The DIGNITY Series: Achieving Dignity

by Editors

This is the last part in a 10-part series examining the loss and possible recapture of dignity in our public lives and political discourse. (Read the series from the beginning here.)

DIGNITY

By Stanley Baran

10. Achieving Dignity

In December, 2008 the Los Angeles Times acquired a leaked copy of a two-page internal White House memo intended for Cabinet members and other high-ranking Administration officials. Designed as a guide for discussing with the press and public President Bush’s eight years in office, it was titled “Speech Topper on the Bush Record.” It encouraged officials, among other things, to stress that Mr. Bush had throughout his two terms maintained “the honor and the dignity of his office.” Perhaps Mr. Obama’s successful invocation of dignity and his call to our better angels moved the White House to try to lay claim to some of Obama’s caché. Perhaps the Administration saw itself in the mirror and recognized an absence of dignity that, too late to be rectified, needed at least to be patched over. Perhaps dignity was just a word, a linguistic currency buying a basketful of extraordinary meanings, picked out of tradition, sounding presidential, and used to mark a transition. Whatever the reason for Mr. Bush’s desire to be remembered as a man of dignity, news of the memo led MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann to borrow from Senator Moynihan, telling his viewers that such a thing could come to pass only if Americans were willing to “define dignity down.”

But haven’t we been defining dignity down for some time? Rather than achieve the America embodied in our self-told stories, haven’t we allowed those cherished narratives to become detached from the realities they were intended to convey? Did we define our national dignity down to the point that our myth of exceptionalism morphed into what Glenn Greenwald called our “blinding American narcissism?” Upon the release of the December, 2008 bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report documenting the sanctioning torture by America’s highest level public officials, he wrote, “Just ponder the uproar if, in any other country, the political parties joined together and issued a report documenting that the country’s President and highest aides were directly responsible for war crimes and widespread detainee abuse and death. Compare the inevitable reaction to such an event if it happened in another country to what happens in the U.S.” Elsewhere he expanded on his theme of America’s narcissism, “The pressures and allegedly selfless motivations being cited on behalf of Bush officials who ordered torture and other crimes—even if accurate—aren’t unique to American leaders. They are extremely common. They don’t mitigate war crimes. They are what typically motivate war crimes, and they’re the reason such crimes are banned by international agreement in the first place—to deter leaders, through the force of law, from succumbing to those exact temptations. What determines whether a political leader is good or evil isn’t their nationality. It’s their conduct. And leaders who violate the laws of war and commit war crimes, by definition, aren’t good, even if they are American.”

But we are American, and we are proud of that. Yet when does our belief that we and our country are “wonderfully different from anything that has been,” in the words of philosopher Rorty, become undignified? Rorty, in a series of 1998 lectures on how leftist thought could help us “achieve our country,” addressed the issue of national pride, taking aim at a common pair of heuristics long employed to dismiss the suggestion that we, as nation, could do and be better—“America, love it or leave it” and its sibling, “My country, right or wrong.” He argued, “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition for self-improvement. Too much national pride can produce bellicosity and imperialism, just as excessive self-respect can produce arrogance. But just as too little self-respect makes it difficult for a person to display moral courage, so insufficient national pride makes energetic and effective debate about national policy unlikely.”

Comedian Bill Maher was more succinct, demanding of his Real Time with Bill Maher studio and home television audiences, “Stop bragging about being the best country in the world and start acting like it.” On his Lincolnesque train trip to his Inauguration, Barack Obama was more expansive, reminding us that in our desire to be human rather than animal, we substituted reason for instinct. Speaking in Baltimore he said, “What is required is a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives—from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry—an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.” Relying on ideology to reduce dissonance, depending on small thinking to arrive at the heuristics that free us from challenging our selfishness, retreating into prejudice and bigotry to make self-protecting attributions, those are indeed the easy instincts. No matter how hard it may be to define, no matter how infrequently we bump into it in our daily lives, we know that if dignity means anything at all, it means rising to the demands of our better angels, the good that resides in each of us and in those around us. Dignity had been leaving town well before the stolen Presidential election of 2000, but it is in the troubled years since that Americans seem to have reveled in its absence, substituting hollow myths and even emptier boasts for what was and is truly great about our country, our “nobility, courage, mercy, and almost all the other virtues which go to make up the ideal of Human Dignity.” If America means anything in the stories we tell to and of ourselves, it means that we are a nation of dignity. Few would deny that this is the greatest hope for our country; few can deny that we have failed to meet its demands. Will we do so now?

_________________

Stanley Baran is Professor of Communication at Bryant University. A Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture and Mass Communication Theories: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. He writes frequently on the media, popular culture, and our understanding of ourselves and our world. He will happily provide citations for this series’ quotations and statistics. Simply e-mail him at sbaran@bryant.edu.

Text copyright 2009 Stanley Baran

____________

The DIGNITY Series: The Stories We Tell (About) Ourselves

by Editors

This is the ninth in a 10-part series examining the loss and possible recapture of dignity in our public lives and political discourse. (Read the series from the beginning here.)

DIGNITY

By Stanley Baran

 

9. The Stories We Tell (About) Ourselves

In April, 2007, without explicit reference to any well established psychological theories, novelist and social critic E.L. Doctorow addressed the issue of Americans’ penchant for protecting themselves from the onus of fully engaging their world and others in it. Speaking to a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society on the theme of “The Public Good: Knowledge as the Foundation for a Democratic Society,” he entitled his keynote speech, “The White Whale.” Rather than make rumor the starting point for his analysis of how we reshape reality to render it more manageable, as Allport and Postman had done six decades earlier, Doctorow chose literature. “Melville in Moby-Dick,” he said, “speaks of reality outracing apprehension. Apprehension in the sense not of fear or disquiet but of understanding. . . reality is too much for us to take in, as, for example, the white whale is too much for the Pequod and its captain. It may be that our new century is an awesomely complex white whale. . .What is more natural than to rely on the saving powers of simplism? Perhaps with our dismal public conduct, so shot through with piety, we are actually engaged in a genetic engineering venture that will make a slower, dumber, more sluggish whale, one that can be harpooned and flensed, tried and boiled to light our candles. A kind of water wonderworld whale made of racism, nativism, cultural illiteracy, fundamentalist fantasy and the righteous priorities of wealth.”

