thers is one of the cornerstones of Bellah's analysis and critique of modern society. The community and others ahead of our own mirrors Bellah's concern that individualism and its relentless focus on the self has cut us off from our communities, our neighbors, and our sources of meaning.14) People's lives have become separated from the social settings that once provided them meaning and purpose.15) If we are to make any improvement in our visibly decaying society, is by means of our intelligences and imaginations, understand that we are, whether we like it or not, members of a community, or rather, sets of communities--neighborhoods surrounded by cities and towns, enclosed in counties and states and finally America. We must come to see that this America is our community, and that as members of it, we are going to be damaged one way or another if we do not from time to time put the interests of the whole above our own concerns. A people who will not sacrifice for the common good cannot expect to have any common good.16) There are fewer and fewer things that get people out of their houses to deal with other people outside of their work context. There are fewer communities that give them support.17) Have we become merely a collection of individuals rather then a community?18) The tendency of people to withdraw into their own small circle of life, leaving at large to itself.19) Americans don't realize because they value their individuality so much, that the ind. they treasure, their dignity, their autonomy, their sense of the ability to make moral choices to train their children in what's right, depends profoundly on the health and the effective functioning of the institutions that shape them.20) Individualism in this sense becomes something closer to isolationism, the desire to be entirely self-sufficient as a country and ignore events elsewhere in the world. 21) The answer is to work on making our institutions better.22) Religion is integ...
