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Cultural Values
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The social morals of an

individual life
a
Ulrich Beck
a
Professor of Sociology , Munich University
Published online: 17 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Ulrich Beck (1997) The social morals of an individual life,
Cultural Values, 1:1, 118-126, DOI: 10.1080/14797589709367137

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 Cultural Values ISSN 1362-5179
Volume 1 Number 11997 pp. 118-126

The Social Morals of an Individual Life

Ulrich Beck
Munich

Asked about their goals in life, people in the 1950's had clear and
definite answers: a liappy' family life, a detached house, a new car, a
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good education for their children, and raising their standard of living.
Today, people speak a different language which, in an inevitably vague
manner, revolves around the search for one's own individuality and
identity.
This vagueness is significant not only from an individual point of
view, but also with regard to the social. Contrary to traditional value
systems which defined success relatively clearly (a detached house, a
car, etc.) today no-one can be sure to have found what s/he was looking
for, and it is even harder to know how to convince others of one's
'success' reliably and plausibly. As a consequence we have wandered
deeper and deeper into a maze of uncertainty, self-criticism, and self-
reassurance. At the same time, the (endless) regress into questions like:
'Am I really happy?', 'Am I really fulfilled?', 'Am I doing the things I
really want to do?', 'Who is this "I" asking all these questions?' generates
ever new and different 'vogues of answers', which can be exploited in
various ways as markets for experts, industries, or religious movements.
Thus absorbed in a quest for self-fulfilment people have become
transformed into products of mass culture and mass consumerism.
Following the tourist brochures, they travel into all the hidden corners of
the world. They separate and enter into new relationships in swift
sequence. They change professions. They diet. They jog. They join
political and social movements. They change therapy groups and put
their faith in ever new therapists and forms of therapy. Self-assured (and
insecure) as they are, they discuss, fathom, and agonise over their own
and others' insecurities in perpetuity. Their complaints about the others'
'narcissism' only serve to make room for their own ego. Obsessed by the
goal of self-fulfilment, they uproot themselves in order to inspect
whether their own roots really are still intact.
This new value system of one's own individual life is subject to
massive criticism. In parliament, political parties and the public sphere
there is talk of an 'inflation of expectations', and of a 'ruthless society'
(Ellbogengesellschaft). However, where if not in politics can harmlessly
altruistic citizens learn how the 'ego society' works? In these lachrymose
©Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1997,108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX41JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Maiden,
MA 02148, USA
 The Social Morals of an Individual Life 119

polemics a blind eye is turned to the fact that the philosophy of an

individual life which has taken root in everyday life is, quite contrary to
these insinuations, the source of a healthy discontent (Querkopfigkeit),
which might yet be sorely needed by the democracy given to the
German people.
The ethics of an individual life approves of what is publicly
lamented: the fact that the social is permeated by the individual.
Without the 'Me' there is no 'We'. The new 'We' is based on self-
determination, it is not a prescription, not a sum, but arises from the
consensus of individuals. The ethics of an individual life thus initially
provides a critique of the prevailing definitions of 'We' - class, status,
family, gender, the common good, political orientation, nation, and so
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on.
What is added to 'success' as it is conventionally conceived is
directed towards self-empowerment as a process which includes the search
for new social ties and forms of solidarity in family, work, and politics.
The social morals of an individual life calls for the freedom to evade or
override traditional prescriptions of roles and to explore other forms of
community and work; it suggests the expression and indulgence of
impulses and desires which one used to suppress; and it asks for a deep
involvement in relationships. The focus on one's own individual life
embraces the desire to enjoy one's life now and not sometime in the
distant future, in short, to develop a 'culture of pleasure'. It demands the
freedom to make one's personal needs one's rights and to defend them
against institutional prescriptions and duties; the freedom to protect
one's personal life against 'alien' infringement, and to take political or
social action if one personally experiences this freedom to be in danger.
Now, the social morals of an individual life are not imposed from the
outside, but, on the contrary, they arise from the most intimately
experienced distress and necessity of defining the limits of one's life, in
order to make it at all meaningful and malleable. The 'material' basis of
this self-limitation is made up of the expectations of others, whose
recalcitrant and unyielding nature I employ to define limits for my own
life. Thus we discover and shape what it is that is our very own in this
life through experiencing the way it 'rubs' against the resistance offered
by the lives of others. This sounds more harmonious than it is (or is
meant). The crux remains in the question of why the surrender of my
individual self in these particular circumstances ought to be meaningful?
This is the question that breaks up marriages, that withers friendships,
that initiates the flight from mass organisations (unions, the church, and
political parties).
It is here that we can also find the reason why, for example, students
find it difficult to cope with the diffuse and contradictory ambiguity of
university life. It is also the reason why, when we are on holiday, where
the usual routines do not apply, the void that takes their place gives rise
 120 UlrichBeck

