DAVID CRUMM SAYS: Dr. Wayne Baker's analysis of American cultural values is eye opening and reassuring, as well.

This University of Michigan sociologist uses sophisticated analysis of global data to argue convincingly that faith, family and country matter deeply to Americans. In particular, faith is as strong a value in the U.S. as it is in countries around the world that we view as religiously conservative.

What makes us unusual among global cultures is that Americans also have a strong desire for self expression. In fact, the American desire for freedom of speech is as strong and widespread as it is in Scandinavia.

We may spend a lot of energy fighting cultural battles in the U.S., but Baker argues that there are more values that unite us than divide us as a people.

I recommend the book for small-group leaders who might purchase it and develop a series of discussions from its provocative and helpful conclusions.

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Product Description

Is America bitterly divided? Has America lost its traditional values? Many politicians and religious leaders believe so, as do the majority of Americans, based on public opinion polls taken over the past several years. But is this crisis of values real?

This book explores the moral terrain of America today, analyzing the widely held perception that the nation is in moral decline. It looks at the question from a variety of angles, examining traditional values, secular values, religious values, family values, economic values, and others. Using unique data from the World Values Surveys, the largest systematic attempt ever made to document attitudes, values, and beliefs around the world, this book systematically evaluates the perceived crisis of values by comparing America's values with those of over 60 other nations.

The results are surprising. The evidence shows overwhelmingly that America has not lost its traditional values, that the nation compares favorably with most other societies, and that the culture war is largely a myth.

The gap between reality and perception does not represent mass ignorance of the facts or an overblown moral panic, Baker contends. Rather, the widespread perception of a crisis of values is a real and legitimate interpretation of life in a society that is in the middle of a fundamental transformation and that contains growing cultural contradictions. Instead of posing a problem, the author argues, this crisis rhetoric serves the valuable social function of reminding us of what it means to be American. As such, it preserves the ideological foundation of the nation.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #289430 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 328 pages

Review
[T]he arrival of Wayne Baker's important book . . . is a welcome development. . . . By Baker's account, the perceived crisis of values is unlikely to disappear any time soon. One can only hope that pundits and politicians will take some time off from waging culture war to read America's Crisis of Values.
(David Callahan Political Science Quarterly )

Anyone concerned about American values in the larger world will be impressed by the elegance and clarity with which Baker treats this complex subject.
(Choice )

Is America experiencing a crisis of values, as popular media and politics claim? In a word: no. Wayne Baker . . . give[s] the most comprehensive empirical analysis of the topic to date.
(Contemporary Sociology )

Wayne E. Baker tries to explain why a gap has opened between the public perception that the U.S. is sharply divided and the empirical reality that it is not. . . . America's Crisis of Values is an important book that ought to be included in any seminar designed to provide background reading for our elected politicians.
(Alan Wolfe Christian Century )

Wayne Baker has produced a thoughtful and engaging work. Scholars interested in public opinion, values, and the discourse surrounding the culture wars in the United States should read America's Crisis of Values.
(James A. McCann Perspectives on Politics )

[A] deeply provocative book. It raises many questions for further investigation, and it will reward careful study.
(Barry Schwartz American Journal of Sociology )

Review
This is an indispensable book to understanding the transformation of American culture on the basis of solid evidence and rigorous methodology. It demonstrates the usefulness of social science to clarify the fundamental debates, which have been obscured by ideology and prejudice. It should be required reading in universities around the world.
(Manuel Castells, Professor of Communication and Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society, University of Southern California )

From the Inside Flap
"This is an indispensable book to understanding the transformation of American culture on the basis of solid evidence and rigorous methodology. It demonstrates the usefulness of social science to clarify the fundamental debates, which have been obscured by ideology and prejudice. It should be required reading in universities around the world."--Manuel Castells, Wallis Annenberg Chair Professor of Communication and Society, University of Southern California

"This is by far the most complete and comprehensive empirical examination of the topic. A significant contribution to the field."--John H. Evans, University of California, San Diego

