In search of human dignity

 Human dignity is inherent to all human beings from the time of conception to natural death. There was a time some years ago that it became my job to find sources, whether historical, literary, artistic, eastern or western, that represented and explained this concept. After undergrad I spent a year working at the Catholic University in Tegucigalpa, Honduras and after that I moved to Mexico and then New York interning and working for an organisation called the World Youth Alliance. Their central aim is to put at the centre of policy decisions the human dignity of the person. I worked on reformatting their staff and intern training material, the ideas was to internationalise it, and for me it was important to structure it in what I considered a logical progression. 

I spent 6 months exclusively searching and reading texts that dealt with the concept of human dignity understood as inherent. This part was important because there is another understanding of dignity that was more common during the Roman Empire and is seeing a revival in official speeches these days. If you ever here someone speak of the state conferring dignity, this phrase has its origin in the type of dignity most common in roman times. While there is a sense of dignity that a certain position confers on the person in that position it is not the same as the inherent dignity of the person. 

I discovered that while the concept was present in all the cultures and religions I looked in to, it had been the most developed by members of the catholic faith, followed closely behind by jewish thinkers. From the time of conception did make it a bit harder with some faith groups because as a Muslim girl told me during that year the soul does not enter the body until 120 days after conception.  While I may be remembering the exact days wrong, since it has been several years since that conversation, and for that I apologise to anyone out there: you are welcome to contradict me, I do remember quite clearly that the debate about when the soul enters the body goes back to the 17th century. There was a famous debate between Albrecht von Haller and Caspar Friedrich Wolff that revolved around how the foetus developed and how this was connected to when the soul entered the body. Haller was more in favour a mechanistic understanding in which the body parts gradually appeared over time, the soul entering later, while Wolff defended that all parts of the body were already present at conception they just began developing gradually and thus the soul was there from the beginning. 

Aside from that bump I found that this understanding of an inherent, inviolable, dignity was found across faith traditions and cultures thus the training began to take shape, it began, quite appropriately with a history of the how the org had been founded and then quickly progressed to a chapter on human dignity: with Martin Buber, Karl Wojtyla, C.S. Lewis and Charles Malik forming the bulk of the chapter. Then it was followed by a chapter on freedom, the solidarity, then culture. I found the best way to express what human dignity meant was to take the reader in a progression through the different manifestations of human dignity, hence starting with freedom, specifically with the thomistic understanding of three freedoms best expressed in a text by George Weigel (I had to consider writing styles as well) and excellently manifested in a text by Mandela. But our freedom can best be understood in community, that is why solidarity came next, very influenced by the Latin American understanding of community but best expressed in the writings of the Dalai Lama and Gandhi, and then culture, our individual expressions artistic and literary expressions of that dignity. I envisioned the entire thing as an intellectual progression from the most fundamental expression of our dignity to its concrete applications in society. The essays and book chapters expressed this yearning for something that goes beyond the material and acknowledged that as human beings we were at our best when we recognised and fulfilled that yearning. Thomas Aquinas thought this yearning to be a natural desire for the divine and part of what led us to know God. 

While I have moved on since then academically speaking I would like to think that the work I put in those years ago continues to touch intellects and souls to this day.