'1he Pursuit of Happiness

Brian Palmer

I iving well is a chgllenge. Brian Palmer, a successful businessman, livesIII ~comfortable SanJose suburb and works as a top-level manager in aI.af Te corporation. He isjustifiably proud ofhis rapid rise in the corpora-uun, but he is even prouder ofthe profound change he has made recentlyIII his idea ofsuccess. "My value system," he says, "has changed a littlebll as the result of a divorce and reexamining life values. Two years ago,Ionfronted with the work load I have right now, I would stay in theI.fftceand work until midnight, come home, go to bed, get up at six, and110 back in and work unt il midnight, until such time as it got do ne. NowIjust kind offlip the bird and walk out. M y family life is more important1\) rne than that, and the work will wait, I have learned." A new marriagemi a houseful of children have become the center of Brian's life. But\1 h new values were won only after painful difficulties.

Now forty-one, his tall, lean body burstîng with restless energy,llrian recalls a youth that included a fair amount ofhell-raising, a lot of

x, and considerable devotion to making money. At twenty-four, hemnrried. Shouldering the adult responsibilities of marriage and childrenIIt" ame the guiding p~rpose o~hi.s life for tpe n~xt few years.

Whether or not Brian felt his life was satisfying, he was deeply com-mitted to succeeding at his career and family responsibilities. He heldIwo full-time jobs to support his family, accepting apparently withoutromplaint the loss of a youth in which, he himself reports, "the vastmajority of my time from, say, the age of fifteen to twenty-two orIwcnty-three was devoted toward giving myself pleasure of one sort oruuother." Brian describes his reasons for working so hard after he mar-ri d quite simply. "It seemed like the thing to do at the time,' he says. "1Iouldn't stand not having enough money to get by on, and with my wifeunable to contribute to the family income, it seemed like the thing to do.

3

4 Habits of the Heart

1guess self-reliance is one of the characteristics 1have pretty high up in~y value system. It was second nature. 1didn't even question the thing. 1JUs~went ~ut and did it." Brian and his wife carne to share very little intheir marnage, except, as he thought, good sex, children, and devotionto his career. With his wife's support, he decided to"test" himself"in theBig .Lea~ue::' and he made it, although at great cost to his marriage andfarnily hfe. What was my concept of what constituted a reasonable rela-ti~nship? 1gues~ 1felt an obligarion to care for materially, provide for, a'wife and my children, in a sty le to which I'd like to see them becorneaccustomed. Providing for my family materially was important. Sharingwasn't important. Sharing of my time wasn't important. 1 put in ex-'tremely long hours, probably averaging sixty to sixty-five hours a week.I'd work almost every Saturday. Always in the office by 7:30. Rarelyoutofthe office before 6:30 at night. Sornetimes I' d work until 10:30 or 1I.

~hat was n.um.ero uno. But 1compensated for that by saying, 1have thismce car, this ~ICehouse,joined the Country Club. Now you have a placeyou can go, SIton your butt, drink, go into the pooI. 1'11 pay the bills and1'11 do my thing at work."

For Brian's wife, the compensations apparently weren't enough. Af-ter almost fifteen years of marriage, "One day 1carne home. In fact, ourhouse was for sale, and we had an offer on the house. My wife said'Before you accept an offer, you should probably know that once we sellt~is house, we willlive in different houses.' That was my official notifica-non that she was planning to divorce me."

.The divorce, "one of the two or three biggest surprises of my life," ledBnan to reassess his life in fundamental ways and to explore the limits ofthe kind of success he had been pursuing. "1 live by establishing plans. 1had ~o plan for being single, and it gave me a lot of opportunity to think,and In the course of thinking, 1read for the first time in many, many years.Got back into classical music for the first time since my colIege years. 1went out and bought my first Bach album and a stereo to play it on.Mostly the.thin~ing process ofbeing alone and relating to my children.'

When his children chose to live with him, Brian found himselfforcedto shift his sense of himself and his priorities in life. "1 found that being asmgle ~arent is ~ot alI that it is cracked up to be. 1found it an extremelyhumblmg expenence. Whereas 1go into the office in the morning and 1have a personal secretary and a staff of managers and a cast of hundreds:vorking for me, 1camehome and justlike every Tom, Dick, and Harryin the world, I'd clean up garbage after these three big boys ofmine. I'dspe~d two hours prep~ring and cleaning up after dinner, doing laundry,foldmg clothes, sweepmg the floor, and generalIy doing manuallabor of

The Pursuit ofHappiness 5

1111' 1 west form. But the fact that my boys chose to live with me was aVI', y important thing to me. It made me feel that maybe 1had been doing

11111 'thing right in the parenting departrnent."Although his wife had left him, and he later found out that she had

III''Il having an affair, Brian's period of reflection led him torerhink hisIili ' in the relationship. "Being a compulsive problem solver, 1 analyzed1 li, failure., 1 don't like failure. I'rn very competitive. 1 like to win. So 1w 'nt back and reexamined where the thing broke down and found that 1IlIld ontributed at least 50 percent and, depending on the vantage point,IIllIybe99 percent ofthe ultimate demise ofthe institution. Mostly it was,1 king myselfthe question ofwhy amI behaving in such and such a way.Why am 1 doing this at work? Why was 1doing this at home? The an-w 'r was that 1 was operating as if a certain value was of the utmost

11111' rtance to me. Perhaps it was success. Perhaps it was fear offailure,hllt I was extremely success-oriented, to the point where everythingwould be sacrificed for the job, the career, the company. 1 said bulIshit.'I'hnt ain't the way it shouldbe."

The revolution in Brian's thinking carne from a reexamination of then uc sources of joy and satisfaction in his life. And it is particularly in aIIIilrriage to a woman very different [rom his first wife that Brian hasdis vered a new sense of himself and a different understanding ofwhat .III'wants out of life. He has a new sense of what love can be. "To be able10 " ceive affection freely and give affection and to give of myself andII(w it is a totalIy reciproc al type ofthing. There'sjust almost a psycho-

IOJ.;ially ~yant feeling ofbeing able to be.so much r.n0re invol~ed andhnring. Sharing experiences of goals, shanng of feehngs, workmg to-

KI' her to solve problems, etc, My viewpoint of a true love, husband-und-wife type of relationship is one that is founded on mutual respect,Ildll1iration, affection, the ability ro give and receive freely,' His neww i' , a divorcee his own age, brings four children to their marriage,Ild led to Brian's own three, They have five children stillliving at home,Ind a senseof energy, mutual devotion, and commitrnent sufficient tomnkc their family life ajoy. .

In many ways, Brian's is an individual success story. He has succeededmntcrially, and he has also taken .hold of the opportunity to reach outhl'Y nd material success to a fuller sense of what he wants from life. Yetti ispite the personal triumph Brian's life represents, despite the fulfilI-uicnt he seems to experience, there is still something uncertain, some-thing poignantly unresolved about his story.

'1 'he difficulty becomes most evident when Brian tries to explain whyli i.~that his current life is, in fact, better than his earlier life built around

6 Habits oJthe Heart

single-minded devotion to his career. His description ofhis reasons forchanging his life and of his current happiness seems ta come downmainly ta a shift in his notions of what would make him happy. His newgoal-devotion to marriage and children-seems as arbitrary and unex-amined as his earlier pursuit of material success. Both are justified asidiosyncratic preference rather than as representing a Iarger sense of thepurpose of life. Brian sees himself as consistently pursuing a utilitariancalculus-devotion to his own self-interest-except that there has beenan almost inexplicable change in his personal preferences. In describingthe reasons forthis change, he begins, "Well, I think Ijust reestablishedmy priorities." He sometimes seems ta reject his past life as wrong; butat other times, he seems to say he simply got bored with it. "That exclu-sive pursuit of success now seems ta me not a good way ta live. That'snot the most important thing ta me. I have demonstrated ta myself, tomy own satisfaction, that I can achieve about what I want to achieve. So.the challenge of goal realization does not contain that mystique that itheld for me at one time. I just have found that I get a lot of personalreward from being involved in the lives of my children."

American cultural traditions define personality, achievernent, and thepurpose of human life in ways that leave the individual suspended inglorious, but terrifying, isolation. These are limitations of aur culture,ofthe categories and ways ofthinking we have inherited, not limitationsof individuals such as Brian who inhabit this culture. People frequentlylive out a fuller sense of purpose in life than they can justify in rationalterms, as we see in Brian's case and many others.

Brian's restless energy, love of challenges; and appreciation of thegood life are.characteristic ofmuch that is most vital in American eul-ture. They are all qualities particularly welI-suited ta the hard-drivingcorporate world in which he works. When Brîan describes how he haschosen to live, however, he keeps referring ta "values" and "priorities"notjustified by any wider framework of purpose or belief What is goodis what one finds rewarding. If one's preferences change, so does thenature ofthe good. Even the deepest ethical virtues arejustified as mat-

\

ters ?f ~ersonal preference. Indeed~l~_etru~a~ is simplythat individuals should be able ta pursue wnatever t ey find rewarding,constrained only by the requirement that they not interfere with the"value systems" of others. "1 guess I feellike everybody an this planet isentitled ta havea little bit of space, and things that detract from otherpeople's space are kind of bad,' Brian observes. "One ofthe things that Iuse ta characterize life in California, one of the things that makes Cali-fornia such a pleasant place ta live, is people by and large aren't botheredby other people's value systems as long as they don't infringe upon your

The Pursuit of Happiness 7

IIWIl. By and large, the rule of thumb out here is that ifyou've gat the111011 y, honey, you can do your thing aslong as your thing doesn't de-IIoy someone else's property, or interrupt their sleep, or bother their

I I < cy, then that's fine, If you want to go in your house and smoke mari-11111113 and shoot dope and get alI screwed up, that's your business, butd\)l\'t bring that out an the street, don't expose ~y children ta It, Just douur thing. -That works out kind of neat." /?'~

In a world of otentiall c~flictin _Jelf-interests~ p.o one can really I~IIY t at one value system is better than another. Given such a world,

Hrinn sets great stare by one basic principle-the importance ofhonestynud communication. It is through communication that people have aI hnnce to resolve their differences, since there is no Iarger moral ideal inI ms of which conflicts canbe resolved. "Communication is critic al notIII dy ta a man-and-woman relationship, it is the essence of our bei~g onIhis planet in my opinion. Given open communication and the ability toIhink problems out, most problems can be solved." Solving conflicts be-Iomes a matter oftechnical problem solving, not moral decision. Lying,whi h would interfere in a critical way with the ability ta communicateIII' .urately and resolve interpersonal conflicts, is thus wrong, but, evenlrcr , wrongness is largely a matter of practicaliry -e-it doesn't pay. "Thehottorn line of my personal value system applies to the way I conducthusiness. My predecessor was characterized as a notorious, habitual,nud compulsive liar, and that's a difficult act to folIow. That's probably.111 of the' reasons that led to his demise-that his lies were catching up .with him and he left before the walIs carne tumbling down."

Not lying is one ofthe major things }3rian wants ta teach his children.IIWhy is integrity important and lying bad? I don't know. It just is. It'sJUSt sa basic. I dant want ta be bothered with challenging that. It's part1) me, I don't know where it carne from, but it's very important." BrianIIYS "values" are important, and he stresses the importance of teaching

Ih m to his children. But apart from the injunction not to lie, he is vagueubout what those values are. "1 guess a lot of them are Judeo-Christian,'thics of modernsociety, that certain things are bad." Even the thingsIh:tt may be "absolutely wrong," such as kilIing, stealing, and lying, may[usc be matters of personal preference-or at least i~j?.E0.2!1s againstIilern exist detached from any social or cultural base that could give themI r ader meaning.

Are there some things that are just absolutely wrong? "1don't think Iw uld pontificate and say that I'm in a position to establish values f~rl.urnanity iri general, although I'm sufficiently SQ2<:;~~~to say that ifIIl ' rest of the world would live by my value system it would be a betterpin e," Brian says. The justification he offers is simply, "I'm quite com-

8 Habits oJthe Heart

forta bie with my values:" Yet values, in turn, continually slip back forBrian into a matter of personal preferences, and the only ethical problemis to make the decision that accords with one's preferences. His increasedcornmitment to family and children -rather than to material successseems strangely lacking in substantivejustification. "Ijust find that I getmore personal satisfaction from choosing course B over course A. Itmakes me feel better about myself To participa te in this union of chaosto try and mold something, this family situation-and maybe it's be-cause ofthis bringing two families together-is a challenge. Believe me,this is a challenge. Maybe that's why it fascinates me. Maybe that's whyit's important to me."

