On the Dignity of Generosity
What is it about giving that dignifies?
What is it about giving that dignifies?
The contributist believes that dignity is found in giving, that the act of giving profoundly connects us to our humanity. But what does this mean? To understand the contributist position on dignity, we will first need to distinguish between two different meanings of the term ‘dignity’ and then recognize the foundational role that generosity plays in human flourishing.
The term dignity descends from the Latin dignitas, a word used in ancient Roman culture to denote a person’s worth — the sum total of their social status and prestige, including not only their wealth and rank, but also their reputation, their stature and impressiveness, their honor, and their moral fitness — their overall “good name.” While ancient Romans reserved the concept of dignitas for male citizens, and often just those of the noble classes, the term dignity has come to be more egalitarian, even as it has retained its association with value or respectability. After a long history through the Enlightenment, the concept takes its modern form in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” In this sense of dignity, all people are dignified, and what was once considered an aristocratic designation of superiority has expanded to cover all persons as inherently of equal value.
But even if we are all “equal in dignity” in one sense, there remains another sense of dignity that we all acknowledge. We still seem to believe that some lives and ways of living are more dignified than others. This sense of dignity is perhaps captured best in the Springfield town motto from the Simpsons: “A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.” Dignity is about the size of the person on the inside, rather than the size of the person on the outside. In other words, to say that our actions dignify us is to say that what we do reveals who we really are. Dignified actions are those that “embiggen” us — they make us large in some intangible, even spiritual sense. Undignified actions are those that “ensmallen” us — they reduce us to something that, regardless of outward appearances, is ultimately really quite small.
To acknowledge that dignity is related to our actions is not a return to the aristocratic past where dignitas was reserved for the wealthy and powerful. Over the course of history, we have become progressively more aware of the reality that wealth, power, gender, and birth status are not what makes some people more dignified than others, and that the most wealthy and powerful among us can indeed often be the most lacking in dignity. And the Universal Declaration is right in that it remains true that all humans are born with a basic human dignity that cannot be stripped from them.
But the Romans were right to recognize that some people live more dignified lives than others do. And while some recent thinkers have developed theories of dignity as the struggle against domination — a humanizing act, no doubt — the contributist believes that acts of generosity are uniquely dignifying. So, we can repeat the question that began this inquiry: What is it about giving that dignifies?
To answer this question, let’s take a moment to recognize the key role that generosity plays in our lives. From our first breath to our last, we are radically at the mercy of the generosity of what is beyond us. We are given life, given a name, provided food straight to our mouths for the first years on earth. We are given a mother tongue, a language in which to be a human and explore our world. We are given teaching and encouragement and nourishment and communities and cities and traditions. We enter trades we did not invent. We build with tools we did not develop. We love art we did not make. Each person is a node in a network of generosity that extends throughout the human community and far beyond.
In the act of genuine giving, there is an acknowledgement of this network, of our connection to others and our world. To give is to participate willingly and intentionally in this network, to recognize that we each play a role in something very large. Isaac Newton famously said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” The giver recognizes that we are a human ladder, our fortunes interlocked — what I give multiplies beyond myself, just as I have multiplied upon what I have been given. To give is to recognize that the idea of pure individual achievement is a myth, and that we make the greatest impact — we multiply ourselves and our efforts — by being part of a whole.
But how easily we forget this. Rather than tend this network of giving, many of us aim only to eek out of it what we can get for ourselves. For various reasons, sometimes because we have been given more than our fair share and sometimes because we have been deprived of what others are freely given, we begin to tell ourselves that we are individuals, and that our task is to protect what is “ours” rather than help it to grow. And like the servant whose fear led him to hide his talent rather than to multiply it through trade, we buy the myth that our lives — our happiness, hopes, and way of living — are disconnected from those around us, to our own detriment. We open our containers and scoop into them what we’re able, paying little thought to whether or not we will dam up the flow of gifts that would have passed through us. We build our resumes, pad our 401ks, and cross our fingers that our property value goes up. But we fail to understand that in our tireless efforts to build our individual net worth, we are simultaneously confining ourselves to it. We are constructing walls while forgetting that they work in both directions — protecting our resources from others, while limiting our own access to the multiplying power of the human network.
Do you see how the giver enhances themselves, not just in relation to the taker, but even to the one who aims to keep what they have for themselves? The act of giving dignifies because it makes us into something larger even than ourselves. In the end, your legacy will not be composed of all the things you managed to keep to yourself, but everything you managed to give. By giving, we enlarge ourselves. In the absence of giving, we are alone, and small.
This casual wisdom seems to agree with medical professionals and social scientists: we are at our best when we’re generous. Indeed, we might say that generosity is a necessary piece in being the kind of thing that a human being is; it’s bound up with our natural goodness, in the same way that being able to live in a pack or have sharp teeth are part of the natural goodness of a wolf. This is why, in the Reader, we have often used the terms dignify and humanize interchangeably — because we are referring to dignity in the “embiggening” sense. In the most literal way, to be bigger is to be more. A big burger is more burger than a comparably small burger. But when we speak of “embiggening” ourselves — that is, of becoming more human — we are not thinking of simply becoming taller or larger in physical stature. We are speaking of the intangible flourishing of our humanity, of becoming richer on the inside, of being more humanized.
Thus, to dignify — and to humanize — ourselves is to be generous. With conscious awareness of our place in a network of giving, to give cheerfully and without obligation is to assert our humanity. It is to affirm that we are not truly self-made, and to find joy in that, because it means that what we make of what we have been given will be further expanded by those to whom we choose to be generous. It is to acknowledge that an individual and isolated existence is not just a myth but a misshapen and corrupted form of life. To give is to brandish and tend our dignity.