Solidarity Regained

Here is Chapter Nine, continuing the excerpts from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006).

Now of course in the view of classical social science in the 19^th century, repeated by many otherwise skeptical scholars down to the present, the coming of capitalist modernity has meant a loss of solidarity. The sociologist Philip Selznick, for example, writing in 1992, rehearses the tragic story of a rural Gemeinschaft lost, to be contrasted with the cold modern world of rationality and contract, at the limit of a townly Gesellschaft. “These benefits [of modernity],” he writes, “are purchased at the price of cultural attenuation. The symbolic experiences that create and sustain the organic unities of social life are steadily thinned and diminished.”[1]

Who says? Really, now, how d’you know? In common with most social scientists, Selznick assumes without inquiring much into the evidence that modernization has these effects, and that they do go to the limit, organic unities terminally thinned and diminished. Selznick and the others rely mainly on the repeated assertion without evidence in canonical works by Marx, Tönnies, Weber, Durkheim, followed by 20^th-century ethnography before the generation of Clifford Geertz and 20^th-century history before the generation of Peter Laslett—in the 1960s Geertz and Laslett challenged the pieties of 1950s modernization theory, which assumed that Marx, Tönnies, Weber, and Durkheim had history right. “In almost every sphere of life,” Selznick asserts, “there has been a movement away from densely textured structures of meaning to less concrete, more abstract forms of expression and relatedness.”

We are asked to believe that a graduate student in Professor Selznick’s law and sociology courses at Berkeley, the descendent of, say, Chinese peasants, has access to less densely structured textures of meaning, a thinner, less love-filled life, than his ancestors. The student reads, let us say, English perfectly and French and German very well, and can understand a little spoken Cantonese. He is married and has a three-year old daughter—whose feet, by the way, he wouldn’t think of binding. He needs only to complete his Ph.D. dissertation on The Abstract Forms of Expression and Relatedness in Modern Life: A Study of Tönnies and Durkheim to take up a satisfying career of teaching and research. He has fellow graduate students he will keep as beloved friends for a long life. He stays in touch with his college classmates, and with some of his friends from the neighborhood where he grew up, in Rio Linda, north of Sacramento.

In what feature exactly, one might ask Professor Selznick, is the graduate student able to enjoy less texture, structure, concreteness in his expression and relations than his male ancestors? One of his male ancestors was his immigrant great-great-grandfather working as a coolie on railway construction in Nevada—he died in a tunnel collapse at age 31. Another great-great-great grandfather lived in a village in southeast China. He could not read a single character, and left the village once only, feet first, when he died at age 44.

On the face of it the graduate student has a more textured, structured, concrete life, and a more uniform, flexible, and abstract one than these men. He has wider experience, a life twice or three times as long, more friends, longer-living relatives, more interesting work, and access to the world’s best in spiritual experiences—advanced Buddhist thought, for example, or the piano sonatas of Beethoven.

True, he cannot go back to the ignorance of his ancestors. None of us can, after innocence. We know that the earth is round (p < .05), we know that cholera is caused by sewerage in the drinking water, we know that people with good advanced degrees in the humanities are capable of serving as SS officers. We cannot forget so by an act of will. But what of it?

Selznick says that “the fundamental truth is that modernity weakens culture and fragments experience.” Does this mean than moderns don’t have a culture? That can’t be right. Does it mean that the moderns participate in more villages, so to speak, than their home village alone? Yes: they participate in the village of work, the village of an extended family in which relatives surviving into their 80s are commonplace, the village of a church or temple, of a professional association, of a square dancing club, of local politics, of a women’s reading group, of a bridge club, of a service organization, of hospital volunteers, of a local coffee house, of Giants fans, of Berkeleyites, of Californians, of Americans, of world citizens passionately aware of our shared big blue marble. What is wrong with that?

What exactly has humanity lost from such “fragmentation”? It should be easy to gather actual evidence on the amount of fragmentation and especially the amount of “loss” if it is so very pervasive a feature of modern capitalist life. The evidence needs to be comprehensive in its accounting and serious in its history. It should not be a notion generalized from Durkheim’s anomie or from a professor’s whinge against his bourgeois neighbors.

The century-and-a-half old premise among anti-capitalists is that we have through capitalism lost a good world worth keeping. But evidence has in fact been assembled by generations of social historians since 1900 against the German Romantic idea of a Black-Forest homeland for a noble peasantry—a peasantry which allegedly benefited from a more densely textured structures of meaning than we moderns can muster.