What is more natural, in other words, than relying on heuristics? What is more natural than selectively perceiving the world and others occupying it in ways that reduce discomfort, even if in doing so we ourselves are reduced? What is more natural than attributing our successes to our fundamental goodness and the shortcomings of others to their fundamental failings? What is more natural than refusing to dignify any reality that requires us to consider the world and others occupying it as anything more than an It threatening our I?

They hate us for our freedoms. The new Hitler. Socialized medicine. Support the troops. Welfare queens. These colors don’t run. East Coast elites. The invisible hand of the market. The kind of guy I’d like to have a beer with. The ticking bomb and the mushroom cloud. All are heuristics designed to short-circuit elaborated analysis and to attribute any failing, any unpleasantness, any selfishness to things and events outside our control; all are part and parcel of a people unwilling to do the critical thinking that is the hallmark of both dignity and its political manifestation, democracy. As Allport and Postman’s post-World War II research suggests, this isn’t a new phenomenon, but it seems to have fully matured in the Bush years. Recall Ron Suskind’s 2004 New York Times Magazine piece entitled “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush.” Arguably, its most quoted passage is this exchange with an unnamed White House staffer. “The aide,” wrote the Pulitzer Prize winner, “said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ … ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore.’”

Suskind’s unnamed aide continued to explain that as the world’s lone superpower, “we create our own reality.” Of course, all nations and cultures create their own realities. They exist in the stories a people tell of themselves. As philosopher Richard Rorty explains, “Stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity.” They are narratives designed to express a people’s highest hopes, greatest goodness, deepest honor, and commitment to dignity. The stories a people tell to themselves are the stories they tell about themselves. When we think of England’s mythology, we see Knights of the Round Table and King Richard, not its colonization and enslavement of the people of India. We remember the French Resistance in World War II, not the collaborating Vichy government, turning helpless Jews over to their Nazi killers. We teach our children the wonderful story of the Founders and their struggle against the tyrant King George as they gave birth to the world’s greatest democracy. But when we get to the stories about our Civil War that emancipated the slaves living here in the freest country in the world, we omit the fact that slavery had been outlawed in England 30 years before, during the reign of the tyrant’s son, William.

What happens when a country’s defining stories are used not to embody its honor and dignity, but to justify a “reality” that conflicts with the reality those stories purport to hold? Vietnam veteran and international relations expert, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich, calls our national mythology “stories created to paper over incongruities and contradictions that pervade the American way of life,” and James Baldwin, in The Fire Next Time, offered this example of how “white Americans” during the Civil Rights era papered over the incongruities and contradictions inherent in their treatment of their fellow citizens of different skin color. They told themselves that “their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace, that Americans have always dealt honorably with Mexicans and Indians and all other neighbors or inferiors, that American men are the world’s most direct and virile, that American women are pure.” Even today we celebrate “The Greatest Generation” for its World War II defeat of global fascism while failing to question the greatness of a generation that racially segregated the armed forces that secured that victory, while at home German POWs could enter Southern diners that were off limits to American Blacks, and more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry, 60% American citizens, were herded into internment camps.

In Myths America Lives By, Pepperdine University religion professor Richard T. Hughes argues the existence of “five foundational myths” that produce a dominant narrative of American exceptionalism: America is the chosen nation, the Christian nation, nature’s nation, the millennial nation, and the innocent nation. Speaking to a 2004 conference, Hughes explained how this narrative protected Americans’ cognitive consistency after the 9/11 attacks: “Americans have by and large refused to face the question of ‘why they hate us’ head-on. Instead. . .they have taken refuge in the venerable myth of American innocence. To claim our enemies hate us because they hate liberty is simple a way of asserting American innocence without coming to grips with the awful truth that our enemies hate us for many clear and definable reasons.” No need to debate why many of our most trusted allies did not support the invasion and destruction of an entire Muslim society; we are chosen, we are righteously Christian, this is our century. No need to dredge up our decades of dealing with Saddam Hussein, the arming and training of the Taliban, the overthrow of disfavored democratically elected political leaders, and our unwanted presence in the Middle East; we are innocent.

As accounts of the killing in Iraq, images of torture at Abu Ghraib, and tales of institutional incompetence and personal viciousness in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath filled the world’s newspapers and television screens, Dermot Purgavie, veteran U. S. correspondent for London’s Daily Mirror, wrote of the nation he covered, “Americans are the planet’s biggest flag wavers. They are reared on the conceit that theirs is the world’s best and most enviable country, born only the day before yesterday but a model society with freedom, opportunity and prosperity not found, they think, in older cultures.”

Indeed, we do think ourselves exceptional, but it is impossible to reconcile exceptionalism with dignity. If exceptional means special or superior, such self-aggrandizement is itself undignified. If exceptional means that we are the exception (the rules we apply to others do not apply to us), we are operating not in a dignified I-Thou manner, but in a state of undignified I-It.

Read Part 10: Achieving Dignity (click here)

_________________

Stanley Baran is Professor of Communication at Bryant University. A Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture and Mass Communication Theories: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. He writes frequently on the media, popular culture, and our understanding of ourselves and our world. He will happily provide citations for this series’ quotations and statistics. Simply e-mail him at sbaran@bryant.edu.

Text copyright 2009 Stanley Baran

_________________________________

The DIGNITY Series: Leaving the Reality-Based Community

by Editors

This is the eighth of a 10-part series examining the loss and possible recapture of dignity in our public lives and political discourse. (Read the series from the beginning here.)

DIGNITY

By Stanley Baran

8. Leaving the Reality-Based Community

Comedian George Carlin famously wondered why we think that anyone who drives slower than we do is an idiot and anyone who drives faster than we do is a maniac. Of course, the answer resides in people’s need to reduce dissonance, avoid elaboration, and find comfort in heuristics. But what if this isn’t enough? What if for some reason we need more evidence to protect ourselves from the realities that surround us? Psychologists offer attribution theory to explain. In its simplest terms, attribution theory posits that humans minimize dissonance and avoid elaboration through attribution error.

Social scientists such as Fritz Heider in the 50s and Harold Kelley in the 60s argued that people, as they encounter various situations and their roles in them, act as “scientists,” trying to figure out the “why” of the behaviors they observe, both their own and others. An internal attribution locates within the person the “why” of an observed behavior; an external attribution places it with the situation. Although all people can and do engage in internal and external attributions, we have a natural tendency to apply external attributions to our own behaviors and internal attributions to the behaviors of others.

