>Personal responsibility is more relevant to a
>collectivist setting than an individualist one.
>People depend on each other. Obviously this can
>be twisted in any number of malignant ways. But
>it should not be rejected out of hand as a
>principle. For instance, the responsibility
>to support oneself dovetails with a social
>responsibility to support those who can't;
>then it becomes an empirical issue as much
>as a moral one (who is not able to support
>themselves, and why?) and opens up all the
>avenues of discussion one could wish for.
This is true, it should not be rejected, one might say it can't be rejected, because of it's availability to be twisted, it's political volatility, and how impacted historically it is with certain political, religious, moral meanings. The avenue I have in mind, what makes it so "hot", it seems to me, is the moral baggage it carries, and its religious trajectory. It's difficult to resolve the interrelations between the empirical and moral that you raise, and this is what interests me.
Here I'm starting, because of the virtue of its clarity and simplicity of example, with my AA experiences (also a collectivist setting, interestingly). Here "personal responsibility" is a core ideology, and the AA 12-step program is historically the origin of the self-help, new age recovery (and consciousness, I would argue) industries, which infuse a not insignificant percentage of the population and the culture, and which Patterson discusses in the context of determinism. But it holds true in the larger context of Patterson's presentation also. I can't say much about his work, other than the chapter from _The Ordeal of Integration_ reproduced for the conference.
He opposes to personal responsibility the "deterministic explanations and moral justifications" he is critical of, regarding race. Yet his personal responsibility contains some at best ambivalent, at worst monotheistic religious, moral justification of it's own. It's possible this becomes more clear the more one reads his work. Once again, I'd have to read more of his work.
Here's the beginning to chapter 2 of his _The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America's "Racial" Crisis_ (Civitas/Couterpoint, 1997):
Most Afro-Americans share, or would like to share, America's and the Western world's core value of autonomy, which embraces the twin moral imperatives of personal responsibility and self-determination. . . .
At the most conservative estimate, this desire holds for about 60 percent of the population--the vast majority of that resilient core of hard-working, *God-fearing* (my italics) men and women of the working and middle classes who have triumphed over racial and class discrimination to become models of self-determining Americans.
For the remaining large minority of Afro-Americans, however, the story is different. Among established Afro-American political leaders and a growing number of young college graduates--and among the poor and troubled bottom quarter of the population for whom they speak--there has been a near complete surrender, in their politics, ideology, and intellectual discourses, to deterministic explanations and moral justifications.
[end excerpt]
What I'm interested in working on is prying the moral away from the material. I have more in mind Marta Russell's take in _Beyond Ramps_, when she writes:
Gingrich writes in _To Renew America_, "Our new-found sense of entitlement and victimization is exactly wrong." He calls for a return to "personal responsibility," citing John Smith's statement, "if you don't work, you won't eat," as an example of real Americanism. His answer--gut the programs that "foster" dependency, ratchet down supportive programs, and ignore that there aren't enough jobs to go around." (p. 183)
And Patterson's binary reduction between "personal responsibility" and "deterministic explanations [entitlement] and moral justifications [victimization]" seems rather dangerously at times to mirror the structure of Gingrich's own formation. Though Patterson is infinitely, shall we say, more sophisticated and savvy in his approach.
Has anybody else read much Patterson, and would they care to add to this?
-Alec
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