Work 3
"THE GOOD SOCIETY' S H A P I N G THE INSTITUTIONS THAT SHAPE US
ROBERT BELLAH RICHARD MADSEN WILLIAM SULLIVAN
ANN SWIDLER STEVEN TIPTON
alking in any American city today, one participates in a ritual that perfectly expresses the difficulty of being a good person in the absence of a good society. In the midst of affluence, perhaps with a
guilty sense of the absurd wastefulness of the expensive meal, new blouse, or electronic gadget that has brought us to town, we pass homeless men or, often, women with children asking for money for food and shelter. Whether we give or withhold our spare change, we know that neither personal choice is the fight one. We may experience the difficulty of helping the plight of homeless people as a painful individual moral dilemma, but the difficulty actually comes from failures of the larger institutions on which our common life depends.
The problem of homelessness, like many of our problems, was created by social choices. The market-driven conversion of single-room occupancy hotels into upscale tourist accom- modations, government urban-renewal projects that revitalized downtowns while driving up rents and reducing housing for the poor, economic changes that eliminated unskilled jobs paying enough to support a family, the states' "deinstitutionalization" of the mentally ill, and reduced funding of local community health programs have together created the crisis of homelessness. But with this issue, as with many others, we tend to feel helpless to shape the institutional order that made these choices mean- ingful---or meaningless.
It is tempting to think that the problems that we face today, from the homeless in our streets and poverty in the third world to ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect, can be solved by technology or technical expertise alone. But even to begin to solve these daunting problems, let alone problems of emptiness and meaninglessness in our personal lives, requires that we greatly
This article is adapted from The Good Society by Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton. Copyright 01991 by Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton. Reprinted by permission of Atfred A. Knopf, Inc., which will publish the book in September. The Good Society is the sequel to Habits of the Heart, written by the same authors.
improve our capacity to think about our institutions. We need to understand how much of our lives are lived in and through institutions, and how better institutions are essential if we are to lead better lives.
One of the greatest challenges, especially for individualistic Americans, is to understand what institutions are--how we form them and how they in turn form u s - - a n d to imagine that we can actually alter them for the better.
In Habits of the Heart (University of California Press, 1985) we offered a portrait of middle-class Americans and of the cultural resources they have for making sense o f their society and their lives. We described a language of individualistic achievement and self-fulfillment that often seems to make it difficult for people to sustain their commitments to others, either in intimate rela- tionships or in the public sphere. We held up older traditions, biblical and civic republican, that had a better grasp on the truth that the individual is realized only in and through community; but we showed that contemporary Americans have difficulty understanding those traditions today or seeing how they apply to their lives. We called for a deeper understanding of the moral ecology that sustains the lives of all of us, even when we think we are making it on our own.
"Thank you. You're pretty damn 'august' yourselF'
12 July 1991:425
"Moral ecology" is only another way o f speaking of healthy institutions, yet the culture of individualism makes the very idea of institutions inaccessible to many of us. We Americans tend to think that all we need are energetic individuals and a few impersonal rules to guarantee fairness. Anything more is not only superfluous but dangerous----corrupt, oppressive, or both. Americans often think o f individuals pitted against institutions. It is hard for us to think of institutions as affording the necessary context within which we become individuals; of institutions as not just restraining but enabling us; of institutions not as an arena of hostility within which our character is tested but an indis- pensable source from which character is formed. This is in part because some of our institutions have indeed grown out of control and beyond our comprehension. But the answer is to change them, for it is illusory to imagine that we can escape them.
We need to understand why the very idea of institutions is so intimidating to Americans and why it is so important to over- come this anxiety and think creatively about institutions. In its formal sociological definition, an institution is a pattern of expect- ed action of individuals or groups enforced by social sanctions, both positive and negative. For example, institutions may be such simple customs as the confirming handshake in a social situation, where the refusal to respond to an outstretched hand might cause embarrassment and some need for an explanation; or they may be highly formal institutions such as taxation upon which social services depend, where refusal to pay may be pun- ished by fines and imprisonment. Institutions always have a moral element. A handshake is a sign of social solidarity, at least a minimal recognition of the personhood of the other. Taxation, especially in a democracy, is for the purpose of attaining agreed-upon common aims, and is supposed to be fair in its assessment.
