Dignity Is Something We Do

One morning my mother, who is in her nineties, had grown so weak that she asked me to take her to the emergency room. We drove to the hospital, checked in, and waited until her name was called.

In the examination room, the staff began asking her questions. I answered them.

I knew the answers, and my answers were correct. My intentions were good. I wanted to help, and I believed the information I gave would help them care for her.

But the staff kept their attention on my mother. They looked at her. They spoke to her. And in their faces I thought I saw a mix of annoyance and dismissal, aimed at the helpful son in the corner.

It took me a moment to understand. They were not only collecting facts. Part of assessing her condition was hearing her speak for herself.

So I stepped back and stopped talking. And my mother answered for herself.

Nothing dramatic happened that morning. No one was rude. No one raised a voice. Yet something important was being decided in that small room, and for a few minutes I was on the wrong side of it.

My Answers Were Correct

I want to be exact about what I did wrong, because it wasn’t the obvious thing. I didn’t lie. I didn’t get the facts wrong. I wasn’t unkind. My answers were correct.

That is what makes this kind of mistake so easy to make and so hard to see. In answering for my mother, I had begun to occupy her place in the conversation. She was the patient. It was her body and her life under discussion. And I was turning her into someone we talked about, when she was someone to talk with.

The staff did the opposite. By addressing her directly, they treated her as a participant whose voice mattered. This was not a favor they granted her, and it was not something she had to earn by proving she was sharp enough to deserve it. It was owed to her, and they acted on it.

Notice that it took all of us. The staff asked. I stepped back. My mother spoke. If any one of the three had not done their part, it would not have happened. Her dignity in that room was not something she carried in with her like a purse. It came about between us, in how she was addressed and in the room that was made for her to answer.

In my doctoral work I developed a model I call EIR: Experience, Interpretation, Response. The experience that morning was the look on the staff’s faces. I could have interpreted it as rudeness toward me and kept right on talking. I interpreted it as a message, they are asking her and not me, and my response was to be quiet. The whole lesson turned on that middle step.

I have carried it into her regular doctor’s appointments. I sit beside her and stay silent, and she takes part in her own care.

Something We Have, or Something We Do?

Most of us picture dignity as something we have. We talk about it like a possession: she kept her dignity, he lost his, they stripped her of it.

I understand the appeal of that picture. It protects something true and important, which is that no one should have to earn the right to be treated as a person.

But the picture has a problem. If dignity were simply ours, tucked safely inside, then nothing anyone said or did could touch it. We all know better. I have written here about the day my high school guidance counselor told me to get used to the idea of being a factory line worker for the rest of my life. One sentence, from a man with authority over me, and it landed hard.

My doctoral research was on humiliation, and humiliation is what it looks like when someone with power over you lowers you. What strikes me now is how ordinary the lowering can be. I can’t know what my counselor thought he was doing. I do know what I thought I was doing in that examination room. I thought I was helping.

So here is where I have come out. Whatever you believe about where dignity comes from, it becomes real in a person’s life only when someone acts on it. It shows up in how we address each other, in who gets asked the question, and in whether we wait for the answer.

I have started to say that dignity is recognized into being. My mother was already there, of course, a whole person with a long life behind her. But her standing in that conversation, as someone entitled to speak and to be heard, came into being when people acted on it. Dignity as we actually live it is less a thing we carry than something we do, and something done to us.

What Hannah Arendt Saw

The philosopher Hannah Arendt saw this on a far larger and darker stage. She fled Germany in 1933 and lived for years without citizenship anywhere, until she became an American citizen in 1951.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she looked hard at the millions of people left stateless in Europe between the two world wars. They had lost their governments, their homes and their legal standing. All they had left was the bare fact of being human, which is exactly the situation the great declarations of human rights were written for.

And that, Arendt observed, was the moment the rights failed them. The world, she wrote, found nothing sacred in “the abstract nakedness of being human.” Once no community claimed these people, no one felt bound to protect them.

Arendt did not conclude that human dignity is a fiction. She concluded that it needs a guarantee: people, communities and institutions willing to recognize it and stand behind it. Declaring that people have dignity protects no one. Someone has to do something.

I would never compare one morning in an emergency room to the catastrophe she lived through. But her insight holds at every scale. Think about why the staff kept turning back to my mother. I doubt it was only personal kindness. I suspect that somewhere along the way, someone taught them to speak to the patient. That is dignity built into a practice, a habit an institution decided to keep. It was waiting for my mother before either of us walked in. I was the one who had to catch up.

The Jacket Question

The emergency room was the easy lesson. The harder ones come every day, and they are much smaller.

My mother often asks me to decide things for her. “Do I need to take my phone with me?” “I wonder if I should take a light jacket.” “What should I order off the menu?”

None of these is a big decision. Nothing in her life changes if she takes the jacket or leaves it. It would be very easy to just tell her what to do, and it would even feel like kindness.

But if I do her thinking for her, a little at a time, I am taking her place again, just as I did in that examination room. So I resist it.

I ask her what she wants to do. I tell her plainly that it is her decision to make. I try to let her know that the world will not fall apart either way. Having a jacket or not having a jacket will not be a big deal. Having her phone or not having her phone will not be a big deal. Sometimes I just say, “Do what you want to do,” and I say it kindly.

I want to be careful, because there is no simple rule here. Sometimes a question about a jacket is only a question about a jacket, or just a mother making conversation with her son. Refusing to answer would be its own kind of withholding. And the day may come when she truly needs me to speak for her, and then speaking for her will be the way to honor her.

What I am learning is to ask myself the same thing each time: am I making room for her, or am I taking her place?

It is important for each of us to use our own voice and make our own decisions for as long as we are able. I suspect it is far less common than we think that a person truly needs someone else to speak for them.

Feet in Two Camps

My mother is not the only person I have talked over.

I was once invited to join a human dignity board that was forming at a university. There was an honesty among its members that I enjoyed. One day I was asked a question, and I began answering to the whole group. My answer ran long, and my tone made me sound like the authority in the room.

The leader of the group, a woman I love and admire, gently reminded me of my White male privilege. That was all she needed to say. I was not insulted, and I was not angry. I saw what I was doing.

I live with my feet planted in two camps. In one, I am a man who grew up in a culture where, because I was White and male, my voice was listened to. In the other, I am a scholar who knows how privilege and oppression work. I can find myself in both camps in the middle of a single sentence.

It was the same habit in both rooms. A man who has always been listened to does not notice when he is taking someone else’s turn. And the people who lose their turn are often the ones the world already listens to least. A woman in her nineties in an emergency room is one of them.

Notice, too, how she did it. She corrected me without lowering me, and that is why I could hear it. It is good to be reminded. That is how our habits come into view, and that is how we grow.

Whose Dignity Is in Your Hands?

When I began studying humiliation, I thought mostly about what is done to us. My mother is teaching me about what we do.

Most of us will never write a declaration of human rights. But every day we decide who gets asked the question, and whether we wait for the answer. It might be an aging parent, a child, a new employee, the person waiting on our table, or the patient in the bed. Each time, something real is given or withheld.

Some readers will ask whether this means a person nobody recognizes has no dignity at all. I don’t read it that way. I think it puts the weight where it belongs, on the rest of us. If dignity happens in what we do, then the person who is ignored or talked over has not failed. We have.

I got it wrong in that emergency room, with good intentions and correct answers. I am trying to get it right at the restaurant table.

Has someone ever answered for you when you could have answered for yourself? Have you caught yourself doing it to someone you love? I would like to hear about it in the comments. And if you think I have dignity wrong, I would like to hear that too.