Three—
Markets and Distant Obligations

Intimacy and Distance

For every social theorist who talks about the decline of the family, the community, and other warm, cozy things, there will always be another to remind us either that these things have not declined at all or that they were never as wonderful as their lamenters insist and we ought just as well to bid them good riddance. One version of this argument, insofar as it concerns problems of moral obligation, runs as follows. Modern liberal democrats, it claims, have important obligations to strangers and hypothetical others such as future generations. Since civil society is the realm of the personal, the intimate, and the local, strong obligations to those we love will in fact make it more difficult to consider the needs of strangers. We are better off, therefore, relying on impersonal mechanisms of moral obligation such as the market (or, for that matter, the state) because they are the best methods of insuring that those we do not know, but on whose actions we nonetheless depend, will receive the same kind of consideration as those we do.

This is a powerful argument, and, as I will try to show later in this book, it especially makes sense in understanding the moral logic of the welfare state. But it clearly applies to the market as well. If a businessman harms his wife and children by working long hours and is forced to fire trusted employees in order to increase his profits yet as a result of these actions contributes to economic growth that provides jobs and material benefits for future generations, who is to say that he has not, even without conscious intent, satisfied moral obligations to others? There will, in other

words, always be some tension between intimate and distant obligations, and the question is never whether the former ought to take precedence over the latter or vice versa, but rather how the two can be brought into some kind of balance.

Yet for all its concern with equilibria, the market is not necessarily the best instrument for keeping precarious matters in balance. Markets are generally praised because they coordinate things indirectly and without conscious planning. As Thomas Schelling has taken the lead in pointing out, however, markets are often responsible for logjams when they encourage people to act in ways that, in the absence of market mechanisms, they would not have acted in the first place.^[1] If we take the examples of traffic jams and residential patterns analyzed by Schelling as metaphors for the general problem of moral interdependence in modern liberal democracies, we are likely to find that indirectness and unconsciousness are not the best ways to balance obligations in the intimate sector with those to strangers and hypothetical others. I will try to demonstrate this point with respect to the United States by considering three ways by which modern liberal democrats are asked to consider the needs of distant others: by intergenerational transfers, which require people to think hypothetically about their obligations in time; by patterns of charitable giving and voluntarism, which express obligations altruistically to strangers; and by the degree to which culture establishes restraints on individual desires for the sake of living together with anonymous others.

Generations and the Social Order

Obligations between generations are not completely synonymous with obligations to distant strangers: when we provide for the elderly we do so in part by giving care to our own parents; when we provide for the very young we do so in part by giving care to our own children. Yet intergenerational moral obligations illustrate the general problem of organizing relations among distant others nonetheless. Obligations to the young and the old are obligations to others who, even if we know them, tend to be inherently dependent. They therefore can be taken as symbolic of all the kinds of dependency that exist in modern society. If the most visibly dependent elements of the population are not well cared for, it is difficult to imagine that others who think of themselves as independent—but who, because they are modern, are dependent on everyone else anyway—will be well cared for as well.

To examine the effects of greater reliance on the moral code of the market with regard to people distant in time from us, therefore, we must look first at the future prospects of those who are children today. To the degree that reliance on the market, especially in the economic sector of society, produces new wealth, its effects on future generations are positive, particularly for those in a position to take advantage of the new economic opportunities thus created. But we can identify three ways in which the needs of generations that will reach maturity after the present one are harmed by a weakening of the boundary between the market and civil society. One is an increase in the number of children who will grow up in poverty; the second is a weakening of the family as a support system, in ways harmful to children of all social classes; and the third is an emphasis on present consumption and gratification that encourages cynicism about the future.

The number of families below the poverty line in America rose dramatically in the early 1980s, the very years when Americans turned away from government in favor of the market. Although in recent years that trend has leveled off, the child poverty rate toward the end of the 1980s was the highest it had been since the early 1960s, despite a relatively well functioning economy (see table 2).^[2] In 1983, 40 percent of the poor people in America were children, and 13.8 million American children lived in poor families.^[3] Moreover, as these trends began to penetrate public consciousness, Americans remained reluctant to tax themselves in order to help the poor among them. As W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson put it, "In contrast to the deep love we feel and express in private, we lack any sense of 'public love' for children, and we are unwilling to make any public commitments to them except when we believe the commitments will pay off."^[4]

Of all children, moreover, those who are poorest are most likely to feel the effects of the weakening of moral ties in the intimate realm of society. Many of the trends that have weakened family bonds, such as divorce, working-woman heads of families, and the difficulties of relying on kin for child care, will, demographers project, continue over the next few decades, even if at a lower rate.^[5] Each trend will make it that much more difficult for poor children to escape from poverty. Between 1960 and 1980, the number of female-headed families tripled.^[6] As a result, in Martha Hill's words, "most children now have mothers who are balancing child-rearing and market work responsibilities, many with no father present to assist in fulfilling these responsibilities."^[7]

One likely consequence of increased child poverty will be a focus on survival in the present without consideration of consequences for the future. Phyllis Moen, Edward Kain, and Glen Elder point out:

Family responses to economic distress are generally directed to immediate needs, with an eye toward specific, short-range consequences. As elements of strategies for economic survival, parental decisions are mostly geared to the short term. But what may be functional in the short run for the family unit may inadvertently have disastrous consequences for the lives of children. It is these indirect and unanticipated outcomes that may, in fact, have the greatest significance for the life prospects of children.^[8]

American families, in other words, will increasingly live in two separate time frames. They will decide whether to pay for dental care, preventive medicine, or education based on present needs, not future potential. To the degree that they opt to live in the present—since the market leaves them little choice—an increasing number of parents will find themselves playing God, taking risks with their children's lives and praying that the risks are worth it.

