Love Languages: Service and Being Useful

Having now finished looking at the five fundamental gestures of love, I will now try to examine the gestures that are essential for building a common life.  While all the gestures we have looked at up to now are important in the immediate, and can be employed independently of an engagement in the common life, these last three gestures are specifically constructive to common life.  The last three gestures arise from a sense of responsibility.  Relationships are ethical to the extent that they are founded on mutual respect - and they are personal to the extent that there is mutual responsibility.  If you break it down, the word responsible refers to one's ability to respond.  One's ability to respond depends upon a number of factors: maturity, courage, strength, conscience, freedom, willingness, etc.

Responsibility should be clearly distinguished from duty.  Duty is something imposed from without, from society, culture, or religion.  You could also use the word duty to refer to obligations.  Obviously, the Philosopher Immanuel Kant has a lot to say about that, along with the other "Deontologists," but I'd rather not get into that.  I would rather emphasize the fact that becoming responsible is not simply the process of becoming aware of obligations or developing a sense of duty.  I would even argue that someone whose sense of responsibility depends upon the accomplishment of obligations is not in fact responsible.  Responsibility is not a virtue, it is the quality of a person who has discovered both a spiritual good and elements of the common good.  Responsibility is not focused on the fulfillment of obligations, responsibility seeks the protection and growth of a personal good and of the common good it depends upon.  An obligation is the formalization of a responsibility - so a responsibility that is no longer connected to an affective knowledge, a knowledge of the good that responsibility is meant to protect and serve.  When  ethics is reduced to its rational element (rational as distinct from intellective), responsibility is reduced to a laundry list of obligations.  Acting ethically means acting intelligently - not just rationally.  Acting ethically requires a true knowledge of an end-good, a good that is able to finalize.  Once this good is discovered for what it is, and for what it requires, I take responsibility for it for the sake of my happiness.  Responsibility has to do with what is necessary for my happiness, and by extension, what is necessary for the happiness of those I love.  Obligation has to do with what I think is important, or what others think is important, but has no clear tie to happiness.  Most people in today's world are seeking happiness and only manage to fulfill obligations with great difficulty or in limited quantities.  We have a greatly diminished sense of duty - for better or for worse.

It would be interesting to examine the modern difficulty with fidelity in this perspective.  Is fidelity a duty or a responsibility?  Well, that depends more on us and on our way of seeing reality than on fidelity itself.  Fidelity can be lived as a responsibility or as an obligation.  Faithfulness is the responsibility of someone who knows that the person he has chosen to love is capable of giving meaning to his entire life, and who knows that the other person depends upon him for meaning as well.  Faithfulness is an obligation for someone who does takes their engagement seriously, but doesn't see infidelity as an obstacle to their happiness, or the happiness of the other person.

We could also contrast responsibility with obedience.  Someone who does what they are told is necessarily responsible.  Someone who does what they are told and discovers their finality thereby becomes more responsible.  So ethical education consists in helping others discover their responsibilities.  Strictly speaking, you do not give someone a responsibility, you trust them to become responsible or to discover and own up to their responsibilities.  If we educate someone at the level of obligation and duty - telling them there are things they simply have to do - when they are old enough to decide that their priority in life is happiness and not the fulfillment of duties or obligations, they will abandon many of the practices we dutifully obliged them to do.

Education leans on obedience to help another person discover their responsibilities.  But obedience is only a true means of education for children, and all those who have not attained maturity.  Adulthood is reached when a person is capable of acting in function of a personal good.  So using obedience on someone who is an adult is inappropriate.  Telling an adult how to discover their finality is treating them as though they were not an adult.  And yet, we all need a reminder from time to time about the meaning of our lives, and that there is a direction in which we are headed whether we are aware of it or not.  That is why an adult continues their self-education by taking into consideration the councils and perspectives of the wise, but ceases to function under the mode of obedience.  God is the only being that could legitimately propose a path of obedience to an adult - and it is precisely because of God's position with respect to human finality.  If God exists, he knows us perfectly, and he knows perfectly what we were created for, he knows what our greatest personal happiness is and how we can obtain it.  So we can trust God beyond our own point of view, and the point of view of others, however we can only know God's will in faith.  Anyone who claims to know the particular will of God beyond the shadow of a doubt is surely illuminated or under an illusion.

