Whose Responsibility?
Behind many of the modern day issues is the question of whose responsibility is this or that? We each do, of course, have responsibilities for ourselves throughout life. This is self evident. Part of the formative years is the need to develop our own ability to be independent, and to understand our own strengths and weaknesses as we increasingly make practice attempts to generate progress on our own. Some parents are so stifling, so controlling, and so protective that their kids never ever become really functional independent adults. As a Professor involved with college age students, these kids stood out as quiet, uncaring about others, rigid, fearing change, fearing challenges, were hesitant, critical of diversity, socially inept, and heavily indoctrinated. They kept things close to their vest for fear of the unknown. Without someone making decisions for them, or dictating how they should think, they are lost.
Let’s start with the most overreaching aspect of responsibility. Every society has a government of some sort, and this government has a responsibility to ensure all citizens have access to basic needs. Government is responsible for all the communities under its governance. One of the serious drawbacks of democracy is that once a particular party puts together a majority base, it becomes that base for which they feel responsible. This means good things get parceled out to their base, and the unpleasant things get dumped on the other party’s base. What could possibly be the ethical case for this? There is no genuine patriotism when various segments of a society can’t stand each other, when the affluent feel no responsibility for the welfare of the less fortunate, when racial or religious groups circle the wagons and gate themselves off from other groups diverse from themselves, when religious groups try to force others, via laws, to practice or participate in their own religious beliefs, when huge national debts are run up for future generations to pay (which they won’t either), when wars of varied sorts are fought with borrowed money and paid mercenary armies who signed up to escape a ghetto of some sort, or to get an income, or by nature they get a thrill of some sort out of violence/danger. Without mercenary armies and with a draft instead, then the population will think twice before engaging in these invasions/conflicts (like the people finally revolted in Vietnam) and thus the draft ended. Most citizens made no sacrifice personally whatsoever for the dozens of invasions over the past 60 years. The cost of war should logically be shared by all citizens one way or another, including the financial costs.
Their is no genuine patriotism when citizens tolerate ghetto communities, whether urban, suburban, or rural. There is no proper acceptance of a collective responsibility when we finance schools via local property taxes. Of course we realize that this means affluent neighborhoods will have good schools and poor communities will have poor schools along with poor teachers. There is no legitimate national pride until we care whether all citizens have good health care, a safe environment, job opportunities, the same individual rights, good pensions, and livable wages. When huge numbers of people feel: “I worked hard for what I own and have. I earned my ‘good life’—-let those in urban, suburban, or rural ghettoes earn their own wealth and benefits.” Remarkably, those who say this sort of thing are often quite religious and devout followers of their own inherited religion. They refer to our country as a Christian nation. That always seemed strange to me since, if Jesus were living today, it seems only logical that he would spend his life, as he did back in his own historical age, helping the poor, the sick, the outcasts, and the less fortunate of all kinds. All religious prophets of major religions have preached the need for everyone to give excess earned wealth to those less fortunate. Jesus believed in family values too, but the family he focused on was the ‘human family’, not genetic cabals. After wrapping themselves around ‘family values’, these are the same people who treasure the national anthem and the American flag the most. It is all so disingenuous and in reality—self serving. True patriots embrace all the diverse people who make up their country.
There is much to be said for individual efforts and individual responsibility for our own actions. We are not all equal. Not in our genetics, our environment, our historical time of birth, our community in which we lived our formative years, our physical appearance, our health status, our personalities, and on and on it goes. It is what it is because diversity plays a major role in the evolutionary process. It is a cruel process where tragedy awaits many of the participants. Humans, however, have a genetically endowed ability to reason and an ethical understanding which enables humans to collectively help the less fortunate, level the playing field for as many as possible, and in so doing, maximize the degree of contentment for the maximum number of people. This is called the Golden Rule—an ethical principle understood by everyone everywhere.
It is also our collective responsibility to enforce some system of reproductive responsibility. There is nothing wrong with responsible reproduction. The needs of society as a whole always trump the needs of individuals. No one with any degree of intelligence would suggest that our planet can flourish if human population doubles as it has in my life time. If it does, the lives of billions will be lost, not to mention further raising the current species extinction rate which is now the 6th major extinction era in evolutionary history—on top of which this current extinction rate is noted as almost entirely due to human activities. We are trapped now in a culture where ‘other’ people don’t count, other species don’t count, environmental protection or climate change rejected because of the cost, facts are irrelevant, emotional baseless opinions are truth, any sacrifice for an ethical society is trumped by self serving materialistic goals, while violence as the means to an end has become more and more rampant.
