The Principle We Keep Forgetting

Birthdays have a way of making me philosophical, whether I want them to or not. This one, I'm sitting in my office on a Friday, the building is quiet with almost no one here, and I can't shake the feeling that the number on my cake keeps pulling me toward a harder question about the country we're living in right now.

We're in a semiquincentennial year. In less than three months, America turns 250. There are parades being planned, a Navy fleet review scheduled for New York Harbor on the Fourth of July, baseball's All-Star Game booked for Philadelphia, the cradle of the whole thing. The bunting is going up. The speeches are being written. And underneath all of that, if you're paying attention, a harder question keeps trying to get a word in edgewise.

What, exactly, are we celebrating?

On June 4, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood before the graduating class of the United States Naval Academy and said something that, in a different era, might have seemed too obvious to bother saying. He reminded those young officers, men who had deliberately chosen a life of service, that American democracy rested on three things: personal liberty, human rights, and the dignity of man.

Three things. Not a party platform. Not a policy agenda. Three principles that Ike believed were so foundational, so basic (to use his word), that they were the binding matter of our entire civilization.

That quote has been following me around. The third one is what stops me.

The dignity of man.

Liberty gets the speeches. Rights get the lawsuits. But dignity? Dignity just quietly sits there, the least defended of the three, and the one we seem most willing to erode without even noticing we've done it.

What gives that observation its weight is what Eisenhower had actually seen. He commanded armies against a regime that had decided, systematically and with great bureaucratic thoroughness, that certain categories of people did not possess dignity. That those people's lives did not have weight. That their suffering was acceptable, or irrelevant, or frankly useful. He had walked through what that looks like at the end: the liberated camps, the skeletal survivors, the scale of what happens when the dignity of man is removed from the list of non-negotiables. And then he went home, became president, and thirteen years later stood in front of a graduating class and said: remember, this is basic. This is the foundation. Don't lose it. He wasn't being rhetorical. He was being precise. The man had receipts.

I've visited the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, with my daughter. Two self-avowed history nerds on something close to a pilgrimage, en route to Philadelphia, where she was starting medical school. I remember standing in front of a display about Ike's farewell address and feeling the particular weight that comes from being in a place where someone's actual life is laid out in front of you. His letters. His mother's Bible. His uniform. The library sits right there in Eisenhower's hometown, modest and serious, very much like the man it honors.

What struck me then, and what strikes me even more now as this anniversary year unfolds, is the gap between the man and the moment we're living in. Eisenhower was not a perfect president, and he would have been the first to say so. But he understood something that feels almost quaint in the current political climate: that the people on the other side of an argument are still people. That disagreement doesn't require dehumanization. That you can fight hard for what you believe and still, at the end of it, extend the basic courtesy of acknowledging another person's dignity.

I don't think that's where we are right now.

This spring, the United Nations' top human rights official issued a formal warning about what he called the "growing dehumanization" of migrants in the United States. Federal agents are conducting immigration enforcement operations in hospitals, schools, and churches. Parents are detained without information about where they're being held, leaving children at home uncertain whether they'll come back. The UN High Commissioner described his astonishment at the "routine abuse and denigration" that has become, in his words, normal. Amnesty International, preparing for the World Cup that comes to this country in June, characterized what it found here as a "human rights emergency."

I'm not going to turn this into a policy argument. That's not what this is. You can hold a dozen different views on immigration law and enforcement and the proper role of the federal government, and reasonable people do. What you can't do is look at a child wondering where their parent is and conclude that the person who was taken doesn't possess dignity. That their suffering is an acceptable variable in someone else's political equation. Eisenhower had seen that logic carried to its endpoint. That's why he stood up in front of those officers in 1958 and said: remember, this is basic. Don't lose it.

And yet that's the direction the drift seems to be going, and not just on immigration. Freedom House just recorded the nineteenth consecutive year of global decline in democratic freedom. Politicians now aim the word "enemies" at fellow citizens with increasing ease. People get sorted into categories of the worthy and the unworthy, the real Americans and the not-quite-Americans, with the line shifting depending on who's drawing it that week. We're preparing to celebrate 250 years of a republic built on the proposition that all men are created equal, and the conversation underneath the bunting has a very different character.

