The very premise of dignity is something acquired through personal effort. Dignity is the human aura that comes through self-reliance. Its underlying premise is independence. A dependent life is a fundamentally undignified life. Self-respect is earned through the sweat of one's brow. An heir to a great fortune may travel the high seas in a hundred-foot yacht and soar through the air in a Gulfstream V. But he will remain fundamentally bereft of dignity so long as he is living on someone else's dime.
The effort to recapture the dignity that springs from self-reliance is what the tea party, at its core, should be all about.
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Friday, November 12, 2010
True dat, Schmuley
Rabbi Schmuley Boteach has said some things with which I don't agree, but when he's on he's on, and he does a great job here in defending the Tea Party. Excerpt:
On the contrary, dignity is not something acquired. It is an inherent and inalienable quality of a human being. It is, I think we could say, the quality of being a human being.
ReplyDeleteWhat Rabbi Boteach is talking about is not dignity as such, but properly accounting for one's inherent dignity in one's personal choices.
(It's also absurd to suppose that there is any sort of life that is not a dependent life, although the supposition is a very popular one.)
semantics
ReplyDeleteIt's not semantics when people are killing others, and losing their own souls, over the very error Rabbi Boteach makes.
ReplyDeleteI think Tom may be right insofar as what Boteach is really speaking of is "self-respect", a term he uses once in the passage I quoted. When we talk about people behaving in dignified or undignified manner we aren't really denying that they have or don't have the dignity which comes with personhood.
ReplyDeleteI feel bad for anyone who has never had to acquire self-respect through personal effort.
"Dignity is a symphonic power metal band from Austria." Google says so. Isn't it soooo confusing when one word can be used to describe different things and different ideas? I hate that.
ReplyDeleteKathleen has a point also. Looking at the dictionary definitions, I notice that the more "inalienable quality" definition comes after the one meaning self-respect in the Unabridged and before it in the Collins English Dictionary. The first given in Collins, however, is merely "appearance" or "bearing" which seems to be neither what Tom or Boteach mean.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm going with the meaning of self-respect which was what I took away from the article initially. I remember years ago an old Italian immigrant, a barber from my home town, saying to me "You can always go on relief if you lose your job..." then he adding, shaking his finger at me "...but only as a last resort!" The insinuation is that relying on that money is something a self-respecting man would rather not do.