Responsibility in a group

This leads to the question of the responsibility of a member of a society, which currently is of great concern to Religious; and which, I think, is being totally misinterpreted, so that in the name of "acting responsibly" Religious are taking on a lay kind of responsibility and shirking the real responsibility they have in the process.

I might point out here that many is the Religious who left his congregation because he couldn't stand "holy obedience," and then found to his dismay that once he got out into the workplace, there was a secular version of "holy obedience" that was twenty times as strict and interfering in his life (telling you that your shoes need shining, for instance) as any that he had left, and which had no concern with his personal feelings or his advancement in anything except the corporate structure. I say this mainly for any Religious who may be reading this and chafing at what they think is undue interference in their lives. I think much of the interference by businesses in the personal lives of their employees is morally wrong; but the fact is that it happens, and in the "real world," it is taken for granted. Everyone wears a uniform nowadays, for instance, except Religious--who are supposed to wear one--and college professors, who have tenure, and who don't know what they're doing anyway.

But to return to the point, let us first of all be clear on what "responsibility" really means. It is not the same as "duty" or "obligation," though the word is often used (analogously) in that sense. When you talk about the "responsibilities of a chairman," you are talking about his duties, on the grounds that if certain actions are not carried out, then he is the one you blame for the omission.

And that is what responsibility entails. It rests on the fact that when I choose to do something, the act I choose to do is in my control; it could have been done or not done. To the extent that I couldn't control it, then to that extent I am not responsible for it. Thus responsibility for an act means that that act would have been different had you chosen differently.

It deals with acts done, not what is in the future. The act is yours because your choice made it be that way; and it would not have been that way had you not chosen so--and you could have chosen differently, since you are free.

Now then, this "control" that we have because of the fact that we "could have chosen differently" has several levels; and therefore, there are different kinds of and degrees of responsibility for what is done.

The lowest level is what I call "physical" responsibility. You did choose to perform the act, even if you may have been "compelled" to choose the act by the fact that the alternative was either immoral or so horrible that you couldn't face it, or that you were so blinded by your emotions that you couldn't actually see any alternative at the time. In that sense, an insane person who chooses to kill someone else because he thinks the other person is an alien who is about to destroy the world is physically responsible for the death of an innocent person, because he did make the choice. But obviously, he would not be regarded as "responsible" in a meaningful sense for what he did. Similarly, a woman who has an abortion, without any idea that her fetus is a human being, is physically responsible for dismembering her child; but she is not morally responsible for this, since she has no idea she is doing it.

At the other extreme, there is moral responsibility, which means that you chose the act, knowing and accepting the reality of the act and its consequences. A woman who has an abortion and knows that this is her child, is morally responsible for the dismemberment of her child.

In the middle, there is what I call "legal responsibility," not because it is always what you are legally responsible for, but because it is the type of responsibility that is used in law. If you violate a law by accident (as when you run over someone because your car's steering suddenly broke, though you had had it safety-checked the day before), then, since you chose to drive the car, you are physically responsible for killing the person. But no reasonable government would want to prosecute a person for this kind of thing, because there was not any meaningful control over the act. On the other hand, if the government relies on moral responsibility, which rests on the knowledge the person had when he made the choice, this knowledge is hidden to anyone but the person, and if he says, "I didn't know the gun was loaded," there is no way absolutely to prove that this statement is not true; and therefore anyone could escape punishment by lying about his knowledge of the law at the time. In that case, you could forget about laws and their sanctions.

To avoid the cruelty of punishing people for mere physical responsibility and the impossibility of knowing what was going on in a person's mind when he made the choice, law resorts to a mental fiction that I called "legal responsibility." It assumes that if you didn't know what the law was (or that the gun was loaded, or whatever), you should have, because "any normal person would have known the law, or checked the gun"; and therefore, you are held responsible for your lack of knowledge, and consequently for your act. That is, you are legally responsible for what the "normal person" would be morally responsible for. If you just didn't advert to what you were doing, that's too bad; from the law's point of view, you should have.

Those are the basic kinds of responsibility. Moral responsibility, which is the most important one for our purposes, has several levels, depending on how clear your knowledge at the time of the choice was, and how capable you were of carrying out your choice (i.e. how much your emotions may have prevented you from doing what you actually chose to do). If you were so blinded by your emotions that you didn't realize what you were doing, you weren't morally responsible for the act at all; if you were somewhat blinded, but still aware of the act and some or all of its implications, you are somewhat responsible for it--though the act as you chose it isn't the act as it occurred, because you didn't see all of the implications. And so on.

