7 ms·

I'm curious about what happened to Duty. My grandparents' generation (English, WW2 generation) had very, very, strong social and emotional consequences for doi

I'm curious about what happened to Duty. My grandparents' generation (English, WW2 generation) had very, very, strong social and emotional consequences for doing/not doing their "duty". This was commonly understood - "England expects every man to do his duty" - everyone knew what their duty was and how to do it. This might be as simple as a soldier fighting the enemy (and not running away), a husband supporting his family, a wife staying in an unhappy marriage to raise the children, and so on. Not all Duty was something we'd recognise as a good thing these days. In fact most of it we'd probably see as repressive now, but that's a different discussion. The consequence of not doing your duty was Shame. Personal, emotional shame, and public shaming by your peers. Publicly not doing your duty could lead to suicide as the only way of escaping the shame. Somehow between WW2 and here, we completely lost the idea of Duty as a personal responsibility. No-one today knows what their duty is, and would be confused if asked. So it seems kinda fitting that we're also losing the idea of Shame.

jbay808 6y ago
I don't know for sure, but I would guess that the war in Vietnam may have contributed to tearing down that belief in duty, at least in the United States. In Europe, perhaps it started its decline at the Nuremberg trials.
- wavesounds 6y ago
  I think this confuses "Duty" with nationalism, it's peoples Duty to stop an unjust war. The Boy Scout oath says "On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country". You could replace God with any moral belief system. I think our sense of Duty started to dissolve sometime in the 80s with the idea that "Greed is good" and then continued in the 90s with a rise in apathy. Both of which are selfish ideas, selfishness is the opposite of Duty.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    that's an interesting statement: "selfishness is the opposite of Duty" I'm inclined to agree - Duty is about serving others, or one's country, not oneself.
  - gen220 6y ago
    Scouts was how I heard of "Duty". We had to define it as part of the initiation rituals. Along with "Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent". As far as cult-ish secular institutions go, Scouts was/is a pretty good one. --- I totally agree that the normalization/expectation of over-the-top greed is our biggest moral failing since the 80s, as a culture. CEOs of national enterprise used to make 10x the lowest-paid employee, and were shamed by their network if they tried to cross that threshold. There are many factors contributing to the new norms, it will take a lot of struggle to move them in the right direction.
rblatz 6y ago
I think the difference is people realizing that taking on that shame is optional. If you don’t care about the people trying to shame you, or write them off as haters the shame loses all power.
leot 6y ago
I’m a Canadian who came to the US for grad school in 2005. The lack of a (British) sense of Duty in the US is one of the most striking differences I noticed when arriving here. I suspect it’s in part a result of the frontier mentality: “I got mine you go get yours”. This went obsolete almost as soon as the West was Won, yet remains as a somewhat pathological vestige.
- nescioquid 6y ago
  Duty would imply a relationship of mutual obligations between the citizen and the state. Thatcherite neoliberalism found an acolyte in Reagan, and ever since in this country, "government is the problem, not the solution". Under such a regime where the state seems to have no real obligations to its citizens, talk of duty seems rather precious.
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    Duty is not necessarily to the state; it can be to society as well. In fact, there's a large fraction of neoliberals who would argue that individuals following their duty to society should displace the state in many areas.
    - claudeganon 6y ago
      > Duty is not necessarily to the state; it can be to society Thatcher is also famous for having said “there is no such thing as society.” Some people who adhere to neoliberal ideology might behave as you say, but in practice it seems little more than excuse for the selfish, cutthroat chaos that has left the US and U.K. so poorly off today.
- pueblito 6y ago
  I’m an American and I fail to understand what duty I am failing to meet? I pay my taxes, obey the laws, treat others with respect and honor my ancestors - as do nearly every single person I know. What duty am I missing? Have not millions of Americans served their country already?
zajio1am 6y ago
Duty defined by society and not individuals themselves is a mark of a non-free society. In free society everyone is responsible for choosing their fate and their commitments, externally imposed commitments are kind of oppression.
- Enginerrrd 6y ago
  I agree with the spirit of this, but there are some deeply broken aspects to this idea. First, you need to define what a society is. A large component of that definition is going to come down to some semblance of shared expectations. Those shared expectations are your duty. At the risk of being guilty of the same hyperbole I'm criticizing: While it's true that a society saying you shouldn't murder your neighbor is ostensibly "less free" than one that allows you to determine for yourself whether or not that's a commitment you want to endorse, the resulting society is in many ways much more free in a pragmatic sense.
- slumdev 6y ago
  Individualism and the concept of negative rights are only a few hundred years old, and they're not universally regarded as progress.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I think we need to have a discussion about the nature of freedom, then. If we choose to live in a society, then in order for that society to function well, we have to all behave in a manner that allows that society to function well. If enough people choose not to behave in a manner that allows society to function well, then it stops functioning well. This is not oppression. Anyone can always choose to leave society and live away from others. But in order for society to function, we need to live with some constraints on our behaviour. If that's not your definition of "freedom", what is?
- ninly 6y ago
  The survival and progressive sophistication of human society and culture has always depended on the effective function of community-level values -- whether understood in terms of duty, honor, shame, mores, rule of law, or other mechanisms. Some influential portion of a population agrees (organically, culturally) that certain ways of behaving are more valuable (or unacceptable) to the community, even if not every individual necessarily agrees. This can obviously result in extremely non-free societal structures, as you suggest, but community at any significant scale will always require some compromise of individual freedoms. This is necessitated by the very diversity of individual human proclivities and interests. To refer to the compromise, sacrifice, or diminishment of some of those interests as "oppression" strikes me as selfish and melodramatic, even if it is often regrettable from certain perspectives. Certainly sometimes it is oppression, and it is frequently unfair, but extreme individualism doesn't fix or even address this fundamental tension.
