1 00:00:00,060 --> 00:00:06,360 Well, thank you, sir, we thank you for this very kind introduction, generous introduction, and of course, for the invitation. 2 00:00:06,360 --> 00:00:09,240 I should start by acknowledging that when I first received the invitation, 3 00:00:09,240 --> 00:00:14,670 I was a little surprised, surprised because I'm not a South Asian intellectual historian. 4 00:00:14,670 --> 00:00:18,330 And while I learnt a lot from it, and as you'll see, 5 00:00:18,330 --> 00:00:24,300 I'm more or less taking on what Faisal and others have said and kind of organising it in new ways. 6 00:00:24,300 --> 00:00:28,950 I do not see myself as advancing our understanding of that project. 7 00:00:28,950 --> 00:00:35,820 Instead, I see myself as bringing Gandhi into a different debate that until now, he has not been seriously considered him. 8 00:00:35,820 --> 00:00:41,920 And so my contributions today are more in the form of questions that I would sort of want to present to you and 9 00:00:41,920 --> 00:00:47,760 to your audience to try and understand how best to make use of Gandhi in order to address these larger questions. 10 00:00:47,760 --> 00:00:56,250 But I'll come to that in a moment. I do it sort of start by saying that this project on Gandhi and Dignity is a new project for me, 11 00:00:56,250 --> 00:01:00,030 and it's something that I had to show on the way of writing the book. 12 00:01:00,030 --> 00:01:06,540 Because although shame and dignity are somewhat, you know, parallel to each other, they are actually very different concepts. 13 00:01:06,540 --> 00:01:14,050 And so early on, I thought maybe I could sort of talk about it and I couldn't. And so dignity became kind of the unthought. 14 00:01:14,050 --> 00:01:18,790 Sort of background assumption for the book, which I'm only now, just now, you know, getting started with. 15 00:01:18,790 --> 00:01:24,400 So what I'm presenting today is I'm kind of trying to immunise myself from any criticism. 16 00:01:24,400 --> 00:01:30,730 Plenty of deserved here, but this project is a new one. 17 00:01:30,730 --> 00:01:37,270 So what I'm going to try and do is I'm going to try to present to you very briefly what the project is. 18 00:01:37,270 --> 00:01:42,790 And then in a moment with your permission, I'm going to read the paper and my my choice of reading. 19 00:01:42,790 --> 00:01:47,440 The paper is dictated by the fact that many of the parts of the argument are still new to me, 20 00:01:47,440 --> 00:01:54,310 and I would much rather present the version of the paper that I'm most confident with, rather than try and sort of muddle through. 21 00:01:54,310 --> 00:01:59,950 But very briefly, in order to sort of help people track. But the argument is going to be, I'm going to make the following claim. 22 00:01:59,950 --> 00:02:06,460 I'm going to say that the concept of dignity, as it has been received in the canon of Western political and philosophical thought, 23 00:02:06,460 --> 00:02:09,880 can best be described as having a certain grammar and the grammar. 24 00:02:09,880 --> 00:02:15,100 I'm going to call the grammar of hierarchy, and it'll become very clear to you what I mean by this. 25 00:02:15,100 --> 00:02:17,830 Things like, you know, standing up for your rights and, you know, 26 00:02:17,830 --> 00:02:21,820 having the courage of men and all these sort of cognate sort of conceptual positions, 27 00:02:21,820 --> 00:02:28,150 I'm going to say, implicitly smuggle in an affinity to the to the two to hierarchy. 28 00:02:28,150 --> 00:02:32,800 But underneath that hierarchy is a certain logic and the logic that has been articulated beautifully, 29 00:02:32,800 --> 00:02:38,590 I think, by Jeremy Waldron, which is what he calls quote, the upward equalisation of right. 30 00:02:38,590 --> 00:02:45,550 So you will see where the title of my talk comes from the dominant position and I'll explain what that is as we go along. 31 00:02:45,550 --> 00:02:50,590 But beneath that logic is a certain affinity to the ontology of power. 32 00:02:50,590 --> 00:02:56,030 And what I'm going to say is that Gandhi retains, in some ways, the grammar of hierarchy. 33 00:02:56,030 --> 00:03:02,080 In some ways, but he inverts the the. 34 00:03:02,080 --> 00:03:09,070 The normative flowed from an upward equalisation to a dominant position, I think Fresnel calls this it typically Gandhian reversal. 35 00:03:09,070 --> 00:03:14,500 I think he reverses things here and he's able to reverse the logic from an upward to a downward logic because 36 00:03:14,500 --> 00:03:20,170 he is able to what he wants to try and replace the ontology of power with an ontology of vulnerability. 37 00:03:20,170 --> 00:03:23,860 And so godly and dignity is oriented towards vulnerability and addressing. 38 00:03:23,860 --> 00:03:32,830 It's it's very sort of real claims upon us, rather than trying to elevate everybody to the position where they have equal amounts of power. 39 00:03:32,830 --> 00:03:41,410 I will say that while this is the story that I'm going to tell, I am not entirely persuaded by the lesson that we can draw from Gandhi. 40 00:03:41,410 --> 00:03:43,810 And I'll come to that in a moment to why that's the case. 41 00:03:43,810 --> 00:03:50,140 But the concept of dignity, as it has been received in the West into historical political canon, 42 00:03:50,140 --> 00:03:55,660 finds its articulation or has had to find its articulation through the logic of the state. 43 00:03:55,660 --> 00:04:01,180 In some ways, the dignity, rights and state sovereignty have formed this very, you know, 44 00:04:01,180 --> 00:04:06,980 deep nexus with each other that has given political reality to the concept of dignity. 45 00:04:06,980 --> 00:04:11,110 At least that's one version of it. I think Jamie Walden would largely agree with it. 46 00:04:11,110 --> 00:04:13,210 And Gandhi, of course, rejects the state. 47 00:04:13,210 --> 00:04:19,930 And so what are the mechanisms to which he thinks his downward equalisation, his ontology of vulnerability could be articulated? 48 00:04:19,930 --> 00:04:26,680 And here I'm going to say that his ashrams, his village communities and the practises of everyday life that a lot of Canadian interpreters have 49 00:04:26,680 --> 00:04:33,460 drawn attention to provide the mechanism by which dignity can become part of everyday existence. 50 00:04:33,460 --> 00:04:42,760 I will say, though, that I find myself troubled and I'll explain what I mean by that I just came across should this book, 51 00:04:42,760 --> 00:04:46,690 which I sort of jumped ahead to the Gandhi chapter to see what she had to say about it. 52 00:04:46,690 --> 00:04:54,610 And then she uses this phrase the Marxists are reduced to what she calls quote, incoherent and inarticulate frustration with Gandhi. 