Your argument in this case elides all differences w/r/t dignity, its various manifestations and ways of being maintained. If the younger man, the killer, defined dignity in terms of not being provoked by off-hand and stupidly sexist jabs intended to provoke how would his behavior have been different... and, if this is so fundamental and unmediated within communities of street folks, are you sure this is the response of the majority of the people, or young men, called pussies? If this was about dignity, why'd he stoop so low as to respond to that undignified posting? This is like almost all claims for universal fundaments or principals of human behavior... the fundamental categories and behavioral principals have insufficient empirically cross-cultural continuity and similarity to hold any water. Last, given everything you know - as a sociologist - about capital crimes, what makes you think there was any evalutation of his material interests or personal freedom? Or is your argument that this street kid found the front to his dignity, on Facebook, so extreme that he couldn't have thought of his material interests or personal freedom... heck, he's just a street kid, you know. If the friends who held him back from previous fights and/or took his knife from him were able to think about is material interests and personal freedom - weighed against this affront to his dignity - why didn't the see the importance of a clear-cut, violent, response to this affront to his fundamental dignity?
How do you deal with limnal/initiation rituals where part of the transition is humiliation and denigration, either of the subject being initiated or as transgressions of normal statuses in the context of the ritual? Furthermore, in Durkheimian terms - oh how I despise these dualistic and false categories - is dignity in relatively undifferentiated small social groups held together by enforced similarity the same thing as dignity in wildly differentiated global social groups held together by mutual reciprocity and respect for difference? How about dignity in traditionally affective relative to rationalized bureaucratic settings? Dignity matters but the category has too much historical, material and cultural diversity to be worth much as a metacategory.
On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 12:55 PM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/10372678.stm
>
> [WS:] What makes this case interesting is that it is a clear-cut
> demonstration of what I believe is one of the most fundamental principles
> of
> human behavior - construction and maintenance of one's own dignity i.e. a
> desirable image of the self projected to others. Not to maximize profits
> or
> pursue his material interests - as variations of the rat-choice paradigm
> want us to believe - but to construct, maintain, and defend if necessary a
> dignified image of the self, even at the expense of one's material
> interests
> and personal freedom.
>
> Everyone does that, but the middle class folks learned how to camouflage
> that under the guise of rationality, political ideology, charity,
> patriotism, or faith. The street folks, by contrast, are very explicit
> about it, and they have neither desire nor social skills to camouflage it.
> This is why middle class folks - judges, journalists, intellectuals -
> find
> it very upsetting, and try to redefine it as "cowardice," "stupidity,"
> "false consciousness" etc.
>
> It follows that liberal/leftist exhortations about "false consciousness"
> and
> people being duped to make choices that undermine their own material
> interests stem from misunderstanding of this simple and fundamental
> principle of human behavior - a dignified image of the self projected to
> others is the ultimate end, everything else is the means to that end. What
> specifically constitutes a "dignified image" varies among social groups,
> but
> they are merely allovariants of the same principle, which remains constant.
>
>
> To use an example, the natives in Joseph Conrad's story "The Heart of
> Darkness" serving the Europeans in exchange for pieces of copper wire are
> not ignoramuses who do not understand the concept of value. They
> understand it it perfectly - to them, the possession of shiny metal, such
> as
> copper wire, is a manifestation of one's social status, and thus dignity,
> which is of ultimate value. They act quite rationally when they go to
> great
> lengths to obtain objects manifesting that value. It is the Europeans who
> are are ignoramuses, as they fail to grasp this simple principle of human
> social behavior, and confused the principle with its manifestation.
>
> Wojtek
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>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319