Why What We Are Comes Before What We Are Allowed to Be
“You don’t have to earn your future self. You only have to be willing to let go of who you are to become who you can be.” – Benjamin Hardy
Foreword
Dignity has been appearing with increasing frequency in my thinking. Perhaps this is because my thesis concerns the way humanity understands itself, and whether the concepts by which we define ourselves are coherent, stable, or even true.
One such concept is dignity. At first glance, it appears self-evident: a word so familiar that it rarely invites scrutiny. And yet, the moment we ask the obvious questions its apparent simplicity dissolves: What is dignity? Who defines it? By what measure is it recognised or withdrawn?
I have known indignity, both inflicted by others and enacted upon myself. I have also known dignity restored, unexpectedly, repeatedly, through God’s providence rather than my own repair. These experiences have taught me that dignity is not merely a social courtesy or moral sentiment, but something far more foundational.
One thing has become unmistakably clear: when dignity is no longer understood as intrinsic to the human person, the erosion of goodness follows with disturbing ease. What is not grounded in being itself can be denied, negotiated, or destroyed.
Before Rights, Roles, or Recognition
Dignity is often treated as a moral afterthought, something we appeal to once harm has occurred, or when boundaries have been crossed. But dignity does not emerge at the end of ethical reasoning; it stands at the beginning. Long before questions of rights, behaviour, productivity, or social belonging arise, dignity answers a more fundamental question: what is a human being?
This matters because moral frameworks do not float freely. They rest on assumptions about being. When those assumptions are stable, ethics has coherence. When they are confused, ethics becomes reactive, fragile, and contested. Modern debates about dignity often feel interminable not because people do not care, but because they are arguing downstream from unresolved ontological disagreements.
If dignity is intrinsic, then it belongs to the human simply by virtue of being human. It does not need to be earned, proven, or performed. It precedes consent, cognition, contribution, and capacity. But if dignity is not intrinsic, if it is something added, recognised, or conferred by social mechanisms, then it becomes conditional. And conditional dignity is always vulnerable.
The modern world tends to resist this framing. Ontology feels abstract; rights feel concrete. We prefer procedural safeguards to metaphysical claims. Yet the irony is this: the more we avoid the question of what a human is, the more unstable our answers become regarding how humans should be treated.
This blog proceeds from a simple but demanding claim: reason begins with ontology. If we misunderstand what a human being is, every ethical structure we build will eventually crack under pressure. Dignity cannot be secured at the level of policy or sentiment if it is not first anchored in being.
Who Gets to Name the Human? (And Why This Is Never a Neutral Question)
If dignity is not intrinsic, it must be granted. And if it must be granted, then someone must decide who qualifies.
This is the point at which dignity quietly becomes political, juridical, cultural, or ideological rather than ontological. Once dignity is no longer grounded in what a human is, it becomes contingent upon what a human does, contributes, conforms to, or represents. The question shifts from Who are you? to What do you bring?
Or worse, Do you belong?
History shows that this shift is never benign.
Charles Taylor traces one of the decisive turns here to modernity’s internalisation of dignity. Where dignity was once embedded in a shared moral cosmos, it becomes relocated into the autonomous self, particularly through Descartes’ emphasis on rational agency and the sovereign will.¹ What is gained is moral seriousness; what is lost is a shared ontological anchor. Dignity becomes something I must live up to, rather than something I receive.
This relocation subtly changes the moral stakes. If dignity is tied to rational self-mastery, then those who are cognitively impaired, traumatised, oppressed, unborn, elderly, or socially marginalised stand on increasingly fragile ground. The logic may not be stated, but it is operative: diminished agency implies diminished dignity.
Elsa Tamez shows how this logic functions under conditions of oppression. In the biblical vocabulary of nagash, to press, to exploit, to dominate, those subjected to sustained pressure are reduced, socially and psychologically, to something less than human.² Oppression does not merely wound bodies; it erodes identity by denying the oppressed the freedom proper to image-bearers. Dignity is not only violated; it is actively redefined downward.
This is why dignity cannot be secured by law alone. Law presupposes an anthropology. It enforces what a culture already believes about the human person. When that belief is thin, instrumental, or contested, law becomes a mechanism of classification rather than protection. The question is never whether dignity will be defined, but who will do the defining and by what standard.
