If you look for “personal responsibility” on the internet, you’ll find endless pages of editorials, blog postings, forum discussions and rants on how nobody believes in it anymore. And yet, amongst all that, you’ll find no one questioning it. It seemed ironic to me; amidst all that outrage, try to find someone who genuinely doesn’t believe in it, and you’ll come up short.

Personally, I have become skeptical of “personal responsibility.” It only seems to come up in response to one excellent point or another about systemic problems and the people those problems afflict. “But what about personal responsibility?” I always hear then. Native Americans bear the responsibility for alcoholism rates on reservations; blacks bear the responsibility for their poverty rates; Mexican immigrants bear responsibility for the antiquated, racist immigration laws they break. As if, backed against a wall, the last resort before admitting that systemic problems affect people’s lives, we resort to blaming the victims. The fault lies not in the system that perpetuates problems like poverty, discrimination, or injustice, but with the people victimized by that system.

To us, the idea of “personal responsibility” seems self-evident. “For me,” Calvin Luther Martin writes, “heir to the western metaphysic, the world begins a mere hair-breadth beyond my fingertips. Like Michelangelo’s famous painting in the vault of the Sistine Chapel, I reach out to touch the Spirit of the Universe outside of me. I, ego, am ; I am not event. Though mythology and now quantum mechanics insist I am.” (1999:138) That notion of the sacrosanct individual, distinct, separate, and bristling with the rights invested by Enlightenment philosophy, demands a “personal responsibility” that goes along with those rights. Amidst its endless litany of defenses, you will hear the refrain that personal responsibility liberates us—after all, only by taking responsibility for what we do can we own it, and only then can we change it. If we have no responsibility for it, then it happens to us, putting us in the passive role of the victim, powerless to do anything against it.

But all too often, in reality, it works the other way. Our responsibility cripples us to do anything about it by making us complicit. In a sense, we find a desperate need to defend those crimes because we’ve made them our crimes; we need to defend ourselves. We cannot fully face the horrors of genocide, slavery, racism, invasion, or other atrocities, because we feel our personal responsibility for those crimes.

Consider the modern environmental movement. We take personal responsibility; we accept the role we, individually, have played in destroying the environment, so we focus on the things we can do, individually, to at least not participate in it anymore. You know the litany as well as I do: eat organic, reduce, reuse, recycle, use incandescent light bulbs, take shorter showers, carpool, drive a hybrid, ride a bicycle, et cetera ad infinitum.

And yet, despite this, we know that even if everyone in the world heeded this advice, if we all achieved enlightenment tomorrow and a flowering of global consciousness put us all in tune with a higher frequency or whatever other spiritual or philosophical metaphor you’d prefer, it would not alter our present ecological course. We repeat the litany again, like a shibboleth to ward off the evil spirit of those thoughts and all the evidence, plain for us all to see, that support them, but no matter how much we ignore them, they remain. 90% of the water used each day goes not to individuals, but for industrial and agricultural purposes, like large factory farms, growing cotton in Arizona, or mining coal. It takes 700 gallons of water to grow the cotton for a single t-shirt, and Arizona’s desert environment means that nearly all of that has to come from somewhere else. The remaining 10% gets shared out not just to individual homes, but also for commercial purposes, like keeping golf course grass green (which itself requires about as much water as all of our individual water use combined). The biggest contribution to greenhouse emissions, electricity, has a similar disparity. It takes 500,000 tons of coal each month to power one aluminum smelter needed to manufacture soda cans and aircraft—as much as a million average U.S. households (Booth, 2009). Even while trying to position individual contributions as significant, Michael Vandenbergh must concede that individuals in the United States contribute only 8% of the world’s global emissions—and only one-third of even the United States’ emissions. The remaining two-thirds—the clear majority—comes not from individuals, but from industrial production (Vandenbergh, 2007). According to Jerry Mahlman, “There’s a colossal misperception that if you bike to work once a week and recycle your garbage, then global warming will be fixed up. The problem is that, even if everyone did that, the attempt to stop global warming would fail by a factor of, oh, roughly of 100, from what we really need to be doing.” (Salazar, 2006) Even if everyone in the United States took every suggestion at the end of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to heart and fully implemented them, U.S. carbon emissions would only drop 22% (Jensen, 2009).

