Agency and personal responsibility are central to humanity - denying them is wrong

There is no excuse, we should expect in a civilised society with universal education that every person understands their personal responsibility - some might say duty - to behave well

In West Side Story, the introduction to the song ‘Gee Officer Krupke’ presents that classic sociology trope about delinquent behaviour being a consequence of environment and upbringing, that underneath they are just good boys:

“Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,

Ya gotta understand:

It's just our bringin' upke

That gets us outta hand.

Our mothers all are junkies,

Our fathers all are drunks.

Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks.

Gee, Officer Krupke, we're very upset;

We never had the love that ev'ry child oughta get.

We ain't no delinquents,

We're misunderstood.

Deep down inside us there is good!”

Even back in 1957 we saw the idea that environment, circumstance or condition trumps human agency popping up in popular (and magnificent) theatre. Woke ain’t new, y’all weren’t paying attention!

Today this idea - that humans are mere puppets, conditioned by our ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or neurology - is held to be largely true. And, to add to this, we are told that the negative things in our lifestyles, things like drinking, drug taking, smoking and eating too much, are not the result of the choices we’ve made but come about from the manipulations of capitalism and the associated oppression of that system’s victims. When Michael Wharton created Dr Heinz Kiosk for his satirical Peter Simple column, he drew on the same psychology and sociology as Stephen Sondheim, on the idea of collective guilt and individual innocence: “(t)he root cause of social dysfunction, or ‘evil’ as it is called by the ignorant and obscurantist, is always in us, the us in question being our biological, cultural, or political ancestors, but never me.”

As Dr Kiosk would say “we are all guilty” while explaining how the Jets, or indeed any number of modern day delinquents, are not guilty except in as far as they are part of humanity’s collective evil. In term’s that 21st century progressives would prefer (at least over 20th century songwriters and satirists):

“The idea that individuals, whether criminals or law-abiding citizens, have little to no control over the many factors that shape their intentional mental states and behavior raises many questions for the criminal justice system.”

There you have it, from a chapter in a book entitled “The Future of Punishment”, the academic refinement of Sondhiem’s lyrics - people’s neurology, upbringing and environment mean they have no control over their actions and choices. This is the ideology that underpins much of modern progressive discourse, not just around crime and punishment but in our wider understanding of poor behaviour, lifestyle choices and achievement.

If somebody is rude, impulsive, selfish and inconsiderate, there are a variety of different interpretations of this behaviour ranging from ‘didn’t know better’ through ‘they have ADHD you know’ to ‘your criticism of this behaviour is rooted in white supremacy’. I have, however, concluded that there should be a fourth response, one that challenges the Kioskian Hegemony of modern psychology and sociology: these bad behaviours are the result of individual agency, the person chose to be rude, impulsive, selfish and inconsiderate. There is no excuse, we should expect in a civilised society with universal education that every person understands their personal responsibility - some might say duty - to behave well.

I drink too much. I don’t want your sympathy or some sort of cod psycho-analysis about how my Mum drank too much, I just want you to understand that this is entirely a matter of the choices I made in life, I was not compelling into drinking by my upbringing, by some sort of neurological peculiarity, or the machinations of Big Booze with their whisky adverts. The only person responsible for me drinking is me, you can all relax, you are not guilty. Doing something about this sort of problem, the result of human agency, rests with the human taking personal responsibility. This may include seeking out support and advice, up to and including substantive medical intervention, but it always begins with recognising that your problems are your responsibility.

If, as too often seems the case, that support and advice tells you the responsibility lies elsewhere - with your Mum and Dad (as my university librarian wrote), with some false wiring in your brain, or with the malign power of advertising - what you are getting is bad advice. And you cannot use upbringing, psychology or marketing as excuses for your behaviour then simply carry on with the bad behaviour secure in the ‘free pass’ of therapy, diagnosis or ideology.

Recently I wrote about how we need to see conservatism as a lifestyle rather than try to squeeze it into the form of a political ideology:

“Personal conservatism relates to a set of beliefs and behaviours that we all recognise - politeness, chivalry, self-reliance, sobriety - that are positioned in a framework of family, community and faith. The first task of political conservatism is to conserve this framework and the values they engender. It is no surprise that the rich and powerful overwhelmingly lead such a personally conservative life.”

Being conservative isn’t signing up to the script of a utopian ideology but a way to live one’s life and bang at the centre of that life is responsibility - you have the tools, capacity and strength to deal with fortune’s slings and arrows. You cannot dump this responsibility onto your family, your neighbours or wider society. Above all you cannot behave badly and expect to use upbringing, environment or neurology as a way to excuse you for that bad behaviour.

Everybody in modern Britain knows that smoking is unhealthy, that they shouldn't drink too much and that too much food plus too little exercise means too much weight. Yet public health argues, rather than telling people it is their lives and their responsibility, that people don’t choose to drink, smoke and eat cake but are led to do so by environmental forces (plus the peculiar power of advertising) - ‘you’re not obese because you eat too much and get no exercise, you’re obese because Big Food has created this ‘ultraprocessed food’ that you are unable to resist’.

The same excuses are given for bad language, anti-social behaviour and the tendency to insult people on social media. This isn’t, we’re told, human agency but result from soup of upbringing, environment and the wiring of brains. A bit like the sociologists who inspired Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics, modern elite discourse tells us that ‘so-and-so is on the spectrum’ or ‘we have to understand so-and-so is neurodiverse’ as if this automatically explains and often excuses bad behaviour. There are people on the autism spectrum (I recall one frightening young man who, as well as eating glass and money, beat his mum and the social worker up) for whom a normal life is not possible. But this isn’t the same as being a middle-aged software engineer who, following a private assessment, discovers his nerdery is an indication he is ‘on the spectrum’. Knowing this may help you take responsibility for your life but it doesn’t demand that other people alter the manner in which they relate with you.

As conservatives we should question the denial of human agency and the avoiding of personal responsibility. If we argue for a strong society based on good values, families and community, we have also to insist that one of those good values is responsibility. And personal responsibility requires that you don’t use upbringing, environment or neurology to excuse failure, bad behaviour or poor life choices. The Jets were recycling what they’d heard and using it as a justification for being punks and hooligans - as conservatives we should reject this entirely, the Jets have agency. After all other working class kids in New York didn’t join gangs, celebrate petty crime or have street fights, they finished school, married, got a job and escaped the poverty of the ghetto - they did the right thing.

So long as teachers, social workers, writers and academics argue that Riff and the other Jets had no choice but to be criminal failures, and this is what they do, we perpetuate a sort of malign entitlement that fails both the individuals involved and society as a whole. Likewise, we should challenge people who excuse their bad behaviour and poor choices by reference to mum and dad, the bad kids in the neighbourhood, the evil genius of marketers or some form of neurodiversity. It is your life, take responsibility for it. Denying responsibility denies humanity.