A Deep Worry Over Compulsion to Leave : Mobility Linked to Nation’s Lack of Commitment

LA JOLLA — For some time now, Richard Madsen has been troubled by commitment.

He’s worried that he fails to see it in college students, many of whom he teaches at UC San Diego. Madsen is a professor of sociology, one who has served as a Catholic priest and as a missionary in the Orient. He left those callings, and he left Taiwan. (More about his leavings later.)

He worries about leaving in general--leaving as a concept, or as a national habit.

A compulsion.

He worries that maybe the old saying is only half-right--when the going gets tough, the weak (rather than the tough) get going. Why else would so many auto workers flee Detroit? Why else would so many spouses flee a marriage?

He worries that many yuppies confuse leaving with commitment--they commit to a corporation, a “megabucks” paycheck, a new job in a jazzy new town. So they rarely think about the consequences-- all the consequences.

Madsen worries that the opposite is true--that leaving and commitment are very different things--and that the country is paying the price.

“It’s hard to make commitments when the way to get ahead in America is to break commitments,” he said. “The way to advance a career is through mobility--to look for a better job in a different place. Most of the people who come to Southern California have done exactly that.”

But are they committed to Southern California? Are they committed to enriching the life of a community in, say, San Diego? How many even know their neighbors?

He also worries that commitment--involvement in community--has gone sadly out of fashion. Who moves to a new area and immediately goes to work for senior citizens? Who spends more than a decade working to aid cancer victims--strictly as a volunteer? He believes the nastier fallout of high mobility--homesickness, loneliness--could be cured by a “deeper commitment” to a new community. Or, by staying in the old one.

‘Habits of the Heart’

Madsen, 45, has studied the problem of mobility versus rootlessness on a professional, even literary, level. He’s one of five authors of the best-selling, critically acclaimed book, “Habits of the Heart.”

“Habits” is mainly a study of the American yen for individualism and how its impact has torn asunder the sturdier concepts of commitment and community, leaving in limbo a nation’s values.

The title is derived from words of Alexis de Tocqueville, the French philosopher of the early 19th Century. Tocqueville wrote of America’s virtue of altruistic “habits”--family and religion, participation in local politics and the tendency of free institutions to counterbalance and deflect the excesses of free-enterprise individualism.

Tocqueville called them habits of the heart.

The heart and its habits may be in trouble, the authors say, because of the pocketbook or maybe just greed. What seems to have happened, they say, is that new habits have torn away old, with society the victim.

Individuals now will do almost anything, they say, to get ahead, fretting little about the cost--or about public, private, even marital responsibility.

Responsibility, they say, is on the wane.

As the Baltimore Sun noted: “ ‘Habits of the Heart’ holds up a mirror to American values, makes us examine ourselves, and dares us to question where our society is going. (It) will make you question your own habits and look into your own heart. Not many books possess that ability.”

One review was unfavorable.

“What the book says,” Madsen noted, “is that Americans’ selfishly pursuing economic wants is not good for the whole of society. The Wall Street Journal couldn’t live with that. I suppose they hold to the opposite value. They criticized us and Tocqueville, on whom we modeled our enterprise.”

Moral Dilemmas

Tocqueville said that, if the habits of the heart ever ebbed, America would be in trouble. In following that premise, Madsen & Co. did hours--years--of interviews (from 1979 to 1984). His were centered in the Boston area (he obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard) and in North San Diego County, where he found that almost all the people he surveyed had come from someplace else (most from out of state).

Regardless of geographical location--Fallbrook or Framingham--most shared similar concerns. They talked of moral dilemmas but did so in hushed tones, as if seemingly great issues--home, family, country, love--were now the province, not of community or conversation, but sadly of private anxiety, of embarrassment, even shame.

Many seemed buffeted by the winds of popular culture.

“Consumerism and materialism tend to undercut the commitments of the heart,” Madsen said. “The media are hostile to the language of commitment. Popular TV shows and advertising undercut (these commitments) with images of wealth and power,” as in “Life Styles of the Rich and Famous.”

He spoke of advertising that extols the virtues (through seduction and manipulation) of the “right” deodorant, beer and soft drink. Shows such as “Dallas” and “Dynasty” do the same, he said--and haven’t exactly won praise for glorifying the saintlier aspects of American character.

