We picture the political spectrum as a line running from Left to Right, liberal to conservative, Democrat to Republican. For much of our history, the middle was inhabited by conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. By forging a compromise with centrists, one party or the other could muster enough support to legislate and govern. Achieving a political compromise was often slow and frustrating, but, until recently, it was not impossible.

Now, for a variety of reasons, the middle of the spectrum is depopulated. Compromise is seen as a betrayal of ideological principle.

Instead of searching in vain for policies that include some liberal elements (to mollify Democrats), and some conservative elements (to appease Republicans), we could look for a new synthesis of Right and Left that is fundamental enough to generate policies that satisfy deeper concerns they share.

Upon what human value could we build a synthesis of liberal and conservative principles? A brief detour into the history of the Left-Right dichotomy provides a clue as to what’s wrong and how to fix it.

Even as the French Revolution unfolded, there were signs that its rousing slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” was a flawed formula for change. Initially in France, and subsequently in a variety of settings, reforms achieved under this banner have often come at the price of misery, mayhem, and murder.

“Equality” has been the watchword for many Leftist political movements, Blueprint for a Majority Third Party but egalitarian values have also provided ideological cover for oppressive regimes. Though the ideal of Liberty has served as a midwife to democracy, it has also served Rightists intent on pursuing predatory forms of capitalism.

Political reformers who make either Liberty or Equality preeminent have usually been disappointed by the dividends for justice or chastened by blood spilled in what at the outset seemed a noble cause.

Given the dysfunctional state of American politics, the need for a path that Right and Left can travel together is urgent. If conservatives and liberals cannot subordinate their partisan agendas to the common good, world leadership will pass to nations that do manage to transcend this obsolete ideological dichotomy.

I shall suggest here that if a political party were built on the notion of Dignity, instead of on Liberty or Equality, we could forge a synthesis of libertarian and egalitarian politics that incorporates the truths that sustain each of these traditional ideologies.

There is broad consensus that dignity is a fundamental human right. I will suggest here that Dignity trumps Liberty and Equality.

What Is Dignity?

As with liberty, dignity is most readily defined in reverse. We know at once when we’ve been ”indignified.” To suffer an indignity carries the threat of being deprived of social and material resources essential to well-being, even to life itself. The need for dignity is more than a desire for courtesy or respect. To be “nobodied” is an attack on one’s status in the tribe, and carries an implicit threat of exclusion that, not long ago, amounted to a death sentence.

In proclaiming a right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” the Founding Fathers came tantalizingly close to recognizing dignity as a fundamental right. By liberty they meant freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control. Thus, the right to liberty affords a large measure of protection to our dignity. Likewise, the right to pursue happiness is undermined by the indignities of second-class citizenship. It’s not much of a stretch to find in the Founders’ intentions an implicit right to dignity.

More than anything except life itself, people want dignity. They will compromise both their liberty and equality to get it. By identifying actions that insult our dignity, we can, step by step, protect and extend both liberty and equality. A vast edifice of law has evolved to protect human liberty by proscribing behaviors that limit it. Building a dignitarian society will require a comparable, generational effort to develop a body of law that, by setting limits to indignities, protects dignity.

Since indignity is caused not by differences in rank per se but rather by abuses of rank differences—what elsewhere I have called rankism—the task of building a dignitarian society can be understood in terms of disallowing rankism (much as the task of building a multicultural society is one of disallowing racism).

Once you have a name for it, you see rankism everywhere, and it’s revealed as the source of much of the dysfunction now plaguing American democracy. But this is no cause for despair. Time and again, we’ve proven that once we take aim at an ignoble ism (e.g., racism, sexism, ageism, ableism, heterosexualism, or homophobia), we are capable of delegitimizing it.

What Would a Dignity Party Stand For

All abstract political ideals, pushed to extremes, can be dangerous, and Dignity is surely no exception. The Founding Fathers were too shrewd to entrust “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to good intentions. They realized that reliable governance must be grounded in the assumption that power-holders will inevitably be tempted to interpret any ambiguities in their writ to their own advantage. Accordingly, they drew up interlocking constitutional procedures to protect liberty by making political leaders accountable to each other and the citizenry.

Only as the powers inherent in rank are spelled out and circumscribed are abstractions like liberty, equality, and dignity rendered benign. Absent detailed procedures that come into play when things go wrong—which they invariably do—slogans, no matter how grandiloquent, are empty promises or worse—Orwellian doublespeak.

How would a society in which dignity is preeminent differ from ones shaped by ideologies in which the organizing principle is liberty or equality?

In contrast to a libertarian society, a dignitarian society is one in which economic power is not allowed to confer educational or political advantages on those who have it. For example, you wouldn’t have to be rich to go to college or command a fortune to stand for office.

Much as church and state are separated in modern democracies, economic and political power will be separated in a dignitarian society. This means that publicly funded elections would replace the current practice of corporate and union campaign financing.

In a dignitarian society, loss of social mobility, let alone division into impermeable classes, is unacceptable. If you apply yourself and work hard, institutional obstacles must not be insuperable. Thus, in a dignitarian society everyone has access to decent healthcare and is paid enough to work themselves out of poverty in a generation. The American Dream is a beacon lighting the way to a dignitarian society.

Rank itself may be unequal in a dignitarian society, reflecting undeniable differences in our talents, skills, experience, and levels of authority, but equal dignity is accorded everyone, regardless of role or rank, both interpersonally and institutionally.

Historically, conservatives are defenders of the rights of rank. They have fought to see that rank-holders are not hamstrung, that individual initiative and enterprise are not discouraged, that entrepreneurial activity is not stifled, and that, as a society, we keep our competitive edge.

In contrast, liberals see themselves as watchdogs against abuses of rank, the ill-effects of which fall primarily on the weak. We’ll know we’re living in a dignitarian society when conservatives condemn the corruption of power and liberals are willing to entrust rank-holders with the authority needed to lead.