53 00:04:54,610 --> 00:04:58,420 I'm not a Marxist, but I can see what that is, where that frustration comes from, 54 00:04:58,420 --> 00:05:01,630 and I think the question of dignity kind of brings that to the fore in Gandhi's 55 00:05:01,630 --> 00:05:05,890 thought in ways that I'm hoping to be able to talk more about with your audience. 56 00:05:05,890 --> 00:05:15,820 So that's the general kind of claim that I'll be talking about. And so with your indulgence, I'm going to now sort of shift to reading my paper. 57 00:05:15,820 --> 00:05:21,400 Today, we have said the dignity of all sorts of people and things, certainly the dignity of democratic citizenship, 58 00:05:21,400 --> 00:05:26,560 of legislation of the human person of cultural traditions, of animals and of nature, 59 00:05:26,560 --> 00:05:31,390 either framed debates about the ambit of rights and obligations or serves as a Trump that 60 00:05:31,390 --> 00:05:37,360 transforms an intellectual defence of a political position into an incontestable moral ultimatum. 61 00:05:37,360 --> 00:05:42,490 Judging by its wide usage, the term to dignity is not without significant benefits. 62 00:05:42,490 --> 00:05:45,040 By underwriting the system of rights claims to dignity, 63 00:05:45,040 --> 00:05:53,590 create moral obligations to frame coercion in the context of rights claims to an essential dignity often ground historical struggles for recognition, 64 00:05:53,590 --> 00:06:02,260 dignity, esteem and its quarterly honour. So as civic glue, that sustained freedom is not diminished or as the catalysts for moral revolutions, 65 00:06:02,260 --> 00:06:05,650 even the Frankfurt School, operating broadly in a Marxist vein, 66 00:06:05,650 --> 00:06:11,950 sometimes identify as the revolutionary programme as devoted to as the philosopher Ernst Bloch once called it, 67 00:06:11,950 --> 00:06:20,440 quote the orthopaedist of the upright church, unquote. Together with the claims to dignity that are often at the foreground of many social movements, 68 00:06:20,440 --> 00:06:24,850 the bedrock of international conventions on human rights and of constitutionalism. 69 00:06:24,850 --> 00:06:32,110 It is not surprising that political science and international law show sustained interest in passing the content and scope of the concept. 70 00:06:32,110 --> 00:06:33,520 Dignity has become. 71 00:06:33,520 --> 00:06:43,240 To quote Reinhard Faust quote in radical context, transcending reference point and quote in a variety of social and political struggles. 72 00:06:43,240 --> 00:06:49,420 The earliest claims of dignity were also grounded explicitly in hereditary office based or aesthetic assessments. 73 00:06:49,420 --> 00:06:57,430 This is latent in the Latin roots of the term dignity, dignity and here to the office one held the connotation should be, 74 00:06:57,430 --> 00:07:01,480 you know, somewhat familiar to us, even if only in a colloquial sense. 75 00:07:01,480 --> 00:07:08,950 We often hear, for example, this version of dignity invoked when someone accuses a leader of having besmirched the dignity of their office. 76 00:07:08,950 --> 00:07:15,490 Whether in this act, the dignity of the person themselves or of the office has been diminished is often historically unsettled. 77 00:07:15,490 --> 00:07:18,130 For example, in the context of the mediaeval poverty, 78 00:07:18,130 --> 00:07:26,470 the official of the state or the person of the noblemen were accorded dignity because because of the particular social role that person occupies. 79 00:07:26,470 --> 00:07:31,900 At the same time, the subject of where dignity resided or where the power it possessed emerged from 80 00:07:31,900 --> 00:07:36,400 was a topic of considerable debate and careful passing by mediaeval scholars. 81 00:07:36,400 --> 00:07:41,740 Regardless, the hierarchical claims made to dignity were quite explicit. 82 00:07:41,740 --> 00:07:46,540 To be dignified was to partake of the same power that orders a hierarchical system 83 00:07:46,540 --> 00:07:51,190 of social status and values such that the closer one is to the source of power, 84 00:07:51,190 --> 00:07:59,930 the greater one's corresponding dignity. If the origins of dignity are explicitly enmeshed in hierarchical social systems, 85 00:07:59,930 --> 00:08:06,650 then the democratic and egalitarian adoptions of the term are often oriented around an explicit rejection of this connexion. 86 00:08:06,650 --> 00:08:14,180 This is because egalitarian adoptions are the language of dignity, usually rely on some metric by which to accord to everyone and equally dignified 87 00:08:14,180 --> 00:08:18,800 status such that the essential dignity of individuals remains inviolate. 88 00:08:18,800 --> 00:08:25,470 This often moralistic conception of dignity is at the heart of many contract given accounts of political rights. 89 00:08:25,470 --> 00:08:28,580 Now let me just make a quick aside here before I continue. 90 00:08:28,580 --> 00:08:34,940 If you talk about the contractor and adoption of the language of dignity, then the big outlier is, as LaVar hopes, 91 00:08:34,940 --> 00:08:42,890 Dupont's pointedly with this moralistic version of placing the relationship to power explicitly at the centre of this account of dignity. 92 00:08:42,890 --> 00:08:48,410 Although a contractor, I would suggest that when looked at from the perspective of what dignity means to us today, 93 00:08:48,410 --> 00:08:52,400 the scandal of Jobs's vision is precisely that he departs from the moralistic 94 00:08:52,400 --> 00:08:57,590 mission that he owns up so directly to a hierarchy oriented around power, 95 00:08:57,590 --> 00:09:06,770 as he puts it in Chapter 10 of the Leviathan. Dignity is quote the public work of a man, which is the value set on him by the Commonwealth, unquote. 96 00:09:06,770 --> 00:09:11,030 Unless we think that the term value here is any deep normative implications, 97 00:09:11,030 --> 00:09:17,750 Hodges already reminded us that quote the value or worth of man is as if all of the things his price. 98 00:09:17,750 --> 00:09:23,160 That is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power quote. 99 00:09:23,160 --> 00:09:28,110 But returning back to the moralistic account, the big name that we have to deal with is obviously Emmanuel can't, 100 00:09:28,110 --> 00:09:33,930 in fact can't be read as a direct refutation intended or not of the Hobbesian formula. 