Habits of the Heart

I'm probably a gonzo individualist trying to repent of his weak community values, a confirmed loner trying to escape from his loner-ishness. So everything I say against entrenched individualism needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, I think, entrenched, gonzo, unencumbered individualism is one of the main things that's "wrong with us" today.

By individualism I mean not so much a high-falutin' political and social philosophy — "belief in the primary importance of the individual and in the virtues of self-reliance and personal independence," Wikipedia puts it — as an attitude. If transmuted into a philosophy of the self, it might become solipsism, the "belief that one's self is the only thing that can be known with certainty and verified." If transmuted into the realm of psychology, it could be narcissism, "the pattern of thinking and behaving which involves infatuation and obsession with one's self to the exclusion of others."

In other words, the assumption I wish to question is the one which says, "It's all about me."


Of course, I live about 99% of my life in it's-all-about-me mode, so this is definitely a case of the pot calling the kettle black. What I'm really trying to do, I suspect, is make some inroads into my own self-absorption.

I see my religion, Roman Catholic Christianity, as an ally in that cause. And never more so than when I read in Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity that Jesus preached mainly against the anti-communitarian, narrow-minded Jewish elites of his day, the scribes and Pharisees in 1st-century Palestine.

Yet I also realize that the problem Jesus confronted was, if anything, the opposite of the one we face today. In his world, the claims of individual human beings to life, health, sustenance, and personal dignity were subsumed under a rigid social and political hierarchy. That hierarchy was confirmed, supposedly, by the "law" handed down from Moses. Under the "law," as Nolan describes the situation, the majority of Jews were maligned and oppressed by their "betters."

The atmosphere was so anti-individualistic partly because of the Roman hegemony in Palestine. Jews in Palestine had any number of approaches to understanding their enslavement, but most believed God was punishing them for their sins. And who were the worst "sinners"? The masses of poor, demon-ridden, illiterate slobs who were too ignorant to observe the textured nuances of the "law." They were the ones responsible for bringing woe to Israel.

To that sort of attitude Jesus said, basically, "No! The real problem with Israel is that attitude itself. It, the opposite of compassion for and solidarity with the poor and the weak, is what will seal Israel's doom, unless there is repentance, and soon."

(I guess I'd better hastily add that this is in no way intended as a polemic against Jews and Judaism. It's merely a comment on the social scene in Jesus's time and place.)

So Jesus, in saying things like "the law is made for men, not men for the law," tried to move his society leftward on the individualism scale. He tried to show that each human life, no matter how poor or ignorant or disease-ridden or "sinful" the individual may be, is equally precious in God's eyes. In fact, those in the well-off elites who scorn such "little ones" will one day find themselves behind others in God's pecking order.


Many centuries later, in northern Europe, circumstances arose which would move society yet further leftward on the individualism scale. In the late Middle Ages, the rise of well-to-do artisans and burghers in places like today's Germany and the Low Countries — these were self-made individuals whose money and status had not been inherited — started the West on a path toward the multifarious institutions of liberty all Americans cherish.

Until very recently, however, liberty was circumscribed for most Americans by various strictures. Much of the constraint was economic. Well-off as I personally happen to be by historical standards, both my parents grew up in families that were, periodically, downright poor. Not living-in-tenements poor, but certainly having-to-pull-up-stakes-and-move-on poor.

Something happened in the middle of the 20th century that made such brushes with poverty unlikely to beset the lives of the greater number of Americans. Economic wealth and financial independence were democratized. Everybody and his brother became, in effect, a "burgher" — the French word for which is bourgeois. And the American bourgeoisie ballooned in size.

As people cast off economic want, they also burst the bonds of all sorts of other strictures formerly confining their behavior — church and religion prominent among them. Not only long-established church communities and parishes vanished, but also social and political institutions which once held people together in some sort of secular community disappeared, as people migrated from cities and farming villes to the wide open spaces of the suburbs. By the mid-1980s, social scientist Robert Bellah and others published Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, saying, in effect, something is out of whack.


Specifically, there has been a decline of true community. There are many reasons for the decline, but an important one is the search for the "unencumbered" self (see p. 152). Bellah and his co-authors suggest that this is not good — that the wholly unencumbered self actually turns out to be an empty self.

The search for the unencumbered self, in turn, is an outgrowth of "radical" individualism. Bellah speaks of . . .

