• Honor and dignity.

• Honor and dignity.

YOU HAD A CHOICE BETWEEN WAR AND DISHONOR. YOU CHOSE DISHONOR! WINSTON CHURCHILL. APPEASEMENT LEADS TO THE DEATH OF THE INNOCENT. YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF. THINK OF THOSE WHO HAVE DIED, AND WILL DIE PROTECTING OUR FREEDOM, NOT TO MENTION THE INNOCENT IN THE WTL & PENTAGON.
--note tossed from a car passing a peace rally, 9-21-01


Sometimes we say we act for the sake of very abstract ideas. We think of abstract principles as almost the same as being altruistic, not selfish. But are those the real reasons for our choices?

Honor is one of those nice words that comes up a lot when we’re talking about something not so nice-- killing women or foreigners, for instance. We like to use it when our wars outlast our excuses. You hear this word a lot on the talk shows, sprinkled liberally by politicians and ideologues to disguise the rotting smell of the carrion they’re serving up to you and me. I even heard it in the GED class, with reference to Pat Tillman, the millionaire football player who signed up for Afghanistan and was killed by “friendly fire.” He died with honor, my student said. At least he has honor. I shook my head. Pat Tillman doesn’t have anything. He’s dead.

I looked it up. The dictionary says honor is respect or reputation; sticking to principles; high rank or recognition. The definitions are clearly related. I wrote earlier about how important consistency is in our relationships, so that other people know what to expect from us. Honor is almost shorthand for our status in the community, and we defend both together.

Nixon explained his policies in more straightforward terms, as the effort to win international credibility-- for the sake of which he extended the war in Southeast Asia for 6 years. He reckoned that killing people gave him a bigger rep than leaving them be. I dunno; maybe the dictators of China and Russia called him up & said, Good job, Tricky Dick! You are one tough hombre! We’re never gonna mess with you again! Unfortunately, a million or more Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians couldn’t say the same, because
a) they had never messed with Tricky Dick, or Exxon, or the U.S. of A., and
b) they were dead.

Next time somebody talks to me about honor, I’ll say there’s nothing honorable about murdering people for oil company profits, or even to save yourself from having to admit a mistake. If you can’t stand the embarrassment of your failures, do the honorable thing: kill your own self and leave the rest of us alone.


There's another fairness-related aspiration that seems to float angelically above the common run of human goals and appetites: what we often term “respect” or "dignity". To hear the protest preachers tell it, violating our dignity is the bosses' worst offense, worse even than poisoning our water or starving our children. And they're right. It's hard to muster the will to fight back against our lords or capos or CEOs, and what usually brings us to that point is as much some offense against our dignity as a physical threat to our lives and livelihoods.

But what exactly is this powerful force?

When we treat people with respect, we are recognizing that what they think or do matters to us; that we have to keep them in mind in making our own decisions. Really, it’s simply acknowledging other people’s power. When we disrespect folks, we’re telling them they don’t matter, we don’t need to take them into account, they have no influence on us, no way to respond to our actions.

This is what Scott says about dignity among Asian peasants:

We know relatively little about a Malay villager if we know only that he is poor and landless. We know far more about the cultural meaning of poverty once we know that he is particularly in despair because he cannot afford to feed guests on the feast of Ramadan, that wealthy people pass him on the village path without uttering a greeting, that he cannot bury his parents properly, that his daughter will marry late if at all because he lacks a dowry, . . . To know the cultural meaning of his poverty in this way is to learn the shape of his indignity and, hence, to gauge the content of his anger (1990 p. 113).

We can readily translate that to our own experience here. When a boss yells at his employees, or makes them wear stupid hats, or tells them they need his permission to go to the bathroom, he may not be taking food out of their mouths at that moment, but he’s signaling with utmost clarity: I can do that and worse any time I choose, and you can’t do anything about it. That’s scary. It’s bad enough to take abuses one at a time, and push back as best one can. Disrespect is a promise of endless abuse without recourse. When our ability to take care of our families and act responsibly in society also depends on the whims of arbitrary employers, it broadcasts our helplessness to the whole community.

Attacks on our dignity unify people who’ve endured different abuses at different times, but share that common pattern of being grossly disrespected. We lose our hopes of somehow winning better treatment. We get ready to fight. And however abstract it may seem on the surface, in fighting for dignity and respect, we are defending ourselves against real threats to our material well being.

