April 23, 2010
The Statue of Liberty stands on a small island off the shore of Lower Manhattan. She has been there since her arrival in the United States in 1885, a gift from the people of France. She is an East Coast thing and there are some—not many but some—who think she needs a mate.
The Statue of Responsibility Foundation is raising money to bookend the continental United States with a second statue on an island in the harbor of an as yet undetermined West Coast city. The Statue of Liberty's missing mate is called the "Statue of Responsibility." And no, I'm not making this up.
According to the Statue of Responsibility website:
The Statue of Liberty has served as a symbol of liberty, both in America and throughout the world. Its counterpart, the Statue of Responsibility, will likewise serve as a symbol—a visible representation and call to responsibility—both in America and abroad. These two principles—liberty and responsibility—when linked together, will help engender and secure freedom for the present generation, and for generations yet unborn, wherever a thirst for freedom exists. Only by balancing Liberty with Responsibility can Freedom be sustained.
The foundation has trademarked "Liberty + Responsibility = Our Freedom" in an attempt to show the importance of this principle and the need for a West Coast statue to match Lady Liberty.
While I'm not sure a $300 million statue in San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Seattle is the solution, it is true that liberty—a word that is actually a synonym for freedom—has devolved in our world into little more than license, the endless quest to do exactly as I please.
After all, hasn't the great American dream become the ability to do whatever I like, whenever I like, with whomever I like? It's a day off from work, a long vacation, early retirement, friends "with privileges," and plenty of money to sustain my chosen lifestyle. Liberty as it is used today eschews responsibility as liberty's antithesis. Justin Moyer, who wrote about the Statue of Responsibility for the Washington Post, commented:
Responsibility is what stern parents lecture their kids about after they break curfew, get loaded and crash the family car. Responsibility is watching "Born Into Brothels" when you really want to watch "Dude, Where's My Car?" If liberty's a candy bar, responsibility is broccoli. Who builds a statue with such dreary symbolic baggage?
Perhaps the Chinese would.
In "The Key to Our Civilization," published in the Spectator (UK),George Cardinal Pell, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Australia, writes:
Paradoxically, modern China can help us understand Western life today. Not because China must achieve economic supremacy… but because this radically different culture is now searching for the secrets of Western vitality to provide a code for decency and social cohesion compatible with sustainable economic development.
Pell points out that the Chinese have long wondered why economic development took place in the West ages before it happened in China. They are also asking themselves how to temper economic development and the freedom it brings with a sense of morality and responsibility, something their citizens, for the most part, seem to lack.
They have concluded that the West's great secret of success is Christianity. Pell cites Zhao Xiao, a Chinese economist, who wrote:
These days Chinese people do not believe in anything. They don't believe in God, they don't believe in the devil, they don't believe in providence, they don't believe in the Last Judgment, to say nothing about heaven. A person who believes in nothing can only believe in himself. And self-belief implies that anything is possible — what do lies, cheating, harm and swindling matter?
