[lit-ideas] Re: You don't say.....
- From: "Steven G. Cameron" <stevecam@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 16 Apr 2005 15:20:58 -0400
**Related concerns are often exhibited in our students requesting
better grades because: their scholarships depend on them, their parents
demand them, they feel entitled (without accompanying warranted
substantiation) -- and moreover without making the required efforts.
Their responsibilities, it seems... are frequently limited to merely
wanting to be thought more highly of. We suffer a severe reduction in
ethical standard at present -- and poor role models to observe/admire.
TC,
/Steve Cameron, NJ
JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx wrote:
> I've frequently observed this phenomena in individuals -- not celebrities,
> but your every-day cashier, teacher, customer service rep, doctor, teenager,
> car-wash attendant, any walk of life... what I can't figure is if it's a
> trickle-down or trickle-up effect.
>
> <<Personal responsibility waning, experts say
>
> Tue Apr 12, 4:10 PM ET
>
> By Steven Thomma, Knight Ridder Newspapers
> WASHINGTON - Simple and direct like the man who put it there, it was a bold
> statement that summed up his approach to leadership and represented a value
> of the generation that helped him build a new America after World War II.
>
> "The Buck Stops Here," said the no-nonsense sign on President Harry Truman's
> desk. Today, it sits in a Missouri museum. And with it perhaps the sentiment
> it represented.
> It was more than a slogan. The notion of accepting responsibility without
> passing the buck or blaming others when things went wrong was central to the
> work ethic and moral tone of the time.
> By contrast today, almost none of the leaders of the country's great
> institutions ever step forward and take responsibility for failure or even
> honest
> mistakes. It is sometimes imposed by others, notably juries, but less so by
> the
> broader American society and virtually never invoked voluntarily in
> politics, business, religion or popular culture.
> In government, for example, no one was held responsible for major failures
> in intelligence in either the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or what
> former
> CIA Director George Tenet called the "slam dunk" conclusion that Iraq had
> weapons of mass destruction. Instead, President Bush awarded Tenet the Medal
> of
> Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
> In business, Worldcom CEO Bernard Ebber's defense against criminal charges
> was that the boss isn't really responsible for his company. A jury didn't
> agree and convicted him.
> In the Roman Catholic Church, the man who presided over the country's worst
> sexual-abuse scandal, Boston Archbishop Bernard Law, eventually resigned his
> American office. But he retains his higher status as a cardinal, is well
> regarded in the Vatican where he now works and will soon be one of the elites
>
> who choose a new pope.
> In popular entertainment, bad behavior once routinely punished on screen now
> can be excused or celebrated. In the 1960 movie "Oceans 11," for example,
> rogues led by Frank Sinatra don't get to keep their stolen money. In the
> 2001
> remake, thieves led by George Clooney get away with the cash.
> Historians, philosophers, political scientists and sociologists cite many
> reasons for the decline of an ethic of responsibility in America over recent
> decades, including:
> - A culture of narcissism or self-absorption;
> - The rise of celebrity worship and entitlement;
> - The distractions of the war on terrorism.
> Whatever the reasons, most experts agree that how people feel about their
> obligations has changed, particularly for those in positions of power and
> influence.
> "Responsibility is waning. The strong sense of holding people responsible is
> getting more and more difficult," said Joan McGregor, a philosopher at
> Arizona State University. "We still hold people responsible all the time in
> a
> legal sense. But in a moral sense, it's as though no one is responsible any
> more."
> It wasn't always so, particularly in the brief period during and after World
> War II when the country was dominated by what Tom Brokaw would later call
> the Greatest Generation.
> When enormously popular Gen. Douglas MacArthur disobeyed presidential
> orders, Truman fired him, risking his own political standing.
> President John F. Kennedy took "sole responsibility" a few months into
> office when the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs turned into a debacle.
> He
> fired the CIA director and deputy who initiated the plan.
> But American society changed in the second half of the 20th century, much
> for the better, some for the worse.
> Post-World War II affluence produced a mobile society, one that tore up the
> roots of closely bound ethnic communities in central cities. Many moved to
> suburbs where neighbors didn't automatically know neighbors and didn't
> necessarily share the same culture. People didn't feel as responsible to
> strangers as
> they did to those who'd known them - and might judge them.
> The divorce rate shot up. The number of people living alone escalated. As
> Robert Putnam noted in his landmark 1995 book, "Bowling Alone," the number
> of
> people who bowled rose, but the number who did so in organized leagues
> dropped. The fabric of American culture highlighted by membership in
> organizations,
> noted by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, came apart.
