To be a man, precisely, is to be responsible. (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
I dare do all that may become a man;
Who dares do more is none. (Shakespeare, Macbeth, I, 7)
And his master said to him: Well done, my good and faithful servant; since thou hast been faithful over little things, I have great things to commit to thy charge. (Matthew 25:21)
Before sinking our collective teeth into the meat of today’s post (part two of an extended treatment on the notion of responsibility), I want to say a warm word of welcome to all new guests of Lord of Indiscipline. I am glad that you are here and deeply grateful that you are reading this.
If you enjoy the writing here at Lord of Indiscipline, please do make yourself at home; if you think that any of your friends (or enemies) might enjoy it, please do share it with them.
In these last months, I have been struggling to enunciate for myself the meaning and merit of responsibility. What does it mean to be responsible? Where does responsibility come from? What characteristics of life make the achievements of responsibility significant? In other words, what do I have to do in order to be called “responsible”? And do the circumstances in which I live have any bearing on the magnitude of that achievement?
Responsibility is the product of a particular action in response to a particular duty. The greater the duty in response to which the action is performed, the higher the responsibility. The action itself can be simple, ordinary even, but the performance of it becomes great by dint of the duty which dictates it. Hence the words of Christ in St. Luke’s Gospel, “He who is trustworthy over a little sum is trustworthy over a greater; he who plays false over a little sum, plays false over a greater.”
In “Free Agency” I mentioned once again the Oppenheimerian tenet that “there is no meaningful responsibility without power.” Read in light of the triumph and tragedy of its author, that tenet can seem inaccessible to the common man and woman. Yet the Gospel formula, rather than nullifying that tenet, actually makes it accessible to everyone. You endow your responsibilities with meaning to the extent that you do the right thing. Raising a tower to the heavens is not power. Doing the right thing, in matters great and small—that is power. And with the wielding of it is found meaningful responsibility.
The lordly purpose of this extended essay on responsibility is to examine what responsibility means; the relationships between responsibility and power, between responsibility and meaning, between responsibility and freedom; the difference (if any) between responsibility and duty; the concrete means by which we are able to attain that state of being, the mode of character, that we call “responsible”; and so on and so forth. Part one of the essay, “Free Agency,” talked about responsibility mostly in terms abstract or abstruse; part two aims to talk about it in terms concrete and clear—namely, in terms of parenting and, still more specifically, fatherhood.
Why parenting? Not, to be clear, because I have any pretensions that such terms would be in any way innovative or inspiring. “Responsible parenting” has been acclaimed as a social goal for long enough to make any such pretension plainly laughable. But I will be so bold as to claim that our conscious comprehension of what constitutes the realities of “responsible” and “parenting” could bear some invigorating. Nothing would make me happier than to discover that I am alone in asking those questions about the meaning and origin of responsibility, its characteristics and creative circumstances, its relationship to the good life, to the holy life—alone, because all others have asked these questions and discovered for themselves the answers. Yet given the “state of things,” I consider myself more than justified in the belief that I am not alone in asking those questions.
And why fatherhood? Because, whether we like it or not, fatherhood is fundamentally and absolutely loaded with responsibility. And as such, it issues a challenge to common conceptions about the good life. I do not think it controversial to state that a predominant consideration in the western world at present is that the two concepts of responsibility and enjoyment are fundamentally at odds with, if not outright inimical to, one another. Responsibility is an impediment to enjoyment; if you have responsibilities, you are duty-bound to fulfill them—lest you suffer the consequences of personal guilt or social disapproval. Responsibility may, of course, be a necessary evil encountered on the way toward enjoyment, a hurdle on the course, so to speak: if I want to enjoy something, yet I have responsibilities, I must attend to those responsibilities before I can start enjoying myself.
In the spirit of fair play, I will admit that I may be overstating the matter for the sake of argumentation. Yet the error would still only be in terms of how widespread the problem is, not in terms of the nature of the problem itself. To illustrate, earlier this summer, we took the family to the ocean. From the parking lot to the beach is a distance of some two hundred yards. I covered that distance pulling a cooler twice my own weight and carrying our almost-two-year-old son in a hiking backpack. Now, being neither a tall man nor an exceedingly strong one, I listed heavily to the side on which I was not pulling the cooler, thanks to the load of toddler on my back. Needless to say, it was slow and painful going. But it was going and I had my eyes on the prize with little thought of anything except putting one foot after the other. Yet as beach-bodies passed us by, they left comments in their wake. “Going to the beach is supposed to be fun, not work!” “Glad I’m not in your shoes!” “Don’t hurt yourself!” “Is it worth it, Dad?”
