I hear a lot of people in light of what has been happening in the United States these recent months sharing the same dilemma. I hear them say again and again: “I keep asking myself, ‘What should I do?,’ but I don’t know what to do.”
I think the problem is that we are each asking ourselves the same wrong, isolating question. Overcome with rapid-fire changes in our social framework, we withdraw to search for a constructive pathway, but we do it in isolation. By asking “What should I do?,” we effectively isolate ourselves from the very base we need.
We need to recognize that in these times, we cannot act alone. We need to discern responsive pathways, not by isolating ourselves but by vulnerably opening up to others about the predicament we find ourselves in.
In times like this, we should be prompting one another with the same question: “What should we do?”
It is frustrating and of little utility to ask oneself to be the architect of a solution for the present situation. Rather, we need to share our dilemmas with one another so as to begin building and discovering pathways to the future. We cannot find those pathways alone; we need to search with one another. In doing so, we need to appreciate much more than we normally do the importance of collective moral agency.
In the field of Catholic theological ethics, the concept of collective moral agency is becoming more and more important. It follows an earlier conversation on the role that social structures and cultures have on our moral agency. A group of philosophers and theologians, huddling around an emerging school of thought called critical realism, argued convincingly that while cultures and social structures have remarkable influence on us, they still have no agency. As the theologian Daniel Finn rightly noted in his important work, Moral Agency within Social Structures and Cultures: A Primer on Critical Realism for Christian Ethics, only persons are moral agents.
This distinction is an important one. Often enough, we attribute to social structures and cultures an agency that they do not possess; it is precisely only persons who are capable of actually deliberating and acting. Still, a subsequent question arises: Is personal agency always individual? Or is it also—or even more so—collective?
This question prompted me to write a review about the call for a recognition of collectives as moral agents. That review highlighted the need to recognize that a good deal of moral agency is more collective than we might realize. In fact, in the United States, we are less inclined to recognize it than elsewhere.
The default to the individual
In the United States, when we discuss moral agency, our default to the individual is a commonplace. Other industrialized countries have similar inclinations, of course, but in the United States, we seem to be more inclined to think of moral agency as in the hands of a singular person. In doing so, we often lose track of the many forms of collective moral agency that actually occur.
Some other cultures have just the opposite problem. In many parts of Africa, for instance, one finds a communitarianism that is palpable. Invoking the famous Ubuntu saying, “I am because we are,” they are less inclined to ask “What should I do?” Rather, they say, “What should we do?”
Of course, on both extremes we see the influence of culture and attendant social structures on personal moral agency.
Today in the United States, ethicists like Lisa Sowle Cahill, Daniel Daly, Kristin Heyer, Conor Kelly, Cristina Traina and Kate Ward, among others, are advancing our awareness in their classes and their publications of the complexity of moral agency. So, too, are newer voices addressing the issue. For instance, Justin Conway is writing a dissertation on the virtues of collective moral agency. He wrote recently on how Pope Francis’ encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” resonates with the work of Black sociopolitical writers who raise up the need to recognize others with collective human dignity. Here we can think of the many movements that have arisen to address matters of economic justice, racial injustice, climate change and forced migration.
In the United States, whenever we ask questions of responsibility, we tend to think some one person must be responsible. The problem is that we do not get beyond this presupposition. Here we might recall Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism from his Philosophical Investigations: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” Indeed, in our culture’s social structures, the individual’s agency and responsibility is much easier to recognize and estimate than that of the collective.
I want to invite us into a reflection of how often, when we were younger, we depended on a deep and powerful inclination to search, find and engage collective moral agency. If we reflect from the dawn of our high school years to their conclusion, many of us likely sought a variety of collectives with which we identified to varying degrees. There were teams and clubs, circles and projects, school programs and neighborhood associations that prompted our interests. Thinking back on those years, we might recognize an enormous resourcefulness about our personality in trying to be more connected. In our pre-adult years, we strove for associative identities with uncanny skill and energy.
I grew up in a Brooklyn working-class neighborhood; most of my childhood was spent “going out and playing with my friends.” I suspect that for many of us, seeking out activities with friends was a primary focus of our childhood years. We tried to be with others.