The evidence is overwhelming. The historians have found that the Gemeinschaft of olden times was defective. The murder rate in villages in the 13^th century, to take the English case, was higher than comparable places now.[2] Medieval English peasants were in fact very mobile geographically, “fragmenting” their lives.[3] The imagined extended family of “traditional” life never existed in England.[4] Or, to turn to other instances: The sweetness of the old-fashioned American family has been greatly exaggerated.[5] The Russian mir was neither ancient nor egalitarian, but a figment of the German Romantic imagination.[6] Vietnamese peasants did not live in tranquil, closed corporate communities.[7]

Love, in short, is arguably thicker on the ground in the modern, Western, capitalist world. Or at any rate it is not obviously thinner on the ground than in the actual world of olden and allegedly more solid times. The feminist Nancy Folbre remarks that “we cannot base our critique of impersonal market-based society on some romantic version of a past society as one big happy family. In that family, Big Daddy was usually in control.”[8]

Robert Bellah and his co-authors of The Habits of the Heart (1985, 1996) repeat the tale of lost solidarity. It is one of their main themes. “Modernity,” they say without offering evidence—why seek evidence for so obvious a truth?—”has had . . . destructive consequences for social ecology. . . , [which] is damaged . . . . by the destruction of the subtle ties that bind human beings to one another, leaving them frightened and alone.”[9] They worry that “the first language of America,” individualism, “may have grown cancerous.”[10] They give aesthetic and moral meaning to their everyday lives as social scientists by detecting through traditional forms of scrutiny of their neighbors a “weakening of the traditional forms of life that gave aesthetic and moral meaning to everyday living.”[11]

Everyone believes it. Everyone does, that is, except the historians who have actually looked at the comparative evidence. Except them, everyone believes in “the extreme fragmentation of the modern world.”[12] After warning about the misleading nostalgia for a “romantic vision of one big happy family,” Folbre retails the usual critique of modernity based on it. “Social critics like Karl Polanyi,” she writes, “have long warned that the growth of market-like behavior . . . might encourage selfish calculation.” So they have, but with not much evidence. “Economic development seems to lead to a decline in the importance of close personal relations.” I don’t think so; if anything, it seems to lead to the opposite. “Our culture has almost certainly become more materialistic.” By comparison with Roman civilization or medieval European civilization? I don’t think so. “Adam Smith believed that we would become . . . more civilized. I haven’t seen much evidence of this.” [13] You haven’t? Not in the rights of women, the extent of higher education, the number of books published, the attendance at museums and orchestra halls worldwide? Such pessimism appears to have more to do with the alienation of academics from the society around them than with the historical or sociological facts.

Intellectually speaking the claim of “fragmentation,” I say, descends from German suspicion of French Enlightenment, which around 1800 emerged as Romance, and later in the century was intellectualized as the particularly German theme in professional folk lore, history, anthropology, theology, and at last sociology. One finds many central-European intellectuals and their followers early in the 20^th century repeating what they learned about the modern world’s lack of solidarity from Marx, Weber, and the rest, accented by the passing bells of 1914-1918: thus Karl Mannheim, Martin Heidegger, Karl Polanyi, Arnold Hauser, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and many other young men after the Great War declaring themselves to be hollow men.

The German sociologist and Fascist enthusiast Hans Freyer (1887-1969) wrote in 1923 that “we feel ourselves to be unconfirmed, lacking in meaning, unfulfilled, not even obligated.” No commitment, no Faith or Love. The Hungarian literary critic and Marxist revolutionary and later Communist state functionary Georg Lukács (1885-1971) wrote in 1913 about the lack of “totality” in modern culture.[14] The implied premise, borrowed from the philosophical history of the German Romantics, is that former times did have such a totality. The decades following 1914 were to show what could be accomplished by making the anti-liberal search for “totality” into an “ism.” The evidence has always been weak for a new “fragmentation.” But the claim justified in Europe 1914-1945 a violent assault on liberal democracy. “Everything in the State, nothing against the State, nothing outside the State” is one version. And in its milder echoes nowadays the nostalgia for an alleged unity justifies at least a disdain for the way we live in Middletown or the San Fernando Valley.