lordnacho 6y ago
There's no authority or common duty-set now. That's why shame doesn't work anymore. You go to the park, you see a kid littering, you tell them to pick up their trash. They tell you to mind your own business, and make YOU feel bad about talking to a child who isn't your own. The problem with the duty system you mentioned is it needs a lot of buy-in. It's like it's metastable, it works when there's buy-in, but generally it doesn't work. As soon as someone is willing to question it, it falls down. "Who are you to point your finger" is surprisingly effective at reflecting shame. In the mid-20th century we were still at the height of nationalism. People thought to be English meant you had to do certain things, believe certain authorities. During that century, people started to notice the cracks and it all went.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I'm not sure Duty had anything to do with nationalism, though there definitely was a "Duty to one's country" that everyone had. The collapse of authority and the establishment, yes. But Duty wasn't imposed by an authority. There's a quote that I can't find at the moment with the effect of "no-one can tell you your duty, it's something you must discover for yourself". totally agree that it's metastable. Which is why I found it fascinating with the Shame connection - shame appears to be metastable too
  - ardy42 6y ago
    > I'm not sure Duty had anything to do with nationalism, though there definitely was a "Duty to one's country" that everyone had. It seems to me that duty has more to do with collectivist feeling in general than nationalist feeling specifically (which is just one subtype of collectivist feeling). You have duty if you belong to and care about something larger than yourself. I think what's weakened people's sense of duty is the wave after wave of increasing individualism that probably accelerated some time after WWII, and has been going on for as long as I've been alive. A big part of duty is sacrificing your individual interests for another, which has always been hard but is even harder if social attitudes don't give it much support.
    - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bonoboTP 6y ago
I think it just became more implicit. Your duty is to have a job, to consume content, to buy things, to create your own purpose, to self actualize, to follow popular culture, to stay in the Overton window of political opinion, etc.
weswpg 6y ago
> In fact most of it we'd probably see as repressive now, but that's a different discussion. I think it's the same discussion. We've lost our sense of community because community is somewhat repressive and we prefer individualism. The tradeoff between social obligation and individual freedom might not be possible to balance and we might just have to choose one way or the other.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  I saw it as a different discussion because the "what is a person's duty?" is a different question than "does a person have a duty?". But you might be right, the evolution of morals that we've seen in the last 75 years might have killed the concept of Duty as a byproduct - because we no longer accept the same things as our Duty, nothing replaced them and the whole concept died.
claudeganon 6y ago
I would say that all concepts of “duty” collapsed in western countries that embraced neoliberalism and austerity politics, Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society“ being a keystone here. Once governments determined that they had no obligation to help or represent anyone beside the wealthiest, people reciprocated in kind.
fullshark 6y ago
What happened was two or three generations afterward developing a complete lack of faith in the leadership/ruling class.
pbourke 6y ago
> No-one today knows what their duty is, and would be confused if asked. I think you’d be more likely to get an answer from those in the military, police, firefighters, paramedics, ER docs/nurses, etc.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  true, I guess - though those institutions tend to make assigning duties explicit, and part of the point of Duty as a concept was that it was implicit on everyone.
phil21 6y ago
> Somehow between WW2 and here, we completely lost the idea of Duty as a personal responsibility. We stopped demanding and respecting it as a society. Started to look at those adhering to such things as stupid and old fashioned, while seeing those who gamed the system as smart and clever. I've been trying to describe this for quite some time now. I watched the below scenario with my own two eyes happen to two "friends" in about 2001. Just look at two defendants arrested and in court for a misdemeanor bar fight. One defendant lowers his head, apologizes, pleads guilty, gets time served, anger management, and a permanent violent assault record. The other defendant lawyers up, refuses to take any responsibility, and gets away with community service with no admission of guilt. The first guy just had his (professional) life ended before it even really began. The second guy got a slap on the wrist. The second guy will be seen as smart and savvy, and the first guy will get made fun of for being a stupid idealist. Society has taught me that owning up to one's mistakes - and by extension sacrificing to do one's duty - isn't even respected these days, it's actively derided.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  Yeah, I get this. I had a discussion with a friend about his son's education. He was divided over "do I teach him to do good, or do I teach him to be selfish? Because there doesn't seem to be any downside to being selfish these days". I've generally experienced outsized rewards from being selfless. But then I have struggled with defining my ambition, so all rewards seem awesome. I have friends who are laser-focused on an outcome, and for them my "do random good stuff and the universe will give you good stuff back" approach is insane. They're all "fuck everyone else, I need this" and it seems to work for them. But that comes with zero sense of social obligation. And I can't see how society is supposed to work if everyone behaves likes this.
sunopener 6y ago
What Happened to Duty? Well when the enthusiasm and obsession ("the fashion") wore away from the horrors and tragedies around that time, the shiny polish of "duty" became nothing but human excrement.
taurath 6y ago
Seems like it could be a carryover from a feudal system that ramped up as nationalization happened during wars (WW1 mobilization for example). Modeling of “duty” was for a specific cause. Duty is for soldiers, servants, employees, and in a smaller way citizens (to pay taxes) in a free society. Now, if you ask people hey would you like to support the less economically well off in society, in theory people can vote on that as being a “duty” of government or a civil service, like a conservation corps.