Despite the combination of tenderness and admiration he expressesfor his wife, the genuine devotion he seems to feel for his children, andhis own resilient self-confidence, Brian's justification ofhis life thus restson a fragile foundation. Morally, his life appears much more coherentthan when he was dominated by careerism, but, to hear him talk, evenhis deepest impulses of attachment to others are without any more solidfoundation than his momentary desires. He lacks a language to explainwhat seem to be the real commitments that define his life, and to thatextent the commitrnents themselves are precarious.

,1'1

li, II, W

Joe Gorman

Joe Gorman would probably caIIBrian Palmer's ideas about success child-ish. Joe lives three thousand miles from SanJose and has never met Brian.But talking about people in his own town whose lives seem totally fo-cussed on individual success, as Brian's once was, he says they are "tryingto be kids again." ForJoe, being like a kid means lacking an appreciation ofone's responsibilities to one's family and one's community. It means think-ing primarily about what you can get out of your familyand communityrather than what you should give them. For Joe, success means achievingthe goals set by your family and community, not using your family andcommunity to achieve your own individual goals.

Joe Gorman is about the same age as Brian Palmer, but unlike Brian,who has moved to many different communities in his search for per-

-sonal success,Joe has always lived in the small town where his father andmot~er have spent most of their lives: Suffolk, f"1assachusetts, a com-mumty of fewer than 20,000 people, aboiit lihalf-hour's drive from Bos-ton. Suffolk was founded in r6 2, and about six months before one of usinterviewed Joe Gorman, the town celebrated its 250th anniversary. Joe

The Pursuit of Happiness 9

"tii tnken charge of organizing the celebrations, although he had not1IIIKinallybeen asked to do so. During the early phases of planning theuuiiv .rsary festivities, the town manager appointed a committee of lo-1IIIIyprominent townspeople that did not indudeJoe. But the problem

IlS tiut practicalIy none of its members had much experience in plan-IIlng such a complicated event. To make matters worse, according toJoe,il ut half of them were more interested in getting their names in the11011' 'r than in doing much work. As a result, the first event in the long,'ri 'S of planned anniversary celebrations had been a fiasco-a large

IOII1rnunity dinner with only enough food for about half of the peoplewh showed up. Joe Gorman knew that he had the ability to organize the1\,1 .brations successfully, and he felt a kind of duty to do whatever heI nuld to help. So he got himself on the committee and became, in fact ifnoe in narne, its head.

Under Joe's direction, the anniversary celebration turned out to be aInnd success. The festivities stretched out for nine months. There were

p.l ades, concerts, 'a carnival, athletic contests, dinners, dances, and ecu-IIImical religious services, all well attended and smoothly organized.'I'h 'fundamental ineaning ofthe celebration was expressed forJoe in the

1) an: "We are doing it together." As he put it, "That's 50 important-I\) work to get as many people as possible active." Another key themeW!lS the importance ofthe family. The inspiration for many ofthe eventsI .une from the fact that that year had been prodaimed by the UnitedNations to be "the year ofthe family." ForJoe, the highlight ofthe festiv-III'S was a softball tournament in which each team was made up of mern-Il .rs of a different extended family. "We.had eight dans-eight big fam-Iii 'S from Suffolk-in the tournament. In one of them some peopleI urne dear from Connecticut just to play softball on the side of theirI.llllily. You know, for me the best time of the whole celebration wast. nding there back behind the bleachers after the softball games with

III .mbers of the families that had played and talking with them aboutIh .ir families and drinking champagne. That to me was the ultimate.I)uring the games between the dans; on many occasions, lots of peoplehowed up besides the players to watch the game and see how people inIIl ' families were doing."

Anotherof the most inspiring events of the anniversary celebrationwnsa day given over to the town's senior citizens. "We told people that thisw. s their chance now to come together and see the people who had con-Iributed to this town. They had an aftemoon on the Common where theyold baked goods and made an awfullot of money." The whole series of

.inniversary celebrations was "so successful that the first thing that peoplenid after it was over was, 'Why can't we have one every year?" Accord-

! :

10 Habits oJthe Heart

ingly, the town fathers decided to havean annual celebration and madeJoeGorman the head ofthe committee for the next year's celebration.

InJoe's vocabulary, success is a very important word. But throughoutour conversation with him, it was consistently applied not to any statushe had gained for himself or even to any accomplishrrient he had realized

/by himse.lf: Success rather ap~lied to the experience of togetherness the" community had created partially through his efforts. "We had a lot of

hassles [in organizing the anniversary celebration] and a lot of com-plaints that we had to deal with before we got it.e!l~. But when itwas over, the town was totally in favor of it. And even most of thosepeople who had been opposed to various things carne up to me and saidthat they were totally for having it again this year. So it was agreat event,agreat success, and it really brought the town together. If it's successfulagain this year, we're going to have it year after year. It was agreat suc-cess. It was great for the community. But I didn't do it. The Suffolkfamily did it. Yes,it's the Suffolk family, and I love being a part of it."

This is not to say that Joe does not care about receiving personal re-wards for his work within thecomrnuniry, What he considers to be oneof the greatest events of his life happened to him several months afterSuffolk's anniversary celebrations were finished. He was named GoodGuy ofthe Yearin Suffolk and a huge celebration was held for him by thebusiness and civic leaders of the town. "It was a complete surprise forme. They gotme to cooperate in it by telling me that they were puttingon a benefit for someone else, one of my co-workers at the factory. It wasreally embarrassing because I was getting after some people thinkingthat .they weren't doing enough in preparation for this celebration forthis co-worker, and then 1showed up and it was for me." Joe was irn-mensely gratified at this expression of community affection. But it wasimportant for him that it carne as a surprise-that he experienced it as areward he had not consciously worked for.

Besides enjoying the prestige the community has "spontaneously"given him, Joe also receives an income from rus efforts on behalf of thecomniunity. It is, in fact, part ofhis profession to be a community "goodguy." He is director of public relations for one of the large rnanufactur-ing companies located in Suffolk. Like most such companies, the firmthat employs Joe wants to maintain good relations with the townspeo-ple, and to do this it contributes money to community recreation pro-grams and other charities. It is part ofJoe Gorman'sjob to help his com-pany decide how best to help the town. Even though much of it happensto be part of his job, however, Joe's community service work clearlyremains a labor oflove. He has been offered promotions to positions inhis company's head office in Houston, but he has refused them. For him,

The Pursuit of Happiness II

II position in the community is more important than his status withinh I mpany. As he sees it, he works so hard for the town because he is a"natural citiz.ep"ofSuffolk. "1 was born here. My father set up the ath-IIli program at Suffolk High. Friendship alone with the people would

t'p me here. Wewill always stay here. It is my home." .Unlike Brian Palmer, therefore, Joe Gorman does not decide the

1" iper goals that would constitute a'successful life on the basis of cur-IIllt "priorities." The goals are given to him by the traditions ofhis fam-Iy. nd community. YetJoe's solution to the problem of discovering ade-

'luate goals in life is a solution that raises problems of its own.'I'he SuffolkJoe loves so much-the community of civic-minded, in-

I( ,1 king families rooted in two hundred fifty years of tradition-does1101really exist. Three-fourths of Suffolk's present population have11I\)V·din within the past twenty-five years. Most ofthem are not deeplyuvolved in the life of the town. If five hundred out of the town's nineIhousand registered voters show up for a town meeting, that is consid-I 'I'd a very good turnout. The work life ofmost Suffolk residents sepa-,.11 'S them from the town. Their jobs are in Boston or in one of themlustrial parks surrounding that city. Even when they happen to workIII Suffolk, they work in one ofthe factories located in the town's indus-111.11 parks-factories that are frequently parts of multinational con-

lumerates. They live in Suffolk because it happens to be conveniently1. It II t d for them and the housing prices there happen to fit their budgets.M IIlY of them readily admit that they really would prefer to live in one ofrh more affiuent towns in the area, but stay in Suffolk because theyI1111le! not afford a house in a wealthier community, Such people do notIhlnk ofSuffolk as their "family,' but only as a convenient suburb. TheyI'"lh, bly looked on the town's anniversary celebration as a set of quaint1. li ities-pleasant diversions for a weekend afternoon, not rituals ex-I" " ing something important about the meaning oftheir lives.

T affirm the importance of Suffolk's traditions, Joe conjures up aI r tltious golden age of the town that has been corrupted by modernIII v 1 pments. The spirit of this age can be recovered, he believes, andIlu' u sk of recovering it can validate one's present life. "Behind what I'mIlt I "15 is one of my hidden motives. I would like to see Suffolk get back1111hat type of atmosphere where fifteen people could get together, fo'rm

lill .ball team, go down to the park, don't need a uniform or anythingIIkc'lhat, play some baII andjust have a good time. Nowadays to do that1111of thing, people demand uniforms and leagues and regulations andII IOflh. They don't trust each other. But this other, older kind of spiritwhnryou need."'1'", spirit of spontaneous, trustful conviviality Joe remembers hav-

12 Habits ofthe Heart

ing experienced as a boy has been lost, he thinks, partly because thetown's newcomers have been corrupted by the atmosphere of Boston,the big city. There is dissension in local politics bec au se "people comingfrom Boston are so interested in payoffs and so convinced that the politi-clans are corrupt." They are also concerned only about their own privateinvestments in the town rather than the public good. "One oftheir con-cerns is that their houses were new and they wanted them to have all theproper facilities and they wanted to make sure that their investment inthem was protected." But besides the corruption that comes directlyfrom the experience oflife in the city, there is also a more subtle kind ofdecay, spread by the modern educational system. "It's like people aretrying to be kids again. It used to be that parents would discipline theirkids and tell them what to do, But now in school you have all thesespecialists, these psychologists, who analyze the kids and say the kidsneed this and need that and the parents don't give the kids discipline and.become like kids themselves. Kids need discipline, but instead they getthese psychic jobs do ne on thern."

The past was almost certainly never as relaxed and innocent as Joenostalgically remembers it, however, and even if it had been, it would betotally unrealistic to try to return to the past by isolating the town fromthe city and eliminating the infiuence of modern psychology from theschool curriculum. Joe's vision of the good life, seemingly rooted sofirmly in the objective traditions ofhis community, is in the end highlysubjective. Perhaps he has to hide his hopes of returning to the good olddays because even he realizes that most ofhis fellow townspeople wouldfind them faintly ridiculous.

Moreover, even if Joe Gorman's vision of a good society could berealized, it is not at all clear that Joe would want to live in it. "We needmore family ties, more closeness as a family group," Joe says. "1 grew upin a family in a neighborhood of nine houses, and all the people in thosehouses were relatives, cousins. The big thing for us was Labor Dayweekend. At that time, all the family would get together for a huge pic-nic. It was wonderful." ButJoe no sooner paints thisnostalgic picture offamily unity than he backs away from it, affirming the need to separa tehimselffrom his family. "As kids grow up, they have to go their separateways. So now I've become more separa te from my family. 1think that'sneeded. The way I've done it, 1pick my time to get together with them.But it's important that we be by ourselves, too."

And, finally, a dangerously narrow conception of social justice canresult from committing oneself to smaU town values. For instance, justtwo months after the culmination of Suffolk's 250th anniversary cele-

The Pursuit ofHappiness 13

11.111 i ins, the town erupted in an angry fit oflocal chauvinism. The town110l! ing Authority had been trying to provide low-cost housing for el-ti Ily citizens. To build this housing, it needed funds from the federalI \IV -rnment. The Department of Housing and Urban DevelopmentIIII.dly offered Suffolk a grant of$5,000,000 to build such housing-butII lipulated that to qualify for the grant, the town also had to build aurall number oflow-cost housing units for poor families. Many towns-

l' OI le feared that such units would be occupied by blacks and CubansII, )OII Boston. In an intensely emotional town meeting, they rejected the1I D grant and voted to establish recall proceedings to remove the'IIWII officials who had applied for it. Townspeople appealed to the unityUII integrity of their tradition-rooted community to justify segrega-

1'1111 ist policies.J German did not approve of the rejection of the HUD grant.

I'here is a fundamental generosity to his character that makes him un-I y, bout the fear of minority groups that many townspeople feel. Yet" n stalgic desire to return to a mythical past provides little help inII!lti rstanding how Suffolk might workout its contemporary problemsuul nlmost no framework for thinking about Suffolk in the context of

tii 1,rger society. .