101 00:09:33,930 --> 00:09:42,320 This is because Conte famously defines dignity in the groundwork for the metaphysics and morals as a value quote raised above all price. 102 00:09:42,320 --> 00:09:49,580 You can see the contrast here between Hodges says dignity is simply the price you have to pay to get someone to use their power on your behalf. 103 00:09:49,580 --> 00:09:57,860 Whereas condos say you cannot put a price to what dignity it is, a separate question of where comes thanks to Stanley resides. 104 00:09:57,860 --> 00:10:04,950 It is a subject of several books whose complexity I'm unable to address in this talk, but I will make a brief mention of at least one. 105 00:10:04,950 --> 00:10:10,410 But the product of this moralistic vision is evident in some of our most cherished democratic documents, 106 00:10:10,410 --> 00:10:14,190 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights bases its claims and dignity. 107 00:10:14,190 --> 00:10:21,840 The German, South African and Indian constitutions all enshrine it at the core or very near it of their respective political bodies. 108 00:10:21,840 --> 00:10:24,840 In the U.S., where such constitutional language is lacking, 109 00:10:24,840 --> 00:10:30,420 dignity sometimes appears in the constellation of values that can be predictably read into its framework. 110 00:10:30,420 --> 00:10:36,690 In fact, in one of the most important recent constitutional developments that have granting same-sex couples the right to marry the 111 00:10:36,690 --> 00:10:44,350 majority opinion explicitly identifies the right of equal dignity as the basis for the equal protection under the law. 112 00:10:44,350 --> 00:10:51,610 The constitutional adoption of the language of dignity has therefore performed an important function within the modern democratic state, 113 00:10:51,610 --> 00:10:55,480 not just the noblemen but communist who can exercise their rights. 114 00:10:55,480 --> 00:11:03,810 And you can see, therefore why dignity has forced, says it is says it has quote context transcending appeal. 115 00:11:03,810 --> 00:11:06,990 And yet, although this way of thinking about dignity is appealing, 116 00:11:06,990 --> 00:11:12,960 it is difficult to uncouple the grammar of even this version of dignity from its connexion to hierarchy. 117 00:11:12,960 --> 00:11:19,950 Different accounts of dignity in this one moralistic mode highlight to varying degrees of explicitness the relationship to hierarchy. 118 00:11:19,950 --> 00:11:24,140 At the same time, these accounts also share a basic, convoluted. 119 00:11:24,140 --> 00:11:31,800 To borrow from Michelle for that, we might say that hierarchy is still the discourse that organises the discourses of dignity. 120 00:11:31,800 --> 00:11:38,040 Now, the logic underlying this master discourse, this grammar of hierarchy is evident in how dignity operates. 121 00:11:38,040 --> 00:11:45,750 In nearly every case, the discursive grammar of hierarchy placed dignity at a remove from the sorts of claims that can be put forth against it, 122 00:11:45,750 --> 00:11:53,850 either by tyrannical or democratic pouch. Dignity alchemical trick converts the vulnerability of the body into a philosophical 123 00:11:53,850 --> 00:11:58,830 or religious or political or legal invulnerability by marking a distinction between 124 00:11:58,830 --> 00:12:02,820 those who are merely subjects and therefore vulnerable to oppression and domination 125 00:12:02,820 --> 00:12:07,530 from those who have the right and sometimes the power to resist the oppressed. 126 00:12:07,530 --> 00:12:14,850 This is why we so often see the aesthetic moment of resistance as mocking someone's dignity if someone meekly accepts their oppression. 127 00:12:14,850 --> 00:12:17,520 Then we do not see this behaviour as dignified. 128 00:12:17,520 --> 00:12:24,330 We might even label such people as the Romans apparently did as obnoxiously, which is the source of the word obnoxious, 129 00:12:24,330 --> 00:12:31,050 which, as Quentin Skinner tells us, was used with people who are perpetually subject or liable to cruel punishment. 130 00:12:31,050 --> 00:12:39,810 This is why the dignity of the mode of resistance or even resistance itself sustains an essential difference between subjection and subject to it. 131 00:12:39,810 --> 00:12:42,690 Now, I know I've spent quite a bit of time explaining dignities history, 132 00:12:42,690 --> 00:12:48,240 and I did so to help draw a sharper contrast with the version of Gandhi, the indignity that I will turn to next. 133 00:12:48,240 --> 00:12:54,210 Let me make one last point by emphasising dignity, political space and liberal regimes politically. 134 00:12:54,210 --> 00:12:56,400 Developments in the legal sphere have made dignity. 135 00:12:56,400 --> 00:13:03,450 The foundational basis for the recognition, extension and protection of rights within liberal societies and rights in turn, 136 00:13:03,450 --> 00:13:10,770 are often grounded in the dignity of individuals. In cases of political oppression, this way of thinking about dignity, as I just said, 137 00:13:10,770 --> 00:13:20,130 both draws attention to vulnerabilities that are violated by an attack on dignity and in the near simultaneous identifies a basis for redress. 138 00:13:20,130 --> 00:13:28,230 But because dignity is located in the post, it does not depend on concrete circumstances or roles within which it is actually to. 139 00:13:28,230 --> 00:13:31,110 This is, in some ways, dignities, tremendous appeal, 140 00:13:31,110 --> 00:13:37,440 atomised individuals become rights holders and a position horizontally beside each other and their enjoyment of rights. 141 00:13:37,440 --> 00:13:43,830 Everyone is accorded dignity because everyone is accorded the same position with respect to each other in this fashion. 142 00:13:43,830 --> 00:13:52,740 Liberal regimes clothe vulnerability in the armour of dignity and on the individual with rights that are backed by the threat of state violence. 143 00:13:52,740 --> 00:14:00,660 There is a second step that is also operative here modern liberal states protect dignity to the armament of constitutional rights and in so doing, 144 00:14:00,660 --> 00:14:08,880 entrench their own claims to legitimacy. I'm reminded here of Bernard Williams's argument that liberal justifications of state legitimacy are 145 00:14:08,880 --> 00:14:14,820 rooted in the concept of modernity because they give a normative importance to democratic participation. 146 00:14:14,820 --> 00:14:23,310 Hence, it is not only that performance of claims to dignity ultimately transform vulnerabilities into invulnerability inherent in this outcome. 