American Society and Individualism

Creating the Good Society

By Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez

In the Good Society, sociologist Robert Bellah and
his coauthors challenge Americans to take a good look at themselves.
Faced with growing homelessness, rising unemployment, crumbling
highways, and impending ecological disaster, our response is
one of apathy, frustration, cynicism, and retreat into our private
worlds. The social problems confronting us today, the authors
argue, are largely the result of failures of our institutions,
and our response, largely the result of our failure to realize
the degree to which our lives are shaped by institutional forces
and the degree to which we, as a democratic society, can shape
these forces for the better.

What prevents Americans from “taking charge” is, according
to the authors, our long and abiding allegiance to “individualism”
— the belief that “the good society” is one in which individuals
are left free to pursue their private satisfactions independently
of others, a pattern of thinking that emphasizes individual
achievement and self-fulfillment.

As the authors point out, this way of thinking about ourselves
and our society can be traced back to our country’s eighteenth
century founders, most notably John Locke: “Locke’s teaching
was one of the most powerful ideologies ever invented, if not
the most powerful. It promised an unheard of degree of individual
freedom, an unlimited opportunity to compete for material well-being,
and an unprecedented limitation on the arbitrary powers of government
to interfere with individual initiative.” Our nation’s founders,
however, assumed that the freedom of individuals to pursue their
own ends would be tempered by a “public spirit” and concern
for the common good that would shape our social institutions:
“The Lockean ideal of the autonomous individual was, in the
eighteenth century, embedded in a complex moral ecology that
included family and church on the one hand and on the other
a vigorous public sphere in which economic initiative, it was
hoped, grew together with public spirit…The eighteenth century
idea of a public was…a discursive community capable of thinking
about the public good.”

It is precisely this sense of common purpose and public spirit
crucial to the guidance of institutions in a democracy that
is absent from our society today. A ruthless individualism,
expressed primarily through a market mentality, has invaded
every sphere of our lives, undermining those institutions, such
as the family or the university, that have traditionally functioned
as foci of collective purposes, history, and culture. This lack
of common purpose and concern for the common good bodes ill
for a people claiming to be a democracy. Caught up in our private
pursuits, we allow the workings of our major institutions —
the economy and government — to go on “over our heads.”

One way of summing up the difficulty Americans have in understanding
the fundamental roots of their problems is to say that they
still have a Lockean political culture, emphasizing individual
freedom and the pursuit of individual affluence (the American
dream) in a society with a most un-Lockean economy and government.
We have the illusion that we can control our fate because individual
economic opportunity is indeed considerable, especially if one
starts with middle class advantages; and our political life
is formally free. Yet powerful forces affecting the lives of
all of us are not operating under the norm of democratic consent.
In particular, the private governments of the great corporations
make decisions on the basis of their own advantage, not of the
public good. The federal government has enormously increased
its power, especially in the form of the military industrial
complex, in ways that are almost invulnerable to citizen knowledge,
much less control, on the grounds of national defense. The private
rewards and the formal freedoms have obscured from us how much
we have lost in genuine democratic control of the society we
live in.

The authors see hope, however, in renovating our institutions
in a way that will revitalize and transform our democracy. In
a culture of individuals possessed by individualism, such a
transformation will not be easy. First and foremost, we will
have to shed our individualistic blinders and learn to “pay
attention” to ways in which we are dependent on and collectively
responsible for the institutions that shape our common life.

Second, we will need to find or create spaces in our lives
where we can “practice” democracy — beginning with our families
(responsibilities shared equitably between parents) and our
places of work (increased worker participation). Educational
and religious institutions, as bearers of our moral ideals,
will also play a vital role in preparing us for active and intelligent
participation in public life. Our larger political and economic
institutions can be redesigned to encourage and nurture citizen
participation. More government policy and planning decisions,
for example, can bc relegated to local levels, encouraging wider
citizen participation and responsibility for government policy.

Underlying these proposals is a belief that as we begin to
participate in public projects, our perspectives and concerns
will broaden. From a focus on self and a view of society as
unrelated autonomous individuals, we will come to look beyond
ourselves and come to view ourselves as members of a larger
community concerned not only about ourselves but about our fellow
Americans, peoples of other nations, future generations, and
non human life. “When citizens are engaged in thinking about
the whole, they find their conceptions of their interests broadened,
and their commitment to the search for a common good deepens.”

The result: an informed and morally sensitive public active
in discussing and debating issues ranging from international
financing to day care, within a framework informed by a shared
vision of a good society; and a citizenry capable of instituting
reforms in our economic and political institutions so that they
work for the common benefit of all peoples.

This reinvigoration of democracy is not proposed as an idealistic
project but as a practical necessity. The authors write that
nowhere is the need more evident than in the international sphere,
where problems are beyond the capacity of any single nation
to solve.

Our economic life is dominated by the dynamics of a vast world
market that cannot be controlled by the action of any single
nation-state. Problems of environmental pollution transcend
national boundaries. The proliferation of nuclear weapons threatens
the security of all. Vast disparities in global wealth and power
lead to petering conflicts that endanger economic health and
political security around the world.

In a world of increasing complexity and interdependence, we
can no longer afford “to go our own way.” Rather, we need to
exercise our capacity for developing institutions that recognize
our interconnectedness, moving toward the creation of “the good
society,” “where the common good is the pursuit of the good
in common.”

The Good Society, by Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen,
William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1991).