Relinquishing Results of Actions: Three Views
In my ethics classes, one of the texts that proves most transformative for students is Martin Luther’s “On the Freedom of a Christian.” It allows students to let go of a rule-based ethic and think more about doing good out of a desire to do good. As one student said at the end of a recent semester, “I learned that Christian ethics isn’t about following rules, but about acting authentically,” and she moved her hand out from her heart as she said the word “authentically.”
Luther’s theology ends up being a bit of a one-trick pony, hammering the concept of justification by faith alone from every angle. But as one-trick ponies go, one could do worse. The basic idea is that one’s deeds - ritual or ethical - do not earn one anything, that salvation simply results from an act of trust in God’s desire to bring people out of sin. For Luther, the desire to “get a cookie” for doing something good is so fundamental to human psychology that giving it any leeway will be like pulling a few sticks out of a beaver dam and seeing it disintegrate - the inner pressure to expect a reward for doing something good is so immense that giving it an inch means it will take not a mile, but several hundred light years. So, learning to rely solely on faith is a relinquishing of a desire for rewards and the task of a lifetime.
Luther also posits that letting go of the anxiety, “am I good enough to get my cookie?” frees people to be more attentive to other peoples’ needs. While Luther works within the basic question of “how do I go to heaven?” he subverts the egocentrism of it by stressing that the “reward” is the ability to care for others. There are many ways in which Luther’s own practice failed in this regard - his writings on peasant rebellions and Jews do not offer a model of solidarity - but the basic principle allows for an internal critique of Luther’s failings.
Luther’s argument works solidly within a Christian framework of Jesus dying for our sins. Can’t stomach the patriarchal Christian mythic structure with its litany of Father-Son-Holy Ghost-(and demoted Mary!) that underlies Luther’s argument? Let’s try another angle to get the same point in a different mythic structure.
Back in 2003, I was preparing for an exam on Hinduism and read the Bhagavad Gita, which has a similar message. It states its main idea succinctly:
Be intent on action,
not on the fruits of action;
avoid attraction to the fruits
and attachment to inaction.1
Coming back to this text yesterday, I was mostly impressed by how the Bhagavad Gita weaves the various layers of Hindu thought, especially the philosophical and the devotional, in a unique way. I picked up on a kind of critique of sacrifice as a potentially mechanistic exchange that can lock people into hopes for material gains, which I hadn’t seen in previous readings.
But a major way in which the Bhagavad Gita advances the idea of relinquishing attachment to the results of one’s actions is to tie the meaning of action to our dharmic duty, a duty that is prescribed by one’s familial status in the varna system, which assigns everyone to either priestly, warrior, merchant, or servant status by virtue of birth.
Your own duty done imperfectly
is better than another one’s done well.
It is better to die in one’s own duty;
another one’s duty is perilous.2
On a personal level, I hear echoes of times in which my own desire to do a duty perfectly has gotten in the way of getting it done at all. But I also think of how in a capitalist society, that predefinition of social duties melts away in the centrality of the freely-entered contract as the lynchpin of society. My vocation was not handed to me, and just the duty to discern a vocation and a path forward has taken enormous time and energy. After I got stuck on the adjunct track, I spent a couple of years, with what felt like pressure from my therapist, to figure out a different path forward. I kept coming back to teaching and research as what I need to do, even though I can’t exactly make a living at it. After a couple of years of spending most of my energy in trying to come up with an alternate route and getting nowhere, I lapsed back into settling for the adjunct teaching because the task of discerning a different vocation was getting exhausting.
Of course, the ethical challenge of the Bhagavad Gita is tied to the fact that Arjuna’s dharmic duty is to kill his beloved relatives in battle. As such, the immediate context for the Bhagavad Gita’s handling of the wisdom of nonattachment to the results of one’s actions is a justification of a warrior society. So, we’re still stuck in a patriarchal/militarist mythic framework. Let’s try another angle to get the same point in a theological framework that mostly sets myth aside.
Back in 1991, my faith was deeply shaken by the failure of mass protest to stop the Gulf War. I had absorbed a great deal of liberation theology, which sees God as active in revolutionary social and political movements to transform unjust social structures. I found a great deal of inspiration in The Gospel in Solentiname, reflections on the gospels in pre-revolutionary Nicaragua, in which people found in the gospels a sense of hope and strength to pursue the task of upending the capitalist-colonialist system that impoverished them. I had been involved with solidarity work with Salvadoran and Puerto Rican resistance movements and really believed that we were moving toward the socialist future that is heralded with the idea of the Kingdom of God. I went to jail several times, usually with nuns, to protest American imperialism. The fall of the Soviet Union, the end of the Nicaraguan revolution in the elections of 1990, and the ascendance of Margaret Thatcher’s edict that “there is no alternative” to capitalist predation had already caused some rethinking among liberation theologians as to strategy. But in 1991, I participated in the largest demonstrations I had ever seen - it hadn’t entered my imagination that you could get enough people in the streets to shut down Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, but we did. But the war went on, and I later learned that the war planners had already taken popular opposition into account before declaring war. My hope that we, with enough solidarity and will, could change the world was shattered.
