Dignity Now?

David Brooks’ recent column, called “In Search of Dignity,” is of pomocon interest. Just as Brooks tends to view genius as the practical result of expeditiously logging big hours of disciplined rehearsal, he sees the survival of dignity as dependent upon the persistence of a “larger set of rules or ethical system.” But for the classic American dignity sheet, Brooks refers to a list that George Washington cribbed from “a 16th-century guidebook”. To be popular today, Washington’s 110 Rules would have to be cut down to 12 Steps, a Top Ten List, or, perhaps, an open-ended series of volumes and anniversary editions of Dignity for Dummies or The Seven Habits of Highly Dignified People .

But even with the plausibility — or reality — of titles like these, Brooks thinks that the best example of dignity today is probably Barack Obama, who shows everyone that internalizing a coolly calculated restraint to the point of second nature — what used to be called ‘grace under pressure’ — is the way to really satisfy one’s biggest ambitions. (Brooks could have sharpened his point even further by noting that Obama’s sophisticated “reticence” and “dispassion” are clear components of HIS own self-realization as an individual being in command of himself. “Americans still admire dignity,” writes Brooks. “But the word has become unmoored from any larger set of rules or ethical system.” This is because we see the ultimate in dignity to be accessible only through the ultimate in being our own individual person.)

Any system or rule set strikes an uncomfortable contrast with our longing for the full experience of individuality. Yet, as we have known ever since Tocqueville, this kind of bipolar experience is a hallmark of democratic life. The only way we can make sense of the shifting smithereens of our Protean, Pelagian contemporary life — overflowing as it is with constantly changing relations, identities, poses, and attitudes, unregulated by strict and finite social hierarchies that last generations — is by recursive reference to public opinion itself. But since public opinion is qualitatively unknowable as a whole, we turn to experts who can supply us with reliable-enough quantitative knowledge about the slices of life that matter most to us at certain times. Social statistics a la four-out-of-five-doctors , ten-million-people-can’t-be-wrong, and the ubiquitous top-ten lifestyle tiplists represented most disposably by Cosmo and Maxim boil down into clear, concise form information about what to do that we can’t readily arrive at in a democratic age by other, perhaps more classical means. Simplicity of method, precise enumeration, comprehensive brevity, and textual literalism count as the great virtues of this approach to social knowledge. These are also many of what we might recognize as the quintessentially ‘modern’ virtues. What’s important to learn from Tocqueville is that the mass production and celebration of these virtues is less the consequence of some ineluctable logic of capitalism — that is, man’s relation with the natural world — than of man’s relation with the social world — that is, how we relate to one another. Once our individual being is realized en masse , away we go.

But of course the happiness that we seek to obtain through recourse to the modern virtues, in what Tocqueville called practical Cartesianism, is at odds with the very individuality that we seek. Happiness and individuality are competing goods or visions of the highest. Or, as a wise man once observed ,

Vain illusions which generate the idleness that comes with inward serenity are dispelled [in the age of the individual]. There is, we learn, no invisible realm of freedom, no impregnable Stoic fortress, into which we can securely retreat. It is undeniable progress to stop ranking people according to their social class, gender, race, religion, and so forth. Productivity is the most visible and surest foundation for a meritocracy—which is why Americans today are having more trouble than ever finding a higher standard than productivity to determine their dignity. Even with the economic downturn, Americans are wealthier and freer than ever, but their dignity seems to depend on being useful and pleasing to others. They increasingly lack the inward self-confidence that comes with having a personal standard higher than “success.” We might want to say that Americans are both more and less free than ever—and in a way that would earn a Stoic’s cold contempt.

Thus Martha Nussbaum attempts to renovate Stoicism as a virtue of mass consensual cuckolds, viewing serial monogamy as an inevitable part of life that we must prepare ourselves always to be resigned to. Nussbaum’s fetish for ensuring we all think of ourselves as always already erotically broken and codependent — what Philip Rieff derisively called “crippled pets” — is a perfect example of both how bad a bad trip post-Christianity can be and how more-Christian-than-Christian in its attempt to saddle us with a needy species being. Nussbaum’s portrait of we codependent rationalizing animals is too close for comfort to MacIntyre’s of we dependent rational animals, however God-poor Nussbaum’s world, and God-rich MacIntyre’s, may be. Still, it’s true that MacIntyre’s human animals are too poor in living out their real individual being while Nussbaum’s are too surfeited with the allure of some fake or mystical quality of individuality. The challenge for Americans desperately seeking dignity is to recognize the difference between living as real individuals and seeking out unreal individuality. The reality of our individual being — and the happiness it opens to us — is actually undermined by the unhappy quest for the full experience of individuality. A stoicism, and a dignity, for our time?