> "People begin to live in a way where they don't share a lot of symbolic
> meaning with the people near them," said the Rev. John Staudenmaier, S.J., a
> historian at the University of Detroit Mercy. "They don't want to share. They
>
> don't come from a world where the commitments you make bind you."
> Popular culture echoed the changes with the rise of the anti-hero. The
> voluntary Hays Code, which prohibited movies from glamorizing crime, was
> dropped.
> So was the Television Code, with its prohibition against showing criminal
> behavior being rewarded. Even the Comics Code Authority, with its
> requirement
> that good must always win, faded.
> Americans adopted a new post-1960s attitude that society - not the
> individual - was to blame for errant behavior. They created no-fault divorce
> and
> no-fault auto insurance. Increasingly, they also turned to lawsuits to blame
> others for their own choices.
> Former President Bill Clinton personified the trend.
> When first accused of having an affair with a former White House intern, he
> angrily denied it and then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton blamed a "vast
> right-wing conspiracy." After he was caught lying under oath to conceal the
> affair, he lashed out at the politics of personal destruction. In his
> presidential library, he avoids personal responsibility and devotes most of
> an exhibit
> on his impeachment to blaming Republicans for trying to unseat him.
> By the time he launched his presidential campaign in June 1999, George W.
> Bush, too, saw a problem.
> "My first goal is to usher in the responsibility era, an era that stands in
> stark contrast to the last few decades, where our culture has said: If it
> feels good, do it, and if you've got a problem, blame someone else," Bush
> said.
> "Each American must understand that we are responsible for the decision each
> of us makes in life."
> But he hasn't taken responsibility for failures in his government, nor has
> he assigned it to those who work for him.
> To be sure, finding people responsible for failure during wartime is
> sometimes controversial.
> During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was constantly second-guessed by
> congressional committees. Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee said one of those
> committees was worth two divisions to his side.
> After Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, the government investigated and
> punished several senior military officials. Similarly, at the height of
> World
> War II, then-Sen. Truman led an investigation into war profiteering by
> American
> businesses, exposing shoddy work and saving billions of dollars and
> thousands of lives.
> After the United States was attacked in 2001, Bush resisted attempts to find
> flaws in the nation's intelligence or security apparatus. Once he relented,
> investigations found fault, but Bush didn't assign responsibility or take
> it.
> Investigations also faulted intelligence services for wrongly stating that
> Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded.
> Again,
> Bush didn't assign responsibility or take it.
> In fact, policymakers who expressed skepticism about parts of the
> administration's case for war weren't asked to return for Bush's second
> term, including
> former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Armitage.
> Those who publicly or privately trumpeted the false intelligence were either
> retained or promoted, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld;
> then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice; her former deputy, Stephen
> J.
> Hadley; and Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter"
> Libby.
> After it was revealed that prisoners were abused in the Abu Ghraib prison in
> Iraq, Bush condemned the practice. Rumsfeld offered to resign, but Bush
> rejected the offer.
> At a recent congressional hearing, a senior military investigator said top
> U.S. officials had failed to set clear rules for interrogating prisoners, but
> he added that it wasn't his role to assign responsibility.
> In business, high-flying, highly paid executives presided over a corporate
> culture that some critics likened to the Gilded Age of the late 1800s.
> "The CEO became a cult hero," said Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at Columbia
> University. "The CEO class came to believe what the cover stories said about
> them, that they were sublime geniuses who made vast amounts of difference in
> the success of their companies."
> When Worldcom's Ebbers claimed he wasn't responsible for financial crimes
> committed at his company - a defense other indicted executives planned to use
> -
> it signaled what Gitlin called a moral collapse.
> "If you think that being the CEO and being rewarded gets you off a hook
> rather than on it, then your moral principle is that ignorance is bliss,"
> Gitlin
> said.
> One thing that's allowed the powerful to abandon responsibility is lack of
> societal pressure. In 1996, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole
> discovered that voters were uninterested in fund-raising abuses at the
> Clinton White
> House. "Where's the outrage?" Dole repeatedly complained.
> Gitlin attributes it to the cult of personality. "There's been a metastasis
> of celebrity," he said. "Celebrity is taken to be a moral position. To be a
> celebrity is to transcend mere categories of good and evil."
> Staudenmaier, the historian, said people are distracted. He suggested that's
> what happened in the Roman Catholic Church.
> "When you're paying more attention to the definition of doctrinal
> correctness, which has been the case for 20 years, you find people looking
> past the
> question of whether people are doing a good job with the power," he said.
> At the same time, he said, Americans became more exclusively focused on
> profits in business and on the war on terror in government.
> Said Staudenmaier: "You take your eye off the ball and you get bad
> behavior." >>
>
>
>
>
>
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