147 00:14:23,310 --> 00:14:27,510 A transformation is a second step wherein the provision and guarantee of rights 148 00:14:27,510 --> 00:14:32,340 endows the state with the legitimacy it needs in order to protect those rights. 149 00:14:32,340 --> 00:14:37,860 This means that state legitimacy depends on its ability to manage social contradictions through democratic 150 00:14:37,860 --> 00:14:44,940 channels and provide protection either from external threats or indeed from itself in the form of civil liberties. 151 00:14:44,940 --> 00:14:51,900 Dignity through his connexion to a liberal articulation of rights becomes yoked to the power of the sovereign state. 152 00:14:51,900 --> 00:14:53,220 Now, this is, broadly speaking, 153 00:14:53,220 --> 00:15:00,270 the philosophical framework of the grammar hierarchy and the logic of upward equalisation about which I will say one more thing momentarily. 154 00:15:00,270 --> 00:15:04,560 It is also the political framework within which dignity has come to be entrenched into 155 00:15:04,560 --> 00:15:09,860 the very heart of modern constitutionalism and liberal articulation of the state. 156 00:15:09,860 --> 00:15:16,490 All of these strands come together beautifully in Jeremy Waldron's understanding of the legal transformation in the concept of dignity, 157 00:15:16,490 --> 00:15:21,440 Waldron's articulation is perhaps the most unabashed about all of the alchemy that I referred to just now. 158 00:15:21,440 --> 00:15:31,940 And of its grammar. The warden's dignity today bestows upon its subjects the right to practise what he calls quote a horizontal hotness. 159 00:15:31,940 --> 00:15:36,380 That is premised on an upward equalisation of rock. 160 00:15:36,380 --> 00:15:41,990 According to Walden, although in the past only the noblemen could claim the claim and access rights, 161 00:15:41,990 --> 00:15:44,870 today those same rights are available to everyone. 162 00:15:44,870 --> 00:15:51,670 This is the result of a gradual expansion of democratic power and the legal language used to have in the state. 163 00:15:51,670 --> 00:15:57,040 This connexion is especially meaningful to me, because for Waldron, I want you to listen to this. 164 00:15:57,040 --> 00:16:01,480 The democratic transformation in law has bestowed on everyone the legal recognition, 165 00:16:01,480 --> 00:16:08,570 legal recognition of equal rank, which in turn has made quote every man a Brahmin. 166 00:16:08,570 --> 00:16:15,420 And. There we have the clearest articulation of the programme of dignity in its European guys, 167 00:16:15,420 --> 00:16:23,190 combining two organs, considerable erudition, development and legal, political and philosophical spheres. 168 00:16:23,190 --> 00:16:33,320 Having developed it, I think we can now turn to gun. Now, I said earlier that Gandhi inverts this logic, this grammar is ontology. 169 00:16:33,320 --> 00:16:37,610 Let me unpack this claim slowly. Like any good inversion, 170 00:16:37,610 --> 00:16:41,960 the fulcrum on which this inversion takes place must remain the same or else 171 00:16:41,960 --> 00:16:46,750 the significance the startling nature of the inversion vanishes from view. 172 00:16:46,750 --> 00:16:53,290 In the case of dignity, this fulcrum is the fact that Gandhi isn't is himself not immune from the draw of this crime. 173 00:16:53,290 --> 00:17:00,850 The language of standing up, showing the courage of men and other cognate conceptual positions occur repeatedly throughout Gandhi's writings. 174 00:17:00,850 --> 00:17:08,990 These are perhaps a product of Gandhi's legal training, or at the very least, the vernacular he must engage, refuse to persuade his interlocutors. 175 00:17:08,990 --> 00:17:14,420 Even so, I think he's doing something beneath the surface of his appropriation of this grammar. 176 00:17:14,420 --> 00:17:23,240 And I suspect this depth because a similar appropriations, for example, of the figure of the shuttle will yield some very unusual results. 177 00:17:23,240 --> 00:17:26,900 But having acknowledged this indisputable fact of this terminology that he 178 00:17:26,900 --> 00:17:32,090 does speak in ways that sound like the European story that Warren constructs, 179 00:17:32,090 --> 00:17:36,380 let us start moving away from the immediate connexion between the grammar of hierarchy and 180 00:17:36,380 --> 00:17:41,630 the logic of upward equalisation that Walden discovers in the broad European tradition. 181 00:17:41,630 --> 00:17:46,940 In other words, let us remember why. Although it shares the language of the kind that Walden employs, 182 00:17:46,940 --> 00:17:53,030 the purely abstract concept of upward equalisation could not possibly map onto guardian ethics. 183 00:17:53,030 --> 00:17:57,500 And the main reason for that is a dignity could never in a guardian frame become what it is in 184 00:17:57,500 --> 00:18:03,860 the liberals the possession of abstract rights between distance horizontally equal individuals. 185 00:18:03,860 --> 00:18:12,800 I think it was Fasel who says at one point that Gandhi's arm Raja is not the rule of Ramos King, but Rahm is husband, brother, father. 186 00:18:12,800 --> 00:18:21,060 I really like this insight because it speaks to concrete responsibilities, not abstract rules, as a framework regarding ethics. 187 00:18:21,060 --> 00:18:28,440 We should pause here for a moment. Earlier, I drew a contrast between an explicitly hierarchical conception of dignity, 188 00:18:28,440 --> 00:18:35,730 the one that we get from the Romans and one that explicitly rejects hierarchies, even though, as I showed it sustains an attachment to it. 189 00:18:35,730 --> 00:18:40,740 In that earlier version, the Roman version Dignity was also attached to particular social norms. 190 00:18:40,740 --> 00:18:47,630 Does this mean that Gandhian dignity, by focussing on specific social rules, mirrors that hierarchical framing? 191 00:18:47,630 --> 00:18:53,960 I think not. I'm inclined to believe that in this respect, whenever he says in his writings that while he, for example, 192 00:18:53,960 --> 00:19:02,270 and excuse me, believes in the caste system, he deems the idea of heinous and loners to be perversions. 193 00:19:02,270 --> 00:19:08,210 Mm-Hmm. From my understanding of the very complicated mediaeval renderings of the concept of dignity in its European form. 194 00:19:08,210 --> 00:19:12,680 I do not think that even the most egalitarian versions of this older form of dignity 195 00:19:12,680 --> 00:19:17,060 would ever deny the hierarchical distinctions dignity is supposed to demarcate. 