political thought, with such gravitational force that it has become, by now, an irreplaceable word in dialogues about human rights and freedoms? Why does every example of social oppression or exploitation, and every threat of political aggression, seem to call forth a new demand for “respecting human dignity,” and the rights of peoples to “the dignity of self-determination”?

One answer has to do with the importance of the extraordinary power, in the modern mind, of the idea of human equality—an idea that presents the problem of understanding just what “human equality” actually is.

Human beings are not equal, obviously, in powers of intellect; emotional capacity; physical ability; moral maturity, or anything else susceptible to observation. But they have to have something equally, if the phrase “human equality” is to mean anything.

This “something” is what the term dignity has come to refer to: humans can be said to be equal in dignity, which is to say, in their basic human value.

But because this value and equality don’t show themselves—because they aren’t discoverable by observation—inherent human dignity is necessarily a spiritual conceit. Further, it is a moral-spiritual conceit with a specific spiritual lineage, originating in Jewish and Christian ideas of human beings equally participating in transcendent divine value, each person being “made in the image and likeness of God.”

Yet how could these blatantly spiritual ideas of equality and basic human value, with distinctive Western religious roots, become a secular truism at the heart of modern politics?

As a question of intellectual history the answer is complex, but it is anchored in a simple insight: the human beings who are affirmed to be equal in basic dignity are concrete individuals living in the world: persons who are embodied, who grow, enjoy, suffer, and die in earthly existence (whatever further spiritual destiny may be envisioned for them). The value of persons is that of incarnate creatures, who come into being, and develop, as physical, social, cultural, and political beings. And so the idea of inherent human dignity on which visions of human equality are based, though it arises from spiritual intuitions and insights, functions inevitably too as a worldly concept; and so increasingly, in the modern era, it functions as a legal concept, protecting recognition and opportunities for concrete persons wherever they happen to have come into existence—irrespective, of course, of any nation’s formal political theology, or of any religious (or non-religious, or anti-religious) beliefs that persons might hold.

So: although the equality of inherent dignity can only be spiritual in principle (i.e., non-measurable, but instead trusted in), it must be worldly in practice if it is to be honored.

Or one might say: dignity is human participation in the divine; but that participation is existence in history, the existence of concrete individuals.

Democracy, and specifically liberal democracy, is the natural political outcome of this vision of equal human dignity. If humans in a society have equal basic value, then each should have an equal “say” in how they are governed; and if some few are not by nature “more human” than others (and thus “born” to rule while others obey), then the polity itself should reflect the personal norm of free, reasonable, and responsible self-government. Government properly should be—humans having equal basic value—of the people; by the people; and for the people.

(The civic education of individuals that protects against members of a democratic polity freely setting their course toward degraded goals and calamity is a topic for another time.)

The intimate link between the original religious vision of humans as equal in principle and the secular democratic ideal of each person deserving an equal say in political self-determination in practice, is expressed by Melville in a famous passage of Moby Dick (Chapter 26), where the invaluable dignity belonging to every human being as such is distinguished from all outward trappings, all moral failures and greedy enterprises, and all political hierarchies: “Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes…. [T]his august dignity I treat of, is not the dignity of kings and robes, but that abounding dignity which has no robed investiture. [It is] that democratic dignity which, on all hands, radiates without end from God; Himself! The great God absolute! The centre and circumference of all democracy! His omnipresence, our divine equality!”

For the historically and philosophically attuned, like Melville, the democratic vision is inseparable from the religious vision of our “divine equality.” But one need not make that association. The greatest strength of the heuristic concept of equal inherent dignity is its effective independence, in the sphere of moral and political thinking, from any explicit religious appeal or definition.

At the same time, I would hazard that those for whom the term inherent dignity confidently radiates a secular truth are gaining, through this embrace, an existential equilibrium that extends beyond the secular world of social and political concerns.

For after all, every person lives in the cosmos: in the fullness of being and narrative meaning that includes the ground of reality. And while people may imagine themselves to be existing in a merely “immanent” universe, still an elementary awareness that reality is a cosmos, and that immanent being rationally requires a transcendent ground of being, exerts a certain pressure in every psyche.

And this, too, helps to explain why the term dignity has moved to the center of modern political discourse that is committed to the truth of human equality. Dignity functions in the psyche as a symbol that links the concrete worldly value of all individuals with the transcendent absolute that grounds their human equality.

Insofar as this is the case, dignity functions as a mythos: a “mythic image” (in the noble sense) that allows “personal value” to be transparent for the absolute of transcendent value.

The function of the notion of inherent dignity as a mythos remains to many (though not to all: see Melville) a hidden process. But so long as an active love of basic human dignity helps to provide persons with existential balance in the cosmos, then innocence about the fact that dignity and equality—along with other key symbols—are mediating transcendent value to worldly existence is not dangerous.

What is dangerous is the absence of belief, or the fading of belief, in human equality. “Inherent dignity” means nothing to those who find the idea of human equality unconvincing, either because of practicalist considerations (for example, in views of humans as essentially competitive consumers where those with fewer possessions and power are less valuable because less successful), or because of ideological convictions (for example, in worldviews where some human types—black, Jewish, female, Protestant, Islamic, Japanese, Roma, Slavic—are regarded as less human than others, or even subhuman).

Unfortunately, it seems all too easy, even in modern times, to remain unpersuaded about the truth of basic human equality.

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