Days and Works: Of Human Dignity

The late Richard Weaver coined the phrase “god-words,” meaning such clichés as the Marxists’ Revolution, the liberals’ progress, the leftists’ liberation, everybody’s dialogue, words having the power to strike modern minds with awe. I submit that a comparable power to numb critical faculties is possessed by what we might call “goodness-words,” and I have identified two specimens. First, the term compassion, used to prove that public programs are better than private charities. Second, the dignity of man, a slogan written, in invisible letters, over the sterile corridors of the monstrous HEW bureaucracy; it oozes from the pens of modern penologists.

Goodness-words, which have taken over from yesterday’s virtue and patriotism, spread an irresistible sugarcoat-ing over ugly bureaucratic realities and give a phony justification to the liberal’s tyranny. Yet, in the mouth of the liberal the phrase is sheer counterfeit. What dignity can there be in beings whom he believes to originate from a chance combination of chemicals, whom he calls products of circumstances, whose immoral decisions he attributes to “sickness” or “social environment”? It is not that he sees man’s life as miserable— which in truth it is—but that he reduces man to a contemptible, puny creature unable to cope without continuous governmental and educational manipulation.

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Gerhart Niemeyer

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The late Richard Weaver coined the phrase “god-words,” meaning such clichés as the Marxists’ Revolution, the liberals’ progress, the leftists’ liberation, everybody’s dialogue, words having the power to strike modern minds with awe. I submit that a comparable power to numb critical faculties is possessed by what we might call “goodness-words,” and I have identified two specimens. First, the term compassion, used to prove that public programs are better than private charities. Second, the dignity of man, a slogan written, in invisible letters, over the sterile corridors of the monstrous HEW bureaucracy; it oozes from the pens of modern penologists.

Goodness-words, which have taken over from yesterday’s virtue and patriotism, spread an irresistible sugarcoat-ing over ugly bureaucratic realities and give a phony justification to the liberal’s tyranny. Yet, in the mouth of the liberal the phrase is sheer counterfeit. What dignity can there be in beings whom he believes to originate from a chance combination of chemicals, whom he calls products of circumstances, whose immoral decisions he attributes to “sickness” or “social environment”? It is not that he sees man’s life as miserable— which in truth it is—but that he reduces man to a contemptible, puny creature unable to cope without continuous governmental and educational manipulation.