Dignity and Social Movements

What is Dignity?  And why does it galvanize social movements? 

The more I study social movements and conflict resolution, the more convinced I become that dignity is an essential basic human need;  denied this, a social manifestation will almost always occur.  I wrote about this extensively in Land and Dignity in Paraguay, and have continued to observe the primary role of dignity in the Arab Awakening as well as the Occupy movements that have essentially been demanding economic dignity.  It even seemed to be paramount in the recent protests in Moscow which demanded (at a minimum) an investigation into recent election fraud. 

I increasingly view dignity as a way to understand these dynamic interrelations.  Theorizing dignity, however, does even more than help us understand contentious politics.  It can help us progress towards actionable clarity regarding how to expand free democratic space with respect to women, first peoples, minorities and other groups whose specific historical experiences make contentious politics necessary. 

This all suggests that we need a more developed theory of what dignity is exactly and why it seems to matter so much to the kinds of socio/political/economic conflict that we’re seeing today.

So then, what is the nature of dignity?  Let’s start with what it is not.  I recently spoke at a workshop on Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies, where it was argued that humiliation is dignity’s opposite.  To be humiliated is to be treated as something less than human—dehumanized.  Extending this, dignity must involve or enable somehow rehumanization.  This is especially true when we think about dignity in post-conflict (or during conflict) contexts, where it arguably matters most. 

So, first, dignity is political.  I have observed elsewhere that dignity is related to inherently political ideas such as autonomy and participation.  As Seyla Benhabib recently (2011) wrote, Arendt was one of the first to really theorize dignity as a political concept. This, Benhabib explains, was a response to explanations of anti-Semitism which Arendt viewed as relying too heavily on economics at the expense of the political.  Indeed, the important question to ask is how the political, the economic and the individual (culture, identity) interact in very specific historical contexts.  The political nature of dignity is almost certainly why social movements demanding dignity for certain groups simultaneously demand political (and social) recognition/inclusion as well as autonomy. 

Second, dignity is relational.  While some of us are amazingly, defiantly self-possessed, especially when we think of the socio-political sense of dignity, we know from social identity theory that we define ourselves largely via connection to or in opposition to others.  This is why a sense not just of personal but of social esteem is so important to a theory of dignity. 

Third, dignity is a basic human need.  From the standpoint of basic human needs, then, we know that it cannot be negotiated away.  The only sustainable, just way to resolve a conflict in which one party feels her (their) dignity has been lost is to meet that need.

This leads me to the question of why dignity seems to be such a prominent theme in the social movements, like the Arab Awakening and Occupy, within what some have called the “Spirit of 2011”.  To simplify quite a bit, social movements tend to emerge when there is

1. Shared grievance

2. Shed helplessness.

Part of this occurs because social movement leaders make political claims that resonate.  Other times it is more organic, especially in our decentralized social media era.  What’s key here is that individuals no longer see their struggle as individual and they no longer see themselves as to blame.    This appears to be just what is happening with the Occupy movement worldwide as a response to the global dominance of neoliberalism.  What is it then that people find so dehumanizing about neoliberalism? Quite a meaty subject, this we will have to leave for a future blog. 

Ten Things the Occupy Movement Can Demand

1.       Stop all “robo-signing” of home foreclosures immediately.

2.       Allow students to declare student loan bankruptcy. 

3.       Reinstate “Glass-Steagall”, which separated consumer banking from investment banking.

4.       Investigation of the major investment banks who were involved in the subprime mess.

5.       Investigation of Fanny, Freddy and the ratings agencies like S&P who gave banks AAA ratings which were false.

6.       Implementation of Elizabeth Warren’s Financial Consumer Protection Bureau. 

7.       Overturning Citizens United.  Money is not speech.  It’s one person, one vote, not one dollar, one vote.

8.       Passage of Obama’s Jobs Act and/or implementation of a WPA-inspired jobs-emergency program. The WPA was a Depression-area government employment program.

9.       Similar to #8, an immediate halt to the laying off of public sector workers, especially at the state and local level.  Consumers create jobs, and we can’t afford to keep squelching demand. 

10.   Break up the banks that are (say it with me) Too Big to Fail.  Such a move is not anti-capitalist, it’s pro-capitalist.  You can’t have capitalism without the possibility of failure for poor investment decisions. 

