A World of Barren Elms: A Review of The Dignity of Dependence
The Shepherd of Hermas is a treasured text from the second century that some early Christians even considered part of Sacred Scripture. In the third section, the author recounts a series of similitudes or visions that are interpreted for him by a Shepherd, a Christ-figure. The second vision came to mind as I read Leah Sargeant’s The Dignity of Dependence. In this similitude, the author observes the symbiosis of a vine and the elm tree it grows on. The elm is barren on its own, but as a kind of trellis it upholds the vine and displays its fruit. The vine would produce rotten fruit, if any at all, were it to grow along the ground. But with the elm to support it, it produces excellent fruit.
The Shepherd explains that this is a similitude for the servants of God, rich and poor. The rich are poor in spiritual matters; their material wealth renders their prayers “small and weak.” But they find salvation when they assist the poor, who are spiritually rich:
Both, accordingly, accomplish their work. The poor man makes intercession; a work in which he is rich, which he received from the Lord, and with which he recompenses the master who helps him. And the rich man, in like manner, unhesitatingly bestows upon the poor man the riches which he received from the Lord.
Like the mutual support of the vine and the elm, the rich and the poor are “partners in the work of righteousness,” providing something essential that the other lacks. This image captures the early Christian awareness of mutual dependence, and a paradoxical ethic in which the wealthy need the poor just as much, or perhaps more so, than the inverse. It was in this spirit that the deacon Lawrence, when ordered by a Roman prefect to hand over his church’s treasures, brought the poor of the church instead. This cheeky move, of course, got him grilled alive. He, like so many, suffered when his countercultural witness angered those in power to the point of violence.
To borrow language from the Shepherd of Hermas, Sargeant’s book is premised on the idea that we live in a world of barren elms, a world that has forgotten that mutual dependence produces the best fruit. The prevailing societal image of success is one of independence, and the healthy, autonomous male sets the standard for human life and work. Thus, the world is the wrong “shape” for women, meaning that aspects of life ranging from the position of seatbelts and airbags to the length of maternity leave policies do not allow women, as women, to flourish. To be successful—hell, even to chop a tomato—she must contort or suppress her body to fit physical and social spaces that were not designed for it.
Her words call to mind the view of freedom as “absolute autonomy,” which Pope St. John Paul II criticized in Evangelium Vitae:
This view of freedom leads to a serious distortion of life in society. If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Thus society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds. Each one wishes to assert himself independently of the other and in fact intends to make his own interests prevail.
As The Dignity of Dependence unfolds, we learn that no one really fits the societal ideal of the autonomous, self-sustaining individual, not even the young, fit, unmarried male who might occupy, for a flash, the “manosphere”: fronting the essential facts of life at his high-powered Wall Street job or raking it in as a bitcoin investor from his luxury apartment in San Francisco. At best, people exist like this for a short time before they must depend upon others.
Whether this constitutes a failure depends upon your viewpoint. Sargeant does not think it is. She wants to shift our vision of the human person and society to one in which the human being is understood as both radically dependent upon others and made for relationships of mutual self-gift, in which the needs of one person are met with the strengths of another. What if pregnancy were not an aberration, but foundational to the human experience? What if women did not feel pressured to suppress their fertility to compete with men at work? What if the limitations placed on caregivers were not only remunerated, but respected?
The book gains momentum when, in the third and fourth chapter, Sargeant discusses attempts to make sense of the contributions of caregivers within a capitalist system by quantifying their service. Because caregiving can fall to women or men, one begins to get a sense of the universality of her argument.
It is here, however, that we also learn that there is no easy solution to re-orienting our vision of the human person and restructuring society accordingly. Public policy fixes are not enough. And in a pluralistic society, it seems as though having recourse to the Judeo-Christian tradition is helpful in only a limited sense.
In Sargeant’s view, the solution is grassroots. Elsewhere, she has written explicitly about government policies that would help new mothers, but in this book, she seems intent to inspire individuals to act in ways that cannot be legislated, systematized, or even perhaps moralized. She writes:
When the world starts with a false image of the human person, it is difficult to become rerooted [sic] in truth. Unlearning the world’s contempt for weakness is not a simple intellectual shift—it takes sustained, lived countercatechesis. We must observe and participate in another way of living (174).