Revisit Mr. Carlin’s driving conundrum. You’re in the fast lane, going 5 miles-an-hour over the speed limit. Another driver comes up on your tail and flashes the car’s high-beams. You make an internal attribution for her, “What a maniac! Why do people have to drive so fast?” and an external attribution for yourself, “Besides, I have to be in this lane; there are too many big trucks in the right hand lanes.” Now put yourself in the second car, flashing your high-beams. You make an external attribution for yourself, “I’m late for work; I just gotta get there on time or I’ll be in trouble” and an internal one for the driver in front of you, “What an idiot! Why do people always drive so slow?”

Dignity demands that we hold ourselves to the same standards that we do others, that we take responsibility for our actions just as we assign responsibility to those who act around us. Because we humans “invented” dignity, choosing to monkey with concepts to rise above the instinctive need for mere self-preservation, dignity demands that we see the world through an I-Thou rather than an I-It lens. But for the last decade or so Americans have been encouraged to and rewarded for locating our achievements internally and our failures externally. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, for example, we, led by our political leaders, went external. Despite an August 6 memo delivered to the Oval Office entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”, Bush officials attributed their failure to anticipate the attacks to Bill Clinton; he hadn’t done enough about al-Qaeda when he was President. The failure to comprehend the seriousness of the threat could not possibly be attributed to their misreading of the memo, claimed Condoleezza Rice. The then-National Security Adviser told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States that it was the document’s fault for being merely an “historical memo. . .it was not based on new threat information. . .No one could have imagined them taking a plane. . .using planes as a missile.’” Thusly protected, no official resigned (in fact, several were promoted or given medals). Thusly mollified, the pitchforks remained sheathed; Americans made no demand for resignations. Even after subsequent evidence demonstrated that the memo did indeed offer new al- Qaeda threat information and specifically envisioned just such an attack, Americans returned these same people to office, Mr. Bush becoming the first president to win an absolute majority of the popular vote since his father, George H.W., in 1988.

In the wake of the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, in which 170 people were killed, in contrast, several highly placed government officials, making internal attributions, did resign. National Security Advisor M. K. Narayanan and Home Minister Shivraj Patil admitted that warnings of the assault had been raised but they had not adequately responded to them. Patil wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh “owning moral responsibility” for the failure. The Chief Minister for security matters for Maharashtra (the state where Mumbai is located) also stepped down. Vilasrao Deshmukh told an interviewer, “I have accepted moral responsibility for Mumbai terror attacks. In a democracy one has to honour people’s anguish and anger.”

Attribution error is a powerful tool of cognitive self-preservation. Five years after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush was granting his “farewell tour exit interviews” in anticipation of leaving office. On December 1, 2008 on ABC’s World News Tonight, anchor Charlie Gibson asked him if going to war in Iraq had been a mistake. Unlike India’s politicians, the Decider decided to attribute blame elsewhere, “A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is (sic) a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration. A lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington, D.C., during the debate on Iraq, a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. . .I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.” As for the financial meltdown that cost millions of Americans their jobs, homes and savings in the last year of his presidency? He attributed that to his father, the first President Bush, “You know, I was the president during this period of time, but when the history of this period is being written, people will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so before I arrived in president [sic].”

Read Part 9: The Stories We Tell (About) Ourselves (click here)

_________________

Stanley Baran is Professor of Communication at Bryant University. A Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture and Mass Communication Theories: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. He writes frequently on the media, popular culture, and our understanding of ourselves and our world. He will happily provide citations for this series’ quotations and statistics. Simply e-mail him at sbaran@bryant.edu.

Text copyright 2009 Stanley Baran

_________________________________

The DIGNITY Series: A Scientific Explanation

by Editors

This is the seventh of a 10-part series examining the loss and possible recapture of dignity in our public lives and political discourse. (Read the series from the beginning here.)

DIGNITY

By Stanley Baran

7. A Scientific Explanation

In 1954 two psychologists, Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril, produced what many consider the classic cognitive dissonance experiment, “They Saw a Game,” in which students from Dartmouth and Princeton recounted two widely different versions of a particularly brutal football game between the two schools. For Dartmouth students, Princeton’s players were the malefactors. For Princeton students, Dartmouth’s gridders were the evil-doers. “In brief, the data here indicate that there is no such ‘thing’ as a ‘game’ existing ‘out there’ in its own right which people merely ‘observe’” wrote the researchers, “The game ‘exists’ for a person and is experienced by him only insofar as certain happenings have significances in terms of his purpose.” Many who study dissonance theory, however, identify a different piece of research as more instructive because it deals with our attitudes toward a more vulnerable class of people than those matriculating at exclusive Ivy League universities.

In November, 1945, Harvard psychologists Gordon Allport and Leo Postman delivered a talk to the New York Academy of Sciences on the role of rumor in the just-ended World War. But theirs was not a study of historical happenstance. “At the present time,” spoke Dr. Allport, “there is reason to suppose that we may be headed for another critical period of rumor-mongering, since we anticipate sharp clashes between minority groups of Americans and majority groups during the coming years of social readjustment.” Through a series of clever experiments they demonstrated that rumors found their basis and longevity in people’s preexisting attitudes and beliefs. Allport and Postman’s most famous test involved a drawing of a confrontation on a passenger train. In it, two men, a well-dressed African-American and an overall-clad white man, are standing in the aisle. The white man holds a straight razor in one hand and points at the Black man with his other. The Black man’s hands are at his side. A description of the scene is passed from one who has seen the image to another who has not, and in something akin to the kids game of telephone, that person is asked to describe as “accurately as possible what you have just heard” to the next person, and he or she to the next, and so on, until the description has passed through six or seven retellings. The psychologists ran the experiment more than 40 times, using people from all walks of life. In a finding they themselves called “the most spectacular of all our assimilative distortions,” by the time the description had moved from actual viewing to final recounting, “in more than half of our experiments, a razor moves (in the retelling) from a white man’s hand to a Negro’s hand.”

