The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Flex
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The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

Post by Flex »

One of the things that's been rolling around in my head these last weeks and months has been thinking about the ideas of collective and personal guilt and responsibility, sparked both by discussions here around Ukraine as well as the discussion sparked by Madeline Albright's passing. No real answers, just something that my brain seems to have seized on and likes to get me to noodle here and there. Anyways, one of the podcasts I listen to just released an episode on precisely this question:



I share it because this topic seemed to be of some interest to a few of us here. I don't particularly endorse (or particularly oppose) any of the points made in the video, and it's interesting to me precisely because I don't think either Robert Wright or Nikita Petrov get a particularly great handle on even really articulating some of these ideas, let alone come away with conclusions. It's just really hard to reason through the nature of our personal responsibility as it relates to both state action and these huge, historical issues.

Anyways, I don't know if I have a particularly good hook to start discussion but the nature of responsibility is sort of a core concept that animates a lot of political and moral thought so I thought having a thread on it may be interesting.
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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Perhaps I'm taking this in a different direction than what you intended, and if so, my apologies and we can ignore what I'm saying here. But one of the things I've tried to foster in students is the idea that, whether in their real lives or in their academic ones as thinkers and arguers, they're moral actors, not disinterested bystanders. There's a perverse (to me) idea that students pick up (partly from their teachers, mostly from popular media) that they are supposed to be objective, unbiased, withholding judgment. To offer an opinion is a bad thing, that it means being "unfair"; education is about finding objective truths. History students are especially susceptible to this, dodging moral judgment on past actors. When I bring up the example of the Holocaust or enslavement of African Americans, that's different—nobody wants to seem insensitive to obvious moral crimes. But if we can say the Holocaust was wrong, why not, say, the War on Drugs and its vast collateral damage? The existence of tougher arguments is treated as a reason not to engage at all.

Getting them to appreciate that evaluating current events and past events on moral grounds isn't some kind of violation of your humanity—that you're not being "fair"—but is about being a responsible human being who is putting value in our sociability, that's a tough nut to crack. Getting people to realize that judgement is not the same thing as being judgemental, and that avoiding judgement is shirking a shared responsibility. It's fine to say that you lack the context and information to make an evaluation, but to deny the validity of the action altogether is what's so troubling and dangerous.
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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Dr. Medulla wrote:
17 Jun 2022, 1:51pm
Perhaps I'm taking this in a different direction than what you intended, and if so, my apologies and we can ignore what I'm saying here. But one of the things I've tried to foster in students is the idea that, whether in their real lives or in their academic ones as thinkers and arguers, they're moral actors, not disinterested bystanders. There's a perverse (to me) idea that students pick up (partly from their teachers, mostly from popular media) that they are supposed to be objective, unbiased, withholding judgment. To offer an opinion is a bad thing, that it means being "unfair"; education is about finding objective truths. History students are especially susceptible to this, dodging moral judgment on past actors. When I bring up the example of the Holocaust or enslavement of African Americans, that's different—nobody wants to seem insensitive to obvious moral crimes. But if we can say the Holocaust was wrong, why not, say, the War on Drugs and its vast collateral damage? The existence of tougher arguments is treated as a reason not to engage at all.

Getting them to appreciate that evaluating current events and past events on moral grounds isn't some kind of violation of your humanity—that you're not being "fair"—but is about being a responsible human being who is putting value in our sociability, that's a tough nut to crack. Getting people to realize that judgement is not the same thing as being judgemental, and that avoiding judgement is shirking a shared responsibility. It's fine to say that you lack the context and information to make an evaluation, but to deny the validity of the action altogether is what's so troubling and dangerous.
This is great, and I think interrelated to what I was thinking about. I havent had time to really write out my thoughts, but I wonder if increasing personal atomization is a shared root cause. It's hard to feel a sense of collective responsibility, indeed even feel compelled to take personal moral positions, if one feels alienated and isolated without any sense that one's thoughts or actions make a difference.
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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Flex wrote:
18 Jun 2022, 8:34pm
I wonder if increasing personal atomization is a shared root cause. It's hard to feel a sense of collective responsibility, indeed even feel compelled to take personal moral positions, if one feels alienated and isolated without any sense that one's thoughts or actions make a difference.
The past few years, my thinking has leaned towards our hedonistic culture as the generator. It encourages selfishness and an ignoring (and ignorance) of social consequences. Which is to say, I lean to Huxley rather than Orwell.

