America’s Dignity Crisis

Why does dignity matter?

In the difficult moments of life, dignity reassures us of our worth and enables us to persist. The lack of dignity can cause hopelessness. Loosely defined, dignity is the intrinsic worth of a person. An individual has value to themselves. It is an affirmation of personhood and identity within a community.

While searching for a palatable description of dignity, I stumbled across this text by Alphonso Lingis in The Humanistic Psychologist: “…[dignity] can only appear as a side effect of doing other things well, aiming at outside objectives.” Lingis’ description of patience also guides us in understanding dignity: “patience is a not just passivity, it is suffering, but it is suffering without grappling for release and without recrimination against the past that can no longer offer its forces and resources.” To extend this directly to dignity, having dignity allows us to endure whatever we must, because we know we are of value. Religion and individualism offer dignity as a bedrock of their philosophy. As noticed in many commentaries, America’s belief in God and in the individual is slipping away. A challenge for conservatives is to instill the importance of dignity of the individual either through one of these mechanisms of the past or a new one.

Dignity in Poverty

Over the holiday, conversation turned to the difficulties of families of the working poor during the lockdowns. With my recent focus on the importance of dignity in work, I started to question how people find worth in working in retail or for a giant corporation. I stopped myself, because I realized that those jobs are not only option best option but also the only option for many, including those in my family. To return to Lingis, how do we have the side effect of dignity if we aren’t mastering worthy tasks.

Many of our predecessors, even in our poor, small communities, developed a mastery through employment. In this mastery of carpentry, construction, plumbing, roughnecking (oilfield), mining, or some other could lead to a working middle class life, often it would lead to working poor. But that is fine in communities that value the hard work performed and community (family) obligations met. While family life and obligations have always been chaotic for the poor, high divorce rates, poorly performing public schools, and the evaporation of manufacturing released that chaos into the middle class.

As much as our economy has changed, our values have moved away from appreciating that hard work and time acquiring a marketable, albeit pedestrian, skill is worthwhile personally and to the community. This path is beneath most millennials and zoomers whose current dream profession is YouTuber or internet influencer. Couple this with the ongoing flight to the cities where manufacturing has moved to the 3rd world, and an increase in the working poor in the service industry was inevitable.

Meanwhile these same information systems (social media) efficiently socialize Americans to be consumers of materials, drama in the form of news, and ideology. Social media created a mechanism for corporations to monetize outrage instantaneously. If you are lacking worth, you can join an internet mob and have someone fired, or a product pulled, or book contract cancelled. However, with all dignity creating activities you must do it well. That means forever searching for the wrongthink violators in order to mobilize the online mob. The only risk is their humanity. And without the power of dignity, what is their humanity worth?

Solutions

There are no easy solutions. There are no simple government policy initiatives to fix the dignity crisis in a four year or eight year span. The actual solution is cultural. Cultural solutions take generations, but we must begin, and that beginning is in our homes.

1. Value hard work. Teach your children (or students) that hard work, and persistence through hard work has value by encouraging them (social reinforcement, short term persuasion) and by giving developmentally appropriate examples of the benefits of persisting in something difficult that they are interested in (fostering intrinsic motivation, a longer term persuasion technique). Give your children the opportunities to do a task well, to create something they can use. Additionally, encourage (or require) them to master something. It can be an instrument or building with legos. The process of persistence and developing a skill is the important task, not the task itself (at least in short to medium term).
2. Create positive messaging for small communities. Money messaging changes minds. I have had many conversations with young leftists online whose primary concern is the cost of housing. Every single time when I asked where they lived it was in a medium to large city (this might be due to my online sample, but voter patterns reflect this reality). I would pull up their area, find a small town near it and find nice houses with mortgage rates at 1/3 of their city rents. I doubt any of these brief conversations actually encouraged them to move, but a conversation with a family member would be more persuasive. Community involvement and value plays an important role in development of dignity.
3. Devalue consumerism. This will be the most complicated due to the pervasiveness of consumerism embedded in modernity. As with most of the approaches, start with the children. Stop buying tons of toys. We have focused any toy purchase on creative play with a minimalist approach, and my kids still have too many toys. (Mainly, this is due to grandparents buying them the toys they couldn’t afford when we were children.) One thing I believe helps is that my children don’t watch commercial television. They never see the new, brightest, loudest, fastest, coolest toy. Monitor your children’s use of any media, because youtube has created a new type of commercials mimicking the success of Ryan’s World encouraging vacuous consumerism. I’ll admit I have no solutions to minimizing consumerism directly with adolescents and young adults. All of my children are young, and my students barely listen to my lectures on course material.
4. Encourage family growth. This might be the most important of all. We need to find ways to encourage the young millenials and zoomers to have children. Part of this will be stymied by consumerism that dominates the young, but we must find a way. Aside from the humanistic and evolutionary arguments, have children is a deradicalizing experience. Most people reorient their priorities which has profound impacts on their worldview. Additionally, pronatalist government policies can have an impact. As a conservative, I would prefer a federalism approach with states creating their own pronatalist programs and promoting them instead of a less efficient federal system. In my experience, very little compares to the pressures and joy of providing for your family. It is a humanizing and centering experience.

Conclusion

Restoring the opportunity for dignity development is a great challenge of supreme importance. The lack of dignity is not just a problem of the poor and working poor. If we as a society to not provide positive avenues for dignity development, negative opportunities will be sought more frequently and are easily accessible on the internet. This project will take decades or more, but concrete, intentional steps now will create success in the future.