Lessons from youthhood
When I was finishing seventh grade in 1965, I enrolled in a weeklong program at the Trinitarian high school seminary in Lynchburg, Va. I liked the visit and decided I’d like to go there the following year. But one day my mother asked me, “Jimmy, if you became disappointed with the seminary, would you be able to tell the superior, ‘I think I have to go home’?” I answered: “I don’t think so. I wouldn’t want to disappoint him, especially after he would have accepted me.” “Then you can’t go,” she said and explained why.
That was such a defining moment. My mother wanted to make sure that I was still Jimmy in the midst of the Trinitarians. I learned that I needed to become more myself first.
In 1966, I enrolled in a brand-new diocesan high school on Long Island but still pursued my growing vocation to religious life. I visited both the Capuchin and the Columban houses of formation in New York. For a variety of reasons, as much as I liked them, I was still not set.
At my high school, the Sisters of St. Joseph (Brentwood) encouraged me to consider developing a student-led project with Christian Life Communities. With their help, I formed a C.L.C. group of some 30 fellow students to become weekly reading tutors in a neighboring grammar school. The diocesan newspaper did a story on our project, and the vice president of the national C.L.C. movement invited me to their assembly in St. Louis in the summer of 1969. From New York, he would drive me and the C.L.C. national chaplain, Frank Drolet, S.J., to the conference and back. In that car ride and at that assembly, I got an introduction to the Jesuits. I entered the order in the summer of 1970 at the age of 17.
At 19, I took my first vows, including a vow of obedience. (I still reassured my mother that I could always up and leave the order if I deemed I should.) I never lost my agency, but I did choose to participate in a collective agency as well.
Though my story of arriving among the Jesuits is particular to me, it shares much more in common with the stories of others than we frequently acknowledge. Each of us had similar and multiple journeys. Even as young as seventh grade, we set our eyes on particular high schools, circles of friends and social groups that would often guide us on our own particular pathways.
In high school, we began to think of who we wanted to become: a dancer, athlete, physician, cook, designer, driver, whatever. We also joined intramural and athletic teams as well as clubs, along with collectives outside of our school, like scouting and church groups. We even began to choose classes that might not be required but were particularly necessary for the professional fields we were learning to pursue.
We were amazingly adept and fluid at experimenting with what felt right and what did not. We made many mistakes along the way, but we continued searching.
We learned to bounce around groups, very informally, in and out of a variety of circles. We were discovering what we wanted to do and with whom we wanted to be engaged. In high school, we learned to present our agency to be engaged collaboratively in a wide variety of matters—and then returned home to our family, another collective, that we would engage differently as we matured. In short, we became social agents.
Though most of us did not enter a religious order or seminary life as high school ended, we did go to another formative collective, be that a community college, a university or straight into the workforce. We were no longer primarily a daughter or a son but rather an agent who collectively engaged others.
All this happened on the dawn of us finally entering our field of work, where we further became identified by the people with whom we worked. While our agency became deeply connected to that profession, we learned never to lose our individual agency as we began to identify with even more collectives.
In short, it might do us good to realize that in most of our decisions, we often first resolved with whom we want to do it, or perhaps more generally, what type of people we wanted to do it with. Of course, along the way, many of us also were looking for someone to spend our adult lives with and, in some instances, perhaps to begin a family one day with that other.
Most of our lives are lived in a familiar, deeply collaborative way. But we spent our early years learning how to engage those complex forms of collective agency.
The need for social trust
Perhaps it is an understatement to say that right now our nation is going through a rough patch. As I said in my last essay for America, I think the key problem is the lack of social trust. Indeed, I would say that we need to recognize that our nation’s social trust is increasingly withering away.
We must recognize that the answer to the challenge before us involves acting together.
Unless we ask how we ought to proceed, we are not yet addressing the challenge of our time.
Still, I am very confident that if we think of how we instinctively learned early on in our lives how to collaborate with others, if we think of the fears, desires and hopes that guided us to join groups and make decisions at young ages with flexibility and agility, and with one another, hopefully, that memory will free us to ask more easily and pointedly what we should do. If we reconnect with those original inclinations that prompted us to realize that my good was very much rooted in your good, then we can find the freedom and wisdom to do what needs to be done. We can learn to work with one another again.
That adolescent social memory might then be a real boon. At least it has been for me.
Our social alienation in the current moment is palpable. The need to rebuild—or to build in another way—the trust we lack is before us. It is good, then, to invite one another into the question of collective moral agency. I hope to hear more people say some version of “I tried to figure out what I should do, but discovered instead that I needed to find others to ask what we should do.”
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