Individualistic Americans fear that institutions impinge on their freedom. In the case of the handshake this impingement may give rise only to a very occasional qualm. More powerful institutions seem more directly to threaten our freedom. For just this reason, the classical liberal view held that institutions ought to be as far as possible neutral mechanisms for individuals to use to attain their separate e n d s - - a view so persuasive that most Americans take it for granted, sharing with liberalism the fear that institutions that are not properly limited and neutral may be oppressive. This belief leads us to think of institutions as efficient or inefficient mechanisms, like the Department of Motor Vehicles, that we learn to use for our own purposes, or as malevolent "bureaucracies" that may crush us under their impersonal wheels. It is not that either of these beliefs is wholly mistaken. In modem society we do indeed need to learn how to manipulate institutions. Yet if this is our only conception of institutions we have a very impoverished idea o f our common life, an idea that cannot effectively help us deal with our problems but only worsens them.
There is an ambiguity about the idea of institutions that is hard to avoid but that we will try to be clear about. Institutions are normative patterns embedded in and enforced by laws and mores (informal customs and practices). In common usage the term is also used to apply to concrete organizations. Organizations
certainly loom large in our lives, but if we think only of organ- izations and not of institutions we may greatly oversimplify our problems. The corporation is a central institution in American life. As an institution, it is a particular historical pattern of rights and duties, of powers and responsibilities, that make it a major force in our lives. Individual corporations are organizations that operate within the legal and other patterns that define what a corporation is. If we do not distinguish between institution and organization, we may think that our only problem with corpo- rations is to make them more efficient or more responsible. But there are problems with how corporations are institutionalized in American society, with the underlying pattern of power and responsibility, and we cannot solve the problems o f corporate life simply by improving individual organizations: we have to reform the institution itself.
If we confuse organizations and institutions, then when we believe we are being treated unfairly we may retreat into private life orflee from one organization to another--a different company or a new marriage--hoping that the next one will treat us better. But change in how organizations are conceived, changes in the norms by which they operate--institutional changes--are the only way to get at the source of our difficulties.
The same logic applies throughout our social life. There are certainly better families and worse, happier and more caring families and ones that are less so. But the very way Americans institutionalize family life, the pressures and temptations that American society presents to all families, are themselves the source of serious problems. So just asking individual families to behave better, important though that is, will not get to the root o f the difficulties. Indeed there is a kind of reductionism in our traditional way of thinking about society. We think in the first place that the problem is probably with the individual; if not, then with the organization. This pattern of thinking hides from us the power o f institutions and their great possibilities for good and for evil.
hat is missing in this American view of society? Just the idea that in our life with other people we are engaged continuously, through words and actions, in creating and re-creating the institutions that make that
life possible. This process is never neutral but is always ethical and political, since institutions (even such an intimate institution as the family) live or die by ideas of right and wrong and con- ceptions of the good. Conversely, while we in concert with others create institutions, they also create us: they educate us and form us----especially through the socially enacted metaphors they give us, metaphors that provide normative interpretations of situations and actions. The metaphors may be appropriate or inappropriate, but they are inescapable. A local congregation may think of itself as a"family." A corporate CEO may speak of management and workers all being "team-players." Democracy itself is not so much a specific institution as a metaphoric way o f thinking about an aspect of many institutions.
In short, we are not self-created atoms manipulating or being manipulated by objective institutions. We form institutions and
426: Commonweal
they form us every time we engage in a conversation that matters, and certainly every time we act as parent or child, student or teacher, citizen or official, in each case calling on models and metaphors for the rightness and wrongness o f action. Institutions are not only constraining but also enabling. They are the sub- stantial forms through which we understand our own identity and the identity o f others as we seek cooperatively to achieve a decent society.