. . . the process by which a primary emphasis on self-reliance has led to the notion of pure, undetermined choice, free of tradition, obligation, or commitment, as the essence of the self . . .

. . . and also of . . .

. . . the radical individualist's sincere desire to "reconnect" with others [as being] inhibited by the emptiness of such an "unencumbered" self . . .

. . . and goes on to say . . .

It is now time to consider what a self that is not empty would be like — one that is constituted rather than unencumbered, one that has, let us admit it, encumbrances, but whose encumbrances make connections to others easier and more natural. Just as the empty self makes sense in a particular institutional context — that of the upward mobility of the middle-class individual who must leave home and church in order to succeed in an impersonal world of rationality and competition — so a constituted self makes sense in terms of another institutional context, what we would call, in the full sense of the word, community. (pp. 152-3)


Radical individualism can be both utilitarian and expressive. It can be utilitarian when seen as a pragmatic means toward maximizing self-interest. It can be expressive — or self-expressive — when it seems the only way an individual can express his or her "unique core of feeling and intuition" (p. 334).

The former mode of radical individualism, the utilitarian, stems from the philosophy of John Locke and others in 17th-century England, which fed into the ideas Jefferson, Madison, et al. incorporated into our founding documents in the 18th century. Locke held that the individual self is fundamentally "prior to society" (p. 143). Civilization is but a byproduct of individual selves coming together in mutual self-interest to form a "social contract."

The latter, expressive mode of radical individualism was originally a romantic reaction against Locke and others. The reason the self should be unfettered, romantics said, was not rational and pragmatic at all. It was that each of us has a sacrosanct core of sentience which can best flourish only under circumstances of radical freedom.

However, both modes, utilitarian and expressive, have been mingled together in American experience. Both assert the primacy of the self over the community; both seek to make the individual person radically unencumbered by history or tradition.


There are also two other forms of individualism, historically speaking, that contribute to the American way of life: republican, or civic, individualism, and biblical individualism.

We inherit our republican or civic tradition of individualism from classical Greece and Rome. This tradition puts "civic virtue" on a par with self-interest as a proper motivator of human action (see p. 335).

The biblical tradition was, until the early to mid-20th century, republican individualism's ally in shaping American thought and practice. Judeo-Christian values emphasize our moral and ethical obligations to one another.

The civic/biblical tradition came unglued from our American attitude toward individualism during the 20th century, in favor of a more radical form using mingled utilitarian and expressive modes of individualism to the exclusion of more tradition-bound approaches. We demoted religion in particular into a purely "private" choice.


In Democracy in America, as far back as the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that we were in danger of (in Bellah's words) "undermining these traditions." Such an unencumbered individualism (again, in Bellah's words) "weakens the very meanings that give content and substance to the idea of individual diginity" (p. 144).

And in the end, paradoxically, unencumbered individualism is empty unless it is set in a context which informs us how to express our freedom. More than anything else, the individual self needs to be constituted within a "community of memory" (pp. 152 ff.). The stories told within such a community are fundamentally necessary because they alone "contain conceptions of character, of what a good person is like, and of the virtues that define such character" (p. 153).


The "older civic and biblical traditions" are our semi-abandoned vessels for these stories, conceptions, and virtues. That's too bad. Yet "a return to traditional forms would be to return to intolerable discrimination and oppression," Bellah writes (p. 144). For example, in Plato's Republic the ideal state was constituted as a strict social hierarchy. And, supposedly, the Bible furnishes scant justification for universal tolerance, seeming to set "God's people" above all others.

"The question is, then," writes Bellah, "whether the older civic and biblical traditions have the capacity to reformulate themselves while simultaneously remaining faithful to their own deepest insights" (p. 144).

I admittedly have given little thought as yet to the republican/civic reformulation — sorry about that. But it seems to me that the sought for reformulation of the biblical tradition flows immediately from Albert Nolan's Jesus before Christianity. Nolan says that Jesus's preaching was all about compassion and societal solidarity. Somehow we have lost sight of this crucial fact, Nolan says, but Jesus's original idea was that inclusiveness, even of so-called "sinners," was, is, and always will be the sine qua non of godliness. (I can think of no better definition of true community, by the way.)

If that teaching of Jesus's were more widely appreciated today, I'd say, a restoration of the biblical tradition of individualism in American could never return us to "intolerable discrimination and oppression"!