The Quest for Human Dignity

One of the benefits of living in a large cosmopolitan city like San Francisco is the backdrop of artistic activity. There are always some people making and presenting what they’ve made - and they’re often so disjoint from my everyday life that it feels like I’ve traveled across the galaxy. Dora and I went to a queer Asian American short film screening in the Castro Theater that was very much this. It made me realize how much I love and miss those types of independent films - the unpretentious ones that aren’t trying to overwhelm your senses.

One in particular stuck out to me - it was about a young person who had emigrated from China to the United States to get a nursing degree and live a free, comfortable life. Their parents were guiding them through the difficult nursing graduation and licensing exams - often with slogans that would have sent me up the wall - “remember what it’s like for you here, it’s so bad here, they treated you so poorly”. The parents clearly came from a place of incredible love for their non-binary, non-mainstream child, which was really touching to see.

I see this theme across so many different surfaces - the quest for human dignity, to be treated as a person the same as everyone else, to escape the daily humiliation of being downtrodden in your social context. Ambedkar talks about it in his book Annihilation of Caste - that the pursuit of annihilating caste is one of social justice - one of freeing people from the social forces that bind them into a humiliating and fundamentally insecure existence. A life where survival is not dictated by the mettle of their character but the whimsy and psychology of a nebulous mass in the surrounding world.

This quest for human dignity has long been associated with the left, and it certainly is a part of the anti-authoritarian left. But leftist states of the past century have been more state than leftist. That is, any time you have a state that wants to claim monopoly on violence, it also has to take on other responsibilities which render it fundamentally illiberal. To run a modern state, ironically, you might need some incredibly regressive people within your country.

Within this context, I always found the idea of being “apolitical” funny - nearly everything we eat and do is a product of politics. A product of the position of some people, some groups over others. I’m not drawing a moral line here, saying that “apolitical” people are bad. I just think they’re political and don’t realize it - they have outsourced their political thinking to a skilled elite. They have someone else making the sausage for them - and I’m the same way!

Despite the supposed leftist credentials of places like Cuba, the USSR and China, the reality of their day-to-day lives is that their citizens are exposed to the vagaries of the world system, and so survival comes first. “Luxury questions” like “what are you doing this weekend?” (something that comes up in the movie) don’t enter the equation. And unfortunately, human rights are also seen as luxury questions rather than fundamental pieces of societal architecture. It is partially because only those whose human rights have been respected at some point can really develop the strength to talk about the importance of those things. Those who have had the knife in their side their whole lives might not realize what life without the knife might be like!

I kept coming back to how unfair this all is - that no country in the world really runs on the idea of human rights. No matter what the government is, we have to fight for human rights, human dignity. The systems of the world will always pursue one metric or another and those metrics will sacrifice anything they can violate. Someone has to make it harder for humans to be treated in inhuman ways.