As Derrick Jensen illustrates (2009), the logic of “personal responsibility” puts us in a double bind that makes it all but impossible for us to acknowledge where the real damage to our environment comes from—much less to do anything about it. He quotes Kirkpatrick Sale: “The whole individualist what-you-can-do-to-save-the-earth guilt trip is a myth. We, as individuals, are not creating the crises, and we can’t solve them.” Jensen points out how the logic of “personal responsibility” reinforces the capitalist vision of a human being as a consumer, giving us the options to either consume or not consume; it paints our impact as inevitably harmful, giving us the options of “heavy impact” or “light impact.” This logic blazes a trail to suicide—as inevitably consumers, as inevitably harmful, we must reduce our impact as much as possible, and we have the least impact of all once we’ve died. This paints an entirely too narrow picture of the human person. We can do other things besides consume, and we can have positive impacts on the land, too.

This logic did not always plague environmentalism. In 1953, Vermont passed a ban on disposable bottles. In the natural world, non-biodegradable items simply don’t exist. The idea of “throwing things away” does not come naturally to humans. It takes a careful attention to avoid the logical pitfalls of it, too; you must stay vigilant to not ask questions like, “What do you mean by ‘away’?” As a result, the natural response to disposable bottles seemed like, well, disposing of them. People would simply throw them from car windows. Then, as now, the lobbying of special interest groups held more sway than conscience or responsibility in legislative bodies, and then, as now, dairy farmers had a lot of pull in Vermont’s legislature. So, when the broken glass thrown from passing cars got into hay, and from there into the bellies of cows, and farmers started losing their cows, the Vermont legislature acted. At that time, it seemed obvious that a product designed to promote a particular behavior bore the responsibility for that, not the individuals who behaved in the manner the product promoted by design.

In response, the bottle manufacturers got together and created a group called “Keep America Beautiful.” You probably know them best from their 1971 advertising campaign starring Iron Eyes Cody—some trash flies from the window of a speeding car, landing at the feet of a majestic Indian. He turns, and we see a single tear roll down his stoic cheek as William Conrad sternly intones, “People start pollution; people can stop it.” Today, a ban like Vermont’s seems unthinkably radical. “[Keep America Beautiful's] ‘great’ accomplishment was that they constructed garbage as the product of individual choices,” said Heather Rogers. “As an individual responsibility, and not one connected to the production process.” In other words, “personal responsibility” means that you bear responsibility for the trash that passes through your hands: not the people who produced it, not the system that leaves you no choice but to live as a consumer, not the laws that legislate away every other possible way of life.

The children of European settlers in North America and Australia like to talk about “personal responsibility” when it comes to the native people they displaced, too (e.g., Lakritz, 2009). On both continents, those who survived the genocide—in several cases, including events in living memory—suffer enormously from alcoholism, and the problems that follow from that. Throughout his books, Calvin Luther Martin writes in moving, convincing prose about the plight of Native America and the long-term trauma it has suffered (1982, 1995, 1999). He notes the writing of Harold Napoleon, and like him, found few Yupiit willing to talk about the epidemics at the turn of the century that killed very nearly everyone. In many ways, it seems most accurate to think of these present-day native societies as post-apocalyptic. They saw their whole world, and all the relationships that defined it, end (a topic Martin discusses in all its terrible detail in his first book, Keepers of the Game (1982)). Napolean calls it “despiritualization,” and describes the present in these communities as a kind of large-scale post-traumatic stress disorder. The genocide involved such overwhelming loss that no one talks about it. “In villages where everyone is either your cousin or auntie (as they put it) or uncle, or even nearer kin, the death of half, two-thirds, or nearly everyone must be close to unthinkable. Survivors covered it up in horrified silence. They invoked nallunguaq: they pretended it didn’t happen.” (1999:129)

How long would it take for any of us to recover from such an apocalyptic horror? You might want to compare it to Europe’s experience with the Black Death—except the Black Death killed a smaller percentage of Europe’s population; neither did it shatter the European understanding of the world; neither did the piles of corpses necessarily consist of your closest kin. And even though we could also trace the many ways in which the Black Death has affected those of us who participate in the European tradition, right down to the present day, most importantly, the Black Death ended. For the Yupiit, the epidemics happened only a century ago; and then came missionaries and schools, the trauma of having your language forbidden and your name taken away, and the loss of your way of life. Even for the woodland Indians of my own home, the Mountain People or Onöndowága in their own language, those we sometimes call the Seneca Nation, their displacement from the Cornplanter Tract—home of the famous chief Cornplanter, and his half-brother Handsome Lake, the prophet who founded the Longhouse Religion, land promised to them “so long as the grass shall grow” by George Washington himself in the first treaty ever signed by the United States—by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build Kinzua Dam happened only a few years before my own birth. The genocide of Native America belongs not just in our history books, but in our current headlines. It does not belong just to the past; it continues even now.

