This one is a shout out to David Weinberger, who I stole the title from.
Is Obama inappropriately receiving credit for killing Osama bin Laden? Given the upcoming presidential election it is a question that might be asked for longer than one news cycle. As someone who tries to keep from plunging his head too deeply into the endless torrent of opinion that is the blogosphere, I have to admit that I haven’t fully probed the variety of answers that people are asking here. But as an anthropologist I do want to comment briefly on what anthropology might have to add to this debate.
A lot of ones and zeros have been spilled on how the president can and cannot take responsibility for things that happen during his administration, but I feel like the other side of the question has not been fully addressed: who did kill Osama bin Laden? The guy who pulled the trigger? In my experience most military folks refuse to take credit for accomplishments that belong to their whole squad. Should we credit the entire SEAL team that went to Abbotabad? But of course it took JSOC to find Osama bin Laden, and it took a lot of taxpayer money to fund JSOC… The problem is not whether one particular person can take credit for killing Osama bin Laden, the problem is trying to understand why we think individuals are the right sort of thing to take credit for actions at all.
My point is that America is an individualistic society. We see the individual as the basic unit of action, the basic bearer or right, and the basic unit of responsibility. In general Americans feel responsibility for an act comes from having the choice to make it, and then making it. This individual-focused understanding of responsibility and agency is fairly widely-spread but I reckon this is due mostly to diffusion, which is to say: colonialism. It is built on an image of people as uncaused actors, actors whose action is caused by their own choices.
But as many people in many different cultures recognize, people can only get things done by working in concert with other people (and a fair amount of objects to boot). And in fact, our own desires to do different things are instilled in us by a huge network of other people and things (bottles, diapers, aunts, staff sergeants). This is the classical anthropological lesson: individualist explanations are compelling to us because they fit our culture, not because they are the best explanation of the data.
Our moral reasoning falls apart when we can no longer see the individuals the bearer of responsibility. This is a tremendous problem, since the most important issues of our time are system ones: the flip side of ‘who killed Osama bin Laden’ is ‘who is created the recession’. We anthropologists have gotten very good at empirical analysis of systematic effects, and we even have some pretty good ideas about how to fix things. But our moral accounts of responsibility are totally out of whack. This is true of the left as well as the right, the activists and the apologists. When people are poor, lefty anthropologists blame the system for making them that way, but when they ruin the global financial system, suddenly it is the fault of elites and not their culture. Or, in the heat of the moment, we simply don’t worry about figuring out who is to blame at all.
I think anthropology has a lot to contribute to a sustained ethical discussion about what happens to the concept of responsibility when it is dissolved in the concept of system — a discussion that makes sense of both left and right objections to the way systemic affects are blamed on individuals. Uh… not that I have any answers at the moment. But if you all could figure that out in the comments then I’d, you know, appreciate it.
Thanks Alex, this is a great post! I agree wholeheartedly.
Rex, I like what you are trying to do here. But I wonder if the framing isn’t a bit simplistic. “America is an individualistic society…..”? What does that actually mean? Do you really think that most Americans believe or act as if they were economic monads pursuing individual interests and making decisions for which only they are responsible? What about the millions of people who go to Sunday school and learn about the Good Samaritan, who went out of his way to help a stranger, or Job, who was not to blame for his suffering, or Christ, who died on the cross to wash away everyone else’s sins? What about recent articles asking who is responsible for student loan debt if a student dies? Can anyone here point to any culture in which children are not supposed to be responsible for learning to do some things for themselves and get credit or blame when they do or don’t?
Then, step back from this America-first stance and look at famous cases documented by anthropologists. Feuds, for example, in which if one of us (however “us” is defined”) is killed, killing any of them (the crowd to which the killer belongs) is right and proper vengeance. What about curious customs like that of imperial China where, if a son passed the examinations and became a mandarin, his parents immediately received superior rank of their own (wouldn’t do, you see, to have a son outrank his dad)?
Where all this leads me is the question, what are individuals held responsible and given blame or credit for in what situations? Lots of variation there, both inside and outside the US of A. Shouldn’t that be where the anthropological gaze is focused?
“When people are poor, lefty anthropologists blame the system for making them that way, but when they ruin the global financial system, suddenly it is the fault of elites and not their culture”
Again, I’m not sure it is that simple. The agency question surfaces here in relation to the structures which allowed this to happen – and the ways in which they limit some while providing space for others to bring these financial issues to the fore.. I think it is a thought provoking question, but there are structural imbalances which render it very difficult to approach with these broad strokes.
It most certainly is the case that America is an individualistic society and no where is this more clear to me than in the classroom. Every semester its a challenge to get students to understand concepts like social structures, institutions, or populations because they are predisposed towards thinking of their own thoughts and actions as the most important factors in determining their life chances.
Try and teach race and you’ll get from your students anecdotes about racial situations between individual actors, but getting them to understand structural inequality or white privilege is difficult.
Try and teach popular culture and the mass media and you’ll hear them say, “Well if you don’t like what’s on TV you can just turn it off, right?” Getting them to understand how discourses frame what are permissible channels of communication is difficult.
I think this comes from an American tendency to imagine the self as a discreet, bounded entity. I am a non-porous, autonomous actor – cogito ergo sum. Like a billiard ball I respond in a rational, sensible way to the Newtonian forces around me.
