Can There Ever Be Dignity For All?
On Egalitarianism and Meritocracy
It’s a common, modern sentiment that everyone deserves basic dignity—but when pressed, it’s not obvious what dignity is.
The term is Roman in origin and has a class/status resonance. Dignity is owed to superiors, but not to people lower down the social pyramid. In post-Enlightened times, where we hold it to be self-evident that everyone is created equal, we assume that everyone should have dignity, as if dignity weren’t inherently a term whose essence is non-egalitarian. Dignity for all might possibly be a square circle, just like a world in which everyone is a leader and nobody a follower.
The reason for the mix-up is that dignity is most deeply connected to the struggle for recognition rather than to material wealth, as Francis Fukuyama, following Hegel, describes.
A world in which all have dignity must be one, for a Hegelian, in which all are afforded recognition, are deemed noble, worthy.
But if nobility is handed out indiscriminately to all, it may prove an empty term, a meaningless concept. It is human nature to compete for glory. As long as good, better, and best exist—dignity will not be equalized.
Perhaps those demanding dignity for all really mean that they want a safety net of dignity, a basic level of dignity for all. But if dignity is a social, and thus, relative concept, it doesn’t seem that dignity can be easily secured. It also means that the more glory a society distributes, the bigger the gap between the glorious haves and the inglorious have nots. The natural enemy of those who seek dignity for all is meritocracy—since meritocracy assigns dignity on the basis of achievement.
And yet to deny people the ability to merit anything is also to deny them dignity.
The term reaches an impasse.
Hegelians were/are optimistic that the impasse can be resolved in some utopian future, that we might eventually create a world in which glory and recognition were optimized and mass distributed. But for those of us who are skeptical, and who accept that dignity cannot be for all, we need a different word to express the humanistic sentiment it summons.
If you are optimistic that dignity can be for all, why? And if you are not, but still consider yourself humanistic, what word would you substitute for dignity?
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