In general, it is extremely difficult to know just how responsible you are for any given act, especially when emotions are involved (as they almost always are). After the fact, you are aware of information that it might seem you were aware of at the time; but the emotions may have been clouding it or totally blinding you to some of it. You might also think, after the fact, that you chose to do the act reluctantly, when in fact what happened was that at the time, you chose not to do it and did it in spite of yourself; and you are now arguing that, since you knowingly did it, you must have chosen to do it.

And so on. I think you can see that, not only can we not really judge others, we can't even judge ourselves. St. Paul says as much in First Corinthians: "I don't even evaluate myself; I am not aware of anything wrong in what I have been doing, but this does not get me acquitted; because the judge in the court I care about is the Master."

And, of course, it doesn't matter how responsible you actually were when you made the choice. If this were an ethical universe, your eternal destiny would depend on it; but if it were an ethical universe, once you had committed the choice, you would be stuck with it anyhow, without the slightest possibility of altering or removing it--in which case, it's too late to worry about it. But in the real world, the sinfulness of the choice is removed by your Master, who can't be bothered in "how sinful" it was; and if He can't be bothered, why are you concerned?

In any case, you are responsible for what you have control over by your choices, and you are responsible to the extent that your choice controlled the act.

It follows from this that when you are in a society, you are not responsible for what you do when obeying legitimate commands. The reason is that when you join a society, you are then morally bound to obey, unless the command exceeds the authority (i.e. it is to do something that has no connection with the society's common goal or common good, or violates a right of yours, or is to do something immoral). Even if the command is foolish, you must obey it.

But if you must obey, then morally speaking what you do is out of your control, since it would be immoral to disobey. Hence, the person who issues the command is responsible for what you do, and you are not. This is simply due to the nature of a society and authority. The authority has the control, not the member.

Note that you cannot "take" or "assume" the responsibility for the act; responsibility is something you have, not something you "accept"; and if you don't have it, you don't have it. If you want to be responsible for doing the act that the commander tells you to do, this doesn't make you responsible for it, because there was no moral way you could have prevented doing it; so morally speaking it is his act and not yours.

Religious lately have been resenting this, because as "adults" they want to "take responsibility for their own acts," and so they don't like the idea that the control of their acts is someone else's. But in a broader sense, this desire to take back control is a shirking of the responsibility they have over being good members of the congregation. That is, when they joined the congregation, they chose to hand over control of their acts to the superior; and therefore, they are responsible for this choice and its consequences. What they don't want, really, then, is to be responsible for the consequences of their original choice to join the congregation. But they are responsible for this choice; and this choice makes them not responsible for their acts when following orders. So their desire to "be responsible" is an irresponsible desire; it is a childish yearning to get out of a commitment that was made earlier in life. Adults live up to their commitments.

This is one of the ways in which Religious are trying to "laicize" their lives, and are contradicting their nature as Religious. (The other obvious way is that silliness about having money, which gives you all of the curses of poverty, the worry and so on, without the blessing of forgetting about money that Religious poverty is supposed to be.) Instead of rejoicing that they are free of responsibility for individual acts under orders, Religious have got themselves into a crazy state of "consultation" where the superior and you "discuss" things so that he orders you to do what you want him to order you to do, on the supposition that this is "discerning where the Holy Spirit is leading."

But there is a qualification to this lack of responsibility, which is connected with a correct sense of "consultation." The person issuing commands may be said to be the "will" of the society; but his mind is not the society's mind. He does not have either all the information the society possesses, nor, however wise he might be, is he possessed of all of the wisdom of the society as a whole. He is the spokesman of the society as a society toward its members, but his task is to find out what the society should be telling its members to do, and issue those orders.

People in authority are not given any special "grace of office" or "wisdom" by God, just because they have been elected or appointed. They are just as stupid and foolish as they were when they were out of authority, as anyone who has been in a society and seen members lifted out of their lowly state to authority can testify. The assumption that God gives a special grace to authorities--particularly to Religious superiors--is based on two things: (a) that the members have to obey the superior, and (b) that God wants certain things done.

But in point of fact, God has no special plans for this world; this world is free, at least insofar as it is the effect of our free choices. And if those choices are foolish, then this is fine with God; and if they lead to disasters, God is not going to "r'ar back and pass a miracle" to save us from our folly. You would think we would have learned this after so many thousands of years. In the eternal scheme of things, what happens here is not important.

Now what this means is that those in authority, and especially Religious superiors, have a special obligation: to seek out information and defer to those wiser than themselves. From which it follows that those members who have information and/or wisdom have an obligation to provide it to the person in authority.

And it follows from this that if a given order is given which you know is foolish because you happen to know something that the superior doesn't, you are now responsible for ^his foolish command and its consequences, since you could have prevented it by informing him. You are responsible for what you have control over. If you refuse to inform your superior, you become responsible for what ^he does because of the lack of information.