Because “Black men are ‘supposed’ to carry razors, white men not,” as Allport and Postman explained, people reconfigured the “reality” of the drawing to reduce their psychological discomfort (their dissonance). They did this through selectively perceiving and remembering what they had heard, leading the researchers to conclude, “Each subject finds the outer stimulus-world far too hard to grasp and retain in its objective character. For his own personal uses, it must be recast to fit not only his span of comprehension and his span of retention, but, likewise, his own personal needs and interests. What was outer become inner; what was objective becomes subjective.” The I is preserved.

Contemporary psychologists have added to thinking on dissonance reduction by expanding people’s “personal needs and interests” to include their motivation to hold socially “correct” attitudes. Among the first to do so were social psychologists Richard Petty and John Cacioppo. In the 1980s they offered their Elaboration Likelihood Model of information processing, which while accepting the idea that people may indeed want to be correct in the attitudes they hold, argues that some of us are more willing to find the correctness in those attitudes than are others, or to use the first word in the theory’s name, people bring varying degrees of elaboration to the attitudes they hold. Those who take the central route of information processing are willing and able to engage in message elaboration, examining different facets of an idea, challenging evidence, questioning personally held assumptions. Those taking the peripheral route avoid elaborating on the information before them, relying instead on other cues in the information environment, cues which may or may not have anything to do with the issue at hand. All of us take the peripheral route at times, especially if the matter before us has little personal import. But we all have a more or less individually characteristic route that we are willing to take when processing information, especially information that potentially challenges our existing attitudes. Some of us are generally willing to scrutinize information; some of us habitually travel the peripheral route. Some of us are willing to dignify the words and ideas of others (even if after elaborating them we reject them); some of us simply retreat to the peripheral route.

Psychologists who believe that people want to a) hold the right opinion, b) reduce, or even better, eliminate dissonance, and c) not have to think about things too much, call this the heuristic model of information processing, the use of simple decision-making rules allowing people to deal with the world without much cognitive effort. A central route processor, for example, might be a long-time Republican who examined Barack Obama’s rhetoric, tested it against the candidate’s public service record, examined both in light of his or her own life-experience while adjusting for personal biases (years of commitment to the Republican Party, for example), and based on this scrutiny either did or did not vote for Obama. A peripheral route processor would rely on a heuristic—I’m a Democrat, he’s a Democrat, I’m voting for him; I’m an American, he has a Muslim name, I’m not voting for him.

Read part 8: Leaving the Reality-Based Community (click here)

_________________

Stanley Baran is Professor of Communication at Bryant University. A Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture and Mass Communication Theories: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. He writes frequently on the media, popular culture, and our understanding of ourselves and our world. He will happily provide citations for this series’ quotations and statistics. Simply e-mail him at sbaran@bryant.edu.

Text copyright 2009 Stanley Baran

_________________________________

The DIGNITY Series: Protecting Ourselves from Dignity’s Demands

by Editors

This is the sixth of a 10-part series examining the loss and possible recapture of dignity in our public lives and political discourse. (Read the series from the beginning here.)

DIGNITY

By Stanley Baran

6. Protecting Ourselves from Dignity’s Demands

The Lynch deception should have been what Salon writer and former constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald calls a pitchfork moment, if not sending us into the streets in protest, at least generating the level of public outrage that accompanies an over-the-hill athlete’s steroid use or the discovery that a pop music group lip-synched its lone hit tune. What has happened to dignity is analogous to what former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “defining deviancy down.” Just as we have allowed the erosion of our commonly accepted civic standards for what constitutes criminal behavior, we have permitted the erosion of standards for what constitutes dignified behavior.

On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Vice President Dick Cheney tells Vermont’s Patrick Leahy, “Go f*** yourself,” in response to a question. It’s not undignified behavior, only the rough and tumble of politics. President Bush’s chief political aide, Karl Rove, orchestrates the outing of an undercover CIA agent, destroying her career and the spy network she spent 10 years building. It’s for our own good in the never-ending battle against Islamofacism. Mr. Rove now enjoys hefty income from Fox News and Newsweek. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld tells us that we went to war in Iraq in the spring of 2003 “with the army we had, not the army we might want or wish to have had at a later time.” We later learn that had we delayed long enough to properly equip, armor, and train that army and deploy it in numbers large enough for the mission hundreds, if not thousands of our brave men and women might not have died. Why the rush to invade? The President’s Chief of Staff Andrew Card explains that “from a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” Mr. Rumsfeld now enjoys his appointment as a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and Mr. Card the glow of an honorary doctorate from the University of Massachusetts.

Displaying pictures of himself looking under the furniture in the Oval Office for the pesky weapons of mass destruction, the causus belli for that “new product,” George W. Bush joked to scores of appreciative reporters at the 2004 Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association black tie dinner, “Nope, no weapons over there; maybe under here.” At that time, more than 500 U.S. men and women and countless Iraqi civilians had been killed. The journalists, most of whom had abetted the push to get that product to market, laughed. Those disgusting images of American soldiers humiliating prisoners at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison that enraged the world? Radio talker Rush Limbaugh says no big deal, no worse than a fraternity prank, “no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation,” later elaborating, “If you, really, if you look at these pictures. . .it looks just like anything you’d see Madonna, or Britney Spears do on stage.” Maybe, he wondered, he could “get an NEA grant for something like this.” Mr. Limbaugh, “the most listened to voice in American radio,” is paid $38 million a year to continuing educating his 14 million daily listeners.

In 2005 Congress voted to make enhanced interrogation official U. S. policy, oblivious to the fact that “enhanced interrogation” is the verbatim translation of the Nazi’s euphemism for torture (Verschärfte Vernehmung). Around that same time a handful of economists began sounding largely ignored warnings of a looming economic crisis. Surveying these events, former Vice-President Al Gore asked in a speech, “Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens?”

Why, indeed? Yes, we loudly spoke our indignation on November 4 (if 53% to 46% can be considered loud), but why did we accept these and countless other indignations—assaults upon dignity—with so little complaint for so long? How could we look at events that so obviously betrayed what should have been our collective sense of national dignity with so little protest? As Thomas More reminds us in A Man for All Seasons, “Qui tacet consentiret,” silence gives consent. To not protest is to acquiesce; to refuse to notice is undignified.

As long ago as 1928, George Bernard Shaw offered this explanation: “The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.” Since then, psychologists have produced more formal explanations of how people maintain cognitive consistency, that is, how we ensure that our actions toward an issue are consistent with our attitudes toward it.