196 00:19:17,060 --> 00:19:24,170 So while Gandhian dignity is attached to specific rules, it is not explicitly committed to a hierarchical Audrey. 197 00:19:24,170 --> 00:19:31,880 Neither is he, as I want to argue, unproblematic be committed to the moralistic version of dignity that is so much in vogue today. 198 00:19:31,880 --> 00:19:36,980 I will leave aside the famous remark refers to the representative of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 199 00:19:36,980 --> 00:19:41,420 to whom he told he would prefer and elaboration of duties over rights. 200 00:19:41,420 --> 00:19:45,980 That refusal itself points to Gandhi's attachment to a different vocation, 201 00:19:45,980 --> 00:19:51,800 which he thought the principles of the the Universal Declaration could never quite capture 202 00:19:51,800 --> 00:19:56,450 to get at that deeper voltage and to understand the logic of downward equalisation. 203 00:19:56,450 --> 00:20:01,080 I want to get to Gandhi's distance from the moralistic version. 204 00:20:01,080 --> 00:20:08,610 A few years prior to his fast unto death, two protests, separate electorates for Dalits, Gandhi made a seemingly strange equation. 205 00:20:08,610 --> 00:20:17,600 He argued that quote Being under foreign domination, we are all slaves and hence less than shrewdest untouchables of the West unquote. 206 00:20:17,600 --> 00:20:24,060 Well, this is a very strange thing to say, especially to cast Hindus who might militate against the equation of slavery, 207 00:20:24,060 --> 00:20:30,960 a condition they might well detest with untouchability, with which most were quite comfortable. 208 00:20:30,960 --> 00:20:35,970 This equation is bound to create some tension in interlocutors mind if he is committed 209 00:20:35,970 --> 00:20:42,000 to maintaining caste hierarchy while at the same time imagining himself as being free. 210 00:20:42,000 --> 00:20:45,840 We might read Gandhi's provocation as an attempt to channel the feelings 211 00:20:45,840 --> 00:20:51,460 associated with the desire for freedom towards the eradication of untouchability. 212 00:20:51,460 --> 00:20:55,910 Well, that is the case, there's also another plenary. 213 00:20:55,910 --> 00:21:04,070 Donnelly is equating the work of freedom and the work of untouchability by writing by routeing it through what he sees as a simpler task. 214 00:21:04,070 --> 00:21:09,590 He seems to be saying that we already have in the palms of our hands what freedom might mean. 215 00:21:09,590 --> 00:21:16,010 It would not mean that we lift everyone to the status of a Brahmin. It is instead to become what we already are. 216 00:21:16,010 --> 00:21:20,790 Should. Now, although Gandhi had already expressed this assessment several times, 217 00:21:20,790 --> 00:21:26,880 we can pick up one other piece of correspondence that explicitly expresses this reality. 218 00:21:26,880 --> 00:21:33,360 Writing in 1933, a few months before his father sent death in order to protest separate electorates for untouchables, 219 00:21:33,360 --> 00:21:41,890 Gandhi responded to a troubled Brahmin correspondent who worried that the agitation against untouchability was feeding violent anti-communist. 220 00:21:41,890 --> 00:21:47,710 In his response, Gandhi goes to great lengths, as he often did, to show tremendous sympathy to his opponent. 221 00:21:47,710 --> 00:21:53,560 At the same time, Gandhi also hijacks the very language of governance. This is a very typical move. 222 00:21:53,560 --> 00:22:00,790 It is true, he says, that Brahmin ism is the highest column, and it is true that Brahmins have everywhere suffered, but they have suffered. 223 00:22:00,790 --> 00:22:04,280 Gandhi argues, because they have given up their call. 224 00:22:04,280 --> 00:22:10,160 And this column is not merely to acquire knowledge and transmit it all the he things, that's the highest thing we can do. 225 00:22:10,160 --> 00:22:17,150 That is not enough. What Brahmins must do is what Gandhi, which is all in this would do, he says, a quote. 226 00:22:17,150 --> 00:22:21,860 I wish that all Hindus will voluntarily call themselves sugars, unquote. 227 00:22:21,860 --> 00:22:26,700 And they should drahi means a life devoted to service. Now read together, 228 00:22:26,700 --> 00:22:34,980 these moments three years apart might help us see why the version of dignity that Gandhi is offering is not quite moralistic in the content search for 229 00:22:34,980 --> 00:22:38,700 can't a capacity for living by the moral law which we acquired through the 230 00:22:38,700 --> 00:22:42,750 use of our sovereign reason is what becomes the basis for our having dignity. 231 00:22:42,750 --> 00:22:46,800 That is one version of where dignity resides in the content scheme. 232 00:22:46,800 --> 00:22:54,990 Gandhi is saying that practical and historical realities have already given us the means of acknowledging a true vocation, which is that of service. 233 00:22:54,990 --> 00:23:02,100 The contrast is between potentiality of living by the moral law versus the actuality of living a life of service. 234 00:23:02,100 --> 00:23:09,610 Far from being a moralist in this declaration, Gandhi becomes, as crooner Montana argues, he is a realist. 235 00:23:09,610 --> 00:23:19,670 So Saddam wanted. Moralist, a realist, the sheer power of what Gandhi is saying here is undeniable, 236 00:23:19,670 --> 00:23:23,930 and its contrast with the story that Warren tells could not be starker. 237 00:23:23,930 --> 00:23:29,780 The aim is not to make every man Brahmin, as has been the programme of much of Western political or philosophical thought. 238 00:23:29,780 --> 00:23:36,410 But to make everything a shoot, well, this reversal has tremendous symbolic power, 239 00:23:36,410 --> 00:23:44,720 and a lot of what Gandhi did was involved in sort of inverting symbols and trying to move them in a different direction. 240 00:23:44,720 --> 00:23:49,880 But I think the transformation here does not stop simply at the symbolic reversal. 241 00:23:49,880 --> 00:23:54,080 I want to think through what it would mean to move it from a symbolic refusal of the logic of 242 00:23:54,080 --> 00:24:00,540 upward equalisation towards a politics oriented around the logic of downward equalisation. 243 00:24:00,540 --> 00:24:06,570 Before I get there, I want to focus once more on the invasion that got the pitfalls for Waldron, the lock, 244 00:24:06,570 --> 00:24:14,790 the logic of upward equalisation is possible because what's in the past the noblemen could do with impunity is today not possible for at least, 245 00:24:14,790 --> 00:24:22,440 the pride that justified the noble man's impunity is today shared by everyone in the form of foot horizontal haughtiness. 