Maintaining Dignity for All: A Path to a More Peaceful World?

In the book Dignity for All: How to Create a World Without Rankism, authors Robert Fuller and Pamela Gerloff describe Fuller’s approach to understanding the problems of inequality and violence. The main components of his approach are rankism (in particular, the abuse of rank) and most importantly, dignity. And a third component is the bond, the bond between individuals and between groups. In his review of the book, Thomas Scheff describes, "Helping the other person or group maintain their dignity maintains the existing bond or strengthens it; disrespect disrupts it… Secure bonds lead to cooperation; disrupted ones, to conflict."

Scheff says, "Fuller's approach is powerful in several different ways. It is applicable to many ostensibly different issues: race, interethnic and international relations, gender, sexual orientation, social class, and so on. It also implies a theory that may explain gratuitous and/or interminable conflict between individuals and between groups." Scheff concludes, "Indeed, [Fuller’s] work could provide the foundation for a social movement to create dignitarian organizations and, ultimately, to build a dignitarian society."

Is there potential for a "dignitarian" social movement in the U.S. and in other countries? In the United States, is one political party more likely than the other to support dignitarian values?

Read the Review

A New Voice in Social and Behavioral Science
By Thomas Scheff
      PsycCRITIQUES, 2008 Vol 53(42)

Comments

[Noach Milgram]

An excellent review by a recognized scholar. The efforts to eliminate abuses by rank and to enhance. not offend, the dignity that we require to live productive and not destructive lives may be successful in dealing with dyadic elationships, employer-employee relationships, and relationships between religious and ethnic groups within a Western society. I am far less optimistic about similar success in dealing with powerful ideological Messianic exclusionary ideologies that emanate from totalitarian societies. There are some conflicts that will not be solved by understanding and by negotiation, but only by a show of force or the actual implementation of violence to quell even greater violence. Rollo May in his seminal book some years back on Power and Innocence asserted that innocence on the part of people will expose them to situations in which they become the victims or the perpetrators of far greater violence than had they adopted a more sanguine Manichean apreciation of a given conflict to begin with.

[c.k. samuels]

A dignitarian society would necessitate the existence and awareness of an alternative food source for those people who feed off the humiliation of others.

A radical transformation in the current mode of existence where consumption and comparison determine security and happiness.