In a dignitarian society, rank may change, but you’re assured of having a place. If you break the law, that place may be a prison. But it is a prison in which your dignity is secure. (Recent experiments show that the best way to reduce recidivism is to treat inmates with dignity while they are paying the penalty for their crimes.)

The politics of dignity spans the conservative-liberal divide. Martin Luther King, Jr. has a place of honor in a dignitarian society—for giving us his dream of dignity for all. So does Patrick Henry—for his immortal “Give me liberty or give me death.” In the economic realm, no institution does more to curtail abuses of power than the free market. On those occasions when the market does appear to have betrayed us, we invariably discover that human beings have interfered with its freedom by rigging it to their advantage.

As a synthesis of libertarian and egalitarian politics, dignitarian politics offers the prospect of closing the ideological fissure that has paralyzed American democracy. Conflicts over liberty and equality do not disappear, but they are reframed and subjected to a higher standard: how do they impact dignity?

Our political history can be read as see-sawing between the ideological poles of Liberty and Equality. So long as the ideological spectrum had a middle, compromise was possible. But absent centrists, ideological polarization leads either to stagnation and decline or to unstable oscillations between the two ideological extremes.

Building a dignitarian society is not a utopian vision, but a natural evolutionary step for an America that can go nowhere so long as liberals and conservative are at loggerheads.

The answer to the impotence and irrelevance of the old parties is a new party—the Dignity Party.

The Dignity Party would draw support from all segments of the Left-Right spectrum. It would attract those who, while insisting upon dignity for themselves, are willing, in return, to grant it to others.

There is good reason to believe that a majority of Americans are ready to sign up for that deal. In any case, running against dignity doesn’t look like a winning ticket. Standing up for both liberty and equality—insofar as each extends dignity—could well be.

Rankism is an assertion of superiority. It typically takes the form of putting others down. It’s what “Somebodies” do to “nobodies.” Or, more precisely, it is what people who think they’re Somebodies do to people they take for nobodies.

It turns out that rankism is the source of most man-made suffering. So, if we could get rid of it, we would be a lot happier. Let me explain.

Before you conclude that rankism is human nature—that we’re like the apes, and they do it, so we have no choice—and dismiss the possibility of overcoming it, consider this list of specific kinds of “put downs” that, not long ago, were deemed cool, but have become a sure way to embarrass yourself:

1. Racism—whites putting and keeping non-whites down
2. Sexism—males limiting and disadvantaging females
3. Ageism—patronizing the young, condescending to the elderly
4. Anti-Semitism—discriminating against Jews
5. Classism—putting down people on the basis of differences in class (more prevalent in former aristocracies like Britain than in America, but also known here)
6. Homophobia—heterosexuals demeaning gays and lesbians
7. Ableism—humiliating people with disabilities
8. Colonialism—subordinating and exploiting another society or nation
9. Workplace and schoolyard bullying; sexual harassment, child abuse, and domestic violence; corporate, bureaucratic, and political corruption
10. …

The list goes on. Once you have a word for it, you see rankism everywhere.

Although all of these familiar isms persist, none of them has the force it did fifty years ago. Most of them are now regarded as distinctly uncool, even grounds for dismissal. The burden of proof, which formerly fell on nobodies, now falls on Somebodies. That’s historical change, and that’s why it is not utopian to think that we might be able to give up putting people down, not just people bearing a targeted trait (such as color, gender, age, class, religion, sexual orientation, disability), but give up putting people down period. For any reason. Period.

You’re probably thinking, What if they deserve to be put down? What if they have screwed up?

Even then, being put down is not what’s needed, nor is it justified. Correction, maybe; put downs, never. Indignity and humiliation have no place in human relations. That is where the above sequence—of no-longer legitimate putdowns—is tending. That is how humans are evolving behaviorally.

Some will think of this direction as long-prophesized. Isn’t this just the Golden Rule? they will say. Well, yes, it is the Golden Rule. But with a difference, a very significant operational difference. This Golden Rule has teeth. In this framework, “Do unto others …” becomes operative. Why? Because many behaviors that violate the Golden Rule can be understood as rankism. The perpetrators of these behaviors are rankists. Once you put a label on ignoble behavior, it is much harder to get away with.

In the same way that sexism and sexists rapidly lost legitimacy once they were named, so, too, will rankists find themselves in untenable positions once a label can be pinned on them. Not overnight. It has taken decades to delegitimize sexism and the other isms, but once the process of de-legitimizing indignifying behaviors begins there is no stopping it until we reach an equilibrium characterized by equal dignity for all.

The title to this piece promised an explanation of WHY we practice rankism. If we look at the kind of “reasons” used to justify the familiar isms, we see that they are now all regarded as specious. Not one of the “reasons” that people trotted out fifty years ago flies today.

So, there must be some hidden reason, something other than the traditional ones, that causes humans to behave in ways prejudicial and inimical to others. Why do we demean, marginalize, and disenfranchise others? Why do we subject others to indignity? Why do we do to others what we would not want them to do to us?

In short, why do we put others down? Or, in this language, why do we tolerate rankism? You’ve probably sensed where this line of questions is going: Why do we sometimes engage in rankism ourselves?

Rankism is a residue of predation. Our species, Homo sapiens, has a long history of predation. We’re not only good at it, we’re the top of the food chain. Of course, we do more than prey on animals and on each other. We also cooperate with each other, we love each other, we have shown ourselves to be capable of living in peace and harmony.

But through recorded history, we have preyed on other tribes, other states, religions, classes, races, etc. Everyone alive today has predatory ancestors and, what’s equally important, ancestors who managed to avoid becoming the prey of other human predators.

