Identity

10 THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF DIGNITY

As we have seen, understandings of dignity forked in two directions during the nineteenth century, toward a liberal individualism that came to be embedded in the political rights of modern liberal democracies, and toward collective identities that could be defined by either nation or religion. Having taken a preliminary look at the collective understandings of identity, we will now return to the individualist ones—that is, identity as it has emerged in modern liberal democracies in North America and Europe.

In the latter group of countries, dignity has been democratized as political systems have progressively granted rights to wider and wider circles of individuals. At the time of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1788, only white males with property had full political rights; the circle of rights bearers gradually expanded to include white men without property, African-Americans, indigenous people, and women. In this sense, liberal individualism gradually fulfilled its promise of becoming more democratic. But as it did so, it also evolved in a collective direction, such that the two strands ended up converging in surprising ways.

When we first encountered thymos and the desire for recognition of dignity in Plato’s Republic, it was not generally shared among all human beings. Rather, it was the exclusive province of the guardian or warrior class, individuals who deserved recognition because of their willingness to risk their lives in a violent struggle to defend the larger community. We saw that dignity became universalized in the Christian tradition because all human beings were held to be capable of moral choice, a capacity that in Protestant thought was said to reside deep inside each individual. This concept of universal dignity was then secularized in the form of rational moral rules by Kant. To this, Rousseau added the idea that the inner moral self was not just capable of binary moral choices, but was filled with a plenitude of feelings and personal experiences that were suppressed by the surrounding society; access to those feelings rather than their suppression became the moral imperative. Dignity now centered on the recovery of the authentic inner being, and society’s recognition of the potential that resided in each of its members. A liberal society increasingly came to be understood not just as a political order that protected certain minimal individual rights, but rather as one that actively encouraged the full actualization of the inner self.

In the Christian tradition, the inner self was the source of original sin, but was also the seat of moral choice by which sin could be overcome. Dignity rested on the ability of an individual believer to comply with a host of moral rules—regarding sex, the family, relations with neighbors and rulers—at the expense of inner sinful desires. With the erosion of the shared moral horizon established by common religion in Western countries, it became less possible to award dignity only to those individuals who complied with Christianity’s moral rules. Religion was instead seen as a form of idolatry or false consciousness; recognition was due rather to the expressive inner self that might at times even want to transgress religious rules.

The way these ideas played out in twentieth-century American culture can be illustrated by the work of the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal Social Responsibility, which issued the report Toward a State of Self-Esteem in 1990. The task force was the brainchild of state legislator John Vasconcellos, who was influenced by the human potential movement that flourished in the California Bay Area from the 1960s on.^{1} The latter built on the ideas of the psychologist Abraham Maslow, who became famous for his “hierarchy of needs.” At the bottom of the hierarchy were basic physiological needs like food and drink; in the middle were social needs like safety and security; and at the top was something Maslow labeled “self-actualization.” He argued that most people fail to realize the greater part of their potential; self-esteem was critical to self-actualization, since individuals were held back by low estimates of their own capabilities. Consistent with the modern concept of identity was the idea that the individual’s self-actualization was a higher need than the requirements of the broader society.^{2}

The task force defined self-esteem in the following terms:

The report noted, “Appreciating my own worth and importance does not depend on measuring the quantity or quality of my abilities against those of someone else. Every person’s abilities are valuable and needed. Each of us has a contribution to make to our society.” It elaborated, “The point is not to become acceptable or worthy, but to acknowledge the worthiness that already exists. Our feelings are part of this, and accepting them builds our self-esteem… We each can celebrate our special race, ethnicity, and culture. We can appreciate our bodies, our gender, and our sexuality. We can accept our ideas, feelings, and creativity.”^{4}

In these few pages we can see the expression of a long line of ideas that ultimately trace back to Rousseau: that each of us has an inner self buried deep within; that it is unique and a source of creativity; that the self residing in each individual has an equal value to that of others; that the self is expressed not through reason but through feelings; and finally, that this inner self is the basis of the human dignity that is recognized in political documents such as the Declaration of Independence. It is, in short, a clear statement of the post-Rousseauian concept of identity.