Not disagreeing with what Matt says. It does, however, concern me that the discussion of individualism immediately leaps to billiard ball agents and Newtonian forces structures as the framing in which the discussion proceeds. I much prefer the framing that David Graeber brought to a recent discussion on OAC, which begins with the observation that at least three frames are in play around the world: (1) the “from each according to his or abilities to each according to his or her needs” basic communism that applies not only to families but to people working together in teams the world over; (2) exchange-based quid pro quo, what’s in it for me model assumed in Econ 101; and (3) customary inequalities, where privilege for some at the expense of others is taken to be part of the natural order of things. It would be interesting to see what happened in a class if these three models were presented and students asked which parts of their own lives fall under each model, instead of setting up the old individual versus society straw man.
The most interesting post on here in some time.
I’m not sure ethical questions should be part of anthropological enquiry – at least, not answering them. It’s interesting to see where different people place the blame or credit for particular actions, or whether they accept things like collective punishment as valid – and that truly is a realm in which people vary, because there really is no right answer (in a sense). There’s an apocryphal story (maybe it’s true; I’ve never checked) from China about a dagger that was convicted of a murder and drowned in a river. Maybe the bullets that killed Osama should be considered responsible (“If it’s a miracle, Colour Sergeant, it’s a short chamber Boxer-Henry .45 caliber miracle”), or the manufacturer of the guns.
Well, most people don’t come to that conclusion because they know that people act on the basis of the stuff going through their heads. That’s a widespread idea because it’s true, and also because the ascription of intention/intentionality to people (and objects) is a human universal. Godfrey Lienhardt has a good article somewhere on this limit on the variability of the concept of “the person”.
Sargon of Akkad didn’t really conquer Mesopotamia, and the Qianlong emperor didn’t really conquer Tibet, in the same way that Barack Obama didn’t really kill Osama bin Laden. Here, the supposedly “individualistic” ascription of blame/credit to these people is based on a collective acceptance of their power – what Searle calls “collective intentionality”. That doesn’t contradict individualist explanations (it rests on the concept of common knowledge from game theory, essentially). But it’s a collective thing, not an individual thing, in some sense.
The problem is that all actions exhibit the accordion effect. The SEAL pulling the trigger was part of a huge network of causes involved in the man named Osama bin Laden ending up dead in Pakistan, and we can expand or contract our description like an accordion. What is interesting is when different groups of people focus on different expansions or contractions of the accordion, but I don’t think saying that Barack Obama killed bin Laden is particularly revealing of American individualism, anymore than saying that Mao Zedong defeated Jiang Jieshi is revealing of Chinese individualism.
I agree with Al’s example of the accordion expanding and contracting to determine who’s responsible. That’s a list that can be constantly growing or only include one person, and you can be right either way. Is Obama responsible because he authorized the command? The soldier who fired? The American people that demanded this? It is easy to get lost in the inter-connected shuffle of “he said, she said”.
I think we are leaving out the most important actor though, Osama Bin Laden himself. Is he not the most responsible factor in his own death? This may seem like another billiards example, but for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And when someone acts as he did than it should come as no surprise his life ended the way it did. Opinions on this war notwithstanding, he was being hunted by a lot of motivated people for a number of years. So on a micro level I would argue bin Laden is more responsible than anyone in all this. On a macro level, the individual is no different in that he/she is always in charge of the decisions they make. Whether or not those decisions will have a fatal repercussion is a different story.
Anyways, I’m an anthro major and stumbled across this article and the site. I’ll definitely be back.
The “accordion effect” was not coined by me. I think it was Joel Feinberg. It’s definitely been discussed by Michael Bratman, Joseph Raz – a JSTOR search ought to turn up a bunch of stuff. I’m pretty sure Searle talks about it in Rationality in Action or Making the Social World – one of those (or both). I think it was developed for looking at moral culpability, but it’s a useful general concept for examining all aspects of action.
Very interesting question indeed. I still have to figure that one out ^^
I would like to add, as a sidenote, that some “left” objections to blaming systemic effects on individuals, on persons, are objections against the blaming of “elites” for systemic effects. There is left critiques of the moral indictment of “elites” (instead of a clear understanding of the system’s workings), notably among the “wertkritik” marxists.
A parallel question, one with which I am personnally struggling is: in what circumstances, in what systemic configuration do people morally blame individuals for systemic effects, and why, in such and such circumstances, such and such people are mainly blamed for such and such effects. I try to look for a beginning of answers in european Middle Ages patterns of violence against lepers and jews, “modern” anti-semitism and xenophobia, and sorcery crisis and trials. One great source of inspiration is: Wilson, Monica Hunter. 1951. “Witch Beliefs and Social Structure. ” The American Journal of Sociology 56 (4) : 307-31.
To go back to the main question of the post, would it be fair to rephrase it like this: “Can there be a moral applied to systems, and what could it look like?” ?
One thing is, I feel, quite obvious: it makes no sense to try and punish a system. Well, it could also be argued that it doesn’t make any more sense to punish people, and it has been argued, but that’s another story I guess.
At the level of procedure, a covert action is not to be undertaken by the U.S. Government prior to the creation of a paper trail demonstrating that it was countenanced by the President.* So Obama really did hang himself out there on this one (something which today’s post-paper, post-literacy media ecology doesn’t exactly encourage). How the assumption of that particular responsibility gets turned into an argument over whether or not Obama is inappropriately receiving credit for killing Osama bin Laden is too nuanced a question to be left to the punditry.
*Jennifer D. Kibbe. “The rise of the shadow warriors.” Foreign Affairs 83, no. 2 (March/April 2004): 105.