Dear Friend!
This is the story of two operas that display the glory of honor and the destructiveness of honor – destructiveness to others, but also to oneself. La Donna del Lago starts with hailing the glory hunters can attain by killing wild beasts, and it continues with an unrelenting invocation of the glory that warriors can reap from crushing the enemy. In the operetta Die Fledermaus, we meet Prince Orlofsky, an aristocrat who is bored, not least since his raison-d’être, namely, to be a warrior who defends his royal master, is unfulfilled. He has accumulated riches and would need war to regain his true knightly identity. Being in limbo, he cynically takes to humiliating his fellow human beings by advertising ridiculous leisure activities as desirable tokens of higher class, and he uses humiliation among underlings as his entertainment. Soon after this opera was created, World War I started, with a sigh of relief among men of honor: finally, glorious action had found a new arena! The subsequent escalation toward the threat of global nuclear annihilation made unmistakably visible the suicidal character of this kind of male honor: it leads to the dance on the Titanic. You are invited to read more here.
Evelin, December 2015
- Written by: Evelin Lindner
Dear Friend!
This is a story of an opera and how it applies to the need to build a world worth living in, for our children and all beings, and the obstacles on the path to get there. Modern-day topics such as terrorism and gender relations are part of this quest. This text starts with a brief description of the opera, and then addresses its relevance for the transition toward a world that manifests the ideals of the French Revolution of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, a motto that is also at the core of modern-day human rights ideals: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood (and sisterhood).” You are invited to read more here.
Evelin, November 26, 2015
- Written by: Evelin Lindner
Dear Friend!
This is a story of an opera and how it applies to deep questions about the nature of reality, of what is and ought to be. These questions pertain also to modern-day topics such as terrorism, gender relations, or music theory. This little text starts with a brief description of the opera, and then addresses its relevance to concepts of masculinity, love, and music. You are invited to read more here.
Evelin, November 22, 2015
- Written by: Evelin Lindner
Dear Friend!
In the English language, the concept of humiliation traversed a fascinating journey throughout the past centuries. It is a captivating story of ‘historical linguistics’, or philology. Greek philologos means ‘fond of’(phil-) ‘words and speech’ (logos). Philology means being fond of studying literature and the historical growth and adaptation of languages.
The year 1757 is of particular significance for the journey of humiliation. This year represents an important historical linguistic marker, a marker that signals a momentous change in the Zeitgeist first in the European cultural realm, and later globally. This marker is connected with the emergence of a form of imagining a person that might have existed much earlier in history, but had since disappeared, a form that ultimately lead up to the ideal of equality in dignity for each individual.
The year 1757 stands for the beginning of a ‘U-turn’ that first led away from collectivist honour toward the honour of a single individual, and from there it culminated in the ideal of equal dignity for all individuals – with the term decorum forming the bridge from honour to dignity. Ultimately, this development led up to these sentences in the first paragraph of Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on 10th December 1948: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood’.
In former times such utterances were unconceivable (and still are in certain world regions also today). A very different version of was regarded as divinely ordained or nature-given: ‘All human beings are born unequal in dignity and rights. Some are endowed with more reason and conscience and should act towards inferiors in a spirit of superiority’. Or: ‘All human beings are born unequal in worthiness and rights – people are born into their rank and they are meant to stay there, only some might move up or down due to their own doing or undoing – and, as an unavoidable consequence, there will always be some who are more free than others, there will always be elites who preside over their subordinate collectives’.
This paper embeds the journey of humiliation and dignity into the larger context of globalisation and why the phenomenon of humiliation becomes more salient nowadays. The paper traces in what ways human rights ideals create an expectation gap that may lead to violent cycles of humiliation. The paper suggests dignism and egalisation as visions for the future.
You are invited to read more here.
Evelin, November 2015.
- Written by: Evelin Lindner
- Reflections on Tannhäuser, Terrorism, Revolution, and Economism
- Mass Shootings: A Missing Link, A Common Denominator
- Reflections on the 25th Dignity Conference in Rwanda in June 2015
- Good News: 2015 Nobel Peace Prize Nomination!
- Good News from the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies Movement, December 2014
- Work that Dignifies the Lives of All People