The idea that institutions are objective mechanisms that are essentially separate from the lives of the individuals who inhabit them is an ideology which exacts a high moral and political price. The classical liberal view has elevated one virtue, autonomy, as almost the only good, but has failed to recognize that even autonomy depends on a particular kind o f institutional structure, and is not an escape f r o m institutions altogether. By imagining a world in which individuals can be autonomous not only from institutions but from each other, it has forgotten that autonomy, valuable as it is in itself, is only one virtue among others and that without such virtues as responsibility and care, which can be exercised only through institutions, autonomy itself becomes an empty form without substance.
he policy analyst David Kirp, in his book Learning by Heart (Rutgers University, 1989), gives moving examples o f a richer conception o f institutions. He and his associates studied a number o f instances where public school systems were faced with the
challenge o f admitting children with AIDS. In a situation o f extraordinary anxiety, superintendents, principals, teachers, and parents were called upon to decide what kind o f school and what kind o f community they wanted to have. The speech and behavior o f institutional authorities took on enormous importance, as did the capacity o f the parents to respond. Doctors could explain that the risks were exceedingly small but school administrators and parents had to decide whether any risk at all should be taken to extend the moral community to include a child in great need. Finding the right m e t a p h o r - - s e e i n g the child primarily as a human being in need o f special compassion, or as a source o f dangerous c o n t a m i n a t i o n - - w a s critical to the outcome.
These stories illustrate the truth that the anthropologist Mary Douglas expressed in these words: "The most profound decisions about justice are not made by individuals as such, but by indi- viduals thinking within and on behalf o f institutions." We can extend her insight b y saying that responsibility is something we exercise as individuals but within and on behalf of institutions. The character of certain individuals, particularly superintendents and principals, significantly influenced the outcome in school districts confronting AIDS panic. But that very character in part reflected the history and moral resources of the community as a whole. Administrators and parents changed the institutional definition o f their schools and communities by how they respond- ed to this major challenge. Those for whom the virtues of respon- sibility and care were determinative (and it is important that those virtues were located not only in them as individuals but in their sense o f themselves as institutional representatives) thought not only that they had done the right thing but that they
had taught their children a lesson more valuable than most o f what they learn in the classroom. Those who, desiring to protect what was theirs, opted to reject the stigmatized child, remained closed, bitter, and defensive long after the event. Their children too had learned a lesson.
s we have said, the very idea o f institutions is often repugnant to Americans. But what- ever their conscious attitude, Americans are also deeply fascinated by the moral drama of institutions, at least when they understand
them, or think they do, as in the case o f sports. Consider baseball, the national pastime. Tens o f millions o f
fans depend for the excitement o f a season not only upon the practice o f the sport but on the institution of the leagues, with their complex athletic, economic, and legal rules. The drama of the annual pennant races is what it is only because the skills of players and teams are supported and guided by the less visible structure of coaches, umpires, accountants, and contracts. Equally crucial is the moral infrastructure o f collective honor, loyalty, and devotion to the sport. For m a n y fans the drama o f baseball is heightened at those moments when the larger institutional patterns come into view---especially in moments of crisis, as when a team is separated from a city long identified with it, or when scandal shocks the public's sense of the honor and propriety that ought to govern the sport.