Margaret Oldham

.1rgaret O ldham is a therapist, not unlike those Joe Gorman accuses ofhuvlng undermined discipline in the farnily and the schools. Raised in al.tI 1 , solidly middle-class home, Margaret wouldnonetheless say that

IIIt 'N oncept of the well-lived life is unrealistic and fails to take aCCQuntof.:.f 11(, r alities of human nature and modern social life. People vary tre-mendously in their values and experiences, she would say, and aU you doII YOLlstick rigidly to your own standards is cut yourself offfrom others.lulcrance for others and a wiUingness to learn from new experience areItllp rtant to Margaret, and their relative absence in the tightly knit,horn geneous community Joe longs to recreate would make it bothI luustrophobic and ultimately too undemanding for her. It would be tootllIl( h like trying to stay forever in the comfort 'of the womb rather thar uming out into the bright light of day. She places individual fulfillmentItlVo"r than attachment to family and community. -----

Margaret, a composed woman in her early thirties, has a strong senseIII discipline and has achieved an outstanding academic record and pro-

Habits of the Heart

fessional success. Indeed, she feels that one ofthe most important thingsshe learned from her parents was the value of hard work-"not justwork, but taking pride in your work and being responsible for YOUF

work and doing it as well as you possibly can and doing a lot of it." Shealso attributes much of her strong sense of responsibility to her parents,who raised her "with a lot of respect for other people and their propertyand their rights." But she has parted company with them in one crucialsense. "1don't think it's important to be quite that moralistic, quite thatrigid," she says. "1 think that 1accept people the way they are more thaneither one of my parents has ever been able to do." Her tolerance forother people makes it easier for her to get along with a variety of peoplethan it was for her father. Her interest in other people and her capacity toaccept them is critical to what makes life interesting for Margaret, par-ticularly 'in her work as a therapist in a large Southern city. "1 got intopsychology mostly because 1 was just really curious about people andw~!. made them t!fk. And I was interested in why people did the thingsthey Jid and why they didn't have the same ideas I did. I had a lot offriends who were intelligent people who were flunking out of school andgetting into a lot of trouble and I always wondered, why? What was themotivation? What was causing them to make the kinds of decisions thatthey made in their lives?"

Being challenged by a variety of people different from herself is acontinuing source of stimulation. As a therapist she has an "eclecticbackground-interactionist, Gestalt, Rogersian," she explains. It is thediversity of ideas and psychological experiences that makes life in herchosen field interesting. "If you're any kind oftherapist at all, you're outthere on the line all the time and you learn things from all your clientsand you grow a lot yourself Doing therapy is almost as good for me as itis for my client, so I do get a lot ofthat sort of reward. I thinkjust beingexposed to different people's thoughts and ideas and problems and find-ing out, you know, what their lives are like just sort of opens up newkinds of ideas. Every time I got a c'lient for a while, I would totally re-think my view of the world because a client would come with all thesedifferent ideas and sort of innocently challenge things that I consider tobe very basic in'life and I have to go home and think about it for a while."

In Margaret's view, the most important thing in life is doing what-ever you choose to do as well as you can. Summing up her sense of themeaning oflife, she says: "Ijust sort of accept the way the world isandthen don't think about it a whole lot. I tend to operate on the assumptionthat what I want to do and what I feellike is what 1should do. What Ithink the universe wants from me is to take my values, whatever theymight happen ro be, and liveup to them as much as I can. If I'rn the best

The Pursuit ofHappiness 15

1" , n I know how to be according to my lights, then something goodIII happen. I think in a lot of ways living that kind of life is its own

II W, rd in and of itself." Like Brian Palmer, Margaret takes "values" asWlI, "whatever they might happen to be."Margaret wants towork hard at her profession, to help people, and to

f ve and receive love in her personal relationships, including her mar-I hl~, to a bright, successful engineer. But she does not think the happi-III fa fulfilling life can be won without a realistic willingness to makeIII 'ffort and pay the costs required. For example, you have to be willingiii ~ive to make a relationship work. What many of her clients wantII I nd, she thinks, is an ideal relationship in which they will be loved""Ilpletely without having to do anything in return. "This is the person

ilo is going to be there to talk to, to go somewhere with them, or, youII0W" a person who's just going to be there and is going to understand

IllI'm\:Most people don't want to have to tell you how they fee!.TheyIlit you to divine that. That would be perfection. Someone who would

uudcrstand them so thoroughly that they would never have to say a word11111 ju t always be there for them and who would just make them feel" tlly secure and really, oh, not alone." What people need to accept is11111 i is their responsibility to communicate what they need and whatIIII y f el, and to realize that they cannot expect someone else magicallyIII mnkethem happy. "People want to be made happy, instead of making1111 msclveshappy."

Margaret's counsel of a sober maturity fits her role. As a therapist, sheI uiu t solve people's problems but can only help them achieve greaterI Il understanding so that they may deal more realistically, and perhaps

lIulte fruitfully, with life and better realize their personal preferences.Iii understands that human relationships require give-and-take, that1111 must work hard for the satisfactions you expect in life, and that youII ultirnately responsible for your own life. But this clear-sighted vi-11111 f each individual's ultimate self-reliance turns out to leave very

Iiliir place for interdependenceand to correspond to a fairly grim viewIII Ihc individual's place in the social world. Self-reliance is a virtue thatItllpll's being alone. "1 do think it's important for you to take responsi-"II IY fj r yourself, 1 mean, nobody else is going to really do it. I mean1" lipi' do take care of each other, people help each other, you know,

lu II S mebody's sick, and that's wonderful. In the end, you're really1.111(' nnd you really have to answer to yourself, and in the end, ifyou

.111I,'l g·t thejob you wantor, you know, meet the person you want, it's atil , I III part your responsibility. I mean your knight in shining armor is11111 (ling to meet you on the street and leave messages all over the world'1YII t find you. It's not going to happen."

16 ,Habits ofthe Heart

Accepting personal responsibility is, then, acting like an adult, notchildishly expecting other people to solve one's problems for one. But itis also simply a necessity for getting along in a world in which otherpeople either cannot or will not help you, in which no one can make youfeel "not alo ne," because in the end you really are alo ne. 'Margaret's irn-age of the world sharply limits the demands she feels people can makeupon one another, even in the dosest, most committed relationships.Even bonds of marriage and parenthood don't overcome the isolationthat is ultimately the~of each individual: ''1' m responsible for my actsand what Ido." Asked whether she was responsible for others, she re-plied, "No." Asked whether she was responsible for her husband, shereplied, ''I'm not. He makes his own decisions." What about children?"1 ... I would say I have a legal responsibility for them, but in a sense 1think they in turn are responsible for their acts." In relationships, as inthe wider social world, "everybody likes to get their own way." So theonly way to run a relationship is to strive for "fairness" -that is, "notone person making all the sacrifices or one always giving-having a rel-ative balance between what's the giving end and getting your own way."

Since, however, there is no wider framework within which to justifycommon values, all one can ask from others is that they do the work ofcommunicating their needs dearly, and one must in turn try to be dearabout one's own needs and desires. If other people don't meet yourneeds, you have to be willing to walk out, since in the end that may wellbe the only way to protect your interests. The inability to make legiti-rnate demands on others becomes an even more severe problem whenone steps out of the face-ro-face personal world where one may be ableto negotiate differences and assure fairness through direct communica-tion. In the world of politics, for example, the hope of cooperative efforttoward common ends is necessarily disappointed: the person whothinks interms ofthe common good is a "sucker" in a situation whereeach individual is trying to pursue his or her own interests. "Everybodywants to be on top and get their own way. It's like in a relationship, WhenI think about government policies, I guess I don't want them to cut off allaid to research in psychology unless they do some other things too thatshould be done. I mean, I don't want to be the only one who suffers. 1don't want to be the only sucker. I don't want to be the fall guy for peoplewho are not doing their part." -.

So while Margaret Oldham has a vision of individual fulfillment thatinvolves deep self-knowledge, wide tolerance of differences among pe 0-ple, and a mature willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life,she, too, is caught in some of the contradictions her beliefs imply. She isresponsible for herself, but she has no reliable way to connect her own

The Pursuit of Happiness 17

11111111111-nt to that of other people, whether they be her own husband11II1I11IIr n or the larger social and political community of which she is

11111I.lblya part.

I tlYlle Bauer

I II' Bauer would probably agree with Margaret Oldham's insistence1111III 'n ed of the individual to make a psychic break with family con-

1IIIH)I1Sand the limitations oftradition. Wayne is a community orga-III II who works in California for the Campaign for Economic Democ-1II II is in his middle thirties now and considers his present outlook11111f· ro be a product ofthe 1960s. "During the sixties we saw a dream,

'1 hud :'vision. And we had a beliefthat things could be much better, onIIIIIIY I .vels,' he says. "1 mean, it was a time of personal growth as well asl"IIIIIe.1 change. And what was exciting about that is that the personal," IIII{Cwas what would be leading into a very significant political1 11>11\'. in the country." Personal change involved a break with one's fam-Iy "A lot ofus were raised either in working-class or middle-dass back-1111111ds and believed that there were certain things that you did with

\1111'life. The status quo, You know, what your father did. How he livedIII li c, You go to high school, you go to college, get married, settleoIIIWll, have a family, get a respectable position in society. And 1 think111.\1what we had seen in the sixties was an emptiness that we saw in ourIII1I1Ii S, that this was not what we wanted for ourselves, that we wanted11I11~,thingbetter."

W. yne's break with his family and quest for "something better" carneIII II) 5, when he was seventeen. He had joined the Marine Corps. "1 had'1111\' from a background ofJohn Wayne, you know, American patriot-I III, This whole kind offacade ofwhat we were ali about as the Ameri-1.111P ·ople." Afterboot carnp he was stationed at Camp Lejeune and

uuld come up to New York City on leave. "Nineteen sixty-five wasII 'II NYU marched and burned the draft cards and all of a sudden

1111I . was a political awareness and these people were letting their hairIIIW a !ittle longerand putting earrings in their ear. And this was a realhllck to me. I mean, I didn't understand this. I was in the Marine,

I III'PS," During this time, some friends ofhis who had gone to college inNl'w York began to argue with him about the Vietnam War. "And after,Iii wcnt on, to make a long story short, for about three or four months,III ulized that my best argument hel~_~o~ghţ. And what happened

1111,ali of a sudden, myview of who I was and my environment was

18 Habits of the Heart

shattered. It was like looking in the mirror and having the whole thingshattere~ on you gnd seeing alI your values, alI your beliefs, everythingyou thought was real just kind of crumble. And it left me without anyvalues and it also left me in a position where 1had this terrible feeling ofloneliness that there was no one 1could go to for help. AlI the people that1had trusted, 1 feel, essentialIy, they had lied to me."

Upon receiving orders to go to Vietnam, Wayhe went AWOL, as-sumed an alias, spent eight years leading an underground life travelIingaround the country, eventualIy surrendered to the military in 1972, spentfour months in a military stockade, but was spared a court-martial and,finalIy, released by the Marine Corps with a general discharge. He re-turned to his parents, found them totalIy uncomprehending of his un-derstanding oflife, and moved from New Jersey to Venice, California.

But Wayne's break with the conventions offamily and community-the conventions that remain so important for people like Joe Gorman-did not end, as it did for Margaret Oldham, with a retreat intoa preoc-cupation with profession and private life. If he knew her, Wayne wouldcriticize Margaret O ldham for her lack of appreciation for issues of so-cialjustice. It was through radical politics that Wayne glued the shatteredmirror of his life back together again. After he made his break with hispast, "rnorality became a question to me. It's sort oflike 1wanted to puteverything back together again with more durable material, one thatwould stand the strain." Political activism became that durable material."Watching politics is watching civilization struggle and evolve, and it'sveryexciting, but it's also much more personal because it's your struggleto evolve into this picture, into this historic picture somehow." In themid-seventies, Wayne was living in a Spanish-speaking neighborhoodof Santa Monica and got involved with some of his neighbors in a dis-pute with their landlord. "1 feIt very much that they were being op-pressed; they were being taken advantage of These goddam landlordsused immigration like a gun at their head and these people live in thisconstant state of fear. I had a very good feeling. 1 realIy liked these peo-ple, they were great people."

