The Mission Creep of Dignity
When it comes to the “culture wars,” the sparring sides often evaluate their words or phrases less for accuracy than for emotional punch. For that reason some words, like life or choice, stick. They resonate. Others feel clunky—true but unhelpful. Take conjugal, for example; it may be an accurate description of real marriage, but that dog won’t hunt.
Occasionally, however, the warring parties fight over the same word, as they are now doing over dignity. This shouldn’t surprise us. Dignity can be confusing. Is it something you have? Is it a way you act? Something you can gain or lose? There are people we call dignitaries—does that mean they have more dignity than the rest of us?
Part of the reason dignity is confusing is because a new definition of the word has emerged to stimulate rather than salve cultural conflict. Let me explain.
Dignity 1.0
Dignity 1.0, the older conception shared by Christians, natural law theorists and others, refers to the idea that humans have “inherent worth of immeasurable value that is deserving of certain morally appropriate responses.” Understood in this way, dignity is an inalienable value. It’s a reality. Human dignity does not become real when you start to believe in it. It remains real even when neglected or violated. It may be discerned differently across eras, but it’s not arbitrary, to be socially constructed in unique ways by collective will or vote.
In the mid-400s, Leo the Great wrote the following admonition, which is now quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Christian, recognize your dignity and, now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return to your former base condition by sinning. Remember who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Never forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of the Kingdom of God.
Of course, dignity was not invented by organized religion. Still, the Church has arguably done a better job than most of detecting it, if not always of respecting it.
From Leo to Immanuel Kant to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this older model of dignity held sway for centuries. Literary use of the word, however, declined during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the 1990s, use of the word bottomed out. From disuse, however, a new understanding of the concept has emerged: Dignity 2.0.
Dignity 2.0
I didn’t realize I was confused about dignity until it became an embattled word in legal contests over marriage. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is now famous—or infamous—for aligning dignity more closely with human autonomy and the right to define oneself, one’s own “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The justice employed the word at least ten times in his 2013 Defense of Marriage Act decision. And in his vigorous dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia cited it nearly as often. But even decades before Kennedy’s writings, an organization called “Dignity USA” was founded to shift Catholic attitudes and practices toward greater acceptance of same-sex relationships. There's a similar contest going on over at the euthanasia debate, where proponents of assisted suicide hold that what they're fostering is “death with dignity.”
To be sure, Dignity 2.0 exhibits some similarities with its predecessor. Each has to do with inherent worth. Each implies the reality of the good. Each understands that rights flow from dignity. But Dignity 2.0 entrusts individuals to determine their own standards. Wants could become needs. Freedom, under Dignity 1.0, did not mean the ability to do as one wishes but—asChristian Smith writes—the ability to “flourish as the person one is and should become” and to help other persons to do the same. Standards came from somewhere else.
Hence, when the Church speaks of “the dignity of the human person in sexual matters,” it is Dignity 1.0 that it has in mind—not an absolute freedom or autonomy of the person in sexual matters. Indeed, she holds that chastity is not simply related to dignity but serves as its prime protector. Persons who strive to be chaste are those whose “gaze can genuinely behold and affirm the dignity of the other.” That’s a claim well afield of the Catholic Kennedy’s evolved definition of dignity.
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Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com
Occasionally, however, the warring parties fight over the same word, as they are now doing over dignity. This shouldn’t surprise us. Dignity can be confusing. Is it something you have? Is it a way you act? Something you can gain or lose? There are people we call dignitaries—does that mean they have more dignity than the rest of us?
Part of the reason dignity is confusing is because a new definition of the word has emerged to stimulate rather than salve cultural conflict. Let me explain.
Dignity 1.0
Dignity 1.0, the older conception shared by Christians, natural law theorists and others, refers to the idea that humans have “inherent worth of immeasurable value that is deserving of certain morally appropriate responses.” Understood in this way, dignity is an inalienable value. It’s a reality. Human dignity does not become real when you start to believe in it. It remains real even when neglected or violated. It may be discerned differently across eras, but it’s not arbitrary, to be socially constructed in unique ways by collective will or vote.
In the mid-400s, Leo the Great wrote the following admonition, which is now quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
Christian, recognize your dignity and, now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return to your former base condition by sinning. Remember who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Never forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of the Kingdom of God.
Of course, dignity was not invented by organized religion. Still, the Church has arguably done a better job than most of detecting it, if not always of respecting it.
From Leo to Immanuel Kant to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this older model of dignity held sway for centuries. Literary use of the word, however, declined during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the 1990s, use of the word bottomed out. From disuse, however, a new understanding of the concept has emerged: Dignity 2.0.
Dignity 2.0
I didn’t realize I was confused about dignity until it became an embattled word in legal contests over marriage. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is now famous—or infamous—for aligning dignity more closely with human autonomy and the right to define oneself, one’s own “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The justice employed the word at least ten times in his 2013 Defense of Marriage Act decision. And in his vigorous dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia cited it nearly as often. But even decades before Kennedy’s writings, an organization called “Dignity USA” was founded to shift Catholic attitudes and practices toward greater acceptance of same-sex relationships. There's a similar contest going on over at the euthanasia debate, where proponents of assisted suicide hold that what they're fostering is “death with dignity.”
To be sure, Dignity 2.0 exhibits some similarities with its predecessor. Each has to do with inherent worth. Each implies the reality of the good. Each understands that rights flow from dignity. But Dignity 2.0 entrusts individuals to determine their own standards. Wants could become needs. Freedom, under Dignity 1.0, did not mean the ability to do as one wishes but—asChristian Smith writes—the ability to “flourish as the person one is and should become” and to help other persons to do the same. Standards came from somewhere else.
Hence, when the Church speaks of “the dignity of the human person in sexual matters,” it is Dignity 1.0 that it has in mind—not an absolute freedom or autonomy of the person in sexual matters. Indeed, she holds that chastity is not simply related to dignity but serves as its prime protector. Persons who strive to be chaste are those whose “gaze can genuinely behold and affirm the dignity of the other.” That’s a claim well afield of the Catholic Kennedy’s evolved definition of dignity.
......................
Read more: www.thepublicdiscourse.com
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