Robert W. Fuller: An End to Inequality and Violence?

By Thomas Scheff 

Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology, UC Santa Barbara

I didn’t understand why I found Barack Obama's race speech so moving until I read Robert W. Fuller's comments about it. They seemed brilliant to me, so I proceeded to read Fuller’s other writings. I think they make a powerful contribution to our understanding of the enigmas of our time, and may have the potential to help us surmount them.

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 his greatest contribution, though. 

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, but 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 focuses his spotlight on dignity and the ways it can be abused. This perspective offers what seems to me to be a distinctive solution to the problem of inequality. That is, it doesn’t concern economic rank or political hierarchy directly, but dignity and its opposite, humiliation. This focus, as will be suggested below, may help with a problem that probably cannot be understood in strictly economic or political terms: gratuitous and/or interminable conflict. 

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. Maybe the boss meant no disrespect, 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 to the traditional problem of macro-inequalities between groups. All contacts between persons and between groups have an effect on the bond: the bond is either maintained, strengthened, or disrupted by those contacts. 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 Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s can be traced back to a defeat of the Serbs by Muslim 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.