The Contradictions of Dignity
Francis Fukuyama Reads the Declaration of Independence
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Regular readers will note that I often revisit the work of Hegel, Kojeve, and, Fukuyama, a lineage of thinkers keyed into the primacy of the struggle for recognition.
In The End of History, Fukuyama applies his Hegelian lens on the Declaration of Independence. “All men are created equal,” he notes, is an attempt to supplant the human need for megalothymia with isothymia, i.e., to replace the need for superiority with the acceptance of equality.
But in what respect are we equal? Fukuyama notes that different thinkers answer this question differently.
For Hobbes, we are all created equal in that we are all equally capable of killing one another in a state of nature.
For Locke, equality means that we enjoy equality of opportunity, though not outcome.
For Christianity, we are equally capable of making moral choices.
The fact that we are “created equal” doesn’t answer much in the realm of political philosophy, then, since the only meaningful question is in what respect are we “created equal.” To say that we are endowed with inalienable rights is almost circular. But it’s also strange, because if the insistence on equality exists to ameliorate the struggle for recognition, talk of “rights” is dissatisfying. A right is unearned. To make dignity a feature of being rather than an aim of being undermines the human need to pursue glory; paradoxically, the effort to preserve dignity also cheapens dignity.
If everyone has dignity from the start and it is truly inalienable, then we should not take it away from those who commit terrible acts of dehumanization. To do so is to say that dignity can be lost—but if it can be lost, surely, it can be won? Progressives are thus faced with a conundrum: to be consistent with their egalitarian principles they must equate the vicious murderer with the saint, all of whom are “endowed by their Creator…” On the other hand, not even Dr. King accepted this. For him, we should judge people “by the content of their character,” meaning that one can and should lose dignity in accordance with moral failing. But this is to say that while Dr. King’s cause of fighting racism was right, he didn’t take it up by holding up formal egalitarian principles—he did it by redrawing the lines of the battlefield; instead of a competition for recognition based in skin color, life was to be a competition for goodness of character. I’ll take that. But it just goes to show that even in a Christian and/or religious context, there is no escaping the universal human need for inequality, for winners and losers, masters and slaves.
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