-His tenant-organizing work led him into involvement with the Cam-paign for Economic Democracy. "1 feel good about what 1do. 1feel thatthe work I'rn involved in is directly affecting other people in beneficialways. It's again this value question. You can spend alI your time in seeinghow many material goods you can get together and how much moneyyou can make or you can spend it helping one another and working ţp-gether. You know, we can adopt any type of system that we want, let's sayit was socialism, cornmunism, or what have you, but the system that wadopt isn't going to mean anything unless we can educate the people to

The Pursuit oJHappiness 19

tii II differently and to be different. And 1 see what 1 do as sort of an1.\111 .u.i nal thing in the community, that what 1 do when 1 organize1. '''li II5 is to take care of an immediate crisis that they have. But realIy

111I1J do is give them a sense of power about their own lives."Whcn they have power over their lives, each individual will have a f

,. III-rsense of efficacy, the marvelIous feeling of personal growth WayneItllli ·If has felt. "They've never made their ideas public, never shared1111, ideas, always felt impotent, that they couldn't affect anything. 1 seetllI III ming out feeling like, welI, hell! we affected something. Then theII.~Istcp is to show them that there are alI kinds ofthings that they can doIII \) .icty, things they can create. And alI they have to do is work as aI1111"·tiveto do it, to agree, to be able to agree to disagree, and then come"I with some kind of consensus. Oh, it's a tremendous thing. 1mean, it's

, 'y bcautiful to see and very exciting to be a part of because what you'rel' Ilfţis kind of an evolution of consciousness."

Hut w~ ecific kinds ofthin .tshould these newly liberated peopleII ,II. in society? Here Wayne becomes strang(;IYlnarticurate-:-They will

III kc society "better," he says. But what does he-;e;moy "better"? "I'rnI'll!h~bly not the best person to ask," he says. Even in his area of spe-II Ity, tenants' rights, he has only vague notions of what kinds of social11.111ments for providing housing tenants would work out if they had

t III nme amount of power as theirlandlords. "1have a right to live in this1It1I101unityas long as I'rn not breaking the law ar damaging things-1111,t'Sa very touchy question because it deals with private property and

"III1'rpeople's rights, investment rights-but 1 think you can affect that,V"1lrnn control that situation, that he can make a reasonable amount of1I11I1Il'Yand you can live a reasonably good life-I guess. God! I'rn notIu IIg very clear." . .

Wnynethus has a much better idea of what he is against than of what he1 lor. As a result, the idea ofjustice that provides such a powerful focus forIII II "'S commitments îsweak in substantive content. When he speaks ofr 'JU II " he talks about individual rights and legal and politica! systerns that} !

ould give everyone a fair chance of asserting them. The language he uses [rnvidcs little conception of the ways in which scarce goods should be

II trlbuted in a complex society when different individuals fairly offerUIllP·ting claims to those goods.* Yet he describes his own involvement

IIIpolitical activism as having broadened his sense of responsibility.

• I II•• IlIt .rviews with Wayne Bauer on which our discussion ofhim in this chapter is based'" arried out in 198q ..Since then his ideas about distributivejustice and public policy

1. II rified considerably. Injune 1983 he was elected to the Santa Monica Rent Control11',,"11.

26 Habits ofthe Heart

ests: Thus, there co~ld b.e gr~at disparities in the income given to peoplein different ~c~upatIons m a.Ju~t society so long as everyone had an equalchance of gettmg a well-paid job, But if, as is now becoming painfullyap~are?t, th~re are more qualified applicants than openings for the inter-estmg jobs, IS equal opportunity enough to assure justice? What of thesocially disadvantaged for whom a fair race is to no avail since they are

~ well short of the srarting line?aur society has tried to establish a floor below which no one will be

allowed to fali, but we have not thought effectively about how to includethe deprived more actively in occupational and civic life. Nor have wethought whether it is healthy for our society to give inordinate rewards tor~lat.ively few. We need to reach common understandings about distribu-trve jusnce-e-an appropriate sharing of economic resources-which mustin turn be based on conceptions of a substantively just society. Unfortu-nate1y, our av~ilable 'moral traditions do not give us nearly as many re-s?urces for thinking about distributive justice as about procedural jus-tice, and even fewer for thinking about substantive justice.

Even a self-styled radical such as Wayne Bauer has a difficult timegoing beyond notions of procedural justice. He is outraged because in~anta Monica the politic al cards have been stacked against poor tenantsm favor of wealthy landlords. He wants to libera te tenants from thisunfai~ system, to give them the same opportunities as rich people roexercise their wills individually. But he becomes confused when askedwhat kind of society, with what kind of distribution of wealth, the ten-ants should try to create once they have achieved a fair chance. There is,after ali, not enough land ne ar the coast in Southern California to accorn-modate everyone who would want to live there. If the mechanisms of thefree ~arket are not to determine who should live in places like SantaMonica, how should that determination be made? How, in short, shouldscarce resources be distributed in the new social order created by liber-ated tenants? What would ajost society really look like? To answer suchquestions, Wayne would have to do more than think about the fair proce-dures that should be created to give individuals the ability to exercisepower over their own lives. He would need some sense of substantivegoals, some way to think about distributive justice. But here his culturalresources fail him, as they do most of us.·. We now turn tQ the traditions that have shaped our language and our

hves ~r what they may tell us about our present predicament. .

D

.ulture and Character:The Historical Conversation

11

III . n American reader, the individualism that pervades the four livesII. ribed in chapter 1 may at first glance.seem not to have anything to,1,1 with cultural tradition, but simply to express the way things are. Yet

II '11 we look more close1y, we see that there are subtle differences1I10l1gour four characters. There are different modes even within theIIt. bularies of each individual. Brian Palmer, for example, was at one

11111'in his life,..single-mindedl devoted to~~~~cc~~s, sacrificingI rrything to attainment ofthat goal. Later, he carne tovalue quite dif-I!, nt things-classical music, books, re1ationships, the 1mm~d'iate en-I"yment oflife-and left behind his total devotion to career. Both theseuiodes are individualistic, but .~hey arc:..~ot~d i~_Qiffer~!lt.tr:<lditions and" v different implications. VIe prppose to call the former mode "utili-I .1 n individualism" and the latter "expressive individualism." Joe Gor-IIIJn and Wayne Bauer combine their individualism with somewhat dif-It, I1t languages of civic responsibility. Margaret Oldham ~oWS_q..UloIe-~I~rp!yfor~~stversion of Brians individualism.

These differences derive from a historical past of which none of ourI haracters is entire1y aware. In our forward-facing society, however, we, more apt to talk about the future than the past and to imagine that the

llil rences between us derive largely from a conflict of current interests.t ven in the debate about our future, our cultural tradition, in its sev-

,~Istrands, is still very much present, and our conversation wouldţuobably be more to the point ifwe were aware ofthat fact.

S long as it is vital, the cultural tradition of a people-its symbols,1".. ils, and ways offeeling-is always an argument about the meaning oftllI destiny its members share.! Cultures are dramatic conversationsdlDllt things that matter to their participants, and American culture is

111\ rxceprion. From its early days, some Americans have seen tne put':

27

Habits ofthe Heart

.' "

pose and goal of the nation as the effort to realize the ancient biblicalhope of ajust and compassionate society. Others have struggled to shapthe spirit oftheir lives and the laws ofthe nation in accord with the idealof republican citizenship and participation. Yet others have promotcddreams 'of manifest destiny and national glory. And alwayşj; ere havbeen the proponents, of ten passionate, of the notion that bert meanthe....n~iE~ and the right to amass wea1tb aud power for on -s~fC'fhe themes of success, freedoIl}, and justice that we detected incllapter 1 are found in ,uJ.b.ree QL~ ~~al strands of <lliJ culturebiblic al, republican, and modern indivjlt1l;;fu;;:;::but they take on dlffer-

"'ent meanings in each context. American culture remains alive so long athe conversation continues and the argument is intense.

The Biblical and Republican Strands (\v.i4o. "'I'~îMost historians have recognized the importance of biblical religio? inAmerican culture from the earliest colonization to the present. Few havput greater emphasis on the religious "point of departure" of the American experiment than Alexis de Tocqueville, who went so far as tosay, "1think I can see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puri-tan who landed on those shores." Just as we have used several individualto introduce aspects of contemporary American culture, we willlook atseveral representative individuals to introduce earlier strands. --

John Winthrop (1588-1649) was one ofthose "first Puritans" to land onour shores and has been taken as exemplary of our beginnings by corn-menta tors on American culture from Cotton Mather to Tocqueville toPerry Miller.? Winthrop was elected first governor of the Massachusett.Bay Colony even before the colonists left England. Just over forty years O

age, he was a well-educated man of good family and earnest religious con-o victions, determined to start life anew in the wilderness in company withthose oflike religious commitment. In the serrnon "A Model ofChristianCharity," which he delivered on board ship in Salem harbor just beforlanding in 1630, he described the "city set upon a hill" that he and nifellow Puritans intended to found. His words have remained archetypalfor one understanding of what life in America was to be: "We must delightin each other make others conditions our own, rejoyce together, mourntogether, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes ourcommunity as rnembers of the same body." The Puritans were .not unin-terested in material prosperity and were prone when it carne, unfortu-

Culture and Character 29t I III 1.lk it as a sign of God's approval. Yet their fundamental crite-t '" ," III ·ss was not material wealth but the creation of a cornmunity inhlt II ,1 K -nuinely ethical and spiritual life could be lived. During his.1 , II' III as governor, Winthrop, a relatively rich man for those days,

I II, ti his life to the welfare of the colony, frequently using his own111+1 1111 P iblic purposes. Near the end ofhis life, he had to step down

I ,"1 1111 Il; vernorship because his neglected estate was threatened withII IlIl't 'y. The Puritan settlements in the seventeenth century can beII 1 III' 1rst of many efforts to create utopian communities in America.

I h V ,IV' the American experiment as a whole a utopian touch that it has1 ,1 iti L. in spite ofalI our failings.P

1,11 Willthrop, success was much more explicitly tied to the creation of, , 11,1111 kind of ethical community than itis for most Americans today.

III Itll.1 offreedom differs from ours in a similar way. He decried what heII, il "n: turalliberty," which is the freedom ro do whatever one wants,II I wcll as good. True freedom-what he called "moral" freedom, "in" II 'I( • to the covenant between God and man" -is a liberty "to that

1111 ' whi h is good, just and honest." "This liberty," he said, "you are toI 11.1 lor with the~hazard of your lives."4 Any authority that violates this

III••II Y ls not true authority and must be resisted. Here again, Winthropl' I IVl'S an ethical content to the central idea of freedom that some other

unul of the American tradition have not recognized.III lik manner, Winthrop saw justice as a matter more of substance

It 111'1 procedure. Cotton Mather describes Wjnthrop's manner of gov-111111 as follows: "He was, indeed, a governor who had most exactly1111111 d that book which, pretending to teach politics, did only contain

111111 I aves, and but one word in each ofthose leaves, which word was.ulcration." When it was reported to him during an especially long

11.1 lurd winter that a poor man in his neighborhood was stealing fromIII wo dpile, Winthrop called the man into his presence and told him.II II he ause ofthe severity ofthe winter and his need, he had permission

iti IIpply himselffrom Winthrop's woodpile for the rest ofthe cold sea-uu, 'I'hus, he said to his friends, did he effectively cure the man fromIt ,11111 .5

'lt· freemen of Massachusetts did not always appreciate Winthrop'sIlII y, for it made it seem that there was no law but the governor'sIII. I le was voted out of office and quietlyserved in minor posts for

, '1 Ini years before being recalled to leadership. Petty leaders in far-Itiiii lonial outposts have not always taken .demotion with such equa-1111111 y. Winthrop accepted the procedural principles ofself-government•IIlIlIKh to temper his own preference for magnanimous, if personal,Itii tantivejustice." If our "whole destiny" is not quite contai,ned in Win-

30 Habits of the Heart

throp, as Tocqueville thought, something very important about our tra-dition nonetheless derives from him and from his fellow Puritans.

'\ The founding generation ofthe American republic produced so manyindividuals exemplary of the republican tradition that it is hard to Ch009among them. George Washington seemed to his contemporaries liksome figure out of the e7t~iyRoman republic. Though he would havpreferred to live quietly on his country estate, Washington responded rohis country's call to be commander-in-chief of the revolutionary armyand, later, first president of the United States. After graduating fromHarvard College, 10~ Adams of Massachusetts, a descendant of the Pu-ritans, devoted Ills talentsas a young lawyer to the constitutional defensofthe rights ofhis fellow colonists, and subsequently to the revolution-ary cause. Thomasjeffersorrfr-zaj-erâzo), however, as authorofthe Dec-laration ofIndependence and leader of the popular cause, stands out as aparticularly appropriate example of republican thinking.