While I'm an atheist and unambiguously oppose the politics of right-wing religion, I think the framework of religious criticism should be appreciated better. Religion shifts the perspective away from that hedonistic self-interest toward one where our actions and inactions are heavily guided by wider and longer-term consequences. In religion, the consequence might be the effect on your soul or Judgment Day and all that unprovable stuff, but it does accept that our immediate enjoyment should not be the primary motivation, that we need to be more reflective and considerate of the implications of our actions, and that it is not inappropriate for our peers to critique us. Caring about others requires stepping back from the hedonistic ideal that has dominated since the 60s.
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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Related, an op Ed perfectly illustrating the mindset:
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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Think of the utopia that we would achieve if we stopped communicating meaningfully! It'd be just the perfect, blandest watercooler talk about what we're doing on the weekend and what we did on the weekend … but all the time! Who needs heroin?
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

Post by Sparky »

Flex wrote:
19 Jun 2022, 8:34am
Related, an op Ed perfectly illustrating the mindset:
I agree with it to an extent, but that's a tough one for me because of all the big lie and conspiracy theorists who are out there right now. When they try to undermine our democracy, I can't help but judge them.
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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Sparky wrote:
19 Jun 2022, 11:20am
Flex wrote:
19 Jun 2022, 8:34am
Related, an op Ed perfectly illustrating the mindset:
I agree with it to an extent, but that's a tough one for me because of all the big lie and conspiracy theorists who are out there right now. When they try to undermine our democracy, I can't help but judge them.
I judge Ciara Kelly all the time by immediately turning the page when I see one of her rubbish articles or by furiously reaching for the remote control to switch over anytime her voice comes on my radio.

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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Flex wrote:
19 Jun 2022, 8:34am
Related, an op Ed perfectly illustrating the mindset:
That's fine for people liking the Big Bang Theory and cricket pizzas with peanut butter but as a blanket statement its idiotic.

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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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"I think poor people are lazy vermin who should have their children taken away from them because they're obviously incompetent at life. Don't judge me or my views!"
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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Just happy and relieved to learn nobody gets judged by the colour of their skin anymore and the so-called "gender wars" are nothing but a figment of my over eager imagination.

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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Low Down Low wrote:
19 Jun 2022, 2:19pm
Just happy and relieved to learn nobody gets judged by the colour of their skin anymore and the so-called "gender wars" are nothing but a figment of my over eager imagination.
As I understand it, only the left is racist and sexist because it makes white men feel bad about telling how it is.
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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Its like that famous mlk quote:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will maybe not be judged by the color of their skin but very definitely not by the content of their character."
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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Flex wrote:
19 Jun 2022, 3:42pm
Its like that famous mlk quote:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will maybe not be judged by the color of their skin but very definitely not by the content of their character."
After all, he was guided by a faith that the arc of history bends toward indifference.
"I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength, like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung." - Richard Nixon, Checkers Speech, abandoned early draft

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Re: The Collective and Personal Responsibility Thread

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Dr. Medulla wrote:
19 Jun 2022, 6:41am
The past few years, my thinking has leaned towards our hedonistic culture as the generator. It encourages selfishness and an ignoring (and ignorance) of social consequences. Which is to say, I lean to Huxley rather than Orwell.

While I'm an atheist and unambiguously oppose the politics of right-wing religion, I think the framework of religious criticism should be appreciated better. Religion shifts the perspective away from that hedonistic self-interest toward one where our actions and inactions are heavily guided by wider and longer-term consequences. In religion, the consequence might be the effect on your soul or Judgment Day and all that unprovable stuff, but it does accept that our immediate enjoyment should not be the primary motivation, that we need to be more reflective and considerate of the implications of our actions, and that it is not inappropriate for our peers to critique us. Caring about others requires stepping back from the hedonistic ideal that has dominated since the 60s.
I'm circling back to this after thinking about it a little (and having a few gins). I sort of instinctively draw back from the kind of anti-hedonism talk which, as you know, here in the U.S. is often particularly coded as a sort of moral majority issue where it's an excuse to demonize various proclivities. But there's something here that obviously has much more to do with rampant capitalist consumerism. It seems like we're dropped into a society that promises almost unlimited material pleasures and weds it with severe, artificial scarcity. In that context - how can you blame people for getting what they can when the getting is good right? The natural gravity is to eat away at the idea of the person as a moral actor. All that's available to us is the act of consumption, and that act is under constant threat, and so how else are we supposed to respond to the environment except with self interest? How can we judge anyone who acts harmfully in their own self interest? How can we ask anyone to act for a collective good? It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop that the more rampant the consumption the more we increase the threat that our consumption will be disrupted (whether because of financial reasons, environmental, other).

There's a broad solution here: the end of capitalism. I, eh, don't exactly know how that's going down. There's a conundrum where we can make changes for ourselves, how we act, but that itself feels atomised. We may improve our own behavior, our own actions, but what good does it do the collective? That seems like the sense of helplessness kicking in. At past historical moments there were mechanisms for collective action, unions for example, that seem lacking for many now. How do we even engage in collective action for the purpose of collective solidarity and social betterment. Not easy!
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Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead
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