Modern liberal frameworks often attempt neutrality here, bracketing metaphysical claims in favour of procedural fairness. But as Taylor observes, neutrality itself smuggles in an anthropology, one that assumes the primacy of choice, authenticity, and self-definition while rendering thicker accounts of the good unspeakable in public discourse.³ Dignity remains affirmed rhetorically, yet its grounding is left intentionally vague. The result is a moral consensus that is strong on sentiment and weak on substance.
James K. A. Smith sharpens this critique by noting that humans are not primarily thinking beings but desiring ones.⁴ What we repeatedly love, attend to, and practise forms us long before we articulate reasons. If cultural liturgies train us to prize productivity, visibility, autonomy, or pleasure, then dignity will inevitably be measured against those ends. The human who cannot keep up will feel the loss first.
Miroslav Volf reminds us that dignity fractures most violently at the boundary between identity and otherness. Exclusion always begins with a story that names some as fully human and others as problems to be managed, corrected, or removed.⁵ Once exclusion is justified, cruelty can be administered with a clean conscience.
Against this backdrop, the Christian claim is not merely that dignity should be respected, but that it is already spoken. To be human is to be named before one acts, before one chooses, before one achieves. Dignity is not aspirational; it is declarative.
Why Dignity Cannot Be Manufactured (and Why It Keeps Trying to Be)
If dignity cannot be earned, and cannot be granted without becoming unstable, the modern instinct is to manufacture it. This is the quiet project beneath much contemporary moral discourse: to generate dignity through recognition, affirmation, visibility, or rights-language without first settling what a human being is.
The attempt is understandable. Modernity is deeply allergic to metaphysics, yet profoundly committed to moral outcomes. We want justice without ontology, dignity without transcendence, meaning without givenness. The result is a strange inversion: dignity is treated as an achievement of social consensus rather than a feature of being.
Charles Taylor names this condition with precision. In the modern “immanent frame,” meaning is expected to arise from within human systems rather than being received from beyond them.⁶ Dignity survives rhetorically, but it floats, detached from any shared account of what the human is for. When moral language is severed from ontology, it becomes fragile, overextended, and easily weaponised.
Hans Urs von Balthasar offers a crucial corrective here. Dignity cannot be reduced to function, capacity, or recognition because it is bound to appearance. It is not appearance as performance, but appearance as self-giving presence.⁷ The human person does not generate dignity by asserting the self, but receives it by being addressed and drawn into a drama not of their own making.
N. T. Wright reinforces this from within Pauline anthropology. For Paul, the renewal of humanity is not achieved by spontaneity or authenticity, but by the renewal of the mind; an ordered reorientation toward truth.⁸ When the mind is downgraded, the human is diminished. A reduced anthropology produces a reduced ethic.
Esther Meek names what is missing here as presence. To know rightly, the self must be at home in itself, receptive to the other, and unthreatened by difference.⁹ Dignity emerges not from control but from hospitality. Where presence is lost, knowing becomes extraction; where presence is cultivated, knowing becomes an act of love.
Sarah Coakley presses even deeper by locating dignity within desire itself. Desire, rightly ordered toward God, becomes the ground of human flourishing rather than its rival.¹⁰ Disordered desire produces anxiety, domination, and obsession; reoriented desire creates the conditions for dignity to endure difference without coercion.
James K. A. Smith shows how this plays out culturally. We are shaped less by what we think than by what we habitually love.¹¹ If our practices train us toward efficiency, consumption, or self-display, dignity will be quietly measured against those ends. The person who cannot perform the script will feel the loss first.
Manufactured dignity must constantly be defended.
Received dignity can finally be lived.
Being Before Behaviour: Why Ontology Must Precede Ethics
Modern moral discourse tends to move quickly to questions of behaviour: What should we allow? What must we prohibit? What outcomes do we want? These are important questions, but when they are asked before the ontological question – What is a human being? – they become unstable. Ethics without ontology inevitably collapses into regulation, sentiment, or power.
Ancient and medieval philosophy understood this ordering instinctively. Plato held together truth, goodness, and beauty as mutually illuminating realities, not competing domains. Aristotle integrated form, purpose, and empirical observation, insisting that to know what something ought to do, one must first know what it is. Medieval Christian thought extended this integration further by uniting ontology, ethics, and theology into a coherent vision of creation ordered toward God. Moral reasoning flowed from being, not around it.