Most prevalent in our public discourse (although rarely if ever offered in terms of our willingness to suffer repeated indignations) is cognitive dissonance theory. The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani relied on dissonance theory to explain the popularity of faux newsman Jon Stewart. “The Daily Show resonates not only because its keen sense of the absurd is perfectly attuned to an era in which cognitive dissonance has become a national epidemic. Indeed, Mr. Stewart’s frequent exclamation ‘Are you insane?!’ seems a fitting refrain for a post-M*A*S*H, post-Catch-22 reality, where the surreal and outrageous have become commonplace—an era kicked off by the wacko 2000 election standoff in Florida, rocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, and haunted by the fallout of a costly war waged on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.” How do Americans maintain belief in the dignity of their nation when confronted by events suggesting they rethink that assessment? They reduce their psychological discomfort (dissonance) by “reconfiguring” the facts of those events. To preserve the self (the I in an I-It relationship) people see what they believe rather than believe what they see.

Read Part 7 : A Scientific Explanation (click here)

_________________

Stanley Baran is Professor of Communication at Bryant University. A Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture and Mass Communication Theories: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. He writes frequently on the media, popular culture, and our understanding of ourselves and our world. He will happily provide citations for this series’ quotations and statistics. Simply e-mail him at sbaran@bryant.edu.

Text copyright 2009 Stanley Baran

_________________________________

The DIGNITY Series: War Stories

by Editors

This is the fifth of a 10-part series examining the loss and possible recapture of dignity in our public lives and political discourse. (Read the series from the beginning here.)

DIGNITY

By Stanley Baran

5. War Stories: Knowing Dignity When We See It and When We Don’t

Physicians regularly debate the value of dignity as a guide for their work, often with little success. American medical ethicist Ruth Macklin, in an essay entitled “Dignity is a Useless Concept,” argued “in the absence of criteria that can enable us to know just when dignity is violated, the concept remains hopelessly vague.” Dignity, she concluded, “is nothing more than a capacity for rational thought and action.” Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the British medical journal The Lancet, reached for a more instructive definition by combining the ideas of two philosophers, the eighteenth century’s Immanuel Kant and the nineteenth century’s Thomas Hill. Horton produced an argument for the I-Thou definition of dignity, writing, “Kant identified dignity as the absolute inner worth of a person, ‘by which he exacts respect for himself from all other rational beings in the world.’ Dignity and self-respect were instruments for asserting the equality of each person. . .Human dignity is an unconditional and incalculable value, admitting no trade-offs. Hill argues that the choices we make should be decided upon according to the view that no one is a mere means, that human dignity is priceless, and that our decisions can and must be made on the basis of mutual respect, seeing every human being as a source of value.” Nonetheless, Horton eventually had to admit defeat, conceding, “Human dignity is a linguistic currency that will buy a basketful of extraordinary meanings. It is not surprising, perhaps, that some critics describe dignity as a meaningless slogan.”

Still, one solution to defining dignity might reside in Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s strategy for evaluating sexual media content: “I may not be able to come up with a definition of pornography, but I certainly know it when I see it.” So it may be with dignity—difficult to define, but we know it when we see it. We preserve the stories of Joan of Arc, Sir Thomas More, Anne Frank, and Oskar Schindler because they define for us lives lived in dignity. But can dignity be demonstrated only in extraordinary times and circumstances (the Hundred Years War, Henry VIII’s break from the Catholic Church, World War II and the Holocaust)? Thurber believed so. “That which is only sporadically realized can scarcely be called a characteristic,” he wrote. “It is impossible to think of it as innate; it could never be defined as normal. Nothing is more depressing than the realization that nobility, courage, mercy, and almost all the other virtues which go to make up the ideal of Human Dignity are, at their clearest and realist, the outgrowth of Man’s inhumanity to Man, the fruit of his unending interspecific struggle. The pattern is easily traceable, from Christ to Cavell.” The story of Jesus Christ, divine proponent of the I-Thou life (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” both from the Book of Matthew; “That which you do unto the least of mine you do unto me,” from the Sermon on the Mount), is a familiar one; but who is Cavell?

A British nurse serving in Belgium during World War I, Edith Cavell is commemorated by a statue in London’s Trafalgar Square. She helped more than 200 wounded Allied soldiers escape to neutral Holland from the Brussels hospital where their German captors had taken them. For this act she was imprisoned in solitary confinement for 9 weeks and executed by firing squad. And as Aristotle wrote that “dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them,” it’s proper that Edith Cavell both possesses (her statue) and deserves her honors.

Today we can recognize dignity in another, more contemporary armed conflict, the war in Iraq. One of its true heroes is a young woman who defines dignity, not because she possesses honors (in fact, she rejected them), but because she deserves them (more so because, feeling others more deserving, she did in fact reject those honors). Private Jessica Lynch’s story may or may not be familiar, although had she behaved as her superiors had wished, she would now be a national heroine, famous and rich. Instead, Ms. Lynch chose dignity.

In the early days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Pvt. Lynch’s convoy was attacked in the town of Nassiriya. Eleven of her comrades were killed. The Pentagon’s official story had the 19-year-old supply clerk wounded, emptying her weapon at the enemy. Knocked unconscious, she was captured, tortured, and sexually assaulted. Only a daring late-night raid by commandoes representing all branches of our military freed her from her captors. Although there was no video or audio record of the attack in which she had been captured, it was America’s good fortune that the rescue was chronicled on green-tinged night camera video. Almost immediately upon its official telling, non-U.S. media outlets challenged the military’s account. Nevertheless, the American press ran with the story of the “little girl Rambo from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting.”

But Lynch herself was soon telling all who would listen—network news shows and Congressional committees—that this was all a lie. She never fired a shot; her gun had jammed. She had been treated kindly by civilian Iraqi doctors and nurses caring for her. Her armed rescuers faced no opposition and, in fact, turned back emissaries who offered to bring Lynch to them. “I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were, in fact, legendary,” she said. In another interview she added, “That wasn’t me. I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do.” And later, what did Ms. Lynch do with her time in the public eye? After disavowing a network made-for-TV-movie hewing closely to the Pentagon’s disinformation, she convinced the television show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to build a new house for a fallen comrade’s orphaned children.