Jefferson carne from the planter class of western Virginia." Aftergraduating from William and Mary College, he early took an active partin the politics of the Virginia colony. At the age of thirty-three, hdrafted the Declaration ofIndependence, and with the words "A11menare created equal" gave enduring expression to his lifelong comrnitmentto equality. Jefferson did not believe that human beings are equal in alirespects. By equality, he meant fundarnentally political equality. Nman, he believed, is born with a saddle on his bacfror another man toride. Therefore, however much he temporized on the practical issue O

emancipation, ]efferson vigorously opposed slavery in principle.PThough he held that equality is a universal principle, true at a11timc

and places, Jefferson was a genuine adherent of the republican traditionin believing that it is only effective politically at certain times and placwhere relatively rare conditions a110wit to be operative. Political equalitycan only be effective in a republic where the citizens actually participa te."The further the departure from direct and constant controlby the citi-zens," he said, "the less has the government of the ingredient of republi-canism." Indeed, the ideal of a self-goyerning so~iety of.relative eqttals in-~ -- ..••_.-'which a11participate is what guided Jefferson a11his life. In comparisonto Europe, he thought this ideal was realizable in the United States inlarge part because Americans, at least whiie Americans, were not di-videdinto a few very rich aristocrats and a poverty-stricken mass. jeffer-sons ideal was the independent farmer who could at the same time makhis living and participa te in the common life. Cities and manufacturinghe feared precisely because they would bring great inequalities of clasand corrupt the morals of a freepeople.?

Culture and Character 31

I . te in life, he saw that manufactures were necessary if the nation1 I I was not to Iose its liberty, but at the same time he more insistently

111>111 rver stressed the princip'le of citizen participation. He proposed toIII! livide counties into >~~ of approximately 100 citizens thatould be "sp1alL~~p.§I'i€s" in which every citizen co~ld ~ecome "an

ling mem er of the Common government, transactmg m person aII It portion of its rights and duties, subordinate indeed, yet important,IId mtirely within his own cornpetence.T'" Such sma11republics would

II IP ro guarantee the health of the large one. In such a society, Jefferson'sIt, unction "Love your neighbor as yourself, and your country more thanVllllrself' could have an immediate meaning to the citizens. ButJeffer-

1111 feared that "our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless." If1"ople forgot themselves "in the sole faculty of making money," he said,1 II uture of the republic was bleak and tyranny would not be far away.l!1 k· Winthrop, Jefferson left oftice much poorer than he entered it andI t -d bankruptcy in his later years.

Preedom wa§ not so tightly tied to substantive morality for Jefferson >t had been for Winthr~p. Indeed, Jeffer~on's,fi~st freedom, fr:edom of >

llgion, aimed at ensunng that people like Wmthrop would not have#1, ~!l1 power to force their views on others. In general, Jefferson favored 'III dom of the person from arbitrary state action and freedom of theI" ss from any form of censorship. Yet he also believed that the best,1 mse offreedom was an educated people actively participating in gov-, urment. The notion of a formal freedom that would simply a110wpeo-plt-to do whăt they pleased-for example, solely to make money-was

unpalatable to Jefferson as it had been to Winthrop. However impor- '''-1 n[ formal freedom was to either ofthem, freedom only took on its real ')II It' • ning in a certain 'kind of society with a certain form of life. Without IIII.\t,Jefferson saw freedom as quickly destroying it self and eventuatingII tyranny.12 .

Listing the. essential principl:s of government .in ~is first inaugural iL-,ildress, Jefferson began with: Equal and exact jusnce to a11men, of<')

whatever state or persuasion, religious or political." While he certainly1lt'lived in the proceduraljustice of our legal system, he could not forget1""t there, is a fll:gher justice that sits in judgment over human justice:", hc laws of n~tu'i=6.ărld~f nature's God.''' In considering the continued

K i, tence of slavery, J;fferson wrote, "Indeed I tremble for my countrywh n I reflect that God isjust; that his justice cannot sleep forever." TheJl' found contradiction of a people fighting for its freedom while sub-It ting another to slavery was not lost onJefferson and gave rise to anxi-, 'y for our future if this contradiction were not solved.P

Habits of the Heart

Utilitarian and Expressive Individualism

"", Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was long regarded at home and abroas the quintessential American. Though uncomfortable with the Puritanism ofhis native Boston, Franklin learned much of practical use frotCotton Mather, whose life his own overlapped by twenty-two yearOne of the founders of the American republic, Franklin often gave evidence of his republican convictions. And yet it is finally neither for hiChristian beliefs, which he embraced rather tepidly and perhaps morfor their social utility than for their ultimate truth, nor for his republicanism, which he more genuinely espoused, that he is best knownRather he is the archetypal poor boy who made good. It is the Autobioraphy that recounts Franklin's worldly success and the maxims from PooRichard's Almanack advising others how to attain the same that are moindelibly associated with him.

Born the son of a soap and candle maker, Franklin was largely seleducated, for he could not afford the college education that Adams anJefferson took as their due. Seeking a respectable craft, he apprenticehimself to his older brother, a printer. So began the vicissitudes ofcareer too familiar to readers of the Autobiography to need summaryhere. Suffice it to say that by the age of forty-two Franklin was estalished iTI Philadelphiaas a printer andpublisher and had made a sufficienfortune to be able to retire from the active direction of his business tdevote himself to his political, philanthropic, and scientific interests fothe rest ofhis life.

The Autobiography, a secular version ofJohn Bunyan's Pilgrim's Prog-ress, which had much impressed Franklin in his youth, is the archetypalstory of a young man who, though poor, attains successJw...diDJ.of hardwork and careful calculation. Both famous and revealmg"is ranklin'account of how he attempted to lead a virtuous life by making a "littlbook" in which he allotted a page to each of the virtues and marked hiprogress as in a ledger, The twelve virtues themselves, derived from ela -sical and Christian tradition, undergo a subtle revision in the direction ofutilitarianism. "Chastity," for instance, is given a somewhat novel rnean-ing: "Rarely use Venery but for Health or Offspring, Never to Dulness,Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another's Peaceor Reputation."14

Even more influenti al than the Autobiography are the aphorisms inPoor Richard's Almanack which have passed into the comrnon sense ofAmericans about the way to attain wealth: "Early to bed and early turise, makes arnan healthy, wealthy, and wise." "God helps those thathelp themselves." "Lost time is never found again." "Plough deep, whilSluggards sleep, and you shall have Corn to sell and to keep, says Pa

Culture and Character 33

ItI 11111\,'ranklin gave elassic expression to what many felt in the•IIti I"'lIll1ry-and many have felt ever since-to be the most im-

III11111Ip."b ut America: the chance for the individual to get aheadtu " "III ici, tive. Franklin expressed it very elearly in his advice tot 'I'! tii rousidcring immigration to America: "Ifthey are poor, they

"III IlS .rvants or Journeymen; and if they are sober, industrious,1IIIII ,1,Ih 'y 500n become Masters, establish themselves in Business," I I . fl. milies, and become respectable Citizens.":"

li II 11.lnklin thought about freedom and justice followed prettyIII1 11111II his understanding of success. Defending popular govern-IIIIIIIii' P nnsvlvania Colony in 1756, he wrote: "The people of this

"Il I Ilr: gcnerally of the middling sort, and at present pretty much.1111, v·1.They are chiefly industrious Farmers, Artificers, or Men in1,• llit'y njoy and are fond of Freedom, and the meanest among them

h, 1,,' h: a Right to Civility from the greatest."16 Franklin under-III, IlhJefferson, that it was only a certain kind of society that wash IIIp.jv~such scape to ordinary citizens, to protect their rights, and to \ '111111i"jr e ~~!.W1nent b.;fore ~ law. B~t for ma~y o~ those in- \ \

• tii 1al I y Franklin, the focus was so exclusively on individual self- ),)'1'1'1"lllcnt that the larger social context hardly carne into view. By the/"II"Iii, 'ighteenth century, there would be those who would argue that

'111 ty where each vigorously pursued his own interest, ţhe social,,,1 ould automatically emerge. That would be@tarian mdlvidual-'

iii p"r form. Though Pranklin never himselfbelieved that, his image1111IIIIIC'd much to this new model of human life!i?'Along with biblical" laIIInnd republicanism, ~ilitarian individualisnţJ!as been one of the•11I01if the American tradition since Franklin's time.lIy Ihc middle ofthe nineteenth century, utilitarian individualism had••11IIt dominant in America that it set off a number of reactions. A

II oi,votcd to the calculating pursuit of one's own material interest1111\0 scem problematic for many Americans, some ofthem women,"'11 1)' them elergymen, and some of them poets and writers. The• "illl'd self-control of Franklin's "virtues" seemed to leave too little111111or love, human feeling, and a deeper expression ofthe self. The•• ,II w riters of what F. O. Matthiessen has called the "American Re-

U \ ,IIIc" all reacted in one way or another against this older form ofItllhvldualism.18In 1855 Herman Melville published Israel Potter, a novel,II II ubjected Franklin himself to bitter satire. Emerson, Thoreau, andII, vihorne put aside the search for wealth in favor of a deeper cultiva-"'11' 1) the self. But it is perhaps Walt Whitmap who represents what we1l' 1 nll "expressive individualism" in ciearest form.

W.dt Whitman (1819-92), Fke Franklin, was the son of an artisan (in

Passageindeedo soul to prima! thought,Not lands and seasalone, thy own clear freshness,The young maturity ofbrood and bloom,To realms ofbudding bibles.

34 Habits ofthe Heart Culture and Character 35

h~s case, a carpenter), was too poor to go to college, largely eduhimself and became a printer and joumalist. But there the resemblends. At the age of thirty-six, Whitman brought out a slim volumpoems entitled Leaves of Grass, and he spent the rest of his life nurtuit thro~g.h one edition after another, with little financial security.first edition of Leaves of Grass begins with it poem he would later acall "Song of Myself," whose first line is "1celebrate myself" Franwas not above cele~rating himself, but he would nothave put ibluntly. The fourth lme, however, is hardly one to which Franklinhave given assent: "1 loaf and invite my soul."19. F~r Whit~an, success had little to do with material acquisition. A.

nch m expen~nce, open to all kinds of people, luxuriating in the senas we~las the mteUectual, above aU a life of strong feeling, was whaperceived as a successful life. Whitman identified the self with O

people, with places, with nature, ultimately with the universe. Thepansive and deeply feeling self becomes the very source of life a"Passage to India": .'

I tii III, II mosexuality, vaguely but unmistakably expressed in" II ,WIIS another way in which he rejected the narrow defmition

I tlltli I P; ) dominant in his day."dlld'llill nventionality, there was a strong element ofthe repub-

I II III I j 111 in Whitman, particularly evident in Democratic VistasIl 11I0111.where in his prose writings.P" The self-sufficient farmerIII III t upnble of participation in the common life was Whitman's1I III nsjefferson's and Franklin's. He would thus have shared theirIII III I (' '. But for Whitman, the ultima te use of the American's in-IIti , Iit(' was to cultivate and express the self and explore its vast so-11I11n mic identities.

, ,IIly luierpretations of American Culture

Afoot and light-hearted 1take to the open road,Healthy, free, the world before me, .The long brown path before rne, leading wherever 1choosc.21

It, 1" 'Il . first to speak of the specificaUy American character was J.,1111,'I.J ~~e g~~coeur, a F~ench settler who published his ~etters11/,1/1I 1/1 tncan Farmer m 1782. e.set the tone for many future dlSCUS-It .,,11 'n he observed that Americans tended to act with far greater .