Most of us can understand the role alcohol might play in the life of an individual recovering from personal trauma, but when an entire community faces it, we preach to them about “personal responsibility.” Many of them accept that mesage. Martin discusses his time with Oscar Active, a man also described in Richard Carey’s book, Raven’s Children. To Martin, Oscar seems like a man torn between two worlds. On the one hand, “he lives three thousand years deep into time” (Martin, 1999:147), his thoughts pulled down the traditional paths of the Yupik people. On the other hand, he has become a Christian, given up alcohol, and credits his recovery to Christ’s power—and his past failure to himself. “We talked much about alcohol in the lives of Yupiit,” Martin writes. “He said Elsie (his mom) won’t blme her son Charlie when he comes home drunk; she blames whoever gave it or sold it to him. Or whoever threw the party. But never Charlie. Oscar had used the same logic on Margaret all those years: he would stagger in and report who gave him the booze, and she would blame the vendor. Never Oscar. Now, however, Oscar was declaring that he realized one had to take the blame for one’s actions. I am reminded of eastern woodlands Indians in colonial times, blaming Europeans for their drunkenness, since it was they who furnished it after all. Or even blaming the beverage itself.” (1999:142)

Before Oscar could change his mind about where the blame belonged, he had to change his mind about the nature of himself. Before he could take personal responsibility, he first had to fully accept the notion of his personal individuality—his being as a static object in a world of static objects, with innate characteristics and defining properties. Yupik tradition did not have such a concept. Like most native traditions, it did not recognize an “individual” as we normally understand it, but a “dividual.”

Poirier studied the aboriginal people of Australia, but they described a similar sense of what defines a person. He used the term “dividual” to describe it. “By ‘dividual’ I mean that networks of social relationships are intrinsic to the Aborigines’ sense of self and composite identities, rather than extrinsic (as in an ‘individiualistic’ notion of a person). … In other words, in a dividual mode, an action is always an interaction, a subjectivity (or agency) is always conceived as intersubjectivity (or interagency) between the different constituents of the world.” (2005:13) Likewise, in comparing the sensory worlds of eastern woodland Indians and Europeans at the time of contact, Hoffer points out that even “the Indians’ perception was communal—individual Indians heard, saw, smelled, touched, and tasted, but meanings emerged from collective deliberation. … The communal assignment of meaning was a social act. For example, Indian shamans healed the sick utilizing shared sensory experience.” (2005:34) Native people do not traditionally conceive of themselves as isolated individuals, the ego of “the western metaphysic.” They acknowledge their deep, intimate, and constant interaction with a more-than-human world. They live their lives in a social context, and define themselves not as discrete objects but as points in a social network.

If we really take them seriously—if we really consider, in all its implications, the radical notion that other-than-human presences can act, perceive, think and communicate—those implications turn “personal responsibility” into balderdash. When the alcohol itself has personality and awareness, when it can act and bear responsibility for those actions, it seems entirely too simplistic to always blame the alcoholic for his alcoholism. When a disposable bottle can exert a presence, by its design, wanting you to throw it, does the blame lie with you for submitting, or with the bottle for trying to get you to do it in the first place? Or the person who gave you the bottle? Or the person who made it? Oscar provides an elegant example, trying to illustrate the personal responsibility he’d learned to take. He told Martin how, if he came into a steamhouse and threw water on the coals, those inside would blame him for tossing them out. But he didn’t toss them out; he didn’t grab them each and throw them out. The steam chases them out, so the steam needs to take the blame.