Madsen said universities--including his own--are part of the problem. Many hold “modern research, expert knowledge” in high esteem--even higher than traditional hallmarks of liberal education. The academic whiz selling his talents to the highest bidder is no rarer these days than a 7-foot basketball center doing the same. Students, Madsen said, seem “loathsomely preoccupied” with making a living--not as much with “making a life.”

He said mobility gave America its dynamism. “Go West, young man” had, at one time, real meaning. Now the last frontier is vanishing.

A Big Change

Madsen, a warm “old shoe” kind of person (with a knack for seeming as comfy as one), spent much of his early years in Taiwan and Hong Kong. He retains “commitments to the Orient, to my past” as chairman of UCSD’s Chinese Studies Program.

He left the priesthood and his missionary work in Taiwan, feeling academia a higher calling for “intellectual, morally committed” purposes, such as the “bridging of gaps between cultures.” He married a woman who had once been a nun, and soon they’ll adopt their own child--a Korean girl they have yet to meet who will fly from Seoul to Los Angeles.

Madsen prizes Oriental culture, believing its reverence for family is a statement for the ages, a standard worth following. Their mobility ranks secondary, he said, against broader landscapes of family and love.

American mobility? Nowadays, he said, it’s mostly a corporate phenomenon. He worries that such movement--at the cost of loyalty, stability and love--is the wave of the present and the future. What America needs, he said, is fewer self -commitments and more for the future.

“Take the (federal budget) deficit,” he said. “What do we gain by creating this huge problem for the next generation--our children? To say, ‘Well, the economy’s doing well, and I’ll be dead in the future, so my kids can worry’--that isn’t just stupid, it’s dangerous.”

Madsen doesn’t see Reagan’s slogan--”Bringing America Back”--as any kind of visionary change. To “dredge up tired policies of the past, to dredge up nostalgia” is, he said, sadly unworkable. He sees nostalgia--and symptoms of homesickness, loneliness and despair--as a malaise, evidence of a need for bolder solutions.

“Habits of the Heart” is hardly a testimony for partisan politics. The left has praised the book for criticizing the exigencies of free enterprise. The right has praised it for its predictions that more centralized government and larger corporate empires may squeeze out “the little man” and take over the country if individualism is left to flourish.

In other words, big autonomous structures will be the “checkers of abuse” if habits of the heart are not. And that, Madsen said, will forever compromise freedom.

He believes that it’s happening even now.

Think Twice

He and his co-authors see the church as a force worth renewing, with marriage close by. He remembers an interview subject, a corporate executive, who talked about staying married to one woman for so long. He spoke slowly, haltingly, muttering something about the hassle of divorce. Finally, he admitted a “shared history” was really important--that in some ways, history (their children and the memories it conceived) may have been love itself.

Madsen thinks Americans should look hard at their own mobility--and think twice before making a move. Believing that the trade-offs are sometimes tragic, he sees “staying, working things out” as an underrated, possibly outdated, notion--but a statement of value nonetheless. He sees leaving--as a cure-all for whatever ails you--as being somewhere in the stupid-and-dangerous category.

He finds it insightful that a region of the country could take on such a negative name--Rust Belt--while another gets labeled with the lure of a magic cure--Sun Belt. To prove the point that moving for moving’s sake is a shallow folly, Madsen cited the influx of auto workers from Michigan to Houston--and the fact that the depressed oil industry now jeopardizes that region.

“We’re a nation of contradictions,” he said. “We say we want commitment but seem mainly to pay lip service. The vast majority of people we interviewed say the thing that would make them happiest would be to marry, to settle down and have a family. I hear this from students too. But many say, almost in the same breath, ‘I just don’t want to be tied down.’ ”

Madsen worries that many have “wimped out,” that mobility nowadays seems restless, directionless, that doing something for the greater good of someone other than yourself seems quaint and peculiarly out of fashion.

Too many people, he said, fail to see a connection between homesickness, loneliness, et al , and the “healing spirit” of community life.

“I remember a Jewish woman who was asked why she went to the synagogue,” he said. “She said that she liked the people, they provided day care and so forth. Then she sighed and said, ‘Hmm, that isn’t it at all.’

“She talked of watching her baby sitter--a survivor of the Holocaust--cradling her daughter. She would rock the baby and sing to it, and all the while, you could see--you just couldn’t miss--the tattoo from Auschwitz.

“The woman knew at that point why she went to the synagogue--she owed it to herself, but more, she believed, to responsibility . . . to the needs of a heart.”