Engaging Our Principles: What Are We Worth?

Martha Hodges - 2006-09-24

"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculties! In form and movement, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

The struggle of Prince Hamlet to decide about the essence of human nature may be one you are personally familiar with. The beauty of the world? The paragon of animals? Or a mere quintessence of dust? The ultimate expression of God’s or nature’s genius? Or merely the top of the food chain? Do we humans carry within us the spark of divinity or are we mere collections of chemicals and electrical impulses, driven by instinct and self-interest?

A lot of us, if we are completely honest about how we experience our fellow human beings, would have to answer, “It depends on the day.” I know that on days when I read or hear about entire communities – even at times entire countries – irresistably drawn to televisions and radios to cheer on the efforts to rescue a missing child, it’s easy for me to see the universal goodness in us, the desire to protect and care for the weakest among us. On other days… Well, on other days, I have to wonder. When Iraqi children die in bomb blasts, or at the hands of drive-by shooters or abusive parents, I have to wonder about our similarity to angels, let alone to gods.

I was once told by a fellow seminarian that someone who doubted the basic goodness of human beings had no business being a Unitarian Universalist. After all, this first principle of the Unitarian Universalist faith is the very foundation of our shared values. “We covenant to affirm and promote the inherent dignity and worth of every person.” But it’s not that simple, is it? We may take this ethical commitment for granted, yet it has implications that are complex and demanding. What’s more, this is a statement of faith as well as ethics. For it requires us to ask what is the basis of this inherent dignity and worth and what is it that calls us to this vision of the world and the difficult discipline of living this way?

So do we believe that every person has inherent dignity and worth? If so, where does this conviction come from when there is so much evidence to the contrary? And if so, why do we ourselves so often act as though we do not? As they say in seminary, “Let’s unpack this claim.”

First of all, if we affirm the existence of something, why should it be necessary to promote it? If it is, it is. The only way this makes sense of the first part of this statement is if we affirm the human potential for dignity and worth and promise to promote its realization.

So if the potential for human dignity and worth is inherent in us, it means that it is present in all and essential to our natures. Does it also mean that it is present in equal measure in all? This depends on how we understand this quality, dignity, and how we define and measure human worth.

Dignity is a slippery concept to grab hold of – at least for me. There’s the kind of dignity that we “lose” when we slip on the banana peel. Or vomit in public, or throw a temper tantrum. This is the stuff of the Three Stooges and other physical comedy. There’s something appealing about seeing other people – always other people – be reminded that they are not entirely masters of themselves. At its worst, this kind of assault on human dignity is downright sadistic. The TV show, America’s Funniest Home Videos, with its shots of people tripping, getting hit by flying objects and otherwise suffering sudden unexpected injuries, just about saps me of the will to live, as do shows like Jerry Springer that celebrate people’s loss of self-control and self-respect – people at their least dignified. At its best, this kind of comedy sticks a pin in our pomposity and the human tendency to take ourselves too seriously. The kind of dignity poked fun at in this way is actually a burden we are well relieved of. This is dignity as straitjacket, the fear of appearing foolish that can keep us from expressing our emotions or really enjoying ourselves. As long as we are subject to the laws of gravity, we can hardly claim that this kind of dignity is inherent to human beings.

At the other end of the indignity spectrum is the person who is deliberately degraded. The victim of torture or domestic abuse, the bullied child, the person forced by hunger to go through other people’s garbage in search of the half-eaten burger or the wilted produce. This is dignity understood as the right to live unviolated, in full recognition of our value as human beings. This is the kind of dignity that the Geneva Conventions recognize and protect. This is a human right, a right that it is relatively easy for us to understand and to defend – or so one might think.

Somewhere in between the banana peel and the question of torture lie the murky questions about the dignity of the comatose person maintained on life support. The delusional person, duking it out with an imaginary adversary as he walks down the street, the drunk, the beggar. These are the people that we turn away from and prefer not to think about. How about someone who has become incontinent through illness or old age? We would rather not think about helplessness, especially our own. Does the helpless person have inherent dignity? There is room for us to hold different opinions about this. My answer is an unqualified yes. The person in the hospital bed, the person no longer in control of her bodily functions, the person forced to depend on others for sustenance – of course they have dignity. More exactly, they have the right to be treated with dignity, with care and respect, regardless of their condition, regardless of the failure of mind or body that will find us all eventually if we live long enough.

This is the meaning of the inherent dignity of all persons. It is not that we inherently behave with dignity. It’s all too obvious that we do not. But we have the inherent right to be treated as if we did. To have our basic needs met, to be treated with gentleness and respect. To be treated with love. No matter who we are.

But why? Where does this right to be cared for respectfully and lovingly come from? It comes from the other half of this statement of faith. We have inherent dignity because we have inherent worth.

Worth that does not depend on earning and spending power, ability or health, skill or education. Worth that is not measured by our ability to contribute to society, by our educational level or even by our behavior. This is where it gets sticky for many of us. Does the sadist, the murderer, the abuser have inherent worth? Does Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden?

When one of my sisters, who shall remain nameless, was a little girl, our mother was explaining to her who Adolf Hitler was. He was a monster, my mother said. My sister burst into tears and ran from the room. Not because she was afraid of monsters or because she was suddenly struck by the understanding that humans could do such things as Hitler did. But because she felt sorry for Hitler. She felt sorry that our mother would call anyone a monster. This story of my sister, seven-year-old theologian, has become one of those family stories that shape our sense of ourselves. For me, her reaction to the dehumanizing of Hitler, the person who dehumanized millions, has become the litmus test for anyone claiming to honor the inherent worth of every person. If I can sense the inherent worth on an Adolf Hitler, surely I must recognize the worth of those I simply dislike or disagree with, and treat them accordingly.

