I was in a group conversation a while back and somebody a generation younger than me used the word duty. Oh my, you would think this four-letter-word was a profanity. I didn’t have my thoughts fully formed on the subject, but I thought it worth mulling over.
Please help me mull in the comments.
First, apparently, there is a small difference between duty and obligation. You feel an obligation to do your duty. Or you feel an obligation but don’t do your duty. That usually leads us to feeling guilty – even shameful – and we hate to feel that way. Perhaps that is why just mentioning duty caused such a stir in the discussion? Perhaps that is why we prefer not to feel an obligation but “volunteer to do the right thing”? Or not to feel an obligation and do whatever we please? Let me continue with using the term obligation rather than duty. As our feelings motivate our actions, no reason to get you into an off mood.
This, doing whatever we please, is usually called freedom. And if we can keep the focus on freedom, we don’t have to feel as guilty or shameful when we do whatever we please. After all, we are only exercising our Constitution-given freedom rights, aren’t we? But are we, as a super social species, at our best when we do as we please and don’t feel obligated to anything or anybody? (And are our Constitutional rights even about how we are with each other or just about what the State can’t stop us from doing?)
As can probably be read between (or even on) these lines, I have a bit of trouble with how we balance the concepts of freedom vs obligation. My main concern is I think we have an obligation to ourselves and each other to grow in our trustworthiness.
A hard part of trustworthiness is that it requires good boundaries. And that requires we sometimes are willing to say No. No to events. No to things. No to people. No to the immediate-gratification-hungry parts of ourselves.
Saying No can create conflict. Or disappointment. And that can make us feel guilty – and we (still) hate to feel that way. So rather than saying No we say some version of Perhaps. Or we say Yes – knowing we will probably not follow through. There is even such a thing as “The California Yes.” How sad is that?
We are unaware that when we say yes to convenience; we often say no to commitments and trustworthiness.
In my youth, I would always get involved. HOA. Industry organizations. Teaching. But when I first landed in the US and was completely overwhelmed with culture shock, I could not commit to anything. I started to get around the problem by consciously not taking on any extra responsibilities. In the first years my children went to school here in the US, I would for example not volunteer at the school. Then I took on small tasks that just required showing up. You didn’t need to sign up in advance, and nobody noticed if you didn’t follow through on your purely internal plan to help pack back-to-school envelopes or whatever was the task of the day.
I noticed that the people more committed had more fun. They got to know one another. They formed a team. So, I started chairing subcommittees. I could be committed for a couple of weeks. If I had promised to take on a task, I was good on my word. But no long-term commitments, please…
Surely, you can see it went “downhill” from there: naturally, I have done years on the PTA board. And the HOA. And the Danes Abroad Business Group.
I use volunteering as an example because the special thing about volunteer activities is people volunteer. Volunteers don’t get paid. You can’t order a volunteer to do anything. If the climate in the group gets toxic, nobody wants to join to do the work, so volunteer organizations require a type of leadership able to create a non-toxic environment. What could create a toxic climate? People who don’t feel a sense of obligation to do the work they signed up to do.
You know the volunteer who must be the chairperson but who delegates everything, and the constituents never see them or hear from them? They can kill an organization.
There is one more reason I talk about volunteering: it is because the commitments we sign up for voluntarily differ from the tasks we get assigned. Who assigns them? One source is our culture and traditions. I could have felt obligated to volunteer, had it been the norm where I grew up, but it wasn’t. Fundraising was not only not a norm for a public school; it was considered elitist and thus improper in my egalitarian birth culture.
Who are the people or causes you feel an obligation to because of your culture and traditions? How deep and wide are the obligations? To your children? Your parents? Siblings? Other family members? Friends? Colleagues? Neighbors? Fellow congregants? The Party? Fellow countrymen? Causes? The planet?
In her early memoirs, Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote how in her Somali traditions everybody knew their ancestors ten generations back. Whoever descended through their male line from your 10xfather was your clan. And within that clan were obligations to support each other: provide room if they travel to your town, give jobs, give money… Her father, who left the family to fend for themselves and basically sold his daughter into a heinous marriage, expected the daughter to provide for him in his old age. (I will leave it up to your imagination how she felt about this.)
In a society without any other social safety net, you can see how this system of mutual obligations might be a way to assure that everybody, regardless of whether they had living descendants or not, could have some support.
Did we start to build organized safety nets because we wanted everybody to have some support – or because we didn’t want to have face-to-face interactions with relatives demanding we live up to our obligations? Or a bit of both, perhaps?
