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On Responsibility
One ship drives east and another drives west. / With the self-same winds that blow; / ’Tis the set of the sails / And not the gales / That tells them the way to go. // Like the winds of the sea are the winds of fate / As we voyage along through life; / ’Tis the set of the soul / That decides its goal / And not the calm or the strife.
This poem, ‘The Winds of Fate,’ by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, touches upon something that seems to be ubiquitous to the modern human condition: the struggle of fate and of personal responsibility.
Given unto ourselves, torn away from value structures, we float aimlessly. Either we believe in hearty individualism, the rugged American pioneer; or we flee into another abstraction, perhaps belief that the stars or personality tests — or worse still, psychologists — can bestow dignity upon us once again.
What is responsibility in this context? It is no longer, as it was once, duty to something other than oneself. Neither can it be utter and complete privacy of self-duty — too many years of psychology and philosophy has rid us of such notions. We are, irreparably, thrown into a contingent context. Indeed, this realization is usually the first wavering of religious faith: “If I was born elsewhere, would I still be X?” This early notion of the importance of context leaves us bare to ‘something else.’
