“What are the sources of our dignity?”‘Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right.’
Summer Readings. 19 September—The theme of this year’s Mut zur Ethik conference, a series of lectures held each summer in Zürich’s environs, was “Living in Dignity.” Given the world we see out our windows, could there be a more compelling topic to explore? I titled my lecture as the above headline has it, “What Are the Sources of Our Dignity?” It seemed the right question, given all the unspeakable indignities with which we are all confronted. How do we find dignity in the world as it is? I know very few people who do not ask this. There was much talk of it at this year’s Mut zur Ethik (which translates roughly as “the courage of one’s ethics”—one’s convictions in the phrase more familiar to English-speakers). I put a lot of Thoreau into my lecture—the Thoreau of “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” as against the naturalist of Walden, who seems more agreeable to American sensibilities these days. My thought was to describe our time just as it is, its singularity, its singular demands, so that we can recognize all that it asks of us—the responsibilities, like it or not, our time imposes upon us. Henry David wrote in response to his circumstances—abhorrent injustice at home, the aggressions of an emergent empire abroad—and he insisted that unless one resisted one was as a clod of dirt. In this he seemed just the writer to cite. This is the second of the lectures we delivered this summer. I have expanded here from its original, as time constraints required I keep my remarks to a strict limit. The first of these lectures, Cara Marianna’s “‘Peace Between the Sword and the Neck,’” is here. —P. L. SIRNACH, Switzerland—We who reside in the West—and my remarks today do not much apply to those in the non–West—are challenged now in I cannot count the many ways. Who, indeed, can count them? How difficult it is to live through consequential, transformative passages in history, to say this differently. The historians cast the years 1871 to 1914 as an era of peace, however much this did not reflect the true realities of those decades. I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to live during those years of relative stability among the Western powers, very relative material prosperity, and a certain cultural vitality. I wonder because we do not live in anything like such a time. Most of us, and certainly we Americans, must speak not of our democracies but of our “post-democracies,” Switzerland’s direct democracy being among the rare and fortunate exceptions, and even Switzerland has variants of the problems that beset the rest of the West. The institutions bequeathed to us so that we can express ourselves collectively are broken—or have been broken, more precisely put—by those charged with operating them. We are no longer governed: We are ruled. Lawlessness in the name of law is a phrase I have used in various of my commentaries, as here and here. It is our condition. The absolutely defining feature of our time is not only that we witness a genocide of world-historical magnitude: It is also that most of us think there is little we can do as our post-democracies openly participate in it—this against the expressed will of what should count decisive majorities of their citizens. A frightening alliance of corrupt political leaders and what we call “Big Tech” seems possessed of the power of a secret state, and I use this term pointedly. By way of our technologies and our obsession with profit as the only value, we are post-literate, and what passes for culture is in most cases an ersatz, corporatized culture that serves—this quite as intended—to numb us. All institutions that comprise what we call culture—the fine and popular arts, schools and institutions of higher learning, media, museums, radio, television, and films, nongovernmental organizations created to advance the more humane of our priorities—everything that creates and stands for our culture is enlisted to serve the State. This is especially so, and maybe especially evident, in the late phase of an imperium such as America’s. Everything must function to advance the interests and project the power of the State. Some of us understand our circumstance, but not so many. Still fewer have any idea what to do about it. Among the many distressing characteristics of our time is the prevalence of somnambulance among us, and there is no thinking matters through if one is lost in dreams, or in nostalgia, or in the illusion that all is not entirely O.K. but will be O.K. once some remedies at the margins are in place. I have long made the case that the sensation of powerlessness is a major source of depression. This sensation is widely shared now. Americans, and I will defend this assertion against all challenges, are a depressed people for just this reason. Paralysis does not seem too strong a term for the condition in which many of us live. I happen to be reading lately our old friend Rudolf Rocker, the noted anarchist of the last century, and he inspires a distillation of our time I will share with you now. We live amid a sharp, ever more critical confrontation between the State and the individual conscience. This seems to me an irreducible summation of our condition, and it would be difficult to overstate the responsibilities this imposes upon each of us. “Wherever political compulsion has achieved its strongest grip upon society,” Rocker wrote in Pioneers of American Freedom, “human