But the authors point out that most of what Joe achieves is an illusion. The town is little more than a bedroom community, in a specific price class, for Boston itself.
The largest employer is a branch of a large corporation with only nominal ties to the community, and Joe is in fact a PR man for the corporation. His own real emotional ties to the town thus serve corporate interests. As came clear in an ugly town debate over some proposed low-cost housing, in which a large Housing and Urban Development grant was turned down, emotionally, over fears of the ethnic undesirables the project might bring from Boston, some traditional values of New England neighborliness were lost to a protective individualism.
An obvious question is whether the transformation that the authors envisage would link the citizenry in an idealistic new concern for the commonwealth or simply create or energize special interest groups regional, economic, religious, occupational and conflicting, divisive coalitions. The ideal is easy to embrace; the practical consequences, hard to foresee. In the liberal world, the state, which was supposed to be a neutral night watchman that would preserve order while individuals pursued their various interests, has become so overgrown and militaristic that it threatens to become a universal policeman.
And the book could do well. Collective action is, as the authors agree, far from totally extinguished. As anyone with connections to small towns knows, the Volunteer Fire Department and the Volunteer Ambulance Corps have often taken over as the focal points of community action.
And yet in their field work, the authors kept finding gauzy and unspecific credos behind this action. In the end, what the authors seek is to pit a heightened and activated version of this sense of community against the rising tides of world poverty and a deepening malaise at home.
All Sections. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. University of California Press.
Does the title Habits of the Heart seem more appropriate for a popular romantic novel or a made-for-television movie than for a serious sociological study? It would be unjust to criticize Bellah for falling short of the standard set by Tocqueville, since this simply puts Bellah in the company of every other student of America in the last century and a half.
It would be churlish to harp too long on the issue of whether the Americans interviewed—about half of them Californians, a quarter therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and their clients, another quarter leftist political activists—are even loosely representative of the nation as a whole. All of this would simply suggest that a prominent sociologist and four colleagues, advised by a distinguished advisory committee, and supported by three foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities, labored for several years and brought forth a mouse.
But it is the particular character of this mouse, and the noises it makes when it squeaks, that may be of interest as revealing some of the habits of mind of one prominent stream of contemporary social science and public philosophy.
One might think that a work based primarily on interviews might be somewhat incoherent, but this is not a problem of Habits of the Heart. Quite the contrary; the interviews are cut and pasted to fit into a clear analytic framework.
It is also our own. American culture consists of three central strands—the biblical, the republican, and the modern individualist.
Perhaps this is the price we pay for the decision to depend primarily on interviews. But the interviews cannot bear the weight put upon them. The snippets from the interviews do little to deepen or sharpen our understanding of the issue. We find ourselves not independently of other people and institutions but through them. We never get to the bottom of our selves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love, and learning.
All of our activity goes on in relationships, groups, associations, and communities ordered by institutional structures and interpreted by cultural patterns of meaning. Our individualism is itself one such pattern. And the positive side of our individualism, our sense of the dignity, worth, and moral autonomy of the individual, is dependent in a thousand ways on a social, cultural, and institutional context that keeps us afloat even when we cannot very well describe it.
Finally, we are not simply ends in ourselves, either as individuals or as a society. We are parts of a larger whole that we can neither forget nor imagine in our own image without paying a high price.
Bellah is everywhere alert to the tensions and ambivalences that plague individualism; the tensions and ambivalences of the biblical and republican traditions he acknowledges only to explain them away.
Bellah is not willing to tolerate a revival of the illiberal aspects and implications of the non-individualist traditions: thus he stresses that he is no simple opponent of modern individualism. But Bellah never offers any argument as to why we should believe that the older traditions do have the capacity to reformulate themselves while remaining faithful to their deepest insights, or how they might do so.
Indeed, he never tells us to which aspects of themselves they must remain faithful, and which aspects must be reformulated.
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