246 00:24:22,440 --> 00:24:29,670 Is again Waldron's words to my mind. A Gandhian conception of dignity unseats the ontological rule of power, 247 00:24:29,670 --> 00:24:34,470 not the upright gait, but the bent shape of one ministering to the needs of the other. 248 00:24:34,470 --> 00:24:39,390 What Gandhi thinks is emblematic of the figure of the shooter is Gandhian dignity. 249 00:24:39,390 --> 00:24:45,940 If so, then the kernel that replaces the seat occupied by power is vulnerability. 250 00:24:45,940 --> 00:24:56,550 Now, at its heart, vulnerability is to borrow lots of famous formulation that's coming from one could go, I guess, with with Butler as well. 251 00:24:56,550 --> 00:25:04,820 But to borrow from Martha Fineman, vulnerability is quote a universal, inevitable and enduring aspect of the human condition, unquote. 252 00:25:04,820 --> 00:25:10,070 Rather than think of ourselves as autonomous and rational beings capable of making contractual relations, 253 00:25:10,070 --> 00:25:14,420 Fineman invites us to begin from a position that regards with circumspection. 254 00:25:14,420 --> 00:25:21,680 These sorts of claims about human capability. Indeed, humility regarding what human beings are capable of and a deeper appreciation 255 00:25:21,680 --> 00:25:26,390 for the networks that make our capacities possible is a fundamental insight. 256 00:25:26,390 --> 00:25:28,320 Feminist scholars. 257 00:25:28,320 --> 00:25:36,390 For Fineman herself, the state ought to act as an off a PDA that protects individuals from the debilitating effects of vulnerability. 258 00:25:36,390 --> 00:25:42,720 Fineman is saying in effect for the state ought to acknowledge my vulnerability and guard me against its worst effects. 259 00:25:42,720 --> 00:25:47,070 Only in this way to a social democratic state can achieve dignity. 260 00:25:47,070 --> 00:25:53,440 Fineman This installs vulnerability at the heart of a programme which legitimates the modern state. 261 00:25:53,440 --> 00:26:00,160 Not rights alone. But rights that protect us in a vulnerable state is refinement the proper business of government. 262 00:26:00,160 --> 00:26:04,960 And we know that Gandhi would not subscribe to this dignity, rights, state sovereignty nexus. 263 00:26:04,960 --> 00:26:09,670 I wouldn't see it, said Read Gandhi as agreeing about the vulnerability of the body. 264 00:26:09,670 --> 00:26:14,560 But unlike some, he would insist that we remember that each attempt to immunise it against this 265 00:26:14,560 --> 00:26:20,210 unavoidable fact depends on relying on the state and its instruments of violence. 266 00:26:20,210 --> 00:26:27,230 In place of the state, we need some other mechanism that makes the vulnerability, you know, takes it as an ideological fact. 267 00:26:27,230 --> 00:26:35,980 This mechanism is also, in my view, the process that tries to transform the symbolic reversal of Brahman intruder onto a political plate. 268 00:26:35,980 --> 00:26:43,510 And it begins from, like with, Simon, an acknowledgement of the role of humility in a letter he wrote in 1930. 269 00:26:43,510 --> 00:26:46,900 Gandhi develops a definition of the attitude of humility. 270 00:26:46,900 --> 00:26:53,050 Gandhi's first gesture in this letter is to distance humility from the cultured behaviour of the aristocratic classes. 271 00:26:53,050 --> 00:27:02,470 This, he says, is not true humility. Gandhi insists that to gain humility quote, one has to forget the sense of I and become a cipher. 272 00:27:02,470 --> 00:27:11,750 He goes on. One who has realised the body's transitory ness and has in some measure become aware of the self soon becomes humble and quote. 273 00:27:11,750 --> 00:27:17,780 Such humility, Gandhi says quote comes only when you have learnt true self respect, unquote, 274 00:27:17,780 --> 00:27:23,030 the self that is deserving of respect is thus not a creature capable of winning the moral law. 275 00:27:23,030 --> 00:27:29,570 True self-respect means rejecting the illusory traps of identifying with the body and in its stead, 276 00:27:29,570 --> 00:27:34,640 respecting the element of Brahman in when relieved of such egotism, 277 00:27:34,640 --> 00:27:41,450 Gandhi argued quote We melt into the ocean of humanity and share its dignity unquote. 278 00:27:41,450 --> 00:27:48,830 If the body and its needs are not central to the programme of true civilisation, then the practises of spinning on which so much has been bred. 279 00:27:48,830 --> 00:27:54,710 Labour and scavenging become mechanisms for relieving the self its egotism, but differently. 280 00:27:54,710 --> 00:28:00,920 These activities are linked to dignity because in enacting them, one recognises the mortality of the body. 281 00:28:00,920 --> 00:28:06,350 Dignity then becomes not about achieving greatness, but by becoming a cipher, a nothingness, 282 00:28:06,350 --> 00:28:13,010 a particle of dust, as he once called it, engaged in service to the most vulnerable and weakest. 283 00:28:13,010 --> 00:28:21,800 Not for me, the institutionalisation of these practises occurs in the US, the ashram, rather than the state, becomes the site for dignity. 284 00:28:21,800 --> 00:28:24,920 The broadly ashrams serves three political functions. 285 00:28:24,920 --> 00:28:31,850 First, I think Gandhi deemed such locales necessary for sustaining the capacity for peaceful cohabitation with diverse others. 286 00:28:31,850 --> 00:28:36,170 This is what I discovered has hopefully identified as a quality of neighbourliness. 287 00:28:36,170 --> 00:28:41,150 Second, these communities model relation knowledge is a proper way of conducting oneself again. 288 00:28:41,150 --> 00:28:45,140 Think of Faisal's interpretation of dramaturgy for the purposes of my talk. 289 00:28:45,140 --> 00:28:50,000 I think the most significant aspect of these actions emerges with this third political function. 290 00:28:50,000 --> 00:28:58,370 They provided a locale where one might learn to undo one's attachment to prevailing forms of dignity in proximity with others. 291 00:28:58,370 --> 00:29:02,510 To me, this is an important point in highlighting the importance of proximity. 292 00:29:02,510 --> 00:29:08,360 I share the insights of Gandhi's interpreters who see in the phenomenology of everyday life the key that unlocks 293 00:29:08,360 --> 00:29:14,330 many of Gandhi's most puzzling positions for the ashram to become the site where vulnerability is practised. 