Common ground
Responsibility. It’s a good trait, right? Of course it is! The word itself has an authoritative sound. Its connotations are smothered in virtue. As children, we probably associated it with chores, timely homework, maybe the promise of an allowance. Perhaps it was also the subject of a parental “talking to,” the lesson intended by a punishment. For adults, it’s a characteristic that helps smooth participation in the “real world.” Relationships thrive on shared responsibilities. We hire people in part by judging them by how they managed previous responsibilities, and expect that the people we work with and do business with are, like us, responsible.
Adding the word “personal” in front doesn’t, on the surface, change this; in fact, it’s an effective way to think about those aspects of responsibility largely in our control. Despite the political right’s recent efforts to appropriate the phrase, the ideals embodied in personal responsibility are not the exclusive realm of conservative – or liberal – thought. President Kennedy remarked "of those to whom much is given, much is required,” paraphrasing a verse from the New Testament. President Obama, in his address to the graduating class of the historically Black Morehouse College, juxtaposed the students’ achievements with a pointed call to personal responsibility and to the family.
Well-respected conservative political commentators – George Will, David Brooks, the late Charles Krauthammer come to mind – similarly apply compelling and I think universal ideas to the concept of personal responsibility. Brooks’ column “The Moral Bucket List” is one of my favorites; in it, he balances an inward-looking perspective of personal morality with the complementary notion of shared responsibility, a notion that imparts meaning to the personal. He writes “…people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?
The meme-fication of personal responsibility
What is the message that "personal responsibility" is intended to convey in this meme?
Personal responsibility has, however, recently acquired new and spiteful connotations, a thinly-veiled dog whistle to rail against social programs. It is used as right-wing red meat that sounds so healthy despite its cancerous core. Personal responsibility has been dumbed down, misinterpreted, twisted and abused to justify a host of today’s regressive ills, including
- Disassembling public assistance programs, from Reagan’s references to “welfare queens” to Paul Ryan’s welfare-recipient “culture problem”
- Marginalizing others, as in the stereotype of the lazy Mexican (or just insert another ethnic minority)
- Exploding income inequality – I “earned” mine, why can’t “they” earn their own?
These, and other similar uses, combine to help perpetuate an agenda that fosters the passive imbalances of white privilege, even supports the active evils of white supremacy.
Dishonest (or woefully incomplete)
To understand why such a simple-minded interpretation of personal responsibility is dishonest, we can examine two parts to its definition. To conservatives, it means self-reliance. It’s a concept often applied externally, to others; “You’re down and out? Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!” To liberals, it means do no harm. It’s inward-looking; “How does my behavior affect others? I’d better do something about that problem!” Neither of these is wrong; both are right up to a point. But one view doesn’t survive without the other to complement it.
If personal responsibility is important – and we started out by agreeing that it was – then beyond telling people to get moving, to work harder, we also need to accept some responsibility for how our actions affect others.
In fact, we all do this already. Consider a set of concentric circles; you, of course, are at the center. The next circle represents your immediate family – children, a spouse – your significant others. You sacrifice, contribute, and take no small amount of responsibility for their happiness and well-being. The next circle, representing a lessened responsibility, might be your extended family – cousins, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, your in-laws. Then perhaps a community; your school, a faith community, a social club, where belonging carries a connotation of responsibility – to attend, to pay your dues, to participate. Wider circles are your town, state, country, and yes, all of humanity. The degree to which your sense of responsibility diminishes as you move outward from the center varies, but it never reaches zero.
Where does responsibility stop?
Where’s the hypocrisy?
Let’s shift focus to today’s many refugee crises. For those of us living in the U.S., the “crisis” at the southern border might be most front-of-mind, but more abstractly, there are unprecedented crises in Europe, in the Middle East, in Northern Africa, in Myanmar. (Envision those concentric circles again; there’s a definite correlation between how “foreign” these crises are and how much we care.) Discounting the magnitude, we care more about thousands of refugees at our border than we do about millions in northern Africa.
To apply a limited interpretation of personal responsibility is to look away, to blame the law-breakers who dare to violate our borders. Laws, we assert, are enacted for good reasons, and responsible people obey them, right? Zero tolerance!