to stress and conflict. Advice abounds: read a book, make plans, go

walking! But god help us if our wishes should be fulfilled. The sweet
idleness we had longed for soon becomes hell if we fail to create some
friction with accepted resistances in other people's lives. If this wasn't
true, broken down marriages should be the ones that are the most sound
and fulfilling; the toil at work would be the most rewarding 'free-time'
occupation.
The key question of how we give meaning to our lives through the
duties we have or perceive with respect to others has been debated
endlessly. A sociologist can only contribute pragmatic information: for
example, the observation that there are indeed cultural practices which
transform freedom into challenge through resistance. Thus the
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popularity of dangerous sports like wall climbing, hang gliding, jumping

into the abyss (tied to an elastic rope), or adventure holidays becomes
understandable. Gardening is an old example of how freedom can be
transformed into meaning in the confines of the home. Gardeners
cultivate meaning, their own meaning, and the meaning of their own self.
The ignorance with which others watch free and sensible people devote
themselves to the care of patio plants misses the point that taking care of
plants (pigeons, dogs, etc.) is a kind of unselfish taking care of oneself.
One embeds the plants in terrafirmaand oneself, by reducing one's own
time, and one's own space, through the care for others. Being close to
plants, one grows roots; and it is no coincidence that when all the loved
ones have gone, the love to those who cannot or are not allowed to leave
flourishes. But the central question — and the deepest dilemma — is
how can forms of individual freedom be bound and focused together
and made accountable to common goals?
Since everything is based on self-determination, enlisting the
responsibility of individuals for the community presupposes a voluntary
submission to the freedoms of others. He or she has to voluntarily agree
not to use his or her freedoms or to use them only in a very limited way.
It all revolves around the Other's self-restraint and self-control with
regard to his freedom for the sake of one's own freedom and the
common good: the paradox of freedom.
'It is the Other's freedom as such that we want to get hold of, argues
Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1957, p . 367):

Not because of a desire for power. The tyrant scorns love, he is content
with fear. If he seeks to win the love of his subjects, it is for political
reasons; and if he finds a more economical means to enslave them, he
adopts it immediately. On the other hand, the man who wants to be
loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. He is not bent on
becoming the object of passion which flows forth mechanically. He does
not want to possess an automaton, and if we want to humiliate him, we
need only try to persuade him that the beloved's passion is the result of
psychological determinism. The lover will then feel that both his love
 The Social Morals of an Individual Life 121
and his being are cheapened. If Tristan and Isolde fall madly in love
because of a love potion, they are less interesting. The total enslavement
of the beloved kills the love of the lover ... Thus the lover does not desire
to possess the beloved as one possesses a thing; he demands a special
type of appropriation. He wants to possess a freedom as freedom.

On the other hand, the lover cannot be satisfied with that superior form
of freedom which is a free and voluntary engagement. Who would be
content with a love given as pure loyalty to a sworn oath? Who would be
satisfied with the words, 'I love you' because I have freely engaged
myself to love you and because I do not wish to go back on my word.
Thus the lover demands a pledge, yet is irritated by a pledge. He wants
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to be loved by a freedom but demands that this freedom as freedom

should no longer be free. He wishes that the Other's freedom should
determine itself to become love — and this not only at the beginning of
the affair but at each instant — and at the same time he wants this
freedom to be captured by itself, to turn back upon itself, as in madness,
as in a dream, so as to will its own captivity. This captivity must be a
resignation that is both free and yet chained in our hands.