I have over the years in so many different settings seen how those who are more committed trust each other more and feel a stronger sense of belonging. Commitment and trustworthiness are siblings. When we voluntarily commit, we generate an obligation. Others may have to rush their part of a task or risk their credibility by delivering late if we don’t deliver our work in time. Just because we can send a text, doesn’t mean there is no loss of credibility when we cancel an appointment at the last moment with no excuse. After all, the other party could figure out to set time aside; a time where they might have said No to other activities to hold it open for us.
Commitment and convenience are opposites. Until we learn to say No when we don’t want to commit and give up a little of our freedom to do whatever is most convenient right here and now, we can’t say Yes to becoming trustworthy.
If you will argue that people calculate into their planning that other people will not show up, or deliver on time, or we get used to last-minute cancellations and know it is not personal, I will agree. In many cultures, punctuality is not a value. We respect other people’s freedom to change their minds. We just have to accept that, empirically, the cultures where people prioritize this way are lower on trust. And in many societies, we are gradually becoming aware trust is a high price to pay – far beyond a pervasive feeling of not belonging.
Being free is a right, but also a gift and, consequently, a responsibility. The complications of the world we live in require serious reflection. Because feeling limited in one’s freedom of choice is very frustrating, but it is good to keep in mind that being free does not mean always being able to do everything you want, on the contrary. There are contexts and moments in which we have the right to choose how to behave, what to say or not to say. This happens, in particular, when a decision concerns us personally and does not affect in any way the life and freedom of other people.
On the contrary, if our choice could be harmful to those around us, or to others in general, it is essential to review priorities and ask ourselves: what is most important to do at this moment? How can I act to avoid discomfort for myself and others?
The modern individual, after having experienced disenchantment with the impositions of traditional and religious ethics, finds himself forced to administer his own freedom. But since the human condition is immediately relational and social, he is continually called to answer for the consequences of his actions, thus discovering that freedom and responsibility are inextricably linked.
To be free means to be responsible. Aware, that is, that each of our gestures, each word, will always have its weight, positive or negative.
I just want to quote you left and right with words from this comment, Aldo.
IMO the interweave of rights with responsibilities is a thing we try to avoid looking at too hard in everyday life. But it is an ethical imperative.
Glad you found value in this read and added more value with your insight!
Thank you for your support and for your friendship.
“At the same time I understand that given we are not willing to pay a living wage to those who look after our old people, perhaps what we see are the hallowed market mechanisms at work?”
There may not be a “perhaps” about it. Most, if not all, elder care support facilities are now part of large for-profit organizations. The driving attitude in the U.S. is elder care is not a family responsibility. Parents move into tiered “communities” of support: independent living, some support, and end-of-life support.
Charlotte–
Jeff mulling here:
“In a society without any other social safety net, you can see how this system of mutual obligations might be a way to assure that everybody, regardless of whether they had living descendants or not, could have some support.
Did we start to build organized safety nets because we wanted everybody to have some support – or because we didn’t want to have face-to-face interactions with relatives demanding we live up to our obligations? Or a bit of both, perhaps?”
The author of BLUE ZONES makes a good case that some societies, such as rural Italy, support the elderly even if they’re not related. The elderly live longer, happier, and more productive (!) lives because they’re not left alone. And those supporting them revel in the role of caregiver. Providing support is not seen as a duty as much as a way of life. Part of the reason we must create such a safety net in the U.S. may be the generational diaspora that defines our society. Kids move away from their parents. Their parents are left increasingly alone, especially if they lack a strong circle of friends. (There is less of that generational, geographic movement in other parts of the world.) Senior citizen homes have taken on the role that children were once “obligated” to carry through culture and tradition.
Our current social safety net originated, to a degree, in political philosophy. Does the government have a responsibility to help care for its citizens, especially its aging ones? Hoover said, “No!” Roosevelt said, “Yes!” It’s still a battle.
In California, we have some preschools where the parents are obligated to deliver a certain number of “volunteer” hours every month. It can be as assistant teachers, for a project like building a new playground, deep cleaning, painting and maintenance…
Some years back I read that Holland was considering a similar model for caring for their elders. There simply weren’t enough available “warm hands” so if you want your parents looked after by the state, you have to do your part.
I don’t know where the Dutch landed with this, but in my mind I see a “timeshare” system where a descendant in CA can log hours that will benefit their parent in NH.
At the same time I understand that given we are not willing to pay a living wage to those who look after our old people, perhaps what we see are the hallowed market mechanisms at work? There probably wouldn’t be shortages of care personnel if they were paid like engineers. But there is an old tradition that care is so important that we don’t need to pay for it.
How that inner logic works is not in the GDP oriented world we live in and measure but the love economy where decency still has a place. And that is priceless.