Standing on our dignity can also divide us, when we value different things about ourselves. For instance, I read with interest this account of a conflict between environmentalists and loggers in Australia. Notice how policy conflict quickly translates to a struggle for respect:

On the environmentalist side people get an emotional or even spiritual attachment to a forest or to individual trees. ‘I’ve seen people go hysterical watching trees come down,’ said Tom Whitaker, president of the South Coast Environment Group. ‘It’s probably equivalent to watching your family getting shot before a firing squad.’
Yet the hardworking culture of loggers has emotional roots that are just as strong. After my night with the ferals I visited a nearby logging site. Six men sat around in a drizzle in a lean-to, barbecueing beefsteaks and sausages for lunch on the surface of a woodburning stove. Not one would ever say, ‘I feel strong and complete and more of a man when I’m working in the bush,’ but I knew that was how they felt.
‘These attacks on good, hardworking people undermine their self-worth and their pride,’ said Jeanette Sturgis, a resident of the timber town of Manjimup. ‘I get a spiritual connection, too; I go to church and connect with people. I have no problem with people having a connection with a tree. But it is just a tree’” (Parfit 20).

Our need for respect can be pretty undiscriminating. It can feel just as nice, or nicer, to be praised by scumbags as by the guy next to you on the assembly line. Writing of Kentucky coal miners, Portelli describes how the struggle for respect meant in practice offering respect to the boss.

In the absence of a vision of class conflict, there is little space for self-validation of the workers’ identity. Recognition must be confirmed by ‘significant others,’ and management is as ‘other’ and as ‘significant’ as they come, especially in the semi-feudal layout of a coal camp. The fact that most of the fiercest struggles were waged about the issue of union recognition reinforces this attitude. This is why is is very important that [General Manager] Lawson, stern but just, ‘never would say a word to you’ if you worked satisfactorily every day and didn’t get drunk. He could tell a good worker from a drunkard and a shirker, and gave that worker pride and security. Of course, in order for Lawson’s recognition to mean something, he must be ‘a good feller’ and ‘a wonderful man’ (203).

Some employers use our need for dignity against us, as when they treat certain groups with respect, even if it’s only symbolic --badges and titles and such-- and others with much less. So sometimes it’s hard to organize professional types, teachers and nurses, for example, to make common cause with the pink collar staffers who work in the same institutions. I’m a professional! I insist; how people value me depends on my role in this institution; I am responsible for it. The housekeepers or the women serving lunch, they are just the hired help. This is a way we let the parasite class define our values; and we imagine that the tiny privileges they bestow on us make up the whole of our dignity and power.

Some people can only feel important by telling others what to do. Many politicians and business managers keep people in line by keeping them competition with one another. Sometimes competition infects sex relationships, too. So we get very fierce reactions when we challenge people who thought they were above challenge; when they hear, I want to decide for myself, they take it as a betrayal. That's when they try to humiliate and kill us, not in the course of business as usual, but deliberately and in person.

Some men once had the idea that their chief value in this world was their capacity to make money, to earn the respect of other men and their own dependent families. But that fragile status depended on an economy where secure, well-paying work was the norm for men and practically forbidden to women. Faludi's Stiffed is full of the stories of men who crumble or do not as they lose their jobs. Sometimes they reestablish partnerships with their families on stronger foundations. Sometimes they come up with ingenious new ways to assert their special value, as when Promise Keeper participants assert claims to a mission as family spiritual leaders.

The key point about dignity is that violations require response. Dignity is about our power to act in the world, and if someone tromps on our dignity, we must answer. But some responses can only get you killed. Enslaved people especially, but also imprisoned people and workers in authoritarian environments have to develop responses that won't get them raped, killed, or tossed out to starve. So elaborate cultures have developed to help us hold on to some areas of personal control or influence. Organizing is the way we merge and expand these zones, and push back against the killers.

Some guys never do find an alternative way to value themselves, and our ability to respond to indignity shrinks down to destruction and self-destruction. Just when we most need to act, we don't know what to do. All the avenues we know have been shut down. We are isolated by the very behaviors that, we supposed, gave us dignity in the first place; just asking for help means we can no longer claim all the great things we imagined we had accomplished on our own. The wizard has to come out of the closet. Or we may have no way to forgive ourselves for the crimes we have helped commit.

Some of us will go to almost any length to avoid certain kinds of knowledge. So we might spend weeks or months reworking our Story to account for our suffering, establish our innocence, and reduce a set of complex problems and options to a single act or behavior that can restore our dignity. I think that's what Faludi means by the "frantic quest for a meaningful showdown" (1999 p. 31). It's a major theme of our culture, and why, for many people, meaningfulness requires the ultimate simplifications, killing and dying. I hate these gun babies who feel they have to kill a bunch of other people before they can kill themselves. We have to help each other tell stories where murder is not the only possible ending.