The twentieth century may go down as the bloodiest of all centuries, but it will also go down as the century in which many millions of human beings threw off centuries of colonial exploitation by a handful of relatively small nation states. And what is colonialism but one group putting another group down for purposes of exploitation.

Colonialism was long justified (as we once justified racism) in terms of a “superior” people ruling an “inferior” people. Colonialism was an example of people who regarded themselves as “Somebodies” putting down people they took for “nobodies.” And once one group has got another down, it can exploit it until its victims—the nobodies—organize and marshal a commensurate, if not surpassing, power.

We “do” rankism to institutionalize and normalize predation. THAT is why we “do” all the subspecies of rankism (racism, sexism, etc.). We practice rankism to put ourselves in a position to prey on others without exposing ourselves to risk. Predators all target the weak, and humans are no exception.

The reasons we’ve given to justify the familiar isms are bogus. They’re actually not reasons at all, they are excuses. They are excuses for putting people down and keeping them down so we can more safely exploit them in future. Or, so they will not compete with us. Or, simply to feel superior.

When I was a student at Oberlin College in the 1950s, the student body was one percent black and there were virtually no women majoring in math or physics. I’d not have made the basketball team if the college had accepted African-Americans in numbers anywhere near their national percentage. The competition for places in graduate school would have been stiffer if women had been encouraged to pursue careers in science. I was the unwitting beneficiary of a number of rankist practices.

Discrimination disadvantages targets by denying them equal opportunity, and it advantages those not targeted. THAT is why we do it—to give ourselves an advantage. THAT is the real reason. We’ve kept it a secret because it diminishes our achievement to admit the game was rigged in our favor.

Fixing the game is the real reason for rankism. If we can handicap or eliminate the competition, we improve our chances of coming away with the spoils.

But isn’t that just what any animal has to do to survive? Isn’t rankism just “survival of the fittest” at work? In short, isn’t rankism nature’s way?

Yes, rankism is what we’ve done through recorded history—one person to another, one group to another, one tribe to another, one nation to another. Until recently, the gains were judged to exceed the costs. But rankism has now become counterproductive. Instead of giving groups or individuals an advantage, rankism backfires in the same way that racism, sexism, and homophobia do. It undermines group solidarity and hampers cooperation. Rankism stifles creativity, inhibits learning, and taxes productivity. Rankism causes unhappiness and illness. Rankism corrodes organizations and societies that condone it.

This is not just another moment in history. We stand on the threshold of an epochal change. Humans are on the verge of giving up intra-species predation. Not just because preying on other people is bad and causes suffering. No. We are giving it up, wherever we can identify it, for a more compelling reason. Rankism is no longer working. Wars aren’t being won anymore. Trade wars hurt more than they help. Slavery is universally condemned. Wage slavery will not for long outlast its brutal antecedent. Nations that disallow rankism will outperform and out produce those that do not, and lead the world in the 21st century.

As we target rankism, we create a world of dignity for all, not just for some at the expense of others. As we disallow rankism, we build a dignitarian world, a world in which, regardless of rank, everyone experiences equal dignity.

Rankism wins, wins, wins, and then one day it loses. In the end, it loses because organizations and societies grounded in dignity for all trump those driven by the threat of indignity.

Dignity is our destiny. Why not embrace it?

Let’s stop hurting each other. You go first. – Alta

It should be obvious by now that the call for people to love one another—whether in church or in song—carries little weight. Evidently, something keeps us from entering the house of love through the front door. Perhaps we should try the back.

When someone insults our dignity, or does something we find unacceptable, it is anger that we experience, not hatred. The key to whether anger transmutes into hate lies in agency—our capacity for acting. If fear of retaliation persuades us to hold our tongue, then anger congeals into hate as we stifle our protest to spare ourselves further indignity or limit damage already done. But if, instead of submitting to the indignity, we are able to right or repel it, then anger is discharged before it can harden into hate.

Anger is passionate—hot, liquid, kinetic. If repressed, it gels into hatred—cold, hard, stagnant.

Though its cause appears to lie outside ourselves, hate has a secret accomplice within. Its name is Fear. “Hate is the consequence of fear,” Cyril Connolly notes. “We fear something before we hate it.” Anger solidifies to hate when we fear domination or feel discounted; hatred persists if grievances remain unaddressed and dignity unrestored.

When we’re unable to stand up to put-downs, we hate those who diminish us; those who, assuming their own superiority, condescend to us or presume to know what’s best for us. When we find ourselves without resources or allies, we despise those who take us for nobodies.

Hate is caused by unrelieved indignity—real or imagined. Imagined indignities can feel as injurious as real ones, and have led people to commit mayhem and murder.

Although the command to “Love your enemies” does not provide a roadmap, it does function to keep antagonists working at the task of envisioning themselves as parts of a larger whole. Once it’s found, they can substitute the co-creation of that whole for the destruction of each other.

With a first diminution of the threat, we re-conceive our enemies as adversaries. With a hint of mutual value, adversaries become rivals—a term acknowledging each party’s role as a teacher of the other. Finally, by recognizing their mutual dependency, rivals begin to see themselves as partners. Enmity has been transformed into comity, comity into amity.

What can we do to initiate this transformation? First, we can cease to perpetrate indignities, no matter where we are in the cycle of recrimination. In order to open the door to accommodation, we have to show our antagonists the dignity we want them to extend to others and ourselves. We must be willing to meet indignity with dignity, for however long it takes, while not slyly sabotaging the process by taking pride in our own forbearance. Maintaining civility doesn’t mean giving in to others’ demands, but it does mean dealing with them respectfully.

A second line of defense against hatred is to recognize that when real indignities do occur—and they are inevitable—a flash of righteous anger or a sharp verbal riposte preempts the slow burn of hate. As we gain confidence to protest against the indignities that befall us, and to apologize for those we ourselves commit, we deny hate the hothouse required for its gestation.

