He and other local residents forced the town to make many improvements in the neighborhood. They also became threatened by efforts to build a low-income housing project in their neighborhood. They organized to prevent the project, believing it would bring the lazy and immoral poor.
Mike also believes the well-to-do are immoral, only their cardinal sins are greed and selfishness rather than lust and drunkenness. Both Mike and Wayne say they do what they do in order to help people and to fight for more power for those who have none. These organizers assume that empowering individuals within their communities is a good thing. But their idea of community is truncated. They seem to think that as long as one has the power to get what one wants, why should one care about others who do not?
Both tend to view the community in a very narrow sense, and see it largely in terms of a variety of self-interested individuals and groups duking it out. It is hard for them to conceive of a common good or a public interest that recognizes economic, social, and cultural differences between people but sees them all as parts of a single society on which they all depend. The idea of public service in pursuit of the common good is subsumed in either a nostalgic vision of small-town harmony or the tough-minded talk of self-interest.
Like other civic-minded professionals, Mary recognizes the need to tolerate differences and viewpoints of individuals, and she stresses the importance of ways individuals can negotiate their differences. Mary has taken some strong stands and made some enemies, especially in carrying out the mandate of the Coastal Commission law to provide mixed income housing. They have been given a public trust. But they are just out for the pocketbook. Individuals cannot achieve success or happiness simply by serving themselves…You have a debt to society.
Decision makers should be conscious of their responsibilities toward future generations. Caring and being cared for in the course of her volunteer work also provides fuel for her long-run commitment to work for wider vision. It is what the authors call a second language that expresses the civic ideal of friends who sustain one another in pursuit of the common good.
This culture of individualism helps to sustain our free-market ideology. This free-market ideology is determinist. It implies that there are no institutional choices: the market decides.
The problems of the environment, education, violence, transportation, high-priced housing, and the breakdown of family and community do not distinguish between the educated and the uninformed, the middle class and poor, the employed and jobless. The authors correctly call for our nation to transcend radical individualism and recover the insights of the older biblical and republican traditions. Not so long ago, this tradition was found in the language and spirit of the New Left of the early 60s and the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s.
These were social movements anchored in a proud, clear language of higher aspiration — justice, equality, community, and freedom. The authors make a compelling case for more democracy and citizen participation. We need something that speaks more directly to the heart and soul.
The authors of Habits want to counter that force with a values-based call for a grassroots organizing campaign. This effort would change the meaning of work to include public contribution, greater accountability on the part of corporations, and more participation in church and civic groups, culminating in a social movement of transformation with the moral force of the civil rights movement.
Their book has stood the test of time and is considered a modern classic on American society. But he also suggested that individualism , a word he was one of the earliest to use and long since a catchword for the American character, could prove dangerous, setting citizens apart from one another, making positive collective action difficult if not impossible, and therefore threatening those same free institutions.
Robert N. Yet the various case studies that are the heart of the book do paint an unlovely and worrying portrait of historical forces, economic most especially, that have compromised not only the tradition of local-level collective action but the traditional certitudes of religious and civic belief.
Stephen Tipton, an assistant professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, talked with therapists and their clients in the South and in the San Francisco area. The key terms that the authors use are established in a four-page glossary, which, among other things, defines the two senses of individualism itself: as a belief in the sacredness of the individual; and as a belief that the individual is real, society only an artificial construct.
The several case histories, which tend to weave through the several chapters and topics, are real and sometimes affecting. But the authors point out that most of what Joe achieves is an illusion. The town is little more than a bedroom community, in a specific price class, for Boston itself.
The largest employer is a branch of a large corporation with only nominal ties to the community, and Joe is in fact a PR man for the corporation.
His own real emotional ties to the town thus serve corporate interests. As came clear in an ugly town debate over some proposed low-cost housing, in which a large Housing and Urban Development grant was turned down, emotionally, over fears of the ethnic undesirables the project might bring from Boston, some traditional values of New England neighborliness were lost to a protective individualism.
An obvious question is whether the transformation that the authors envisage would link the citizenry in an idealistic new concern for the commonwealth or simply create or energize special interest groups regional, economic, religious, occupational and conflicting, divisive coalitions. The ideal is easy to embrace; the practical consequences, hard to foresee.
In the liberal world, the state, which was supposed to be a neutral night watchman that would preserve order while individuals pursued their various interests, has become so overgrown and militaristic that it threatens to become a universal policeman.
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