The Consciousness Reformation

By Robert Wuthnow

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1976.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520335721

Robert Wuthnow

Robert Wuthnow is Professor of Sociology, Princeton University. He is the author of many works, including The Crisis in the Churches: Spiritual Malaise, Fiscal Woe (1997), Poor Richard's Principle: Recovering the American Dream through the Moral Dimension of Work, Business, and Money (1996), and Meaning and Moral Order: Explorations in Cultural Analysis (California, 1987).

Book preview

THE

CONSCIOUSNESS

REFORMATION

THE

CONSCIOUSNESS

REFORMATION

Robert Wuthnow

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1976 by

The Regents of the University of California

ISBN 0-520-03138-5

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-27937 Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 The Scope of Social Experimentation

CHAPTER 2 Consciousness and Meaning Systems

CHAPTER 3 Meaning Systems and Experimentation: Some Propositions

CHAPTER 4 Testing the Relations

CHAPTER 5 Is a Shift in Meaning Systems Taking Place?

CHAPTER 6 Alternative Theories of Social Experimentation

CHAPTER 7 The Politics of Diversification

APPENDIX A The Bay Area as a Cultural Seedbed

APPENDIX B Methodological Notes

APPENDIX C Supplementary Tables

APPENDIX D Interview Schedule

NAME INDEX

PREFACE

For some years, a gradual, largely imperceptible, yet overwhelmingly profound cultural shift has been taking place in American society. This shift has wrought changes in our basic conceptions of ourselves and in the meanings we ascribe to our worlds. Although there are perhaps many ways in which to describe this shift, its fundamental components can be readily identified: an ever declining willingness to attribute the ultimate governance of life to the supernatural; a correlative decline in the rugged individualistic ethos that flourished so prominently throughout the nineteenth century and that even today has far from disappeared; a dramatic increase in the prevalence of scientific understandings of life and perhaps most significantly of social scientific understandings which emphasize the importance of social, economic, and cultural forces in human affairs; and more recently, and therefore as yet less profound, an increase in the popularity of what might be called mystical or experiential understandings of reality which rely more on intuitive insights into the nature and meaning of life than on logical or philosophical explanations.

Societies are organized with reference to systems of ultimate meaning such as those just described. Conceptions of the forces ultimately and eternally governing reality serve either to undergird or to undermine systems of political authority, methods of distributing scarce economic resources, styles of family life, and standards of moral conduct in relation to one’s self and to one’s neighbor. When these conceptions change, changes in the concrete patterns of societies often follow. Our interest in the present volume is to examine the effects that the current cultural shift away from theism and individualism and toward science and mysticism is having in both the private and public realms of society. We are concerned chiefly with documenting the great extent to which the public’s willingness to support or participate in various efforts to change life styles and social arrangements, on the one hand, and its tendency to resist such changes, on the other, is influenced by its location with respect to the alternative conceptions of reality that are now competing for ascendancy. Although much of our discussion is concerned with describing these influences in a strictly contemporary setting, we also present historical evidence which situates the cultural shifts at issue in a broader perspective and which allows some educated speculations to be made about the future.

The problem on which this study focuses is clearly of contemporary importance both to those who are engaged in the struggle to bring about improved social conditions and to those who are simply interested in trying to understand more fully the changes going on around them. But the problem of specifying the relations between alternative cultural meaning systems and the concrete conditions of social life is also one that has stimulated scholars throughout history and that is likely to continue to do so in the future. Therefore, we have attempted in the pages that follow to focus not only on recent social and cultural events but to present a general theoretical discussion of the nature of cultural meaning systems and to illustrate a method of studying such meaning systems empirically which hopefully will be of broader application than to the contemporary period alone.

The research reported here was initially inspired by a desire to make sense of the waves of protest and unrest that swept the nation’s campuses during the late 1960s and early 70s. Although much research was already being conducted on the so-called counter-culture at that time, little systematic attention had been devoted to the deeper cultural meanings—the symbols, the assumptions, the values, in short, the consciousness—of those involved in the counter-culture. Hence, with the generous assistance of a grant from the Institute for Religion and Social Change to Professors Charles Y. Glock and Robert N. Bellah at the University of California, Berkeley, a four- year research project commenced in early 1971 to examine the symbolic (and especially the religious) dimensions of the counterculture. The study called for a series of in-depth inquiries into the nature of specific religious, quasi-religious, and political movements associated with the counter-culture, the results of which have been published in a separate volume entitled The New Religious Consciousness, Charles Y. Glock and Robert N. Bellah, editors, and a more general cultural assessment using historical and survey research methods.

