A DEFINITIONAL VIEW OF INDIVIDUALISM

 

This blog has dedicated a countless number of words to describe how individualistic the nation has become, especially since World War II.  The overall history of the nation describes the evolution of a fairly individualistic people, maybe because from almost its start, a variety of ethnicities – and hence no overarching cultural dictate[1] – was involved in its formulation.  This diversity has, for example, fueled a successful, individualist-based capitalist economy that has led the world to unprecedented riches.

But this bent, until the great war, was meaningfully contained by certain communitarian biases that served as the foundation for a federalist view of government and politics.  That view emphasizes a recognition that the nation’s constitutions, both at the national and state levels, set forth federated structures among its people.  Yet, as the history of the nation evolved, its people have chosen a more self-centered view of social arrangements.  So, this blog can seriously ask:  what does it mean to say the United States is too individualistic?

The concept, individualism, needs more substance than most people ascribe to it.  Individualism does not make itself known similarly in all situations.  Back in 1985, Bellah, et al. looked at individualism in the American social make-up.  They wrote in Habits of the Heart, “[i]ndividulism is more moderate and orderly than egoism” and proceed to quote Tocqueville:

Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate him[/her]self from the mass of his[/her] fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends, with this little society formed to his[/her] taste, he[/she] leaves the greater society to look after itself.[2]

They describe individualism as a habit of thought well ingrained in America’s historical psyche. 

While the mass phenomena to find true self and the extravagance attached to that quest is more recent, Americans are basically a people who see themselves as individuals, as opposed to members of society or community, to rely on the resources for social and personal goals and the source of meaning for those goals.  These cited writers refer to Ralph Waldo Emerson (who wrote an essay entitled “Self-Reliance”), the Puritans, John Winthrop, and Thomas Jefferson as harping on the same theme.

Among the middle class, individualism is highly tied to the work ethic, something firmly felt in America to this day.  “The problem is not so much the presence or absence of a ‘work ethic’ as the meaning of work and ways it links, or fails to link, individuals to one another.”[3]  Work, which forces the individual to have a public life, has become, due to large-scale industrial (and now postindustrial) operations, segmental and encourages self-interested workers.  By doing so, work has lost a lot of its binding character among the work force.

Individualism can express itself in two modes:  utilitarian individualism and expressive individualism.  Utilitarian individualism tends to be single-minded, and goal driven toward advancing careers.  Expressive individualism values relationships, forms of art, even social improvement goals.  In either form, the writers express concern about the goodness being defined by one feeling good.  “Acts, then, are not right or wrong in themselves, but only because of the results they produce, the good feelings they engender or express.”[4]

They continue that this bias suggests or relies on a moral sense.  It is based on a morality or ethics as being highly subjective; therefore, the distinguishing character of individualism remains ineffable or difficult to describe.

The touchstone of individualistic self-knowledge turns out to be shaky in the end, and its guide to action proves elusive … [T]o what or whom do our ethical and moral standards commit us if they are “quite independent of other people’s standards and agenda?”[5]

          The above concern brings to the fore a battle of priorities.  The battle can be described within the following question:  Is it truer to say societal well-being is produced by assuring individual well-being or is individual well-being produced by assuring societal well-being?  Current schools of thought in psychology generally known as self-actualizing seem committed to the former.

          One of the founding fathers of the self-actualizing school, psychologist Abraham Maslow, using the concept, “synergic” (taken from the anthropologist, Ruth Benedict), assumes that what society can do for the development and well-being of the individual is also good for the development and well-being of the society.[6]

          Bellah, et al, observe:

Our individualistic heritage taught us that there is no such thing as the common good but only the sum of individual goods.  But in our complex, interdependent world, the sum of individual goods, organized only under the tyranny of the market, often produces a common bad that eventually erodes our personal satisfaction as well.[7]

The total level of utility in a society, therefore, can only be enhanced or protected if the commonweal of the entire society is the focus.  Bellah, et al, in Habits of the Heart, identify that the nation is afflicted with a “cancerous” dose of individualism.[8]

          In a later book, The Good Society, these writers pick up on the same theme and further state that to address the disease, social problems should be viewed not from the perspective of the individual, but through the institutions in which the problems are found.  They point out that it is only through institutions that the individual learns to become interdependent with others.  It is not just important what institutions do, but how they do it.  It is through these actions that people coordinate, build social trust, and expand social capital.

