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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Authorship and Social Responsibility

A friend of mine, from the United States, once told me an interesting
account of his time spent in a monastery. There he came to know an old
Russian professor, retired, a layperson, who lived at the seminary school
which trained future priests. The professor was a worldly man and an
intellectual, but very devout and pious, his thinking very much influenced
by Russian Orthodox beliefs. One day, during Lent, the period before
Easter, he was looking at an iconographic painting of the final Day of
Judgment, depicting the wicked souls being cast into the torment of hell
and the righteous souls being admitted to a heavenly paradise. He
remarked that the day of Judgment must certainly be most severe for
authors, because although the ordinary person must answer only for
personal actions and sins and transgressions, an author must take
responsibility for the conduct of thousands or millions of people who are
influenced by the author’s writings, either for good or for evil.

Each of us is author of our own actions (or inaction) and our lives and
careers are our books, whether famous, or infamous for the very few, or
simply anonymous for the vast majority. Each of us must answer for our
actions in some fashion or other. We pay a price for foolishness or sloth,
and we are rewarded and compensated for wisdom and industry. But an
author or artist is a different sort of beast from the ordinary individual or
average citizen.

We must ask ourselves two questions. First, what do we mean by social
responsibility? Secondly, what is the nature and motivation of an author or
artist?

In every society, government, culture, and ideology, there is a stress and
emphasis upon the responsibilities of an individual to society as a whole.
From the time we are small children, we are painfully aware that certain
things, in fact, many things are expected of us, and that there are
consequences and a price to be paid should we fall short of those
expectations. The notion of an individual’s social responsibility has
existed in one form or another since very ancient times, in the earliest of
governments and polities, and even in the small tribes of hunters and food
gatherers at the dawn of history. It is only in the past several centuries
that there has arisen a notion that societies have responsibilities to
individual members. We call this new found notion of society’s
responsibility “Human Rights” or “Civil Rights”.

Every school child in America is required to read “Huckleberry Finn” by
Mark Twain, (a.k.a. Samuel Clemens). Twain’s novel is required reading
because it is a brilliant and entertaining and, now, historic portrayal of a
time of slavery and oppression in America. We now know that smoking
and the use of tobacco is very damaging to the health. In Samuel
Clemens’ day there was no notion that tobacco might be harmful. Yet,
every other page of Huckleberry Finn is praising the virtues and pleasures
of smoking tobacco. Many young people have been tempted to
experiment with tobacco simply because it was so romanticized by Mark
Twain’s novels. We may see this negative influence of Huckleberry Finn
as an example of social irresponsibility, of corrupting the youth. We
certainly cannot lay the blame for this corrupting influence at the feet of
Mark Twain. We must, if anything, blame generations of educators who
have chosen to place the book among the required readings of the
curriculum of very young and impressionable students without giving
thought to the damaging social consequences.

If we extend our notion of authorship and social responsibility to artists,
then possibly, we may see the painting “Guernica”, by Pablo Picasso, as a
positive exercise of social responsibility, dramatizing for society the evils
of violence and war. Yet, if we study the life and works of Pablo Picasso, it
becomes quite obvious that concern for social responsibility was not in
the forefront of Picasso’s mind as a goal or concern or inspiration. In the
1960s, Francoise Gilot, one of Picasso’s several ex-wives wrote “Life with
Picasso”, and painted a picture of a very selfish, egocentric and
unpredictable personality. That woman divorced Picasso and married the
famous humanitarian Jonas Salk, who pioneered the development of the
first polio vaccine. We may certainly see someone like Jonas Salk as a
scientist committed to social responsibility in his attempt to alleviate the
suffering of many. Though, perhaps it is far more accurate to observe
that each author, whether of books or paintings or theories in physics and
math, is driven more by a quest for the power of recognition than by
some altruistic notion of social responsibility. Authors and creators are
most driven by a eudaimonic inspiration or compulsion which drives them
mercilessly and relentlessly towards the act of creation, and often, in that
process, alienates the author from society as an eccentric rebel outcast.

What of the authorship of someone such as Albert Einstein, the author of
the theory of Relativity which made possible the terrible destructive force
of the atomic bomb? The ancient Greeks spoke in their myths of
Pandora’s Box. The name Pandora means “every gift” or “all gifts”. When
Pandora’s Box was opened, many terrifying things escaped which could
never be put back again. In the myth, the last thing to escape was Hope.
Many physicists felt dread and guilt over the monster of destruction which
they had created and unleashed.

Those who are religious and believe the Bible to be the divinely revealed
word of God feel that each and every sentence is totally good and
instructive. Yet, at the end of the New Testament, in the Second Epistle of
Peter, Chapter 3, verse 16 we find this curious warning:

“[In the Bible] are some things difficult to understand , which they that are
unlearned and unstable twist and distort, unto their own destruction.” So
here, we see the Bible itself warning us that there are verses within it
which are harmful to certain people. In the Old Testament of the Bible, in
the Book of Jeremiah, the prophet speaks scathingly of “the lying pens of
the scribes.” And yet it is those very scribes who copy and perpetuate the
religious scriptures. Indeed, Karl Marx saw religious scriptures as “an
opiate of the people” and therefore as something negative from the point
of view of social responsibility. Conversely, the religious communities of
the world see communist regimes in a negative light, believing them to
oppress and censor freedom of religious expression and worship.