Before you stop reading, I’m not about to suggest that each of us take full and personal responsibility for all these refugees. Instead, I’ll shift the focus from personal to corporate, in the sense of a commercial entity as well as a community. We’ve been informed by the Supreme Court that corporations are persons with certain rights and responsibilities; to many, this is unsettling, but it is our current reality. Significantly predating this development is an understanding that governments, like people, have rights and responsibilities. In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln borrowed a phrase from Oxford professor John Wycliffe’s 1384 introduction to his Bible translation. Wycliffe wrote “of the people, by the people, for the people,” which Lincoln used to emphasize the promises of unification through shared responsibility and a shared future after the deep rifts of the U.S. Civil War. It follows that the U.S. should exhibit both forms of personal responsibility: private and public, individual and corporate, looking inward and outward as we accept responsibility for our actions on both accounts.
The harm we’ve done
It is well-documented that many of today’s unprecedented refugee crises are, to varying and alarming degrees, consequences of American and European actions. It would be difficult to discuss the plight of refugees in Yemen, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, El Salvador, Mexico, even Venezuela (not an exhaustive list), without acknowledging the impact of Western imperialism. Call it democracy-building, regime change, peacekeeping, oil-grabbing (“protecting American interests”), economic sanctions, even guarding the Second Amendment (fueling the violence in Mexico, where 70% of illegal guns are smuggled in from the U.S.). Good intentions or not, these all have unintended and often devastating consequences. Regardless of the motives, it’s dishonest to suggest that America – and we, as Americans – don’t bear some responsibility. Colin Powell, a moderate Republican who served under four Republican administrations, famously said of Iraq: “you break it, you own it.” (He was speaking about owning responsibility, not about actually owning Iraq.)
Show me the responsibility
How has the Trump Administration responded? I don’t have the room to list (nor you the patience to read) all Trump’s atrocities; here are a few obvious highlights:
- Reduce the number of refugees admitted to the U.S. to a historic low
- Retreat from previous commitments to foreign aid for refugees and asylum-granting countries
- Send a despotic message to migrants by separating children from their families
- Effectively and broadly ban many Muslims from entering the country
Donald Trump may be the epitome of an individual lacking personal responsibility; sociopath is a timid description. But this isn’t a critique of the man’s lack of compassion. Trumpism both inherits these flaws and infects his administration, trickling down to those that support him.
Why do we allow Trump and his minions to shun our responsibility to these refugees? In place of a measured discussion rooted in reality, we are fed a nonstop stream of fear and lies; fear of negative economic impact, of unspecified (but scary) violence, fear, ultimately, of the “other.” Trump effectively pits our abstract outer circles of lessened concern against our tangible innermost circles of supreme responsibility – as if it were a zero-sum game.
Irresponsible? Clearly. And since we, the people, are effectively our government, we are obligated to take some action, however large or small, to correct these wrongs. To take personal responsibility. For if we don’t, who will?
Racist?
I won’t “play the race card” here. But I’ll bet that, if Great Britain were to start sinking rapidly into the Atlantic and the English Channel, we would open our doors to millions of refugees.
How did this become a blog on immigration?
The world is filled with problems; immigration and refugee crises happen to be prominent in the news. I could have chosen homelessness, finding myself at a sort of ground zero in San Francisco, a city struggling with pervasive homelessness. Or income inequality, or universal healthcare. In today’s news, Trump promises to drop affirmative action guidelines promoting diversity in university admissions policies; what does this shift look like when viewed through these differing personal responsibility lenses?
Personal responsibility, at its limiting, libertarian extreme, emphasizes self-reliance, self-transformation, ownership of personal well-being; not bad qualities. Perhaps best epitomized by the rugged cowboy, personal responsibility viewed in such isolation is an anachronism; even today’s “self-made man” has many – including the government – to thank for his or her success. In its more inclusive, progressive sense, personal responsibility balances self-reliance by examining the impact our actions might have, or have had, on others, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. It’s an acceptance of our interconnectedness, our meaningful role in our communities, our countries, our world.
Postscript
Mitt Romney said (and some still repeat that dubious claim) that President Obama went on an “apology tour” after his inauguration. In fact, he did admit to some flaws in American foreign policy – a way of acknowledging some level of responsibility. But in the same speeches, he called on other nations to work together with the U.S. to forge “common solutions to our common problems.” This is, at least in words, a progressive – not liberal, not conservative, but a blend of the two – approach. Contrast this with Trump’s belligerent and isolationist “America First” approach to the world, scuttling alliances, blaming allies, accepting no responsibility.
The next president is going to need more than one apology tour.