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.