Bellah and his fellow authors defer to Robert Putnam on the evidence for a rise in bowling alone. Habits of the Heart, they note in the Introduction to the updated edition of 1996, “was essentially a cultural analysis, more about language than behavior.”[15] Putnam, they say, assembled the real evidence of behavior. The behavioral evidence is not persuasive. They quote Putnam in the 1990s, for example, as predicting that the internet would probably “not sustain civic engagement.” That behavioral prediction by now does not seem to have been a very good one. Look at the “civic engagement” of Howard Dean’s internet-based campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2003-04, or the new unionism built on e-mail mobilization. [16] Look at the hundreds of thousands of little communities worldwide that now gather every evening in the ether to chat and court and opine and quarrel, a virtual stroll in an electronic city square.
The new social forms do not constitute, an “obligation” or a “totality” in the sense that 20^th-century fascists and communists understood the terms. They are not a “terrestrial paradise,” as Isaiah Berlin described the myth that has long haunted Western thought, “an ideal state of affairs which is the solution of all problems and the harmonization of all values.”[17] But what is the evidence that there ever was such a totality, or that it would be a good idea if it ever were achieved? The idea is Rousseau’s general will and its dismal spawn. “The Fascist conception of the State,” wrote Mussolini and Gentile in 1932, “is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value.”[18] Swell.

And in any case the notion that “social capital” has declined appears to be misleading. Richard Florida conveniently summarizes the recent criticism of Putnam’s work by Dora Costa, Matthew Hahn, Robert Cushing, and others.[19] The decline of social solidarity that worries Putnam seems to be exaggerated.

In particular the numerous “weak ties” of the modern world, as Mark Granovetter put it, have taken together great strength. They are like a rope made of many strands. At the beginning of modernity Bishop Butler used the same phrase as the sociologists now use looking back on it: “anything may serve. . . . to hold humanity together in little fraternities and co-partnerships: weak ties, indeed, and what may afford fund enough for ridicule, if they are absurdly considered as the real principle of that union; but they are in truth merely the occasions.”[20] The occasions of work groupings and hobby clubs and NASCAR races is the “natural principle of attraction in man towards man” which one finds in 2006 as much as in 1725.

Putnam yearns for the one-strand rope of an invented tradition. Florida challenges him gently:

I am not advocating that we adopt lives composed entirely of weak ties. . . . But most Creative Class people that I’ve met and studied do not aspire to such a life and don’t seem to be falling into it. . . . They have significant others; they have close friends; they call mom. But their lives are not dominated or dictated by strong ties to the extent that many lives were in the past. . . . Interestingly, people seem to prefer it this way. Weak ties allow us to mobilize more resources and more possibilities for ourselves and others, and expose us to novel ideas that are the source of creativity.[21]

Richard Sennett, in The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (1998) is, like Bellah and other communitarians, nostalgic for strong ties, the “social bonds [which] take time to develop, slowly rooting into the cracks and crevices of institutions.”[22] He has particular nostalgia, as many on the left and right do, for the 1950s in America: “strong unions, guarantees of the welfare state, and large-scale corporations combined to produce an era of relative stability.”[23] I remind my communitarian and neo-con friends—who share more than they realize—that if you were not male and white and straight and a suburbanite and a union member, those 1950s were in fact not very nice, even in America. They were nice only by comparison with still earlier times of still stronger ties, still greater stability, and still tighter social bonds rooted in institutions. Enracinement sounds nice. But the real glory is the flower, the human flourishing, not the roots.

Somehow we have traveled from the sunny realism of Bishop Butler and Adam Smith in the 18^th century to a dark and unrealistic pessimism in the 20^th century, at just the time that liberal capitalism is succeeding. We’ve traveled from Butler’s belief that “it is manifest fact that . . . the generality are frequently influenced by friendship, compassion, gratitude; and even a general abhorrence of what is base, and liking of what it fair and just” to Christopher Lasch’s assertion that we live in a culture of narcissism. [24] We’ve traveled from Smith’s belief that “the uniform, constant, and unmitigated effort of every man to better his condition . . . is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things towards improvement” to Georg Lukács’ assertion in his old age (the 1960s) that “even the worst socialism is better than the best capitalism.”[25]

I suggest that German Romanticism was the detour. German Romanticism still seems attractive to many, against the Scottish and liberal idea of letting people alone in their marketplaces to fashion a varied culture. I follow Berlin in observing that one strand in Romance led to modern racism, by way of myths of Kultur. Another strand, he says, led to modern revolution, by way of myths of Action. And a final strand led to some of the best of modern liberal values, by way of Romanticism’s novel notions of sincerity and authenticity.[26] Jerry Muller notes that there was a liberal counter-argument to the bad strands in Romance even in Germany—such as Walter Goetz in 1919 making “an extended critique of the notion that there existed some ongoing essence of the German Volk.”[27] Muller, or for that matter Goetz, could have cited another German, Franz Boaz working in America to the same liberal and anti-racist end.

When Bellah and his co-authors venture to illustrate the modern fragmentation they do not persuade. The only example they give of the fragmented character of modern solidarity is “the euphoric sense of metropolitan belongingness” that comes “when a local sports team wins a national championship.” These are “rare moments,” they claim, which happen “briefly.”[28] They view them as fleeting episodes of trivia.