As the study got under way, it became evident that the student protests of the sixties were only the visible tip of a much more general cultural development which had been emerging for several decades and which seemed likely to continue long after the highly vocal fervor of the counter-culture itself had dissipated. It also became clear as the study progressed that the broader cultural shift with which we were concerned could scarcely be examined in anything but a preliminary way by a single study such as ours. Convinced both of the profound historical importance of the current cultural shift and of the unique opportunity afforded by the counter-culture and the broader social unrest surrounding it for examining the general relations between alternative forms of consciousness and social change, we have nevertheless ventured to publish the conclusions of our inquiries, tentative though they necessarily must be.

In the course of writing this book I have incurred many debts which can never be fully repaid. Without the generosity of the Institute for Religion and Social Change and the gracious encouragement of its directors, John Phillip and Daniel Dever, this study would likely have never been initiated. Its completion was also greatly facilitated by an international conference on new religious consciousness organized and hosted by the institute in Honolulu in 1974.

Robert Bellah and Charles Glock administered the larger research project of which the present study was a part and tirelessly read working papers, chaired seminars, rewrote survey questions, edited manuscripts, pointed out theoretical oversights and logical inconsistencies, and more than once rescued those of us who were fledgling researchers from the hands of failure and despair. Their ideas are omnipresent in the pages that follow in a way that footnotes can never fully reflect. To them also must be given credit for bringing together the research team, known eventually as the Berkeley Religious Consciousness Group, which, through countless hours of informal association and discussion, contributed immeasurably to the present study: Randy Alfred, Barbara Hargrove, Donald Heinz, Gregory Johnson, Karen Landsman, Ralph Lane, Linda Pritchard, Harlan Stelmach, Donald Stone, Alan Tobey, James Wolfe.

A considerable debt to the staff of the Survey Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, for conducting the field research, the results of which form the backbone of the present report, must also be acknowledged. William Nicholls drew the sample and administered the entire field operation. Charlotte Coleman supervised the interviewing staff. Heidi Nebel cleaned the raw data and readied it for computer analysis. Karen Muhonen assisted ably as both secretary and programmer. Tom Piazza performed most of the actual computer processing.

Early drafts of the manuscript were typed by Karen Muhonen and by Emily Harris. The final manuscript was typed by Janet Mesik and proofread by Robbie Crane, Sandy Goers, and Renette Saunders.

All or parts of the manuscript were read by Robert Bellah, Charles Glock, Steven Hart, Donald Heinz, Tom Piazza, Donald Stone, Guy E. Swanson, and Claude Welch. Their comments stimulated many much-needed revisions. I am also especially grateful to Joseph Breznau, Otis Dudley Duncan, Richard Kalish, Charles McCoy, Zwi Werblosky, and Bryan Wilson for valuable comments and criticisms.

Finally, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the women in my life— my wife, Sally, my daughters, Robyn and Brooke, and my mother, Kathryn—who agonized, consoled, rejoiced, suffered, and celebrated with me in the private travail without which no books would ever be written.

R.W.

INTRODUCTION

Every age has known social unrest, turmoil, and change, but our time has provided an exceptionally well-furnished laboratory in which to observe the processes of social conflict and transformation. The late 1960s and early 70s will long be remembered for the extensive variety of social experiments they produced not only in politics but in family styles and living arrangements, religion, education, dress, and leisure activities. This so-called counter-culture for a time consumed the imaginations and energies of a whole cohort of young people. Communes once again flourished in sufficient numbers to arouse more attention from scholars than they had for over a century. For the first time in American history Eastern religious movements were popular enough to command widespread investigation. Political groups like SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) earned reputations capable of making them objects of debate and analysis for years to come. Besides these more visible manifestations of social unrest, gradual changes have also occured in standards of sexual conduct, in attitudes toward racial and sexual minorities, in religious commitment, in political opinions, and in other indicators of public response toward basic social institutions, many of which have continued to show change even as the more visible forms of counter-cultural activity have subsided. In combination, these various manifestations of social unrest and experimentation add up to a major historical development in American society having profound practical and theoretical implications.