As we remove hate from human intercourse—either by eliminating the causes of indignity or by restoring agency to indignity’s victims—we give love a chance. There are no shortcuts. This procedure applies not only to relationships between persons, but also to those between groups and nations. Love is shy, but it will turn out to be ubiquitous and abundant once it’s safe for it to show its face.

Let’s stop hurting each other. You go first. – Alta

The twentieth century saw many nations consumed by their own enmity. Hatred is inflammatory, and it has now reached a level where to stoke it, from either the Left or the Right, is incendiary. Beyond a certain level, public hatred sours personal relationships. In societies such as prewar Spain, wartime Germany, Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1970s, Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, hatred in the public sphere had catastrophic consequences in the private.

There are worrisome signs that comity is losing ground to enmity in America. As enmity displaces comity, pride suffers from disunity.

Recently, hatred showed its face in the vituperation unleashed by President Obama’s Nobel Prize. Not only did the president’s detractors seize the opportunity to revile him; they derided anyone who did not share their contempt. Both the president and those who supported the award were casually compared with the most villainous figures of the twentieth century.

This piece is not about Obama-hatred. The response to his Nobel is merely another sign that hate is out of hand. President Bush was also compared to Hitler and Stalin. Before that, the Clintons were execrated. No one party has a monopoly on malice.

Calls for civility have not worked, either with the public or the partisan commentators who model disdain and contempt for their followers. Why is hate resonating with the American public?

Though its cause appears to lie outside ourselves, hate has a secret accomplice within. Its name is Fear. “Hate is the consequence of fear,” Cyril Connolly notes. “We fear something before we hate it.”

Anger congeals to hate when people fear domination and experience the indignity of being discounted. No one, conservative or progressive, likes being taken for a nobody. Hatred takes root when fears remain unaddressed and dignity is disregarded. Imagined indignities can feel as injurious as real ones, and suffice to incite people to commit mayhem and murder.

What’s needed to initiate the winding down of enmity is for at least one party to the recriminations to stop returning indignity in kind and start allaying the fears of its opposite number. This means talking over the heads of media demagogues straight to those whose fears have left them vulnerable to hate-mongers. The epigram notwithstanding, it does not put one side at a disadvantage to “go first” in extending the olive branch. Then, it must be willing to meet indignity with dignity, for however long it takes, while not subtly compromising the process by taking pride in its own forbearance. Maintaining civility doesn’t mean giving in to others’ demands, but it does mean dealing with them respectfully.

With even a modest diminution of fear, we re-conceive our enemies as adversaries. With a hint of mutual value, adversaries become rivals—a term acknowledging each party’s role as a teacher of the other. Finally, by recognizing their mutual dependency, rivals begin to see themselves as partners. By this time, comity has replaced enmity, and incivility is out of fashion.

A second line of defense against hatred is to recognize that when real indignities do occur—and they are inevitable—a flash of righteous anger or a sharp verbal riposte preempts the slow burn of hate. As fear subsides, and we gain confidence to protest against the indignities that befall us and apologize for those we ourselves commit, we deny hate the hothouse required for its gestation.

As we remove hate from the public discourse—either by eliminating the causes of indignity or by restoring agency to indignity’s victims—we give comity a chance. Nothing we could do, at home or abroad, would do more to enhance our safety than putting the “We” back in “We the people.”

Some will say that Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize is premature. “What has he done?” they’ll ask.

Obama got the prize not for doing, but for being. Not for making peace, but for exemplifying something new on the world stage–the politics of dignity.

The Nobel Committee has simply made explicit what many have sensed. President Obama is the herald of dignitarian politics. Not libertarian, not egalitarian, but dignitarian.

Dignitarian politics represents a modern synthesis of libertarian and egalitarian politics. War between these two battle-scarred, exhausted ideologies shaped both national and international politics throughout the twentieth century. Obama is the first politician of world stature to identify and model an alternative that can meet the challenges of the twenty-first. Awarding him the Nobel Prize is an expression of the hope that our best chance for world peace lies in the dignitarian politics of which Obama is an exemplar.

What is dignitarian politics? It is the recognition that people the world over actually want dignity more than either liberty or equality. In policy terms, it means ensuring dignity for all–within and among nations.

Obama’s dignitarianism manifests in his inclusiveness, his style, and his manners. Domestically, dignitarian politics supercedes identity politics to embrace blacks and whites, men and women, gays and straights, young and old, rich and poor, immigrants and the native-born. The president has also made a point of reaching out to those who disagree with him both domestically and internationally.

The Nobel Prize will put pressure on Obama to make explicit his reasoning for what has been, up till now, a largely instinctive pursuit of the politics of dignity. Dignitarian politics means not condescending to Americans or citizens of other countries. It means not treating political opponents, whether at home or abroad, with indignity. It also means extending dignity in concrete ways, both political and economic, throughout the world. In programmatic terms, the quest for dignity is usefully conceived of as overcoming rankism–the abuse of a power advantage to demean, hold at a disadvantage, or dehumanize those with less power.

Globally, Obama’s politics of dignity makes Americans safer, in contrast to policies that, by humiliating others, leave us vulnerable to retaliation. Indignities inflicted on others make them indignant and so predispose them to side with our enemies, if not turn against us themselves. President Obama understands that part of a strong defense is not giving offense in the first place. He realizes that in an interdependent world, muscular exceptionalism is a losing strategy.

Dignitarian politics has a host of immediate, practical consequences for international affairs. If President Obama is seen as reacting defensively to indignities served up by his opponents, he will appear weak. But if he goes on the offensive, not against those opponents themselves, but rather in favor of the emergent politics of dignity, at which he is a natural, he will prevail. Awarding President Obama the Peace Prize is a bet on the Nobel Committee’s part that the honor will support him in implementing the politics of dignity that he heralds.

