WOTD LXVIII - Responsibility
Time for some synthesis feat. twentieth century theology.
Today’s word is in fact a family of words: respond, responsible, responsibility [v., adj., n.]. Sure, they all come from Latin, which is very fun and lovely: respondeo, -ere, … etc. is the verb, meaning “to respond” or “to answer / to refute”; and there’s the noun responsus, -us which is rendered “response” or “answer.” All of that is quite obvious.
This merits a WOTD, however, not because of any novelty of the word(s), but because of an entire book which I read years ago: The Responsible Self, by H. Richard Niebuhr. It was published posthumously in 1963 and consists of material from lectures he delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1960. Now, although this is the only full work by Niebuhr which I have read, I am sufficiently familiar with other ideas of his to know that I do not agree with everything he wrote. (How could I? He is not God.) Therefore, do not take what follows as a blanket endorsement of his full theological program. Please bear with a long block quote as we begin [and please excuse any possible errors; I am transcribing from a commonplace book]. All bolded emphases mine:
For the word “I” we substitute now the word “one”; the “I” now becomes one among many, yet not one self among many selves; it is just one living body among many bodies; one thinking mind among many minds; one complex of feelings among many such complexes. So the person loses himself in a mass and responds not as a self but as a part of a machine, or of a field of faces, or of a system of ideas. It responds in all its action not to the act by which it is a self but to the action by which the group of bodies or of minds or of emotions exists.… Some social psychologists call this situation one in which the self is “Other-directed” rather than “self-directed”; we might call it the situation of response to all others except that otherness by which the self is self, and of response therefore by forces in the body and the mind, but not by the self as self.… [W]e might speak of it as the state of our unresponsiveness as selves. In this state we say “I think” but really mean “It seems”; we say “I believe” but really mean “It appears likely.” Even contracts, promises, and commitments are made in a third-person mood as though our signature on the bond meant “Someone will see to it that this one or its heirs will meet this obligation.” We may even make the commitment “I will love, honor, and keep thee” as though it meant “It seems likely something in me will continue to love, respect, and be good to you.”
…
Or, to state the matter in another way, by that action whereby I am I in all the roles I play, in reaction to all the systems of action that impinge upon me, I am in the presence of the One beyond all the many. And my response to every particular action takes the form of response also to the One that is active in it.
…
When I respond to the One creative power, I place my companions, human and subhuman and superhuman, in the one universal society which has its center neither in me nor in any finite cause but in the Transcendent One. And the response is accordingly qualified.
H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self: Chapter 4, Section II.
Sixty some years after Niebuhr gave these lectures, our dear English language has only been further weaponized for the atomization of selves. Is this not the entire undercurrent animating the contemporary thesis of “Mass Formation Psychosis”? That the individual self might be so doused and drowned in a sociocultural solvent that what is left is a pool of homogenous sludge, suitable only for blunt politicking? But let us first move backwards. Let us exercise retrosynthesis.
For some, this may be uncharted waters. “What is all this about selves and responding to “otherness” and a Transcendent One etc. etc.?” Niebuhr’s thesis is plain: that before man was/is/will, God is. That every speck of material reality and every speck of time itself was and is created and upheld by God. Therefore, because man is in a position of infinite subordination—sub, “under,” ordination, “rank”—to God, man can never subvert or contradict God’s agency, or Authorship [my term]. Instead, because God always has the first Word—and the last Word: Alpha and Omega—man always, unswervingly, shall have the second word. Man is in a position of infinite response.
This is not to say that man does not have free will: he unambiguously does. Man may respond however he wishes! But always it shall be a response. Man cannot, definitionally, declare, as God can. “The Heavens declare the glory of God.” Man may elect to also declare the glory of God, or man may elect not to: but either way, it is a response to and in light of the glory of God. In Niebuhr’s conception, the nucleus of man’s existence—the nucleus of the self—is response. Everything in Creation is an act, an outpouring, of God; therefore everything which man may do, as man is part of Creation, shall consequently be of a responsive nature towards God.
In a recent post, I commented that men are often criticized for shirking responsibilities regarding mate selection, marriage, family formation, etc. Such casual usage of that word tends to aggravate me. Responsibility is a sweeping word charged with majesty and grand scope. To be responsible is to be more than respond-able, or able to respond: it is to be obliged to render a response, it is to have a response demanded of you. Any professional position may be defined as having “responsibilities and privileges,” but I think the better word there is “duties.”
A responsibility is less a thing you carry around like a briefcase and more an existential state of being, a quality. I do not juggle a plethora of responsibilities; rather, I live submitted to responsibility. I am responsible for all of it. Everything. At all times. But what do I mean?
Exhibit 1: you walk into a grocery store. A stocking clerk solicits your help in reaching something off of the top shelf; because you are short, it turns out that you cannot help the clerk. You’ve no responsibility for this shortcoming: you’re simply short.