Uncertain prospects face not only poor children in America. "Families at every economic level are increasingly unsure of what the future holds—for themselves and for their children," Moen, Kain, and Elder continue.^[9] Under increasing financial pressure to pay for more expensive homes with higher mortgage rates, an increasing number of middle-class American families are finding themselves unable to save for their children's college education. In the absence of direct government grants-in-aid, the amounts taken out in student loans, once thought of as a middle-class supplement, not only tripled (in constant dollars) between 1975 and 1985 but were relied on by an ever greater number of borrowers. A study sponsored by the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, while obviously unable to ascertain whether such heavy indebtedness will alter career choices and family size in the long run, pointed out that "there are clear signs that indebtedness is likely to continue on its upward course" and noted that "students cannot know what the real burden of the debt they are assuming will be."^[10] A reversal of intergenerational obligation seems to be taking place: those born around 1920 often deprived themselves so that their children could go to college; those born around 1970 will deprive themselves as adults, not to pay for their children's education in the future, but to pay back their own education in the past.

As the pressures put on the family by the market intensify, children and young people in all social classes are less likely to find parents with the time and energy to respond to their special needs. The emotional (and nutritional) consequences have already begun to worry child specialists. Rituals that incorporate children into family bonds, such as the family meal, have increasingly become a thing of the past. "Food relationships," two experts have written, "seem minimal, fleeting, and superficial."^[11] The Kettering Commission on Youth spoke of a generation of young people "never having had the opportunity to care for a child or an elderly person, never having had to be with someone who was lonely, disconsolate, sick, or dying."^[12]

Not unaware of the present generation's weakening sense of obligation to them, younger people have begun to act as if their future is quite problematic. Between 1960 and 1980, the suicide rate among young people in the United States doubled, about as dramatic a sign one can have of severe anticipations of the future.^[13] (Teenage suicide might have surprised Durkheim, for, as he pointed out, suicide is rare among children.^[14] Since teenage suicide is neither egoistic—many teenagers do not yet have a fully developed ego—nor altruistic—it is hardly an act of duty—it would seem to be an ideal type of anomic suicide.) Not a single rate of what are generally

taken to be indicators of social disintegration—from crime to drugs to passivity—failed to increase among American youth in the past decade.^[15] Eighty percent of American youths in 1980 could not name one foreign head of state, although, it should be added, adult recognition of basic political facts in America is not all that much higher.^[16] A surprisingly large number of students were found to be believers in creationism, extraterrestrial life, and other notions that were supposed to disappear with modernity.^[17] American youths, it seems fair to say, are not being especially well prepared to take seriously their membership obligations in the adult society they will join.^[18]

Most of the attitudes toward social life we associate with the market are being passed on to a new generation. It is not that youth has become "immoral"; on most moral issues excluding those of sexual behavior, such as whether lying or cheating is justified, 1980s students were not significantly different in their responses than earlier generations of students.^[19] Rather, students today seem much more attracted to educational patterns and career choices that will give them immediate payoffs in market terms. Thus surveys conducted annually by the American Council on Education have discovered a significant decrease in altruistic feelings among college students in the 1980s: the number of students who felt that being well off financially was an essential life goal increased between 1967 and 1987 from 45 percent to over 70 percent, while those who wanted to develop a meaningful philosophy of life decreased from 84 percent to 40 percent. Similarly, careers in education dropped to extremely low levels before starting a slow rise again in 1984, while business careers have consistently increased in number since 1973.^[20] There seems little doubt that American youths have become more concerned with themselves and less concerned with the needs of others.

It is evident that not all the changes in young people's outlook and behavior can be traced to a greater reliance on marketplace principles in the intimate sphere of society. It is also true, furthermore, that a concern with the alleged immorality of youth has been a theme throughout American history. Yet despite the caveats, there have taken place changes of sufficient magnitude to conclude that reliance on the market as a moral code does not leave an especially positive legacy for future generations. For all those who may benefit economically from a loosening of the moral ties of civil society, there are many who do not. Moreover, something seems amiss in the social and moral prospects of all children, not just those living in poverty. The weakening of the boundary between civil society and the market

allows little room for the symbolic ways by which present generations transfer obligations to future generations. Pessimism about the future, increases in antisocial acts such as suicide and crime, and a tendency to serve the self to the exclusion of others testify to the difficulty of considering obligations as abstract as those to future generations when present decisions are guided ever more by considerations of self-interest.

Just as a greater reliance on the moral code of the market makes sacrifices for future generations more problematic, it also suggests that present generations will be less likely to recognize that their good fortune was the result of sacrifices made by earlier ones. This is not to suggest that those who are now in retirement face a future of increasing poverty. Especially in material terms, older people in America have it better at the end of the 1980s than ever before. Indeed, the meaning of old age in the United States has been almost completely transformed, with many elderly people living longer and better than anyone could have imagined a generation ago. To the degree that the improvement in their condition is a product of the rapid increase in the stock market during the 1980s, market reliance has meant obvious benefits for those living on pensions. Much the same can be said for improvements in health care, the possibilities of warm-weather retirement, and other aspects of old age in the United States. We have, especially in contrast to previous periods, taken good care to satisfy our obligations toward those who came before us.

