American Culture and Moral Values: Robert Bellah’s “Habits of the Heart”

Robert Bellah is a leading American sociologist and social critic. He was rewarded with the National Humanities Medal in 2000 by President Clinton. His work has focused on the relationship between religion and society. Habits of the Heart is one of his most popular and well known works. Habits of the Heart appeared in the 1980s. It is a penetrating study into the moral framework of American society. Habits of the Heart presents a rigorous and critical interpretation of American culture. Bellah’s book is a sociological investigation into the mores of contemporary middle class America. He argues that Americans are “crippled by the very individualism that is supposed to be our proudest trait.” Americans have been so inundated by the doctrine of individualism that they find it difficult to think in terms of a community interest rather than their own individual interest. One of the central reasons for this, in Bellah’s view, is that Americans lack the moral resources or moral language to think otherwise.

Bellah was heavily influenced by the American philosopher John Dewey. Like Dewey, Bellah emphasizes the relationship between language, community, and value. Community provides a context for the development and articulation of moral values. Moral values arise from the interests that are held in common and that are able to be expressed in a common language. It is through symbols and language that we are able to transcend the immediacy of the present moment. This makes reflection and evaluation possible. According to Dewey, the ability to evaluate our experience is the mark of the human.

The crucial problem confronting modern democracy is that the impoverishment of community has been accompanied by a decline in moral language. Bellah’s primary argument is that American culture has lost a genuine sense of community and that moral discourse has become thin and fragile. Utilitarianism – the language of individualism – is the dominant language of American culture. We still have deeper moral sentiments and concerns for something beyond our individual interests but Bellah thinks we lack the language to articulate those feelings and bring them to the surface. We relate to one another almost exclusively in terms of self interest and contractual relations Bellah interviews a number of individuals in Habits of the Heart. One of his conclusions is: “They are responsible and, in many ways, admirable adults. Yet when each of them uses the moral discourse they share, what we call the first language of individualism, they have difficulty articulating the richness of their committments: Dewey expressed a similar sentiment in The Public and Its Problems. “The prime difficulty… is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile, and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests.”


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