Social Responsibility Archives

Obligation and motivation have a complex relationship. On one hand, obligation will lead us to do things that we don’t want to do. We don’t necessarily want to get up to go to work, but we do because of our obligation to do so, for example. On the other hand, obligation can turn pleasure into pain—the event we might have chosen from interest, suddenly becomes a burden when it is an obligation.

I think of this dynamic in the a writing practice and particularly in my relationship with writers with whom I work. Writing is hard and requires a lot of effort. When it starts to feel like an obligation, that sense of burden can really start to weigh.

Psychologist Neil Fiore, who for many years worked (and perhaps still works) with graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that procrastination often arises from resentment—the sense that the research is an obligation keeping the writer from other things.

For people who have become writing-averse, especially for people who have started to struggle with writing anxiety after enjoying it earlier in their lives, this obligation-fueled distaste becomes a real problem.

Internal and external sources of obligation

Some obligations are external—the commands of parents, teachers, work superiors, etc.—are external obligations. A speed limit, for example, is an unwelcome external imposition on the impatient driver sure they can drive twice as fast and still be safe. These external obligations are typically unpleasant and source of resentment.

Some obligations are internal. If, for example, I feel much better when I consistently practice yoga, I feel an internal obligation—it is only my own desire for long-term well being that I put up with the short-term discomfort of a yoga practice. These internal obligations may have a touch of unpleasantness, but they do not generate the same resentment because of their fully optional nature: I am not trapped by them in the same way that I am trapped by an external obligation.

Some obligations have a mixed provenance that can make them emotionally complex. For me, personal correspondence often falls into this category. There is an emotional residue from my childhood when I hated to write and was forced by my parents to write thank you notes—the unpleasant external obligation. But there is also the more mature internal obligation stemming from gratitude that is only unpleasant in the sense that I will feel better for thanking people to whom I am sincerely grateful.

Discipline vs. obligation

There is a gap between discipline and obligation, especially between an external obligation and a personally chosen discipline. Choice is a key factor—the emotional state related to the external obligation compared to the internal personal choice is huge—when one has made a choice, it’s much easier to feel enthusiastic about it.

To be sure, we can feel trapped by our choices. We may choose a job or relationship and later find that we need to leave that job or relationship. That can be true of a discipline, too. A person who enjoyed eating meat might choose to become a vegetarian for personal convictions, maintain that discipline despite temptation, and then give up their decision a decade or more later.

We want to engage with writing and our work as a discipline, not an obligation. If our writing and work are both a discipline and an obligation, we can choose a perspective on which to focus.

Discipline and obligation

If you are in academia, it is likely that you are motivated by things like curiosity/the desire to gain knowledge and/or social service (perhaps while also getting rich/famous, as, e.g., inventor of a new technology both serves society and can also get wealth/fame).

Being in academia, however, creates obligations. You have to meet the expectations/demands of the institution in which you work. You have to satisfy professors when you’re a student. When you’re staff or faculty, you have to satisfy hiring committees, grant funders, journal editors and reviewers, etc.

The obligations make it too easy to lose sight of the internal motivation for the discipline. Unfortunately, this can really poison the experience of work in much the same way that negative feedback can kill motivation to work on a project.

Can you choose to focus on the discipline instead of the obligation?

This is not to suggest that you fail to meet obligations or ignore them, but, to the extent that they are overlapping, to focus on the aspects of them tht grow out of the personally chosen discipline rather than on the externally imposed obligations.

For example, there is pressure to publish on the scholar or researcher. On the one hand is the obligation of the publish-or-perish environment of academia. On the other hand is the desire to share valuable knowledge. The researcher who has evidence for evidence-based practices, or the scholar who identifies some important theory both do some sort of service to society by advancing the scholarly discourse. They can only do that by getting published through peer review.

Focusing on the potential help to society, or even just on selfish personal interest an curiosity, makes it easier to work than focusing on the demands of a peer reviewer or editor or professor or dean or whoever is making demands of you. If you see what you’re doing as helping people (or yourself), it’s easier to work as if you see your work as a response to someone else’s demands (especially if you feel their demands are unreasonable).

Choosing the positive focus

The world is complex. Things in the world are imperfect. The people we love appear to be imperfect at times. The activities we love or enjoy are sometimes disappointing or frustrating. So, too, is the work of writing or research or teaching, whichever it is of these that motivates us to work and write.

We have some choice in where to turn our attention. If your supervisor is yelling at you to meet a deadline, you can still remember that your work is going to serve society.

Try to avoid looking through the lens of obligation and remember, whenever possible, the lens of discipline.

Don’t let a sense of obligation poison an experience you would have otherwise enjoyed. That’s a challenge, but working on it can pay off in peace of mind.

I had been planning on writing about the changes made in the seventh edition of the APA Publication Manual, but I got distracted by larger questions.