My family can attest that I am not the most cheerful worker—things tend to bother me in the course of a project. But I can say confidently that in this case I was not consciously bothered by the task of hauling cooler and child to the beach until they started bothering me about the task. It’s not me; it’s them. It’s not the responsibilities of fatherhood that a given father bears; it’s the way we look at the man who bears them (however happily or unhappily) and the conclusions we draw (consciously or unconsciously) about his possession of such responsibilities and their effect on his possibility of attaining the good life—at least commonly considered.
What is the good life, commonly considered? For starters, it means having stuff, and lots of it; it also means being on a path towards all or at least most of the stuff that one could possibly ever have or want to have. And stuff need not be understood solely in the material sense. Ours is obviously and terribly a materialist age and we, its inhabitants, are bound to breathe its cold wind in and out of unwholesome lungs; but in the heart of even the most avid collector of things there yet dwells the desire to have and hold a prize (or several) which is intangible, incorporeal, invisible. It is that desire which guarantees that our race will be marrying and giving in marriage until the coming of the Son of Man. This desire is clothed in flesh, but it is not of flesh but of spirit. Thus does it guarantee also, perhaps not necessarily the proliferation of the human race, but certainly the provision of care and affection for those who serve to proliferate it: namely, children.
In the equation of human experience, childhood is the constant. “For of such is the kingdom of heaven.” Children and childhood are inescapable. For even if you have no children of your own, you were once yourself a child; even if you never enjoy the awesome task of establishing and securing the spaces of childhood for another, you once roamed and reigned in those same spaces yourself. Children are also anything but neutral in the scheme of life: they are either protagonist or antagonist, merit or defect, good fruit or poisonous. Thus, in the version of that scheme which is popularly known as “Having It All,” the addition of a child is initially antagonistic to the order and operation of the scheme; a dedicated and resourceful parent can, however, overcome that antagonism and install the child as an integrated and beneficial element of that same scheme. In other words, everything has changed—but not everything has to change.
At the risk of repeating myself, any given choice presupposes freedom; action is necessary to make good on that choice; and responsibility is the guarantor, so to speak, of that action actually being made. For example: here I stand, a free man. I choose to become a father. The child arrives and with it the time to make good on that choice. The extent to which I am responsible, or willing to become responsible, is the extent to which I will really be that thing we call a father. To become responsible, because it requires choice, also demands sacrifice. A father has to choose: to choose between the child or this other thing. On the face of it, this can appear tragic: a sad and sorry fact of life that one cannot have all the things one wants to have even when all those things are, plainly and simply, good things.
How does one respond to this fact? One way that immediately springs to mind is that sense of something is not right. It is wrong, a sign that the world is out of whack, this order of things in which neither dads nor moms can have it all. And yet, it need not be so. Wrongs can be righted; mistakes can be corrected. If we normalize hybrid work schedules… If we go back to the land… If we overcome the pay gap… If we defeat outmoded stereotypes… If we can just work this out…
And so on and so forth. Although the guiding spirits and concrete forms of the first response can (and do) differ widely, the basic thrust is identical: activism. Something is wrong and we have to do something about it. Make no mistake: this kind of assertion is not intrinsically wrongheaded. When something is wrong, we typically have to do something about it.
Take, for example, a sick child. When your child projectiles vomit across the bedroom floor in the witching hour, you have to get yourself up out of bed and move to her bedroom and accomplish the task of cleaning her, the clothes, the bedding, the room, the carpet, the teddy bear, and reorienting her in a clean bed and back to sleep. Something is wrong: the child has thrown up. Something has to be done: you clean it up. Activism? Only a fool would say that.
But what did I say? “When something is wrong, we typically have to do something about it.” Typically. The morning after your child is sick, she feels well enough to play outside. It is a beautiful day in the neighborhood; the sunlight chases the fogs of nocturnal war against illness from your head; the sounds of your child playing happily fill your ears; balance is restored. Until it is not: your child, wholly bent on some mysterious mission of her game, stubs her foot on a stone and, losing her balance, takes a terrific toss over the fire pit and sprawls across the patio.
In that moment, in one, single, sudden moment, you startle; your mind instantaneously refigures from enjoyment-of-tranquility to emergency-response-service; you feel hot (the phrase “heat of the moment” now makes perfect sense); and you are about to do something. That something has the power to effect the course of the entire morning. You stand up. You leap to her side. You pick her up. You ask her if she is okay (she is not). You tell her she needs to stop crying because you can’t understand when she is crying. You say it again because she keeps crying. You set her on her feet but she collapses, still crying. You buckle down to the task, offer some vague counsels on feeling better and still-more vague indications about what the rest of the day might hold in terms of events, activities, and desserts, that should set her once again at ease. Finally, after enormous (relative to fifteen seconds ago) emotional engagement, you are successful: she stops crying, she is all better. Only now she does not want to play outside and the morning must reset into something else. Even if that something else ends up being something good, the fact of the matter is that the morning, that life, was disrupted by that event—and disruption is rarely, I say rarely, a good thing.
