Response paper 3

By Tom Wheat

on  “Habits of the Heart”, by Robert Bellah.

poli. 5

Pro. G. Brahm

 

"These sectors of the doctrinal system serve to divert the unwashed masses and reinforce basic social values: passivity, submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined enemies, etc. The goal is to keep the bewildered herd bewildered."

--Dr. Noam Chomsky, from What Uncle Sam Really Wants, censored ex parte from WUTK radio's Alternative Nation, Summer 2001 

 

The notion of American character is inherently a political construct. The character of a nation corresponds to ideals that more or less correlate with abstract definitions of archetypal roles and duties of patriotism, i.e., loyalty in accordance to the  social contract extended to American citizens by the Constitution. The premise of patriotism and propaganda rests upon defining a  discernable moral view or narrative  interpretation of  the history of the state that legitimizes its hold on authority. The heroes and metaphors of history have become immortalized and then often reformulated into ideological tokens of formal authoritative wisdom that is then disseminated to an abstract court of public opinion. To the extent that archetypal presence is felt is to discern the degree of conscious choice existing in a society that proclaims itself to be truly free. In this sense then the supposition must lie upon a sustainable modality of solvent premises corresponding to the political and economic realities that encompass the moral universe of the citizen. To the extent that such a citizen is capable of discerning rational logic then depends upon the existence of a rational state that can legitimize its monopoly as the originator and regulator of virtue and vice. To of what end is the degree of patriotism, and the principle of American values, other than family, economic creed and economic sustenance but a craft of natural values and an organic cognitive inheritance of the ideology of state positivism. To that end must be allayed the Jeffersonian spectrum of natural law and the human heart that compels a separation between freedom and bondage in a state society.

 

The Essay, “Habits of the Heart,” by Robert Bellah argues that American character is a diffuse principle emanating from a particular moral and ethical as well as a class dimension in perpetuating its discourse as to what constitutes the character of a nation that claims that all of its legal inhabitants are free.  According to Bellah, Tocqueville’s concern was that while America was a nation of free born individuals he saw the propensity for negative unrestrained individualism when the public and private spheres of a society have been compromised or ancillary to the principle of state sovereignty as the dispenser of law and as the harmonizer of conscience between good and evil. Tocqueville’s notion of the potential for “freedom gone awry” stemmed from the potential for Americans to not become acquainted with civics or public affairs rather to fall to the temptation of the tragedy of the commons, where mutual public welfare is sacrificed blindly to whims of an exploitative interlocutor entity none other than the whim of the market, the blind beast of civilization out of control.

 

As such Bellah’s paper researched the philosophical and socioeconomic values of white middleclass America, by constructing four character typologies that constituted typical American beliefs about freedom and the will to dissent. Bellah’s argument for utilizing this statistical category is that such persons constitute the members of an active voting class, having been historically been installed with the rights and means of pluralistic participation.

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Pursuant to the scope of my response paper I was assigned to analyze the character of Wayne Bauer. A character analysis of Bellah’s revisionist construct of the tragic-hero/ liberal shall now follow.

 

Wayne Bauer was a soldier in the USMC and served in the Vietnam conflict. The early part of his life was spent under the rule and belief in a paternalistic social order that assured ease of conscience by maintenance of the status quo. The chief archetypal image of American patriotism for Wayne was essentially the Hollywood television cowboy character John Wayne. Wayne became influenced with the ideology of free spirit and the sixties, anti war movement and went AWOL from the military. He must have had a patron because he still received a general discharge after confinement in a military brig. When he returned home to meet his family again, his ideology had become incompatible and incomprehensible to his parents and by extension the old social order. As such Bellah argues Wayne was forced to severe his ties with the community and family that had originally sustained and created Wayne.

According to Bellah, Wayne was a character that believed that moral qualities could be cultured through participation in civic affairs. As Wayne embarked further upon his quest this goal became the reality that framed his pursuit of social activism and corresponding notions of social justice requiring a reassessment of minority and low-income class tenant relations with arbitrary landlords in Santa Monica. The ideal of American freedom for Wayne was that freedom is open to all, and according to Wayne the current state of class stratification in his new community did not embody this traditional view of American democracy and its belief to foster the ability to partake in truly free enterprise.

Bellah argues that Wayne’s goals to empower economically disadvantaged tenants do correspond with an American ideal of self-determination. However, in practical reality such ideals fall short of the realities of the new interdependent global economic order. (p. 24, 2^nd paragraph) Wayne’s views about social justice were constrained by his ideology of overt individualism. Wayne’s problem was that there was no vehicle in place to implement a long-term policy that could address the means in which class exploitation has been institutionalized into the values of American society as well as practically exercised in its civic structure. His individualism was in conflict with the reality of Santa Monica’s civic structure in regards to its willingness to be assuaged as to the potential economic viability of implementing a policy of rent control. Rather, Bellah finds that Santa Monica’s view of private party rights as being preeminent over tenant rights as being the rationale and practical exercise of what true American freedom entails when it is at the behest of the market.

To some extent Bellah would argue that Wayne is an unconscious actor and product of the market, and the market has capitalized that individual self-interest to the extent that everything worthy is viewed under the lenses of the short-term model of instant capital acquisition and maximization of profit and an ideology of capitalism as truly the right arm of atheism since its ideology preaches that the moral speculation on the nature of political freedom leads to amoral nihilism and relativism. Hence the champions of free market capitalism create their own ideological construct, i.e., economic freedom, which is a backstage discourse for class control and maintenance of the stratification system by virtue of nepotism and insulation of its own progeny from the moral discourse it exists as antithesis towards.