294 00:29:14,330 --> 00:29:19,820 It was not enough to arm everyone with abstract rights, although these obviously had a place. 295 00:29:19,820 --> 00:29:24,920 Instead, Gandhi wished to experiment with practises that could class the underlying attachment 296 00:29:24,920 --> 00:29:29,720 to existing forms of social domination in the context of Gandhi's political activism. 297 00:29:29,720 --> 00:29:36,840 This meant developing political practises that could give up the appeal of what he called bodily welfare and hence Raj. 298 00:29:36,840 --> 00:29:44,730 Proximity prevents any easy substitution of concrete duties with abstract rights on which the appeals to bodily welfare often rest. 299 00:29:44,730 --> 00:29:49,510 Proximity exposes to us the needs of the vulnerable body. 300 00:29:49,510 --> 00:29:56,500 It is in this sense that bred labour that is work done to sustain the communal body of the ashram becomes a form of sacrifice 301 00:29:56,500 --> 00:30:03,250 yojana taken on behalf of the poor because it brought the ashram residents into proximity with that aspect of the divine, 302 00:30:03,250 --> 00:30:07,660 which was, Gandhi says, Quote incarnated as the poor. 303 00:30:07,660 --> 00:30:14,110 The leader in Iraq end quote. It is true that in other contexts, Gandhi offered an economic rationale for bread labour. 304 00:30:14,110 --> 00:30:21,610 He suggests that productivity delinked from bodily exertion is the source of what, whether or not we can trust Gandhi's political economy. 305 00:30:21,610 --> 00:30:26,710 We would miss something if we took his insistence on bread labour as just an economic rationale. 306 00:30:26,710 --> 00:30:35,470 Indeed, just as we read spinning as disclosing a moral programme, we might read bread labour as highlighting a programme of moral transformation. 307 00:30:35,470 --> 00:30:40,180 Indeed, Gandhi at one point says that bread labour is the highest form of sacrifice, 308 00:30:40,180 --> 00:30:46,150 which is the title he otherwise tends to use for spinning, done, cutting. 309 00:30:46,150 --> 00:30:53,080 Similarly, and in the absence of drainage facilities in his ashram, Gandhi insisted upon cleaning communal latrines himself. 310 00:30:53,080 --> 00:30:59,080 Perhaps nothing drew the derision and anger of his upper caste critics more than his advocacy of this practise. 311 00:30:59,080 --> 00:31:05,740 Gandhi's critics insisted that engaging in this activity was a sacrilegious violation of the caste principles, 312 00:31:05,740 --> 00:31:11,320 despite trenchant criticism of this position, including from his own life. Gandhi did not share their views. 313 00:31:11,320 --> 00:31:18,700 This is because for Gandhi, scavenging could quote help one to a true appreciation of the equality of man, unquote. 314 00:31:18,700 --> 00:31:24,280 The mortal ordinary reality of our own bodies as a shrewd commander might remind us and its needs 315 00:31:24,280 --> 00:31:31,460 proved the equality of albeit this equality ultimately is that we are all particles of dust. 316 00:31:31,460 --> 00:31:36,920 No, I would not say more about Gandhi, because anything else that I have to say is probably already familiar to most of you, 317 00:31:36,920 --> 00:31:40,820 so I'm going to go deeper into sort of going deeper into my reading of Gandhi. 318 00:31:40,820 --> 00:31:45,440 I'm going to try and bring the story back to this western story of dignity whose grammar, 319 00:31:45,440 --> 00:31:51,140 logic and ontology are all pointing in directions away from a in politics. 320 00:31:51,140 --> 00:31:57,110 I also want to retain the space for my own discomfort with this kind of conception of dignity. 321 00:31:57,110 --> 00:32:01,760 But let me start by sort of drawing three contrasts very briefly. 322 00:32:01,760 --> 00:32:09,140 I'm going to start with the liberal framing of dignity. Specifically, I have in mind here the kind of dignity and its relationship as politics. 323 00:32:09,140 --> 00:32:16,280 That is the one that is at the heart of John Stuart Miller's account. The upshot of contrasting this vision against Gandhi, it seems to me, 324 00:32:16,280 --> 00:32:23,600 would be to theorise the epistemic importance of proximity in the place we give to dignity in the context of mass politics. 325 00:32:23,600 --> 00:32:28,520 The million account dignity is premised on the idea that, as most famously put it quote, 326 00:32:28,520 --> 00:32:33,290 it is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than the full satisfied and quote. 327 00:32:33,290 --> 00:32:39,890 The cultivation of the higher senses has the power to transform the way in which an individual relates to social demands 328 00:32:39,890 --> 00:32:47,510 and the broadened franchise that had in time completely transformed the political and social landscape as no salt mill. 329 00:32:47,510 --> 00:32:54,210 Of course, all these developments with resignation, meaning he was neither against it nor enthusiastic about it, is programmed to counter, 330 00:32:54,210 --> 00:33:01,010 therefore was an attempt to both tame its worst excesses and to channel it towards an expansive view of human capabilities. 331 00:33:01,010 --> 00:33:06,650 His ethology, as he called it, was therefore an integral part of the programme of developing a moral science that 332 00:33:06,650 --> 00:33:11,960 could craft individuals capable of writing the transformative waves of modernity. 333 00:33:11,960 --> 00:33:18,200 By doing so, they would release human creativity from the bondage of the erotic class system. 334 00:33:18,200 --> 00:33:28,520 Dignity in this context is achieved in a capacity to undertake middle class quote experiments in living end quote in a vast, tumultuous public realm. 335 00:33:28,520 --> 00:33:33,870 By contrast, Gandhian dignity is rooted in what I'm calling experiments in proximate living. 336 00:33:33,870 --> 00:33:40,640 Gandhi's call to become should the shares with an acknowledgement of the transformative effects of civilisation and involving 337 00:33:40,640 --> 00:33:47,660 resignation of its irreversibility and an attempt to create a counter anthology to tame the worst effects of modernity. 338 00:33:47,660 --> 00:33:54,260 But the aim is not to create a cosmopolitan imagination that rose around the world, combining Bentham and Coleridge fields. 339 00:33:54,260 --> 00:34:01,210 Instead, it seeks in service to that which is immediate and mere assuring guide to dignity. 