Robert Fuller: An End to Inequality and Violence?

by: scheff

Sat May 03, 2008 at 12:10

Fuller has had an illustrious career; first as physicist, then President of his alma mater, Oberlin College, as a citizen diplomat during the Cold War, chair of the board of Internews, and many other distinctions. The approach he takes to the issue of inequality may be a still greater contribution.

In his approach there are two main components to the problem of inequality: rankism, on the one hand, and dignity, on the other. The term rankism doesn't concern rank per se, only the abuse of rank. Some systems of rank are inherently abusive: white over black, male over female, hetero over homosexual, Christian over Muslim, extreme nationalism, and so on. But even legitimate systems of rank, those in most organizations, are often abusive; if not in principle, then in practice.

Fuller's analysis begins with what he calls micro-inequalities, the withholding of dignity by one person from another. At work, if your boss continually interrupts conversations to take phone calls, it is a slight, a small indignity. But slights add up. If they are frequent enough, one can feel like a nobody. The boss may not intend it, but to be slighted consistently is humiliating.

Much of the sociologist Erving Goffman's work concerns this issue. He called it facework, the saving and loss of face. But it also is crucial to his most famous idea, impression management. One seeks to manage the impression one makes on others, in order to maintain one's dignity, and often, the dignity of others.

Goffman was concerned only with face-to-face interaction, but Fuller extends dignity/humiliation process up to the traditional problem of macro-inequalities between groups. All contacts between persons and between groups have an effect on the bond: it is either maintained, strengthened, or disrupted. Helping the other person or group maintain their dignity maintains the existing bond or strengthens it. Disrespect disrupts it. There are no exceptions: contact cannot occur without affecting the bond. Secure bonds lead to cooperation, disrupted ones to conflict. When the bond is entirely broken, as is often the case, others can become mere objects.
Fuller's approach is powerful in several different ways. It is applicable to many ostensibly different issues: race, inter-ethnic and inter-nation relations, gender, sexual orientation, social class, and so on. It also implies a theory that may explain gratuitous and/or interminable conflict between individuals and between groups.

For example, the Serbian attack on the Moslems in Bosnia in the 1990's can be traced back to a defeat of the Serbs by Moslem Turks hundreds of years earlier. The Serbs took this ancient defeat as a humiliation, and harbored vengeance until it became possible. Similarly, France plotted for many years to regain their honor (read dignity) after defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, and Hitler won over the German people by promising to regain the honor they lost in the defeat in 1918. Humiliation spawns humiliation, and it can strike deep. The dignity/humiliation framework seems to reach into the very core of human conduct.

Finally, Fuller uses terms that are understandable by everyone. Audiences all over the world have responded enthusiastically to his speeches. Indeed, his work could provide the foundation for a social movement to create dignitarian organizations and, ultimately, to build a dignitarian society. For these and other reasons not mentioned in these brief comments, Fuller's ideas are well worth our attention.