Lynch’s reward for these acts of dignity? Hate mail instead of plaudits. Obscurity instead of fame. A seat at West Virginia University in Parkersburg instead of fortune. “I want people to remember me as being a soldier who went over there and did my job. Nothing special. I’m just a country girl at heart,” she said three years after her capture. How many of us remember her?

Read Part 6: Protecting Ourselves from Dignity’s Demands

_________________

Stanley Baran is Professor of Communication at Bryant University. A Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture and Mass Communication Theories: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. He writes frequently on the media, popular culture, and our understanding of ourselves and our world. He will happily provide citations for this series’ quotations and statistics. Simply e-mail him at sbaran@bryant.edu.

Image: Public domain photograph of Edith Cavell (Wikipedia)

Text copyright 2009 Stanley Baran

_________________________________

Are You Going to Eat That?

by Editors

NEW VOICES

Are You Going to Eat That?
Thoughts on “Freeganism” Today

By Judith Shimer

Freeganism, a mash-up of “free” and “veganism,” is a word I’ve really only encountered in slightly condescending newspaper articles. The rubbish-happy culture which adopted me in Scotland (and which thrives in parts of the States as well) doesn’t have a single name, and not everyone is vegan or vegetarian or a social activist. They share only a love of getting stuff for free — from the trash.

I was an instant convert. Suddenly I was proselytizing to everyone who didn’t already do it, including Argie, a games designer living in my hostel in London. He was predictably disgusted at first. “You mean, you look for food in people’s trash?” I could see the usual montage flashing through his head: meth addicts, a bitter night in December, half-eaten McDonald’s hamburgers.

“No no,” I assured him. “It isn’t people’s bins you want, it’s the supermarket dumpsters.”

There are many items in supermarkets that are considered unsellable after only a day — especially bread, even though it takes weeks to go stale in your fridge, and it can be stored for months in the freezer. Bread is abundant in supermarket skips (that’s regional for “dumpster,” making dumpster-diving “skipping,” which sounds more appealing anyway). And not only sliced white bread, but wholegrain bread, rolls, pastries, muffins, cupcakes, birthday cakes, scones, cookies, doughnuts, and these little pre-fried pancakes with maple syrup mixed in the batter, all neatly packaged and usually bundled safely together in fresh garbage bags.

Other skipping regulars include yogurt, juice, fruits and vegetables, prepackaged meals, and frozen meat. When you think about it, the obsessive quality of the products on supermarket shelves—un-dented, crisp corners, airtight shrink wrap and distant sell-by dates—requires massive amounts of waste. And all of the products which are unlikely to sell, less often because they’re rancid than because one edge of the wrapping is crushed, are doomed for the landfill.

“Damn,” said Argie. “I can’t wait ’til Waitrose closes.”

There’s no need to lecture on how many starving people could get fat on the things we throw out. But as if the waste isn’t depressing enough, consider the grocery stores that keep their dumpsters locked. You could make an argument for vermin, but what about the British chain that puts blue food coloring in the skips? That sure isn’t to dissuade raccoons. (It doesn’t dissuade some humans, either; our kitchen had electric blue smears all over.) The fact is, supermarkets don’t want their reputations spoiled by folks who look poor, or electively excuse themselves from certain social etiquette.

Like with everything we consume, edibility and safety aren’t the only factors when choosing what we eat. Convenience also counts—I can get that squeamish types might not want to climb into a dumpster. On the other hand, when I joined a group of students at Montserrat College of Art organizing a “Food Not Bombs” to give away meals cooked with rescued food, it was baffling the number of people who opted to buy their lunch at the restaurant down the street rather than eat something hot, delicious, convenient and free, sanctioned by the health department, and requiring absolutely no flies, no strange runny substances on shoes, and no people yelling at you to get out of the bins.

I didn’t understand. Why pay money when you don’t have to? The answer: We don’t buy food because we have to. We buy food because it’s our privilege. And if you surrender that privilege for a free meal, you may suffer from homelessness, weirdness or socialism.

My flatmate Scoutt found a dumpster key and was overjoyed at finally getting into the Costcutter bin down the street. This Costcutter does only seem to throw out a lot of one thing at a time—all sliced ham once, all Smirnoff Ice and vodka Irn Bru another—but that first night, Scoutt, Joey and I found six liters of orange juice.

Our glee was only a little dampened by the pub-crawler who halted at the side-street entrance and stared. “You’re in the bins,” he muttered, unable to believe his eyes.

“Yes, want some OJ?” said Scoutt, making to toss him a carton.

He just continued to stare. “You’re in the bins!” he said again, louder. “Freaks!” And then he walked off.

The three of us looked at each other and shrugged, pitying the fool who will waste hundreds of quid on orange juice in his lifetime.

For more information on Food Not Bombs, the alarmingly benevolent international anarchist free food organization, go to www.foodnotbombs.net.

___________________

Judith Shimer, contributing writer, fronts Ohio indie rock band The Alphabet.

NEW VOICES is a Bread and Circus Magazine feature in which emerging writers share their views on aspects of contemporary culture.

_______________________________________

The DIGNITY Series: Dismissed Warnings

by Editors

This is the fourth of a 10-part series examining the loss and possible recapture of dignity in our public lives and political discourse. (Read the series from the beginning here.)

DIGNITY

By Stanley Baran

4. Dismissed Warnings

More than a quarter century ago Jimmy Carter, who since having left the Presidency in 1981 has lived his life in service to others, confronted Americans’ collective loss of dignity, our “growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” He reminded his fellow citizens that, “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.“

Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” Rather than accept his call for a return to our better angels, we recoiled from the “scolder-in-chief,” rejecting his characterization of a nation in “malaise” (a word he never used), and we booted him from office in favor of Ronald Reagan’s morning in America, complete with its tripling of the federal budget deficit and the Gipper’s conviction that the growing hordes of homeless people, 600,000 on any one night and 1.2 million over the course of a year, “make it their own choice for staying out there.”

President Carter’s contemporary, Polish-born American rabbi and civil rights activist Abraham Heschel, also worried about the disappearance of dignity under the avalanche of stuff. He believed that the Hebrew Prophets, in whose voices “the word of God reverberated,” taught that “self-respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself.” Of the prophets he said, “The Prophet is an iconoclast, challenging the apparently holy, revered, and awesome. Beliefs cherished as certainties, institutions endowed with supreme sanctity, he exposes as scandalous pretensions.” People today who argue the merits of self-denial are the ones deemed scandalous, occupying the fringes of culture and discourse.

