Responsibility

by Ghassan Hage

The concept of responsibility permeates social life. While it has many meanings, they often centre around questions of practical and moral accountability, culpability and liability. One can learn a great deal about a social formation by looking at the way the meanings of responsibility are deployed within it, the way they vary from one social space to another, and the way they are often at the centre of a political struggle over how we define and apportion blame. The essays in this book do more than examine such processes. Each in its own way also invites the readerto push existing assumptions about what individual, political, ecological and corporate responsibility entails.

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Ghassan J. Hage is a Lebanese-Australian academic serving as Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are so many books like this, and overall, I basically love them. They take a word we think we know well and have very positive feelings about, responsibility in this case, but I’ve also reviewed books on empathy, merit, belonging, waiting (by the same author), desire, expertise, habits or distinction, and then they show all of the problems with these words and the concepts behind them. Sometimes the authors don’t go far enough, sometimes they go too far – but I generally enjoy the journey all the same. This is a series of short chapters by various academics on different aspects of responsibility. I don’t think I didn’t enjoy a single one.

The book starts by saying that the origin of the word responsibility is in to provide a response – so, to give an answer – but also points out that in Arabic the word is about a question, rather than answer. I’m not sure how much difference this really makes, but it is interesting in its own way. In many ways, responsibility is something that almost defines us as humans – and not just for existentialist, where someone like Sartre says we should hold ourselves responsible for everything that happens in our lives, given that our lives are otherwise meaningless. This hyper responsibility is something I always feel I should think more about, but worry it might become the only thing I end up thinking about.

The other side to this is the current tendency to very much limit what we are responsible for. We’ve just had Australia Day/Survival Day/Invasion Day here in Australia. Should non-Aboriginal people be held responsible for the harms done in the colonisation of Australia? Many people say that since they were not born when these harms were committed it would be wrong to hold them responsible. They tend to ignore that they still benefit from these harms and Aboriginal people still suffer from those harms too. It is not like an insult my great grandfather might have said to someone else’s great grandfather that is now forgotten with them both now being dead. These are ongoing harms and making no one responsible for them means no one can address them.

Similarly with climate change. We are all responsible for the destruction of the planet, but those of us in the west more so, because of our past and present actions in causing the problem. And yet, some use the same argument, that we today can’t be held responsible for the actions of our grandparents. The problem with this argument is that most of the carbon that has been pumped into the atmosphere has been done in our lifetimes and so we are the ones who have both directly benefited from this destruction and also caused it. It is interesting, because if we benefit from something, rather than take responsibility for it, we are more likely to do the opposite and see it as something that is beyond all responsibility. A twist on that old saying about how hard it is to convince someone of something that undermines their wage.

Although this book was written before the current genocide in Gaza, it is hard not to think about that in relation to the themes of this book. In one of the chapters there is a discussion on Noel Pearson and his claim that the liberal left are causing the ongoing harm to Aboriginal people by not allowing them to take responsibility for their actions. The short version being that Aboriginal people make bad decisions and blaming it all on Australia’s history of racism is both the easy way out, but also continues the paternalistic attitude towards Aboriginals that never allows them to become fully functioning members of Australian society. The solution, I’d have thought, to this would be to provide Aboriginal people with autonomy and a voice that we are obliged to hear – both of which have been taken from them, particularly when the majority of Australians recently voted to not allow an Aboriginal voice to parliament.

There is a great chapter at the start of this on the Milgram experiments, which challenges the way these are generally read – you know, as a simple stating of the ‘people do what they are told, even when it causes infinite harm to others’. Instead, the author focuses upon how distressed those ‘just following orders’ proved to be by the experiment. Some directly refused, but others pleaded with the authority figure to allow them to stop.

Hage’s chapter in this is particularly interesting. It looks at an extended Lebanese family, many of whom are distributed across the world, and how they resolve (or not) issues of being responsible for an ageing parent. The deep situatedness of this is particularly interesting. You know that term ‘wicked problems’? I really like it. A wicked problem isn’t one where we haven’t quite found the right solution yet – but rather one where every solution causes some other problem. Bringing this back down to the level of a single family is a powerful way to making this clear, not least since it is based on experiences we have all had at one time or another.

I really liked this book. Well worth the read.