340 00:34:01,210 --> 00:34:08,950 Now, with the Republican framing, I have it have in mind the idea of the famous contrast drawn by Quentin Skinner and Philip 341 00:34:08,950 --> 00:34:14,230 Pettit between the Freemen and the Slave and this relationship Skinner and Pettit remind us, 342 00:34:14,230 --> 00:34:23,220 is one of arbitrary domination in master, even a anyone can truly choose dominate the choices the slave makes. 343 00:34:23,220 --> 00:34:30,630 Which forbid it means that the master can at any moment intervene into the slaves life and control the slaves will, 344 00:34:30,630 --> 00:34:37,580 which means therefore that even with a kindly master slave is never truly free. 345 00:34:37,580 --> 00:34:42,470 Anyone could attack the sleep with impunity and the fragility of the status this 346 00:34:42,470 --> 00:34:48,990 tarnished dignity as a sleep should remind us of the precarious nature of their freedom. 347 00:34:48,990 --> 00:34:53,730 Now, I understand the element of choice here is so deeply problematic in the way Gandhi talks about it, 348 00:34:53,730 --> 00:34:58,200 but the Gandhi emphasis on becoming shoes makes for a startling contrast with neo room. 349 00:34:58,200 --> 00:35:02,700 Ambitions in republicanism is ultimately about the question of how to manage the 350 00:35:02,700 --> 00:35:07,530 inevitable presence of power and to channel it to its ends that sustained freedom. 351 00:35:07,530 --> 00:35:13,230 Then the equation of freedom with a wilful service to the other can appear foolhardy. 352 00:35:13,230 --> 00:35:19,140 At the same time, I think Gandhi is also offering a more nuanced psychological portrait of the power of, 353 00:35:19,140 --> 00:35:24,420 you know, the imbalances between the slave and the Freeman. 354 00:35:24,420 --> 00:35:32,730 I think Gandhi and Dignity could address structural inequalities in ways that perhaps the Republican account cannot without, 355 00:35:32,730 --> 00:35:38,790 in some way tarnishing the complexity of a psychological portrait that it constructs. 356 00:35:38,790 --> 00:35:42,630 But let me come to I want to jump to the last part, and I'm running out of time. 357 00:35:42,630 --> 00:35:49,350 And I said earlier that I find myself sometimes reduced into an incoherent, inarticulate frustration, as Shruti calls it. 358 00:35:49,350 --> 00:35:51,870 But I don't want to think alongside Gandhi. 359 00:35:51,870 --> 00:36:00,180 I'm not a Ganiyu, I'm I'm not a Marxist, but I'm inclined to choose man as George Orwell once sort of, you know, 360 00:36:00,180 --> 00:36:05,490 called this schematic difference between Marxists and anarchists on the one side and Gandhi on the other. 361 00:36:05,490 --> 00:36:11,790 And here, rather than going through the route of Ambedkar, who obviously would be the real person, one could sort of opposed to Gandhi. 362 00:36:11,790 --> 00:36:18,030 I'm going to go through Dubois, and this is what Dubois says in what I'm going to call Dubois at length. 363 00:36:18,030 --> 00:36:22,440 Quote, We believe that at the bottom of organised human life, 364 00:36:22,440 --> 00:36:28,200 there are unnecessary duties and services which no real human being ought to be compelled to do. 365 00:36:28,200 --> 00:36:35,340 We push below this Munsil, the derelicts and Hoffman, whom we hate and despise and seek to build above it. 366 00:36:35,340 --> 00:36:40,380 Democracy on such foundations is really a theory of exclusiveness, 367 00:36:40,380 --> 00:36:44,400 a feeling that the world progresses by a process of excluding from the benefits of 368 00:36:44,400 --> 00:36:50,160 culture the majority of men so that a gifted minority may blossom through this door. 369 00:36:50,160 --> 00:36:54,780 The modern Democrat arrives to the place where he is willing to allot to able bodied men 370 00:36:54,780 --> 00:37:02,130 and to fine horses to the task of helping one beldon to take the morning air unquote. 371 00:37:02,130 --> 00:37:08,230 What is describing here, what is critiquing there is what he calls the manure theory of social organisation and Dubois. 372 00:37:08,230 --> 00:37:12,420 His point is that there are some things we need to do that no one wants to do. 373 00:37:12,420 --> 00:37:16,290 We compel others to complete these necessary tasks, 374 00:37:16,290 --> 00:37:22,660 and the completion of these tasks destroys human bodies, corrupts minds and still defies the spirit. 375 00:37:22,660 --> 00:37:31,000 How have we square this barbarism with our ideals? We have done so by pushing this task onto people whom we at the same time deprived 376 00:37:31,000 --> 00:37:35,680 of any social reality people who we might today call along with Orlando Patterson, 377 00:37:35,680 --> 00:37:38,410 Natalie alienated, in contrast, 378 00:37:38,410 --> 00:37:46,090 those who benefit from this unequal division of labour and its fruits have bred into them a sense of their own, necessarily superiority. 379 00:37:46,090 --> 00:37:47,350 What Dubois paints, 380 00:37:47,350 --> 00:37:53,890 writing at the end of the First World War and of the particular condition of menial servants drawn entirely from the black working class, 381 00:37:53,890 --> 00:38:01,150 might be the story of 20th century Democratic America. It might also be as Marxist would remind us the story of every civilisation. 382 00:38:01,150 --> 00:38:07,640 Think of the sheer number of slaves responsible not only for autocratic Sparta, but democratic arms. 383 00:38:07,640 --> 00:38:13,310 I think in his critique of modern civilisation, Gandhi will find much to agree with what Dubois is saying, 384 00:38:13,310 --> 00:38:18,390 but I think they would also depart at the point in which Dubois offers a solution. 385 00:38:18,390 --> 00:38:25,730 So according to Dubois, technology can liberate us from these tasks with the aid of washing machines, dishwashers, microwaves and ovens. 386 00:38:25,730 --> 00:38:32,750 Can we not, as Dubois asks quote, look forward to a world of service without servants, unquote. 387 00:38:32,750 --> 00:38:39,450 The world, in other words, in which vulnerability is still abolished, but in which it is not made a virtue. 388 00:38:39,450 --> 00:38:45,540 Dignity would then become possible in the act of rescuing individuals from the drudgery of work that destroys them. 389 00:38:45,540 --> 00:38:54,240 And not in service to the other, the voice to use Orwell's phrasing definitively chooses. 390 00:38:54,240 --> 00:38:58,770 Now, for me, this is an appealing promise, and I think I can guess what the boys might say in response. 391 00:38:58,770 --> 00:39:02,100 I'm not sure I'm at a place where I can prefer his answer to that of Dubois. 392 00:39:02,100 --> 00:39:09,009 But this is something that I think I would like to discuss with all of you. Thank you.