Banī-Ṣadr Abu-l-Ḥasan - Dignity in the 21st century: Middle East and West

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The Author(s) 2017

Doris Schroeder and AbolHassan Bani-Sadr Dignity in the 21st Century SpringerBriefs in Philosophy 10.1007/978-3-319-58020-3_1

1. The Quest for Dignity

Doris Schroeder 1 and Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr 2

(1)

School of Health Sciences, College of Health, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK

(2)

Versailles, France

Doris Schroeder

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Abstract

Dignity is a highly controversial concept. Few other terms have been used in so many settings with so many contradictory meanings. Political events in the Middle East have given dignity new meanings. Some analysts have gone as far as calling the revolutions and civil wars that have dominated this region in the early 21st century the dignity revolutions. With this book we want to show that the concept of dignity can be meaningfully employed in politics, philosophy and everyday life, if one is clear about its different meanings, and about which of those meanings to use in what context.

Keywords

Dignity Dignity revolutions

There is no cultural system, Western or non-Western, however new or however old, that fully lives up to the idea of human dignity.

Wood (: 64)

It is difficult to write about dignity. Few other terms have been used in so many settings with so many contradictory meanings.

On the one hand, it is proclaimed that dignity) to government commissions investigating the neglect and abuse of elderly residents in care homes (Age UK n.d.), politicians and activists have used the term to support their quests.

Swiss philosopher and novelist Peter Bieri (also known as Pascal Mercier ) captured some of the mysteries of the term dignity in his novel Night Train to Lisbon . The novel sees middle-aged teacher Gregorius abandon his post and travel to Lisbon. There he meets a former resistance fighter, Joo Ea, who lives in a nursing home. One day, Joo Ea is reluctant to receive Gregorius for their regular chess meetings.

When Joo Ea stood in the door of his room on Sunday, Gregorius saw in his face that something had happened. Ea hesitated before asking him in. It was a cold March day, yet the window was wide open.

Ea moved the pawns. I went in bed last night, he said in a rough voice. And I didnt notice it. He kept his eyes lowered to the board.

Gregorius made tea and poured him half a cup. Ea saw the look that fell on his shaking hands.

A dignidade , he said.

Dignity, said Gregorius. I have no idea what that really is. But I dont think its something that gets lost just because the body fails.

Ea botched the opening.

When they led me to torture , I went in my pants and they laughed at it. It was a horrible humiliation ; but I didnt feel I was losing my dignity . But what is it then ?

Did he believe he would lose his dignity if he had talked, asked Gregorius.

I didnt say a word, not a single word. I locked away all the possible words in me. Yes, thats it: I locked them away and bolted the door irrevocably. So it was impossible for me to talk. I stopped acknowledging the torturers as actors. They didnt know it, but I degraded them.

And if they had loosened his tongue with a drug?

He had often asked himself that, said Ea, and he had dreamed of it. He had come to the conclusion that they could have destroyed him with that, but they could never take away his dignity in this way. To lose your dignity, you had to forfeit yourself.

And then you get worked up about a dirtied bed? said Gregorius and shut the window. Its cold and it doesnt smell, not at all. (Mercier : 364365)

Joo Ea believes that he kept his dignity during torture and that the torturers could never have taken it from him. Yet he also believes that he lost his dignity when he went in bed. His chess partner Gregorius admits that he has no idea what dignity really means, but insists that it does not get lost when the body begins to fail. The interpretations of dignity that this short excerpt point to are already quite diverse. One is connected to willpower and effort (resisting torturers), the other is independent of either and refers only to the frailty of the ageing human body.

This book aims to illuminate the concept of dignity in the 21st century. What does it mean in the West? What does it mean in the Middle East? And could there be a common understanding? Or is there a common essence? Our attempt to answer these questions from a Western perspective will be done from a broad base, which includes fiction, politics and everyday life (e.g. sports), as well as the philosophical literature. There are three reasons for doing so:

1. Using examples from a wide range of contexts highlights vividly why the concept of dignity is so contentious in the 21st century.
2. Dignity has become a popular topic in philosophy, and many excellent books that engage critically with a broad range of interpretations have been published recently. To add one that simply covers the same ground would probably not be very useful.
3. The concept is so important in everyday life, as the many examples will show, that the discussion is intended not just for a specialised audience, but general readers too.

One could ask: why draw a distinction between dignity in the Middle East and dignity in the West? Why not assume that we can agree on one universal concept, as envisaged by the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 (UN )? To make this assumption would be to ignore the continuing heated debates about the essence of dignity. It would also not make the concept any clearer. If one had to pack everything that people could mean by dignity into one concept, that concept might become meaningless. Any serious effort to describe dignity therefore has to disentangle different meanings first, and only then ask whether some of these meanings could be reconciled.

While it may be desirable to strive for a universal understanding of dignity, in that it could facilitate intercultural dialogue, one of our reasons for writing this book is that dignity is too multifaceted a concept to be captured in one essence. Instead we strive to bring out the distinctions within Western concepts and then provide one Middle Eastern interpretation. This is necessary because dignity is one of the most controversial concepts of the 20th and 21st centuries. It has been described as powerful (Beyleveld and Brownsword ).

Fig. 1.1

Judgements on the concept of dignity

Within this confusion, one looks to the Middle East and realises that political events have given dignity new meanings. Some analysts have gone as far as calling the revolutions and civil wars that have dominated this region in the early 21st century the dignity revolutions (Hassan ).

While rising food prices, poverty , unemployment and corruption have contributed to these uprisings, commentators in the region and around the world have spoken of a dignity uprising: ordinary Tunisians, Libyans, and Egyptians themselves describe the heart of this moment as a revolution for dignity (Marquand ) put it in an editorial entitled The Drive for Dignity :

The basic issue was one of dignity , or the lack thereof, the feeling of worth or self-esteem that all of us seek. But dignity is not felt unless it is recognized by other people; it is an inherently social and, indeed, political phenomenon. The Tunisian police were treating Bouazizi as a nonperson, someone not worthy of the basic courtesy of a reply or explanation when the government took away his modest means of livelihood.

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