More thoughts on responsibility, this time at the personal level.

A friend of mine wrote last week to ask about the tension in my entry about Lance Armstrong between my attraction to a Nietzschean take on the real and my critique of the Calvinist version of it, which tends to look a lot like social Darwinism. I had written:

This friend of mine responded:

When I was writing it I was acutely aware of both the faith I have in the Nietzschean critique and of the degree to which inequality of starting position over time (nature or nurture, and not just at birth but through the entire developmental phase (extending perhaps to 25)) sustains the Calvinist fantasy.

I am not sure how to resolve the contradiction between those things, quite honestly--I'm really stuck right at that spot. Yes, my identification with Armstrong is strong precisely there where he refuses to apologize for his success, and yes, I do think that America's larger-than-proportionate share of the West's total power/assets has to do with a general cultural willingness to make Nietzschean grabs at the brass ring (and damn the natives!) rather than just luck. But the one is in relation to a bike race with equal starting conditions (minus the doping, if it exists) and the other in relation to a world whose complexities make Calvinism (a shorthand of course) a pretty terrible explanatory or ethical model.

The larger problem is I suppose how one deals with the power one's received at the macro level through no choice of one's own (i.e., whiteness, maleness, the fact of never being sexually abused, Americanness, class, other genetic factors in happiness, intelligence, and the like) in relation to one's life at the micro level, where the will can make itself felt. Again, Calvinism not the answer; I think what my argument comes up against here is that it looks, or can be made to look, too much like Nietzsche, or Nietzsche too much like it.

That is, it seems to me that one of the struggles one must engage with--and one engages with even when one isn't paying attention--has to do with the notion of "responsibility." I imagine that most people raised in the Judeo-Christian West are familiar with a sense of "responsibility to. It's what I take the Parable of the Talents to be about--a notion of being responsible to your gifts, which you can discharge by using them well and wisely. But here I am thinking of a much simpler form of responsibility, in which you agree to hold someone (sometimes yourself) or something responsible for what has happened to you. It's a truism that most people will consider themselves responsible for their successes, and others responsible for their failures, and of course neither one of them is always quite true--the list of factors, macro and micro, that intervene at every moment at which we might assign responsibility are too complex to boil down to something like "it was me" or "it was my circumstance."

I wonder--I really wonder, and will continue to think about this over the next couple months--whether a notion of ethical responsibility can be grounded solely on those things within the limits of a personal control, but remain contextualized (affected not in its action, but in its interpretation) by broader, macro-level issues. The questions here are: how much responsibility does any one bear for their life? And: how much responsibilty should any one bear for their life?

The crime is not in being born on third base, but in thinking you've hit the triple. That said, in the road home--longer in life than in baseball, since it is the road to one's own death--the decisions made step-by-step are, for the one involved, full of decision and choice that is real enough. Somewhere in Tristam Shandy, Sterne writes that the pain suffered by the working class is nothing next to a single bruise on the leg of a bluestocking. He's making a relative claim; the question is, how to recognize the bluestocking's pain as real--how to respect that pain--while remaining sensitive to the broader pain-context in which it occurs. Likewise for the bluestocking's successes and failures. And the reminder that one might mitigate the pain simply by telling the bluestocking about the working class proves only that we're dealing here with a complex and interesting system.