The Declaration of Independence, one of the guiding lights of the United States of America, proclaims that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are unalienable rights of humanity. These rights may be unalienable in some abstract political sense (i.e., one person has no right to take these from another person), but in practice they can limit each other.

On of the principles espoused by John Stuart Mill in his treatise On Liberty, is that a person should be free to do whatever they wish, so long as they harm no one else. In an interconnected world—one where the actions of one individual impact others—this limitation is huge and problematic. When I say “problematic” I don’t mean “bad” so much as I mean “difficult to manage and understand.” Ultimately, real life will present us situations in which it is uncertain where the balance of good and ill lie.

As a global pandemic sweeps the world, and governments around the world are either radically restricting the freedom of individuals or requesting radical restrictions, the question of freedom becomes difficult to sort out.

The other day I was speaking with a scholar studying, among other things, militarization of the police and political efforts to control specific populations. We were discussing the ominous character of any governmental action to restrict personal freedoms. There is no question that the restrictions being suggested, and increasingly imposed, by the US government and other governments are restrictions against which citizens of the “free world” and their generally democratic/republican governments eschew. They are certainly the kind of restriction that would be considered utterly unacceptable in normal situations. The question then arises whether the current situation warrants the restrictions on liberty that have been imposed.

On the whole, and with a strong appreciation for the value of preventative measures, my opinion that the response has not been strong enough. Taking significant restrictive measures to prevent the spread of the disease immediately might limit the spread and duration of the problem. But that’s my opinion and it’s not really what I want to write about here.

My interest is for the underlying issue of the dynamic interaction between liberty and social behavior, and the idea that some desirable things are mutually exclusive (which is the question of trade-offs). It’s a question relevant to responses to the coronavirus, which is primarily what I’m thinking about, but I often think about trade-offs in the context of writing and developing a writing practice, and at the moment I’m working on a piece that does talk about trade-offs in the writing process.

The issue with the pandemic is that we have two desirable things that are at odds: on the one hand we have a desire to prevent the pandemic from growing, on the other we have a desire for liberty and the freedom to move and associate as we choose. These wishes are in conflict: to prevent the spread, we need to limit the social contact we desire; to have the social contact we desire, we risk spreading the disease.

Because different people desire these things to different extents, there is no universal answer to the question. Patrick Henry famously declared “Give me liberty or give me death!”, a sentiment echoed by New Hampshire’s “Live free or die” motto. It valorizes freedom over any life without liberty. Unfortunately, that is the question with the pandemic, too. For Henry and the revolutionaries, of course, the problem was a bit more personal: the only people who stood at risk were those who made a choice to rebel against King George III. In the case of the pandemic, on the other hand, our personal freedom (our selfish choice) may cause the death of others (who had no choice). This is particularly true of younger and healthier individuals who do not appear to be at significant risk from the disease, but who can give it to those who are at severe risk.

This past Wednesday (March 18), I saw an article talking about the metaphor that we are at war with the pandemic, and it cited a tweet of St. Patrick’s day revelers with a caption talking about being undefeated. I can understand that framing—that the disease is an enemy with whom we are at war (though I don’t necessarily agree with it)—and it seems the most likely interpretation of the tweet. But as I was writing, I started wondering to what extent that “undefeated” might also be an expression of resistance against the government, and especially government restrictions of personal liberties. There are, of course, many in the U.S. population concerned with government infringement of civil liberties. Undoubtedly many of them see attempts to restrict movement and social gathering as an attempt to take away civil liberties and see their going out and socializing as a form of resistance in which they will not be defeated. “The government doesn’t have the right to stop me,” I imagine them thinking/saying. (And I can also imagine a paranoid group saying “the pandemic is a hoax meant to restrict our civil liberties.”)

But, of course, the pandemic is not just about the choices made by individuals. Those St. Patrick’s Day revelers were able to make a choice as to whether they wanted to participate in activities that might endanger themselves. Unfortunately, that choice may then be forced on others—the family and friends of the revelers who might be exposed to virus as a result of the choice made by the reveler. And that problematic nature is particularly exacerbated because the revelers might not give those other people a choice. Take, as a hypothetical example, a young man who is roommate with one of the St. Patrick’s day celebrants: that young man may be exposed to the virus as the result of his roommate’s choice. And if that young man has a responsibility to help anyone in an at-risk group, he may be faced with the choice of either withholding that help to limit risk of exposure to the virus or offering that help, along with the risk.

John Stuart Mill espoused the notion that liberty ends when it impinges on the well-being of another. To me, it means that we need to restrict our actions for the good of other people. This notion of social responsibility calls for sacrifice of personal freedom in the time of pandemic. That’s the kind of trade-off that people make all the time. It’s not easy to give up something you desire, but often two desirable things are at odds. To some extent, behavior during the pandemic reveals a good deal about how each of us values the the two desirable things that are at odds: are we interested in cooperating at a societal level or are we interested in maintaining our freedom?