Redefining Personal Responsibility

The phrase "personal responsibility" or "individual responsibility" has often been taken by the Left as code for conservative policies that reinforce the divide between the haves and the have-nots. That's not surprising: the Right routinely invokes the phrase to imply that government should not do much to help ordinary people, who should rather just help themselves.  

This is not the kind of "individual responsibility" I am interested in here. But nor am I talking about the apparent alternative: abdicating personal responsibility by trusting a cadre of elites to promote our best interests through a variety of social programs and policies. Instead, I'm advocating an understanding of individual responsibility that goes beyond such traditional formulations, which tend to be more politically divisive than they are constructive.  

Viewed another way, individual responsibility is the privilege and obligation exercised by citizens when they critically examine the spoken and unspoken assumptions of any leader, institution, or corporate entity who would presume to have their interests at heart. That's a demanding task, to be sure, but one we must continually undertake if we are to preserve the democratic ideals upon which our nation was founded.  

The political and commercial mass markets of our culture - advertisers, politicians, the media - spoon-feed their constituencies with technologically slick, but intellectually and morally simplistic, pabulum. They seek to condition us to act as sheep - to turn over to them our money, our votes, our leisure hours our loyalty. Yet the masters of these markets are abetted by their target audiences! They thrive on our own personal interests, our unacknowledged biases, our deep-rooted desires - for these are what give the culture industry, and its leaders, the power to shape our perceptions and influence our behavior.  

Individual responsibility, then, is a challenge to greater self-awareness and heightened skepticism when it comes to the countless entities that seek and demand our allegiance. To place too much of our collective faith in individual leaders, representative organizations, or belief systems themselves is to abdicate this fundamental human responsibility; it is likewise to impoverish the minds and imaginations of future generations.  

The corporate world supplies countless object lessons in how simplified or misleading beliefs can come to dominate collective thinking. It's common, for example, for popular culture to represent corporations in evolutionary terms, as "organisms" seeking to survive and thrive in their given environment. We should see this characterization for what it is, however: a metaphor held over from 19th-century Social Darwinism. The metaphor of the "corporate organism" suggests, dangerously, that it is "natural" for corporate entities to eliminate workplace protections, to reduce salaries and benefits, to lay off thousands of workers, to circumvent environmental laws, and to crush smaller competitors. These strategies, we are told, are simply a means of guaranteeing survival in a competitive, capitalist economy. As it is in nature, so it is in business: only the strong survive.  

Clearly, this metaphor is no longer adequate, for it confuses the natural and the social, and conceals the ways in which governments protect corporations from real competition. Corporations exist only because governments permit them to do so. The legal, regulatory, and economic environment in which corporations are born, live, compete, reproduce, and die is one created by human societies. In a democracy, then, this means that corporations can only do what we the people permit them to do.  

Moreover, the Social Darwinist metaphor implies that morality does not have a place in corporate behavior - a dangerous idea in an age when individual rights, environmental resources, and traditional social patterns are under increasing pressure from global capitalism.  

There are some lessons to be learned here from the "lost generation" of the early 20th century. No generation, perhaps, better understood the need for greater individual responsibility than this cast of critically-minded rebels who founded the literary and artistic movement of the 1920s and 30s known as "modernism," with its explicit injunction against the mingling of politics and art. Advanced by intellectuals from around the globe, and typified by experimental artistic forms, modernism critiqued middle-class complacency, cultural dependency on mass media, and the rapidly growing pop-culture industry - what had become, in lieu of orthodox religion, a new "opiate" for the senses.  

Perhaps that's why nobody reads modernist poetry these days - it's just too damn much work. "Art for art's sake" neither encouraged people to see art as merely decorative, without purpose, nor was it intent upon making a sacred fetish of art. This movement was, however, producing art that would have radical cognitive benefits by encouraging self-reflection, heightening awareness, and kindling creative thought, so that all might see the world and its cultures more keenly and more critically. When Wallace Stevens, for example, wrote "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" in the midst of World War I, it was to express his hope that imagination would prevail over jingoistic populism, political propaganda, and institutional values. As a means of combating the violence of the world, Stevens and other modernists endeavored to separate substantive ideas from soul-deadening clichés.  

Modernism, then, offered a challenge to the intellect and a spur to individual responsibility that is just as crucial today. That challenge was not just to our leaders, not just to a political or cultural "elite." The challenge was to individuals, to demand greater intellectual breadth and philosophical depth, to be examples of the rational faculty available to all. In its emphasis on the unorthodox, in its attempt to unsettle perception and disorient the senses, the modernist movement was anti-authoritarian and anti-totalitarian in spirit. Modernist writers, artists, and thinkers sought to expand the popular perception of what constituted human "family," seeing it based not on genetic kinship, but on something larger - call it the human spirit, basic humanitarian principles, the capacity to reason, or something else. Human relationships were held to be sacred, in contrast to corporate, institutional, or political interests.  

Given the conditions and contentions of our current political climate, we would do well to reconsider what the exercise of one's individual responsibility should mean, quite independently of the slogans and policies it has become associated with. Among other things, it means questioning the sense of a militarized "war on terror" based on the fear of such spectral entities as "gathering forces" and "evil-doers." It means resisting the perversion of language by which a "Patriot Act" divests individuals of their civil liberties, by which the "Clear Skies" initiative eases air-pollution regulations, and by which the "Healthy Forests" initiative makes it easier to log old-growth forests. It means educating ourselves about history and culture, so that we can better keep our own cultural and historical moment in perspective. It means all this, and much more.  

Daily besieged as we are by individuals and organizations seeking our allegiance, skepticism is our best defense, and our best opportunity to preserve our autonomy in a world increasingly shaped by institutional thought. As individuals, we have not only the right to do so, but the responsibility.

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