          Before leaving the topic for this posting, perhaps a reminder as to the meaning of social capital would be helpful.  According to Robert Putnam, social capital as a societal quality is characterized by having an active, public-spirited citizenry, egalitarian political relations, and a social environment of trust and cooperation.[9] 

Surely, individualism as described here is more an obstacle to attaining social capital than an asset.  The next posting will look at the theoretical framework this blog will use in the postings to follow – that way, the reader knows what is guiding this blogger.

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[1] This is a qualified claim.  Yes, the early colonial experience was heavily British, but in that, a variety of religious traditions, albeit geographically segregated, found their way to this new land (at least to Europeans).  As the 1600s and then the 1700s progressed, America saw representatives from the array of European cultures make their way over the Atlantic in search of new lives.

[2] Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart:  Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York, NY:  Harper and Row, Publishers, 1985), 37.

[3] Ibid., 55-56.

[4] Ibid., 78.

[5] Ibid., 78-79.

[6] George Leonard, “Abraham Maslow and the New Self,” Esquire (December 1, 1983), accessed “gateway” site November 18, 2021, https://classic.esquire.com/article/1983/12/1/abraham-maslow-and-the-new-self .

[7] Bellah, et al, Habits of the Heart, 95.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone:  The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York, NY:  Simon and Schuster, 2000).

KEEPING UP WITH “AXIAL” CHANGE

 

This blog, in recent postings, has been citing a string of writers from the waning years of the twentieth century.  This is due to this blogger’s current interest in how federalism and related topics have been considered from roughly that time.  Of great interest, perhaps due to the upcoming “turn of the century,” was the notion of transformation and how the world – especially the advanced nations – was going through meaningful change.  One writer, the world historian, Leften Stavros Stavriano, zeroed in on this theme.

          He hinted that the descriptive term, “axial period,” could possibly be applied to that time and the years to follow into the twenty-first century.  In 1992, he wrote, “As in the original axial age [first millennium B.C.], basics are being challenged – governments, isms, traditions, and leaders.  In the course of today’s axial age, one and all are now on trial.”[1]  Does such a view reflect a “present bias,” one that augments what is happening now?  The belief here is that profound changes are taking place and perhaps what one has been experiencing is just a new normal.

          For example, as the prior postings hint, the nation’s economy is transforming, but American institutions are not functionally transforming with it.  Of course, what is of interest here is the educational institution.  The question is not whether schools are teaching as effectively today as they did earlier – if one can describe American schools as ever being effective – but are they sufficiently effective for the challenges that the future holds?

          In the opinion of many responsible writers, current schools are not meeting these challenges.[2] But, summarily, one can get an overall sense of this state of affairs in the following quote from the Department of Education,

It’s clear what it means to be prepared for tomorrow’s economy.  Already, three-quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require education beyond a high school diploma, with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers prominent on the list.  However, our schools aren’t preparing enough of our students for that reality.  Today, the United States has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the world.  Among students who do complete high school and go on to college, nearly half require remedial courses, and nearly half never graduate.[3]

The irony is that to address these globally induced demands, one must look to the nation’s most intimate of settings; one must address the demands of communal institutions such as the family and the local school.

          Prominent in these concerns are the conditions of schools.  The challenges to schools promise to be more demanding under the economic and social realities briefly outlined earlier in this blog.  Whether schools are effective, the gap between how effective they are and how effective they need to be is growing.  To be more effective, schools need to be perceived as more supportive yet demanding places.  In addition, students must perceive that what they are engaged in at school demands a certain level of duty.

