SKILL 9
Social Responsibility
Social responsibility entails recognizing and assuming responsibility for the well-being of the larger group and for the other individuals who live and operate within it. That larger group could be a business enterprise, a church congregation, a sports league, a community, and so on. One demonstrates that he or she is a constructive and cooperative member of the social group by contributing to it in a reliable manner. Typically, one would give one’s time, effort, participation, money, and allegiance to the group and its individual members in order to help it accomplish its collective purpose in a way that benefits all its members.
WHY SHOULD WE CARE ABOUT SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY?
Social responsibility is the glue that holds societies and communities together. It is the reciprocal relationship between the individual members and the group that supports them and allows groups to achieve collective goals far beyond what an individual ever could alone.
How do we ever come to identify and know ourselves as a society? We can only gain this wisdom through the reflections we receive from the world around us. In our postmodern electronic global community, those reflections increasingly come through the electronic media. Because the authentic energy of an actual person-to-person connection is not present there, it makes it more difficult for our children to develop social responsibility skills and more essential that we cultivate and model them as adults.
According to Joseph Turow (1997, p. 3), “The U.S. is experiencing a major shift in balance between society-making media and segment-making media. Segment-making media are those that encourage small slices of society to talk to themselves, while society-making media are those that have the potential to get all those segments to talk to each other.”
This shift has resulted in much unconscious and conscious jostling for status between newly fragmented groups that perceive all “others” to be different. It makes developing and maintaining social responsibility all the more difficult and all the more imperative!
The cost of allowing our social responsibility to erode is perhaps best captured in the following declaration made by Pastor Martin Niemoller to the Council of the Evangelical Church in Germany, October 18, 1945. There are many versions of his remarks in circulation, but his actual statement can be found at www.christianethicstoday.com (click on #9 for the specific issue).
“First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
There are two kinds of human behavior that the pendulum of history has swung between for a very long time, competition and collaboration. Competitive behavior produces more content: rapid change and innovation, reduced monetary costs, more efficient manufacturing and distribution of products, and of course, winners and losers. That is because these kinds of goals tend to be linear in nature and are attainable through rational mechanistic processes led by individuals with high IQs.
Collaborative behavior produces more context: slower, system-sensitive change, reduced social and environmental costs, a more integrated and equal distribution of resources, and far fewer winners and losers. That is because these kinds of goals tend to be multidimensional, interdisciplinary in nature, and follow organic, intuitive processes led by teams with high EQ.
Rational intelligence did a great job at solving most of the problems that got our species out of the dark ages and into the 20th century, but since 1900 the number of people sharing this planet and all of its resources has increased by a factor of 3.5, and the unpaid interest on the debts that have accrued from the reductionist worldview leave us with problems too complex for it to understand, let alone resolve. In spite of all the apparent evidence to the contrary, the pendulum accelerates toward collaboration.
HOW CAN WE BUILD SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY?
As you explore and rededicate your commitment to social responsibility, allow the words of Robert Kennedy to guide you:
“Some men see things as they are and ask ‘why?’
I dream things that have never been and ask ‘why not?’”
The first step in building social responsibility is to learn to value our social engagements in a new way relative to our self-interest. We must pay a new kind of attention to the cooperative advantage we sustain through communicating honestly and working together toward common goals that will genuinely benefit all of us. The economic advantage we have achieved through technology has served to weaken this awareness. When we look at the human species in comparison with all others, we notice that no other animal has an insatiable “need” for more. All other species, including the great apes, orangutans, chimpanzees, and other higher primates to which we are most biologically similar, observe a natural limit to the amount of food, territory, and so forth that they attempt to control and/or consume. Humans alone do not.
This is perhaps largely due to our ability to think symbolically, the capacity that supposedly makes us more evolved than all other animals. The downside of the “subject-object” schism is that it allows us to perceive ourselves as distinct from everything else. Our liability to this kind of misperception should be recognized for what it is and managed consciously, intelligently, and rigorously; otherwise, we can jeopardize life as we know it on the planet.
Building social responsibility means developing more relationships that explore and express our interdependency and strengthen our appreciation of that connection. In order to act in ways that bind us together rather than fragment us, we must integrate and synthesize an honest agreement about what our real needs, desires, and interests should be.
In order to build these kinds of relationships, we must re-evaluate from where we derive our sense of identity. If we see ourselves as a single isolated human body that might perish any day in an accident, or at best survive eight or nine decades before disappearing into oblivion, it could make sense to live as if “whoever dies with the most toys wins.” To build socially responsible relationships we must identify with something larger than ourselves. For eight billion people to share this planet in peace and prosperity, what we value and feel a part of will need to expand to include much more of the Earth’s rich diversity. Perhaps someday we will grow to feel socially responsible for all of her environment, all of her resources, all of her people.
The more responsibility we take for each other and for all life on the planet, the safer we will feel, the more we can achieve, the better we can care for the fragile environment that supports us. Each of us will feel a greater sense of purpose. We will feel more valued and appreciated. We will each feel that our contribution is more meaningful, that we belong and are more fully supported in achieving our life purpose. We experience less stress when we know we are not alone.
STAR PERFORMERFormer President Jimmy Carter smiles and speaks with a serenity and compassion that is unmistakably representative of an internal peace of mind. Through his continued efforts to help resolve conflict around the world, he demonstrates an unquestionable commitment to social responsibility so remarkable that he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his work to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development through the carter center. He is also a key figure in Habitat for Humanity.
REEL PERFORMERIn Remember the Titans, Denzel Washington plays Herman Boone, a Virginia football coach at a newly integrated high school in the 1970s. He must first help the young men overcome their own racial prejudice enough to bond and function as an effective football team. Then he must protect and continue to nurture their unity in the face of the community’s hostility toward the coach and the African-American students. His best demonstration of building social responsibility comes when he runs his players to a Civil War battleground and helps them connect with the human pain and suffering that was common to everyone on both sides. They leave with a commitment to do their personal best to transcend those human foibles in themselves for the sake of what they all hold in common, their love of the game.