jbay808 6y ago

I don't know for sure, but I would guess that the war in Vietnam may have contributed to tearing down that belief in duty, at least in the United States. In Europe, perhaps it started its decline at the Nuremberg trials.

wavesounds 6y ago
I think this confuses "Duty" with nationalism, it's peoples Duty to stop an unjust war. The Boy Scout oath says "On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country". You could replace God with any moral belief system. I think our sense of Duty started to dissolve sometime in the 80s with the idea that "Greed is good" and then continued in the 90s with a rise in apathy. Both of which are selfish ideas, selfishness is the opposite of Duty.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  that's an interesting statement: "selfishness is the opposite of Duty" I'm inclined to agree - Duty is about serving others, or one's country, not oneself.
- gen220 6y ago
  Scouts was how I heard of "Duty". We had to define it as part of the initiation rituals. Along with "Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent". As far as cult-ish secular institutions go, Scouts was/is a pretty good one. --- I totally agree that the normalization/expectation of over-the-top greed is our biggest moral failing since the 80s, as a culture. CEOs of national enterprise used to make 10x the lowest-paid employee, and were shamed by their network if they tried to cross that threshold. There are many factors contributing to the new norms, it will take a lot of struggle to move them in the right direction.

rblatz 6y ago

I think the difference is people realizing that taking on that shame is optional. If you don’t care about the people trying to shame you, or write them off as haters the shame loses all power.

leot 6y ago

I’m a Canadian who came to the US for grad school in 2005. The lack of a (British) sense of Duty in the US is one of the most striking differences I noticed when arriving here. I suspect it’s in part a result of the frontier mentality: “I got mine you go get yours”. This went obsolete almost as soon as the West was Won, yet remains as a somewhat pathological vestige.