Ever let the fancy roam,
Pleasure never is at home…
Open wide the mind’s cage-door,
She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar.
– John Keats

Most kids visit their grandparents by car. Not me. Mine lived on Puget Sound and to see them my mother, baby brother, and I (at age five, and on a return visit, at nine) rode the train for a week–from New Jersey to Seattle. We had a roomette to ourselves, but roamed the train under the watchful eyes of “porters,” all of whom belonged to The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the vanguard union for African-American labor.

No African-Americans lived in my town. None went to my school. As a child, I didn’t notice, let alone understand, that blacks were effectively excluded from many Northern towns by gentlemen’s agreements that barred them from owning or renting property. Sleeping car porters were the first African-Americans I ever spoke to. Of course, they were not then identified as “African-American,” but as “Negroes.”

By the time these men had served us breakfast of sliced oranges and blueberry pancakes in five states, daily made up our little room, and hovered helpfully from sea to shining sea, they were like fond uncles. The contrast between the prevailing racist stereotype and my personal experience of these kindly protectors could hardly have been starker.

A decade later, when I met blacks at college, my experience of the porters helped me bridge what might otherwise have felt like a chasm.

Travel breaks stereotypes. We get to see for ourselves, form our own impressions.

Like many who read Jack Kerouac’s bible for trans-continental pilgrims–On the Road–I spent several summers exploring America in old cars fueled by 35 cent per gallon gasoline.

Why did I go? To devour my country. To swallow it whole. Like a gerbil exploring its cage, I was driven to give my confines a once over and probe the limits of the Americentric vision I’d been raised on. In Of Time and the River, Thomas Wolfe writes of someone who consumed not books, but libraries. That rang a bell. The generation that came of age as America took its place on the world stage was voracious for experience.

Shortly after chalking up my forty-eighth state, I sailed to France for a year of graduate study. Within days of landing, I took off for Germany on a rented scooter to see if it lay in ruins as depicted in wartime newsreels.

Not a stone seemed out of place in Munich, but on the outskirts of the city lay a mountain of rubble that was all that remained of the prewar site of the legendary Oktoberfest. And just down the road was the death camp of Dachau, which left me with a life-long question, one I plan to address in a subsequent blogpost: How could the Holocaust have happened?

In the late sixties, travel brought me another life-shaping revelation, this time in the Soviet Union. Celebrated as our ally against Hitler in World War II, the USSR was now regarded as a treacherous Cold War enemy. By this time my compulsion to explore whatever cage I found myself in had resulted in multiple forays through Western Europe and South America. But Russia, the Pacific countries, and Africa remained virgin territory.

My immediate goal was to find out if the USSR was indeed a workers’ paradise, as some claimed, or a police state with an agenda of world conquest, as others insisted. An exchange with the Russian guide assigned to “mind” me, planted a question that would drive me for decades. After several days of fervent lectures on the unparalleled achievements of Soviet communism, I asked the guide how mental illness was treated in the USSR. I remember her answer verbatim: “There is no mental illness in the Soviet Union. Mental illness is a by-product of capitalism.”

I suspected otherwise, and for years I wondered if behind their official masks, Russians were not just like us. It was, of course, logically possible that they inhabited a parallel universe; that truth for them was different than truth for us. I facetiously called this the “Martian hypothesis,” and vowed to put it to the empirical test, in the manner of my youth, by riding the trans-Siberian railroad across Russia.

Ten years would pass before I could get it together to make the journey. Six years after riding from the Baltic to the Pacific in search of common ground with the Russians, I took the “trans-Sib” in the reverse direction–from Beijing to Budapest. Travel-writer Paul Theroux speaks for me when he notes, “I sought trains; I found passengers.”

I’ve since traveled to Russia many times, and every trip has been an adventure. During the Cold War, there was uncertainty about getting a visa, clearing passport control, even finding an edible meal. Foreigners and Soviet citizens alike feared arbitrary arrest. Getting anything done, felt like a small victory. I was anxious the whole time, even in my sleep.

Fear is part of what makes travel so enlivening and revelatory. You’re perpetually off-balance and on guard. After a while one yearns for the mindlessness of familiar routines. And when you do return home, old pleasures are much the sweeter for having been suspended.

Travel is like truth serum. Whether snaking across the American prairie or the Siberian taiga, crossing the Rockies, Urals, or Karakorams, or cycling through Beijing or Berlin, travel makes us porous to new customs, beauties, ideas, and dreams. I can’t think of a better vaccine against dogmatism or a quicker cure for self-satisfaction. As we struggle to reconcile what we’re experiencing with what we take for granted, we strip away what’s arbitrary in cultural practice and approach what is universal.

Non-travelers are more susceptible to habitual seeing and thinking. Traveling, jolts us awake. Even to cross the street we must cease our sleepwalking…or die. It must be admitted, however, that travel may simply confirm some in the superiority of their own ways. As Thomas Fuller observed in 1732, “Travel makes a wise man better, but a fool worse.”

Travel not only invites us to see the world anew, it gives us an unaccustomed look at who is doing the seeing. None of the benefits of travel compares to the oblique glance it allows us of our selves. By placing us outside ourselves, travel provides us with the distance required to see what it is we are habitually doing and the anonymity to try out new ways of being in the world.

So, we do not travel to get away from it all. Alas, as the bumper sticker says, “Wherever you go, there you are.” Travel fails as escape but it succeeds as confrontation–confrontation with our old selves that, deprived of their usual confirmatory surroundings, may yield to a new one.

Lately, as I head to the airport, I’m starting to feel like one of Pavlov’s dogs. The self-renewal so reliably delivered, by making myself a stranger in a strange land, seems to be triggered by merely climbing into the airport van. By the time I disembark an hour later, it feels like there are enough new ideas coursing through me to justify turning around and going straight home where I can sort them out in comfort.