Yet in moral as opposed to material terms, the extension of the market into the intimate realm of civil society does have serious consequences for the lives of our elders, because the family is still the largest provider of support and care.^[21] Proximity to children is an important prerequisite of care, yet grandparents and their children live farther away from each other than ever before. As Andrew Cherlin and Frank Furstenberg put it, "Grandparents are at the mercy of their children's mobility."^[22] (Surprisingly, Cherlin and Furstenberg discuss only children who move away from their parents, not, in this age of Sunbelt retirement communities, parents who move away from their children.) Smaller families decrease the number of children available to support the elderly. Divorce, moreover, complicates the question of who is responsible to whom.^[23] Under the impact of such changes, parents, like their children, look less to the future, although positive feelings about the future still underlie a willingness to provide care.^[24] Friendship networks and ties of reciprocity can help substitute for weakening family ties, yet these aspects of civil society are also in decline as the market is relied on to organize real estate to an unprecedented degree.^[25]

Such demographic changes, in Pamela Doty's words, "are likely to decrease the availability of informal family supports in the future."^[26] The same tie between a weak sense of obligation in the intimate realm and a failure to recognize obligations in the distant realm that affects children in America, in other words, also affects the elderly.

Increasingly unsure that their families will be able to care for them and extremely distrustful of politicians at a time of cost cutting, older Americans have responded by forming interest groups and lobbying, quite successfully, for benefits.^[27] In so doing, however, they tend to reinforce the idea that each generation is a special interest, whose primary responsibility is to look after its own.^[28] As a result, talk of "intergenerational inequity" has become more frequent in the United States.^[29] Anxious to protect the benefits they have won, the elderly often become politically unsympathetic to the needs of those who will themselves be elderly in the future. At the same time, a large number of recently married Americans, about to start families of their own under conditions of uncertainty about the future, instead of recognizing that their prosperity is the product of sacrifices made by older Americans when they were young, have begun to ask whether older Americans have it too easy. Thus polling data assembled by Daniel Yankelovich in the late 1970s indicated that parents not only expect to sacrifice less for their children but will also expect less from their offspring when they themselves go into retirement: the proportion of Americans who believed that "children do not have an obligation to their parents regardless of what their parents have done for them" was 67 percent.^[30]

For all the success the market has shown in improving the material conditions of many, but by no means all, elderly people, it has at the same time confused our sense of what the young owe the elderly and what the elderly owe the young. The material success of the elderly in the United States contributes to their "modernization," to the triumph of such market-associated values as individualism. Symbolized by retirement communities in warm-weather areas which exclude families with young children or by the quest for perfect health regardless of the costs to the rest of the society, the elderly often find themselves cut off from other generations; in a certain sense, they live outside those aspects of the life course inevitably associated with aging. As Daniel Callahan has put it, "There can be no community at all, much less community among the generations, without some sacrifice of an unlimited quest for individualistic pleasure on the part of the old."^[31] It is as if the same cynicism toward the future that is now developing among the young is matched by a cynicism toward the past on the part of

older generations. In many ways, the fact that the elderly can live by the same moral rules as everyone else is a positive development, yet, like the very rich, the elderly are in fact different from everyone else. It is not discrimination, but simple common moral sense, that leads us to organize our relations with them by different moral rules than apply to individuals better situated to maximize self-interest in interaction with others.

If we take ties between the generations as symbolic of people's ability to be responsible for the needs of hypothetical and distant others, reliance on the market, as the American experience indicates, becomes increasingly problematic. Because of improved technology and health care, infants live to adulthood and the elderly live to an age that would only seem miraculous to previous generations. Yet it is not just that our obligations have expanded over time that is important; it is also that we have greater awareness of how these obligations ought to affect what we do. As Annette Baier puts the matter:

We are especially self-conscious members of the cross-generational community, aware both of how much, and how much more than previous generations, we benefit from the investment of earlier generations and of the extent to which we may determine the fate of future generations. Such self-consciousness has its costs in added obligations.^[32]

It is questionable whether the moral principles of the market constitute the best way to represent this self-consciousness of intergenerational dependency. The very features that make markets so effective in the economic sector—indirection, spontaneity, and the ability to take advantage of unforeseen consequences—are not features that make for adequate recognition of the debts that all generations owe one another. Because the social fabric is vertical as well as horizontal, reliance on the market to account for intergenerational obligations takes inadequate recognition of what can only be called "the social limits to time."^[33]

The Fate of the Third Sector

Ever since Tocqueville, Americans have prided themselves on their voluntary organizations. So important is the idea of voluntarism in America that it is often called "the third sector," sitting alongside the market and the state. The third sector includes charity, not-for-profit corporations, volunteer fire companies and ambulance services, museums and cultural institutions, hospitals, religious activities, public libraries, community organiza-

tions, blood donation centers, the Red Cross, the Peace Corps, and any other effort characterized by community spirit and altruism.^[34] The Filer Commission on Private Philanthropy has estimated that one out of every ten Americans is employed in the third sector.^[35]

The third sector is continually being rediscovered because it serves as a symbol of obligations to strangers. When we agree to donate time or to give to charity of our own free will, it is because we recognize that others whom we do not know are dependent on the choices we make. Although they are sometimes conflated, therefore, voluntarism and the market are quite different moral codes. One is based on sacrifice and puts the interest of the collective before that of the individual. The other is rooted in distrust and pleasure maximization and puts the interest of the individual before that of the collective.^[36] Today, greater reliance on the moral code of the market in families and communities raises the question of whether Americans are as committed to the third sector as they have been in the past.

If asked about their attitudes toward voluntarism in surveys, Americans say they believe as much as ever in the ethic of the third sector. For example, data collected and published by the Independent Sector (a merger of the National Council on Philanthropy and the Council of National Voluntary Organizations) indicate not only that a large number of Americans (more than half) volunteer in one effort or another but also that the rate of voluntarism increased by over 20 percent from 1984 to 1985.^[37] It is obvious that the idea of voluntarism is still powerful in American society, no matter how preoccupied Americans have become with their private selves.

