Why dignity is the only measure that matters for advanced societies

If there is one thing that everyone knows about Japan by now, it’s that its travelling football fans take enormous pride in clearing up after themselves. They turn up waving “Japan Pride” bin bags that function during the game as banners. Later, when stuffed with post-match detritus, the bags become a tool of stadium-based statecraft: the supremely dignified visitor, respectfully dignifying the host.

Well done Japan. But it may be time to give all of that a rather sharper comparative edge. The last 17 months of Donald Trump’s presidency have, in their pulverisation of so much that once seemed solid, shown up the lack of an easy metric that tracks normative breakdown and resistance to it.

Gross national dignity, in a week of literal cage fighting on the White House lawn, feels like a valid candidate to fill that gap. It is now more than 20 years since the mathematician essayist Masahiko Fujiwara’s The Dignity Of The Nation barged its way past Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince to the top of Japan’s bestseller list.

The book took an extended swipe at free markets, globalism and democracy, and decried “those vulgar countries that see nothing objectionable in single-minded money worship”. Its rhetorical punch landed hard. In 2006, “dignity” was voted Japan’s word of the year.

So how to define national dignity in an era that seems so corrosive to the concept, and why does it matter? One answer is to think of it as a measure of how consistently, effectively and generally a given nation’s institutions are geared to the goal of seeking maximum dignity for the maximum number of people. Hard to put a number on, of course, but instinctively measurable.

The creation of the world’s first trillionaire does not delete our individual dignity, but points to a system that is no longer concerned that inequality on that scale creates a permanent dignity deficit. This definition helps separate temporary national indignities from the fundamental ebb and flow of gross national dignity.

So Lord Peter Mandelson being caught urinating in the street makes no difference to gross national dignity; research by the Royal Society for Public Health showing that, after years of closures, there is now just one public toilet in England for every 15,481 people demonstrates national dignity in clear decline.

In 2020, Gene Sperling, who served as director of the National Economic Council under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, published Economic Dignity – a book that considered how policymakers should shift emphasis to the delivery of dignity where it particularly relates to work and remuneration. Sperling notes that dignity, as a political concept, confronts an “I know it when I see it” difficulty of tight definition.

Still, he suggests three criteria. The ability to participate in the economy without abuse, domination or humiliation; the right to true first and second chances in your economic life; and, above all, “the economic capacity to care for family while not being deprived of fully experiencing the moments, joys and roles that humans most value”. That is neat because it helps immediately see where institutions are letting us down.

Like Fujiwara, Sperling is explicitly critical of the historic US tendency to downplay dignity or ignore it completely. And it is extremely tempting, given the daily spectacle of Trump’s administration, to see the President and his cronies precipitating an outright collapse of national dignity. Often, that is what is happening: Trump’s dismissal of “affordability” as a serious concern for millions is a bellwether for dignity-lite sensibilities.

At the same time, though, there are real flashes of concern for national dignity in the Trump agenda: industrial policy, however punitive of friends and underestimating of foes, is theoretically built around restoring an atrophied strand of national dignity.

Gross national dignity may, ultimately, prove too hard to measure usefully. But the attempt to do so matters hugely. We are at what feels like a pivotal moment for human dignity, with all the risks to the downside. AI threatens livelihoods on a potentially huge scale.

The world’s largest powers have shown how casually they are prepared to go to war. Serious debate on climate change mitigation has retreated. Whether measurable or not, everyone needs to enter this next phase with dignity levels as high as possible. FINANCIAL TIMES