Exhibit 2: you walk into a grocery store. A stocking clerk solicits your help in reaching something off of the top shelf; because you are weak, it turns out that you cannot help the clerk. Why not? While you are tall enough, you cannot lift the case of Twinkies. You bear responsibility here. You’ve no good reason to have not been strong enough to lift a case of Twinkies. Have you sinned? Some might say so. I am content to say only this: if we are to love our neighbors, and we are then physically incapable of helping our neighbors, how are we going to love them? The bottom line is that that case of Twinkies has to come off the shelf. Somebody has to do it. Why not you?
Exhibit 3: you frequently log onto your favorite social media and disgorge a colossal jeremiad against BlackRock Inc. Fair enough. Have you looked at your 401(k) lately? Because you probably gave a bunch of your money to BlackRock. That is an assets management firm, and in all likelihood, “your” assets are numbered in what they manage. So now you’re at a crossroads. Do you want to maximize your returns from your investment portfolio, or do you want to be intellectually honest? You are responsible to your conscience [and God, incidentally]. If you wish to continue whining and weeping over the fact that somehow, mysteriously, BlackRock has enough money to buy up a bunch of real estate you don’t think they ought to own, consider that some of that money they’re using is yours. In fact, the returns you are enjoying on your 401(k) are quite literally runoff from the profits BlackRock is making from, among other ventures, their real estate dealings. Yes, I go so far as to suggest that a person may be responsible for what he does with his treasure, even sequestered though it may be in a retirement account.
How could he not be responsible? It is his treasure and no one else’s.
Using such sweeping language concerning one’s responsibility to the world (truly, it is unto God, but that human-to-divine responsibility is often realized and expressed through human-to-human avenues) is, I recognize, a precarious road. “But Paul, this is a one-way road to legalism [or works righteousness]!” Yes, I suppose it may very well be, if not for the moderating theologies of Grace and Charity. Remember that Niebuhr’s book is titled The Responsible Self; and was that title written about men? No. That title was written about Jesus Christ. Christ, Niebuhr says, was the responsible self. He responded on account of all. There is therefore no condemtnation… etc.; the New Testament is awash with reassurances that we mustn’t tremble too much. But, paradoxically, we are to tremble. We are to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.
Like Kierkegaard before him, Niebuhr is pointing to the transcendent, ineluctable reality that eclipsing all of one’s ordinary interactions with the subhuman and the human is an infinite interaction between oneself and God. Remember David writing that against God, and God alone, had he sinned; this is only possible in a cosmic arrangement wherein God, the Higher, the Other, the Transcendent, comes before—is preeminent—everything else any self may encounter. Kierkegaard remarks that the relationship between each self and God is itself higher than everything else in Creation. And that relationship is something for which we are responsible.
This is corroborated in the Book of Common Prayer, in which a prayer closes with:
… And, above all, keep in our minds a lively remembrance of that great day, in which we must give a strict account of our thoughts, words, and actions to him whom thou hast appointed the Judge of quick and dead, thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
A strict account? We must respond. A response is demanded of us: for it all. For everything. Remember that the original Latin has slight legal connotations, as the verb had “refute” as a possible definition. Of course, we shall not be doing any refuting before The Lamb of God, but we shall be submitting to judgment.
A closing note, in returning to parts of the long block quote I gave earlier. Another integral component to Niebuhr’s thought is that our self may only find its full realization and identity in relation to the Divine. In our post-postmodern civilizational slurry of today, there is a readily observable inversion of care and affection. Consider the below figure from a paper published in 2019.
Now, consider the above in light of this from Niebuhr:
[W]e might call it the situation of response to all others except that otherness by which the self is self,…
Liberals are more concerned with moral allocation—“care,” or dare I say, response—towards lizards and parasitic protozoa than to their immediate family, and rather dramatically so at that. What is “that otherness by which the self is self”? In Niebuhr’s conception, that is God, of course. But what follows directly after God in the litany of those “others” by whom a self defines itself? Family, and then friends, and then acquaintances, etc.
When one synthesizes Niebuhr’s teachings on the self with the implications of the moral allocation heat maps and with the sociocultural state of affairs in the post-postmodern West, what is one left with? Not many loose ends.
And so this is the WOTD. Responsibility. Take care that you are fulfilling that for which you are responsible. Upbuild your spirit, mind, and body. Sharpen yourself into that which arouses fear and despair in those who are evil and courage and joy in those who are good. The Book of Common Prayer, in another prayer, puts it tidily [emphasis mine]:
… Give us grace to be just and upright in all our dealings; quiet and peaceable; full of compassion; and ready to do good to all men, according to our abilities and opportunities.…
That is what being responsible is. Being ready to do good to all men according to your abilities and opportunities.