Moreover, if positive feelings toward the voluntary sector increased, so have contributions to charity. A number of major empirical studies have measured the degree to which Americans give to charity, and most come to similar conclusions.^[38] (Table 3, containing data collected by economist Ralph Nelson for the American Association of Fund Raising Councils, presents the most reliable as well as most representative figures.) First, the highest rates of charitable giving in recent years took place in the years immediately after World War II, when, as I argued in Chapter 2, the pressures of the market were lower than before or since. From this peak, rates of charitable giving began to fall, reaching a low point sometime during the 1970s. Beginning in the 1980s, however, government cutbacks in social programs sharply reduced the amount of funds available for the American version of the welfare state, and in consequence Americans began to increase the amounts they gave to charity.^[39] (A variety of volunteer organi-

zations, including Hadassah and the National Association of Women's Clubs, report increasing membership in the early 1980s as well, which reverses an earlier decline.)^[40] These latter developments in particular insure that the present period, characterized as it is by faith in the market, will not be characterized by greater private niggardliness—although, as Alan

Pifer of the Carnegie Foundation has written, the notion that private donations could make up for government programs "is, frankly, ridiculous to someone who is well informed about the entire field of philanthropy."^[41]

Despite the fact that reliance on the market as a moral code has not harmed the moral logic of the third sector overall, there is at least some reason to think that it might in the future. As is the case with intergenerational moral obligations, people are more likely to volunteer and to give to charity—thereby recognizing their obligations to distant strangers—when family and community relations in the intimate sector of society are strong. A survey undertaken by the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan for the Filer Commission indicated that married people give more to charity than single people, small-town residents more than urbanites, and old people more than young.^[42] Thus, although gross data indicate that people give as much to charity as ever, closer analysis reveals that ties of help from kin and neighbors have declined in America, even as ties of help at the workplace have increased.^[43] Perhaps the most significant caveat in an otherwise optimistic picture about third-sector obligations is the fact that young people, who tend to give less to charity, also tend to volunteer less: the Independent Sector data showed an 11 percent drop in volunteer rates for Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four.^[44] This decline, moreover, can be directly traced to greater market intervention in families: the added burden of student loans has been cited by the director of the Independent Sector as one cause of a declining commitment to voluntarism.^[45]

Another obvious change in the intimate level of society that affects a willingness to express obligations to distant others is the entry of women into the labor market. In the United States, the giving of time rather than money has traditionally reflected a sexual division of labor, in which men worked for income and women devoted time to community and charitable concerns.^[46] As women begin to work, their ability to participate in voluntary organizations declines.^[47] At least one study found that between 1974 and 1980 women's participation in voluntary associations declined significantly, a trend that has also been noted in such areas as religious work.^[48] Moreover, when working women do volunteer, they tend to join associations that have instrumental rather than expressive purposes, that is, organizations with less of a direct service orientation.^[49] Although one side to the women's movement of the 1970s was to encourage voluntarism in the form of women's self-help groups, birth counseling centers, and other innovations very much in the Tocquevillean tradition of American life, it also seems inevitable that the drive for equality in wages and working conditions between women and men, however justifiable on its own terms, will

significantly crimp a long-standing tendency for American women to express moral difference by participating in charitable activities out of a sense of obligation to the community.^[50]

As these trends in family structure suggest, the problem is more one of time than of money. Because of greater family income resulting from two wage-earners, lower federal taxes, and an economic recovery, many families had more disposable income in the early 1980s. Yet giving time and attention to community is in many ways more important for strengthening the social bond between strangers than is giving money. As people work longer hours, they may be substituting higher monetary contributions for the time that is no longer at their disposal. Thus, if we consider the rates at which people offer something other than money, we find a decline as the market becomes a more important force in American life. Figures compiled by the Red Cross indicate that between 1972 and 1984, activities that require more than the giving of money, such as chapter formation, the joining of community volunteers, or student participation in school programs, have decreased (see figure 4).

Although corporate contributions to charity do not reflect the same tensions between intimate and distant obligations, greater reliance on the market ought to have consequences in this area as well. As with attitudes toward voluntarism and rates of private charitable giving, corporate contributions to charities increased in the first half of the 1980s. Data assembled by the American Association of Fund Raising Councils show that these increases in fact raised the level of corporate giving to the highest it has been since 1960 (see table 4). Such corporate generosity of course has its self-interested side, since firms, unlike individuals, give money not out of a feeling of personal obligation to strangers but instead to identify potential markets.^[51] Moreover, since corporations account for only about 5 percent of charitable giving in America, the increase that did take place in the early 1980s in no way matched the concurrent decline in public funding. Salamon and Abramson estimated that private giving would have had to increase by 30 to 40 percent a year between 1981 and 1985 to make up for the cutbacks proposed in Ronald Reagan's first budget,^[52] yet the largest one-year increase in corporate giving, between 1983 and 1984, was 16 percent.^[53] Still, no one was forcing corporations to give more, and in that sense higher profits in the private sector do not necessarily produce lower donations in the charitable sector.