"America's Crisis of Values is the most sophisticated account we have of opinion and value polarization in cross-national perspective. Clear, accessible, and loaded with evidence, it makes a uniquely valuable contribution by placing the U.S. case in a much broader context; distinguishing polarization of values from polarization of policy preferences (and demonstrating how surprisingly weak is the link between the two); and by showing where each has been growing or declining around the world. This book is required reading for any social scientist concerned with the "culture wasr" and the issues surrounding themt."--Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University

"Amid continuing speculation about culture wars and an erosion of traditional values, Wayne Baker has produced a valuable study grounded in an extensive examination of empirical data. Optimists and pessimists alike should read this book carefully--for both will find surprises that challenge their preconceived ideas."--Robert Wuthnow, Princeton University

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Customer Reviews

Thought-provoking and timely synthesis
The best thing about this book is that it raises a number of very profound and important questions in a way that makes you think deeply about them. If you have any interest at all in what insight scientific reasoning can bring into large scale human behavior, this book will truly make you think.

Rather than the usual political diatribe, this is: (1) an exceptional objective summary of what is special about the United States drawing from a wealth of previous work, (2) a wide-ranging and balanced analysis of the widespread American perception of waging an internal culture war at the turn of the millennia, and (3) a speculative and potentially somewhat testable (but largely untested) cyclical theory of cultural crises in general as a product of both endogenous and exogenous factors.

Baker finds no empirical support for the theory that American traditional values have diminished over time, and support for only a loose coupling of our polarized moral orientations (which he refers to as absolutism and relativism) and our religious beliefs and social attitudes. In this context, absolutism simply refers to the core idea that ultimate authority must come from a transcendental and perhaps eternal source, while relativism is the core idea that authority resides in the individual.

Baker finds that our political parties are highly and increasingly polarized but that when it comes to particular issues, Americans of all stripes tend to share more values and attitudes than they differ about, in spite of also being a mixture of absolutists and relativists. This is because he finds that our moral orientation is only loosely coupled to our religious beliefs and social attitudes. People can have the same religious beliefs yet differ in social attitudes, and vice versa, and similarly for our moral orientations and our religious beliefs. There are atheist absolutists and Christian relativists. Absolutists and relativists live and work and worship and debate side by side in the U.S. rather than representing a divided social structure.

When political pundits try to put every social issue in terms of the two sides of the culture war (usually Christians vs. Secularists), according to Baker's analysis they are making an unwarranted assumption that beliefs, attitudes, and moral orientations are much more tightly coupled than they really are. Thus they are exaggerating the polarization of the nation. The question is ... why do we do this, and why does it seem so compellingly true?

Baker's data shows besides an elevated sense of anxiety over the economy, what made the 1980's most distinctive was that across every demographic category, huge numbers of Americans went from being moral relativists to being moral absolutists. Prior to 1980, by far most Americans answered survey questions in a way that revealed them to be moral relativists, but by 1990 we were half relativists and half absolutists. This even division, according to Baker, emphasizes the contrast between these different moral orientations and the respective different guides they provide to conduct and the evaluation of goals. It is this even distribution of absolutism and relativism that Baker theorizes creates the impression of being a divided nation, even though our traditional values have during the same period remained entirely stable, we have remained remarkably independent of the secularization trend of the other modern nations, and we are actually converging over time rather than polarizing over social issues (with the notable exception of abortion).

So Baker does find a gap between the facts of American culture revealed by values surveys, and American'ss perception of their own values. However he does not dismiss the gap as a matter of mass hysteria or ignorance or simply political propaganda. The primary purpose of the book is to engage in a systematic analysis and understanding of the "adaptive" or "functional" reason for this gap. The assumption is that perceiving ourselves as waging a culture war is important for some reason and that our public rhetoric has adapted to that need. The adaptive reason that Baker comes up with is that America is unique in being a nation united by creed and ideology rather than by culture, and so as a result of our unique cultural heritage, traditional values have become the thing that make us Americans. Traditional values are on one end of one of Baker's well-validated values scales, the other end being secular-rational values. Secular-rational values are what the modernization and secularization theories expect us to see increasing as a nation’s wealth increases and as they shift from agriculture to industrial and service economies. We see that happen all over the world very consistently, except for the United States. The United States maintains its traditional value orientation over time because that is the source of its sense of identity as a nation and many Americans begin to feel threatened when they see evidence of encroaching secularization. In spite of highly visible legal conflicts over the interpretation of the establishment clause, we still share the same traditional values that unite us as Americans.

