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THE DIGNITY OF HUMANITY
An investigation into why the ideal of humanity’s dignity vanished, andhow this explains Americans’ seeming inability to self govern.Part 1
 
E.L. Beck
October, 2009; revised January, 2012
The Small “r” 
 
•e-mail:thesmallr@gmail.com •website: The Small “r”on Scribd
 
Introduction
Few Americans remember why Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., traveled to Memphis, Tennessee in April of1968, where he was assassinated: Dr. King wanted to support the city’s trash collectors and their strike,collectors who were demanding better working conditions and a raise in their paltry pay.What leaps out at anyone who has ever watched the news footage from that strike are the signs that hungfrom the striking trash collectors’ necks, marching in protest. The signs did not read, “More money,” or“Better benefits.” Rather, the signs read:“I Am a Man.”In four critical words those collectors summed up everything that had been missing from the Americandialogue for decades: I am a man. I am a woman. I am an individual. I was born with the inalienable,immutable and intrinsic natural rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In short,
I possess dig-nity
.Whoever decided to write those four words and use them in, of all settings, a strike, understood its inci-sive message.Within the upheavals that are starting to emerge in America – the right pressing against governmentalinstitutions and the left pressing against economic institutions – for those of us who are not involved inthe shouting matches, we step back and ask ourselves, “Haven’t I seen this before?” And the answer, ofcourse, is “Yes.”Too long has the Great American Debate swung back and forth between economic institutions and politi-cal institutions. And yet both side maintain the audacity to argue that a more favorable outcome is in theoffing, if only we allow businesses more freedom to operate, or government more freedom to manage.What is invariably left out is any place for the individual American, that person who possesses dignity.Yet, businesses cannot possess natural rights. Governments cannot possess natural rights. Only individu-als possess natural rights. America’s founders framed a society wherein governmental and economic in-stitutions were given a place to serve the betterment of the individual,
not the converse
 , to enable individu-als to pursue and uphold their natural rights.Thomas Jefferson was a firm believer in the American people. There is no better example of this than hiseloquent thoughts written on the subject in a February 28, 1796 letter to John Adams:"Never was a finer canvas presented to work on than our countrymen. All of them en-gaged in agriculture or the pursuits of honest industry, independent in their circum-stances, enlightened as to their rights, and firm in their habits of order and obedience to
The Small “r”: E.L. Beck 
The Dignity of Humanity2
 
the laws. This I hope will be the age of experiment in government, and that their basiswill be founded on principles of honesty, not of mere force."So, did Jefferson enjoy a hardy faith in Americans? Or a persistent delusion?
Self-governance
The Enlightenment reached its apogee by the late 18th century, and its promise seemed to be emerging inthe newly-formed United States. So were Americans somehow "better" in their abilities to live in and up-hold a republic in the late 18
th
century? In the aftermath of the American Revolution, there was certainly asense of "we're all in this together," with a willingness to make this new country work, whatever the cost.Yet time fades the memory, citizens turned to their private pursuits, and a vast, broad continent resided tothe west, an opportunity just waiting to be tapped.By the early 19th century, a nascent industrial revolution was breaking out in Britain. A similar revolutionwas slowly taking hold here, but couldn't unleash its full power until Americans settled the issue ofwhether they would tolerate the presence of free labor. The inevitable answer was "no," for slavery stoodagainst every ideal of America's democratic republic. After the American Civil War, however, there wasno restraining the capitalistic fervor in America.And so America moved forward, creating larger and larger economic institutions and in response to thiseconomic growth, larger and larger political institutions. Somewhere, somewhere between these eco-nomic and political behemoths that came to define America, society was lost and more importantly, theindividuals that constituted that society. Was it an historical inevitability? Doesn’t complexity require acomplex response?It's important to understand the connections between the individual, dignity, natural rights and the roleof political and economic institutions. In 1689, the British political philosopher John Locke argued for theidea of natural rights – the foundations being life, liberty and property – and the civil rights that helpedcitizens retain their natural rights. Locke referred to them as "natural rights" since he believed they weredivinely bestowed on individuals, or naturally bestowed if one is an atheist. Individuals preceded theestablishment of government, hence natural rights are inalienable, immutable and intrinsic to the person,that no government bestows natural rights on the person, therefore no government has the power to re-voke these rights.Using Locke's examples, Adam held these natural rights, as did Eve, and when Eve arrived we witnessedthe creation of society. As Locke argued, only when individuals required a third party to weigh in on dis-putes did the necessity for government emerge. Thus the individual and society preceded governmentand therefore Locke was able to place the individual and society to the forefront. Political and economic
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uploaded a new revision for this document (#3)

02 / 12 / 2010

uploaded a new revision for this document (#2)

12 / 03 / 2009
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