The purpose of this book is to formulate and test insofar as possible a theory explaining the recent upsurge of experimentation with alternative life styles and social arrangements and the broader climate of support that has surrounded this experimentation. The theory presented stresses the role of longer-range cultural shifts which have created a new consciousness in which experimentation with social alternatives tends to be regarded as more meaningful and legitimate than it has in the past. This emphasis is in contrast with previous analyses of the counter-culture, and of protest more generally, which have largely neglected the influence of broader cultural tendencies, focusing instead on objective social causes such as strains within the economic or educational systems or opportunities formed by sustained economic affluence.1 Hence, the larger purpose of the present study is to offer a theoretical and conceptual discussion of symbolic cultural constructions which may have applications for understanding instances of social unrest and transformation more generally.

In choosing to focus on the ways in which people subjectively understand their lives rather than on objective social conditions, we are siding with a perspective on human behavior that assumes that people seldom act solely on the basis of objective social circumstances, but rather according to the meanings they attribute to their circumstances. This perspective is, of course, in keeping with a long tradition of social theory including both the Weberian and symbolic interactionist positions. We also accept as given the assumption that people adopt relatively comprehensive or transcendent, but nonetheless identifiable, understandings of life which inform their attitudes and actions under a wide variety of conditions. Accordingly, our concern is not so much with the immediate, transitory meanings that develop in particular social situations, but with the overarching symbolic frames of reference, which we shall refer to as meaning systems, by which people come to grips with the broader meaning and purpose of their lives. In particular, we are concerned with discovering whether or not there may be some change taking place in the transcendent systems of symbolic meaning inherent in American culture, some change that has been conducive to the origin and development of social experiments and that may continue to nourish social experimentation in the future.

The possibility of some general shift in American world views is not an unfamiliar theme among observers of the culture. Many students of American religion have argued that Christianity is slowly withering away, to be replaced by some variety of personalistic, humanistic, or scientific world view. Other students of religion have seen a trend away from hard and fast doctrines toward a more experiential and mythic approach to the questions of meaning and purpose in life.2 Observers of the more general culture have for a long time claimed that people are becoming less individualistic in their thinking and more collectivistic or other-directed. Other scholars have tried to show that so-called modern, scientific world views have begun to recede relative to world views that are somehow more primitive and mystical.

The present study is focused on four meaning systems, each of which supplies a distinct understanding of the meaning and purpose of life and each of which appears to be dominant among a fairly sizable segment of the American people. Each of these broad systems of meaning seems to be either conducive to or antagonistic to social experimentation. Each has also been thought by some social observers to be either gaining or losing prominence in American culture. These meaning systems are distinguished from one another by what they identify as the primary force governing life.

The first meaning system, which will be called the theistic mode, lies at the center of America’s major religious traditions. It is an understanding of life that identifies God as the agent who governs life. God is assumed to have a purpose for each person’s life. He watches over and cares for each person, hears his prayers, and guides him in his daily decisions. Through knowing God, trusting in him, and following his will, one finds meaning and happiness. God is also assumed to be the creator of the universe and the one who directs the course of history. He has established laws, found in the Bible, which men should obey both in their private lives and in the affairs of state.

The second meaning system is what has become known as rugged American individualism. Rather than God being the agent who governs life, the individual is in charge of his own destiny. He is free to choose his own goals in life. He sets his own course; there is no predetermined path he must follow. Success or failure is attributed to the characteristics of the person himself. In the classic American version of individualism these characteristics tend to include such virtues as hard work, willpower, determination, thrift, honesty, and the avoidance of such vices as laziness, drunkenness, and deceit. The most basic of these is willpower, for a person is totally free to follow good or to choose evil. The person with a strong will who cultivates these various characteristics is assured of happiness and good fortune.

The third meaning system has found its clearest expression in modern social science. Like individualism, it stresses the role of man in human affairs rather than God. But unlike individualism, it understands life to be governed chiefly by social forces rather than individuals. Family background, social status, income, the society a person resides in, the nature of the political system he lives under, influence him more than anything else. An individual does not simply choose his own goals, he is socialized into them. In one culture he is likely to believe in one set of goals; in another culture, in a different set. One’s happiness and good fortune are not entirely within his control; they vary according to the kind of chances the society has given him.