It is our collective responsibility to protect our natural environment including the air we breathe, the water we drink, and all the natural resources upon which we depend. All the preceding flaws in human nature help prevent climate change. Everything in this paragraph impacts on the future of humans, other species, and the nature of our planet. The planet will survive, evolution will proceed, but the nature of life on our planet is at stake. It does not seem that anything in this paragraph, or some of the preceding paragraphs, are beyond the ability of humans to understand. Unfortunately, we are still flawed by our greed, our self-serving mental states, and political/religious/cultural mindsets which paralyze us from saving the future of our society. It is a rare politician anywhere that even talks about the matters covered in this paragraph. Mention responsible reproduction and most just conclude “Well there is nothing we can do about that. No one is going to let anyone tell them how many children they can have.” Same with sharing our wealth with the less fortunate. “it is my wealth, I earned it and I want to give it all to my own kids.” End of discussion. Of course, we all like to say that everyone should earn their own wealth—except our own kids who should be given huge amounts of unearned wealth via inheritance. We are all so disingenuous regarding major aspects of life. Inheritance is just another form of welfare.
We can blame those who live in our urban, suburban, or rural ghettos for their plight and we do. But because we allow these ghettos to wallow in their own misery and to grow larger decade after decade we have created a very explosive situation. Science dictates that people, especially children, who live with chronic high levels of stress hormones in their body will be physiologically affected, especially those in their formative years. This is not to infer that only those in ghettoes can end up with chronic high levels of stress hormones in their bodies. And it is also true that individual responses to stress vary considerably. Not everyone raised in a ghetto is adversely affected in any permanent way, but most are. We watch these people in riots and many of their everyday actions and we are aghast at their behavior—“they act like vicious/dumb animals”. Yes they often do. If we allow people to be raised like animals, they may end up behaving like animals. Beware of people who have nothing to lose in life. They are usually not filled with kindly thoughts and are even eager to make others feel their pain in life. After listening to someone emotionally make clear to me how much they despised the people trapped in a ghetto community, I remarked: “it is quite clear how you feel about them, but why then are you so upset, when given a chance, that they show how much they hate you?”
Ours is the first age noted for human overpopulation, The ever increasing toxicity of differing groups toward each other, is hardly a surprise. When there is not enough pie for everyone to get a piece, behaviors deteriorate. This is probably the first time in American history when the older population often state “I would not want to be young again given the current state of affairs”. Which is not to say a sizable portion of our citizens do not live well, appreciate diversity, live mostly by the golden rule, and are not caught up in endless compulsive/addictive self serving behaviors. But they are not in the majority, as clearly evident from the last Presidential election. Nor is it reasonable to say that these people are all that irrational. The lower economic class victims of our society have lived through Reagan, Bushes, Clinton, Obama etc. and nothing has changed but for the worse in terms of their salaries, pensions, job opportunities, job security, quality of schools, neighborhood safety, health care, and so on. They are at the point they are willing to blow up society as a last measure—just to see what happens after it gets blown up. They have had enough of the empty promises. Even Obama, who tried, could not stop the flow of wealth going to the already wealthy. It is not clear that any President really could succeed in this area.
It is necessary to point out that the long term future of the evolutionary process is not at stake. This process has been going on for billions of years, and the human species involved a mere several hundred thousands of years. Species come and go and almost all eventually become extinct. Of course not us humans, we—blessed with the best inherited religion—will be lolly gagging around in Heaven. The human species is as dominant on the scene as were dinosaurs in their day. I mean, how would they ever become extinct with all their size and power? Humans have already evolved since we arrived, both physically and socially. Our genetic capabilities have really surpassed that of former species. Because of genetic diversity, chance, and environmental changes, predicting the future is simply impossible for any species, or the nature of future living. While humans tend to view ourselves as a focus of importance to the process, there is no real evidence of this. God’s laws (regardless of our concept of God) which run the evolutionary process remain in charge. Time stays, we go and that is about the reality. It is really sort of inane to worry about the future of our grandchildren or their grandchildren—since soon we will never have anything to worry about again and whoever ends up being our genetic descendants will never give a thought about us either.
Gone with the wind is a perceptive expression.
