National character studies and modern American identity analysis

¶ … National character studies were all the rage in the 1940s and 1950s. They arose during World War II, when anthropologists could not travel to their usual research haunts. They were therefore left either studying culture at a distance, through a variety of what a post-modernist would call "texts," or writing about their own culture as if it were foreign to them. One of the most popular, and enduring of these national character studies was Margaret Mead's and Keep Your Powder Dry, her 1942 ethnography of the United States. It was a celebration -- although not an uncritical one -- of what we think about ourselves as Americans. The book portrayed the national character as brave and fierce and fundamentally independent.

Today Mead's book, along with other national character stories like Ruth Benedict's the Sword and the Chrysanthemum, an overview of Japanese psychology, is looked at as a quaint relic from an era in which it was thought possible to say something profound and fundamentally true about millions of people who shared little in common with each other except for legal citizenship or at least proximity of residence.

And yet the temptation remains to try to explain the motivations, the culture, the psychology of a whole people. And when one reads books like Robert Wuthnow's American Mythos: Why Our Best Efforts to Be a Better Nation Fall Short or Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Communities or Edward Lawler's Social Commitments in a Depersonalized World one can feel the attraction to such studies. They seem to explain so much.

Each of these books explores what it means to be American in this new millennium. And while the emphasis has shifted from the studies of three generations ago -- when cultures were defined more in opposition to other cultures -- there remains a certain glibness in the discussions. Certainly, these researchers provide us with insights into the ways in which Americans organize -- and segregate -- themselves.

This paper examines the models each of the authors puts forward as a way of explaining what is happening to America -- and more specifically, what is wrong with America, and how we can make things better. Each of these books contains important truths in them. How enduring and how universally American these truths are may not be determinable until there is some historical distance between these works and the reader.

Loosening Ties, Failing Safety Nets

Putnam's Bowling Alone in America accrued a great deal of attention when it came out almost a decade ago. It seemed to catch hold of something that many Americans had felt but had not been able to pin down. He seemed to explain -- to reverse paraphrase Ronald Reagan -- how it was that it was no longer morning in America. Putnam created a portrait of a nation in which there were fewer and weaker connections amongst Americans. We were becoming increasingly unknown to each other and, as a result, to ourselves as well.

Putnam's depiction of America is a portrait (almost) of a nation of ghosts, a people who have a constant (and growing) degree of social-capital deficit. It is a place in which the kinds of conditions that are needed to encourage people to act morally are absent. There are simply too few institutions that we belong to with other people and too many conflicting values. The Elks Lodges are empty most of the time, he writes, as are the PTA meetings and the church picnics. We don't all contribute to the United Way anymore, or stand and pledge allegiance at the same time.

But even worse than this, Putnam argues, is that we as Americans make too little time in their lives to spend with friends and family members. While it might be understandable (he argues) that we do not feel the need to become involved in the public discourse, it is far less comprehensible that we should not be to find time to spend with people with whom we share opinions, experiences, DNA -- or some combination of these. Our (American) increasing isolation -- which he writes arises from the increasingly deep roots of television in our everyday lives, from families where all adults have at least one job, and often two, the high degree of inter-generational geographic mobility, and other changes in society and culture have unfortunate -- and sometimes even dangerous -- consequences.

Among the detrimental consequences of our increasing isolation, he argues, are less functional schools, more crime in everyone's neighborhoods, the economic system -- especially the equitable distribution of wealth -- and the functioning of the polity.

Television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values -- these and other changes in American society have meant that fewer and fewer of us find that the League of Women Voters, or the United Way, or the Shriners, or the monthly bridge club, or even a Sunday picnic with friends fits the way we have come to live. Our growing social-capital deficit threatens educational performance, safe neighborhoods, equitable tax collection, democratic responsiveness, everyday honesty, and even our health and happiness.

Putnam backs up his model of increasing isolation (and social and political dysfunction) with lots of numbers, and it is this careful research that makes his research compelling.

Among the statistics that he offers his readers: In 1960, almost 63% of Americans of voting age cast a ballot in that year's presidential elections, but by 1996, the percentage had dropped to just under 49%. Church attendance is down -- depending on how one measures it -- between one-quarter and one-half since the middle of the last century, and the percentage of Americans who attend public meetings -- from the schoolboard, to the city council, to the water board, etc. -- went down about 40% between the early 1970s and the early 1990s.

Fragments? Or Freedom?

And yes, this is certainly true. But it is important to take a step back and examine the assumptions that the authors are making. Yes, social structures are different than they were fifty years ago. But this loosening of our social connections, our turning inward and away from certain established social institutions, has been accompanied by a loosening of conventions that were in many ways suffocating. (Let us just imagine, for a moment, the difference in life for a gay teenager today and in 1950.) One of the troubling things about Putnam and Lawler, Thye & Yoon is that they seem to be insufficiently aware of the costs of the social institutions that they are championing.

We have not, as Americans, changed the ways in which we organize ourselves simply because we have forgotten how to do so, or because we have become emotional more friable, or more selfish or less compassionate. Or -- if any or all of these things are true -- we have not changed solely because of such measures. We have also changed the ways in which we participate in groups because those groups and our means of interacting with them have lost a great deal of their usefulness to us.

It is important to note -- as all of the authors make clear -- that these changes have been entirely voluntary on the part of Americans. Certainly, many women have entered the workforce because they wanted the chance to engage in the professional work world and gain the kind of recognition that had been denied to them for generations. But many other women -- and many of the first category as well -- entered the workforce because the economy shifted underneath them and their families required two incomes. Shifts in the way in which we act culturally, socially, and economically are never entirely accomplished through free will.

What Putnam along with Lawler, Chye, & Yoon seem to underplay is that what they call isolation and fragmentation have been at least some of the time by some of the people as freedom. This is a point that Wuthnow takes up, although he does not frame it in quite this way. But when he writes that Americans are still "joiners" but rather that they are simply joining in different ways he is acknowledging that the old forms of alliance and affiliation are no longer workable.

Wuthnow argues that Americans of each generation are served by their own institutions, and if the current generation makes virtual rather than actual connections then that is what this generation needs to do. National character studies tend to cast a very rosy glow on the past and the generations of the ancestors. But they might be far more valid and useful if -- like Wuthnow -- they tried harder to look into the future.