Individualism Essay, Research Paper

1) An individualist is considered to be someone with personality and character, someone who is not easily intimidated by social pressure or customs, someone with a personal opinion and a singular view of the world. Because modern society finds it important that people think independently, decide autonomously and take personal initiatives, the concept of individualism has acquired a positive connotation. However, individualism is also linked with the tendency to withdraw from social life and turn in towards oneself.

2) Which drives people to withdraw into a small, enclosed world consisting of their family and a few select friends, leaving the rest of society to its own devices.

3) Courageous individualism refers to the dedication shown by people who have independently chosen for something or someone and work energetically for its sake in spite of opposition from family or society; indifferent individualism refers to people who have either lost all hope in their fellow human beings or are no longer interested in initiatives of a social nature, with the result that they are prepared to withdraw from society at all costs.

4) people who have received less education and who find themselves in a precarious economic situation are more quickly inclined to believe that it is ‘everyone for himself’ in our society: on this view, politicians pay no attention to the needs of the people, society develops in a chaotic and unpredictable manner, the welfare we once enjoyed belongs definitively to the past, life has little meaning, and there are no longer any people or associations to which one can make an appeal.

5)On the other hand, whoever considers work not only as one’s own achievement but also as an opportunity provided by the community, and whoever sees it as one’s duty as a citizen to ensure opportunities for fellow citizens by contributing to unemployment benefits, medical care, child care, public libraries, education, etc., will also continue to favor the solidarity model and argue for the fairness of high taxes.

6)No one is better placed to speak about the process of individualism than Robert Bellah. Even before the rise of the debate between liberals and communitarians, Bellah and his colleagues had pointed to the problem by asking whether a society whose members believe that they are responsible only to themselves can see any need for structural justice, public institutions or general welfare.

7) America is not Europe,(Solidarity)

8)”In Habits of the Heart, Robert Bellah and four coauthors blasted the isolating effects of American individualism and called for a renewal of republican and religious traditions.

9)”Habits of the Heart holds up a mirror to American values, makes us examine ourselves, and dares us to question where our society is going. [It] will make you question your own habits and look into your own heart. Not many books possess that ability.”

10) This book is about the inevitable conflict between American Individualism and the fact that humans are by nature social. We hunger for relationship yet we want it only on our terms. Bellah and his team of reseachers take on the enormous task of interviewing people from all over the country and the results of these interviews are presented factually and then analyzed. Whether one agrees with the book’s conclusions or not, the interviewees speak for themselves, and they speak for a majority of Americans today who are often torn by conflicting authoritative messages and motives from without and within. This book is a marvelous and sometimes unsettling mirror into contemporary American society.

11) Which examined America’s conflict between individualism and social commitment) with one that focuses on institutions. After acknowledging that we all live in and through both private and public institutions (families, schools, corporations, the nation, etc.), Bellah and his colleagues argue that we as an American citizenry must take responsibility for our institutions if we are to create a more effective and morally conscious society.

12) The initial language in which those interviewed appear to express their moral ideas is strongly individualistic: everyone places himself or herself at the center, takes personal responsibility for whatever is achieved or whatever goes wrong, and considers moral, aesthetic and religious values to be a matter of personal choice. Those interviewed also speak a `second’ language, however, which expresses their membership in one or more shifting groups, but this second language is easily reduced to the principles of the first language. Bellah and his collaborators criticize this individualistic use of language for not allowing those involved to form an adequate picture of the way in which they actually participate in their community. The individualistic use of language blinds Americans to the social character of various institutions such as marriage, politics or religion. The language of freedom and emancipation – most explicitly employed by therapists who, without being judgmental, try to bring their clients closer to their personal feelings – creates grave misunderstandings and deadlocks in politics, in family life, at work and within the religious communities. This language sees ethics, religion and politics as strategies for individual expression and personal power, instead of as institutions that, each in their own way, give form and depth to interpersonal existence. Along the same lines, Bellah and his co-authors published. No one seems to realize that social institutions structure the existence of every citizen and give it meaning. It is this resistance to social institutions that has led to the moral crisis currently affecting American life.

12) Growing social inequality and the breakdown of public facilities

13) The idea that our emphasis on individualism has tended to separate us from our social context and from others is one of the cornerstones of Bellah’s analysis and critique of modern society. The community and others ahead of our own mirrors Bellah’s concern that individualism and its relentless focus on the self has cut us off from our communities, our neighbors, and our sources of meaning.

14) People’s lives have become separated from the social settings that once provided them meaning and purpose.

15) If we are to make any improvement in our visibly decaying society, is by means of our intelligences and imaginations, understand that we are, whether we like it or not, members of a community, or rather, sets of communities–neighborhoods surrounded by cities and towns, enclosed in counties and states and finally America. We must come to see that this America is our community, and that as members of it, we are going to be damaged one way or another if we do not from time to time put the interests of the whole above our own concerns. A people who will not sacrifice for the common good cannot expect to have any common good.

16) There are fewer and fewer things that get people out of their houses to deal with other people outside of their work context. There are fewer communities that give them support.

17) Have we become merely a collection of individuals rather then a community?

18) The tendency of people to withdraw into their own small circle of life, leaving at large to itself.

19) Americans don’t realize because they value their individuality so much, that the ind. they treasure, their dignity, their autonomy, their sense of the ability to make moral choices to train their children in what’s right, depends profoundly on the health and the effective functioning of the institutions that shape them.

20) Individualism in this sense becomes something closer to isolationism, the desire to be entirely self-sufficient as a country and ignore events elsewhere in the world.

21) The answer is to work on making our institutions better.

22) Religion is integral comprehensive vision of ourselves in relation to what we recognize as the basic conditions of our existence.