'"1.tI initiative and self-reliance than Europeans and that they tended to v

1II1111pressedby_spcial rank or long usage. He describes the transfer-1"111Il the European immigrant into an American: "From nothing to" hlln being; from a servant to the rank of a master; from being theI In ome despotic prince, to become a free man, invested with lands,It I Il .very municipal blessing is annexed! What a change indeed! It is

Illti cquence of that change that he becomes an American."23I III) led by the philosophes of the eighteenth-century French En-

I 1lillIll1ent,Crevecoeur had no difficulty appraising the typical Ame'r-{'It II . kind of "new man," an emancipated, enlightened individual

lIi/hl'ntly directing his energies toward the environment, both natural1111II(i31,aiming to wring from ita comfortable happiness. The type ofI uunliry Crevecoeur sketched approximated the rational individual1111I rucd about his own welfare that had been the model character ofttlljolhtenment thought and that was at that time receiving renewed ern-It in the writings of politic al economists such as Adam Smith.IVI" eur wrote ofthe American that, "Here the rewards ofhis indus-

Iy lullow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour isItltllld.d on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allure-tllItll?"24 The rational, self-interested individual had emerged as Eco-'"1111( Man and, as such, was conceived as living most naturally in the1111111tions of a competitive market in which trade and exchange wouldti pilit: . traditional ranks and loyalties as the coordinating mechanism of

o soul, repressless, 1with thee and thou with meThy circumnavigation of the world begin, 'Of man, the voyageofhis mind's return,To reason'searly paradise,Back, back to wisdom's birth, to innocent intuitions,Again with faircreation, 20

~reedom to W?itman was above all the freedom to express oneagainst all constramts and conventions:

!he franknes~ ofWh~tman's celebration ofbodily life, including sexu Iiry, was.shock~ng to mneteenth-century Americans and led to more th~1Ia few difficulties, though he never compromised the integiity ofhis ('H

Habits of the Heart

sociallife. As Crevecoeur said, "We are alI animated with the spirit ofindustry which is unfettered and unrestrained, because each perworks for himself."2S

Clearly, among our four exemplary Americans, it is Benjamin Franlin, at least the Franklin of legend, who comes closest to Crevecoeurideal of American character. Indeed, Franklin was taken as both an idAmerican and an ideal philosophe by many French intellectuals of tday, a number of whom created a virtual cult ofFranklin during his yeain Paris. But Crevecoeur's exclusive emphasis on this aspect of Americculture and character blinded him to other facets. He saw American rclgion as gradually fading away into bland tolerance or indifference-aaccord ing to Enlightenment views, it should. Crevecoeur did not UIderstand the strand of American tradition represented by John Winthrop, and one would not know from his writings thata great seriesreligious revivals was about to begin around 1800. He ignored almostcompletely the specifically republican political culture that was so mua part ofthe revolutionary generation. He did not see what many Amer'cans ofhis generation did, that a purely economic man would be as unsuited to a self-governing society as would the rank-bound subjecttraditional regimes. Fortunately, another Frenchman, Alexis de Tocquville, who visited the United States in the 1830s, gave a much more adquate view. Nonetheless, Crevecoeur's view as to the essential natureAmerican character and society has long been influential, appearing irecent times in the much-quoted books ofLouis Hartz and Daniel Boorstin.26

For Tocqueville, the optimism ofthe Enlightenmenr had been tem-pered by the experience of the French Revolution and its aftermath andthe prophecies of the early political economists were fmding an'alarrn-ingly negative fulfillmenr in the industrial infernos of English milltowns. Tocqueville carne to the United States as a sympathetic observer,eager to determine what lessons the first fifty years of the first trulymodern nation might have to teach prudent and uncertain Europeans,He added to Crevecoeur's earlier sketch a more penetrating and compleunderstanding ofthe new societv, informed by republican convictionand a deep sensitivity to the place ~f religion in human life.

In Democracy in America (published in two parts, in 1835 and 1840),.Tocqueville was concerned to understand the nature of the democratisociety he saw everywhere coming into existence but most fully exern-plified in the United States. In particular, he was attempting to assestwhether such democratic societies would be able to maintain free politi-cal institutions or whether they might slip into some new kind of des-potism. He appreciated the commercial and entrepreneurial spirit that

Culture and Character 37

"III IlIld cmphasized but saw it as having ambiguous and prob-11111'11.1(1)I1Sfor the future of American freedom.1'11'1111'.irgu s that while tl:~ physical circumstances o~ the

I I III hnvc ontributed to the maintenance of a democratic re-I II luve ntributed more than those circumstances and mores11/) 111111(' th:J1Ithe laws."? Indeed, he stresses throughout the bookti" 1 IIIIU'S have been the key to the Americans' success in estab-III 11101ui.rinraining a free republic and that undermining American

It I IIll' 111st certain road to undermining the free institutions of1I1III1II 't, t s. He speaks of mores somewhat loosely, defming them

tII," Iy 0/1 "habits of the heart"; notions, opinions and ideas that1111'11IIt'I1tnihabits"; and "the sum ofmoral and intellectual disposi-II 10/111('11in society."28 Mores seem to involve not only ideas and1111111but habitual practices with respect to such things as religion,1111,il p.irticiparion, and economic life.III III"i, Tocqueville, un1ike Crevecoeur, saw the great importance, in

1. Ilwri an mores ofhis day, ofthe continuing biblical and republican,11111III,-the traditions of Winthrop and Jefferson. He also saw very

1 ""y tii, 'y in which Americans operated in the tradition of Benj amin• II~III. and to describe this, he helped to give currency to a new word.huhvrdualism' is a word recently coined to express a new idea," he1111'." ur fathers only knew about egoism." Individualism is more'11I1"I,lt' and orderly than egoism, but in the end its results are much the1111/' Individualism is a calm and considered feeling which disposes each

11111II -isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw intoIIII II''le offamily and friends; with this little society formed to his taste,

III I InlIy leaves the greater society to look after itselC'29 As democratic11I.llvidualismgrows, he wrote, "there are more and more people who,1111111il neither rich nor powerful enough to have much hold over others,II, '1 gained or kept enough wealth and enough understanding to lookIII' heir own needs. Such folk owe no.man anything and hardly expectlIything from anybody. They form the habit ofthinking ofthemselvesin

I 1 dlltlOnand imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands," Finally,IIIil people come to "forget their ancestors," but also their decendants, as /,II. isolatingthem~elves from their contemporaries. "Each man is for-

I ' r thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shutIII' in the solitude of his own heart."30 Tocqueville main1y observed theIIIlitarian individualism we have associated with Franklin. He only in a" w instances discerns something of the expressive individualism thatWhitman would come to represent.

Tocqueville saw the isolation to which Americans are prone as omi-1I0USfor the future of our freedom. It is just such isolation that is always

Habits ofthe Heart

encouraged by despotism. And so Tocqueville is particularly interes!in alI those countervailing tendencies that pull people back from thisolation into social communion. Immersion in private economic pusuits undermines the person as citizen. On the other hand, involvemin public affairs is the best antidot~ to the pernicious effects of individalistic isolation: "Citizens who are bound to take part in public affalmust turn from the private interests and occasionalIy take a looksomething other than themselves."31It is precisely in these respects tllmores become important. The habits and practices of religion and dCIocratic participation educate the citizen to a larger view than his pur Iprivate world would allow. These habits and practices rely to sometent on self-interest in their educational work, but it is only when selinterest has to some degree been transcended that they succeed.

In ~~ that)eff~~ w~ul~ have understoodJ..Tocqueville arguthat- varietyo active civic organizaîions are_th~Key to American dm0'2acy. T!lrOugli active invo vement in~o~mon~r s, rhe citizcan overcome the sense of relative isolation and powerlessness th

I results from the insecurity of lire in an increasingly commercial society\ Associations, along with decentralized, local administration, media: between the individual and the centralized state, providing forums iI which opinion can be publicly and intelligently shaped and the subt!

habits of public initiative and responsibility learned and passed on. A/sociationallife, in Tocqueville's thinking, is the best bulwark against th\ condition he feared most: the mass society of mutually antagonistic in

dividuals, easy prey to despotism. These ~terme~e_M:r~ures check,pressure, and restrain the tendencies of centralized government to a •sume more and more administrative control.

In Tocqueville's still-agrarian America, as indeed throughout thnineteenth century, the basic unit of association, and the practical foundation of both individual dignity and participation, was the local community. There a civic culture of individual initiative was nurturthrough custom and personal ties inculcated by a widely shared Protc •tant Christianity. The mores Tocqueville emphasized were still strong,Concern for economic betterment was widespread, but it operatwithin the context of a still-functional covenant concern for the welfarof one's neighbor. In the towns, the competitive individualism stirred bycommerce was balanced and humanized by the restraining influences O

a fundamentally egalitarian ethic of community responsibility.These autonomous small-scale communities in the mid-nineteenth

century were dominated by the classic citizens of a free republic, men ofmiddling condition who shared similar economic and social positioruand whose ranks less affluent members of the population aspired to en-

Cu/ture and Character 39

,'10II III ( 'ssflllly. Most men were self-employed, and many whoI 111I ,III Hhcr were saving capital to launch themselves on their

,. ,1 W,I LI cxpansion, as Tocqueville noted, reproduced this pat-II ,,1 I II intralized, egalitarian democracy across the continent." I 1 III Iii i:t, mship was anchored in the ethos and institutions of the

1,I I II 'I11munity of the town.V

, ", tII dep indent Citizen

II. 'I quevillean image of the American town that Joe Gorman, ,01 his wn vision when we met him in chapter 1. For American

1,"1111 III~ f the nineteenth century, the town at its best was a moral, ,1 il IIII hanneled the energies of its enterprising citizens and their1I1111t IIt collective well-being. The morallife of the community, it

1"II'v .d, would simultaneously increase material welfare and nour-It I'lIhle spirit. The life of the towns was tightly bounded, however,

.11111 I ould yoke individual initiative for the common good, it couldI "1 I lud the different and suffocate the unconforming. The stric-III III l wn morality were in part generated by the citizens' unease at

IIIK to reate community while navigating the flood of geographical,11111 'I:\phic, and economic expansion. For, as Tocqueville saw, the

1111 I 1.111, that new kind of person, was a tentative character typeIt 1" ti by inherited values on the one hand and the challenges of the

l' IJding frontier on the other. ../1. u-pr sentative character is a kind of sy~bol. 33 It lS a way by which ~

, I \Il I ring together in one concentrated image the way people ma)• I II ial environment organize and give meaning and direction to lIII il liv·S. In fact, a representative character is more than a collection of l

'\III! dual traits or personalities. I~is rather ~ public image .that h.el~sfiI IIIH', ' r a given group ofpeople, Just what kinds ofpersonahty traits It, ,")(1. nd legitimate to develop. A representative character provides aniti, 1, . point of reference and focus, that gives living expression to a

, It III f life, as in our society today sports figures legitimate the striv-'ti ti youth and the scientist represents objective competence.

'1 I 'queville'sAmerica canbe viewed asan interlocking network of spe-Iltli o ia!roles: those ofhusband, wife, child, farmer, craftsman, clergy-III~II,lawyer, merchant, township officer, and so on. But the distinctive1111111 ty of that society, its particular identity as a "world" diffe~ent fro.mIII It s cieties,was summed up in the spirit, themores, that ammated its1111 I Il b rs, and that spirit was symbolized.in th~ representative character of

IltluilS oJlile Heart

what we can call the independent citizen, the new national type Tocqviile described.t+ In many ways, the independent citizen continuedtraditions ofWinthrop and Jefferson. He held strongly to biblical religiand he knew the duties as well as the rights of citizenship. But the mod IBenjamin Franklin, the self-made man, loomed ever larger in his definitraits, Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the noblest example of the minineteenth-century American independent citizen. In his languagc,surpassed the biblical eloquence of John Winthrop and his understandiof democratic republicanism was even more profound than that of tman he always recognized as his teacher, ThomasJefferson. And yet itLincoln the railsplitter who went from log cabin to White House raththan Lincoln the public theologian or Lincoln the democratic philosoplwho captured the popular imagination.

In any case, representative characters are not abstract ideals or facelsocial roles, but are realized in the lives of those individuals who succmoreor less well in fusing their individual personalities with the publrequirements of those roles. It is this living reenactment that gives cutural ideals their power to organize life. Representative characters thdernarcate specific societies and historical eras. The new American rpublic of the nineteenth century was the era of the independent citizensurely as it was defmed by the town and national expansion.

Because representative characters are the focal point at which a soety encounters its problems as interpreted through a specific set of c

••r tural understandings, they have frequently been mainstays of myth anpopular feeling. Certainly, powerful American myths have been builaround the self-reliant, but righteous, i~dividuarwhose social base is tilife ofthe small farmer or independent craftsman and whose spirit is thidealized ethos of the township. These myths are i!!1p_ortantsourcesmeaning in the lives of a number of the characters we describe in thibook, and they have lately come to play a large, if somewhat disingenuous, role in national political rhetorie. Myths often tell important truthabout the tensions people experience and their hopes for resolving thotensions or somehow turning them to constructive use. _

Tocqueville depicted the conflicts between the democratic citizenconcern for individual advancement and security on the one hand anreligion and local political participation on the other. He traced privatiz-ing tendencies to the new spirit of individualism attendant on nascencommercial capitalism and concern for community to the republicanand biblical traditions.

