Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, by Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Habits of the Heart was one of the publishing events of 1985, a widely acclaimed work of national self-examination by a team of four sociologists and a professor of philosophy, led by Professor Robert Bellah of the University of California at Berkeley. The book’s uncannily fortunate timing seemed to dovetail with the increasingly dour mood of the American intellectual world—not to mention the American public’s perennial appetite for national soul-searching. Indeed, our propensity for anxious and highly generalized brooding upon our national sins seems to thrive particularly in times of prosperity, such as the current one; that fact perhaps reflects the extent to which our heritage of Protestant angstpersists in us, even as its supporting beliefs have become less and less of a part of acceptable public discourse.
There is, however, plenty to be anxious about. The declension of the public realm, the disappearance of civic consciousness, the disintegration of marriage and family life, the increasingly tenuous and openly self-serving character of human relations, the near-disappearance of religious values from our shared existence—these are all matters of legitimate concern, to liberals no less than conservatives. Indeed, it has been refreshing and encouraging to see liberals finally back away—if only in theory, so far—from the absurdly dogmatic civil libertarianism that has been so damaging to criminal justice and public morals in this country, and begin to accept the proposition—again, only in theory as yet—that prescriptive values are indispensable to a free society. The wonder is that even so tentative a change has taken so long.
That the acceptance is only in theory, however, is amply confirmed by the appearance of this book. Many of its criticisms of contemporary America are quite accurate, if distressingly hackneyed; the trouble is that, particularly for anyone of genuinely conservative bent, it does not tell us anything we have not known for decades, nor anything that we have not read a hundred times in the Sunday supplements by now. We have known for a very long time that a philosophy of liberal individualism, if not moderated by some countervailing force, would erode the very basis of an orderly society by undermining the foundation for our commitments to one another. What is wanted at this point is not yet another repetition of stale formulae, but a sense of what is to be done. On that score, Bellah’s book hardly begins even to address the problem, relying instead on the incantation of abstractions that remain conveniently disembodied and unexplained.
One would think that a book dedicated to a revival of public morals and communal values would have something to say about some of the pressing moral issues of our time, particularly those—such as abortion, divorce, adultery, homosexuality, and pornography—which bear upon sexuality, that most intimate point of intersection between the public and the private, the communal and the individual. But Habits of the Heart does not, for the simple reason that, for all of its authors’ putative commitment to a post-liberal moral vision, they would never dream of being caught taking an illiberal position on such questions. The book repeatedly dwells on the need to recover a “framework of values,” upon which we all can agree and upon which we can build a rich and renewed social life together. But these values remain conveniently unspecified, for the authors clearly did not want to ruffle anybody’s feathers or challenge anybody’s sensibilities (although they are quick to fault the “unreflective” rigidity of evangelical Christians). Thus, their call for moral revival is little more than empty posturing and vague uplift, reminiscent of Norman Vincent Peale or Bruce Barton, with some Walter Rauschenbusch thrown in for good measure.
The book calls for a return to our “republican” and “Biblical” traditions, to counterbalance the dangerously amoral, selfish, radical-individualist tendencies of unrestrained liberalism. To the extent that these two bland terms mean anything at all, this would seem reasonably sound advice. But the authors show little interest in explaining exactly what these traditions are, devoting only four short pages to that task. Presumably, if these traditions have been so utterly lost as the authors imply, a good deal more explication is needed to help us recover them. The trouble is that, as a sociological investigation, Habits is interested only in the benign social effects that can be made to flow from a revival of these systems of belief; it does not consider their truth or falsehood. But, to reverse Richard Weaver’s familiar dictum, consequences have ideas; such a revival can never occur without Americans, including our social critics, taking seriously the contentofthese traditions—a good deal more seriously than Bellah and Co. do themselves.
Moreover, it gradually emerges that Bellah and Co. do not really want to revive these traditions as they actually existed. He wants them mutatis mutandis, purged of any elements that might run contrary to the conventional liberal political agenda. He wants us to avail ourselves of them piecemeal, picking and choosing what parts are appropriate to the 1980s and what parts are not, remaking the tradition as we feel necessary. But the presumption that we can pick and choose which of the Ten Commandments to obey is not much different from the liberalism he derides; if the term “Biblical tradition” means anything at all, surely it asks far more of us than that. Bellah wants all of the benefits of these traditions without paying the price for them. He wants to have strong moral values without the taintof discipline or intolerance, strong communal values without insularity, strong commitments without punishments for those who disdain them, national pride without patriotism, and so on. But this wish listis composed of insubstantial word-combinations, the fond pipedreams of tender-minded academics. They have no relationship to reality, no precedent in history.