The point is that when you are in a society, you are responsible for what other people do, because you have some control, either direct or indirect, over what they do. When a superior issues orders, they are apt to affect many people in the congregation; and if you could have provided "input" in the form of facts or wise advice and you didn't, then you have control over the effects on these other people.

Well, but suppose the superior doesn't believe your facts, or won't listen to your wise advice, and he issues the order you know is foolish. Then you have discharged your responsibility, and are not now responsible for the foolish order (which, of course, you must obey).

And I think it a sign of the laicization of the Religious life that this "consultation" that goes on is not really by way of informing the superior about some course of action the superior is contemplating; it is really about what the member wants to do. The superior is no longer in a position, it seems, to decide what the best task for the congregation would be; because this "discernment" process ties his hands, and he has to let the members go where they think the Spirit is leading them--when in fact the Spirit is leading them where the superior tells them to go, no matter whether he does it by listening to the vagaries of their emotional states or by (as it used to be) simply placing them where they were "needed," irrespective of how they felt about it.

The words "democracy" and especially "collegiality" have made a mockery out of the Religious life lately; and they are ways in which Religious are reneging on their real responsibility for the misinformed and misguided commands of their superiors in the name of "taking personal responsibility for their own acts." "Collegiality" is a particularly inappropriate term. It refers to the fact that each Bishop is the direct representative of Jesus in his diocese--but only insofar as he is not contradicting the teaching of Jesus, which is the teaching of the Bishops as a whole in time and space: the "college" of the Bishops as "colleagues."

The relationship between the Holy Spirit and the superior and the members of an order is not "collegiality." Members are under obedience to superiors in a sense in which Bishops are not under obedience to the Pope, who is the spokesman for the doctrine of the Bishops as a college, but cannot command this doctrine; it is the doctrine of Jesus, and the Pope has no more control over it than any other Bishop has; it is just that when he says that Jesus' teaching is such-and-such, he is not making a mistake; and if any other Bishop says that Jesus' teaching is such-and-such, then he is making a mistake if he contradicts what either an ecumenical council or the Pope says it is. The Pope's "authority" over the Bishops is an authority in the sense in which Webster is an authority on the meaning of words, not in the sense that the city council is the authority in the city.

Nevertheless, the "consultation" mode of governance--if you can call it governance--is a perversion of a step taken in the right direction. The old "mother superior" or "father superior" mode of governance, where the congregation was likened to a family of which the superior was the parent was a perversion in the other direction. The reason parents have authority over their children is that parents are more informed and wiser than their children; and their authority lessens as the children advance in information and wisdom.

Religious superiors have no superior knowledge or wisdom; and therefore, it is wrong for them to act like parents. They must consult, as I said; but not consult the wishes of the members; they must consult the information and wisdom of the members: the intellectual contents of the members' minds.

In this, democracy is a terrible model for Religious congregations. Democracy, of course, assumes that there is a special "grace" or "wisdom" that resides in the people, so that the wishes of the majority will be what is best for the society as a whole. But in general, the majority of people are not the wisest; the majority are pretty badly informed and not aware of the implications of what they want; and so there is almost a guarantee that if the majority get their way, the wisest course of action will not be followed--and many minorities will actually have their rights trampled on. The majority base their vote on what they feel and what they want, not on facts or what is best for the group as a whole.

Why does democracy work in the United States, then? First of all, because the laws are not made by majority vote, but by a small elite, who are elected; there are various roadblocks in the way of the majority's simply getting what they want. Secondly, we are talking, in the case of the United States, of a civil society, whose precise function is for people to be left alone to do what they want insofar as this is possible without actually violating anyone else's rights. The United States as a society has no function beyond this. Obviously, then, the laws should facilitate whatever it is that the people want, always keeping in mind the non-violation of anyone's rights.

But in some society like a Religious congregation which has a special function, like, for example, the Christian advancement of the members through poverty, chastity, and obedience, in the service of the education of the young--then what the members want is secondary to what achieves the purpose of the congregation. I know of orders like this where very few of the members are actually teaching, presumably because "discernment" told them that the Spirit was leading them into social work or library science or manning soup kitchens. All these are laudable; but why did these people join a congregation devoted to teaching? That is, when these people "discern," then presumably they should be trying to find out how they can best promote the stated purpose of the congregation, not how they can distort the meaning of the constitution so that it suits their inclinations. And superiors should not permit this silliness; superiors are shirking their responsibility when they let the members have the control over what they do. Consultation should give the superior information on what the member likes and so on; and the superior should take this into account, not be bound by it.

But this is not all there is to responsibility in a society. When a member acts, then the society is acting in and through him. The society, after all, has no ability to act except in the actions of the members.