The California task force report embodies a huge internal contradiction, however, which in turn reflects the fundamental tension between isothymia and megalothymia. It asserts that each individual has a creative and capable inner self. It strives to be nonjudgmental, warning that we should not compare ourselves to others or allow ourselves to be judged by other people’s standards. However, the authors of the report quickly confront the problem that the inner selves we are celebrating may be cruel, violent, narcissistic, or dishonest. Or they may simply be lazy and shallow. Having affirmed the need for universal self-esteem, the report immediately states that self-esteem must also encompass “social responsibility” and “respect for others,” noting that crime is the direct outcome of the absence of such respect. It celebrates, as a component of self-esteem, “integrity of character,” which is composed of virtues such as “honesty, compassion, discipline, industriousness, reverence, perseverance, devotion, forgiveness, kindness, courage, gratitude, and grace.” But not everyone is virtuous in these ways, which means that some people are more worthy of respect than others. We would never esteem a rapist or murderer as we would an upstanding citizen.

The view that self-esteem is based on an individual’s ability to follow certain substantive social rules—to possess virtues—is a much more traditional understanding of human dignity. But since not everyone is virtuous, this understanding of esteem stands at odds with the report’s desire to affirm everyone’s intrinsic worth. This points to an inherent tension between isothymia and megalothymia. Megalothymia does not just reflect the vanity of the ambitious; it constitutes the just deserts of the virtuous. Some people need to be valued at a lower rate than others. Indeed, if one cannot feel shame—that is, low self-esteem—for having done bad things to other people, it is hard to see how one can ever come to accept responsibility for others. Nonetheless, the task force’s report in two succeeding bullet points recommends that the state educational system simultaneously “serve to liberate rather than domesticate,” and yet “promote responsible character and values.” One can almost hear the liberal members of the task force arguing in the pages of the report for greater inclusiveness, the more conservative ones worrying about the consequences of this for social order, and the liberal ones responding in turn that “we can’t be judgmental if we are to promote self-esteem.”

The California task force report was widely mocked at the time, becoming the target of the Doonesbury comic strip for several months. The effort to raise everyone’s self-esteem without being able to define what is estimable, and without being able to discriminate between better and worse forms of behavior, appeared to many people to be an impossible—indeed, an absurd—task. Yet in the succeeding years, this agenda took on a life of its own and became the objective of a large number of social institutions such as nonprofits, schools, and universities, and of the state itself. One reason that identity politics has become so embedded in the United States and other liberal democracies is because of rising concern over self-esteem, and by what has been labeled “the triumph of the therapeutic.”

The latter refers to a 1966 book written by the sociologist Philip Rieff, who argued that the decline of a shared moral horizon defined by religion had left a huge void that was being filled by psychologists preaching a new religion of psychotherapy. Traditional culture, according to Rieff, “is another name for a design of motive directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.” As such it played a therapeutic role, giving purpose to individuals, connecting them to others, and teaching them their place in the universe. But that outer culture had been denounced as an iron cage imprisoning the inner self; people were told to liberate their inner selves, to be “authentic” and “committed,” but without being told to what they should be committed. The void left by priests and ministers was now being filled by psychoanalysts using therapeutic techniques “with nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being.”^{5} Rieff’s critique of the therapeutic spawned an entire genre of social commentary in the next generation whose target was the modern model of identity itself.^{6}

The original therapeutic model was built around the discovery of hidden identity. Sigmund Freud came to his psychological insights treating Viennese women crippled by what he labeled hysteria, an intense unconscious repression of their natural sexuality, driven by what Freud would come to call the superego. Freud’s account of the inner self shifted over time, from memories of childhood abuse to projected sexual fantasies; in either case, therapy rested on the recovery of knowledge of the provenance of the person’s condition. Freud remained morally neutral in the standoff between the inner self and the demands of society, recognizing that both had powerful claims; if anything, he was on the side of society. But he was part of an “unmasking trend,” in Lionel Trilling’s words, founded on the belief that “beneath the appearance of every human phenomenon there lies concealed a discrepant actuality and that intellectual, practical and (not least) moral advantage is to be gained by forcibly bringing it to light.”^{7} Many of Freud’s followers, such as Herbert Marcuse, and those in subsequent psychiatric traditions, were less neutral than Freud and saw their role as that of liberators of the individual against a broadly repressive society.