If the book has anything even slightly new to contribute to the debate over moral revival, it is the insight that many contemporary Americans lack even the language to express profound moral distinctions. In interview after interview with their case-study subjects, this point is brought home in painful detail; the subjects cannot account for their moral sentiments in any terms other than self-interest. Even though the fit between the interviewees’ comments and Bellah’s thesis is too neat to be entirely believable—life, thankfully, only rarely imitates art—we all have known enough such people, the sort of consumption-mad, status-obsessed, new-class types Cyra McFadden satirized with merciless accuracy in her novel The Serial. Bellah has a good point here. But he does not tell us how we are to learn to speak the “language” of the “Biblical tradition” if we do not believe in it. Indeed, he does not seem to realize the extent to which his own vague sociobabble itself exemplifies the incapacity he is talking about. The inability to articulate a moral sentiment does not mean one does not possess it—just as the ability to articulate it does not mean one has fully embraced it. Nor does the “language” of moral sentiment matter for much if one is unwilling to act upon one’s convictions, or talk about specific moral questions.
Indeed, one could argue plausibly that the social sciences have played a major role in impoverishing our moral discourse, and thus in creating this problem. Hence sociologists are not likely to be part of its solution. The language of self-interest which Bellah deplores is, far more than he seems to grasp, identical with the language of the social and behavioral sciences, applied to the task of living. Is it any wonder that men and women conceive their identities as nothing more than an aggregation of impermanent social roles, marriage and family as a passing phase in the universe of possible kinship arrangements, the political order as only the legitimation of naked power, and material gratification as a perfectly respectable goal? This is what they have been taught to believe; the ones who believe it most are the ones who have been paying attention in class. Indeed, only those who have been exposed to such “advanced ideas” in college are likely to hold such a dehumanized view of humanity; and the subjects of Bellah’s study are middle-class and college-educated men and women—a very narrow sample on which to make sweeping generalizations about this country. A much more revealing book than this one might have pursued the poverty of contemporary discourse further, and asked what the effect of social-scientific thinking has been upon the moral language of Americans. But such a book is not likely to be written by a team of sociologists. They are not likely to ask whether social science itself The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987.
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By the time you read this review, most of what is going to be said about Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind will have been said. The book has fetched the attention of the media. The nation’s major newspapers not only reviewed the book within days of its publication (which is rare, even in the case of most “popular” literature), but have reprinted abridged portions of it—especially from the chapter concerning the effect of rock music upon the intellectual and moral development of students. As I write this review, this Sunday’s Washington Post and New York Times advertise it with the bold stringer: “At last you will know why today’s young Americans are ‘isolated, self-centered, tolerant of everything and committed to nothing.’” It’s the sort of stringer that gets one on television, which happened quickly for Professor Bloom. Interestingly, it is also the sort of stringer that is apt to engage concerns which cut across the ideological spectrum. To the cultured Left, who are the mandarins of our university system, this sounds like the predictable effect of six years of Reaganism and neoconservative economics. To the cultured Right, the stringer immediately arouses the suspicion that it is indeed an accurate report from the “graves” of academia, where objective truth and disciplined learning have been on the wane for quite some time. There is something in this book for everyone. As an academician who has written a serious book, Professor Bloom has the rare opportunity of an audience outside the classroom.
The book consists of three discussions, which are interwoven throughout. In the first place, Professor Bloom attempts to give a profile of our university students—in general, he says, those who inhabit the best twenty or thirty schools. Concerning the students, who Bloom characterizes as “flat souled,” the report is not likely to surprise anyone who has worked in universities for these past two decades. I do not think that anyone would deny that, among our students, sentiments have been divorced from formal education, and that teachers can no longer assume that the students have what Bloom calls an “eros” for learning. That eros has either been flattened out and constrained to a thin utilitarian motive, or it has been seduced by other objects (e.g., the bacchanalian revel of rock music) and rendered unfit for the discipline required for high-level learning. The pathology outlined by Bloom is most apparent to those who teach in the liberal arts (including the theoretical wing of mathematics). The problem is not just that students have jumped ship for business programs or for ersatz majors in quasi-sciences; nor can the problem be blamed simply on the fact that the students are sorely deficient in the knowledge prerequisite for university classes in the liberal arts. All of this, of course, is true. However, the problem spotlighted by Bloom is that students are not interested—somuch so that one is tempted to say that even a competent demagogue or sophist would be hard pressed to arouse a lively response. In other words, the pathology of the “flat soul” seems to transcend the sum of the parts of the other problems. If nothing else, Professor Bloom has done a good job in conveying both the insight and frustration of teachers.