Modern philosophy, by contrast, often achieves clarity through separation. Methodological pressures have encouraged the isolation of epistemology from metaphysics, ethics from ontology, and meaning from transcendence. The result is precision at the cost of wholeness. We can analyse parts of the human with remarkable sophistication while remaining uncertain about the human as a whole.
Charles Taylor diagnoses this condition as one of fragmentation under the immanent frame.¹² When transcendence is bracketed, moral reasoning does not disappear, but it loses its depth. Dignity remains affirmed, but its grounding is deferred. Ethics becomes a matter of consensus, and consensus becomes vulnerable to cultural drift.
This inversion has consequences. When behaviour precedes being, dignity becomes conditional. Worth is measured by compliance, contribution, or coherence with prevailing norms. Those who fail to perform the expected scripts, whether through disability, trauma, poverty, or dissent, find themselves morally precarious. The system may still speak the language of dignity, but it no longer knows why it should protect the vulnerable when doing so becomes costly.
The biblical witness moves in the opposite direction. Human dignity is not inferred from moral performance; it is declared prior to it. Humanity is named as imago Dei before any action is taken, any command given, or any failure recorded. Ontology comes first. Ethics follows.
N. T. Wright captures this Pauline logic with precision. For Paul, moral transformation does not begin with rules or spontaneity, but with the renewal of the mind; an ontological reorientation toward what is true.¹³ When the mind is renewed, behaviour follows organically. When the mind is bypassed, ethics becomes brittle, reactive, and moralistic.
Hans Urs von Balthasar deepens this insight by showing that dignity is bound to appearance, but not appearance as performance. Dignity arises from being addressed and revealed within a divine drama, not from asserting the self into visibility.¹⁴ The human person does not manufacture meaning; meaning precedes the person and invites participation. To reverse this order is to burden the self with a task it cannot bear.
This helps explain why modern attempts to secure dignity through rights alone feel both necessary and insufficient. Rights are vital, but they are downstream. They presuppose a prior agreement about who counts as a rights-bearing subject and why. When that agreement weakens, rights language becomes strained, expanded beyond coherence, or selectively applied.
Ontology, by contrast, does not fluctuate with social mood. If dignity is grounded in being, it does not rise and fall with capacity, recognition, or utility. It remains intact even when obscured, violated, or denied. Ethics, then, becomes an act of alignment rather than invention; an attempt to live truthfully in relation to what already is.
This is why the ordering matters.
When ontology is clear, ethics can be courageous.
When ontology is confused, ethics becomes defensive.
To ask what humans are allowed to be before asking what humans are is to reverse the moral grammar of reality. Dignity cannot survive that inversion for long.
What We Love Shapes What We Are: Desire, Formation, and the Fragility of Dignity
If dignity is ontological, it must still be lived. This raises a further question: how is dignity either sustained or eroded in everyday human life? Ontology may precede ethics, but formation mediates between them. What we are declared to be must be learned, rehearsed, and protected against distortion.
Here the modern error is subtle. We tend to assume that dignity is primarily threatened by explicit violence or overt injustice. Yet far more often, dignity is quietly eroded through misinformation and habits, narratives, and desires that train people to see themselves and others as less than they are.
James K. A. Smith argues that humans are not fundamentally “thinking things” but desiring ones.¹⁵ We are shaped less by arguments than by liturgies; repeated practices that orient our loves toward particular visions of the good life. These liturgies operate beneath conscious awareness, forming identity long before moral reflection begins. If a culture’s practices train people to value productivity, visibility, autonomy, or consumption above all else, then dignity will be implicitly measured against those ends.
This explains why indignity often feels internal before it becomes political. People begin to experience themselves as burdens, failures, or excess. They may retain formal rights while losing a sense of worth. Dignity is not denied in principle, but hollowed out in practice.
Esther Meek’s work on knowing illuminates this dynamic from an epistemological angle. She describes presence – a settled, embodied readiness to receive reality – as essential to healthy knowing and healthy being.¹⁶ When presence is lost, people become fragmented, defensive, or performative. They no longer inhabit themselves with peace. This loss of presence is not merely psychological; it is ontological disorientation. The person becomes estranged from their own dignity.