If one looks at popular authors and artists like Picasso, Hemingway, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Proust, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Thomas Dylan, and many
others, one sees that they are rebels, renegades, misfits, alcoholics,
recluses. We see that the worlds of imagination which they create in their
writings and art are forms of escape from reality and everyday
responsibilities of a good citizen.

Now, if we search for socially responsible authors, then one might choose
Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” When Abraham
Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he exclaimed, “And here is the little
lady who started the Civil War.” Certainly, Lincoln was exaggerating to
some extent in his good natured humor, but it is certainly also true that
the nation as a whole became more self-conscious about the evils of
slavery after reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” with the cruelty of Simon
LeGree, whose name became the byword of wickedness.

Another prime example of social responsibility in American literature is
“The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair, which exposed the evils of company towns
who exploited immigrant workers in the meat-packing industry.
President Theodore Roosevelt was sickened by the brutality and injustice
which Sinclair’s novel dramatized so vividly. Roosevelt immediately called
upon Congress to pass a law establishing the Food and Drug
Administration and, for the first time, setting up federal inspection
standards for meat. The Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection
Act, were both signed into law on June 30th, 1906, as a direct result of
Upton Sinclair’s book “The Jungle.” President Roosevelt commended
Sinclair for exposing the corruption and injustice, but scolded him for
being such a socialist. Certainly, Sinclair seems to be one author deeply
motivated by notions of social responsibility.

We even see, in the 20th century, authors like George Orwell and Aldous
Huxley, examining the state and society as some abortion gone bad,
creating a nightmare world for its inhabitants. The passion of the author’s
creative obsession is closely analogous to the reckless abandon of sexual
passion. In Orwell’s novel, “1984”, it is a love scene of wild abandon in a
secluded woods which symbolizes the rebelliousness and isolation of the
individual’s will to power. It is the State of “Big Brother” which crushes the
sexual feelings of the protagonist during his imprisonment.

We easily come to see society and the state, not in their day to day
reality, but in the fictional picture which is painted for us by novelists and
philosophers and historians. We romanticize our notion of the state until
we become like America, carrying its holy grail of democracy and
freedom to the four corners of the globe through diplomacy or force, to
the willing and unwilling alike. As social activists, driven by our ideologies
we become Christs running about everywhere seeking out the largest
cross, and then gathering about us a reluctant crowd of Herods.

In Genesis it is said of Abraham that he believed the promise of the divine
vision, and that his very belief was counted to him as a form of
righteousness or correct action, which also goes by the name of social
responsibility. But by the time we come to the end of the Book of Job,
God is saying to Job, “Tell your friends that I am angry with them because
they BELIEVED about me incorrectly.” We see how ideology and theory
and belief gradually supplant the individual and his daily actions and
conduct in life. Finally, by the time we arrive at Jesus and his Apostles and
Paul, we are told that we are utterly worthless and hopeless no matter
what we do, but that there is a way to be forgiven, if only we will embrace
a certain belief. Communism and Capitalism are both jealous gods
preaching their ideology to the world and offering forgiveness and shelter
in return. A certain physicist once pointed out that, in a gaseous collection
of molecules, each individual molecule enjoys the utmost random chaotic
freedom of chance. No one may say what a given individual molecule will
do at any given moment. And yet, the mass of molecules as a whole is
under strict obedience to various laws of temperature and pressure and
gravity. The fiery rebel freedom of any single renegade molecule
represents the force of hundreds or thousands of molecules robbed of
their vigor and spontaneity and exiled to an icy state of passivity and
inaction.

Plato explored many notions of social responsibility his dialogues, most
notably The Republic. Plato proposes to examine the State as a kind of
microscope to view the soul written in large letters. Plato envisioned
philosopher kings in a society which saw the noble character of its citizens
as its product and enterprise. Remember that Socrates was put to death
for allegedly corrupting the youth through his teachings, whether oral or
written we know not.

That great German philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, said that we must
always act in such a way that we treat individuals as ends in themselves
rather than as means to some end.

Psychiatrist John Powell wrote: "To live fully, we must learn to use things
and love people, not love things and use people."

http://www.meaningoflife.i12.com/psychology.htm

Gradually, over the millennia, our notion of social responsibility has
evolved and shifted from the prehistoric hunter’s and warrior’s duty to his
tribe, and has done a hundred and eighty degree about face. Now the
great emphasis is upon society’s duty to the individual in the form of
human rights or civil rights.

In light of the above considerations, I must personally conclude that the
notion of social responsibility of the author is something alien and
unknown to the author, imposed posthumously by a reading public.
Responsibility, if it lies anywhere at all, lies in the appetites and demands
of the consumer public, who clamor for an endless stream of murders,
rapes, cataclysms, wars, monsters and even alien invasions from outer
space. Our true responsibility is to our own inner space first. If we
personally make that inner space of the heart in order, then the
orderliness of society will perhaps follow more naturally. Perhaps the real
truth is that both religion and politics are the opiates of the soul, lulling it
into complacency, apathy and indifference.

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