The second discussion, or theme, pursued by Bloom is the effect of German thought upon American schools. Bloom’s excursion, or digression, as the case may be, into intellectual history constitutes a book within the book. His understanding of the role played by German philosophy is a necessary complement to the long prevalent notion that American education has been shaped principally by Deweyan pragmatism. Although our political and legal institutions are peculiarly “Anglo-American,” and although we have inherited what could generally be called “pragmatic” sensibilities from British culture, Bloom takes great pains to show that the derivation and pedigree of our ideas have to be seen in the light of nineteenth-century German thought. Most Americans do not appreciate the extent of the reaction against the Enlightenment, and how a certain misology, or hatred of reason, is a consequence which now has worldwide effects. Bloom does not explicitly mention this, but it would be fair to interject here that America is the last society in which both the Reformation and the Enlightenment have at least some residual life. This perhaps blinds us to the fact that for well over a century the Western intelligentsia have quite explicitly, even programmatically, abandoned the ideals of the Enlightenment. The scientific, political, and moral ideals of the Enlightenment have been regarded by cultural conservatives as themain problem, for the Enlightenment sought to replace tradition with philosophy; leftists, on the other hand, tend to regard the Enlightenment as a movement co-opted by capitalism, which has only given us an emaciated and inhumane “science.” However unwelcome the Enlightenment was to those who wished to retain the supremacy of throne and altar, and however unwelcome it eventually became to the radical Left, Professor Bloom makes a considerable case that the collapse of the Enlightenment has created a far more troublesome situation. It has unleashed patterns of nihilism which have little respect for our political ontology of Left and Right. Nihilism has played itself through both, and has found a home in the American university. Bloom points out that we have a peculiarly American way of digesting Continental despair: “It is nihilism with a happy ending.” Only in America do we find the Sartrean existentialist and the Nietzschean “overman” consulting self-help books in shopping malls.
So, in the third place, Professor Bloom examines the nature of American institutions, and why they are especially vulnerable to the effects unleashed by the collapse of the Enlightenment. His basic argument is that the university has a deceptively important role to play in American society precisely because our political society was created from the rib of the Enlightenment. America was born when the Enlightenment was at its high tide. Bloom might overstate his case when he says that it is “only in a liberal democracy that the primacy of reason is accepted” (primacy of reason, here, construed in contrast to convention or tradition), he is no doubt correct that the American regime was explicitly founded upon an intellectual consensus that is identifiably of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. We need not rehearse here all of the intellectual geometry of the “founding” in order to agree with Bloom’s main point: “that for modern nations, which have founded themselves on reason in its various uses more than did any nations in the past, a crisis in the university, the home of reason, is perhaps the profoundest crisis they have.”
American students, Bloom observes, are unlike their European counterparts, for our students do not have conventions or traditions to fall back upon once reason is disparaged. Nor, significantly, do American students have the same, well-developed literary culture that conveys a tradition of learning, and which is capable of training the sentiments even when the authority of reason is at a low ebb. Bloom’s point is well taken. When the French and German intelligentsia capitulated to the irrational currents of romanticism, and scoffed at the scientific and philosophical ideals of the Enlightenment, Europe was thrown into the grip of one ideology after another. Terrible wars ensued. Nevertheless, students had ready access to high caliber literature. While this was not an adequate substitute for the philosophy and science jettisoned after the Enlightenment, it was capable of sustaining some sense of high culture. European universities flourished, even amid the rubble of the wars. Our universities seem unable to flourish in the midst of prosperity.
In an American context, when reason is disparaged we are in deep trouble, for wehave nothing to fall back upon except the vagaries of popular culture. Paradoxically, Americans, who are generally characterized as intellectually barbaric, are more dependent upon rational symbols and disciplines than their European cousins. In my view, this is the most provocative and constructive contribution of Professor Bloom’s book. Again, it cuts across the agenda of either the Left or the Right. But it is the cultural conservatives who will find the lessons suggested by the book most disagreeable. Although it might be true that the “liberal” mandarins of our schools have misjudged and mismanaged the problem, we are all affected by the loss of confidence in rationality occasioned by the collapse of the Enlightenment. There is nothing constructive to be gained by championing its collapse, or by exploiting its ill effects in favor of some “better guide” than reason. If the Enlightenment was fundamentally misconceived, and if we truly are prepared to say good riddance (i.e., it is not to be corrected, but dismissed altogether), then one has to be prepared to abide by the implications—which, in the case of America, are radical rather than conservative. Once again, Bloom’s provocative, yet deceptively simple point is that, whereas the French or the Germans couldregard the rational symbols of modernity as representing a collective, yet passing, fit of insanity, and then go on to sink back into non- or pararational symbols of traditional “French” or “German” culture, Americans enjoy no such luxury. We need universities precisely because America is so directly the product of a rational experiment.