culture sank to its lowest ebb, for its natural powers could thrive only in a state of freedom, while they must wither and die in confinement.” Rocker’s followers published this wonderful little book in 1949. And how much one can identify all these years later with his phrasing. “Political compulsion.” The withering and dying of culture. A culture’s “natural powers.” This last is a thought to which I will return. If Rocker so cannily described our circumstances eighty years ago, where are we to find our dignity in these circumstances? This is the question we face together. It stands to perfectly plain reason that were our dignity as human beings not under constant assault of one or another kind Mut zur Ethik would not have organized this conference under the title “Living with Dignity” and I would not be addressing you on this topic today. The short answer is, We must defend to the very last the sovereignty of the individual conscience against the impositions of the State if we are to live with dignity. This is the true cause of our time. O.K., but how do we go about this? My time at the lectern is brief, so I will go straight to my three replies to this question—on the understanding there will certainly be others. ■ I do not know how well Thoreau travels among Europeans: He is so quintessentially an American writer. But his celebrated essay, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” published in 1849, is perfectly pertinent to the first point I wish to make. Thoreau wrote in response to the pressing issues of his time: America’s unprovoked war of aggression against México and, as may be obvious, slavery. But he took the State’s immoral conduct for granted. This was a given. Thoreau was concerned primarily with the question of conscience, and, while he did not use the term, with dignity. Let me share some passages from this superbly timeless essay.
And then a page or two further, in a reference to his home state:
With this Thoreau comes to his big question. And as it happens it anticipates ours:
And then his reply:
To act on principle is how the individual defends his or her conscience against the impositions of the State: This was Thoreau’s point, or one of them, and so my first point: To live with dignity requires each of us to act. It is no good holding the right opinions and doing nothing to advance them. “Action from principle changes things and relations”: Is this truly so? Only sometimes and with great effort and with sacrifices few are willing to make, I would say. So it is that so many of us live without much dignity, to state a bitter truth plainly. This thought brings me to Camus. “The futility of all action, the necessity of any,” he once wrote. This sounds thoroughly fatalistic at first, but on reflection I think Camus was at bottom not so far from Thoreau: Whatever the outcome of what we do, and we cannot know this in the moment of our action, it is essential to act in defense of our consciences in the face of the power of the State—or whatever form power may happen to take. From Camus to Craig Murray, a British ambassador in a previous life and for some years now a committed critic of post-democratic power. “I have now finally shed the last of my illusions,” Murray wrote in a piece Consortium News published two summers ago:
The shedding of illusions, for anyone who has any and most of us do, is an essential first step on the way to living a dignified life. It is when we are “dis-illusioned,” it seems to me, that we become capable of acting in ways that have meaning, and acting—my argument here—is essential if we are to keep our souls alive. “We resist our own governing systems, or we are complicit,” Murray wrote further on. Murray is a Scot, but this is straight out of Thoreau, isn’t it? And then his, Murray’s, conclusion, a point I am eager to share with you today:
■ To act in the service of our consciences necessarily implies that we take the greatest care in our relations with others. This is a question of clear sight. We must endeavor to see all our “Others” just as they are, not as we insist they are, or think they are, or wish them to be—or, most of all—as we are told they are. This means understanding perspectives that are not our own, knowing and understanding how others see the world and then to act on our understandings. The philosophic principle called perspectivism, which holds that knowledge is determined by where a given observer is standing, is as old as the pre–Socratic Greeks. But it is interesting to note that it took on a certain currency in the second half of the 19th century. This was when the European empires were at their height, yes, but concurrently this was when an awareness of all the West’s colonized Others was sharpening. We live through something roughly analogous, a time when non–Western nations are emerging as alternative poles of power. This is why understanding the perspectives of the people of these nations is essential if we are to do well in our century—and why failing in this understanding is a certain path to failure. I am talking about a collective act of self-transcendence. I am talking not about the acceptance of difference but about the embrace of difference. The immediate task before us is to advance decisively beyond the binaries of the Cold War decades. West and East, or as I put it West and non–West: We may assume we put these distinctions behind us at the Cold War’s end, in recognition of our shared humanity, and maybe we have done this, one person to the