Our Duty as a Whole
“Where all are guilty, nobody is.” (147)
In today’s world, interconnected society is an unquestioned reality. As the world shrinks vastly smaller with the moment, it reinforces the idea that we are a united people. In a matter of minutes I am able to read about the status of a country on the other side of the planet, or watch a video on political change in an area that I had learned about only seconds before. Because of this interconnected nature, people have information on the world around them at their fingertips. As such, we all have an inherent responsibility to be aware of the actions of others within our community as well as the plights of our neighbors.
Arendt makes a very clear claim in her writing — that, while we, as individuals, are part of a collective community that may be responsible for wronging others, we ourselves are not guilty. By taking unified guilt, as my opening quote suggests, no one is truly guilty. She goes on to explain that “guilt, unlike responsibility, always singles out; it is strictly personal” (147). This is something that we, as a whole, must be aware of in order to help others; we are not to blame for the hardships they face, and should not feel inherently bad about circumstances that put us ahead of others. Instead, we should use this feeling of inequality to assist those around us and be responsible for the actions of our community.
“I must be held responsible for something I have not done, and the reason for my responsibility must be my membership in a group which no voluntary act of mine can dissolve” (149).
Arendt relates this allusion between guilt and responsibility back to the Holocaust; when rally cries of German citizens echoed “We are all guilty”, many believed this to be true. The Germans as a whole had become swept up in Hitler’s plan and allowed millions of people to be murdered by their community in the name of moving themselves forward. However, they were not guilty for this. By assigning them blame, it takes away from the guilt of those who consciously executed millions of people. Now, take the original phrase, “we are all guilty”, and replace “guilty” with “responsible”. “We are all responsible”. Instead of giving the message that all the German citizens that supported the Third Reich were aware of the actions of everyone around them and at peace with the decisions made, it gives the sense that they should not have allowed this oversight to happen, and they realize this. This is the difference that Arendt is pushing with this portion of her essay: that while all people are not guilty for the deeds of their community, by being a part of said community, they are responsible for the actions of the community.
Within my service experience, I have seen this transpire tenfold. Initially walking in, I sometimes feel out of place. The first few times I visited, it seemed to me that students were questioning what this older, white student was doing in their safe haven, and what she could possibly bring to it to make it better. I belong to a community of people who are of a different race and socioeconomic standing that all of the kids who attend NGS. This is a community which has often slighted the communities that surround NGS students. While I would love to discard this identity to create less strife with my experience, “[…] no man can live without belonging to some community, this would simply mean to exchange one community for another and hence one kind of responsibility for another” (150). While this guilt I feel is slightly unfounded, and most likely a result of empathy, I can take responsibility to the plight that previous generations have cause those around me and try my best to help destroy stigmas in place by society and aid these students in their progression forward.
“This vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for this we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men” (158).
Because we live in such an interconnected community, it is indeed our duty to take up the responsibility of the actions of our community, as a whole, and recognize what is happening around us. By doing so, we can assist those who are in a position that is unlike our own, in communities that do not have the same advantages that we do, and by doing so strengthen the global community that we call Earth.
