Humiliation and Humility

I belong to a group of professional and semi-professional philosophers who meet every 6 weeks or so to discuss something read in common. The last time we met, we had read an article by a political philosopher who was arguing for more and better social democracy. As part of his argument he contended that a guaranteed income would be better than the current system of social services because of the "humiliation" suffered by those who depend on various versions of the dole.

This was one of those statements that was made with such rhetorical smoothness and such a strong sense of authority that the tendency was to accept it and go right on. But there was something about it that caught my attention. Because we didn't discuss it at the meeting, there was no chance for me to pursue whatever this brief flash was, but I think I now know what it was.

There is something intuitively obvious in a claim that those who are dependent on services provided by the state would inevitably feel humiliated. And yet my experience undermines this contention. Ever since having been "downsized" out of regular work, I have been to some significant extent dependent on a variety of services provided by what Peter Sagal wryly refers to as "the great socialist paradise": Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, and a more-or-less union-guaranteed teaching job at a local university.

There is much about this situation that I don't like. I have never been good at following orders and have spent most of my life, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, trying to be embraced and affirmed by the institution without ever really buying into the conformity that is always and inevitably demanded by institutions. The services I refer to are provided by huge, faceless bureaucracies, in which nothing really matters except the rules, the forms that demonstrate that the rules have been followed, and the schedule which has to be met in submitting those forms. For someone with my temperament, this is difficult.

And yet the reality is that I have never felt humiliated. Annoyed, certainly; put out that I have to fill out another one of these damn forms, absolutely. But never humiliated; not even embarrassed or patronized. In fact, the few times that I have dealt with an actual person, either face-to-face or on the phone, the transaction has been pleasant and efficient.

I think that to some extent the reason for this is that I have achieved, here in my dotage, a measure of humility. I am righteously angry about what was done to me but I also know, in some deep and meaningful sense, that bad things happen, many of them much worse than what happened to me. So I don't feel much temptation to throw a tantrum, stamp my feet, and hold my breath 'til I turn purple. For this I am grateful.

But there's something else to be found in the un-packing of this situation. In some very real way, all these services are the modern, mass society version of our providing for one another in times of need. We don't live in villages anymore or even in small towns. We don't all know one another and aren't in the habit of caring for one another in the way that small, intimate groups used to do. Instead, we have organized and rationalized the mechanics of care: people need money or food or medical care, we have created institutions to provide what is needed. We all contribute through taxes and we all can draw on these services.

A faceless bureaucracy, yes, and an imperfect one. But when one stops taking it for granted, or focusing on its imperfections, and thinks about what a remarkable, unlikely thing it is, gratitude is the only appropriate response.

One of the opening bits at the recent Democratic convention infamously said that "government is the only thing we all belong to." If the people who see the world that way are ever able to put it into effect in practical ways, we are in terrible trouble. But it is also true that in a country with a population of over 300 million people, most of them concentrated in huge urban centers and participants in an economic system which is dependent on dynamism and its inevitable disruptions, only government could provide the services that our local, state, and federal governments do. And for this we should all be grateful.