Sarah Coakley deepens this analysis by locating desire itself within ontology. Desire, she argues, is not a defect to be managed but a clue to our created orientation toward God.¹⁷ When desire is severed from its transcendent reference point, it does not disappear, it becomes anxious, obsessive, or absolutised. Modern culture’s fixation on sex, gender, and identity, Coakley suggests, reflects not liberation but a deeper dislocation: desire without a final horizon.
This dislocation has ethical consequences. When desire is misdirected, dignity becomes unstable. People oscillate between self-assertion and self-erasure, between demanding recognition and collapsing under its absence. Institutions respond by multiplying categories, policies, and affirmations, but these often address symptoms rather than the underlying fracture.
Miroslav Volf warns that dignity collapses most decisively where exclusion becomes normalised.¹⁸ Exclusion is not always violent; it is reminder enough. It tells some that they belong fully, and others that they are tolerated conditionally. Over time, this conditional belonging corrodes both the excluded and the includers. The community loses its moral centre.
Against this, the Christian tradition insists that dignity is not maintained by vigilance alone, but by worship rightly ordered. Formation matters because worship names reality. It reminds people who they are before telling them what to do. When worship is displaced, by markets, ideologies, or even therapeutic moralism, formation does not cease; it simply changes hands.
This returns us to the central claim: dignity cannot survive on affirmation alone. It requires formation grounded in truth, desire ordered toward God, and practices that rehearse belonging prior to performance. Without these, even well-intentioned societies will continue to injure the very dignity they claim to protect.
Conclusion: Dignity as Gift, Not Achievement
Dignity is not a moral achievement, a social concession, or a psychological state. It is an ontological gift. When this is forgotten, ethics becomes anxious, law becomes brittle, and identity becomes a site of contestation rather than rest.
This essay has argued that the modern crisis of dignity is not primarily the result of malice, but of misordering. We ask ethical questions before ontological ones. We debate rights without agreeing on what a human is. We protect dignity rhetorically while leaving its foundations undefined.
Ancient and medieval philosophy understood what modern culture often resists: being comes before doing; ontology before ethics; gift before obligation. Christianity intensifies this insight by rooting dignity not merely in human nature, but in divine naming. To be human is to be addressed before one speaks, loved before one acts, and claimed before one chooses.
This does not eliminate moral responsibility. It makes it possible. As N. T. Wright reminds us, transformation begins with the renewal of the mind not the enforcement of rules or the celebration of spontaneity.¹⁹ When people know who they are, they can live accordingly. When they do not, even virtue becomes performative.
The tragedy of modern dignity discourse is that it often tries to secure dignity by multiplying safeguards rather than clarifying foundations. But no amount of procedural protection can compensate for ontological uncertainty. If dignity is granted by institutions, it will always remain vulnerable to revision, revocation, or reinterpretation.
If dignity is conferred by God, it stands even when denied.
This does not solve every ethical disagreement. It does something more basic: it stabilises the human. It places a limit on power, a restraint on cruelty, and a hope beneath failure. It tells the traumatised, the marginalised, the unborn, the elderly, and the forgotten that their worth does not fluctuate with recognition.
In a culture tempted to define the human by utility, choice, or coherence, the ontology of dignity insists on something quieter and stronger:
You matter because you are.
You are because you are named.
And you are named before you ever speak.
Some Poetry
Becoming Better
A shrouded game dealt by others’ compulsive choice,
Old cards already bent before they hit the crooked table,
Hostile rules whispered after the wager was pre-lost,
My broken hands empty but blamed for the outcome.
Like a drunk stumbling around,
Elbows bruised on barroom tables,
Laughing too loud so no one hears the bleeding ache,
Calling it freedom because it numbs fast.
Just another cracked bottle to get to the bottom of,
Glass after trembling glass chasing the promised ghosted silence of Cap Theorem
That never stayed silent long enough,
My throat burning for something cleaner than forgetfulness.
Stronger than liquor;
Hate.
Distilled, aged, swallowed neat.
Hate.
Hate.
Fed by probability, baptised in suspicion, taught to call it freedom.
I learned to hate my blue eyes.
Not because they were weak,
But because they saw too much
And were taught to apologise for it.
Like questions asked with answers already written.
They stared down the barrel of a gun,
Iced metal logic pressed to the face,
Finger twitching with borrowed certainty,
Daring me to flinch.
The noose of relativism tightening its grin.
At the instructed monster in the mirror,
A thing assembled piece by piece,
Fear roughly hand-stitched to fear,
Given my name and told to despise that it was mine.
