I think you should be responsible; me, I'm not so sure.

Not long ago I was wheeling around the radio dial when I happened to catch a New Age evangelist sermonizing on the importance of eating only organically grown foods. Given the epidemic cancer rate in this country, this seemed like sound advice so I decided to listen for a few minutes to what turned out to be the benediction of a weekly program of mass therapy. Having offered specific dietary counsel, the speaker went on to more general issues. In a softly hypnotic voice she exhorted her flock, "it takes great courage to be healthy." How so, I puzzled? Is it because many of our unhealthy habits, like overeating, alcohol and drug abuse are attempts to stave off anxiety; hence, the pursuit of health requires a willingness to abjure from unhealthy defenses against anxiety ? That wasn't exactly her drift. The coda continued, "if you want to be healthy, the first and foremost thing is to be willing to take responsibility for yourself." In other words, the pursuit of health requires the courage to proceed as though the lives we live are nothing more nor less than the lives we have chosen.

The commandment to take responsibility for ourselves is, these days, frequently iterated. Indeed, on a recent Sunday I heard almost the same homily that I had caught on the radio delivered from the pulpit of a local church. Though depressive shades of mind can certainly obscure the fact, we do have more control over our lives than some of us would care to admit. Amongst those with a full belly and a therapist, and, I suppose, amongst those without a full belly and a therapist, much suffering is self-wrought. People neglect their bodies and then moan about their fate on the way to the emergency room. Parents who could not put their ambitions aside for a moment when their children were growing up feel embittered when they begin to comprehend that their now grown Jack and Jill abhor the idea of spending time with them. As the Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, was fond of pointing out, we often create

unpleasant states of mind and/or affairs which once set in motion acquire their own momentum and so spin beyond our control. If the truth be told, we are not always as passive in our suffering as our suffering would make us think; which is, in part, to concede that the ukase to take responsibility for oneself has its proper applications. If, however, Freud, Foucault, and other virtuosi of suspicion have taught us anything it is about the necessity of reading our oughts for their connotations and submerged interests. With this kind of an ear cocked, the rhetoric of responsibility carries some potentially disturbing undertones.

There is a relationship between the way we talk to ourselves and the way we talk to others. People who are always snarling at themselves are either always snarling at others or always trying to refrain from snarling. Though most of us are thankfully much less than absolutely consistent, the individual who imagines herself to be the pure product of her own choices is likely to think the same about her neighbor, be that neighbor someone whose most pressing problem is trying to decide whether or not to dip into her principal, or a single mother struggling to find a job, take care of a handicapped son, and come up with the rent on a rat-infested apartment. Whether or not the fanatics of freedom intend the letter of their sermons is an open question, but the claim that we ought to take absolute responsibility for the kind of people we are suggests that we enjoy complete control over our lives. Guess what? We do not.

Depending upon your situation in life, some claims are much easier to assent to than to believe, and yet surely everyone must agree with the essayist Joseph Epstein who writes, "We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing" (Ambition: The Secret Passion, Dutton, 1980). And one could go on and on and on. All the clucking about owning one's choices notwithstanding, our lives are shaped by many contingencies. It will, of course, be gainsaid that while we may not be able to control what comes our way, we can at least control our response to it. Put another way, while we cannot choose the circumstances of our lives we cannot help but choose what kind of people we are going to be. Where character is concerned, there are no contingencies. I am both the author and the book; or, to put it in Epstein's terms:

We do choose how we shall live: courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or drift. We decide that what makes us significant is either what we do or what we refuse to do. But no matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. And as we decide and choose so are our lives formed.

Interpretation: no matter how horrid our situation, be it Auschwitz or Cambodia, we are still left with choices (e.g., whether or not to live courageous, loving, honest lives) and it is in responding to these choices that we decide what kind of people we are going to be. Despite the nearly unanimous conviction that human beings are nothing if not corruptible, the creedal assumption is that nothing can rob us of our freedom.

Yet the conceptual pressures carried by such an assumption are palpable. That is why we do not want our armed robbers walking free, even though they might plead that they grew up in violent circumstances; nor do we want our friends to lie to us, only to explain that they can't help it because mutual deception was a way of life for their parents. And yet the outer does cast its shadow on the inner.

The circumstances of our lives can render it more or less impossible to make certain movements of the will. Yesterday I read of a farmer who lost his wife and three children to dehydration brought on by a water shortage caused by a long and typically ridiculous civil war. This man could not control the fate of his family but as the old dogma would have it, he can control how he is going to respond to his loss. It is, for instance, up to him whether or not he will become embittered. Or is it? What client of Club Med could chastise such a Job for cursing the day he was born? Those of us in the pink of life have, I think, a responsibility to acknowledge that people who have had the rug, floor, and foundation pulled out from under them are up against a slightly different beast than the rest of us.

For people born into a family with a garden, the tend-to-your-own-garden ethos carries the possible implication that we bear no responsibility toward people who don't have any gardens. The church in which I heard the "take responsibility for yourself" sermon was a wealthy congregation, with considerable resources for helping their neighbors up and down the road. Naturally, the last thing this flock wanted to hear about was rich folk, salvation, and eyes of needles. The next-to-last thing was that as winners in the lottery of material life they ought to stop groaning about low interest rates and spend some of the money they were going to use for that much-needed third vacation to help the horde of people whom life has placed against the wall. Not surprisingly, the first and last thing they did hear was exactly what they wanted to hear, namely, that we all need to take responsibility for ourselves. Though I am not sure that he would want to take responsibility for this moral, the pastor explained that what our impecunious neighbors really need are not Good Samaritans, but rather to take charge of their own lives.

In order to give life to his invocation, the minister discussed the death of Len Bias, a college basketball superstar and high N.B.A. draft choice who died from a drug overdose before he was ever able to take a single jump shot as a pro. Understandably many sports writers blamed this young man's death on the fact that he grew up under crushing circumstances. The shepherd of my flock would, however, have none of this meliorism. He insisted that if anything outside of Len Bias's will were responsible for Len Bias's death it was the acceptance of just this kind of palaver about individuals not being responsible for themselves. The truth, as he intoned it, was that Len Bias was solely to blame for Len Bias's death. Different circumstances would not have made a bit of difference. Had Len Bias played his high school ball at Phillips Exeter, summered on Martha's Vineyard, had a therapist to help him work through his self-destructive impulses, the result still would have been the same, or so this narrative goes. I am not so sure. While I would hate to encourage anyone to think that they cannot control themselves, it is a mistake to pretend that the nurturing environment which we all struggle to provide for our children is actually of no moral or characterological consequence. Just as the well-to-do will find it infinitely more difficult to adopt certain spiritual postures than someone less (but, as faith might have it, more) fortunate, so will the downtrodden find it more difficult than others to will themselves into certain states of mind (e.g., confidence about the future, or a conviction that it is a just world and that hard work will be rewarded). Poverty, no less than riches, but in a different way, can severely diminish the sway we have over ourselves.

Some years ago President Ronald Reagan was being pressured about the exponentially increasing number of people without roofs over their heads. At one of these pressure points, he burbled that it wouldn't do any good to sacrifice public funds for the homeless because most of the folks who were sleeping on grates were doing so out of their own free will. Most of us who caught this gaffe thought the president was hyperextending the concept of free choice in order to beg out of his social obligations. The rhetoric of responsibility is, I think, often put to the same self-excusing purpose and as such it is capable of undermining our sense of social responsibility. The moralists who preach that those without boots ought to pull themselves up by the bootstraps ought at least to recognize that of all possible messages, this moral is, strangely enough, the one which taxes them the least.