Once your travels have shown you what it means to see freshly, you discover that you can almost do so without leaving home. Almost, but not quite, at least not forever. There seems to be nothing like immersion in another culture for staving off the mind’s tendency to calcification and continuing the life-long process of creating one’s self anew. We travel to grow up, wake up, and stay on our toes.

The object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country… . – G. K. Chesterton

Q: What do you mean by “somebodies” and “nobodies”?
A: “Somebodies” are the relatively powerful and successful, “nobodies” the relatively weak and vulnerable. Somebodies with higher rank and more power in a given context can maintain an environment that is hostile and demeaning to nobodies with lower rank and less power in that context. Taken together, those of low rank vastly outnumber those of high rank. If they were to stand together against rank-abuse, they could overcome it. But it’s not that simple because nobodies may also abuse their rank by putting down those of still lower rank. There is usually someone weaker on whom you can pull rank, even if it means kicking the dog.

Q: How can “nobodies” stand up for their dignity?
A: The same way women did in the 1960s. They broke the taboo on discussing gender and initiated a process of consciousness-raising about gender issues. In the process they coined the term “sexism,” which served to identify their grievances and put men on the defensive. In like manner, we must (1) break the taboo on discussing rank, (2) give a name to rank-abuse, and (3) replace the prevailing social consensus, which tacitly sanctions abusing and exploiting the weak, with a new consensus in which rank-abuse is regarded as uncool.

Q: What shall we call rank-based abuse and discrimination?
A: When discrimination and injustice are race-based, we call it racism; when they’re gender-based, we call it sexism. By analogy, rank-based abuse and exploitation are rankism. We won’t be able to confront rankism until we overcome our fear of seeming uppity by using the word in public. Following in the footsteps of uppity women, expect to see more uppity nobodies as the dignity movement gains momentum.

Q: Are you proposing to do away with rank?
A: Not at all. When earned and exercised appropriately, rank is a legitimate and virtually indispensable tool of organization. We rightly admire and respect those who attain it. But when those of higher rank abuse their authority, those of lower rank experience indignity not different in its material and psychological effects from the indignities we now disallow when victims are black, female, elderly, gay, or have a disability. People do not object to legitimate differences in rank, only to rank abuse. Overcoming rankism does not mean doing away with rank any more than overcoming racism and sexism mean doing away with race or gender.

Q. Isn’t rankism human nature?
A: One of the hard-earned lessons of the twentieth century was that racism and sexism are not immutable. While it is virtually inevitable that a power advantage will be exploited initially, it is just as inevitable that such abuse will eventually be resisted. In this sense, rankism, of whatever sort, is no more part of human nature than are racism or sexism. If anything is human nature, it’s that human beings resist abuses of power. Racism, sexism and rankism may be hard to uproot, but they are not immutable. The first two were put on the defensive in the late twentieth century, and rankism itself is no more likely to survive scrutiny than the now-familiar isms.

Q: Why focus on rank instead of class?
A: In modern democracies we interact with authority in terms of rank, not class. In contrast to aristocratic societies, it no longer matters whether your superior has blue blood or blue collar ancestry. What matters is that he or she is your boss, your professor, your doctor, a police officer, or a president.

Q: What are the dynamics of rankism?
A: Rankism occurs when rank-holders use the power of their position to secure unwarranted advantages or benefits for themselves at others’ expense. It typically takes the form of self-aggrandizement and demeaning and exploiting subordinates. It is the opposite of service. Good leaders eschew rankism; bad ones indulge in it.

Q: Where is rankism found?
A: Although it is not necessary to abolish rank to eliminate the abuse of rank, it is true that hierarchies are breeding grounds for rankism. When authorities are not held accountable to those served by the hierarchy, rankism invariably develops. Thus, rankism can be found in bureaucracies, corporations, businesses, workplaces, families, schools and universities, as well as religious, nonprofit, and healthcare organizations. It can be especially hard to confront in non-profits, which see themselves as “doing good,” and may become blind to malpractice within their ranks. Rankism, however, is an equal opportunity malady, and will infect any organization where accountability is lax.

Q: What are the effects of rankism?
A: Rankism distorts personal relationships, erodes the will to work and to learn, taxes productivity, fosters ill-health, and stokes ethnic tensions.

Q: Who are the victims of rankism?
A: Although racism and sexism target specific identity groups, we are all potential victims of rankism. This is because rank is not fixed, but relative. You can be a nobody in one context—and as such vulnerable to rankism—but a somebody in another—and thus a potential perpetrator. Likewise, you can be a somebody one day and a nobody the next. Like racism in the era of segregation, rankism is pervasive and enjoys the support of a tacit social consensus. Rankism afflicts no group more than the working poor, whose hand-to-mouth subsistence makes them vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. In Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich makes a compelling case that the working poor are in effect unacknowledged benefactors whose labor subsidizes the better off.

Q: What are some examples of rankism?
A: Examples include a boss harassing an employee, a customer demeaning a waiter, a coach bullying a player, a doctor humiliating a nurse, a teacher disparaging a student, a parent belittling a child. The civil rights and women’s movements have managed to put racists and sexists on notice. But there has been no corresponding outcry against abuses that occur within a race or gender, in part because until now we haven’t had a name for them. Blacks insult and exploit other blacks of lower rank, whites do the same to whites, and women to women, all with confidence that such behavior, which does not fit the definition of racism or sexism, will pass for business as usual and escape censure.