One of the main sources of confusion over American values can be seen in the second well-validated values scale that Baker uses: survival vs. self-expression values. Many discussions of values do not distinguish these two scales, yet factor analysis shows them to be reliably independent. Although Americans have retained their traditional values and have not moved increasingly toward secular-rational values as predicted by secularization theory and as seen in other nations, we have moved particularly far and quickly from survival values to self-expression values.

Self-expression values combine with traditional values to give the unique hybrid found in American culture, we internalize both traditional values and individualism, and these are actually different guides to conduct. The result is, according to Baker's theory, a uniquely motivated search for meaning among Americans in trying to reconcile their mixed traditional and self-expression values. This is an interesting and unexpected aspect of Baker's synthesis: he says that the contradictions created by traditional + self-expression values create a cognitive dissonance, leading to the feeling or perception of a crisis of values.

Baker gives just enough background to make his point and show its relevance to his argument, but never so much that I forgot the point he was trying to make. You'll be introduced to various theories of religious history and cultural evolution, various psychological theories of how beliefs and attitudes are related, several fascinating maps of the values of different nations and how they have changed in recent years, and a revealing look at how absolutism and relativism affect our thinking.

Good, if not perfect
This is a good, but not perfect, study of values in the U.S., testing various hypotheses related to the perception that traditional values are declining in America. An earlier reviewer got rather overheated about what he/she saw as the ethnocentric nature of Baker's conclusions, and for a related bias in the instrument used. Neither is warranted: while the study suffers for its over-reliance upon survey data, the main survey (the World Values Survey) is a carefully designed and conscientiously administered instrument, and the conclusions are not so much ethnocentric as understandably formulated with an American audience in mind. The biggest problem with the book, in addition to its overreliance upon one method (surveys), is its layout: the absence of statistical tables in the main text may lead one to think that it is accessible to those lacking statistical knowledge, but the text continuously refers to the multitude of tables in the Appendix, in a highly annoying fashion.

Important social science research for generations
In this timely volume, Wayne E. Baker cuts through both the media and pop-politics hype to argue that America has not lost its values and we are not subsequently headed for trouble. Having waded through the ever-growing mountain of criticism about values, I was pleased by Baker's fresh approach to this enduring policy question.

His comparative international study argues that the values argument and related campaigns are nothing more than a very elaborate `smoke and mirrors' arrangement which is designed to play on public insecurity and lack of complete information how America fares against itself and other nations.

The success of the culture war can ultimately be attributed to the fact that emotional charge can successfully get people riled up and against each other over actually nothing. "They" are doing the right thing, but people then worry that their neighbors are somehow doing something `different' from their own actions.

Baker's evidence from religion, psychology, and sociology presents a rational argument that our values are just fine as they are, thank you.

The overall absurdity of the `declining values' argument against this strong research package has not prevented politicians from using `values' charges and statements inside their own campaigns however.

They have practically campaigned on `restoring values' even though we cannot fix something which is not already broken. Yet, Baker suggests that the politicians and candidates (who also live in this society) may not have access to the truth either. They may also honestly not realize that everything is in fact okay.

This truly non-partisan approach makes Baker's research much more substantial than a tome written by an individual/foundation with a specific political ideology. Baker can concede that nobody has a monopoloy on 'good values' but America is not a repository for 'bad values' either. Because wallowing in partisan muck has been proven much easier (including for book sales and media hype) Baker himself is a paragon of values.

Finally, the emotional grasp of `values' on the American psyche is so effectively bipartisan that politicians from both political parties campaign to this imagined crisis. The success of the DLC (who had also endorsed v-chips) and the 2000 Democratic ticket of Gore/Lieberman (which talked about their own belief in values in an attempt to offset the Republicans) also demonstrate that the Democrats were equally anxious to campaign on `restoring values' in America.

Baker's research is a necessary acquisition for both academic libraries and personal collections. It is a must read for politicians from all points on the political spectrum so we can finally move onto problems which do exist in America.