The affirmation of inner identity depended, in the final analysis, on the truth of Rousseau’s assertion that human beings were fundamentally good: that their inner selves were sources of limitless potential (what Rousseau called perfectibility), and that human happiness depended on the liberation of that self from artificial social constraint. That was certainly the starting assumption of the human potential movement and the California task force.

But what if Rousseau was wrong and that inner self was, as traditional moralists believed, the seat of asocial or harmful impulses, indeed of evil? Some in the human potential movement saw Friedrich Nietzsche as one of their progenitors. But Nietzsche was ruthlessly honest in foreseeing the consequences of personal liberation: it could just as easily pave the way for a post-Christian morality in which the stronger ruled the weaker, rather than a happy egalitarian outcome. Adolf Hitler would end up doing nothing more than following his inner star, as countless college graduates are constantly enjoined to do.

This was exactly the critique made in the late 1970s by Christopher Lasch, who argued that the promotion of self-esteem enabled not human potential but a crippling narcissism, indeed, a narcissism that he felt had come to characterize American society as a whole. People were not liberated to fulfill their potential; rather, they were trapped in emotional dependence: “Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience.” This had hugely negative social implications:

In an American context, Lasch argued that narcissism as a social phenomenon would lead not to fascism, but to a broad depoliticization of society, in which struggles for social justice were reduced to personal psychological problems.^{8} Lasch wrote well before the rise of Donald Trump, a political figure who almost perfectly embodies the narcissism he describes. Narcissism led Trump into politics, but a politics driven less by public purposes than his own inner needs for public affirmation.

Moralists such as Rieff and Lasch may have been right about the social consequences of a therapeutic society. But by the time they wrote, an entire psychiatric profession had arisen, whose members did not see themselves simply as scientists observing natural phenomena; they were also doctors with a therapeutic calling to heal their patients and make them more functional. Ordinary people who wanted to feel better about themselves created a huge demand for their services. Freudian psychoanalysis in the last decades of the twentieth century went into a long-term decline in the United States, but the underlying therapeutic model continued to gain ground, and psychological language began to permeate the popular culture of developed societies. For example, the term self-esteem was virtually absent from U.K. newspapers in 1980, but references to low self-esteem began to rise steadily to well over thirty-three hundred by the year 2000. Psychological counseling expanded, with a fourfold increase in the number of mental health professionals between 1970 and 1995.^{9}

If therapy became a substitute for religion, religion itself took an increasingly therapeutic turn. This was true of both liberal and evangelical churches in the United States, whose leaders found that they could reverse the trend toward declining attendance if they offered what amounted to psychological counseling services built around self-esteem. Robert Schuller, a prominent televangelist whose Hour of Power show was broadcast weekly to millions of viewers over several decades, and whose Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, was one of the largest churches in the United States, wrote a book early on entitled Self-Esteem: The New Reformation.^{10} Rick Warren, whose Church Growth Movement has transformed many thousands of evangelical churches in recent decades, has put forth a similar therapeutic message. His trademarked Purpose Driven Life movement emphasizes the importance of pastors attending to the “felt needs” of nonbelievers, deemphasizing traditional Christian doctrine in favor of an overtly psychological language. Like Schuller, and like the California task force, he downplays sin and any judgmental aspect of traditional religion; the Gospel is more of an “owner’s manual” for how to achieve happiness in this life rather than in the one beyond.^{11} Luther’s Christian dignity was something hard to achieve; the Purpose Driven Life by contrast is available to everyone.

The therapeutic turn in the popular culture of advanced liberal democracies such as the United States was inevitably reflected in its politics, and in an evolving understanding of the role of the state. In the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century, the state was held responsible for protecting basic rights such as freedom of speech and association, for upholding a rule of law, and for providing essential public services such as police, roads, and education. The government “recognized” its citizens by granting them individual rights, but the state was not seen as responsible for making each individual feel better about himself or herself.

