C’est quoi “human dignity”?
Posted by: adonis49 on: October 27, 2009
C’est quoi “human dignity”? (October 25, 2009)
Two blasts in Baghdad in front of the Justice Palace: 160 dead and over 50 injured. Three weks ago, two blasts in front of the Foreign Ministry in Baghdad: 100 dead and over 200 injured. Every day, two dozens are killed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Iran, and Guinee in Africa. More military pre-emptive interventions around the world to “stem the scourge” of terrorism: only the western dead soldiers have faces and receive formal funerals with flags. Every day hundreds die of famine, curable diseases, and family violence but they are common news that are relegated, maybe, to statistics. Everyday, thousands of girls less than 10 years of age are sold as prostitutes in India; statistics estimate there are 1.5 million of these kinds of children in the market place. What about the many articles in the UN Charter concerning human dignity?
Someone give you birth, you live a miserable life and then you die. You live obeying orders, following opinions, reacting to impressions, fearing the future, shrieking when you see a large old black spider, hating mosquitoes, relatives, and family, and then you die. Excellent, that would be a fitting ending to life. No, they won’t let you die in peace. First, you have to experience purgatory and then wait, and wait until someone decides for you to go to hell or transcend to a boring heaven.
The concepts of dignity and liberty come in one package deal; the relative implant of these concepts in the organizational culture guides the trend in any one culture. Human dignity and liberty of choices are the main ingredients in a “civilized” individual’s belief system; that’s what the UN wants you to comprehend but never applied equitably as the UN stated in its declaration with no discrimination to race, color, religion, or gender. How long mankind has to wait for the UN to become a credible institution to all?
The mainly unconscious belief system is mostly hard wired in the nervous network that tips the balance on the thousands of daily decisions and only our actions reveal our real values. If you tend to accept the above paragraph as making a lot of sense then most probably you have been strongly influenced by the Western colonial culture and tend not to dwell on any definition that discriminate how dignity and liberty are assimilated and interpreted by other cultures.
In fact, colonialism is fundamentally the imposition of a specific supra-mythical culture on other communities. Outside the natural sciences, the colonial powers have no interest or need to fine tune the general concepts related to human sciences and much less of dignity and liberty. The ancient colonial powers are still exercising their influence on other communities and have generally substituted military force by technocracy in banking, monetary reforms, and globalization of trade and finance, and technology standardization.
The pragmatic western culture is resuming its well known strategy that says “the best route to transforming other cultures is to install the basic material standards and then, gradually and inevitably, the other cultures will adopt the philosophies of legal capitalism, democracy, modernism, progress and open borders for one world material exchange culture”
Liberty is not just the freedom for a community of selecting and adopting a religion, which is necessary but never sufficient. A community that values liberty should be ready to genuinely accepts the contributions and values of other religions, traditions and customs. Liberty has for pre-requisite constant dialogue and inter-communication among the various communities and religions. Thus, any belief system is fundamentally wrong: it basically means to exclude the other beliefs; any reshuffling or modification to a belief system remains wrong no matter what and liberty means accepting variations on sets of values.
A human is a whole microcosm in such a way that the destiny of humanity unfold through one individual and this concept is the foundation for human dignity, otherwise we are to accept that we are merely a tiny part in the chain of the other billions of individuals and we are ready to follow monolithic and totalitarian systems that want a unique universal conceptual system of values.
If very few distributions of genes biologically differentiate an individual from his neighbor then we might conjecture that what differentiate the value system and moral behavior of an individual from his neighbor are a tiny number of qualitative attributes. It is not the numerous common elements that we share but the values we attach on rare qualitative values that set us apart. There are special individuals like Gandhi and Martin Luther King who are the ultimate political men striving for sainthood through fair non-violent and active struggles for the dignity of the disinherited, the humble, and the common folks.
What dignity is there watching swarms of skeletal humans roaming arid and desert lands among calcified carcasses, not a patch of green or a tiny tree on the horizon to taking shelter under, heading toward a camping ground hundreds of miles away for international relief succor? What dignity is there to experiencing haggard humans fleeing civil war-torn villages to cramp up tent compounds? What dignity when these occurrences are frequent and happening all over the under-developed States?
Respecting human dignity means that we are ready to offer the individual with the tools and opportunities to resume fighting against imminent death, against famine, sickness, and oppressions: Life is a struggle against the chaos in death. Respecting human dignity means alleviating the material struggle and thus shortening the necessary resting pauses when people feel the need to believe that destiny is traced at inception: they do at times feel exhausted; they have to surmounting artificial obstacles that are not in the nature of things; they do lose confidence in the organizations that constantly defy the processes of living organisms.
Respecting human dignity is providing the resources to overcome the unnecessary frequent pauses when people are forced to believe in pre-destiny because they are not allowed to experience the little daily pleasures of loneliness, privacy, quality leisure time, and self paced working habits.
There is dignity in erecting a school for children so that they might grow with dreams of better opportunities than their present lot. There is dignity in building a dispensary so that children and the sick grow hope of having their pains alleviated. There is dignity sharing in the digging of a well and the construction of an irrigation canal, a few necessary infrastructures so that a sense of control over destiny is palpable. It does not take much investment to increase the level of dignity for changing the mind set to an alternative course for the future.
As long as the disparity between the rich and the poor in a society is increasing then the culture of the society tends to obliterate the notion of dignity to all; it sends the strong message that the notion of liberty for seeking a happy and satisfying life is essentially selective among classes.
Man is yet to be formed; it is a sickly creature but is nonetheless constantly inspired by dreams of what he can do and desire to transcend his inadequacies. Man has proven to stand tall against injustices and fight a non-violent struggle at the expense of his own suffering, pains and even death for the dignity of his fellow man.
Adonis Diaries 
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