It is expected that star players are extraordinarily well paid; but when they allow their own image or their own self-indulgence to b e c o m e more important than their contribution to the team, the enjoyment o f the game changes to moral outrage, as it does when owners appear to be acting for private gain at the expense o f the honest life o f the sport. Why this indignation? At such moments the public acknowledges that moral norms are woven throughout baseball; shared indignation expresses the f a n s ' tremendous moral identification with the sport as an institution. Clearly baseball in such moments is not being understood as a neutral device for individual satisfaction--if it were, who would care about scandals? Rather, baseball, with its purposes, codes, and standards, is a collective moral enterprise, an institution in the full sense, and many Americans care deeply about it. As an institution, baseball is more than the actual players and orga- nizations who play the game during any given season. That is why we can see the sport as sometimes succeeding, sometimes falling, in becoming what baseball really ought to be. This under- standing o f things was beautifully expressed by the late Baseball Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti in his statement of August 10, 1989, concerning his decision to banish from the game for life the former baseball star and then-manager o f the Cincinnati Reds, Pete Rose, as a result of Mr. R o s e ' s gambling activities:
I believe baseball is a beautiful and exciting game, loved by m i l l i o n s - - I among t h e m - - a n d I believe that baseball is an important, enduring American institution. It must assert and aspire to the highest o f p r i n c i p l e s - - o f integrity, o f professionalism o f performance, o f fair play within its rules. It will come as no surprise that like any institution composed o f human beings, this institution will not always
12Ju& 1991:427
ognizes the excellence o f his o r her achievements. E a c h indi- vidual's possibilities depend on the opportunities opened up with- in the institutional contexts to which that person has access. W i t h o u t the collective effort represented b y the teams o n the field, there could be no grand slams.
fulfill its highest aspirations. I know o f no earthly institution that does. But this one, because it is so m u c h a part o f our history as a people and because it has such a purchase on our national soul, has an obligation to the people for w h o m it is p l a y e d - - t o its fans and its w e l l - w i s h e r s - - t o strive for excellence in all things and to promote the highest ideals.
I will be told that I a m an idealist. I h o p e so. I will con- tinue to locate ideals I hold for m y s e l f and f o r m y country in the national g a m e as well as in other o f o u r national institutions. A n d there will be debate and dissent about this or that or another occurrence on or o f f the field, and while the g a m e ' s nobler parts will a l w a y s be enmeshed in the h u m a n frailties o f those who, w h a t e v e r their role, have stewardship o f this game, let there be n o doubt or dissent about the goal o f baseball or our dedication to it. Nor about our vigilance and v i g o r - - a n d p a t i e n c e - - i n pro- tecting the g a m e f r o m blemish or stain o r disgrace. Sports fans intuitively understand things important for all
Americans to know. Their enthusiasm for institutionalized sports enables them to r e c o g n i z e that individual excellence depends on collectively maintained codes o f h o n o r and discipline. As generations o f coaches have claimed and athletes have affLrmed, sports teach and f o r m character. But so d o all institutions: in this they are not so m u c h unique as exemplary.
Institutions are patterns o f social activity that give shape to collective and individual experience. A n institution is a complex whole that guides and sustains individual identity, as a family gives sense and p u r p o s e to the lives o f its m e m b e r s , enabling them to realize themselves as spouses, parents, and children. Institutions form individuals by making possible o r impossible certain ways o f b e h a v i n g and relating to others. T h e y shape character by assigning responsibility, demanding accountability, and providing the standards in terms o f which each person rec-
nstitutions, then, are essential bearers o f ideals and mean- ings; yet in the real world the e m b o d i m e n t is imperfect. T h e achievement o f individual ends, like the carrying out o f patterned social activity on which it a l w a y s depends, requires material resources. It also involves
the use o f power. For this reason all institutions--armies, teams, and e v e n f a m i l i e s - - a r e necessarily involved to s o m e degree with both wealth and power. These means all too easily b e c o m e ends in themselves. Institutions b e c o m e corrupt, s o m e m o r e so than others. The e n o r m o u s a m o u n t o f m o n e y at stake in pro- fessional sports has introduced an element o f corruption so pro- f o u n d that m a n y fans are deeply cynical about the sport that at the same time they also d e e p l y love. Indeed, it is just at the point where the relative clarity o f the g a m e is c l o u d e d o v e r b y purely business considerations and p o w e r conflicts that disil- lusionment sets in. Suddenly an institution we thought we under- stood well begins to look like the institutions we d o n ' t understand at all. W h a t seemed m o r a l l y clear is n o w m o r a l l y a m b i g u o u s . It is n o w o n d e r that A m e r i c a n s have an often-noted allergy to large i n s t i t u t i o n s - - t h o u g h , as in the case o f sports, e v e n in o u r c y n i c i s m we continue to d e p e n d on them.