          Usually ignored in the discussion of what is happening in schools have been the social contexts in which schools find themselves and the environments they create within their walls.  No longer can schools count on a type of community support that characterized most of their history[4] and the sense of community they enjoyed among the nation’s work force.  While America was not as communal as perhaps other nations, it still enjoyed a far greater sense of community than it does today.  As Christopher Hurn noted toward the end of twentieth century,

 

Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s, high schools became less solidary institutions capable of inspiring loyalty and commitment.  At the beginning of this period most high schools held weekly assemblies in which all students were expected to be present, maintained large numbers of clubs and voluntary societies that met after school, and celebrated and feted exceptional achievement in award and prize ceremonies.  All these activities helped create a sense that the school was a community to which one owed allegiance rather than simply a place where students came to work … [I]t must be emphasized that there is virtually no research about these trends against which they might be compared, they suggest high schools lost a significant part of their previous ability to sustain a sense of community and shared purpose among their students during the period of declining test scores.[5]

 

To reach meaningful reform, the lack of community life must be addressed.

          It must be addressed both regarding how schools are organized and how they manage their curriculum content relating to social studies, particularly in the teaching of government and politics at both middle and high school levels.  This blog proposes that rebuilding of community life, in some form, is essential to making schools the kind of institution a federalist advocate expects them to be.  In this, this blogger’s book, Toward a Federated Nation (available through Amazon), offers a how-to presentation by which civics teachers can move to assist in meeting this aim.

          Of course, this concern simply reflects a more general tension Americans face, that being of individualism – especially as touted by the natural rights view – versus community – as touted by federation theory.  The next posting will attempt to answer the question:  what does the statement – the United States is too individualistic – mean?  That posting will add more substance to the concept of individualism.

[Reminder:  The reader is reminded that he/she can have access to the first 100 postings of this blog, under the title, Gravitas:  The Blog Book, Volume I.  To gain access, he/she can click the following URL:  https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zh3nrZVGAhQDu1hB_q5Uvp8J_7rdN57-FQ6ki2zALpE/edit or click onto the “gateway” posting that allows the reader access to a set of supplemental postings to other published works by this blogger by clicking the URL: http://gravitascivics.blogspot.com/ and then look up the posting for October 23, 2021, entitled “A Digression.”]

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[1] L. S. Stavianos, Lifelines from Our Past:  A New World History (Armonk, NY:  M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 198.

[2] For example, E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy (New York, NY:  Vintage, 1987) AND Eric Liu, “What Every American Should Know,” The Atlantic (July 3, 2015), accessed November 14, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/what-every-american-should-know/397334/ AND Diane Ravitch, National Standards in American Education:  A Citizen’s Guide (Washington, DC:  Brookings Institution Press, 1995) AND Grace Chen, “10 Major Challenges Facing Public Schools,” Public School Review (November 5, 2020), accessed November 14, 2021, https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/10-major-challenges-facing-public-schools AND Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations:  Preparing Ourselves for the 21^st Century Capitalism (New York, NY:  Vintage Books, 1992) AND Sydney Johnson, “Robert Reich on Student Brains, Civic and Restoring Pathways to the Middle Class,” EdSurge (August 3, 2018), accessed November 14, 2021, https://www.edsurge.com/news/2018-08-03-robert-reich-on-student-brains-civic-education-and-restoring-pathways-to-the-middle-class .

[3] “Progress in Our Schools,” Department of Education (n.d.), accessed November 14, 2021, https://www.ed.gov/k-12reforms .

[4] A Pew report shares that while 57% of Americans engage in community programs, only 9% participate in parent engagement activities which consists of school related or youth program activities.  See Aleksandra Sandstrom and Becka A. Alper, “Americans with Higher Education and Income Are More Likely to Be Involved in Community Groups,” Pew Research Center (February 22, 2019), accessed November 15, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/22/americans-with-higher-education-and-income-are-more-likely-to-be-involved-in-community-groups/ .

[5] Christopher J. Hurn, The Limits and Possibilities of Schooling:  An Introduction to the Sociology of Education (New York, NY:  Harper and Row, 1993), 254-255.