In the aftermath of this crisis of faith I read Sharon Welch’s A Feminist Ethic of Risk.
Welch contrasts the “ethic of control” - “the assumption that effective action is unambiguous, unilateral, and decisive”3 to “the ethic of risk," in which responsible action is more about creating conditions for further action than reaching closure. She explores the ethic of risk through an analysis of African-American women's literature - novels such as Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, the Timeless People and Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters. She notes that
in this moral tradition action begins where much middle class thought stops. The horizon of action is recognition that we cannot imagine how we will win. Acknowledgement of the immensity of the challenge is a given. There are no national and international programs, no particular strategies that can convincingly guarantee that the many forces and structures of exploitation can be stopped.4
What Welch taught me is that even collective action can be hampered by getting caught up in a desire for the reward for the action. My disillusionment after the Gulf War was not evidence that my actions against it were futile, but evidence that I was measuring my participation in collective action against an imagined outcome that I hoped we could guarantee. Years later, a friend who was in Palestine during the Gulf War said, “you have no idea how much difference it made to see the protests on TV.” We couldn’t stop a war, but we could provide hope and strength to people more directly affected by the war.
Like Luther and the Bhagavad Gita, Welch connects this sense of acting without attachment to the results of one’s actions to spirituality. However, she breaks with both by pushing her critique of the ethic of control to conceptualizations of deity. Welch notes that there is a contradiction between religious ethics that critique power and a conception of deity as omnipotent.
All three of these perspectives do the same thing: They advocate for a life lived without hoping for rewards for good behavior, they assert that way of living requires a spiritual connection, and they mobilize that way of living for a sense of social responsibility.
It’s easy enough to find the common thread. But how am I doing with taking on the task they set forth? How are we doing with taking on the task they set forth? Spirituality isn’t so much about “believing in” certain counter-factuals, but in walking the hard road that the lessons those counter-factuals reveal.
I feel like I’ve worked through a fair amount of bitterness and frustration that hit especially hard after a promotion was denied in 2018. I knew that the adjunct track is merciless, that it doesn’t provide financial stability or opportunities for professional growth, and my prayer life consisted of one prayer: “What the fuck do you even want from me, God?” I made financial and emotional sacrifices to get through graduate school, and I wanted those to pay off. I felt the added burden of the way that feeling bitter about a dead-ended career is considered bad form. Reminding myself of acting without attachment to the results of action helps me see how I made certain choices, took certain risks, and I can look back on my actions not as “wrong choices” but as actions from which I learned something. A friend recently reminded me that I’m someone who did exactly what I wanted to do with my life and that many people never get around to doing that. So, I can approach the results of my choices with a bit more equanimity.
I also approach Substack with the sense of it being an exercise in doing something without worrying about engagement, quality, or other metrics of success. It’s simply a time for me be accountable to the task of writing. I haven’t enabled comments because I don’t want to get sucked into the feeling of “I’m getting engagement,” the way I would get sucked into the hope for likes, replies, and retweets when I was on Twitter. But Twitter was an excellent lesson in accepting the mismatch between what one puts out and what others pick up. My favorite tweets would languish - the most trivial thoughts would take off. So, instead of creating a structure where I’m hoping for my “good” ideas to meet with a kind of response, I’m just putting them out there.
The recent onslaught of news about Artificial Intelligence reminds me, too, that we live in a world where powerful people act according to the ethic of control, not the ethic of risk. The very agenda of technologizing the world is one of making the world bend to our desired outcomes, except we seem to be on the precipice of those outcomes going in unforeseen directions. ChatGPT may make this sort of writing obsolete within a year, but what it can’t do is give me the satisfaction of having done something on my own, just for the sake of having done it.
The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War, translated by Barbara Stoler Miller (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 36.
Bhavagad-Gita, 46.
Sharon Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk, Revised Edition (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 25. The revised edition is the one I have handy, but I have always preferred the original edition. In the revisions, Welch succumbs to a level of abstraction at times that lessens the force of the original. I recommend finding the first edition.
Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk, 45.