Rather the notion of the dynamic community is a half-truth in the sense that the actors of such community represent the ideological spectrum of the market community, which is ultimately the corruptor of governments, and freedom, when it is not regulated. Hence Bellah and I do agree that there is a need for common consensus on the nature of market regulation and to some extent religion should have a place and provide a discourse that can mediate between the self interest of the market and   its potential to corrupt democratic government. The ideal of the republic was that in order for a nation of freeborn elect to survive and endure the test of time required the cultivation of public and civic virtues. To the absolute extent that cultivation and exercise of public virtue must have long term breadth is the essence of its virtue and to the relative extent that virtue must be balanced in conjunction with the immediate demands of the market that favor unrestrained hedonism, and relativisms, as means to keep the discourse of freedom open to interpretation, but not obscured by the hedonistic herds of capitalism.

The majority of Americans do not own private property in the sense that the founders envisioned what true freedom entailed rather the present system more or less represents a temporary lease on that freedom. Private Property ownership is an inalienable right granted by the constitution. The market is denying fewer and fewer people the opportunity to acquire property. The historical notion of American constitutional freedom is in trouble and the unrestrained market is the agent of tyranny that will lead to the overthrow of republican government. The market’s sole aim is oligarchic, and if you trace the evolution of all corporations they are more or less monarchical entities that evolved out of western feudalism and later legitimized by atheistic Protestants eager to dispel the Christian notion that the pure poor stood the best chance of reaching heaven. Rather it was the Protestants who first made poverty a sin in the western tradition and they more or less are credited for founding capitalism.

“In Tawney's Foreword to  MAX Weber's book he summarizes Weber's main thesis as follows. It could not be simpler and better expressed.

The pioneers {the Calvinists] of the modern economic order were, he [Weber] argues, parvenus, [upstarts]who elbowed their way to success in the teeth of the established aristocracy of land and commerce. The tonic that braced them for the conflict was a new conception of religion, which taught them to regard the pursuit of wealth as. not merely an advantage, but a duty. This conception welded into a disciplined force the still feeble bourgeoisie, heightened its energies, and cast a halo of sanctification round its convenient vices. What is significant, in short, is not the strength of the motive of economic self-interest, which is the commonplace of all ages and demands no explanation. It is the change of moral standards which converted a natural frailty into an ornament of the spirit, and canonized as the economic virtues habits whic! h in earlier ages had been denounced as vices. The force which produced it was the creed associated with the name of Calvin. Capitalism was the social counterpart of Calvinist theology.”

Source: http://www.visi.com/~contra_m/pc/1956/2-9Tawney.html

 

 

Bellah’s notion of “competing claims” to freedom represents the ideological crux of his argument that the social order and the values of a society corresponds to the rational fait accompli stratified economic wealth of the social classes, and that political participation or the degree to which it is recognized is determined on the basis of property accumulated, and not on the basis of individual worth.

Bellah’s argument may seem like an arcane cliché of values that extols the virtue of "Globalism" and corporate consumer culture. However, liberal market capitalism can only truly favor the wealthy and not the true economic wealth of the nation or the knowledge potential of its citizens in that the current dominant class structure wins by default since they own the tendrils and the vehicles of market indoctrination and certainly has effectively unified and molded the character of the nation and its people by preying upon their desires and their vices, and as such unity of the spirit, an analogy of collective freedom falls prey to the notion that Americans are unworthy or incapable of free independent thought. True freedom then is redefined as commercially constructed collective harmony. However, the harmony of the market is truly chaos, and in this age of globalisim, the exploitation of class and degradation of environmental resources shows the betrayal of the market as the noble sage current of history, in reality it is a child spoiled to long on the government dole.

“But it is an ideal of freedom that leaves Americans with a stubborn fear of acknowledging structures of power and interdependence in a technologically complex society dominated by giant corporations and an increasingly powerful state. The ideal for freedom makes Americans nostalgic for their past, but provides few resources for talking about their collective future.”(Bellah, 25)

He argues that American justice is conceived with the notion that all are equal under the law; however, the mundane truth is that justice is not egalitarian rather procedurally exercised according to social relationships on the basis of an order of priorities, i.e., stratified power relationships. Bellah’s argument that Wayne’s ideals towards social justice are highly individualistic, though legitimately connected to historical notions of American freedom, however, they do not address the long-term effects of what such freedom would entail if it were so easily provided for the masses. 

 

Market relativism presupposes that there is nothing better than to impart the truth of human nature as dreary as the beast of the leviathan, but that the shock of true freedom would compel man to anarchy, and dissolution of the social order. Hence the real problem is not the fact that rent inflation or environmental degradation is occurring rather the general vague principle of the problem of overpopulation is used as a red herring to obscure the essence of noble freedom and refurbish it with market enhanced preprogrammed freedom to consume and to say nothing of more other than more. Inherently, such relativism is a veil and a restraint on the legal extremities of procedural due process. For as the logic of the wealthy free republic rests upon its sole virtue that is that to do anything different or allow for change in rent prices in accordance with a wage scale for that to occur in the current social and political structure on the basis would impart a negative freedom that would unfairly disenfranchise wealthy people of their common inalienable right to freely exploit poor people in America. Such is the legacy of capitalism.

 

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