nescioquid 6y ago
Duty would imply a relationship of mutual obligations between the citizen and the state. Thatcherite neoliberalism found an acolyte in Reagan, and ever since in this country, "government is the problem, not the solution". Under such a regime where the state seems to have no real obligations to its citizens, talk of duty seems rather precious.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  Duty is not necessarily to the state; it can be to society as well. In fact, there's a large fraction of neoliberals who would argue that individuals following their duty to society should displace the state in many areas.
  - claudeganon 6y ago
    > Duty is not necessarily to the state; it can be to society Thatcher is also famous for having said “there is no such thing as society.” Some people who adhere to neoliberal ideology might behave as you say, but in practice it seems little more than excuse for the selfish, cutthroat chaos that has left the US and U.K. so poorly off today.
pueblito 6y ago
I’m an American and I fail to understand what duty I am failing to meet? I pay my taxes, obey the laws, treat others with respect and honor my ancestors - as do nearly every single person I know. What duty am I missing? Have not millions of Americans served their country already?

zajio1am 6y ago

Duty defined by society and not individuals themselves is a mark of a non-free society. In free society everyone is responsible for choosing their fate and their commitments, externally imposed commitments are kind of oppression.

Enginerrrd 6y ago
I agree with the spirit of this, but there are some deeply broken aspects to this idea. First, you need to define what a society is. A large component of that definition is going to come down to some semblance of shared expectations. Those shared expectations are your duty. At the risk of being guilty of the same hyperbole I'm criticizing: While it's true that a society saying you shouldn't murder your neighbor is ostensibly "less free" than one that allows you to determine for yourself whether or not that's a commitment you want to endorse, the resulting society is in many ways much more free in a pragmatic sense.
slumdev 6y ago
Individualism and the concept of negative rights are only a few hundred years old, and they're not universally regarded as progress.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
I think we need to have a discussion about the nature of freedom, then. If we choose to live in a society, then in order for that society to function well, we have to all behave in a manner that allows that society to function well. If enough people choose not to behave in a manner that allows society to function well, then it stops functioning well. This is not oppression. Anyone can always choose to leave society and live away from others. But in order for society to function, we need to live with some constraints on our behaviour. If that's not your definition of "freedom", what is?
ninly 6y ago
The survival and progressive sophistication of human society and culture has always depended on the effective function of community-level values -- whether understood in terms of duty, honor, shame, mores, rule of law, or other mechanisms. Some influential portion of a population agrees (organically, culturally) that certain ways of behaving are more valuable (or unacceptable) to the community, even if not every individual necessarily agrees. This can obviously result in extremely non-free societal structures, as you suggest, but community at any significant scale will always require some compromise of individual freedoms. This is necessitated by the very diversity of individual human proclivities and interests. To refer to the compromise, sacrifice, or diminishment of some of those interests as "oppression" strikes me as selfish and melodramatic, even if it is often regrettable from certain perspectives. Certainly sometimes it is oppression, and it is frequently unfair, but extreme individualism doesn't fix or even address this fundamental tension.

lordnacho 6y ago

There's no authority or common duty-set now. That's why shame doesn't work anymore. You go to the park, you see a kid littering, you tell them to pick up their trash. They tell you to mind your own business, and make YOU feel bad about talking to a child who isn't your own. The problem with the duty system you mentioned is it needs a lot of buy-in. It's like it's metastable, it works when there's buy-in, but generally it doesn't work. As soon as someone is willing to question it, it falls down. "Who are you to point your finger" is surprisingly effective at reflecting shame. In the mid-20th century we were still at the height of nationalism. People thought to be English meant you had to do certain things, believe certain authorities. During that century, people started to notice the cracks and it all went.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
I'm not sure Duty had anything to do with nationalism, though there definitely was a "Duty to one's country" that everyone had. The collapse of authority and the establishment, yes. But Duty wasn't imposed by an authority. There's a quote that I can't find at the moment with the effect of "no-one can tell you your duty, it's something you must discover for yourself". totally agree that it's metastable. Which is why I found it fascinating with the Shame connection - shame appears to be metastable too
- ardy42 6y ago
  > I'm not sure Duty had anything to do with nationalism, though there definitely was a "Duty to one's country" that everyone had. It seems to me that duty has more to do with collectivist feeling in general than nationalist feeling specifically (which is just one subtype of collectivist feeling). You have duty if you belong to and care about something larger than yourself. I think what's weakened people's sense of duty is the wave after wave of increasing individualism that probably accelerated some time after WWII, and has been going on for as long as I've been alive. A big part of duty is sacrificing your individual interests for another, which has always been hard but is even harder if social attitudes don't give it much support.
  - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

