The books share a villain: the lingering influence of John Locke’s concept of society as a collection of autonomous individuals. In “Habits,” Bellah and his colleagues used Locke’s thesis to explain why Americans are so preoccupied with self-realization-and so indifferent to the needs of what they called “the public household.” In “The Good Society,” Lockean individualism also explains why Americans “believe that we can live as we choose, using the big institutions-agencies of the state, the companies or organizations we work for, the schools we attend-for our own ends, without being influenced by them.” In fact, the authors show, institutions are not neutral mechanisms. Rather, they powerfully shape our feelings as well as what we do. Like individuals, institutions embody values and ideas about the good life, and thus are subject to moral scrutiny.
Wherever they look, the authors find the nation’s institutional life crumbling from neglect. Families don’t cohere, schools don’t teach, neighborhoods are disappearing, churches are dissolving into caucus groups, politics invites cynicism and ennui, corporations exploit, urban environments (human and natural) pollute. Instead of citizens bent on transforming institutions that do not work, we compete for the services of a burgeoning administrative state. Where whirlwind is that “polity” of enlightened and engaged citizens that James Madison saw as the foundation of a truly democratic society?
The answer, the authors suggest, can be found wherever individuals “pay attention.” Democracy, they write, “means paying attention.” Just as children flourish under attentive parents and students under attentive teachers, so citizens must attend to how institutions function for the public weal. But, they observe, “the present mood of American voters would seem to be that of consumers out to protect their own interest … and attentive to neither general nor particular issues that do not appear to have an immediate effect on their own lives.”
As a demonstration of the kind of public discourse Bellah wants to encourage, “The Good Society” offers informed criticism of the large-scale institutions which most Americans find too complex to comprehend-or care about. They discuss and ultimately condemn the utilitarian cost-benefit analyses that government bureaucrats use as a substitute for hard thinking about the common good. The authors criticize the tendency of narrowly focused courts to view complex social issues like abortion in terms of competing absolute rights. They also suggest a re-evaluation of the legal basis of corporations and prescribe greater participation by workers in defining corporate goals. Among other specific recommendations, the authors urge that political advertising on radio and television be outlawed. This, they think, would eliminate the need to raise huge campaign funds. And it might help elevate the debased political discourse that emerges from overproduced images and contrived slogans.
Perhaps because they are professors themselves, Bellah et al. are especially helpful to-and critical of-higher education. Universities, they argue, have lost their souls by settling for teaching methods in the humanities and social sciences rather than what the materials assert about what is and ought to be. More important, they remind us of the classical Greek understanding that schools are not the only or even primary institutions for educating the young. Communities are. Locke was wrong. The good society is not the byproduct of autonomous individuals pursuing their own self-interest. Nor is it achieved by the careful balancing of competing interest groups. The common good, Bellah reminds us, is the good we pursue in common. We may not agree on what a good society is, but the message here is that we will never have one until we realize that the public we complain about is us.
*Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven M. Tipton.