The focus of the new democratic culture was on male roles. But thethIc of achievement articulated by men was sustained by a moral ee Iogy shaped by women. Among artisans and farmers, the hous;hold unit

Culture and Character

I ti \ 111I1()1l1i role, within which men's and women's positions,III' '11"tIIIIP wer and prestige, were largely complementary. InIIHWII nnd cities, however, and particularly among the profes-

I \1111'11Il 'ss lasses, women were more and more deprived of anII tii IIII nud were expected to specialize in the expressive and nur-1,.11 III III thcr and beau ti fier of the horne, it self viewed more as a

11111111111·'v ryday world than as a part of it.P As women reactedIItiV III lh 'se new ·pressures, the first consciousness of, and oppo-1'1 III 1,1 .quality of women came.to be expressed in America. By

1 1111Iit ' nineteenth century, the fact that women were not "inde-1,IIII 111\',l'lI." was experienced as a major social strain.

1111I h-v.m 'ofCrevecoeur and Tocqueville for orienting our under-\111111\II th present is suggested by the echoes of their respectiveI I III the haracters of our study. Brian Palmer's relatively privateI "111111dsti orientation rehearses Crevecoeur, while Joe Gorrnan'sIII 1\111Margaret Oldham's sense of isolation seem to confirm some1III q\l('ville's fears of privatism, an anticipation at least somewhat111111h.ilan ed by the contemporary public passion of Wayne Bauer.1111111'1,tand the representative characters of present-day America, we,1111III ve beyond Tocqueville's era, but in Tocqueville's spirit, notingIIIII1I i n of new characters emerging in response to the transforma-

111111ill' United States into an industrial world power.

1'111' D'ltrepreneur

1" 1itizcn perceived by Tocqueville was indeed closer to being an indi-ItIt"tI"shut up in the solitude ofhis own hea t" than earlier AmericansIII ligi us and republican stripe had been.P" Yet he was a considerably

I lated and self-regarding figure than -the entrepreneurs of the1.I"dAge of thelate nineteenth century or the bureaucratic managers

".1lh srapists ofthe twentieth.I\) .queville voiced great misgivings about two phenomena that he

Itllllf.lhtthreatened the moral balance of Jacksonian democracy. One,1 the slave society of the South, which not only treated blacks inhu-

11\.111'Iy but, as Tocqueville, like Jefferson, noted, degraded whites asI liP The second danger lay in the industrial system, which first made

II uppearance in the Northeast. Factories had concentrated great num-InI of poor and dependent workers, of ten women and immigrants, intoIqlidly growing mill towns, and Tocqueville feared the rise of a newfiIIIIl of aristocracy that would make owners and managers into petty

42 Habits of the Heart Culture and Character 43

despots and reduce workers to mechanically organized, dependentatives, a condition incompatible with full democratic citizenship.Has the plantation system subordinated the yeoman farmer in the Sso the spread of industrial organization both concentrated econcontrol in the hands of relatively few owners and threatened to displthe independent artisans so central to nineteenth-century demolife. lronically, the trauma tic Civil War that destroyed the slave civiltion enormously furthered the growth of the industrial structureswould fatally unbalance the original American pattern of decent raiiself-governing communities.

Between the period of rapid westward expansion and indugrowth that followed the Civil War and the entry of the United Stonto the world scene in World War 1, American society passed thrthe rriost rapid and profound transformation in its history, not excluour own time. Nothing less than a new national society came into bin those years, a society withinwno5e-structurewe' still live, andmarkedly unlike that of most of the nineteenth century. By the enthat century, new technologies, particularly in transport, communtions, and manufacturing, pulledthe many serni-autonomous local seties into a vast national market. Though fostered in many ways byfederal government, the new expansion was largely carried out byvate individuals and financial groups, who generated private wealthcontrol on a previously unheard-of scale.P?

The new economically integrated society emerging at the turn ofcentury developed its own forms of social organization, political contand culture, including new representative characters. The new s_..-- ~form, capable of extending the control of a group of investors overresources, huge numbers of employees and, often, great distances, wabusiness corporation. The Pennsylvania Railroad, with its tentacureach, its supervised, graded, and uniformed army of workers, itschanical precision of operation and monopolistic ambitions, becammodel of a new institution destined eventually to affect the lives of almall Americans. The steel, oiI, banking and finance, and insurance indtries rapidly adopted the new bureaucratic form of the corporation.w

The old local governments and orga~izations lacked the capacitydeal with problems that were increasingly national in scope. Under thconditions, the traditional forms of social and economic life of the tolost their dominant position, in fact, if not in symbol, and the traditioidea of American citizenship was called into question. The new indutrial order was focussed on large cities that seemed the antithesis of torderand decency ofthe town. Factories, slums, immigrants, and war.1bosses seemed "foreign" and frightening. In those years, a new politii I

I ti, • lop .d, with the powerful national economic interests of1"1 IIlflil , bnnks, and their investors, and, eventually, the labor

I III" 11111Il .ting with the old regional, ethnic, and religious inter-1.. , ,II vel prnents changed the workings of the political parties

II I '"I ti KOV rmment. By the early decades ofthe twentieth cen-1•• 1'111 I 'S rivc movement was calling for a sinoother partnershipII III I '.1 economic organizations and government at all levels

Iii," ti ~( "th tumultuous process of social and political change. IfIII I II luu () Americans have had to confront "future shock,' surelyIII 1" IIt - ntury generation faced the most severe challenge.

I , • 1p' the old economic and social patterns brought stormyil ',1111111 es and complex cultural changes in its wake. One was theI I II II III 1 ti possibiIity always avaiIable to some in American society,1111111 I ,It i n ofthe successful entrepreneur from the confining ties of .11,1 IOIW,I 111 rality. The GiIded Age was the era of the spectacular

, IIlltll" .' nomic success: captains of industry who could ignore the1111 I d publi opinion and rise to truly national power and prestige by1""11t III .nns alone." In the predatory capitalists the age dubbed rob-II 1'111 , ,,'itne ofthe worst fears of earlier republican moralists seemed111111I d: ehat by releasing the untrammeled pursuit of wealth without.III' tit' demands of socialjustice, industrial capitalism was destroy-

It. I ti IIi fa democratic society, threatening social chaos by pittingdu t c1ass.Where, many wondered, could new limits and direc-

1111 individual initiative be found beyond the broken bounds oftheI 1" foi verning community? The inabiIity ofthe old moral order ef-I ,Iy 10 encompass the new social developments set the terms of a

1111I l' d zbate in which we as a nation are still engaged.PII" III st distinctive aspect oftwentieth-century American society istllv I Il of life into a number of separate functional sectors: home

I III kplace, work and leisure, white collar and blue collar, public andI 1\ 'I'his division suited the needs ofthe bureaucratic industrial cor-I 11111" that provided the model for our preferred means of organizingIt I hy the balancing and linking of sectors as "departrnents" in a

1•• I 1111. I whole, as in agreat business enterprise. Particularly powerfulI"'llding our contemporary sense ofthings has been the division be-III t h various "tracks" to achievement laid out in schools, corpora-

III, ov rnment, and the professions, on the one hand, and the balanc-I 1111- ctors of home, personal ties, and "leisure," on the other. AlI

iti I IIstrong contrast to the widespread nineteenth-century pattern inItlt li, IS on the often-sentimentalized family farm, these functions had

,,1 II listinct boundaries. Domesticity, love, and intimacy increasingly1" 11I1' "havens" against the competitive culture of work.

44 Habits of the Heart Culture and Character 45

With the industrialization of the economy, working life became 111

specialized and its organization tighter. Simultaneously, industrialition made functional sectors ofthe economy-various industries, whgeographical regions-more interdependent than before. Yet thetoral form of organization and the competitive pressures of the natiemarket made this interdependence difficult to perceive. While the prsures to compete and the network of private life were immediately pceptible, the interrelationships of society as a whole were largely absertions. The sectoral pattern of modern American society has thus O

been able to contain potential conflicts by separating those who arferent without impairing the economic linkages ofsectors withinlarger economy.t?

Under such conditions, it is not surprising that the major problemlife appear to be essentially iQ?i;:-~dual matters, a question of negotiatinreliable and harmonious balance among the various sec tors of liftwhich an individual has access. As its points of reference contracted fan economically and occupationally diverse local community to the ggraphically spread, but functionalIy homogeneous, sector within whiperson competes, success carne to be defined in professional terms.concept of one's "peers" concomitantly underwent a subtle, but imptant, shift of meaning. It carne to signify those who share the same spcmix of activities, beginning with occupation and economic position,increasingly implying the same attitudes, tastes, and style of lifc+'

The responses to all this that were articulated around the turn ofcentury have continued to shape our ways of conceiving and relatingAmerican society. Those responses have all along been closely interven with new character types that, like the earlier ones, have cornseem representative approaches to the common conditions of life, KIing moralmeaning and direction to the lives of individuals.

_~''''''" I!Ilddll ()I\Ss. Yet in practice the recurrent American dream of"1 11/11'11rontinued to approximate the old image ofthe business-1111111provider and citizen. The turn-of-the-century nabobs

1, III lill ·ntly sought legitimation through public philanthropyfi, III il 1', vi ,drawing on models more deferential-their critics

11I1ti" Ih:'111American republican tradition countenanced. ButII 1 I liullvldual entrepreneur, though a continuing feature of Amer-I IIlllm Il 3 powerful symbol, has not represcnred the dominant"II I tii 1 uu mic and social development.

" l.uu-uurratic organization ofthe business corporation has beenI!III IIIIII (or e in this century. Within the corporation, the crucial

1, I 1111be n t~e professional manager+" The competitive indus-1101. I W Iil its sectoral organization and its push toward profitability, II Iill' lndisputable reality of modern life for the manager, rather

Iiti ,oI:lt' 'c of a passionate faith in "progress," as for the entrepre-1IIIIIIIKhthe manager in effect builds upon the work ofthe entre-

III IIlti shares with him the drive to achieve andproblem-solvingIII 111,1( . re 014 American traits, the social positions and outlooks of" IYI ~'s differ importantly.

1". ('II . ofthe manager's task is to organize the human and non- ;t "1. (lIl rces available to the organization that employs him so as to ~

, II f~it~9P in t.he .m~rketplace. His role is to persuade, inspire,'I"d Ilţ,~'tle~ and intimidate those he manages so that his organi-II 1111.1ufus up to criteria of effectiveness shaped ultimately by the11 IIIL specifically by the expectations of those in control of his

III '1Iion-finalIy, its owners. The manager's view of things is akinIt I .11t il •technician of industrial society par excellence, the engineer,

1" IIl11tthe manager must admit interpersonal responses and per-11111,including his own, into the calculation of effectiveness.wI , ,'', entrepreneur, the manager also has another life, dividedti p~use, children, friends, community, and religious and other

11I'llpncional involvements. Here, in contrast to the manipulative,, I III .nt-oriented practices of the workplace, another kind of per-IIIy actualized, of ten within a social pattern that shows recogniz-I1111(Inuity with earlier American forms of family and community.

I "1 .\11outstanding feature of industriallife that these sectors havetll/l. rudically discontinuous in the kinds.oftraits emphasized and theI l undcrstandings that guide individuals within them. "Public" and

" ur" r les of ten contrast sharply, as symbolized by the daily corn-1111II1)1n green suburban settings reminiscent of rurallife to the indus-

I III hnological ambience.ofthe workplace.IIII split between public and private life correlates with a split between

The Manager

,f (T':e self-sufficient 'entrepreneur, competitive, tough, and freed by weal~ external constraints, was' one new American character. Certain]

~ much of the moral appeal of the self-rnade man is his apparent freedonnot only from traditional restraints, but from the tight organization, tidrudgery and banality, of so much of modern industriallife. The irony,course, is that the entrepreneur's m~or historical role has been to creatthe modern industrial context .. Celebrating the economic struggle, t IIIself-made man ofmeans became the legitimizing symbol for some oftlu

Rabits ofthe Heart Culture and Character 47utilitarian individualism, appropriate in the economic and occupatispheres, and expressive individualism, appropriate in private life.long time such a split was incipient in American life. Early in the niteenth century, indeed already in the eighteenth century, an appeal toculating utility was complemented by an appeal to sentiment or em tiJefferson, following the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher ,lieved in an innate "moral sentiment" that impelled men toward benlence. The Puritan theologianJonathan Edwards (1703-58) had seengion, too, as located in the "affections." When science seemed rodominated the explanatory schemas of the external world, moralityreligion took refuge in human subjectivity, in feeling and sentiment.rality and religion were related to aesthetics, the realm offeeling par x

{

lence, as we saw in the case ofWhitman. When morality carne to beciated with the role of women and the family, and religion to be Iar 1

"'7 matter of revivalistic emotion, the split between the utilitarian and"? expressive spheres in nineteenth-century America widened. Noneth 1

theologians and moralists believed feeling had some cognitive contsome access to the external world, and Whitman certainly believedpoetry was expressing the truth not only ofhimselfbut ofthe world.with the emergence of psychology as an academic field-and, even mimportant, as a form of popular discourse-in the late nineteenthearly twentieth centuries, the purely subjective grounding of expreindividualism became complete.

