Responsibility and Authority
Peggy Noonan had a really good column last week on the topic of responsibility and authority.
Here's a little bit of it:
Individual responsibility, the flip side of individual freedom, seems to be rarely recognized today. The erosion of moral constraints on behavior is producing a substitution of legal constraints. That's a problem about which I want to think more and on which I would like to invite thoughts from the rest of the group and readers.
Here's a little bit of it:
Governments always start out saying they're going to help, and always wind up pushing you around. They cannot help it. They say they want to help us live healthily and they mean it, but it ends with a guy in Queens getting arrested for trying to have a Marlboro Light with his Bud at the neighborhood bar. We're hauling the parents of obese children into court. The government has increasing authority over our health, and these children are not healthy. Smokers, the fat, drinkers of more than two drinks per night, insane swimmers in high seas . . .
We are losing the balance between the rights of the individual and the needs and demands of the state. Again, this is not new. It's a long slide that's been going on for a long time. But Katrina and Rita seemed to make the slide deeper.
It is hard for governments to be responsible, and take responsibility. It takes real talent, and guts. But authority? That's easier. Pass the law and get the cuffs.
Individual responsibility, the flip side of individual freedom, seems to be rarely recognized today. The erosion of moral constraints on behavior is producing a substitution of legal constraints. That's a problem about which I want to think more and on which I would like to invite thoughts from the rest of the group and readers.
Posted by Andy Morriss on
Monday October 3, 2005 at 7:46am
First, there is the dynamic relationship between freedom and responsibility. Second, the different modes of social constraint on behavior: moral and legal. Allow me to address each in turn.
Regarding, freedom/responsibility. One could argue, and in my classes I do, that as Christians we believe that we are made free in Jesus Christ so that we can become responsible. The burden of sin is precisely that it bindings the will to that which is other than God. Or, and this is worse, sin binds us to God in a manner that is ungodly (the Pharisees come quickly to mind). In both cases the effect is the same, human beings are made slaves of our own passions (disordered desires).
When Christ comes, He comes first of all to set us free from our passions so that we can respond in love and truth to both God and our neighbor. In other words, responsibility is first and foremost our ability to, well, respond to God and our neighbor. It is only secondarily the moral quality that we typically think of when we hear the term.
But, now I have to go to class (I'm lecturing this morning of Augustine's understanding of memory), so I will finish this a bit later.
In Christ,
+Fr. Gregory
I have been thinking about this from a canon law perspective. I was asked earlier in the week, by someone who was participating in a panel discussion, about "good" versus "bad" canons from the standpoint of maintining norms of behavior and orthodox theology.To be more specific, the individual wanted to know about the proper role of government, in this case church government, in dealing with individual behaviors.
The gist of the paper being presented was that the only "good canons" were those that could prevent lapses into heresy and insure good behavior, at least among the clergy. One group proffered its body of canon that was extensive in detail and overwhelmingly positivist as a model. Indeed, I think that, under such rules, one would never get to have the Bud, much less the cigarette-particularly if he is in the clergy.
Always at the core of such rules-whether ecclesiastic or civil-is the hand of a man. I, like Fr, Gregory, immediately call to mind the Pharisees. While it is necessary to have rules for governance in the church and society, man's rule does not prevent sin, although it may constrain it; nor does it obviate stupidity.
Man-made, or, rather, man-inspired law invariably is agenda-laden, wherever one finds it, even in the church. Not to pick on a particular denomination, but I'd say that the current canons of the American Episcopal church highlight the problem. A brief glance at these rules of that body shows that there is a socio-political agenda built in, and that a double-threat of clergy discipline and parish property seizure enforces that platform.
Of course, one is free to leave for another denomination-there are, after all, low barriers to entry in the economic sense. One is not so free to depart from the hand of a civil government that increasingly defines what it believes to be sinful behavior, or, "not sin" in the case of recent enactments in Connecticut and Massachusetts on the marriage question.
At the same time, the ability of the church to speak to the issue of moral responsibility and questions of sin in the public sphere is being diminished. (Witness the human rights complaints lodged against Christian traditionalists in Canada who dared speak out on behalf of traditional understandings regarding marriage.) Increasingly, then, we leave the issue of controlling behaviors (not responsibility)to the hand of an intrusive government.
It works the same way in the ecclesiastic realm. The desire to "control" the direction of the church or particular behaviors becomes a question of having a legal cudgel, and not a function of living in and with Christ. Regardless of which side of moral issues one is on, this positivist approach rarely is godly either in content or application.
As St. Thomas points out, "men in society must be under rules." De Regimine Principium, Ch. 1. "It is necessary for him to live in society so that one person can help another and different men can employ their reasons in different ways." Ibid. citing Ecclesiastes 4:9. But, within such a society, rules must be ordered to a good end-a common good, otherwise the rules are those of slaves, unjust and perverse.
Putting aside questions of the good doctor's approving view of kings and the tyranny of a majoritarian government, government should direct its subjects to a life of virtue, in a society united towards acting well. This is not a function of externals such as mandating our weight or preventing incarcerating a cigar afficionado, it goes to that question of something far greater--a something I fear that some want expunged from public life.
In Christ,
Fr. C.
Substitute "activist government" for "legal constraints," and then ask youreslf if the direction of causation shouldn't be reversed. It seems to me that the rise of the welfare state with the Great Society reduced the individual economic costs of a lack of moral restraint. Having a remote federal government doling out the checks without any expectations of responsible behavior on the part of recipients is far different from having local, voluntary institutions (such as churches) providing aid and expecting something in return in the way of taking responsibility. So now, the check comes, no responsibility is assumed, and in comes the government with legal restraints to try to lessen the harm.
I've always wondered about the direction of causation here, and perhaps it goes both ways.