This calls to mind Jacques Maritain’s Christian humanism, a strong, clear thread which runs from his early works like Integral Humanism to his very last, The Peasant of the Garonne. In his vision, the Holy Spirit acts in society through the baptized faithful. This takes various forms, exists in diverse political and religious movements, and is, by its very nature, decentralized, even as all these small actions are oriented toward a common goal, which is the bringing about of the Kingdom of God.
In the modern world, a lay Christian humanism can accomplish what the Church can no longer accomplish—and what secular politics refuses to accomplish. Sargeant writes, “We need to go beyond neutrality to anticipate and accommodate the exuberant outpouring of love and risk taking so many of us want to undertake for the sake of another.” This “countercatechesis” undertaken by the living witness of the lay faithful establishes the networks of dependence that affirm the dignity of each human person.
In order to undertake the alternate way of living Sargeant envisions, we must ask, “What do we owe to those who cannot pay us back?” (167). This tips the modern logic of merit on its head. Even as a theology professor who constantly thinks about concepts like justice, the common good, and human dignity, I had to read the sentence a couple times to make sure there was not a mistake in it. This question gets at the heart of the book and challenges the reader to formulate their own answer and put hand to plough.
Yet for all its thumos, the book lacks a clearly stated objective and an impatient reader may not appreciate how the chapters hang together, or what is at stake in each. “Why are we here?” is something I wrote frequently in the margins. Sometimes Sargeant mixes the serious and superficial: the height of kitchen counters and the risk of death in auto accidents. Sometimes she glosses over topics without sufficient treatment. Her mention of antidepressant culture lacked an awareness that many are helped with real ailments by these medications, even if future generations might regard them as misdirected, much as we regard bloodletting. I would have appreciated more robust empirical data supporting her section on anorexia.
The near-fatal flaw of The Dignity of Dependence is that the author never defines dignity. This is problematic because the term is labile enough in common parlance to refer to anything that supports the cause at hand.
“So . . . what is human dignity?” This was the question posed to me halfway through a course on faith and science, by a diligent student whose face and tone of voice suggested that she was just considering this question for the first time. We had been reading the article “Medical Science Under Dictatorship” by Leo Alexander, which contains some of the most horrifying reports of scientific experimentation on human beings under the Nazi regime. I had been using the term “human dignity” the whole semester, but it was only when faced with an example of its total absence that this student began to wonder what it really meant.
The Church speaks of the dignity of the unborn, the dignity of the migrant, and the dignity of the worker. But consider the oft-quoted comment from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s 1993 Senate confirmation hearing: “A woman’s right to choose an abortion is something central to a woman’s life, to her dignity.” And the most prevalent usage of the term today, outside an ecclesial context, refers to assisted suicide—"We should all have the right to die with dignity," claims the website masthead of the end-of-life advocacy group Death with Dignity, a group that has been advocating for physician-assisted suicide since 1994.
Still, I am hesitant to fault Sargeant for failing to define dignity clearly. I suspect this was a conscious choice. She knows her audience is a world that, as Maritain says, “is growing weary of reason and ideas,”1 and so she writes not through syllogisms, but through stories, which propose to the reader a sense of dignity that aligns with the Catholic teaching without appealing directly to it. And this is received according to the mode of the receiver.
The Dignity of Dependence strikes me as illustrative of one of three principal approaches for preserving the truth of inherent human dignity in our pluralistic, post-religious context. The first approach consists of clear arguments from Judeo-Christian tradition, the kind evident in the texts of Catholic social teaching. The second approach consists of philosophical or humanistic arguments constructed outside a religious context, like those in Glenn Hughes’s Inherent Human Dignity: A Philosophical Meditation.
The third is the one taken up by The Dignity of Dependence: we might call this approach the narratival one, for it is ultimately comprised of anecdotes, real-world data, and above all, a lived witness to the thing being argued for. These three approaches are symbiotic, like the vine and the elm in the Shepherd of Hermas.
The narratival approach is as essential as the others: when faith lacks persuasive power, and when reason has been reduced to sophistical rhetoric, the authority of the lived witness is all that remains. Such a witness to dignity can be rejected and ridiculed—the life of the saints is testament enough of this—but it cannot be ignored.