That doesn’t seem right. Sports championships are rare and brief, of course, aside from the New York Yankees since Ruth, and in Chicago for a while during Michael Jordan. But the belongingness in the big city and its hinterland that sports teams nourish is not rare. To some in the clerisy it seems trivial, I realize, but loyalty to sports teams creates for millions in America and Holland and Japan an enduring belonging. It’s nicer, actually, than war. And it’s not brief. Ask a New Englander about 1918-2004. Ask a 60-year-old Englishman today about the World Cup win over Germany in 1966, or a Dutchman about the loss to Germany in 1974. My 98-year old grandmother wore a Cubs cap while she watched on television her beloved team of Ernie Banks, Ron Santo, and Billy Williams trying and failing, yet again.

Yes, I know: such stuff is so silly, so unacademic, so characteristic of the alienated lives of moderns. It is so much less dignified than the densely textured structures of meaning that came out of the villages of English Volk c. 1300 playing, uh, football.

The five-person Habits team interviewed about 200 Americans. They concede that they found no one among the 200 who was fragmented. “Most are seeking in one way or another to transcend the limitations of a self-centered life.” [29] But that’s what people have been doing since the invention of language—at least in the brief episodes in which their material circumstances have given them time to think. “If there are vast numbers of a selfish, narcissistic ‘me generation’ in America, we did not find them.” That’s right: there are not actually in very large numbers the sociopaths and Dilbert characters who are supposed in some theories to be generated by capitalism.

What the Habits team did find is that people could not articulate a theory, usually, beyond a naïve ritualism or a naïve individualism provided to them by the less thoughtful of the local clerisy, the parish priest, say, or a précis of Ayn Rand. But are Americans actually moved by the worst of these, and in particular by radical individualism? Some Americans say it. But do they do it? Is Prudence Only, Screw-You, Mac, really the operating system of capitalism? The clerisy has believed so since 1848. Is it right about this?

Habits of the Heart begins with a relentless if polite criticism of one of the interviewees, called “Brian Palmer,” a businessman who holds two full-time jobs to support his family. The main complaint against Brian seems to be not that he has no values—which would be a strange assertion under the circumstances—but that he can’t say what they are. “Apart from the injunction not to lie [’integrity is good and lying is bad’], he is vague about what his values are.”[30]

Gosh, that’s terrible. Palmer is a poor theorizer. He can’t say what his values are. Another interviewee, “Wayne Bauer,” is a community organizer. Apparently it is not only the business bourgeoisie who have this characteristically modern American problem of ethical disfluency. When grilled about his ethical theories, the college professors note, “Wayne becomes strangely inarticulate.” Liberated people “will make society ‘better,’ he says.” The exasperated professors quiz the student: “what does he mean by ‘better’?”

Only a group of intellectuals would regard as a Grave Problem such a failure to articulate. One is inclined to respond uncharitably: “If even the glorious Immanuel Kant found it challenging to articulate the Meaning of Life, what do you expect to get by way of such theories from 200 ordinary Americans, untrained in German philosophy and sociology and theology? I suppose that in the 200 ordinary Americans not even one could articulate the categorical imperative, much less give its three alternative formulations. So bloody what?” I said “uncharitably.”

The unspoken premise of the Habits method is that under the “traditional” forms that gave aesthetic and moral meaning to everyday living in olden times the results of conversations with 200 people would be quite different. But that’s not likely. If you asked 200 American fundamentalists nowadays or 200 of Hester Prynne’s fellow Puritans what their values or their ethical theories were, you would get a predictable set of allegedly Bible-based formulas. Hester’s Puritans would be articulate, all right, wonderfully so. Words would spill out with King-James eloquence. But the words would give little or no scientific insight into the actual state of love and justice in Boston or Springfield c. 1680. The formulas would not be the actual sociological rules of 17^th-century Massachusetts.[31] Ditto for a sample of ordinary modern fundamentalists. There would be theorizing, all right, but bad theorizing, bad in every sense: mistaken, superficial, insincere, uninsightful, often enough concealing a hatred for others under a theory of a hateful God. And certainly you would get little or nothing by way of independent theorizing, except perhaps from a rare Anne Bradstreet. The Puritans would get a bare C+ in the professors’ examination. The 700-Club fundamentalists would get a C-. These are better than the well-deserved D- assigned to the appalling Brian Palmer and Wayne Bauer, to be sure, but certainly not the honor-roll level of theorizing the professors seek.

