From 1979 to 1984 Robert Bellah, a historian of religion, set out with a team of researchers to explore the state of the American character. Their primary focus was on the concept of individualism and the ways in which Americans found meaning in their private and public lives. What they seem to have discovered is that after Vietnam, "The Me Generation," and the era of limits, Americans were no longer so buoyantly optimistic about the future.
There was a time when, under the battle cry of "freedom," separation and individuation were embraced as the key to a marvelous future of unlimited possibility. It is true that there were always those...who viewed the past with nostalgia and the present with apprehension and who warned that we were entering unknown and dangerous waters. It is also true that there are still those who maintain their enthusiasm for modernity, who speak of the third wave or the Aquarian Age or the new paradigm in which a dissociated individuation will reach a final fulfillment. Perhaps most common today, however, is a note of uncertainty, not a desire to turn back to the past but an anxiety about where we seem to be headed. In this view, modernity seems to be a period of enormously rapid change, a transition from something relatively fixed toward something not clear. Many might find still applicable Matthew Arnold's assertion that we are
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.
There is a widespread feeling that the promise of the modern era is slipping away from us. A movement of enlightenment and liberation that was to have freed us from superstition and tyranny has led in the twentieth century to a world in which ideological fanaticism and political oppression have reached extremes unknown in previous history. Science, which was to have unlocked the bounties of nature, has given us the power to destroy all life on earth. Progress, modernity's master idea, seems less compelling when it appears it may be progress into the abyss. And the globe today is divided between a liberal world so incoherent that it seems to be losing the significance of its own ideals, an oppressive and archaic communist statism, and a poor, often tyrannical Third World reaching for the very first rungs of modernity. In the liberal world, the state which was supposed to be a neutral watchman that would maintain order while individuals pursued their various interests, has become so overgrown and militarized that it threatens to become a universal policeman.
Yet in spite of those daunting considerations, many of those we talked to are still hopeful. They realize that though the process of separation and individuation were necessary to free us from the tyrannical structures of the past, they must be balanced by a renewal of commitment and community if they are not to end in self-destruction or turn into their opposites. Such a renewal is indeed a world waiting to be born if we only had the courage to see it.