#occupyyourownmind

"The enemy of the black is not the white. The enemy of capitalist is not communist, the enemy of homosexual is not heterosexual, the enemy of Jew is not Arab, the enemy of youth is not the old, the enemy of hip is not redneck, the enemy of Chicano is not gringo and the enemy of women is not men. We all have the same enemy: The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind. The enemy is every expert who practices technocratic manipulation, the enemy is every proponent of standardization and the enemy is every victim who is so dull and lazy and weak as to allow himself to be manipulated and standardized." ~Tom Robbins



"Those who make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities..." ~Voltaire


“If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”   ~Malcolm X

The connections between peace, critical thinking skills and a good old fashioned (young fashioned? Pretty young protestors out there) sense of civic duty have not ever been more clear to me. I wrote elsewhere once a few years ago that fascism, or totalitarianism in general if you prefer, is more of a mindset than a government. This was in the context of a discussion a few years back (Obama was not yet president) of a Florida college kid who was tazed by a campus security officer at a Kerry campaign speech. Discussion erupted about whether the kid had deserved it; apparently he’d been going on and on at the mic during the Q and A and someone even mentioned that he had spoiled Harry Potter! And there was the inevitable argument that the security guys did what they had to do. After all, how did they know he wasn’t a threat? I found myself pointing out repeatedly that that wasn’t relevant. In a democracy that’s working, of course, the burden of proof was on the law enforcement. This is because they have greater physical and legal coercive power, and people just don’t handle power well unless it’s constantly checked. That the kid was rude and arrogant was never the point, no matter how true. That he’d spoiled Harry Potter was not the point (though one does sympathize). I was stunned to find myself hearing such arguments by those who say they believe in democracy in support of law enforcement being able to inflict pain essentially to correct public manners—to teach the kid a lesson.

The over-identification with authority and with the elites, in my view, explains such reactions. It explains the need to see the kid put down or even the need to mention Potter-spoiling at all. It also helps explain how so many of our essential institutions seem to have slipped out of our control. This kind of over-identification with authority is damaging to a democracy just as surely as an Al Qaeda or corporate media ownership. Yet it’s so hard to talk about because so personal and intangible. But understanding this dynamic is essential to being a citizen in a democracy because fascism, again, is not so much a regime as a mindset. A mindset that says, “They know best”. A habit that fails to take personal responsibility for being informed and forming one’s own opinions. Our own minds are the real last line of defense against totalitarianism. This is, as others have also said, why regimes even bother targeting academics, journalists and artists.

What’s the relevance to the unrest and peaceful uprisings that we’re seeing now, especially the Occupy movement? Finally enough people across the US—across the world—have begun seeing and saying out loud that we insist on our own voices being heard and the social contract continuing to work for at least most of us. Apathy and cynicism, of course both servants of the status quo, appear to be disintegrating. This is one reason that the “agenda” media folks seem to be demanding (they are of course elites too, deeply implicated in shaping what’s worst about our current status quo) isn’t crystal clear yet though themes of economic justice, jobs, addressing corruption and peace are clearly observable. Because the reality is that a number of institutions and cultural systems (media, political, financial) are seen to have all failed us, the problem is just probably not going to fit into one white paper. Wherever this ends, it must start with citizens doing their fair share of governing if we are to remain a government BY the people. Before we can #occupywallstreet, we must #occupyourown minds.

Straight Outta Tottenham: Anger, Dignity and Austerity

"To be wholly overlooked and to know it are intolerable” ~John Adams

A clear thread is woven through the fabric of the many different, and often differently expressed, social upheavals that we have been experiencing throughout the year, and that thread is the challenge of global neoliberalism to dignity. Perhaps indeed some late 21st century Barbara Tuchman will tell the story of how 2011 was 1848 or 1937. What’s important now is that we understand how our systems—social, cultural, economic and political—are failing us on a large scale and what needs to be done to begin transforming them.

• London (unemployed youth riots)

•Ohio (union bargaining rights)

• Chile (student demonstrations over access to education)

• Wisconsin (union bargaining rights)

• The U.S. Tea Party (shrinking the welfare state)

• Israel (affordable housing—or as my colleague Aziz Abu Sarah memorably put it, “In Israel, the Rent Is Too Damn High”)

• The Arab Spring/Revolutions

But this goes even further back. Remember those uprisings in Paris a few years ago? Or the spate of anti-immigrant violence in Australia? How about pre-revolution food-price riots in Cairo? What about even the “Battle in Seattle” when the WTO was in town?

Why do I suggest that such different protests as the above all share a common impulse? Without ignoring local specifics, I see current the unrest as an extension of a larger trend that may have been developing throughout the 21st century so far as economic globalization and democracy expand and contract in response to what I believe are tectonic shifts of the global socio-political landscape. A root-bottom driver of the above is the relationship between entrenched neo-liberalism worldwide—which has accelerated to austerity as after-shocks of the Great Recession continue—and social dignity.

Dignity is what allows people to have faith in the social contract. So even if someone else has more materially, a young man or woman can still feel that

1. Others perceive him or her to be a part of society

2. Her role in society has some sort of meaning for her

3. She can have some sort of control over her future, especially as it relates to being able to provide for basic survival

Some excellent research has been done about the socio-political negotiation of social contracts and a community or nation’s security (see for example Beverly Crawford’s work on the “myth of ethnic conflict”). Essentially this is the agreement, sometimes spoken or written, sometimes not, that underlies how a society’s resources are divided up and what will constitute the CONSTRUCTED concept of legitimacy in a society—who gets to hold power, how and why. What we’re seeing in each of the cases above, I would argue, is a demand for renegotiating the social contract.