My argument is in some ways the opposite of that in Habits of the Heart, though the Habits authors and I agree on many things. We agree that ethical matters are important, that Prudence Only is a poor ethical theory, that what they call “Biblical” values are not to be disdained. But I would argue that bourgeois and capitalist and modern American life in fact participates in the transcendent as much as life anywhere has. I’m willing to stipulate that bourgeois life does not participate in the transcendent any more than earlier and non-capitalist life—though I wish that my friends of the clerisy who despair of modernity would concede in turn that because of capitalist economic growth many people in capitalist countries, for example my friends of the clerisy who despair of modernity, have now the time and mental equipment to push beyond What Dad Said.

Doubtless the booboisie doesn’t push hard enough. Doubtless it views artists and academics as something like inessential entertainment. But at least some of the booboisie try to reach the transcendent, in their contemptibly naïve ways. And the rest at least pay willingly for someone else to try. American Babbitts save for their children’s college educations on an impressive scale, educations in which the children are taught to despise the values of their parents.

When the political philosopher Harvey Mansfield noted to his colleague at Harvard Judith Shklar that virtue in America is bourgeois virtue, she replied, “Is there any other kind?”[32] That’s right, and more professors need to acknowledge it. Americans, bourgeois and workingclass, in fact exhibit an integrated set of virtues, though present-day, non-clerisy, non-fundamentalist people have no ready formulas for describing it in a way that would satisfy a panel of professors.

This is not the interviewees fault, the rhetorical subtext of Habits to the contrary notwithstanding. It’s the clerisy’s job to provide articulations that illuminate our lives. Artists and intellectuals provide the images and the theories articulating a transcendent. For a century and a half a good part of the clerisy has been off duty, standing in the street outside the factory or office or movie studio hurling insults at the varied workers there.

On this Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, Tipton, and I do agree: “individuals need the nurture of groups that carry a moral tradition reinforcing their own aspirations.”[33] Time for members of the clerisy, such as we six, to articulate a moral tradition more useful than Down With the Bosses or To Hell With the Poor or Back to the Church or Reverse the 1960s or Prudence Only.

The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.

[1] Selznick, Moral Commonwealth, 1992, pp. 6, 8.

[2] Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict, 1979, p. 271f.

[3] Raftis, Tenure and Mobility, 1964, Chps. VI-VIII.

[4] Wrigley and Schofield, Population History, 1981.

[5] Coontz The Way We Never Were, 1992.

[6] Dennison and Carus, “Invention of the Russian Rural Commune,” 2003. For the attachment to the figment, see Engels’ first footnote to the 1888 English translation of The Communist Manifesto, in which Haxthausen’s notions about the mir are praised.

[7] Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant, 1979.

[8] Folbre, Invisible Heart, 2001, p. 20.

[9] Bellah et al., Habits, p. 284.

[10] Bellah et al., Habits, p. xlii.

[11] Bellah et al., Habits, p. 291.

[12] Bellah et al., Habits, p. 286.

[13] Folbre, Invisible Heart, 2001, p. 32.

[14] See Muller, Mind and Market, 2002, pp. 263, 280.

[15] Bellah et al., Habits, p. xvii.

[16] Freeman (2003), “Not Your Mother’s Union.”

[17] Berlin, letter to Norman Birnbaum, quoted in Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 1998, p. 251. Compare Nozick, Anarchy, State, 1974, p. 297: “That it is impossible simultaneously and continually to realize all social and ethical goods is a regrettable fact about the human condition, worth investigating and lamenting.” But a fact.

[18] Mussolini and Gentile, “Doctrine of Fascism,” 1932, para. 10.

[19] Florida, Creative Class, 2002, Chp. 15.

[20] Butler, Fifteen Sermons, 1725, Sermon I, p. 367, italics supplied.

[21] Florida, Creative Class, 2002, p. 277.

[22] Sennett, Corrosion of Character, 1998, p. 24.

[23] Sennett, Corrosion of Character, 1988, p. 23.

[24] Butler, Fifteen Sermons, 1725, Preface, p. 343.

[25] Smith, Wealth, 1776, p. 343 (II.iii.31) and Lukács quoted in Lendvai, Hungarians, 1999, p. 491.

[26] See for example Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, 1998, pp. 245, 247, 248.

[27] Muller, Mind and Market, 2002, p. 280

[28] Bellah et al., Habits, p. 292.

[29] Bellah et al., Habits,. p. 290.

[30] Bellah et al., Habits, p. 7.

[31] Innes, Labor in a New Land, 1983.

[32] Mansfield, “ Liberty and Virtue,” 2003, p. 9n. Mansfield is uncertain whether Shklar was praising the bourgeoisie or dissing “virtue.” It seems unlikely that one who spoke so often of the republican virtues intended the latter.

[33] Bellah et al., Habits, p. 286.