All of these thoughts should help us understand the spirit in which we serve one another.  Service is part of acting responsibly.  Service is a gesture that demonstrates one's engagement in the common good with concern for protecting personal relationships.  Service is  a gesture of cooperation in the common project of living together.  Without gestures of service, it starts to look like someone has no real intention of living with the other people in the household or community.  Someone who shows up for meals, but doesn't offer to help in the kitchen in any way, shape, or form is either a guest, a child, a special needs case, or a thief.  Unless special arrangements exist, or an exception is made, the shared material goods of a household are maintained by those who use them, and are used for the good of all in the household.  An adult member of the household who uses the common good without contributing to its upkeep, or renewing it, or replacing it acts like a thief.

One difficulty arises when someone considers the production of money as a sufficient way to serve the common good.  Money is not good in itself, it is a certain power to obtain material goods, it is a means to acquire material goods.  Someone who views their contribution to the common good as consisting exclusively in the production of money only contributes virtually.  A virtual contribution to the common good does not build family or community.  A truly constructive engagement in common life requires gestures of service that maintain the material common good.

Beyond the material common good, a community (or household) also needs to be build on the common concern for the personal good of its members.  This concern is a special kind of service, the service of a friend who shows his concern for his friend.  A friend wants his friend to be happy, and knows that his friend's happiness depends upon more than just being friendly.  This Personal Attention is a special service that can be rendered in the form of initiatives in the realm of service or in the form of councils given when they are asked for.  A friend is the one most capable of rendering this service, and it is through our experience of the demands of friendship that we learn to serve other people in a personal way.  It is the friendship of a couple that enables them to educate their children to become human persons.  Service becomes something we do for someone not simply because we love them, but because we want them to be happy.  Not just because we want them to become better persons, but because we are practically engaged in living together.

Service becomes difficult when what one person thinks important is different from the other person(s) in the household.  When it comes to cleaning, or maintenance, or cooking, there is always an aspect that can become a point of contention.  Some people like things cleaner than others, some people take better care of things than others, and people have different standards and abilities when it comes to cooking.  It is therefore important to come to an agreement about what tasks or services each member of a household or community will be responsible for and how often etc.  Obviously this requires a dialog and some flexibility.

We could reflect on what a fundamental service might be - one we provide for others out of basic respect.  Ethically, does basic respect for other people require us to serve them at all?  Basic respect has more to do with not causing hurt or pain than with actually doing good.  Basic respect in the domain of service has to do with avoiding causing others inconveniences.  Basic respect in the domain of service has to do with behaving oneself in such a way as to not create work for other people.  For some reason, it seems like most deficiencies even among adults are found in this area.  An example: basic respect in terms of service would require me to put my shopping cart somewhere out of the way of other people's cars, i.e. not behind my neighbor's car in such a way that they can't back-out without moving the cart first.  So, if this happens, it could be done by someone who is not yet adult and therefore not able to think of others.  If it is done by someone who is adult, it would be because of negligence, inattention, or even spite!  Basic respect requires not only that we avoid creating inconveniences for others in circumstances where they will know it was us, but that we avoid creating perceptibly anonymous inconveniences as well.

Beyond the basic level of respect, we find gestures of service that are open to friendship, also known as politeness.  Politeness comes from the Greek work polis, which refers to the city.  Obviously the city is build on constructive actions of individuals that contribute to the material well-being of other citizens and to the concord between citizens.  The Boy-Scouts have a saying that is directed to these gestures of service that are open to friendship - "do a good turn daily" and "Leave the place better than you found it."

We already looked at the service proper to friendship - doing what we can to help our friend achieve their happiness and finality.  This can be in the form of giving counsel when asked, or taking on additional material responsibilities to give them more time for an important activity.