But corruption can be r e c o g n i z e d and criticized. I f the ideals e m b o d i e d in an institution are n o t totally dead, they stand as a j u d g m e n t against the corruption o f their embodiment. This is something we often overlook. T h e heroic individual w h o cleans up the corrupt institution is a staple figure o f o u r lore in m o v i e s and television. It is easy not to notice that the honest c o p and the crusading reporter, in the v e r y act o f resisting corruption, are drawing upon and enacting n o r m s and ideals at the core o f the institutions with which they struggle. W h e n h e r o i s m has a lasting effect, it is because it has worked catalytically to reignite the dedication o f others to the highest codes o f the police o r o f journalism. That is, it m u s t find expression in r e f o r m e d insti- tutions.
Sports help us to see that at the core o f any viable institution there is a moral code which m u s t be periodically reinvigorated so that the institution m a y survive and flourish. Sports do not help us to see when our institutions are in such serious difficulty that drastic institutional innovations are required. F a m i l y and sports often serve us well as institutional metaphors to help us m a k e sense o f our world. But the problems our society faces today require that we expand our repertory beyond these familiar examples, that we think hard and critically about what has too long been taken for granted.
A successful life in A m e r i c a n society depends on the ability to negotiate competently a series o f requirements, primarily to s h o w technical c o m p e t e n c e a n d secondarily to demonstrate the ability to deal effectively with other people. The educational s y s t e m dovetails with the occupational system in maintaining these emphases. Socialization in the middle-class f a m i l y rein-
/
428: Commonweal
forces this pattern through its emphasis on doing well in school, being competitive (in sports as well as studies), and getting along with others. In family, leisure, school, and w o r k the fine cal- culation o f the relation o f means to ends is emphasized, and this gives rise to the pattern o f utilitarian individualism which w e described in Habits of the Heart, a pattern m o d e r a t e d only partly b y the attention to h u m a n relations---expressive individ- u a l i s m - f o r the emphasis here, too, is heavily strategic.
Life in this paradigm is a competitive race to acquire the objec- tive markers (College Boards, admission to the right school, GPA, LSAT, advanced degree, entry into the right organization, p r o m o t i o n to higher-echelon positions) that give access to all the g o o d things that m a k e life worthwhile (attractiveness to a desirable mate, purchase o f an appropriate h o m e , A m e r i c a n Express G o l d Card, vacations in Europe). But what this f o r m o f life minimizes, if it does not neglect it altogether, is any larger moral meaning, any contribution to the c o m m o n good, that might help it to m a k e sense. So while there are m a n y rules, and the rules operate so as to put great pressure on us to c o n f o r m to them, there are few reasons, tn short, it is not just the "big insti- tutions" that d o n ' t m a k e sense but our o w n lives. B e y o n d fol- l o w i n g the rules that tell us h o w to get ahead, w e have trouble m a k i n g moral sense o f o u r immediate actions.
From the individual point o f view, the educational and occu- pational systems appear to have an objective givenness that puts them b e y o n d question. Failure o r refusal to adapt to them has the inevitable c o n s e q u e n c e o f depriving a person o f access to precisely the rewards that in this paradigm make life worthwhile. T h e presence o f large n u m b e r s o f people in our society w h o have failed in these regards serves as an a d m o n i t i o n to make sure one does not j o i n them, but it also, even if subliminally, raises questions about the legitimacy o f the whole pattern. Part o f the problem is that w e do not bring the sense o f institutional m e a n i n g that we intuitively h a v e about baseball to bear on the educational, e c o n o m i c , and administrative institutions that d e m a n d so m u c h f r o m us. We think what is required here is only a high level o f c o m p e t e n c e , o f expertise, o f "profession- alism," not the moral w i s d o m that should be at the basis o f any g o o d institution. A n d w h e n things g o wrong, w e tend to blame individuals, we decry their lack o f "ethics," but we d o n ' t question the morality o f the institutions themselves.