It follows from this that every act of a member, when he is identifiable as a member, is also an act of the society as such. The member is never on his own, and what he does, the society does in him (even when he is not particularly following orders). I remember one nun years ago complaining to me, "Every time I open my mouth, they all take it that the congregation is talking; they never take what I say as just mine." Well of course not. Nothing she ever said was "just" hers. She was not the official spokesman for the congregation, but when she spoke, then in a secondary sense, the congregation spoke also--as is clear from the fact that the congregation could have silenced her if it chose.

Thus, a member who acts has a responsibility for the effect of his acts on the reputation of the society, because his acts will legitimately be attributed to the society to the extent that he is identifiable as a member.

A third phase of the laicization of the Religious life is that Religious are no longer easy to identify as members of their congregations. Orders from Rome have gone out time and again that congregations should wear a "distinctive habit" as a sign of their difference and commitment to their way of life; and the "habit" has been interpreted--I have actually heard it so interpreted--as "not wearing designer clothes," or having on a little pin.

The idea is supposed to be that you can do your work better and relate to the people you are serving better if you don't look different; and there may be something in this. But it is also true that people resent it if they find out that you are a monk, because they--rightly--think that they should act differently toward a monk who is a representative of a special commitment to a religion which they respect than the way they would act to another layman or even one not of their religion at all.

Monks and nuns who think that laymen ought not to act differently toward them simply do not recognize what it means to be a member of a society. They want to be accepted "for themselves" and not "for what they belong to"; but "what they belong to" in their case forms a large part of what the definition of their "self" is. They cannot divorce the two; and the attempt to disguise what they are by dressing just like everyone else is just that: an attempt to disguise what they are, and evade the responsibility they have to the society by not being identifiable as members of it until after the fact of their membership has been revealed.

And it is not the case that the Christian work of monks and nuns is better done if people can't tell that they're monks and nuns. Statements about Jesus and Christianity are resented as fanatical or pious mouthings when spoken from one layman to another (as if the one saying it is trying to be "holier than thou"); but Religious are supposed to see things in the light of eternity, and are not putting laymen down when they speak of things in the light in which they see them; laymen's functions are different, as I hope I have begun to show in all of these pages.

So Religious can do their work with layman properly only if the laymen recognize that they are Religious, and can expect the point of view of Religious from them. Laymen have a right to know who they are dealing with, so they won't be put into false positions. Religious should be identifiable by their dress, and not by their "works," which are inconsistent if done by lay Christians, but perfectly sensible if done by Religious. The idea that the monk or nun will be identifiable by his lifestyle is a fallacy; if his lifestyle is that of a monk and his habit is that of a hippie, his lifestyle will be misinterpreted.

To sum up, a member of a society is responsible for what he does in informing his superior so that the superior can issue sensible orders; he is responsible for the effect on the society of whatever he does to others outside the society; but he is not responsible for what he does under orders, unless the orders are illegitimate (in which case, he is responsible for obeying, since he shouldn't do so).

Religious, then, should carefully examine the responsibility they have and see to it that they are living up to it like adults (who act in accordance with their real responsibilities); and they should enjoy their freedom from responsibility when they are in fact free from it.

Now then, let me resume the difference between the Christian life of the Religious and that of the layman. In the first place, the Religious' Christian acts always involve the whole congregation, because whenever he acts, the congregation is acting in his action. When the layman acts, these acts are his and his alone. He is not, as we will see, the Church acting; the Church, as a visible society, exists for the layman, and though as a community it includes the layman, he is more or less in the position of a student in a school, where nothing can be demanded of him that is not for his own development. The society which is the Church (i.e. the organization which can demand under threat acts objectively not beneficial to the agent) is the clergy, and does not include the laity.

Secondly, the Religious has an obligation to see to it that the congregation knows what he is doing and approves of it; it would be wrong for him simply to go ahead and do something without bothering to find out if the superior (i.e. the congregation as such) wanted him to do it--because what he does is what the congregation does, and this is supposed to be under the control of the superior.

The layman's Christian work, on the other hand, is not, strictly speaking, under the guidance of the Bishops and priests of his area, and is usually not even known by them. Nor is his work under their control, except in a negative sense; if what he is doing is contrary to Church teaching or practice, they can veto it, by declaring that what he is doing is not Christian and should be stopped. But in so doing, they are informing him, really, rather than commanding him. We will see this later. They can also suggest ways he could help the Church and do some work they would like to see done; but this is always a suggestion, never a command. The layman, in his Christian activity, is under the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit (i.e. not under the Holy Spirit through the hierarchy); and so is on his own. The hierarchy serves him, basically by providing information as to whether what he thinks is an inspiration is from the Holy Spirit.