Toward a Politics of Dignity

(FP’ed 3:15 AM EDT, Thursday, September 27, 2007

Politics and dignity in the same title. Who would have thought?
– promoted by exmearden)

It is very easy, in the day to day, for any kind of hope for a livable world to slip away.  It’s hardly necessary to reiterate the reasons in a progressive forum, but they bear repeating if only as an introduction to my arguments.  At the top is population; in my lifetime the world’s population has doubled, and resources have not kept pace.  Thirty five thousand people or so die every day from starvation and it’s consequences.  While we live in the global west, a step removed from the face of this horror, the results of shrinking resources and ecological catastrophe are not far behind us.  In this context, Americans – and perhaps eventually Europeans, Canadians and Australians as well – are facing a future of desperate and reactionary governments, the diminishment of liberty, and lives increasingly circumscribed by expectations of conformity and loss of privacy.  In America especially, we have seen the rise of a government dedicated to permanent war and the promulgation of fear, hatred and vengeance as guiding values and, indeed, policy.

Our host on this site recently posted a diary in which he asked – given that the Democrats are not our hope – what can we do?  In an off the cuff blog post (which I may, or may not expand later) – this is my attempt to form an answer.

I believe that every society, from the dawn of civilization, has worked to instill conformity, respect for common values, and obedience to hierarchy.  Indeed, it would appear we are wired for these things, to some degree.  Put someone in a room with four others, and have the four tell an obvious lie about the direction of an arrow, and the fifth will tell you the same lie, most of the time.  Social reality is important, even when it goes against our senses, our experience, what we would know, alone in that same room, to be true.

Collect three hundred million people, or twenty million, and put them in the room of a nation’s borders, and what is commonly agreed becomes the ground on which people stand.  Raise people to obey authority, to trust the words of their mother and father over the evidence of their childhood senses, to respect law over right, and invest power with moral authority in every case, and they will develop certain lies by which they not only live, but identify each other.  In our country those lies have a specific shape.  “Welfare queens are ripping us off “.  “Black people are lazy and not as smart”.  “Gays just want special rights”.  “Criminals aren’t really people like you and me.” And deepest of all “There are bad people all around us, and we must be afraid.” These certitudes are not even, I suspect, believed in the majority of cases; or rather, they are never examined as the objective, testable truth.  They are understood as the words and tropes that keep one among the good people, never to be mistaken for the bad.

Our leaders, who rise by conformity and predictability, have every bit of independent thought wrung out of them.  The media are not monsters, throwing candidates to the curb by virtue of the liberality of the candidate or the conservatism of the press.  Reporters and editors understand that people who do not know the lies have never learned to play the real game of power, and are not to be trusted with it.  This rule has been applied ruthlessly to their own careers, from their first cubicle to the present; surely it is even more true of people who command armies and determine the course of a nation and it’s laws.

Nonetheless, we are not without power, and this is my first answer to the question our host posed.  Courage is powerful and contagious. Our power is not to command great actions, or change the vote of the senate by virtue of our eloquent essays or even, much of the time, by the doorbells we have rung and phone calls we have made (though that is surely important).  Our power is to tell the truth, the truth we see and hear and understand.

This does not seem like much, really.  To tell the truth is expensive.  There are few demonstrations in the streets.  Americans are being introduced to the sort of consequences for political speech that people in China, the old Soviet Union, and much of the Arab world have long experienced.  To speak up too loudly, or too effectively, is to lose the ability to travel, to come under surveillance, to invite government scrutiny of one’s affairs at a level which may render simple livelihood difficult at best.  The prospect of worse waits in the wings – if you’ve ever done something that can make you into a breaker of laws, no one will even notice, much less mourn your passing from the world of the free.  And there is the sense that we have not reached their limits, that much more repressive measures are, as one our president’s advisers said, one bomb away. 

Blogging is not courage, and in that I have no answer to our host.  Courage means you sign your name for it, and take the consequences, good or ill, in this life.  This essay is not much courage; it is only a woman writing about courage.  If we are to win, to gain ground in this lifetime or our children’s, it will be as ourselves, not behind the anonymity of online handles.  Courage is only contagious in the face of real danger.  It is not enough to talk about facing demons and lecture on demons and attend seminars on demons.  One must step out the door to meet them, and those who you would have follow must see you do so.  They must hear the quaver in your voice, and see the fear in your eyes, and sometimes, they must watch you fall.  They may not come after, that day, or that hour.  But they will remember.  They will tell their children about you.  Depend upon it.

For courage to be contagious and not merely appealing from a distance, it must have, I believe, certain qualities.  One of those conditions is, it must meet, simply and honestly, what the listener knows to be true, in their own life. No one likes to be spied upon, for example.  To say, it is not right to spy on people, to rob them of their privacy.  No one wants to die of a preventable illness, or of the inevitable complications of disease which could be treated.  No one wants to bear the brunt of violence or contempt for being, merely, who they are.  But policy prescriptions will not change people’s minds.  You must show them, in a way their bodies and eyes cannot deny.  You must show them over, and over again.

But what of the media, of big business, of the endless propaganda, you ask?  What of it?  In part, this is a matter of isolating the people who are so broken by authority that they are reduced to endlessly parroting the phrases and thoughts of conformity.  Republicans really are assholes in large part, and so we need to emphasize, as a generational message, that it is not cool to be an asshole.  That seems trivial, but right now in America, it is very cool to be an asshole.  It’s cool and funny to identify with the tasering cop, the brutal politician, the prison guard, the border police.  But how does one change this?  What can be done?  Obvious answers are education, the ways we respond to people in our own lives…but I’m led inevitably to the conclusion that, since we are the stories we tell ourselves, art is the most powerful thing in the world.  Whether it’s secular art, religious art, the art of the sermon or great burning effigies in the desert, we need more stories that describe the life we wish to live, that we wish others to understand.  It’s not enough that it merely be art, however, or express our feelings, or be elegant or sophisticated.  It must have courage.  We must sign it, we must take the consequences of it’s creation, we must describe things the listener or reader or viewer can understand as true, as conditions of dignity. 

I do not know if these things will change the world in our lifetime.  It is the accumulation of acts of courage, like water on stone, that changes the world.  I did not believe this for many years.  I thought the world was only changed by many people acting at once.  I did not understand that the world is first changed by many people acting individually, in respect for what is true, and with courage, and then many people are moved to act together.  And the world is changed.