The fourth meaning system is most akin to mysticism. Unlike the other three meaning systems which presume to understand the meaning of life and the forces that govern life, it holds that such things cannot be understood; they can only be grasped intuitively from the experiences one has, particularly from the mystical or ecstatic experiences one has. In such experiences the blinders of normal perception are stripped away and one sees that life makes sense, one feels that it hangs together. But the mystic does not rely solely on sheer feelings. He too has a philosophy about the forces governing life, just as the proponents of the other forms of consciousness do. The forces that influence his life most are his own intense experiences. In such experiences he can alter time and space. He can experience God. He can escape the social and cultural forces that impinge upon him. He can create reality itself.

These meaning systems are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Since virtually all Americans have been exposed at one time or another to each of them, it is entirely probable for some people to espouse more than one at the same time. Nevertheless, each clearly offers different interpretations of the influences that people feel impinging upon their lives.

In focusing on these meaning systems and their relations to contemporary social unrest and experimentation we do not mean to discount the importance of more objective social factors. To the extent that a shift in consciousness can be discerned, this shift undoubtedly has its roots in other changes that have taken place in social, political, and economic structures. But our primary concern is not with these structural changes. It is instead with the character of the four meaning systems we have briefly introduced and with their independent role in helping to legitimate, or else in helping to legitimate opposition to, contemporary forms of social experimentation.

DESIGN OF THE STUDY

In deciding how best to examine the nature of the relation between trends in different meaning systems and contemporary social experimentation, one option would have been to study the members of specific groups or movements that have actually spearheaded this experimentation. The larger research project of which the present study is a part, in fact, included some studies of such groups. It was recognized, however, that these studies by themselves would be limited in two respects. First, an understanding of why people engage in social experimentation obviously requires some understanding of the people who don’t. A study focused only on new groups would reveal little about the differences between their participants and people pursuing more ordinary styles of life. Second, much of what has aroused attention in recent years as social experimentation is not embodied in any specific group or movement or, if it is, this embodiment represents only the iceberg tip of a larger but less visible form of experimentation. The few groups who advocate eating organic foods clearly do not subsume the wider but less organized degree of interest in organic foods that exists in the society. The relatively small numbers of people who engage in demonstrations or who join revolutionary political groups should not be dissociated from the larger number of people who value radical political change or the even larger group who are deeply disenchanted with existing political structures. Other forms of social experimentation may be even more difficult to pin down to any specific group or even to any specific form of personal activity. Much of the commentary on the so-called counter-culture among youth in the late sixties described it chiefly as a new set of values, such as valuing the inner self, valuing body awareness, valuing more intimate relations with others. Still other forms of social experimentation consist mostly of an attitudinal willingness to vote for or support in other ways various social policies; for example, legalizing marijuana, granting more freedom to homosexuals, changing the tax system, limiting the power of the police. A study focused on the members of specific social movements would obviously fail to tap these more subtle forms of social experimentation.

For these reasons, a study of a more general sample of people was decided upon. For purposes of describing the extent of various social experiments, the best focus for this study would obviously have been a sample of the national population. For analytic purposes, however, this was not the best option. First, because of the greater costs of conducting a national survey instead of a survey of some local population, a national survey, given a fixed budget, would have meant being able to obtain considerably less information from each person in the study. Since no standard, efficient way has been developed to measure different meaning systems, it was necessary to obtain a fairly large body of information from each person interviewed. Second, many of the attitudes, values, and life styles with which this study is concerned have not yet become widespread in the American population generally. Because of the possibility that they may become more widespread, however, it seemed fruitful to study them where they were already most fully developed; that is, where enough people were experimenting with new things and where the relations between these things and other social and cultural factors had become crystallized enough that a detailed analysis could be pursued.

The population that satisfied all of these conditions was the San Francisco Bay Area. Not only was it convenient to the University of California, Berkeley, from where the study was administered, making it efficient for both survey methods and the ethnographic methods called for by the larger project, it was and is a focal point for much cultural ferment and social change. It was here that much of the so-called new culture among youth was born and continues to be nourished. Consequently the Bay Area provides a natural laboratory for the study of social experimentation. It affords an opportunity to view a variety of novel social and cultural experiments while they are still in an early stage of development and before they perhaps become more widely diffused throughout American culture.