Q: Do we really need another “ism”?
A: Yes, but rankism, which includes the other ignoble isms as special cases, is the last of the lot. Identity politics, because of its exclusive focus on the rights of particular groups, can foster resentment in those who feel that its concerns and protections don’t extend to them. But no one is immune to rankism. Everyone has experienced it in some context or other (and most of us have dished it out). So overcoming rankism is an inclusive, unifying goal that reduces the myriad injunctions of political correctness to just one: Protect the dignity of others as you would have them protect yours. Sound familiar? The concept of rankism puts teeth in the golden rule.

Q: Does the dignity movement have a slogan?
A: To succeed a movement needs to know what it’s for and what it’s against. The dignity movement is for dignity and against rankism. Imagine the bumper sticker. Better yet, design one.

Q: What would a dignitarian society look like?
A: A dignitarian society would provide universal healthcare, equal access to quality education and retraining, an equitable tax structure, affordable housing, campaign finance reform that prevents vote-buying by special interests, and compensation compatible with living in dignity. In short, a dignitarian society does not tolerate a dignity gap, as created and maintained by rankism, and that, in turn, will require us to make good on the promise that the Founding Fathers imprinted on the American psyche—liberty and justice for all.

I’m gonna live forever.
I’m gonna learn how to fly – high!
I feel it comin’ together.
People will see me and die. Fame!

I’m gonna make it to Heaven.
Light up the sky like a flame; fame!
I’m gonna live forever.
Baby, remember my name.
– From the musical Fame

I hope to persuade you that the seemingly frivolous title question holds a secret with the power to reshape human relations. That a wish for fame belies the existence of a crippling, undiagnosed malady, one rather like malnutrition, except that it’s a disease of the self, not the body. Let me explain.

In a world that sees people as Somebodies and Nobodies, indignities abound. The primary source of man-made indignity is rankism. By analogy with racism and sexism, rankism is defined as what somebodies do to nobodies. To be sure, not all somebodies abuse their power advantage. We’ve all known somebodies who are devoted to serving others and wouldn’t think of abusing their rank, just as prior to the civil rights and women’s movements there were whites who weren’t racist and men who weren’t sexist. On the other hand, most of us, even quasi-somebodies, have gotten a taste of the indignities routinely visited upon those taken for nobodies.

Rankism is now appearing on the radar screen. To do so, it needed a name, and at last it has one. (If it’s new to you, google “rankism” and see where the meme is taking hold.) But, many victims of rankism are still in the position of women before the word “sexism” elbowed its way into the language. Rankism’s victims know that the indignities to which they are subjected are unjustified, but as yet they have few tools with which to resist their tormentors.

So long as rank-based abuse is regarded as business-as-usual, humiliation and indignity will remain unchecked. There are two ways to deal with this. We can either follow the example of identity politics and de-legitimize rankism (as the civil rights and women’s movements have de-legitimized racism and sexism, and as the gay and disability movements are doing to overcome homophobia and ableism). Or, we can attempt to acquire enough power to place ourselves squarely in the Somebody camp and so enjoy the relative security that status provides in a society saturated with rankism. Everyone knows that it’s imprudent to indignify a somebody. Who hasn’t fantasized getting even with those who put us down when we were vulnerable by shoving our Oscar, Emmy, MVP award, Pulitzer, Nobel, or simply our promotion, in their faces? Accrue enough fame in life and you may even attain immortality and, in the words of the song, “live forever.”

It should be noted that avoiding rankism by seeking status and fame is the same strategem employed by victims of identity groups who sought to blend into the dominant group. Passing as a somebody is like passing as a white or a straight. Until we can dismantle rankism, this is an understandable recourse for sidestepping its cruel injustice.

Dignity assures belonging. It’s more than respect or courtesy. To live in dignity affirms, nurtures, and protects. Dignity is the social counterpart of interpersonal love. In the West Side Story ballad Somewhere, when the lovers sing “There’s a place for us,” they are claiming a right to the dignity of inclusion. Contrariwise, in her famous “nobody” poem, Emily Dickinson captures the indignity of exclusion:

I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
The there’s a pair of us—don’t tell.
They’d banish us, you know.

Nobodies are marginalized to the point of invisibility. Since humans are social creatures, banishment carries a threat of being deprived of social and material resources critical to health and happiness, and sometimes to survival itself. No wonder we’re so sensitive to indignity. It poses an existential threat.

Fame promises an escape from whatever ghetto we’re in, real or imagined. It deters detractors and may even squeeze a few crumbs of recognition from those who have begrudged us a smile while we were clawing our way out of Nobodyland. It’s no coincidence that Oscar-winners enjoy better health and longer lives than runners-up.

Like liberty, we’re often unaware of dignity until we lose it. A hint of disrespect may be a test of our resistance to subservience, or a reminder of our place in the hierarchy. A slight is often a precursor to pigeon-holing us as a nobody.

When strangers ply us with questions like “And you are?”, “Who are you with?”, or “Where did you go to school?” they are likely sizing up our power as belied by our affiliations.

The more recognition we can amass, the less likely it is that anyone will dare to nobody us. Fame is a bulwark against indignity. It proclaims our worth to anyone tempted to put us down and threatens retaliation if they persist. It even helps to quiet the critical voices we have internalized—of parents, classmates, and teachers—that echo in our heads long after these naysayers are gone.

The Miasma of Malrecognition

But alas, as everyone knows, there is not much room on the Red Carpet. Acquiring fame is like winning the lottery: many are called; few are chosen.

What then can we do until the dignity movement has garnered the support to put rankism in the doghouse with the other ignoble isms? Fortunately, there is an antidote to indignity more accessible than fame. It is called recognition. We gain recognition through the contributions we make to others and from their acknowledgment. These contributions need not be Oscar-worthy to gain us the dignity we need to thrive. In fact, they can be quite humble in conventional terms. But they must be accurately understood and acknowledged by all involved.