To my mind this implies the need for a global social contract. What rights can indeed a citizen demand? To what is he entitled? What does a citizen of Country X “look like” and/or believe? These are fundamental underlying questions being struggled over. The more interconnected our economies become, and the more migration continues throughout the 21st century, the truer this will be.

As I’ve written in my book on indigenous communities and austerity in Paraguay (Land and Dignity in Paraguay), when you take away someone’s ability to control their future, you take away their dignity. More than a set of mere economic policy prescriptions, neoliberalism is also a set of social norms and assumptions about human nature. This is where austerity, and Ha Joon Chang’s concept of “kicking away the ladder”, comes into play. The idea is that as one group climbs up the socio-economic ladder, benefitting from public spending on infrastructure, health, education, research/development and so on, they then begin to call for those supports to be chipped away.

I don’t think high rates of unemployment alone would have resulted in the riots we’re seeing in the UK. As a number of interviews with some of the rioters and protestors have shown, the ideas of power and economic injustices have been resonant. As part of austerity, youth services in Tottenham were cut by 75%! Don’t forget that historic Tunisian man who immolated himself in front of a municipal building after the confiscation of his vendor’s cart. It’s not just being unemployed—it’s being invisible!

An under-appreciated movie, “Dirty Pretty Things”, has a scene which captures the importance of “mere” visibility as a first step towards dignity. Several immigrants from various places encounter one another in some of London’s seedier sections. A few grisly scenes suggest that they have gotten caught up in the black market of organ smuggling. Having discovered it, they are soon blackmailed and threatened with deportation. Toward the end of the movie, a security man asks the Nigerian immigrant, “How come I haven’t seen you?” The immigrant replies, “We are the people you don’t see”. In all of the above cases, whatever distinct and valid differences they might also have from one another, the protestors are demanding to be accounted for—to be seen!—in the social contract.

Youth Development Is Security: Cairo Edition

Youth development, as I’ve developed a habit of saying, is security. As we have all watched unrest, riots and protests throughout Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Jordon, and previously in Iran, I continue to believe this truth.

Numerous analysts have noted how young “the Arab world” (we’ll set aside the fuzziness of that term for now) is. Stanford reports that 37% of Tunisia’s population is young (defined as 15-29). The median age in Yemen, according to the CIA Factbook, is 17. A full 50% of the country is of “working age”—25- 64. For context, the literacy rate in this country, in which the US has been using predator drones, is 50%. Nearby in Egypt, where tanks have been rolling onto the streets as I type, the median age is 24! 63% of the population are between 15-64. (It’s worth noting that Egypt’s literacy rate, at 71%, is significantly higher, which will matter greatly for Egypt’s future.) All of these countries grapple with high unemployment which may well be connected to the global financial crisis (at least in Egypt).

(Click here to watch Frontline’s Egypt: Middle East, Inc. which features a youth development effort.)

I rehearse this data, of course, because it so powerfully underlines an insight that I think is key to understanding the urgency of peace education, which again is precisely that “youth development is security”. Elsewhere I’ve written that I think there is great potential in peace education to “inoculate” young people against extremist views, whether it might be the mercenary violence of an MS13 or the more ideologically-driven terrorism of Al-Qaeda. So what then should we as peace educators be doing now? How can US educators help American students to understand what is unfolding? And how can teachers and schools in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and elsewhere, equip their students for a rapidly changing future in an increasingly armed and global world?

US educators might begin by opening discussions with their high school students (who are almost certain to be excited to begin driving) about where our oil comes from and the role it has played in shaping our foreign policy. The might also note that, as numerous media outlets have reported, the tear-gas cannons fired in Cairo at the protestors were made in the USA. Do today’s students feel this is right? What about the military aid we’ve given to Mubarak? This is also an exquisitely teachable moment regarding civil liberties and the rights to assemble, to peacefully protest and to petition one’s government, which every human being should have.

I won’t presume to explain to teachers or educational leaders in the Arab world what to do with this teachable moment. But there is some general wisdom from some of the founders of peace education, such as Freire and Montessori, that may be of use here. One insight is that schools too often are instruments of the state. Naturally this is even more the case when regimes are repressive and so use schools as instruments of repression. I would imagine some educators in these schools observe this daily. This use of schools as mechanisms of autocracy can often occur, for example, through plain censorship of what’s taught to encouraging one-sided views of history, lionizing accepted leaders, demonizing the opposition or (more subtly but crucially) shaping curriculum that encourages rote memorization, discourages critical and creative thinking and fosters individualism over community and collaboration. If democracy, or even “mere” good governance in any society is to be fostered or maintained, such an oppressive approach to education must be peacefully revolutionized.