We see this in the until recently-unquestioned truth of how our economy is supposed to work, in our cherished certainty in the holy, revered, and awesome institution endowed with supreme sanctity, “the market.” Nobel-Laureate economist Milton Friedman wrote, “So the question is, do corporate executives, provided they stay within the law, have responsibilities in their business activities other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible? And my answer to that is, no, they do not.” This child of Hungarian immigrants, graduate of public high school and state-supported college, the man The Economist called “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it,” recommended the eradication of Medicare, welfare, the postal system, Social Security, and public education. He said that “there is no poverty in America.” We see it in George W. Bush’s national call to action after the attacks of September 11, 2001: restore trust in the economy, go shopping, “Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” In the 1987 movie Wall Street, insider-trading, rapacious capitalist Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas whose performance earned him an Academy Award for Best Actor) insisted that “greed is good.” Writer/director Oliver Stone had intended Gekko to repulse audiences. Instead, Americans loved him. In October, 2008, at the height of this country’s financial meltdown, the Providence Journal, the flagship newspaper of the state that had just that week surpassed Michigan as having the nation’s highest unemployment rate, editorialized using Gekko’s mantra, “Greed is Still Good.”

 

Read Part 5:

War Stories: Knowing Dignity When We See It and When We Don’t

_________________

Stanley Baran is Professor of Communication at Bryant University. A Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture and Mass Communication Theories: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. He writes frequently on the media, popular culture, and our understanding of ourselves and our world. He will happily provide citations for this series’ quotations and statistics. Simply e-mail him at sbaran@bryant.edu.

Text copyright 2009 Stanley Baran

_________________________________

The DIGNITY Series: I-Thou vs. I-It

by Editors

This is the third of a 10-part series examining the loss and possible recapture of dignity in our public lives and political discourse. (Read the series from the beginning here.)

DIGNITY

By Stanley Baran

3. I-Thou vs. I-It

A third use of the word dignity, perhaps its most common contemporary application, is its invocation in verbal combat. We say, “I won’t dignify that comment with a response.” Dignity here connotes a judgment—our judgment. It no longer represents something that is intrinsic or even a quality that people can earn through their contribution to something outside themselves; it is something we have the power to recognize or discount.

Twentieth century German Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber characterized this as the distinction between “I-Thou” and “I-It” relationships. In I-Thou relationships each person is fully present in the other. This was the central sentiment of the Obama family’s 2007 holiday greeting, “We all have a stake in each other, in something larger than ourselves.” In I am the Walrus, the Beatles voiced I-Thou as “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” In I-It relationships, others are objects, means to various ends. When we “dignify that comment with a response,” we enter an I-Thou relationship, admitting that although we might disagree with another, we recognize the worth of that person (after all, we share a common humanity). We strive to explain or otherwise move that other to our position. Again quoting the Beatles, we “come together right now.” But in America we’re more Bachman-Turner Overdrive than Fab Four, so we “keep looking out for number one.” When we “refuse to dignify that comment with a response,” we reject it (and its speaker) because it deflects us from our individual end. Dignifying the other’s response requires that we reflect on our own assumptions and therefore ourselves. It’s simpler to have an I-It relationship. Deny the worth of the other. We owe no explanation. Move on.

Living an I-Thou rather than the I-It life makes demands on us that are difficult to easily meet. We claim dignity as our own, yet we reserve the freedom to decide who among others is worthy of dignity. But dignity demands that if our worth is to be acknowledged, we must acknowledge it for all—people unlike ourselves, the poor and working class, and yes, even those people whose ideas might get in the way of what we want. But why?

Thurber’s 1939 ruminations on dignity offer a hint. He wrote, “Instinct has been defined as ‘a tendency to actions which lead to the attainment of some goal natural to the species.’ In giving up instinct and going in for reasoning, Man has aspired higher than the attainment of some natural goals; he has developed ideas and notions; he has monkeyed with concepts.” Humans created dignity to become human. In “giving up instinct and going in for reason,” we opted to value I-Thou over I-It. But I-Thou has become old school, and it’s been on the path to irrelevance ever since advertisers and marketers learned they could sell us more stuff by convincing us that what we had was more important than who we were.

This shift began with the introduction of mass consumer marketing around the turn of the 20th century, but hit high gear in the immediate post-World War II years. The factories, technology, and science that helped win the war had to keep making something, and the new marvel, TV, was the perfect advertising medium to reach the emerging middle class with word of all those newly-made things. In 1947, two years after V-J Day, Edward Bernays, who believed that Americans were “fundamentally irrational people. . .who could not be trusted,” formally presented his idea, the engineering of consent. In other words, “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing it.” He added, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Bernays’s business partner, Paul Mazur, however, wanted to rule not how people were governed by others, but how they were perceived by themselves. He argued, “We must shift America from a needs to desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality.” A little over a decade later, with television in 90% of all U. S. homes, Volume 1, Number 1 of Advertising Age reported, “The biggest business in America is not steel, automobiles, or television. . .It is the manufacture, refinement, and distribution of anxiety. Packaged as advertising and measured in dollars, the total volume of ‘anxiety’ circulating in America as 1960 dawned was worth more than $11 billion.” In the U. S. alone, the anxiety business now annually expends more than $500 billion helping us be all we can be, because we simply can’t be the new generation in our father’s Oldsmobile despite the fact that we deserve a break today. It’s difficult to worry about Thou when I need It, and I need It now. And we need It now so badly that we show no outrage and even less reflection on who and what we have become when a store employee is crushed to death and a pregnant woman trampled into miscarriage by an onslaught of 200 Long Island Wal-Mart shoppers hungry for stuff to buy in honor of the holiday that celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ. Those same people laughed, jeered, and complained when the victims’ medical assistance impeded their Holiday shopping. Like many Americans, they knew the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Read Part 4: Dismissed Warnings

_________________

Stanley Baran is Professor of Communication at Bryant University. A Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture and Mass Communication Theories: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. He writes frequently on the media, popular culture, and our understanding of ourselves and our world. He will happily provide citations for this series’ quotations and statistics. Simply e-mail him at sbaran@bryant.edu.