Let’s rewind, shall we? Your child, sprawled across the patio, starts to cry. You startle; your mind instantaneously refigures from enjoyment-of-tranquility to emergency-response-service; you feel hot; and you are about to do something. And you choose, in that moment, that that something is nothing. You are still. You check her in your peripheral. She stands up. Still crying, she checks if she is okay (she is). She looks at you. You look back at her. Are you okay, you ask her. She nods. And, as Paul Simon says in the song, she moves on. The difference: Interruption, not disruption.
Now, lest you think I am picking and choosing events that support my argument, let me tell you frankly: I am. Let me also assure you, however, that I am eminently qualified to do so. If you are a parent, you probably are as well. I can pick and choose as I do because in both of the examples set forth above, that child has been my child. I have been facilitator of both disruption and interruption. I have sprung to my feet and I have sat idly by. I have sat idly by and then sprung to my feet. Parenting is not a linear process, anymore than being human is a linear process: I do X one day and determine that it is useless, so I do Y the following and decide it is highly helpful; then the next week I am back to doing X. And why? Because I am a man.
And as a man, I am subject to the temptation to activism. One element of that temptation is the assertion that the oscillation between activities or approaches to activity is unacceptable, even untenable. One way has to be right. It need not even be X or Y; it could be Z, for all I care—it need only be one and one only, not one of many. A discomfiting declaration, smacking heavily of dogma. And that is precisely what activism depends upon: dogma. Have you not heard it said, by a friend, a family member, a colleague, perhaps (strangely) even yourself, that there is a system, a school, a strategy, to “making things work”? And how many of those systems, schools, or strategies have we tried and found them wanting? Or worse, tried them and found ourselves wanting?
If we are being forthright with ourselves (if not each other), we would reply: All of them. No matter how amazing is a given “external resource,” it will serve me poorly if I am ill-equipped to use it. And no matter how amazing an individual I happen to be, if the resource I employ is ill-suited to its purpose (i.e., raising a child), then I will be poorly served. By this onslaught of criticism, I intend neither to discredit the helpfulness of external resources (be that a book, a pedagogical approach, or the wisdom of one’s elders) nor to deny the objective need to avail ourselves of those resources. My intention, rather, is to underscore a fundamental, yet largely ignored, truth. Namely, that anterior to the issues of “having it all” and “doing it the right way” is the matter of being a certain someone, a certain something. There is cause for shame, but not undying shame, in being found wanting by using or seeking to use “external resources” to improve oneself. The shameful thing, to put it in concrete terms, is in thinking that “external resources” can install in me the capacities I need in order to be a good father. By virtue of my nature, I already have those capacities; I cannot look outside of myself for their existence. Once I do, I submit myself to the swirling chaos of influence.
The heart of the matter is this: Does responsibility preclude our ability to “have it all,” and thus dash our hopes of a fully-fulfilling existence against the rocks of duty? “Moms can’t have it all,” we lament; “dads can’t have it all either.” We lament this because we have been (or have led ourselves) to believe that having is the measure of completion and that activity is the marker of goodness. In reality, it is being a certain way, and not having a certain thing (or things), which makes us whole; in reality, it is the way we are that determines what we do, not the other way around. Can it be the case that fatherhood, in a wholly natural way, contains the power and glory which it signifies? Could it be that the phrase “being a dad” is a declaration of totality? That all the deeds that a father is suppose to do, all the things that he is suppose to have, all the responsibilities that he is suppose to embrace—these are part and parcel of the paternal identity? And as such they are made accessible and intelligible to each man—unfit to be called but called nevertheless—to the awesome task of paternity?
The primary responsibility of the father is the care of his child. This is the dictate of nature. You reap what you sow. Yet just because the task of paternity occurs in the purely natural order of things does not make it ordinary. Paternity is no ordinary task because its object—the child—is no ordinary thing. Consider how naturally the child takes a part in these wise words of C. S. Lewis:
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, [parent], snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your [child] is the holiest object presented to your senses.
“I have become all things to all men,” writes St. Paul; in some mysterious, analogous way, I think that the responsibility of fatherhood is the becoming of all things to your child. Dads can’t have it all. But do they have the power—and thus the meaningful responsibility—to become all, that their children might be saved?
Credit: Vincent van Gogh, The Sower, 1888 (via Wikimedia Commons).