bonoboTP 6y ago

I think it just became more implicit. Your duty is to have a job, to consume content, to buy things, to create your own purpose, to self actualize, to follow popular culture, to stay in the Overton window of political opinion, etc.

weswpg 6y ago

> In fact most of it we'd probably see as repressive now, but that's a different discussion. I think it's the same discussion. We've lost our sense of community because community is somewhat repressive and we prefer individualism. The tradeoff between social obligation and individual freedom might not be possible to balance and we might just have to choose one way or the other.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
I saw it as a different discussion because the "what is a person's duty?" is a different question than "does a person have a duty?". But you might be right, the evolution of morals that we've seen in the last 75 years might have killed the concept of Duty as a byproduct - because we no longer accept the same things as our Duty, nothing replaced them and the whole concept died.

claudeganon 6y ago

I would say that all concepts of “duty” collapsed in western countries that embraced neoliberalism and austerity politics, Thatcher’s “there is no such thing as society“ being a keystone here. Once governments determined that they had no obligation to help or represent anyone beside the wealthiest, people reciprocated in kind.

fullshark 6y ago

What happened was two or three generations afterward developing a complete lack of faith in the leadership/ruling class.

pbourke 6y ago

> No-one today knows what their duty is, and would be confused if asked. I think you’d be more likely to get an answer from those in the military, police, firefighters, paramedics, ER docs/nurses, etc.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
true, I guess - though those institutions tend to make assigning duties explicit, and part of the point of Duty as a concept was that it was implicit on everyone.

phil21 6y ago

> Somehow between WW2 and here, we completely lost the idea of Duty as a personal responsibility. We stopped demanding and respecting it as a society. Started to look at those adhering to such things as stupid and old fashioned, while seeing those who gamed the system as smart and clever. I've been trying to describe this for quite some time now. I watched the below scenario with my own two eyes happen to two "friends" in about 2001. Just look at two defendants arrested and in court for a misdemeanor bar fight. One defendant lowers his head, apologizes, pleads guilty, gets time served, anger management, and a permanent violent assault record. The other defendant lawyers up, refuses to take any responsibility, and gets away with community service with no admission of guilt. The first guy just had his (professional) life ended before it even really began. The second guy got a slap on the wrist. The second guy will be seen as smart and savvy, and the first guy will get made fun of for being a stupid idealist. Society has taught me that owning up to one's mistakes - and by extension sacrificing to do one's duty - isn't even respected these days, it's actively derided.

marcus_holmes 6y ago
Yeah, I get this. I had a discussion with a friend about his son's education. He was divided over "do I teach him to do good, or do I teach him to be selfish? Because there doesn't seem to be any downside to being selfish these days". I've generally experienced outsized rewards from being selfless. But then I have struggled with defining my ambition, so all rewards seem awesome. I have friends who are laser-focused on an outcome, and for them my "do random good stuff and the universe will give you good stuff back" approach is insane. They're all "fuck everyone else, I need this" and it seems to work for them. But that comes with zero sense of social obligation. And I can't see how society is supposed to work if everyone behaves likes this.

sunopener 6y ago

What Happened to Duty? Well when the enthusiasm and obsession ("the fashion") wore away from the horrors and tragedies around that time, the shiny polish of "duty" became nothing but human excrement.

taurath 6y ago

Seems like it could be a carryover from a feudal system that ramped up as nationalization happened during wars (WW1 mobilization for example). Modeling of “duty” was for a specific cause. Duty is for soldiers, servants, employees, and in a smaller way citizens (to pay taxes) in a free society. Now, if you ask people hey would you like to support the less economically well off in society, in theory people can vote on that as being a “duty” of government or a civil service, like a conservation corps.