In 1985, Robert Bellah and his colleagues published a groundbreaking sociological analysis of the role that individualism plays in American culture. Called Habits of the Heart, its analysis was so significant and insightful that 35 years later, the book is still in print, still required reading in most sociology programs, and still often compared to de Tocqueville’s famous Democracy in America for its evaluation of the benefits and threats that individualism presents for and to our society.
I share all this because as I have been watching the pandemic unfold and listening most recently to the debate and arguments over whether or how to reopen our schools this fall, I have been reminded of Bellah, et al’s work, and in revisiting it, I realized it has a lot of bearing on the current situation in which we find ourselves. What’s more, I think it has important and timely lessons to teach to those of us willing to listen and learn, and so if the reader will indulge, I want first to provide a summary of Bellah and his colleagues’ original analysis for anyone not familiar with it and then present the lessons I think it has for the current debate about school opening.
Bellah and his team start their examination of individualism in America by identifying the type they found most prevalent in their research: an idea they called “ontological individualism.” It is, they argue, the notion that only the individual person is real and can have actual being through his/her/their unique thoughts and experiences and that, therefore, any truth-claims can only be those of the individual: what is true is what I think is true.
Yet, such an understanding of individualism, they proceed to point out, has profound consequences for the communal nature of our society. For starters, it reduces even our most deeply held ethical virtues and values to mere personal preferences. That, in turn, leaves us with the inability to make legitimate demands on others because “in a world of potentially conflicting self-interests, no one can really say that one value system is better than another” (p. 7). In other words, where every individual’s truth is real and therefore just as valid as every other individual’s truth, we have no justification for obligating someone else to behave in a certain way. Moreover, because we cannot justify obligations on others, we have no grounds for forging the kinds of civic attachments that might impinge on the personal freedom to create the self of one’s choice—precisely the kinds of civic attachments needed to form a just society. Therefore, Bellah, et al contend, the dominant form of individualism practiced in this country undermines the very moral reasoning needed for creating our society in the first place.
And the consequences of this fact, documented in their research, are significant, momentous, and potentially threatening to our future well-being. First, having lost the language to speak of substantive common goals that transcend individual wants and needs, we have divided ourselves into like-minded groups of individuals who share only our attitudes, beliefs, economic status, and/or lifestyles—a division which the technological revolution of the past 35 years as only amplified as we sit staring at our screens, siloed in our own little narcissistic bubbles of distraction. Second, without a common understanding of moral character and what civic virtue is, we have a harder and harder time seeing these things in others who are not fellow members of our group—resulting over the past 35 years in the increasingly bitter and ever more dysfunctional partisanship of our public domain. Third, when any sense of “should” is defined only by someone’s personal values, people become only as valuable to one another as their ability to meet each other’s wants and needs. Meaning that when they can no longer do so, there is no obligation to maintain the relationship, and “love-thy-neighbor” degenerates into “love those compatible neighbors they have surrounded themselves with…while letting the rest of the world go its chaotic, mysterious way” (p. 179).
Which is exactly the situation we find ourselves in today—with the emphasis on “chaotic.” Instead of organizing daily life for civic well-being where we are called to contribute through our individual behaviors to binding us together for a greater good, we have organized our society purely for private achievement (as social media expert Ana Homayoun says, it’s all about the “likes”) and individual consumption (think Amazon and Netflix). Gone is any notion that a good citizen is someone who understands that personal welfare depends on the general welfare and acts accordingly—you have only to witness the politicization of wearing facemasks in the midst of a public health crisis to see what I mean—and thus, as Bellah, et al challenged 35 years ago, the question confronting us today is whether a society with “an individualism in which the self has become the main form of reality” (p. 143) can in fact survive.
The simple truth is that we have shattered society into almost as many special interests as there are individuals, and as a consequence, “we have committed what to the republican founders of our nation was the cardinal sin: we have put our own good as individuals, as groups, as a nation, ahead of the common good” (p. 285). Furthermore, we find it nearly impossible to confess and save ourselves from this sin because “the language of individualism, the primary American language of self-understanding, limits the ways in which people think” (p. 290). We have formed mental habits that presume our individual destinies are entirely in our own hands, and as a consequence, we implicitly dismiss all the relationships that actually make our lives even possible, denying that we are, in fact, fundamentally and utterly co-dependent on one another for our individual as well as collective survival and well-being.
It is this latter denial (which I have written more about elsewhere) that is the root cause of why we are struggling so hard right now with the decision about re-opening schools. We have no way to discuss what is the common good because too many of us are simply concerned with “what’s good for me and mine?” Thus, when we find ourselves (as we presently do) forced to decide between competing common goods by the reality of the SARS-CoV-2 virus—e.g. the quality of our children’s futures and their collective mental health versus the prevention of an increased spread of COVID-19 among the most vulnerable—we do not possess a united understanding of what is best for the overall public welfare and future of our society to address the problem. Where we need a choir, we have cacophony, and without a united voice, we will continue as a country to bungle every aspect of this pandemic—including its impact on schools—as badly as we have to date. As the old Pogo cartoon once said, “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”
Interestingly enough, Bellah, et al would go on to write a follow up to Habits of the Heart where they presented the argument for how Americans might transform our almost systemically narcissist individualism with its many problems into a more republican individualism with its benefits of personal freedom not found at the expense of the common good. Entitled The Good Society, they conclude this book with a chapter called “Democracy Means Paying Attention”—as in paying attention to those who are different from us; paying attention to the quality of our social safety-net; paying attention to the social injustices right there in front of our faces; paying attention (as I have argued throughout this project) to how we educate our children; paying attention to….
The list could go on, but right now, too many of us are only paying attention to a mirror, and unless we start truly paying attention to the character of the web of relationships of which we are a part, then I fear the original words of Bellah and his colleagues in may be more than predictive; they may become prophetic:
We have never before faced a situation that called our deepest assumptions so radically into question. Our problems today are not just political. We have assumed that as long as economic growth continued, we could leave all else to the private sphere. Now that economic growth is faltering and the moral ecology on which we have tacitly depended is in disarray, we are beginning to understand that our common life requires more [of each of us]… and if [individual] power is our only end, the death in question may not be merely personal, but civilizational (p. 295).
References
Bellah, R., et al. (1991) The Good Society. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Bellah, R., et al. (1985) Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, Ltd.
Homayoun, A. (2018) Social Media Wellness: Helping Tweens and Teens Thrive in an Unbalanced Digital World. Thousand Oaks: Corwin Press.
Light a Candle 