Years ago, I lost someone I cared deeply about to a sudden illness. Yoko had been my assistant for nearly a decade: my partner, my protector, my work mom, and my dear friend. When she died without warning, the absence she left was enormous, and one of the things I kept bumping into in the grief was how much of what she gave me was simply the daily, unremarkable gift of being treated with dignity. She saw the whole person, not just the professional. She anticipated what I needed before I knew I needed it. She made room for me to be a complete human being at work, flawed and tired and occasionally very wrong about things. I remember one afternoon, in the middle of a stretch when I was running on empty and short with everyone around me, she set a bottle of Coke Zero on my desk without a word and closed the door on her way out. No commentary. No judgment. Just the quiet signal that she saw what was happening, and it was okay. That's what dignity looks like when it's not performing.

That's a small-scale version of what Eisenhower was describing. Not grand declarations, but the practice of it. The daily decision to treat the people around you as people, not as obstacles or instruments or demographic categories or enemies, but as human beings who possess the same irreducible worth you'd like to think you possess yourself.

When I think about what made Yoko extraordinary, it wasn't that she agreed with me. She didn't, plenty of times. It's that she never let a disagreement become a diminishment. There's a whole leadership philosophy hiding in that sentence, and I've spent years trying to live up to it.

Eisenhower was speaking specifically to officers, men who would spend their careers ordering others into harm's way and, when necessary, being ordered there themselves. The military understands that the person beside you, the person under your command, is not interchangeable. Their life has weight. Their suffering is real. Mission, hierarchy, and discipline are all essential, but they function, at their best, in service of people. Not the other way around.

On this birthday, I think about what I've tried to pass on. Not the obvious lessons, which are easy to name. The quieter ones. The ones I hope stick, even though I'm never quite sure they did.

When Ted was pitching Little League one afternoon and struggling, I walked out to the mound in the wrong mood and said exactly the wrong thing. I was so focused on the performance that I momentarily forgot the person. He knew it. I knew it. We've laughed about it since, but the lesson went in deep, into me more than into him. Parenting teaches you, over and over again, that dignity isn't a reward you hand out when someone has earned it. It's the starting condition. You begin from a place of respect and work from there, through the hard conversations and the disappointments and the long silences and the sudden unexpected moments of grace.

That's what I want my kids to understand, and what I've tried to model, not always successfully. That dignity isn't something you perform for an audience. It's something you practice when no one is watching. When it's inconvenient. When you're losing the argument. When the other person hasn't, by your estimation, done anything to deserve it.

We've become quite skilled, as a culture, at winning arguments. We're much worse at keeping the person intact while we do it. The argument can be correct, and the relationship still irreparably damaged. We announce our commitments to human rights while treating the specific humans before us as props in our own narrative.

Ike's three principles are worth reading in order. Liberty is what we're free to do. Rights are what we're protected from. But dignity is what makes the other two mean anything at all. Without it, liberty becomes license and rights become weapons. Dignity is the premise, the thing you have to believe about a person before any of the rest of it holds.

In three months, we're going to stand in Philadelphia and celebrate 250 years of a country founded on the idea that certain truths are self-evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed with rights that can't be taken away. That's worth celebrating. It's also worth asking, on a birthday in a semiquincentennial year in a spring that feels more complicated than most, whether we still believe it. Not as a slogan. As a practice. As a daily choice about how we treat the person in front of us, regardless of where they came from or what side of the line they're on.

I drove through Abilene on a hot July afternoon with my daughter, taking photos as memories, and I lingered in the room with Eisenhower's letters longer than she probably wanted to. There's something in those letters, in the care of the language and the attention to the person being addressed, that you don't see much of anymore. A five-star general writing to a grieving mother with the same deliberate respect he'd bring to a letter to a head of state. He called it basic. He was right. It's also, apparently, the hardest thing in the world. 

But it's not nostalgia. It's a standard. One we set for ourselves once, and can set again.

—

"Basic to our democratic civilization are the principles and convictions that have bound us together as a nation. Among these are personal liberty, human rights, and the dignity of man."

— President Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. Naval Academy Commencement, June 4, 1958