Whether that pattern will continue in the future, however, is also problematic. Because corporate donations are dependent on profits, they can easily decrease as economic conditions change—a trend that has in fact

[Full Size]

Figure 4.
American Red Cross, Chapters and Volunteers, 1965–84
Note: 1971 data not available.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau,  Statistical Abstracts of the United States:  
1970, 307; 1976, 322; 1980, 363; 1984, 399; 1986, 384.

already begun to happen. In 1986, the Conference Board in its annual survey noted a 2.5 percent decrease in corporate giving over the previous year. Even the figures of the American Association of Fund Raising Councils, which tend to portray higher rates of giving, indicated only a modest increase in 1986. According to William Woodside, executive chairman of Pri-

merica Corporation (once known as American Can), a new breed of manager has already taken over American industry, one that thinks "it becomes positively un-American to look at anything except their own bottom line." These people may not agree with T. Boone Pickens's observation that "company giving has to be related to the company's interests; not be a gift to the ballet because my wife likes ballet." Yet when leveraged buyouts, insider trading scandals, and hostile takeovers characterize the corporate world, business giving for charitable purposes will likely decline.^[54]

Much, although by no means all, of the evidence assembled here does not support my thesis that greater reliance on the market will harm one form by which we express obligations to distant others, that is, voluntarism and private charity. In the first half-decade of the 1980s at least, Americans, although preoccupied with material considerations, did not contribute less to charity or show less willingness to volunteer. Yet a nagging sense that this fact does not tell the whole story makes me reluctant to conclude that the matter is settled. In matters concerning private charity, a weakening of the boundary between the intimate realm and the market has already led to people's being less able to donate time to others and will likely, given present trends, produce problems for charitable contributions in the future. In matters concerning corporate charity, trends already indicate, because of increased economic competition and a more market-oriented sense of moral obligation, declines in the amounts that will be forthcoming.

We might therefore give the last word, not, of course, to Tocqueville, but to two contemporary French visitors, both of whom wanted to find the world of Tocqueville still in existence but, unhappily, did not. The anthropologist Hervé Varenne, who lived for a year in a small town in Wisconsin, was determined not to preach to Americans about their society as so many Europeans tend to do. Because one cannot live in a small town in America without becoming involved in the Farm Bureau Federation—or so Varenne thought—he began attending meetings. "The times I was present," he wrote, "no substantial issues arose and the meetings were poorly attended." Moreover, he found that this had been the pattern for some time. "The people who came were the original founders, now in their sixties to eighties. No young adults attended the meetings." Hence, "discussion was weak, superficial, uninvolved. The leader had to force and cajole people into taking positions, something that they did only after ensuring that unanimity would not be destroyed by their decision." The lessons taught at such meetings are far removed from Tocqueville's ideas about a virtuous citizenry.^[55]

Similarly Michel Crozier, despite his great respect for the United States, was frightened by the change that had taken place in the country between his first visit in 1946 and a subsequent one in 1980. America was, in his view, a long way from Tocqueville's hoped-for "free schools" of civic virtue:

The United States today is no longer the America Tocqueville described. Its voluntary associations have ceased to be the mainstay of a democracy constantly on the move but are now simply a means of self-defense for various interests (which, though perfectly ethical, are still parochial in nature). This breakdown of community structures is what has made America a country full of anxiety, and periodically shaken by reactionary crusades.^[56]

Voluntarism and charity, it seems fair to conclude, are still strongly encouraged virtues, and they still play an important role in American life. There are reasons, though, for worrying that future trends will not be so positive if the market continues to grow as a moral code for individual decision-making.

Loosely Bounded Culture and the Market

Modern liberal democrats are able to live together with strangers because their choices are to some degree organized by culture. When cultures work well, they do so by uniting members of a group around a set of common stories that define their identity. In most cases these stories emphasize the need for some kind of restraint on individual desires so that meeting obligations to others becomes as important as satisfying the needs of the self. Even in societies where religious traditions are weak, secular stories—Washington's honesty, Lincoln's humility—allow the transmission of moral rules by emphasizing trust, probity, solidarity, and other virtues that enable people to live in something other than a Hobbesian world. Culture, in short, like intergenerational obligations or the third sector, ties together distant strangers who would otherwise not recognize their mutual interdependence and gives them a stake in what others do.

Culture in America, especially when compared to more ethnically homogeneous societies, is not especially strong in its binding capacity. As Richard Merelman has pointed out, American culture is uncomfortable with bipolar dichotomies, strict standards, and sharp boundaries. It is not a Durkheimian morality standing above utilitarian individualism with disapproving powers, but rather an all-forgiving, undemanding, and affirming mechanism of reinforcement. Strong cultures dichotomize and, in the tension that results, unite. Weak cultures unify and, in the harmony that

results, leave differences unresolved.^[57] Culturally speaking, Americans tend to be unbound to begin with.

In recent years, there has been considerable discussion in the United States as to whether an already weak culture has not become even weaker. One does not need to be a preacher, or even a member of the Moral Majority, to recognize that the stories associated with Washington and Lincoln seem to have little to do with how Americans lead their lives in the late twentieth century. In the early 1980s, Americans were exposed to presidential aides who routinely broke laws; Wall Street brokers who traded on inside information; fundamentalist religious figures who engaged in dubious moral enterprises; defense contractors who thought first of their company's bottom line and only later of the national security; and interest groups whose concerns extended no further than their own self-interest, no matter how damaging to the social fabric as a whole. A general lament that more and more Americans think of themselves first and of their obligations to society only later, if at all, has become the stuff of conventional wisdom.

Is the conventional wisdom correct? Popular sentiment nearly always believes morality to be in decline and yearns for the "good old days," when people were honest and law-abiding. In the absence of any controlled experiments to measure whether honesty and trust have in fact atrophied, such sentiments can and should be dismissed as hopelessly nostalgic. It is therefore of particular interest that—in what can only be described as life imitating sociology—an experiment not even Harold Garfinkel could have invented for testing the strength of tacit understandings of the social bond took place, purely by accident, in Columbus, Ohio, on 22 November 1987, when the doors of an armored truck opened on Interstate Highway 71, spilling hundred-dollar bills all over the road. Did passing motorists, Lincoln-like, carry the bills back to the rightful owner, perhaps in expectations of praise or even a small reward? On the contrary, it seems, Bonnie-and-Clyde-like, that they not only kept the money they found but were praised in the public imagination for doing so.^[58] (Likewise, the fact that one of the figures involved in the Watergate scandal, Jeb Stuart Magruder, was later hired to discover the moral lessons that followed from this incident indicates either a tremendous capacity for forgiveness or a serious confusion about what morality means.)^[59] One can interpret the results of this fortuitous experiment in any number of ways, but surely one interpretation ought to be that rules of moral obligation to anonymous others are enforced either by cultural standards or not at all.

