On Human Rights Day 2025, which will take place this coming Wednesday on the 10th we are called to remember not only the rights enshrined in law but the relationships that make those rights real. In the realm of social care, this is not a theoretical exercise but rather it is a daily, lived reality.
On reflecting upon this I was reminded of a great speech I heard whilst in Boston for the Global Ageing conference a few weeks ago. It was given by the essayist and journalist David Brooks. Several times during his contribution he used the word ‘beholden.’ It sent me searching the dictionary for its origin and meaning.
I discovered that beholden comes from Middle English, originally the past participle of behold. It was a word which did not mean simply to see rather it meant to hold, to keep, to be bound to another. To be beholden is to live in obligation, not as a burden, but as a bond. It is to recognise that our lives are entangled, that our dignity is shared, and that our rights are sustained not only by law but by love.
In an age that prizes autonomy and self-sufficiency, beholden sounds uncomfortable. In our age of individualism, beholden sounds archaic. We prefer autonomy, independence, self-sufficiency. Yet in the realm of social care, and indeed in the moral ecology of our communities, perhaps it is a word we most need at the present time. Because care is not a transaction but rather it is a covenant. Care is profoundly about relationship not task.
Reading a bit more about his writing I have discovered that David Brooks, in his work on the Weave Project and in The Second Mountain, as he did in his speech, speaks of a society fraying at the edges. One that is lonely, tribal, spiritually hollow. His response is not technocratic but relational. He calls for a “relationalist” ethic, one that sees people not as consumers or clients, but as neighbours, as kin.
Brooks writes of “radical mutuality,” of lives built not on independence but on interdependence.
In The Second Mountain, in particular, Brooks argues that the first mountain of life is about personal success, but the second is about moral joy found in commitment to others, in covenant, in community. To climb that second mountain is to become beholden – not in weakness, but in strength. It is to say: I am because we are.
This is not sentimentality. In this view, social care is not a service – it is a covenant.
This is not weakness. It is strength. It is a strength those who work in social care will easily recognise. It is the strength of carers who show up day after day, often unseen and underpaid. It is the strength of communities who hold their elders not as burdens but as bearers of wisdom. It is the strength of a society that says: I am because we are.
In Scotland, we are facing a crisis in social care. But it is not only a crisis of funding or infrastructure – it is a crisis of moral imagination. The centralisation of care contracts, the economic fragility of rural care homes, and the bureaucratisation of support have eroded the relational soil in which human rights grow.
As I’ve said before, “You would be, quite frankly, insane to waste your money building a private care home in any part of Scotland, unless you were guaranteed 100% of private income.” But the deeper insanity is imagining that care can flourish without community.
The National Care Home Contract has failed not only economically, but relationally. It does not reflect the reality of being beholden – to elders, to carers, to the land and its people.
In my writing on the local democratisation of social care, I have argued that we must move from a model of delivery to one of relationship. The Self-directed Support Act of 2013 was meant to empower individuals, but its implementation faltered because it did not embed itself in the moral soil of community.
We need a care system that is not just efficient, but beholden – to the values of dignity, inclusion, and human rights. We must move from a model of delivery to a model of relationship. From care as service to care as covenant. From rights as entitlements to rights as responsibilities held in common.
Ageism, as I’ve explored in recent speeches, is a symptom of a society that has forgotten what it means to be beholden. When older people are seen as burdens rather than bearers of wisdom, we lose not only their stories but our own moral compass. The rise in age-related hate crimes, the media’s portrayal of ageing as decline, and the economic marginalisation of older workers – all point to a rupture in our social fabric.
To repair it, we must reclaim the ethics of obligation. Not obligation as duty alone, but as relationship. To be beholden is to recognise that our lives are entangled, that care is not charity but reciprocity.
On this year’s Human Rights Day, I’d love us to reclaim beholden as a word of moral power. Let us say we are beholden to those who age, not as problems to be solved, but as people to be honoured. We are beholden to carers, whose labour is love and whose work is justice. We are beholden to communities, whose strength lies in their capacity to hold one another.
David Brooks reminds us that moral renewal begins not with systems, but with stories. And in Scotland, we have stories of care that stretch from croft to coast, from ceilidh to care home. They are stories of people who are beholden and proud to be so.
Let us write policy, yes. But let us also write poetry and story. Let us build care systems but let us also build kinship. Let us be beholden, not as a relic of the past, but as a radical vision for the future.
Human rights are not sustained by policy alone. They are sustained by people who are beholden to one another. By carers who show up. By neighbours who listen. By governments who remember that dignity is not delivered but that it is held.
Let us be beholden. Not as a relic of the past, but as a radical vision for the future of social care.
Because to be beholden is not to be bound – it is to be human.
In his poem The Poet’s Obligation the great Pablo Neruda shares a declaration of the poet’s moral duty to awaken others to the vitality of life. Neruda sees himself as beholden to those trapped in routine, pain, or isolation. His obligation is not merely artistic but rather it is human, spiritual, and communal. The sea becomes a metaphor for freedom, and the poet a conduit for its liberating force.
I leave you with his words as we approach Human Rights Day in the spirit of beholden.
The Poet’s Obligation
by Pablo Neruda
(Translated from Spanish)
To whoever is not listening to the sea this Friday morning,
to whoever is cooped up in house or office, factory or woman
or street or mine or harsh prison cell;
to him I come, and, without speaking or looking,
I arrive and open the door of his prison,
and a vibration starts up, vague and insistent,
a great fragment of thunder sets in motion the rumble of the planet
and the foam, the raucous rivers of the ocean flood,
the star vibrates swiftly in its corona,
and the sea is beating, dying and continuing.
So through me, freedom and the sea
will make their answer to the shuttered heart.
https://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/poetry/obligation.html
Donald Macaskill
Photo by Andrew Hall on Unsplash
