We are fair-minded and thoughtful, yes? Let us consider then the several ideals, values, policies, institutions and ethical principles that a robust civilization must hold most dear. Then, let our short list become still shorter; let our selection narrow to two or three most defensible and worthy among them all. Lastly, may we then go on to discount – for good reasons – those that can be counted among the embarrassingly vague, the (unrealistic, impossible) idealistic, and those that can be counted as platitudes; let us reject “love” on our list, as well as “community” and “honor”, as well as all such similar insubstantial terms, and relatively elevate those which must finally inhere at the sagacious core of any non-hypocritical, virtuous polity. And after we’ve besmirched the lesser with our forthright, critical ink, what remains? It is, methinks it must be, human dignity, the irreducible dignity of the human person.
Can such a value amount to something more than the merely optative?
“Dignity” always implies some elevation. However, we must not confuse the term as it is sometimes used, for instance, in reference to monarchs and aristocratic protocols and the like with the meaning here intended in the words “human dignity.” Dignity is herein used to reference an unabridged acknowledgement of the integrity, the sanctity, of the individual person, to include his and her feelings, attitudes, rights and values. In this vital sense, dignity is not achieved in the haughty strut but rather in the altogether contrasting abiding reality that one is never degraded by one or a number of his species, nor by avoidable mischance or calamity, but remedy is sought in every instance of every human being’s suffering and/or degradation. Our species is our house, and the house divided against itself cannot stand, and no human being shall be allowed, following a hypocrisy-disdaining rubric such as the present one, to suffer being rendered an expedient in some professed or popular or opportunistic scheme. And the enduring value of order shall also sedulously comport itself with a full, clear minded, Golden Rule ken that there go I!
Human dignity is to human rights what the Holy Spirit is to Christian theology: these are demonstrable, sine qua non in their domains, and they transcend matters of ‘faith’. This is evident in real conditions (dignity, in not being debased) and real actions (smiling as a result of improved spirits and resultant waxing hopefulness, for example).
Importantly, for the purposes of the present writing, I must point out that it has been among my most longstanding dissents concerning democracy that it (democracy) does not deign to affirm any particular principle, value, excellence, ideal or merit beyond crassest popularity… and – my God! – even that (popularity) did not carry that fateful, inauspicious November day in 2016 when Americans looked in dismay upon their newly crowned, decidedly unpopular champion. Democracy is at best indifferent regarding the all-too-familiar vice of human selfishness. And often it is taken as a given that each voter can be expected to cast his or her ballot with selfish ideas and convenient prejudices, and corrupt, self-serving values aforethought – these as most trusted, reliable guides. And when the election is done, we adherents to democracy’s incontestable Oz-wondrousness expect that the result of all this (in all candor, a gilded political ritual of selfishness?) will yield some unimpugnable and axiomatic virtue, such as, for example, “fairness”. Still, we must acknowledge that democracy itself in no wise disparages selfishness. People may vote for “the larger good,” but democracy is indifferent to whether they actually do.
But any virtuously civilized political policy or philosophy ought to aim higher than an unhesitant, excessively confident, culturally imperious, tendentious and nearly unexamined accommodation of selfishness! We seem to have accepted in toto the notion that the self-seeking is also the politically necessary and unavoidable. Yet, is it really necessary that our obeisance toward democracy be so complete, so unquestioning and uncritical? Is there, at last, a way we might somehow insert decidedly civilizational agendas and incorporate the august values of kindness, compassion, social responsibility, intellectual defensibility, human dignity and non-oppression into our political processes and institutions, analogously, if you will, to the way an IV is inserted into the skin of the needful patient?
Americans already voted (in 2016, instrumentally) to debase democracy, bypassing all the candidates versant in the historical, crucible-tested values and protocols of modern governance and policy, the political folkways and social philosophies of their storied democracy, in favor of an arriviste, an apostle of insensate, unapologetic, hound snout capitalism. So, if it isn’t already too late, if the poor patient on the bed isn’t already doomed, what might be done to get civilization back on track, back to some semblance of probity and upright proaction, and out of the languorous deathbed of democracy’s default selfishness, of cynicism, pessimism, narrowness, parochialisms, impossible, craven isolationism, fault finding, division, obscurantism and disillusionment before it is too late, before some tantamount Armageddon-seizure rudely intercedes and eclipses our species and the comfort bed of democracy is rendered a still more comfortable grave?