If it is difficult to know whether the moral stories that give strangers a stake in the actions of others are weakening in influence, it is even more difficult to know whether such a weakening might be attributed to greater reliance on the market and its moral code in the intimate realm of civil society. The grounds for thinking that this probably is the case should be obvious. One attraction of the market as a moral code is that, unlike strong cultural ties, it emphasizes the immediate fulfillment of individual needs and desires. As a result, and not surprisingly, a certain tension has always existed between culture and the market. One binds, the other unwinds. One is individualistic (if more in theory than in practice), the other collectivistic. One thinks of the present, the other of the past and the future. One seeks change, the other stability. Goods, as Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood have shown, can be surrounded by the trappings of culture, but as we saw in the discussion of the Chicago school of economics in Chapter 1, culture imposes limits, and markets have a way of overcoming those limits.^[60]

Will greater reliance on the market's moral code in the intimate sphere of society weaken culturally defined obligations to distant others? It is impossible to say for sure. We can, however, find suggestive evidence in one corner of American life: advertising, the cultural industry with the greatest impact on popular perceptions in the United States today. Ironically this industry, before it came to be organized by market principles, was better able to tell stories that defined a common identity—even if those stories were those of the market—than it does now that the market increasingly regulates its internal dynamics.

Industries do not structure themselves according to the logic of the market overnight. Methods of production are often born in households or in small firms that operate by rules emphasizing intimacy and close personal contacts. Nonmarket methods of producing for the market have in fact been fairly common in Western experience: apprenticeship, family ties (still important in many ethnic communities), trusteeships, partnerships, and even early corporations were organized by an emphasis on personal responsibility rather than impersonal calculations of pure self-interest.^[61] Advertising, like many industries, was not originally organized by market principles. Attracted to advertising as an arena to exercise a craft, the men who started the industry in the United States believed, however myopically, in a kind of cultural uplift. Advertising for them was a profession organized by a guild, not a free market in both labor and sales. Such marketplace principles as ease of entry and exit, weak customer loyalty, and

ruthless competition were not as important as paternalism and gentleman's agreements. As Jackson Lears has shown, moreover, early advertising men believed that they were guardians of the public taste, not of business ends, leading campaigns for truth and sincerity, which their own advertisements were undermining.^[62] A generation later, advertising men, even while paving the way toward a modern, consumption-oriented, capitalist society, were, in Roland Marchand's view, continually shocked at the gullibility of the very public they were trying to influence, as if greed and acquisition, rather than being essential moral features of capitalism, were somehow unseemly.^[63]

From a craft American advertising has developed in the past twenty years into a form of enterprise organized to an unusually strong degree on market principles. As was the case with families, communities, and schools, it is surprising how late the market came to be relied on to organize advertising as a form of cultural production. Not until the 1950s and 1960s were employees recruited from all sectors of society and not just from WASP enclaves as before. Because they were labor-intensive, advertising agencies began to enter and exit the market with ease. Turnover among staff became more rapid than in any other industry; George Lois, once a "hot property" on Madison Avenue, quit Papert Koening Lois, started Lois Holland Calloway, quit that agency, joined another firm as president, was fired, and then started Lois Pitts Gershon—all within only a few years.^[64]

By the 1970s, customers of the advertising industry were beginning to respond to increased marketplace logic. Rather than keeping their accounts with a single firm, they began to move their accounts rapidly from one agency to another. Agencies went public in an effort to raise cash (and then were often bought back by their previous owners). Mergers increased dramatically. Toward the end of the 1970s government regulatory agencies began to allow direct comparisons of competing products (a practice formerly banned by companies themselves as part of gentleman's agreements). International competition hit the advertising agencies in the 1980s as some of the most famous U.S. advertising firms were bought and sold by foreign companies, while new challengers, such as the British firm of Sachi and Sachi, began to dominate a world advertising market. Meanwhile at home, advertising took what seemed to be the last logical step; instead of interrupting programs—in this case, children's programs—with ads, it took control of the program itself, turning the whole show into a carefully designed product campaign.^[65]

"The advertising profession," Merelman has written, "is composed of

many small firms which compete with each other in a classical free market. Advertising agencies resemble corner grocery stores in a medium-sized city more than they resemble either the three commercial television networks for whom they design commercials or the corporations for whom they labor."^[66] As it came increasingly to be organized by a new moral logic, the advertising industry no longer resembled an exclusive club of like-minded artistes . A new economic logic, in turn, affected the production of stories in the industry. The messages transmitted by advertisers began to depart from those emphasizing what Alex Kroll of Young and Rubicam called "the vibes you get in a screening room [or] . . . peer applause" in favor of what he calls "consumer take-away . . . the cold, gritty eye of the marketplace."^[67]

Roland Marchand's rendering of the great parables of American advertising—the stories purveyed in the 1920s and 1930s—suggests that to the extent the advertising industry is not organized by the logic of the market, the greater its ability to tell the story of the market, for, in its early days, advertising was full of wonder toward capitalism and its potential to create a material utopia.^[68] It was the set of gentleman's agreements and exclusivity, the feeling of belonging to a special club, that enabled the advertising industry to develop and deliver its message. In the intensely competitive environment of contemporary advertising, by contrast, nothing is taboo so long as it sells. Indeed, given the constant need for novelty in saturated advertising outlets, the more outrageous and morally offensive an advertising campaign is, the more likely it will be to call attention to the product being promoted. Not surprisingly, therefore, the advertising industry will even utilize anticapitalist themes if they help to sell the client's goods. In contrast to the great parables of capitalist growth that characterized American advertising fifty years ago, Michael Schudson's examination of more contemporary ads led him to this conclusion: "If capitalism is a system promoting private ownership, these ads are oddly anticapitalist or noncapitalist, honoring traditions of social solidarity like family, kinship, and friendship that at least in principal are in conflict with the logic of the market."^[69]

