Being and Responsibility

In one of her essays, a discussion of daytime talk shows, Barbara Ehrenreich points out that, though producers of the daytime genre intend it ultimately to be politically impotent and the issues under discussion marginalized, it is the only forum left in contemporary culture that confronts people with moral responsibility, with the shame and guilt of their actions.

Years ago, while teaching Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, I came across a critical essay that argued that our attitudes toward moral responsibility have changed dramatically over time beginning with

• a Judeo-Christian belief in sin and atonement


• then shifting around the 19th century to seeing reprehensible actions in terms of crime and punishment


• and finally arriving with Freud and Modernism to condoning behavior in the paradigm of neurosis and therapy.

(I'm leaving out pharmaceuticals, but that can wait for another discussion.)

This observation has always struck me, for it reveals a great deal. This is not to say that the identification of neuroses and its adjunct therapy is invalid. It is to say, however, that the culture may have gone rather overboard in tolerating unacceptable behaviors. I can scorn you if you smoke, but can say nothing if you're rude in the theater or if your children are kicking the back of my airline seat.

One Sunday morning during a PBS fund-raising campaign I watched the self-help author Wayne Dyer's segment. The man is annoyingly self-aggrandizing but had a couple of interesting things to say. One of his contentions was that true nobility is not about being better than anyone else. It is about being better than one used to be. That evening on 60 Minutes, Elaine Stritch provided yet another insight when she asked Morley Safer if he had ever been fired. He laughed, No.

Oooooooh, she said, rolling her eyes and shaking her head with knowing wisdom of what he'd never had the experience to learn. Her response to the ax, she said, was not, "I'll show them." It was, "I'll show me."

Starting over with eyes wide open is hard work. Stanley Kubrick's much misunderstood film Eyes Wide Shut confronts the issue of seeing what we want to see rather than what is actually there.

I have argued that David Mamet's entire oeuvre could be said to center on the human capacity for limitless self-delusion, on our uncanny ability to believe what we want to believe while remaining blind to what is immediately before our eyes in order to preserve our psychic status quo.

Freud wrote that everyone is an artist because everyone dreams. The perverse side of that creative impulse might be our seemingly inexhaustible capacity for self-delusion.

To so great an extent are we motivated by fear - that pesky, ubiquitous fear of the unknown. It haunts us all. Even if it hurts us, we will persist in the behavior we know because ... well, it's what we know. Better the evil we know than the evil we don't. Or those twin phrases we hide behind: "It's just the way I am" and "I can't help the way I feel." Well, yes, Virginia, you can.

If one can come to terms with one's fears, whatever those fears may embody, then it should allow the means to come to terms with all of the other little deaths that the process of confronting the unknown inevitably requires. If we're going to die anyway, what should hold us back from the petit mals? Well, easier said than done for all of us.

See David Brooks's NY Times 11/09/2009 editorial "A Rush to Therapy," which I read the day after I wrote this.

PS An acquaintance from graduate school, Larry Baker, has recently published A Good Man, a re-imagining of Flannery O'Conner's character in the Bush years.