So, in answer to the question of why students are “flat souled,” Bloom argues that the crisis of confidence in reason has abandoned them to popular culture, which in America is not even minimally able to form the sentiments required for citizenship, learning, and for all those other good things which could be enjoyed if one were to unplug, for the time being, the earphones connected to the Sony. When reason flees the schools, and in particular the universities, then the dire predictions of the fate of egalitarian democracies will come to pass. As Sheldon Vanauken has pointed out in his recent book The Glittering Illusion, few people of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries really believed that the masses are capable of the kind of rationality required if an egalitarian democracy is to work over the long haul.
Unfortunately, what Bloom never resolves is a question that dawns on the reader rather early in the book: that is, is it not in the very nature of a regime founded by a rational experiment that, short of a utopian realization of its ambitions, the regime is almost bound to collapse? If Bloom is correct, then it seems that we are forced to either accept the popular culture, or to devote ourselves exclusively to the cultivation of a philosophical culture adequate to the rational demands of the founding experiment. We need Mr. Jefferson’s yeoman farmers to receive Fulbright scholarships to be trained in something resembling Plato’s academy. Furthermore, it is reasonable to ask whether our “founders” ever entertained such a dilemma; or has Bloom, the proficient translator and interpreter of Plato, arranged the terms of the dilemma in such a way that they correspond very closely to the problematic of the Republic? This is a question that the reader will have to ask and answer for himself. It is, however, curious that while Bloom clearly outlines the pathologies which ensued once the Enlightenment spent itself, and while he argues strenuously on behalf of America as a distinctively rational experiment (and hence, that there is something fundamentally correct about the founding), the overall drift of the book seems to imply that a liberal democracy of this sort is unable to sustain such an experiment. America can only be America if it recovers a pre-Enlightenment political culture. Perhaps there is a Straussian “key” to unlock this dilemma, or maybe I am reading too much into this aspect of the book.
Finally, it is worth mentioning that one will be disappointed ifhe looks to this book for specific recommendations regarding educational reform. Bloom’s way of translating practical problems into philosophical issues is the strong suit of the book, so I am not prepared to complain about the absence of concrete proposals. There is, however, one matter that can be touched upon in passing. While Professor Bloom expresses some ambivalence about the so-called “great books” approach (i.e., not even great books are capable of overcoming a bad case of flat-soulness), he does recommend the approach. Perhaps it is impious to ask whether the great books method isn’t a “conservative” version of the intellectual smorgasbord found everywhere else—albeit, the diet is more substantive. But one wonders whether it is any more conducive to the discipline required if one is tomove among and between the differentiated areas of knowledge. After all, one of the great achievements of the Western university system since the high Middle Ages is the differentiation of the sciences and their respective methods. (I should mention that the role played by medieval men in constructing universities which are recognizably similar to our own is never mentioned by Bloom. His analysis skips over the historical period in which universities were first founded.) The specific content and methods appropriate to these areas of knowledge would seem to be as, or more, important than a collection of great books, which only invite the student to carry on a seemingly interminable conversation with “great” minds. How quaintly American, especially the egalitarian notion embedded in it! As Bloom argues so well, America lacks a traditional literary culture, and is therefore fated to a kind of cosmopolitan approach to the history of knowledge. We are everywhere and nowhere, and therefore we can converse across all cultural traditions. While Bloom is correct in observing that this is a potential strength of American culture, it also harbors the temptation to recede from the discipline appropriate to the specific sciences and arts. A student who reads Aristotle and Flaubert, but who does not understand the theoretical and methodological differences between science and art, perhaps “has” great thoughts, but he now needs to go to a university in order to learn, if not to master, one or another of the disciplines. Do we really expect nineteen and twenty year old students (whether they are “flat-souled”or not) to play the part of Leonardo da Vinci, conversing across seminar tables? Mortimer Adler has claimed some success in using this method with corporate executives, but I am dubious about its efficacy among late adolescents. might be the very disease it proposes to cure.