Twenty years ago radical critics of advertising worried that people were being bombarded with so many messages supporting the capitalist way of life that their ability to develop their own opinions was seriously threatened.^[70] At the present time, advertising illustrates another fear altogether: when culture-producing institutions are organized by the logic of the market, it is not the reproduction of any one set of cultural ideas that seems problematic, but the inability of these institutions to produce any cultural

ideas at all. The debate between the advertising industry and its critics once centered on whether people shaped culture or culture shaped people. What seems to matter more, however, is the texture of the culture and the character of the people that are shaped. As advertising becomes more driven by a pure market logic, both the culture and the individuals affected by it are changed.

Culture, as we know from Clifford Geertz and other anthropologists, is an interpretative phenomenon, a way of telling stories.^[71] For Americans, advertising is one of the primary means of storytelling. Yet as advertising becomes ever more organized according to the logic of the market, something happens to the stories. They thin out, become less ambiguous, more repetitious. Reluctant to offend any constituency, advertising searches for common themes; as Merelman puts it, it "fiercely condenses the mythic message in time and space."^[72] Advertising, increasingly underinterpretative, involves itself with what Varda Leymore calls, not mythic, but "a degenerated form of myth," one always searching for the "exhaustive common denominator."^[73]

The thinning of cultural experience that has occurred as advertising has become more oriented to marketplace demands would matter less if individuals had other places to turn for their stories. The problem is that liberal societies organized by the market are not strong on storytelling. As Stanley Hauerwas writes, "Ironically, the most coercive aspect of the liberal account of the world is that we are free to make up our own story. The story that liberalism teaches is that we have no story, and as a result we fail to notice how deeply that story determines our lives."^[74] The story of capitalism was at least a story. Its passing, and the failure of its opponents to substitute a satisfactory alternative story, leave Americans with fewer common symbols that make sense of the society they inhabit.

We can, then, identify grounds for concluding that weakening moral ties in the intimate realm of society will contribute to a weakening of those forms of obligations to distant others that are expressed through culture. This is not merely to state that stories are more likely to be meaningful and to inculcate moral lessons when taught by parents to children or in similar intimate situations, though it is probably true that weakened family ties—such as the lack of contact between grandparents and grandchildren—have contributed to what David Gutmann calls "deculturation."^[75] It is also to state that even when stories are told and retold as part of an industry designed to get people to buy things, they will be less morally binding when the industry itself comes less to resemble the moral world of

civil society. To the extent that personal feelings and a sense of professional pride no longer mitigate against an "anything goes so long as it makes money" attitude, the messages of advertising will take on the same coloration as the methods by which they are produced. If advertising is one of the major forms of cultural production in America, cultural understandings are less likely to insist that collective recognitions of obligations to others ought to take precedence over the fulfillment of immediate desires.

The Market and the Social Fabric

Ever since Charles Dickens, stories about the penetration of the warmth of families and communities by the hard-heartedness of greed and self-interest have brought tears to the eye. Yet while bonds in the intimate realm of civil society do offer comfort and security, relations to strangers and hypothetical others are, in many ways, more important. Society can only reproduce itself when people are capable of identifying with those they do not know and, in all likelihood, will never come to know. We cannot have families to love and communities to appreciate unless we first have societies that require us to consider the needs of nonintimate others.

Our dependence on strangers and hypothetical others, and their dependence on us, ought to mean that we are best off relying on the moral codes of markets and states, since both, in contrast to the moral codes of civil society, emphasize impersonality and anonymity. It is surely for this reason that the market and the state play such major roles in structuring the moral obligations of modern liberal democrats. Yet if the experience of recent American life is any indication, reliance on the market to structure distant moral rules does not work as promised. By examining three ways by which we are called on to express obligations to distant others—intergenerational dependency, generalized altruism, and ties of culture—I have tried to show that the penetration of market logic into civil society in fact tends to weaken our sense of obligation to those with whom our fates are impersonally connected.

The moral principle of the market, that our primary obligation is to ourselves, fits intergenerational dependency poorly. It is surely more "rational" for one generation to transfer the costs of its debts to another, just as it is "irrational" to put money into social security funds when one may well have no opportunity to collect in the end. Furthermore, the ability of any particular generation to make rational choices is premised on the "irrational" conduct of the one that came before, since it was their sacrifice

that helped make possible our fortune.^[76] The impatience with time manifested in the theories of the Chicago school of economics does have its real-life counterpart in both an unwillingness to wait so that future generations might benefit and a lack of appreciation for the fact that the capacity to make rational choices depends on the altruistic deeds of previous generations.

