Giving Dignity to Life

　　by

　　Bhikkhu Bodhi

　　© 1998

　　To ask what it means to live with dignity may sound strange in an age like our own, when our frantic struggle to make ends meet hardly allows us the leisure to ponder such weighty matters. But if we do pause a moment to give this question a little thought, we would realize soon enough that it is not merely the idle musing of someone with too much time on his hands. The question not only touches on the very meaning of our lives, but goes even beyond our personal quest for meaning to bore into the very springs of contemporary culture. For if it isn”t possible to live with dignity then life has no transcendent purpose, and in such a case our only aim in the brief time allotted to us should be to snatch whatever thrills we can before the lights go off for good. But if we can give sense to the idea of living with dignity, then we need to consider whether we are actually ordering our lives in the way we should and, even more broadly, whether our culture encourages a dignified lifestyle.

　　Though the idea of dignity seems simple enough at first sight, it is actually fairly complex. My Webster”s Collegiate Dictionary (1936!) defines dignity as "elevation of character, intrinsic worth, excellence... nobleness of manner, aspect, or style." My Roget”s Thesaurus (1977) groups it with "prestige, esteem, repute, honor, glory, renown, fame" — evidence that over the last forty years the word”s epicenter of meaning has undergone a shift. When we inquire about living with dignity, our focus should be on the word”s older nuance. What I have in mind is living with the conviction that one”s life has intrinsic worth, that we possess a potential for moral excellence that resonates with the rhythm of the seasons and the silent hymn of the galaxies.

　　The conscious pursuit of dignity does not enjoy much popularity these days, having been crowded out by such stiff competitors as wealth and power, success and fame. Behind this devaluation of dignity lies a series of developments in Western thought that emerged in reaction to the dogmatic certainties of Christian theology. The Darwinian theory of evolution, Freud”s thesis of the Id, economic determinism, the computer model of the mind: all these trends, arisen more or less independently, have worked together to undermine the notion that our lives have any more worth than the value of our bank accounts. When so many self-assured voices speak to the contrary, we no longer feel justified in viewing ourselves as the crowning glory of creation. Instead we have become convinced we are nothing but packets of protoplasm governed by selfish genes, clever monkeys with college degrees and business cards plying across highways rather than trees.

　　Such ideas, in however distorted a form, have seeped down from the halls of academia into popular culture, eroding our sense of human dignity on many fronts. The free-market economy, the task master of the modern social order, leads the way. For this system the primary form of human interaction is the investment and the sale, with people themselves reckoned simply as producers and consumers, sometimes even as commodities. Our vast impersonal democracies reduce the inpidual to a nameless face in the crowd, to be manipulated by slogans, images, and promises into voting this way or that. Cities have expanded into sprawling urban jungles, dirty and dangerous, whose dazed occupants seek an easy escape with the help of drugs and loveless sex. Escalation in crime, political corruption, upheavals in family life, the despoliation of the environment: these all speak to us as much of a deterioration in how we regard ourselves as in how we relate to others.

　　Amidst these pangs of forlorn hope, can the Dhamma help us recover our lost sense …

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