Under the therapeutic model, however, an individual’s happiness depends on his or her self-esteem, and self-esteem is a by-product of public recognition. Governments are readily able to give away public recognition in the way that they talk about and treat their citizens, so modern liberal societies naturally and perhaps inevitably began to take on the responsibility for raising the self-esteem of each and every one of their citizens. We noted already Supreme Court justice Kennedy’s opinion that liberty was not simply freedom from government action, but “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” a view that could have come directly out of the Esalen Institute.

Therapeutic services came to be deeply embedded in social policy, not just in California but throughout the United States and in other liberal democracies. States began to offer psychological counseling and other mental health services, and schools began to incorporate therapeutic insights into the way that they taught children. This expansion took place in stages, in tandem with the growth of the American welfare state from the New Deal onward. In the early twentieth century, social dysfunctions such as delinquency or teen pregnancy were seen as deviant behavior that needed to be dealt with punitively, often through the criminal justice system. But with the rise of therapeutic approaches by midcentury, they were increasingly seen as social pathologies that needed to be treated through counseling and psychiatric intervention. The 1956 amendments to the Social Security Act allowed for federal reimbursements of a range of therapeutic services to strengthen family life and self-support. These subsidies were further enhanced by new amendments in 1962, leading to an explosion of caseworkers and caseloads in the following decade. Title XX amendments in 1974 broadened the coverage beyond the poor to middle-class recipients.^{12}

This rapid expansion of therapeutic social services triggered a conservative backlash in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, along with efforts to cut their growth. Yet by then therapeutic responses to life problems were demanded by millions of ordinary people, who were now less comfortable turning to pastors, parents, companies, or other traditional sources of authority. The therapeutic state metastasized across a wide number of institutions, including a large nonprofit sector that by the 1990s had become the delivery vehicle for state-funded social services.^{13}

Universities found themselves at the forefront of the therapeutic revolution. This can be illustrated by the controversy that broke out in 1987 over Stanford University’s Western Culture core course. That year civil rights leader the Reverend Jesse Jackson led a group of Stanford students in chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Culture’s got to go”—which earned the university instant national attention. The existing core course was built around fifteen texts, beginning with the Hebrew Bible, Homer, and Augustine, continuing through Machiavelli and Galileo, and on to Marx, Darwin, and Freud. The protesters wanted to expand the syllabus to include nonwhite and female authors, not necessarily on the grounds that they wrote important or timeless books, but that their very inclusion raised the dignity of the cultures out of which they came, and therefore the self-esteem of students coming from those cultures.

The therapeutic motive underlying demands for changes in the curriculum was evident in the testimony given by Bill King, president of Stanford’s Black Student Union, in the original debate over Western Culture:

What is revealing about King’s statement is that his justification for the curricular shift is entirely psychological: the current canon is “crushing the psyche” of minority and female students, and hurting people “mentally and emotionally in ways that are not even recognized.” A wider reading list will not necessarily transmit valuable or timeless knowledge that would be educationally important; rather, it would raise the self-esteem of marginalized students and make them feel better about themselves.^{15}

The therapeutic model arose directly from modern understandings of identity. It held that we have deep interior spaces whose potentialities are not being realized, and that external society through its rules, roles, and expectations is responsible for holding us back. This requires both an individual plumbing of that inner space and a potentially revolutionary agenda to liberate us from the restraining rules. The therapist was not particularly interested in the substantive content of what was inside us, nor in the abstract question of whether the surrounding society was just or unjust. The therapist is simply interested in making his or her patients feel better about themselves, which required raising their sense of self-worth.

The rise of the therapeutic model midwifed the birth of modern identity politics in advanced liberal democracies. Identity politics is everywhere a struggle for the recognition of dignity. Liberal democracies are premised on the equal recognition of the dignity of each of their citizens as individuals. Over time, the sphere of equal recognition has expanded both quantitatively, in the numbers of people accepted as rights-bearing citizens, and qualitatively, in an evolving understanding of recognition not just as formal rights but as substantive self-esteem.

Dignity was being democratized. But identity politics in liberal democracies began to reconverge with the collective and illiberal forms of identity such as nation and religion, since individuals frequently wanted not recognition of their individuality, but recognition of their sameness to other people.