Responsibility

When it comes to responsibility, we are all so awful, aren't we?

Why would our children want to follow our example, we have to ask ourselves, when we so reluctantly take the kind of responsibility that we demand from them?

The truth is that it is hard for all of us - me, especially - to admit our failures. I have quite a few, myself. All of us do, when we're honest. Yet, somehow, we often pretend that we got to where we are by trial and no error. We've spent the last 6-7 years making it that much more difficult for us to face up to ourselves, nevertheless to others, about those failures.

The only way forward on that is to admit the bigger failure around being so harsh and aggressive with people, nevertheless the smaller failures that we want ourselves and others to take responsibility for.

I've been really disappointed with Americans and liberal democratic citizens and governments, generally, around this issue for the last few years. But my most empirically-validated hope is that liberal democracies, better than most if not all other cultures and governing arrangements, tend to take responsibility for their failures, better, with time, than do less liberal democratic cultures and societies. We didn't own up to our treatment of Native Americans or slaves or for Japanese internment immediately. It took time. And the hope in liberal democratic societies is that big failures, like the one we're in the middle of, today, in how we hyperaggressively pursue accountability much more than the war in Iraq, is that we are the most likely of cultures, most if not all others which are far more brutal, harsh, aggressive, and punitive, to own up for our failures. At some point, at least.

Reading Joe Nye's somewhat harsh assessment of the justness of the war in Iraq and assigning responsibility solely to the President, responsibility that people like Joe and Andrew Sullivan and Peter Beinart, Hillary Clinton, and many of the Administration's harshest critics share since they supported this effort publicly before it was underway, reminds me that everyone, even people as smart as Joe, have a hard time owning up for their failures. All of us do. Which is why we all need more space to do so, not more aggressive, punitive, forceful efforts to bring us down.

Our model for responsibility - for ourselves and for others - is hardly the most effective possible, given all of its failures. What we need is more of the liberal democractic values that respect our free will and appreciate our humanity to create and extend a better model than the failed one we carry around today.

It is difficult for all of us to admit our failures, especially when we are afraid of looking bad or being treated badly.

It is also the only way forward. And admitting the biggest failure - our failure to provide the space for failures, even the biggest ones, to be acknowledged openly and publicly, if at all - is the most important acknowledgment of responsibiliy that will be needed for a more genuine progress on our most serious concerns.

Love,
Ben