Being here (4) …. Being responsible…
Torrey Orton
July 12, 2010
Being responsible and taking responsibility for…
My friend Hamid likes being and I am moved by the care he gives to his being…steadily pursuing its latest manifestation(s) in shaping his future (and mine to the extent that my doing and his overlap). I was engaged with my being early one recent morn – a time when I am most able to contemplate uninterruptedly. My topic was responsibility. I was musing upon it, pondering* it…my responsibility, or lack of it, in a recent event.
I became aware that taking responsibility and being responsible are different moments in the process of responsibility. Being responsible - that is, having a source of responsibility in me - is the pre-condition for taking responsibility and consequently acting responsibly. To act responsibly I have to already, all the time, have the need and intention to be responsible quietly present to me. In this sense, my being responsible is the origin or source (here the noun matters as the verb did above) of my doing things responsibly (or trying to!).
And here we can segue into ethics – both learning and acting – gliding on the back of character or foundational values, without which we cannot take action, ethical or otherwise. Being responsible is one of these values. Taking responsibility for specific actions is the public expression of character.
Actively denying responsibility for something, especially if not explicitly having been asked to take responsibility for it, is a backhanded acknowledgement of a self-perception of having actual or possible responsibility for it – guilt by defensiveness?. You can see this at work in public sex scandals when the implicated (eg. footy team managements and the users of their public faces for profit – advertisers, would be celebs, etc.) protest the innocence or mitigate the undenied behaviour of the accused. Or, see the recent David Jones CEO resignation for a higher class of the same predicament for corporate boards.
Back to being…
So, when we are working with people about being, we might entice them into experiencing their own values and virtues. Enticements might be invitations to tell stories about challenging events in their lives of which they, or which others who they value, are proud or ashamed. Both 'good' and 'bad' experiences (hence pride and shame as markers) can be sources of value finding because they are heavily loaded with various feelings and so self-traceable along the tracks of one's history. Values have to be enticed into view often because they reside in the foundations of our being and are shy of the light of day. Values and virtues tend to be a bit self-abnegating or they can easily turn into vices (pride, hubris, arrogance…).
In the process of seeking and bringing virtues and values to light we implicitly disclose the structures of being, perhaps. For instance, when acting responsibly we are in tune with ourselves and experience our intentions as emerging smoothly from the circumstances requiring them - a kind of mild flow experience.
Depleted replicas?
We learn to be responsible by doing and being with others – the active processes of social role modelling. Learning responsibility, among others, takes years, the sort of learning only an upbringing can provide. Hence, it takes a village to raise a child. It is possible in our times, freer of villages than ever, that those aspects of being inhabited by virtues and values will be thinly populated by depleted models. A google of their spiritual entrails may reveal bloodless, because unblooded, replicas of our historical values and virtues.
Being on the edge of nothingness??
*it's hard to know the right verb here, not because the action is evanescent (pondering is just a bulky musing) but because the subject assumes a different materiality with the action expressed in it! Responsibility is as often engaging for its presence as its absence, in which case the feeling is heavy and its trigger the sadness of disappointed, though justifiable, expectations of self or others.