Text copyright 2009 Stanley Baran

The DIGNITY Series: Dignity, The Word

by Editors

This is the second of a 10-part series examining the loss and possible recapture of dignity in our public lives and political discourse. (Read the series from the beginning here.)

DIGNITY

By Stanley Baran

Part 2. Dignity, the Word

Today, when we do use the word, more than likely it is in one of three incarnations. Each says something about why the word, if not dignity itself, has fallen into decline. The first use has to do with death, as in “dying with dignity.” Oregon passed a Death with Dignity law in 1994. The State of Washington did the same in 2008. Used this way, dignity means that each of us possesses an intrinsic value or worth that even incapacitating illness and death cannot erase. This is the way international law, as expressed in Article 75 of the Geneva Conventions, means it when it says, “All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.” It is the way the United Kingdom’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks means it when he argues in The Dignity of Difference that dignity is a set, non-negotiable property of humanness. It is this meaning to which the Germans have granted their highest constitutional significance. Article 1 of the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (Grundgesetz), titled Human Dignity, states that “(1) Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority. (2) The German people therefore acknowledge inviolable and inalienable human rights as the basis of every community, of peace and of justice in the world. (3) The following basic rights shall bind the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary as directly applicable law.” The “basic rights” that flow from a person’s inherent dignity include equality before the law and freedom of faith, conscience, and creed; freedom of expression, assembly, association, and movement; the privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications; occupational freedom; and the inviolability of the home. This codification into their constitution of dignity and specific “inviolable and inalienable human rights” was no accident, as these were the very rights denied the Grundgesets‘s post-War authors by their Nazi oppressors. But as the evil spawn of the so-called War on Terror—our nation’s countenance of torture as official policy and the ease with which we gave up many basic civil rights in the name of security—suggest, Americans seem not to share the German’s belief in the inherent, intrinsic value of all individuals. But this may explain why we discarded the word, not why we were willing to discard the values it represents.

A second, less common use of the word has to do with the worth of labor. Barack Obama employed it this way in his campaign. His television spot entitled Dignity closed with the line, “And never forget the dignity that comes from work.” In this usage, dignity is not necessarily inherent. It can be enhanced (Because I contribute I have worth) or diminished (Because I do not contribute I have little worth). This understanding of the word has a long history, especially in religious thinking. Commenting on Pope John Paul II’s 1981 encyclical, Laborem Exercens, Roger Cardinal Mahony, Archbishop of Los Angeles, wrote, “Catholic teaching on work—based on the principle that people are more important than things—reflects a compelling Christian revelation. In Genesis, we come to understand that human beings, created in God’s image, share in the tasks of the Creator through their work…In our own (Catholic) tradition, work is not a burden or punishment, but an expression of our dignity and creativity.” Long before the Book of Genesis was conceived, the Persian prophet Zarathushtra, Zoroastrianism’s founder, wrote that Ahura Mazda, the “Wise Lord,” taught, “It is never below the dignity of any one to work by his own hands. There is no shame to put one’s hand at the plough, there is no shame to set one’s shoulder to the wheel, there is no shame to dig a trench, there is no shame to work as a cook or a servant or a maid or to do any menial work.”

This use of the word is now passé because respect for work itself is outdated. We are prouder of what we have than what we do. Our measure of success is not the effort (the work), but the outcome. Cardinal Mahony’s belief that people are more important than things seems quaint in an America where 22,000 people die every year—more than the number that are murdered—for lack of health insurance; where parents routinely name their children Lexus, Nautica, L’Oréal, and Courvoisier; where there are twice as many shopping malls as high schools; where the average garage on today’s newly constructed house contains more square footage than an entire new home built in 1950.

The foundation of our economy was once manufacturing; it’s now consumption. When he introduced the country to his Great Society in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson said that Americans must ensure that “the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.” This sentiment is now an anachronism. Look no further than representation of working class people, men especially, in our television shows and movies. Inarticulateness, clumsiness, irrationality, and lack of self-control are standard; think truck driver and construction worker stereotypes. In the news, work stoppages are invariably over workers’ demands in response to management’s offers. The strike’s impact on the company and consumers, not on the workers’ lives, shapes the reporting. The proposed $14 billion automaker bailout of December 2008 faced strong opposition and calls for “significant concessions from autoworkers” at Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler. The workers agreed to concessions, but not enough for many in the Senate. Despite having delivered a trillion dollar bailout to Wall Street banks and insurance companies not only with the conviction that it was the right thing to do but with few demands and little oversight, the loan to the automakers was denied. Compare Congressional treatment of auto laborers with that of professionals in the financial industry, insisted labor leader Bruce Raynor. The “double standard is staggering,” he wrote. “In the financial sector, employee compensation makes up a huge percentage of costs. . .(I)t accounted for more than 60% of 2007 revenues for the seven largest financial firms in New York. At Goldman Sachs, for example, employee compensation made up 71% of total operating expenses in 2007. In the auto industry, by contrast, autoworker compensation makes up less than 10% of the cost of manufacturing a car. Hundreds of billions were given to the financial-services industry with barely a question about compensation; the auto bailout, however, was sunk on this issue alone.” Shabby treatment of workers by pampered Senators might seem unremarkable, but 70% of the American public also opposed helping the automakers and their employees, leaving very few to lobby for the everyday heroes, as George Bailey did in the 1946 movie classic It’s a Wonderful Life. “They do most of the working and playing and living and dying in this community,” argued Jimmy Stewart’s character, “Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?”Again, this may explain why we discarded the word, but not why we have discarded the values it represents.

Part 3: I-Thou vs. I-It (click here)

_________________

Stanley Baran is Professor of Communication at Bryant University. A Fulbright Scholar, he is the author of Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture and Mass Communication Theories: Foundations, Ferment, and Future. He writes frequently on the media, popular culture, and our understanding of ourselves and our world. He will happily provide citations for this series’ quotations and statistics. Simply e-mail him at sbaran@bryant.edu.

Text copyright 2009 Stanley Baran

Images: (upper) Cover of The Dignity of Difference (Contiunuum 2003); (middle) Barack Obama (White House photo); (lower) Lyndon Johnson signing the Medicare Bill in 1965 (National Archives).

_________________________________