The town had provided a metaphor of a moral ecology in whichpolarities of public and priva te, masculine and feminine, were integrby means of generally shared codes ofbehavior. Preindustrial Amerlcharacter surely oscillated between the instrumental orientation O

"masculine" world of work achievement and the values of the "finine" spheres of nurturing domesticity. But the cultural framewmade that oscillation, including its conflicts, intelligible.

IW1tiithe coming of the managerial society, the organization of wpb~e of residence, and social status carne to be decided by criterieconomic effectiveness. Those same economic criteria further facilitt e rowt o nationa mass marketing and, with it, expanded consuichoice. The older social and moral standards became in many way Irelevant to the lives of those Americans most directly caught up innew system. The manager could reorganize resources for greater e? tiveness in economic life. Similarly, the relatively affluent twentieth-

r tury American could reorganize habits and styles of life experimentto achieve a more gratifying private life. In this process, 'Amerilearned to become more efficient in adapting to new sets of expectatlonand styles of consumption.

II" "'/ fi

111111 Kt'r, he therapis is :ts,Eecialist in mobiIiziug tesour~c.s,forI li t III ,only ere the resources are largelY..i!.ll.etnaLto~the.indivjd-

t "" Ilie. sure of effectiveness is the elusive criterion of personal. ~~11,," ' Also like the manager, the therapist takes the functional

I 11t"III industrial society for granted, as the unproblematical con-I I " ','I!. goal ofliving is to achieve some combination of occupa-•••1 III Iylc" that is economically possible and psychically tolerable,

tll~ ," The therapist, like the manager, takes the ends as they areI .1" I\H'\I is upon the effectiveness ofthe means. .Iti II Ih .m, the manager and the therapist largely def~e the out-II. nti th-century American culture. The social basis of that

•• I III·world o ureaucratic consumer capitalis which domi-' •• ,,~, penetrate , most o er, ocal economÎC' orms. While the

•• ,,1 li I ,mager and therapist does not speak in the language oftradi-l unu rlieies, it nonetheless proffers a normative order oflife, withIti' I I " ls, images of the good life, and methods of attaining it. YetII IlIlli 'rsta?ding of life generally hostile to older ideas of moral}

t It l' .nter IS the autonomous individual, pres umed able to choose.It hc will play and the commitments he will make, not on theIIIhll{h r truths but according to the criterion oflife-effectiveness

I IlIltvidualjudges it.II uroral languageand images of this culture of utilitarian and ex-I • ud ividualism have infl.uenced the lives of most of the characters

IllIok. and one of our chief tasks in i:hechapters that follow will bsih!llut . and understand its forrnsr As we shall see, th:e effects of this

I .tIand therapeutic understanding are not always benign; it doesI ~y succeed, even by its own standards, Indeed, the very term

Il "II iuggests a life focussed on the need for cure. But cure of what?I Iillalanal~sis, it is ure ofthe lack ~f fit petweenthe present b~ga-

hlll of the self and ~~eav!il.:l>leorganization of work, intimacy, and1I1I1t;. And this cure is to take the form ~f enhancing a;;:d-empow~r:: ,

Ifto be able to relate successfully to others in society, achieving.Inr atisfaction without being overwhelmed by their demands. InIIunderstanding, the expressive aspect of our culture exists for theIun and fulfillment of the individual. Its genius is that it enables

IlId vidual to think of commitments-from marriage and work to11111I and religious involvement-as enhancements of the sense ofII 1.11101well-being rather than as moral imperatives.

1111 ulture of the manager and the therapist is thus both recogniz-II t untinuous with earlier American cultural forms and yet different

Some Recent Interpretations

Culture and Character 49

1'.1this change with foreboding, feeling that the future ofIt 1111111.1'y lay in the balance.r" '",It public interpreted !2.a~~~ widely read ~Ii-

/"""/ (II) ) j 1 the same way.49 The old independent "inner-1111111.111was being replaced by new, "other-directed" corpo-ItI, 1.1Il) ntable results. Read carefully, Riesmans argument is

1,,, 111111'omplex, and his evaluations are rather different from1 II I 1I1.!Ilactually proposes four character t es not two. Tra- ~\, -<...,. • """)

II., 'II il I har: ter IS what most premodern societies produce. It isII ti II AII1'rica largely by immigrants from peasant societies.ti 1111I dirccted type characterizes old American culture and

1" IIIililialgam of our biblical, republican, and utilitarian individ-1" l' .rhaps the inner-directed person is the old independent

'""" ,lltun d to his own intern al morality than to the cues ofhis'1 II II!lt Riesman is far from endorsing the inner-directed type,"1" 1I'f-\0 f the inner-direcred person is itself an introject from

,"111"1Y cxpcrienced in childhood. Like the other-directed person1.11111''.1 tII, conformist pressures ofthe immediate social environ-Iii, II.,,'-directed person lacks genuine autonomy. The autono-ItII IIH'I' is Riesman's fourth type and the only one he genuinely

IIIt IIIans concept ofthe autonomous character is elearly relatedII III II, ' idcas of Erich Fromrn and seems to be elose to what weII," 1II,' 'xpressive individualist type, especially in its relatively pure1111,III 111. lndeed, whatever its immediate reception, Riesman's .'"I 10h .rald an increasing importance ofthe expressive individ-

I I, IIIIl stwar America, relative to which the other-directed, or11111" t'lu racter seems to have been a relatively transient type.I It 111,111grew alarmed at some of the implications ofhis work, or" tllI implications some readers drew from it, is documented in, III hc upplied in successive reprintings. But Riesman's later

111111do Il tin the least.detract from the value of The Lonely CrowdI """1011k study ofthe transforrnation of American character.III 11111b ok that we would place together with those ofthe Lynds

" 1111'11,a major interpretive contribution to the und~rstandingIII" 111- ntury American character and society is Herve \Tarennc's-

,,,,1/1, 'liI.l!cther (19'7J.) •.~_.varenne's classic study of a smal town in111111Wis onsin is the subtlest depiction to date of how AmericanIII, IIId character interacted in recent times. Varenne elearly sees the111111111'of utilitarian and expressive individualism as modes of char-• 11I.1I ultural interaction, and especially the delicate balance be-II 1111III arid their mutual dependence. The drive toward indepen-

11I.1mastery only makes sense where the individual can also fmd a

48 Habits ofthe Heart -t\

from them. The obvious point of similarity is the emphasis on eh ' tpendence of the individual. As we have seen, self-reliance is IAmerican value, but only one strand of the complex culturalhave inherited. The expressive culture, now deeply allied with 1

tarian, reveals its difference from earlier patterns by its readiness t 1

normative commitments as so many alternative strategies of self-luiment. What has dropped out are the old normative expectations O

makes life worth living. With the freedom to defme oneself aneplethora of identities has also come an attenuation of those c itiunderstandings that enable us to recognize the virtues ofthe oth ir,

In fact, tlie n~; cuiture is deeply ambiguou . It represents bot]easing of coiiStrămts and aogmatic prejudices about what others .hbe and an idealization of the coolIy manipulative style' of managerIn our society, with its sharply divided spheres, it provides a way Ibeleaguered individual to develop techniques for coping with thccontradictory pressures of public and private life. Yet it does so bytending the calculating managerial style into intimacy, home, andmunity, areas oflife formerly governed by the norms of a moral ee 1

Robert and Helen Lynd in Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Tra(1937) offered the most extensive sociological study hitherto undcrtof a single American community (Muncie, Indiana). The Lynds soug

,/show what was happening to America under the impact of industri. ~ion and the social changes accompanying i~.They took th~ year 189

baseline with which to compare the Amenca of the twenties and thithat they studied firsthand. They saw the typical nineteenth-century tthat Muncie had been in 1890 transformed into the rapidly changindustrial city ofthirty or forty years later. In particular, they noted thinto a business elass and a working c1ass, with the former dominantthe latter in many ways exeluded from full participation in commuIife. What becomes elear from the two Middletown books andKnowledge for What? (1939), Robert Lynd's more general book aAmerican culture, is that the Lynds brought a rich harvest of sociolodetail to document what was by then an old theme among social critinamely, the deeline of the s:u~!.ureof the independent citizen, with

1 strong b16IiCaland"7epublican elernents, in the face ofthe rise of'thc Im,'l ness (managerial) c1assand its dom~na~t ethos of utilitarian individual] III

50 Habits of the Heart Culture and Character. SIcontext to express the love and happiness that are his deepest feelland desires. Fragile communities are put together to meet the utilitand expressive needs of individuals, with only a peripheral surviv Iolder biblic al and republican themes. For Varenne, this balance r psents a successful cultural code containing and equilibrating its incontradictions. While our reading of modern American history mus more doubtful about the success of this equilibrium, we remaindebted to the brilliance of his insights, which, besides those of the tering figure ofhis fellow Frenchman, Tocqueville, have most influenour study.52

American Culture Today

1111111111I IIf'SlIrviving forms ofthe old ideal ofthe indepen-I III IIItI ('n today, In some cases, what we call the concerned

I 1111ti III il,' .nding the moral beliefs and practices ofhis or","11" 11\tit' c c of a permissive therapeutic culture and theI 1111111,1, nt rs and managers that do not understand, and

"iti, 10, 10 al community feeling. We find what we call,"I '1 1 Iti 'Il professionals, committed to helping their corn-

I \1 , III IIl'W hallenges in a way that does not ru pture tradi-I 1111tll'llI) ratie participation. And we also find movementIII '111111\Ih' task offorming a new public, organized for dis-"oi IIIitIII, is ~ major commitrnent. The activist works within

I 11111 ti, " hut also hopes to influence understandings of societyIII " 1111III ignifican; change. None of these present-day repre-

III !III thl of the independent citizen can avoid being in-Ilo 1111111111'1,Iland expressive individualism, the pervasive worldII II '1'" 1111<1the therapist. But they give evidence that the old1 1I 1111'1!It isnor over, and that alI strands of our tradition are still

,,1 IIII pcnk to our present need. Perhaps it is now clear thatluu 1.~IIlt. nager; Margaret Oldham, a therapist;Joe Gorman, a

'1 ti , II~"II; and Wayne Bauer, a movement activist, though all111,11' t1l1ldistin their language, draw on a more complex tradition

1.1!l1I'Il'quite realizes.

Perhaps the crucial change in i\meriţ_aplife has been that we have mfrom the locallife of the nineteenth century-in which economisocial relationships were visible and, however imperfectly, morallyterpreted as parts of a larger common life-to a society vastly morterrelated and integrated economically, technically, and functionally.this is a society in which the individual can only rarely and withficulty understand himself and his activities as interrelated in mormeaningful ways with those of other, different Americans. Insteadirecting cultural and individual energies toward relating the self tlarger context, the culture of manager and therapist urges a strenueffort ta make of our particular segment of life a small world of its O

However, the cultural hegemony of the managerial and therapethos is far from complete. It is rooted in the technological affluenpostwar society, a prosperity that has been neither equitably shareduniversally accepted. Challenges to that ethos have arisen from a varlof quarters, from those left out of that prosperity, as well as from thwho, while its beneficiaries, criticize it for moral defects. Sometimcriticism seems to be motivated by a desire to hold on to the last ve tiof the autonomous community and its ideal of the independent citiSometimes it is motivated by a desire to transform the whole so Iand particularly its economy, so that a more effectively functioningmocracy may emerge. In either case, there is a powerful rejection fmanagerial-therapeutic ethos, in which we can see not only the ditents of the present economic and social order, but also reminders 01ticontinuing importance of the biblic al and republican cultural traditlon

, in American politics.

o