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>While I agree that one runs into a sort of radical individual
>utilitarianism every day, especially on the Net, I disagree
>that this is a _predominant_ view. As a long-term member of
>the marginalia, I find American culture profoundly imbued with
>idealism, communitarianism and religiosity artfully wedded to
>a politics of imperialism, militarism, police-ism and class
>war, and it also exists in a less violent form, such as the
>nearly unshakable devotion of the folk to Social Security and
>public schools. You can easily check this out by reading
>those who post to CNN's message boards or at your local tavern.
my basic point was that chris seems to think people here are ignorant of his position, as if we need to be exposed to it because it is somehow marginal. we both agree gordon that it's not at all marginal. that there are competing voices is not surprising...that's the nature of hegemony. perhaps hegemonic would have been better. at any rate, what i'd suggest is that in the US we have predominant individualist ethos. we articulate our positions in a "first language" of individualism that comes readily to our lips,is easily comprehended by others, is very much taken for granted. we also have a "communitarian" second language that isn't as predominant, but certainly a large part of our heritage. it's what accounts for, i suspect, chris's ambivalence.
i don't see any profound problem with recognizing that USers hold contradictory views. the predominant view i identified, utilitarian individualism, does indeed include moral agony over what is viewed as an inextricably intertwined, but always contradictory, competitive relationship between the individual and community. mills, after all, goes through the same sorts of agony as Chris does here.
as far as I'm concerned, one of the best recent explorations of this can be found in Bellah et al, _Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life_ and Alan Wolfe's _Whose Keeper?_ The authors in _Habits_ call this situation one in which there are two languages of individualism, a first (utilitarian and expressive) and second language (biblical/civic-republican). There is no accident that there are contradictory views, if you dig Marxist epistemology and sociology of knowledge.
"In _Habits_ we explored this American individualism. We asked where it came from and sought to describe its anatomy. We found that it took both a "hard" utilitarian shape and a "soft" expressive form. One focused on the bottom line, the other on feelings, which often were viewed therapeutically. Most critically, we questioned whether individualism in either form serves us well as a society, whether it serves even the most successful among us, that educated upper middle class which has historically been most devoted to many of the values of individualism. Our answer then was a qualified no. We argued...that individualism has been sustainable over time in the US only b/c it has been supported and checked by other, more generous understandings.
In times of prosperity, Americans have imagined individualism as a self sufficient moral and political guide. In times of social adversity such as the present, they are tempted to say that it is up to individuals to look after their own interests. Yet many of us have felt, in times both of prosperity and of adversity, that there is something missing in the individualist set of values, that individualism alone does not allow persons to understand certain basic realities of their lives., especially their interdependence with others. These realities become more salient as individual effort alone proves inadequate to meet the demands of living. At such times in the past Americans have turned to other cultural traditions, particularly those we term the biblical and civic republican understandings of life. <...>
The biblical tradition, a second language familiar to most Americans through a variety of communities of faith, teaches concern for the intrinsic value of individuals because of their relationship to the transcendent. It asserts the obligation to respect and acknowledge the dignity of all. <...>
The key point of connection between these traditions, one which sets them off from radical individualism, is their appreciation for the social dimension of the human person. These voices have contested individualism's mistaken identification of individuality with the typical virtues of adolescence, initiative and independence, along with their less savory concomitants of adulation of success and contempt for weakness. Civic republicanism and biblical religion remind us that being an individual--being one's own person--does not entail escaping our ties to others, and that real freedom lies not in rejecting our social nature but in fulfilling a critical and adult loyalty, as we acknowledge our common responsibility to contribute to the wider fellowship of life. <...> Further, one influential type of republicanism that we inherited from he 18th c, our version of the English Whig tradition, best known in its early form as anti-federalism, was anti state and anti-urban, idealizing the yeoman farmer in all his independence. <...> A paranoid fear of the state is not something new, but can be seen from he earliest days of the republic.
We also underestimated the moral meaning of the individualism we called utilitarian. In at least one version of utilitarian individualism the real focus is on moral self-discipline and self-help, not primarily on extrinsic rewards. Worldly reward are signs of good moral character--an idea that developed in Calvinist tradition. The individualist focus on adolescent independence, which we certainly emphasized, involved enduring fears of a meddling, powerful father who might push one back to childish dependence, fears easily transferred to a paternalistic state seen as threatening to reduce free citizens to helpless subjects. This moral utilitarianism works out in class terms: the rich are independent adults and the poor are dependent children, and both have only themselves to thank or blame. American individualism resists virtues such as care and generativity, let alone wisdom, because the struggle for independence is all-consuming.
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