The data upon which this inquiry is based were collected from a sample of 1,000 randomly selected persons living in the San Francisco-Oakland Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, and San Mateo counties).³

The sample was designed to yield a larger sample of youth (age 16 to 30) relative to their numbers in the general population than of mature respondents (age 31 and over), since one of the interests of the study is to examine generational differences in understandings of life, values, and attitudes. Consequently, in each household with at least one person age 16 to 30 an interview was either completed or attempted, while among the households with persons age 31 and over, half were randomly excluded.⁴ In parts of the subsequent analysis where it is desired that data be representative of the general population, a weighting factor is merely assigned which gives each person over age 30 approximately double the weight of each person under 30.⁵

Interviews lasting approximately one hour and fifteen minutes and conducted by professional interviewers were done with each person in the sample. Each interview consisted of over 350 questions covering assumptions about meaning in life, religious beliefs, personai experiences, values and aspirations, political opinions, life style, and background. The questions were developed and refined through preliminary interviews with over a hundred persons not included in the sample. A copy of the interview guide is included in Appendix D.6

No attempt will be made, it should be noted, to generalize the specific Bay Area findings to American society at large. Their purpose is more to illuminate the analytic relations between highly general meaning systems and more specific kinds of values, attitudes, and involvements. Many of these relations may not be too different in the Bay Area from other large metropolitan centers (a comparison of the Bay Area with other cities and a discussion of the conditions making it a seedbed for cultural innovation is presented in Appendix A). Still, the initial motivation in choosing this area was that it is in some respects probably more pronounced on many of the social experiments to be examined and it will, therefore, be regarded as relatively unique in comparison with other areas.

What data such as these, collected at only one point in time, do not do, of course, is to afford a way to assess propositions about trends in different meaning systems. A series of studies conducted periodically would obviously be needed to document the presence or absence of such trends. Given the impossibility of doing this for past time periods and the substantial delay that would be required if future developments had to be covered, the present research design appears to be the most preferable interim strategy. It affords a chance, first, to determine whether or not highly general meaning systems can even be tapped with standard survey procedures; second, to discover if there are, in fact, relations between these meaning systems and more specific manifestations of social experimentation; and third, to find out if these meaning systems are located in the

6. The interviews were conducted between March 15 and August 15, 1973, by a team of 45 professional interviewers from the Survey Research Center. The largest share of interviews was completed by the first of June, with the remaining time devoted to following upon persons not at home or reluctant to be interviewed. To encourage cooperation, a letter of introduction explaining the nature of the study was mailed to each household prior to the interviewer’s initial call. In addition, during the final month of the field work, interviewers sought names of respondents remaining to be contacted from neighbors and from telephone directories and attempted to contact them either by telephone or by mail to make appointments for interviews.

society in a way that is consistent or inconsistent with the idea that a cultural shift is taking place. In addition to the Bay Area data, moreover, there is a substantial amount of evidence available from historical sources. Although relatively unsystematic, this evidence provides a rich source of suggestive material on trends that helps to put the Bay Area data in perspective.

1 Among the more general treatments of the rise of contemporary social experiments, see Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth in American Society (New York: Dell Publishing Company, 1965), Young Radicals: Notes on Committed Youth (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), Youth and Dissent: The Rise of a New Opposition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971); Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1969), Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1972); Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Bantam Books, 1970); Lewis S. Feuer, The Conflict of Generations (New York: Basic Books, 1969); Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970); Erik H. Erikson (ed.), The Challenge of Youth (New York: Doubleday & Company, 1965), especially chapters by Bruno Bettelheim, Talcott Parsons, and Reuel Denney; Seymour Martin Lipset, Rebellion in the University (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1972); Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Gibson Winter, Being Free: Reflections on America’s Cultural Revolution (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1970); and William Braden, The Age of Aquarius: Technology and the Cultural Revolution (New York: Pocket Books, 1971).

2 Two discussions of macroscopic change in religious orientations to which the present study is especially indebted are Charles Y. Glock, Images of ‘God,’ Images of Man, and the Organization of Social Life, in Charles Y. Glock (ed.), Religion in Sociological Perspective: Essays in the Empirical Study of Religion (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1973); and Robert N. Bellah, Religious Evolution, in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 20-50.

3 The sample was chosen by first selecting 116 census tracts, representing 116 geographic areas each relatively homogeneous in ethnic composition, type of housing, and economic level. The probability of each tract being chosen