In a more-than-human world, “personal responsibility” takes very strange turns. “The system” itself acts like a person; it shows awareness, it communicates, it thinks and perceives, and it defends itself. Or, if you want to deny volition or will to anything but other Homo sapiens (or perhaps, restrict it a little more to just those Homo sapiens who fit your favorite categorization, whether you define it by age, or religious belief, or melanin content; since we’ve already defined personhood away from anyone but humans, what does a little more restriction hurt?), you could still put it in the colder language of systems thinking, for this kind of dividual appreciation of a world bristling with active, willful agents speaks of the same things that a careful, scientific observer might call systemic problems. To the animist, what good does it do us to place the blame for someone’s condition solely on the shoulders of that one person, amidst all the active, willful persons influencing her life? To the scientific observer, what good does it do us to blame individuals for systemic problems?

Once we have recognized our place as dividuals, as one part of a rich, vibrant community, woven of human persons and other-than-human persons alike—or at the very least, recognize that systemic problems exist for which we might bear insignificant personal responsibility, or even none at all—then perhaps we can move past simplistic questions like “blame” or “responsibility,” since those perspectives illustrate that we live in a world too beautiful and too complex for those things to have any but the most superficial meaning. From those perspectives, the questions of “blame” and “responsibility” lose their relevance; instead, questions of harmony and restitution emerge. The question “Who do we blame for this?” becomes unimportant, because we can see how the causes cascade to everyone. The question “How do we fix this?” or “How do we restore harmony?” become the important ones to ask.

As I said before, people often preach about the ways that accepting our “personal responsibility” should free us—though in my experience, I’ve usually encountered it simply as a way to blame the victim. Rejecting “personal responsibility,” though—and the narrow, self-contained notion of the “individual” that gives rise to it—has given me that feeling of liberation.

I weigh too much. I haven’t yet suffered from any of the lasting health problems that obesity creates, but if I don’t do something in the next few years, that may change. The possible consequences frighten me. For years, friends, family, and others who care about me have urged me to take “personal responsibility” for my health. They mean well. They care about me, and they want to see my health improve, as would I. Yet, the refrain of “personal responsibility” has never helped me. When I fail to keep to my diet, or when I fail to keep up my exercise, “personal responsibility” tells me the fault lies with my own weakness.

But how does that explain anything at all? I do not like carrying around all this extra weight. Eating healthy foods should make me feel better, even in the short term. Exercise should provide an almost endless list of benefits. Why do I fail to do things that help me, that improve my life, that make me feel better? I don’t overeat or eat poorly because I enjoy the excess weight. Rather, I have little time and a lot of stress, so I choose foods that I can eat quickly—foods which also don’t provide the nutrition I need. Because of my weight, I have sleep apnea, so I wake up several times through the night. I can’t get a good night’s sleep, so even when I wake up, I feel tired. I feel constantly deprived of sleep, so I have even less time and even less energy. I’ve wound up caught in a vicious cycle, and that only describes one of several that this leads to. Dave Pollard puts the process in simple terms: “This false economy leads us to buy what we don’t need, which requires us to work harder to pay for those unnecessary goods and services, leaving us even less time to look after ourselves and our own needs and forcing us, in a vicious cycle to ‘outsource’ even more of the things we might be doing for ourselves.” (2006).

By “taking personal responsibility” for my weight, I knew I had no one to blame but myself. I weighed too much because I ate too much and exercised too little, and nothing would change that but a simple application of willpower. I have willpower in spades, but in this case, that approach led me straight into failure after failure. In junk food, I had my last refuge. Other times, my willpower always won out; I could deny myself everything, usually by compensating with food. When it came to kicking my main crutch out from underneath me, I ran into the limits of that strategy. Without acknowledging the context beyond myself in which this all happened, I ensured that my plan would fail, because I refused to even acknowledge that anything outside myself might play a part. After all, that would mean shirking my “personal responsibility.”

In doing precisely that—in shirking my “personal responsibility,” indeed, in rejecting the very underlying assumption of it—I’ve finally found the liberation it supposedly promises. Defenders of “personal responsibility” tell us that if we forfeit that, we also forfeit our ability to change anything about it. But the perspective of a dividual puts us in the midst of a vast web of relationships. We participate actively in the world every day in the most intense way possible. We create the world constantly. The very nature of reality reacts and responds to our intention and awareness. By breaking out of the narrow mold of ourselves as consumers, as destroyers, as one thing and not another, as individuals, we can understand our part in the systems we engage with and the patterns we participate in. And we can do what we can to change our circumstances, bit by bit.

Bibliography

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