I believed their lies.
Because familiar repetition sounds like truth
When you’re tired,
When you want the consuming shouting to stop.
Lies.
Lies.
Lies.
The haze gone.
Not suddenly,
But like fog lifting from a field
That didn’t know it was soaked.
Your love shone.
Not as spotlight or spectacle,
But as steady daylight
That doesn’t argue with the dark,
Just replaces it.
For nineteen months
I’ve written a love song,
Not polished, not pretty,
Just honest enough to keep breathing.
I’ve asked:
If You say who we are,
Why don’t we believe it?
Why do we trust the mad crowd more than the Creator,
The echo more than the voice?
I’ve wept at humans
Like us
So terrified of insignificance
We weaponise belonging,
Call it justice, call it progress.
Manipulating to hold power, status, control,
Stacking ladders on bruised, bleeding, broken backs,
Calling domination “care”
And coercion “compassion.”
They labelled us.
Reduced mystery to metrics,
Souls to slogans,
People to positions on a chart,
A number on an ID.
Separated us from dignity,
As if worth were conditional,
As if our shallow breath itself
Needed permission to count.
Kept us chasing the wishing well,
Glittered paper coins bleeding from our pockets,
Promises rusting at the bottom,
Hope marketed but never delivered.
Disappointment, a global song.
Slaves to the hustle,
Measuring life by output on spreadsheets and applause,
Running faster so we don’t have to ask
Why we’re running at all.
Just to belong.
Their instrumentation:
Clipboards, screens, policies, procedures,
All fine-tuned to the frequency of taxed control.
A cruel torture device.
Not screaming, not chains,
Just constant pressure,
Enough to make you doubt your own name,
Teaching us to breathe not-enough like air.
They call it reason,
But forgot the T.
Truth removed for efficiency,
Meaning sacrificed for manageability.
Our lives, a pawn for experimentation.
Hypotheses written on our bodies,
Outcomes measured in headlines,
Failures buried quietly.
You answered my song.
Not when I was impressive,
But when I was exposed.
And now I see:
The hate was given.
Injected, not innate.
The lies entrenched.
Poured into grooves before I could resist.
The monster created.
Trained to survive in a world
That rewards fragmentation,
Called fake-it-till-you-make-it.
But in You
I see the kindness in blue eyes,
Not soft, not naïve,
But resilient, unashamed, unbroken.
That stayed strong
Not by hardening,
But by refusing to become cruel.
Because You said I can.
Because You spoke before I performed.
You held me long enough
To feel my calloused feet again.
You answered my little song.
Not with noise;
No thunder, no spectacle,
With naming.
Calling me what I was
Before the distortion.
The hate was learned.
The lies rehearsed.
The monster trained
By hands that called it care,
By voices that said, “This is love,”
While teaching me to disappear.
But You did not flinch
At my blue eyes.
Did not recoil from the seeing.
You didn’t look away.
Not when I confessed,
Not when I trembled,
Not when I named the sprawling damage.
You said I was not the gun,
Not the threat, not the violence.
Not the mirror,
Not the distortion staring back.
Not the echo,
Not the repetition of other people’s fear.
So teach me how to stand
Without apology,
Without disguise,
Without borrowing my worth.
Where You already stand.
In truth that does not need consensus.
Help me be better,
Not to earn love,
Not to perform repentance,
But to be true.
Aligned.
Whole.
For You.
Help me be better
For You.
Thank You for being the beautiful reason I don’t have to die.
ajb ‘26
TRACK TO ENJOY:
Footnotes
¹ Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 134.
² Elsa Tamez, The Bible of the Oppressed, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1982), 10.
³ Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 17–20.
⁴ James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 25–26.
⁵ Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 29–31.
⁶ Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 734.
⁷ Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 36.
⁸ N. T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 172–173.
⁹ Esther Lightcap Meek, Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 39–40.
¹⁰ Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay “On the Trinity” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 8–11.
¹¹ James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2016), 7–8.
¹² Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 304–305.
¹³ N. T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 172–173.
¹⁴ Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 36.
¹⁴ Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), 36.
¹⁶ Esther Lightcap Meek, Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 39–42.
¹⁷ Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality, and the Self: An Essay ‘On the Trinity’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 8–11.
¹⁸ Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 29–31.
¹⁹ N. T. Wright, After You Believe: Why Christian Character Matters (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 172–173.
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