Scott Cawelti

Better title:  The Problem with Using Personal Responsibility to Bash Government.   Certainly I'm not against taking personal responsibility.  But I'm against using it to bash government. 

1-20-13

Conservatives believe that the mark of a mature adult involves taking full responsibility for one’s actions.

When you grow up, you own up.  We all have free will to choose our life paths.    

To right-wingers, homosexuality is a lifestyle choice, as is choosing to overdrink, overeat, neglect your family, flunk out of school, go on a rampage.   Every bad action starts with a free choice to break bad.  

If only people would start taking responsibility and choose the right action.   No more victims, no more letting others do what they should be doing for themselves.   No more government overreaching and paying freeloaders. 

Everyone should save for their old age when young, should make sure they keep all their bills paid up, should care for their parents and children cradle to grave, should make healthy choices for themselves and encourage others to do the same. 

Politicians should get out of the way and let citizens live their own lives, which they will do responsibly, if left alone.  Cutting off government handouts might even force freeloaders to start taking their responsibilities seriously. 

For conservatives, most of the country’s problems could be solved if everyone would take responsibility for their freely chosen actions.  

That’s what I hear from my right-leaning friends, who use “taking personal responsibility” as a club to beat government.   

Only one problem:  It’s wrong.   In actual practice, conservatives’ “personal responsibility” mantra doesn’t connect with life as we live it.

In reality we’re all interdependent with everyone and everything, 24/7/365.  No one is an island entire of itself, to paraphrase a wise poet from the seventeenth century.

If you’re breathing and eating, you depend on others to help keep the air breathable and the food edible.  If you’re working or playing, someone has to provide a reason to work or play, and something to work at and play with.  We do nothing wholly alone; it’s a logical and actual impossibility.

So how much responsibility can individuals take for clean air, food, water, and reasons to work and play?  Next to none. 

Life is a constant collaboration, involving compromises and changes for the good of all.  

Even worse for that conservative core belief, most of us have brains that trick us into thinking we know what we’re doing when we really don’t.   Neuroscientist David Eagleman’s 2011 book Incognito, reveals that “most of what we think and do is not under our conscious control,” and that our waking mind "is like a stowaway on a transatlantic steam ship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot."

Contemporary neuroscience undercuts the idea of free will and personal responsibility.  We live with unacknowledged needs from our genes and experiences that drive us toward actions we can’t stop or even change.  

Post-traumatic stress sufferers and addicts can’t affect what they’re doing without enormous, sometimes impossible, effort.     They’re driven to various forms of self-destructive behaviors beyond their control.  Jail or punishments make no sense for these people.  Serious treatments and ongoing research into better treatments does. 

They would never choose the lives they lead, destroying themselves and their loved ones.   How much personal responsibility can they take, realistically?  

Here’s the bottom line:  we need to accept what we cannot change, change what we can that needs changing, and be wise enough to understand the difference.   That’s the powerful serenity prayer, and it shines a clear light on personal responsibility.  

At times, there’s little we can do but accept our actions as being beyond our understanding and control--probably more than we care to admit.

Taking personal responsibility may work as an ideal, but not as a means to condemn people for their seeming choices, or worse, to deride and downsize government for its willingness to offer a safety net.

Like it or not, the bell tolls for all of us.         

I wrote this for the Courier  three weeks after Bill Maucker died in July of 2005.  He was probably among the best college administrators in the country for years, and contributed mightily to what UNI was to become.   As UNI searches for its tenth president, here is an appreciation for its sixth president,  Bill Maucker.  

Former UNI President Bill Maucker died July 5, and I’ve been pondering his enduring legacy.  He started his career as college president in 1950, when he was just 38.

 UNI was then Iowa State Teachers’ College, and he shepherded that sleepy little teacher training institution through its transformations as State College of Iowa, then on to a genuine university. He retired in 1970 after twenty years, the last five of them downright grueling.

By 1970, UNI had grown to nearly 10,000 students, and had become a complex institution, with multiple colleges and administrators, conflicting constituencies, and a restless faculty intent on having a voice in university governance.  Oh yes, and a large coterie of active, vocal students, some of them fresh from Vietnam, others from civil rights marches.  

Faculty and students alike united in social causes; sit-ins, marches, and demonstrations marked campuses all over America. UNI more than held its own on these fronts.  The campus offered students and faculty plenty of intellectual fervor and ferment, not to mention eccentric personalities and causes.

Maucker led the university through it all--the McCarthy “red scare” years, the civil rights marches and Vietnam War protests, and the disturbing Hoffmans and Childress controversies. His visionary leadership left UNI with a tradition of supporting free inquiry that lives to this day.

I remember admiring Maucker as a UNI undergraduate, then as a graduate student, then as an assistant professor before he retired.  He always knew my name, and always took time to stop and chat, though he seemed incapable of making small talk.  A sidewalk conversation with Bill Maucker usually meant an inquiry into the direction of your life, not to mention university politics, with side comments about whether a particular class was really worth teaching.

Nothing was lost on Bill Maucker; he listened with almost frightening intensity.

To me he became a touchstone of an administrator, meaning you could test other administrators by (speaking metaphorically) scratching them against Maucker’s essence.  If they left any mark at all compared to Maucker, they were probably the real thing.

That’s a hard test because Maucker made tough, unpopular decisions and stood by them.  I remember a colleague in the English Department talking about Maucker’s unqualified support for Ed Hoffmans.  Hoffmans had written an article for the college paper with the headline “From Dissent to Resistance:  Hell No, I Won’t Go.”  He suggested that students had a perfect right (even a duty, according to the Declaration of Independence) to resist the government’s drafting them to fight an undeclared, and possibly illegal, war fought by an “imperialist” country, namely the United States. 

His article didn’t sit too well with legislators, not to mention alumni and local newspaper editors, who promptly demanded that Hoffmans be fired.  My department colleague, who hailed from Texas, could hardly believe Maucker had the guts to assert that “We will take the banner of freedom of speech and nail it to our masthead!”  Maucker refused to even reprimand Hoffmans.  

Hoffmans was later fired by the university for poor teaching, and Hoffmans agreed--he wasn't doing the job he was hired to do.

 In fact, Maucker was granted the prestigious Meiklejohn award in 1968 for his defense of Hoffman’s right to publish his views. Five Iowa chapters of the American Association of University Professors had independently nominated him.

In defense of faculty freedom of speech and inquiry, Maucker declared, “I believe [in] the maintenance of freedom of thought and expression in the university community.  It is for educational reasons essentially that such freedom must be maintained—so that ideas freely expressed may freely compete, stimulating thought and analysis by students and faculty.”

And he made this point, which stands as an unequivocal statement of his position:  “It is not enough merely to tolerate provocative ideas—the university is obligated actively to encourage the free exchange of ideas.”

Four years ago, President Koob and Provost Podolefsky, among other UNI administrators, unanimously defended students’ decision to perform “Corpus Christi,” a highly controversial play which both embodied and sharply questioned Christian values.  As I read their comments, I could sense Maucker’s enduring legacy.   

President Maucker is dead. 

Long live President Maucker.