But if someone I loved were brutalized or killed without compunction, would I still claim that the offender had inherent worth? It’s easy for me to say yes because this hasn’t happened to me. I’m not arrogant or foolish enough to say how I would feel if it did. But I hope I could say this. I hope that I could be one of those remarkable people who, when a loved one has been murdered, protest the state execution of the murderer. Not because they do not hold the killer accountable for his act, not because they deny that the thing he did was evil. Not even because they forgive the killer. They may or may not. But these heroic people of principle want to save the life of the one who wreaked irreparable damage on their own lives because they recognize that there is something in him that speaks to something in themselves. The spirit in him meets the spirit in them. They cannot avoid the conviction that they are, in a real sense, the same.

This is a hard faith to accept, I know, and a harder one to live out.

“I am a human being. Nothing human is alien to me.” Terence, the Roman playwright, wrote this in 154 BCE. Yes, we can affirm that the “other” – the Afghan woman, the Sudanese child, the Chinese earthquake victim, the Katrina survivor – we can affirm that we feel a commonality with these, an empathy. We try to learn about their experiences, to imagine what it might be like to live their lives. And the dog handler at Abu Ghraib, the child molester, the rapist, the terrorist? Can we imagine what it might be like to live those lives? Do we want to imagine such a thing? Are we willing to imagine that if we had been born under other circumstances, if we had been raised by other parents, suffered other humiliations, been taught to see the world and other people another way – do we dare to imagine that maybe – just possibly – that there is the tiniest possibility – that we, too might be capable of such things?

My freshman year in college, in my Introduction to Psychology course, I learned about something called the Milgram experiment. Are you familiar with it? This was a series of experiments begun in 1961 at Yale University. Paid subjects, men ranging in age from 20 to 50, of all educational backgrounds, were told that they were participating in an experiment on the effects of pain on learning. In reality, the experiment was testing how much pain an ordinary person would be willing to inflict on another person because he was ordered to do so by the experimenter, a figure of authority. The subjects believed that they were administering electrical shocks to a “learner,” who was actually an actor, when the latter gave an incorrect response to a word-pairing exercise. As the actor screamed and writhed in simulated pain, the subjects, ordinary people, would administer greater and greater shocks when ordered to do so by the experimenter. Most subjects objected, they exhibited extreme stress, but they obeyed, even to the point of administering supposedly lethal shocks to the other – even after the other had stopped responding.

Before the experiment Milgram asked fellow psychologists to predict the results. His colleagues unanimously believed that only a sadistic few (0.1%), would be prepared to give the maximum voltage. In fact, this experiment and others like it have shown consistent results across variations of time and place. Between 61 and 66 percent of subjects will comply with orders to administer fatal levels of electric shocks. Of those one third of subjects who refused to comply, none insisted that the experiment be terminated, nor left the room without permission.

Learning about the Milgram Experiment changed me. I could never after that look at the inherent dignity and worth of human beings in quite the same way. “I am a human being: nothing human is alien to me.” Would I have administered the fatal shock? I hope to god I would not, but can I say with certainty?

My understanding of human worth is complicated by this dark knowledge of our human potential for evil.

The Unitarians of yore proclaimed that, contrary to the dominant Calvinist doctrine of the time, humans were not inherently cursed by Original Sin, objects of total depravity, redeemable only by the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Our Universalist forbears insisted that no finite human was capable of such evil that he merited eternal damnation and that God was a loving God who would not condemn his children to such a fate. These heretical beliefs are the origin of our first principle proclaiming the inherent worth and dignity of all people.

And we post-Holocaust, post-Milgram Unitarian Universalists – we who, thanks to modern communications, are privy to information about human depravity that our nineteenth-century ancestors never dreamed of – how are we to reconcile this knowledge with our desperate wish to believe in, to hope for, the inherent worth of everyone – in our own inherent worth?

Yes, we have the potential to do evil. But we also have the potential to be loving creatures who willingly accept responsibility for caring for others. This is equally undeniable. The evidence for this, as well, is all around us. The paragon of animals or the quintessence of dust? The reality is both. And there is another reality. We can choose. We can choose not to administer that fatal voltage. We can choose not to objectify the enemy, the beggar, the mad, the helpless, and yes, the criminal and the torturer. We can practice the spiritual discipline of seeing our own reflection is their eyes.

It is only by acknowledging our commonality with these, our common origin and ancestry, our common humanity and our common worth, that we can come to fully know and accept our own inherent worth. If we recognize that we are indeed, linked in a web of interdependency, the death or suffering of one affects us all in ways that we can never fully understand. The loss or degradation of one of us changes that sacred web forever; the birth or exaltation or act of compassion of one changes that web as well. It changes us. We have worth because we can choose to recognize that each one of us deserves to be accorded dignity and love. We can choose to invest our lives in affirming that, as we are worthy of love, so is everyone.

If modern life, with its science and technology, has allowed us to know the evil of which we are capable, so has it made it impossible to deny our essential connections and commonality with all humanity. By creating love and living by the laws of love, we choose to be worthy of love. By treating others with dignity and affirming the human potential for good, we affirm our own right to dignity and our own potential for good.

We therefore choose to covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person. A difficult discipline and a demanding faith, in which lie our own salvation and our hope for the salvation of the world.

My demand and expectation of dignified treatment recognizes the same in you. That which is of worth in me speaks to that which is of worth in you. The spirit in me meets the spirit in you. Namaste.