next. But in the West we are still immersed in this consciousness of division, of difference. And for one reason. Two, actually, although the second reads right out of the first. One, those who hold power in our post-democracies dedicate themselves to keeping the world divided just as it was during the Cold War decades. They are dependent on the sustained restoration of all the old enmities and on keeping the threat of war ever before us. And to get this done it is imperative that we do not see others—and by extension ourselves—as they are and we are. This is the primary business of the State in our time. It is in essence an operation against our consciences and our shared consciousness. Two, this is also the business of our corporate media. They are dedicated, in turn, to poisoning our public discourse, and so our collective consciousness, with the official propaganda that our Others are sources of evil because they do not see the world as we do and, so, face us with risks and threats from which we are protected only by the power of those who purport to lead us. Russophobia, Sinophobia, Islamophobia, what I call Castrophobia, etc., etc., etc. down a long list: This is the stuff with which our media infuse the air we breathe and the water we drink. So we are back to Thoreau and Rudolf Rocker. It is a question once again of reason and the individual conscience resisting the power of the State. This I propose as a second source of dignity. There is no dignity in succumbing to the propaganda of difference, of Otherness. It follows immediately that to dignify others is to dignify ourselves. ■ The third source of dignity I will mention today arises from the second. This is the acceptance and then the embrace of parity among all peoples and nations. I mention this from time to time in the published commentaries. It is time—it is well passed time—fully and actively to repudiate a half-millennium of the West’s presumed superiority over the non–West—which means over most of humanity. It is not a question of welcoming non–Western peoples to join us, which is the common assumption. It is a question of us, we in the West, 12 percent of the global population, joining them, the other 88 percent. We must act on this recognition not only in the cause of parity but also in the cause of our dignity and the dignity of all others. This, too, requires an act of transcendence. As a practical matter, it also means defending the institutions founded after the 1945 victories to establish parity in law. The United Nations is chief among these. There is also the defense of international law, and by way of our defense of international law our defense of domestic law, because the two are not, finally, to be separated. The Trump regime, case in point, is able to act lawlessly across the world because it is permitted to act lawlessly at home. When we honor parity among all peoples and incorporate this into our conduct we also honor ourselves. I have long counted these last two sources of dignity, seeing from the perspectives of others and the embrace of parity, as 21st–century imperatives. They are imperatives also to any life lived with dignity. ■ I will end with a couple of corollaries, which we can count imperatives of another kind. One is accepting our limitations. This means, among other things, recognizing the defects of our corrupted political systems and determining what is to be done to respond sensibly to this circumstance. I mentioned earlier the sensation of powerlessness. I put some thought into this phrase, because powerlessness is in many cases—not all, of course—only a sensation. So it is in the case of our apparent voicelessness, too. I am thinking here, to speak plainly, of what we call extra-parliamentary action of just the kind Thoreau urged in “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” Parenthetically, this essay’s title is customarily abbreviated in America as “On Civil Disobedience,” and I have long speculated that this is because most Americans do not want to hear about their duties. Let us, here, restore the full title to remind ourselves of what falls to us as our duties. Thoreau was responding to the circumstances of his time. So is Ambassador Murray. And so must we. Bitter as it may be, our time forces the necessity of disobedience upon us. The second corollary, reading out of my first, is active, vigorous, altogether public condemnation of those who act against human dignity by way of what they are and what they do. There is no dignity, just as Thoreau put it, sitting around with our hands in our pockets wondering what to do, to take the very most obvious case, in the face of the Zionist regime’s genocidal assault against the Palestinian people. We act or we are complicit, just as Craig Murray had it. Thoreau made a direct connection between the sovereignty of conscience and the inevitable necessity of sacrifice. This was the reality of his time, and in this ours is not so different. Truly to live in dignity requires sacrifice of us. There is no ground left to avoid this truth. The Floutist publishes this piece without a paywall. We ask those who are not paid subscribers to consider becoming one: We can use the support of all those who see worth in the work. A subscription is $5/month or $50/year. Every dollar is appreciated and helps keep us going. You can also support us by sharing this article. For those readers who are already subscribed, our usual and sincerest thanks. 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