Even theories of moral obligation that avoid the problems of basing individual motivation on egoistic self-interest have difficulty expressing why generations are interdependent, so long as they make individual calculations of interest their main assumption. In A Theory of Justice, for example, John Rawls admits that "the veil of ignorance fails to secure the desired result" when justice between generations is at issue. He argues that since people in what he calls the original position cannot know which generation they will be part of, they will establish rules fair to all generations that come after (a practice that is unjust to the first generation, as Rawls acknowledges). Yet by adding to this articulation the qualification that "a generation cares for its immediate descendants, as fathers, say, care for their sons," Rawls recognizes that, contrary to his general insistence on moral rules that are impersonal and weakly motivated, intergenerational obligations are a special case, in which affection and loyalty, even love, ought to play a role.^[77]

If it is true, as Karl Mannheim once wrote, that "as far as generations are concerned, the task of sketching the layout of the problem undoubtedly falls to sociology," it may be because the ties between generations are a matter of moral intuition, social common sense, and obligatory notions of reciprocity, all of which are part of what used to be called civil society.^[78] It is simply no longer sufficient to quote Joseph Addison's aphorism that "We are always doing something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us" and so dismiss the issue.^[79] Indeed, few philosophers have dismissed the issue as thoroughly as Thomas Schwartz, who argues that we have no obligations at all to the generations that will come after us.^[80] To develop satisfactory rules of intergenerational moral responsibility, modern liberal democrats would in all likelihood be better off trying to protect the institutions of civil society rather than relying on a moral code that often cannot see beyond the present generation.

A similar conclusion can be drawn concerning those obligations embodied in general altruism to strangers. It is obvious that altruism is an important aspect of the social order; even Chicago school economists consider it important enough to theorize extensively about.^[81] Sociologists and

anthropologists have also been interested in the "gift relationship," viewing altruistic behavior as the expression of the forms of solidarity that make society work.^[82] There is something quaint about this literature that conjures up images of necklaces being passed around in ever-widening chains. Yet in large-scale, bureaucratic, and capitalist societies, where most interactions are between strangers, direct giving, as in the case of organ transplants, is still a social need.^[83] Indeed, the more complex and anonymous societies become, the greater the need for people to give to each other. No one can enjoy a park unless others give the gift of keeping the park free of crime. When wage restraint characterizes wage negotiations, the gift of freedom from inflation is granted. When strikes are kept to a minimum, everyone enjoys the gift of less social disruption. Employers who do not fire workers when times are rough give the rest of society the gift of not having to pay, through taxes, the costs of unemployment.

Despite its emphasis on satisfaction and a utilitarian preference for the avoidance of pain, reliance on the market involves just as much sacrifice and gift giving as any other form of moral obligation. If workers accept lower pay or higher productivity as necessary to spur reindustrialization, they give to their employers the gift of higher profits. Deregulate airlines, and a predictable number of people will give the gift of life so that a social value called competition may be enhanced. When public land is turned over to the private sector, those who once received the gift of nature renounce their treasure so that others can use it for personal benefit. Scratch a believer in self-interest, and a philosopher of sacrifice—someone else's sacrifice—bleeds.

The question, then, is how different moral codes come to recognize and value the many small gifts of everyday life that reinforce the social order. The problem with reliance on the market as a moral code is that it fails to give moral credit to those whose sacrifices enable others to consider themselves freely choosing agents. By concentrating on the good news that we can improve our position, rather than the not-so-good, but socially necessary, news that we might consider the welfare of others as our direct concern, the market leaves us with no way to appreciate disinterest. Traditions of charity and voluntarism, by contrast, because they are premised on the idea that giving has moral and social rewards, symbolize the many ways in which the fates of strangers in modern society are interwoven, ways that become even more intricately bound as societies become more complex. If rates of charitable giving and voluntarism continue to increase in the United States, despite a greater trend toward reliance on the market in the

intimate sphere of society, there is no need to worry about this problem. But if I am correct in suggesting that the penetration of moral codes emphasizing self-interest into families and communities will, over time, weaken a sense of obligation to anonymous others, then the economic approach will once again fail the moral difficulties of modernity.

Finally, the indirection offered by the market fails to respond to the challenge of linking people's fates together through culture. Reliance on the market, as the example of advertising shows, loosens cultural ties, thereby impoverishing moral codes that emphasize restraint and replacing them with codes that, by placing no value on anything, encourage a sense that everything is morally permissible. Advertising men, like public-opinion technicians and manufacturers of frivolous goods, respond that they are only giving people what they want. This is true: the market is a fantastically sensitive device for responding to changes in preference. But that is also what makes it problematic as a moral code organizing obligations among strangers. Responsiveness to distant others is hard work; it demands that we distance ourselves from the siren call of immediate desire.

One way this distancing has traditionally been accomplished is by insisting on culture so refined in its sensibility that ordinary people can merely stand in passive awe. Hence, the weakness of culture in America is often lamented by those of a conservative bent who would like to see the stories of another time preserved as if in aspic.^[84] Yet cultural weakness ought to worry not only those committed to aristocratic values, but those committed to democratic values as well. Culture is equally problematic when, instead of the audience never being consulted, it is consulted all the time. Liberal democrats need to keep their instincts and their culture in a state of tension; neither must be allowed to rule over the other. Traditional forms of high culture leave liberal democrats little scope for participation. But culture organized by the moral code of the market leaves them little room for restrain. The demanding work of developing stories that join people together in mutual obligations will not come about if we rely on the market to structure the ways in which stories are told and retold; rather, only strong ties in civil society that insist on our participation in hearing and transmitting those stories will allow us to define and reinforce our rules of obligation to distant others.

Although few would doubt that the market's ability to produce economic growth today will meet obligations to generations tomorrow, reliance on the market does not solve the problem of balancing obligations in the intimate sphere of society with those toward distant others. Dis-

trustful of compartmentalization, inclined toward expansion, resentful of the limits imposed by time, space, and culture, the market is a poor instrument for sensitizing individuals to the complexities and paradoxes of moral obligations under modern conditions. We are more likely to meet those demands, as I will argue later in this book, when we learn through our relations in civil society the social practices that enable us to empathize with others, even with strangers and future generations. To meet the complexities of modernity, we are better off extending inward moral obligations outward, rather than outward moral obligations inward.