STA divides actions into an interior principle (either first or second nature) and an exterior principle: law. Law is thus both a link to something higher and the recognition of a constraint on how much we can do by ourselves; in the first sense it is a source of dignity and in the second sense a limitation of it.
(1) Law is taking part in something above ourselves, so there can only be law to the extent that we understand our actions in this way. This often happens though the antiquity of law, which gives the sense that this is how things have always been done, but it minimally requires the universal conviction that law deserves the sacrifice of any gain that could come at its expense. Where this conviction is not universal, the sense grows that law is for suckers, and that its veneration is a myth that the strong use to keep the stupid in line and to get them to die on cue. This seems to be the conviction that arose in the U.S. after Vietnam, where any possible source of law in tradition, government or patriotic feeling was called into question.
For all that, we still derive dignity by participation in a collective that transcends us: those who go to Ivy league schools enjoy the glow of the alma mater, sports fans rise and fall with the fortunes of the team, scholars congratulate themselves at passing peer review, etc. What’s been largely missing since Vietnam is a common dignity that could be the foundation of law. Sports teams and colleges don’t write laws, and allegiance to a political party is not to the entity that makes law.
(2) Participation requires subordination of the part to the dignity of the whole, so the person has to take himself to be less dignified than the whole. That vague contempt one might take for everyone that didn’t go to Harvard is a contempt for the a state that everyone is born into. So far as we live under the idea that we exist and have dignity of ourselves we will see no point in participated dignity, and in this sense individualism is contrary to law. While it’s unavoidable that we will relate to our dignity both through our talents and intrinsic qualities and our participation in larger collectives, nevertheless the individualist spirit as such must marginalize and occlude this latter source of dignity.
Persons in individualist cultures will be keenly aware of the ways in which collective dignity can destroy individual value: the dangers of conformity and patriotism, the stupidity of mob behavior, etc. They also know the thrill of believing that one is the master of his actions with no need for exterior principles. All my reasons can be my own, all my accomplishments can be by my effort… Doesn’t the principle of sufficient reason require that all that ever occurs must have a sufficient reason that I can know for myself?
But operation follows existence, and only God exists without participating in anything else. All created activity is under law, and so the universe must have at least one Dionysian hierarchy and we shouldn’t be surprised to find more of them.
The reality of law constrains how much we can know, since all knowledge is within us but law is a source of our action that is not within us.
Just Thomism 