Genuine recognition must be differentiated from both false and inflated praise. The self-esteem movement fell into disrepute because the respect it offered was often disingenuous and exaggerated. What is required instead is a precise understanding and appreciation of each person’s role, and the contributions he or she makes to others. These contributions can be anything into which time, effort, and care have been put—a home, a theory, a dance, a business, a garden, a pie, a blog, any job well done.

Children sense insincerity in exaggerated praise, and soon learn to discount it. The extreme adulation visited upon celebrities and superstars can be deadly. Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Di, and Michael Jackson were first lionized and then destroyed by their responses to celebrity. The situation is reminiscent of the grotesque distortion that ordinary bees impose on their queen by force-feeding her royal jelly.

Recognition is to the self what food is to the body. And like food, too little or too much can be harmful. We must understand the effects on those who suffer from either a deficit or a surfeit of recognition and take steps to avoid malrecognition, much as we now guard against malnutrition. Seeking fame to preempt indignity and heal the wounds of malrecognition is like overeating to protect against malnutrition.

Rankism and its counterpart—the miasma of malrecognition—lie at the source of much of the social dysfunction that now vexes human societies worldwide. Effective policies to overcome school failure, poverty, chronic disease, criminality, discrimination against women, terrorism, and war require a redistribution of recognition and the de-legitimization of rankism.

In a subsequent post, I will describe a dignitarian society, one in which rankism has lost its bite, dignity is secure, and, although some people are better known than others, we seek salvation not via the vain pursuit of fame, but through service.

If I loved you,
Words wouldn’t come in an easy way—
Round in circles I’d go!
Longing to tell you …
How I loved you—
If I loved you.
– Carousel, Rodgers & Hammerstein

When we fall in love, we don’t know our beloved. She’s a mystery. We’re constantly looking for her—in our mind, on the street. We contrive “chance” encounters. When we meet, we’re jumpy and off-balance.

We want to gaze upon our beloved, inhale her aroma, absorb her essence. Everything we behold is suffused with love. The world is new.

Why do we love? To complete ourselves. To give us purpose. To know our quest. To bring us home. To accept ourselves. “You’re nobody till somebody loves you.”

In adolescence, as we struggle to put together a viable self, our basic guide is love—love for ideas, art, cultures, but above all, love for particular individuals. Love, while it sometimes leads to folly, is nonetheless the best catalyst there is for defining ourselves and identifying our task. As Charles Baudelaire said, “Nature, whether in cookery or in love, rarely gives us a taste for what is bad for us.”

Young love is fanciful, fleeting, and fragile—in a word, romantic. As we come to know our lover, we lose a piece of our innocence. Once love has been acknowledged and returned, it either evolves or turns into memorabilia. Memories aren’t experience, whereas love must be experienced or it’s just habit. Disappointed, we may conclude that love has not lasted. But, in truth, it has as many lives as a cat.

As routine displaces novelty, we may be tempted to shift our attention to someone new and taste again the thrill of romantic love. This is the point of no return. As the mystery that fuels romantic love is dispelled, we either move on or get serious.

If we follow its lead into deeper waters, love morphs into something with the potential to remake us. This is the love of familiar, committed partners, variously known as conjugal, married, or spousal love. Marriage is love’s crucible—it has the tensile strength to contain the heat of self-transformation.

Here, we know our partner. There’s neither the mystery nor the uncertainty to stoke fevered romance. In fact, relationships between mortals invariably include conflict as well as canoodling. But we do not abandon our partner or abort the process just because our ego takes a hit. The bonds of marriage bring us back to try and try again. In “sparring” with our partners, we root out the false in each other and grow.

In a long-running, committed relationship, we love our partners because they love us in spite of the fact that they may hate something about us (often the very same things that bother us about ourselves). A love strong enough to incorporate criticism continually renews its lease on life. As we respond to our partner, a subtly altered person steps into our shoes. Instead of settling into habit, the relationship is recharged by the advent of changed partners.

Sometimes the business of love completes itself for one or both partners. Two people may either hit an impasse or, for reasons they may only dimly surmise, cease to support one another’s continued development.

At moments like these it will seem that love has indeed ended, that the relationship is beyond hope. The point of the sword is hard to find, and having found it, it’s a mistake to wriggle off before getting as clear as you possibly can as to why you’re doing so. Achieving a blameless understanding of a break-up may take years, but it’s a high-return investment in the rest of your life. As we better understand how ex-partners served our development, they may come to feel like old friends.

During a long relationship, there are moments when we see our partners as we did at the outset—with beginner’s eyes. A certain smile, a fragrance, a toss of the head, a posture or gait, can make our hearts leap.

At the start, there was mystery: What does a smile mean? Will our love be returned? Now, we know. The smile holds not mystery but meaning: together, we go forward. The gaze of love holds not a question, but an answer: refreshed, love endures.

For years, poet William Butler Yeats famously courted Maude Gonne—in vain. As part of his suit, he wrote When You Are Old, in which he reproaches his beloved:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Yeats’s attempt to draw Maude Gonne to him by conjuring up a regretful old age for her was no more successful than are most self-serving admonitions. Yet it produced a diamond of unrequited love.

In Words, another poem written long after his failed suit, Yeats asks himself how it would have affected his life if his court had succeeded. By this time, he’d “come into [his] strength” as a poet, “and words obey[ed his] call” (though Maude Gonne did not):

That had she done so who can say
What would have shaken from the sieve?
I might have thrown poor words away
And been content to live.

When life won’t oblige us, we too can draw inspiration from those who refuse our call and crush our hopes. No suitor wants to admit it, but those who don’t return our love often give us something as valuable as those who do. Like Yeats, novelist Henry James saw an upside in the failure of love, remarking stoically that he’d had to “give up life to be conscious of it.”

We tend to discount our unrequited loves. But not having our way with someone is often as important to the narrative of our lives as the outcome we so ardently desire. The next time you raise a glass to love, consider a silent toast to love unrequited.