Читать книгу Livin' la Vida Barroca. American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies онлайн

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To use a word is to run the risk of meditating on the meaning of the concept that lies behind it. And meditating about dignity is to run the risk of seeing how much of what we do, or allow to be done, in our daily lives runs counter to its implied demands.

For example, if we were to once again become interested in dignity, we would have to confront people who think that their wealth or their rank gives them license to play with the emotions and lives of other people in the workplace and in many other face-to-face encounters.

We would have to challenge the idea, which has been repeated over the last three decades to the point where it has come to be seen as an unchallengeable truth, that “everybody has their price.” It would require us to point out that wealth and power are only two of the many, many things that make people tick and that pretending that they are the only things debases the enormous beauty and variety of the human condition and the many ways of leading purposeful lives.

It would lead us to fight in the most vigorous way the invasions of our privacy implemented by the Bush Administration and ratified and extended by the Obama Administration. To have a space in our lives that belongs only to ourselves and that is only to be shared when, and if, we mindfully and conscientiously decide to share it, is a basic tenet of free and dignified societies. More prosaically, we all deserve to be free of the fear (and let’s not pretend that it does not or will not happen) that our private information might be used to defame or blackmail us.