There is a profound gap in our culture between technical reason, the k n o w l e d g e with w h i c h w e design computers or a n a l y z e the structure o f D N A , and practical or moral reason, the w a y s we understand h o w we should live. We often hear that only technical reason can really be taught, and our educational c o m m i t m e n t s f r o m p r i m a r y school to university seem to e m b o d y that belief. But technical reason alone is insufficient to m a n a g e o u r social difficulties o r make sense o f o u r lives. W h a t we n e e d to k n o w is not simply how to build a powerful computer or h o w to redesign D N A but precisely and above all what to do with that knowledge. As the p o w e r o f our ability to manipulate the world g r o w s , the poverty o f our understanding o f what to do with that k n o w l e d g e b e c o m e s m o r e apparent. E v e n when w e see that the solution must have something to do with institutions, we once again look f o r a technical solution in s o m e kind o f " m a n a g e m e n t science"
rather than in trying to understand the inherently moral nature o f institutions themselves.
Ironically, the confusion and nihilism that threaten us are related to the c o m m i t m e n t to reason, k n o w l e d g e , and education that has a l w a y s been central to A m e r i c a n success. This country has rightly celebrated the intelligence o f an educated citizenry, the c o m m o n sense o f the merchant or tinkerer, and, more recently, the scientific and technical leader. B u t just at the point w h e n our citizens d e p e n d more and more o n knowledge, we face a crisis about the purposes and m e a n i n g o f that knowledge.
It is easy to see this as a personal problem, to say that Americans have b e c o m e selfish, self-indulgent, spoiled by affluence and readily available c o n s u m e r goods; o r as a cultural problem, to say that we have lost the work ethic and have c o m e to believe that the g o o d life is a life o f h e d o n i s m and comfort. But it is also, and perhaps primarily, an institutional problem. Our insti- tutions today f r o m the family to the school to the corporation to the public a r e n a ~ o not challenge us to use all our capacities so that we have a sense o f enjoyable achievement and o f con- tributing to the welfare o f others. We tend to accept our institutions as they come, passively, and we do not see clearly e n o u g h h o w some o f them operate to encourage that passivity. In the case o f d y s f u n c t i o n a l institutions, w e have simply tried to escape from them and have allowed them to fall apart rather than reform and revitalize them. In the case o f coercive institutions, we have submitted to them as t h o u g h they were unchangeable natural forces. A n d the malaise is palpable: a loss o f m e a n i n g in f a m i l y and job, a distrust o f politics, a disillusion with organized religion.
merican culture has focused relentlessly on the idea that individuals are self-interest max- imizers and that private accumulation and private pleasures are the only measurable public goods. We have been blind to the w a y
that institutions enable or cripple our capacity to be the persons we m o s t want to be. We need to understand historically h o w we c a m e to think that individual f r e e d o m is the highest g o o d , that institutions stand in the w a y o f our freedom. We need to understand h o w we failed to see that the virtue in autonomy, in the sense o f personal freedom, can be realized only along with other virtues, such as care and responsibility. Our present problems are the result o f historical conditions, not o f s o m e inevitable historical law. T h e y are the result o f actual choices that people have made in history, choices made without awareness o f w h a t the consequences w o u l d be if e v e r y o n e made similar choices.
We hope to renew earlier efforts to create an A m e r i c a n public p h i l o s o p h y less trapped in the clich6s o f r u g g e d individualism and m o r e o p e n to an invigorating, fulfilling sense o f social responsibility. But responsible social participation, with an enlightened citizenry that can deal with moral and intellectual complexity, does not c o m e about just f r o m exhortation. It is certainly n o t e n o u g h simply to i m p l o r e our fellow citizens to "get i n v o l v e d . " We must create the institutions that will enable such participation to occur, e n c o u r a g e it, and m a k e it fulfilling as well as demanding.
12Ju& 1991:429