What Sartre exposes with regard to the example of love is more widely
valid. Voluntary, free, yet chained self-captivity - this is the contradictory
ideal for relationships in the 'Me-culture'. There is no doubt that this
metaphor increases our awareness of the actual reality of failure, which
is so clearly marked out. However, it denies us insight into the many
ways in which people (perhaps only temporarily) tame this demon.
Mutual, neighbourly help, liftsharing schemes between commuters, the
care for the disabled who fall short of the norms of meritocracy — all
these small, everyday strategies of helping each other, of being there for
one another when it is necessary or even as a preventative measure,
contradict the vision of hopelessness which is set up here. The thousands
of initiatives against hunger and war — they all are people's own
initiatives, often outside of the established organisations, and they prove
the current negative understanding of the 'ego-society' wrong.
We live with a flourishing everyday ethic. This is proved not least
through the masochistic patience with which the Germans sort their
rubbish every day, in order to save the world after all. Another fact
points in the same direction: while relationships are becoming more
difficult, if not to say impossible, a burning desire for relationships has
reached epidemic proportions. Values like family, faithfulness,
solidarity, trust have rarely been so highly regarded as they are in our
times, when they genuinely seem to be in danger of becoming
unattainable.
But the significance of the social morals of an individual life only
becomes obvious when two misunderstandings are rectified. The first
 122 UlrichBeck

one could be called a misunderstanding of the individual life governed

by egoistic market principles. Here it is assumed that talk about one's own
individual life mainly revolves around the economic interests of the
individual. The individual is seen as striving for the maximisation of
benefits (in a narrow and a wider sense). But the term 'individual life'
encompasses an historically different mode of reconciling the social and
the individual. The individual is explicitly not defined in the terms of the
nation state anymore. No longer can the individual be thought about in
terms of class, family, state. People's lives are simultaneously personal,
individual and global. We lead lives that are suspended in complex,
confusing, and contradictory webs of interdependencies, in which we
nevertheless are forced to act.
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To reduce this to (economic) self-interest would not only be foolish,

but also dangerous. One's personal and one's global life have to be led
and co-ordinated across boundaries, they both have to appropriate the
Other in order to survive as 'an individual life'. However, in a world full
of contradictions the individual has to strive for, and establish, a high
degree of autonomy; but this is autonomy without egoism. On the
contrary, it presupposes the ability to deal with insecurities,
interdependencies, and mutual responsibilities. It is, therefore, a severe
mistake to interpret the question of evolving forms of solidarity as one of
how market oriented self-interests can be curbed, tamed, and focused.
The question must be understood differently: how can autonomy and
interdependence, one's personal life and one's responsibilities in a
civilisation which is in danger of self-destruction, be attuned afresh, re-
aligned in all the diverse spheres of social life, including the economy?
The second misunderstanding could be called the traditionalist fallacy
of the 'We-moral'. Here parallels are drawn between the rejection of
traditional and organisationally prescribed forms and norms of
solidarity/community and the anti-morals of a personal life. This is pure
dogmatism, which makes the dominant standards absolute. In fact, the
individual life is very much a life that is moral from the point of view of
the community, a life based on the often desperate search for an
existence with others and for others. However, this must not be confused
with the old non-sellers of history — class, family, nation. Rather, the
solidarity of individual lives arises and is strengthened by what
Anthony Giddens calls 'active trust'. This is a form of trust which
institutions cannot lay claim to, but which must be won. Active trust
does not condemn, but presupposes an individual life. This is the only
way to bring about socially moral behaviour. Anything else would be
wishful thinking.
Within the family, active trust means care for others. But this kind of
taking care of one another must not be mistaken for the traditional
duties categorised by gender, role within the family, and family
membership. On the contrary: this care (not constant worry) arises from
 The Social Morals of an Individual Life 123

the critique of the traditional norms and hierarchies of the family and
aims at mutual liberation from its yoke. What I mean can be summarised
in five points:
Firstly, choosing to care for someone defines limits for one's own self
and gives it meaning; the willed resistance makes one's own self
malleable, experienceable, meaningful. This care for others presupposes
a positive attitude towards one's own life. This kind of care originates
precisely as the care of two (or more) individual lives for each other.
Thus, and this is my second point, this care for others revolves not
around fixed, but around open identities and programmes of action. The
solidarity which now becomes possible is not one that can be claimed,
but one that has to be iteratively re-created, in conversation with the
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Other, through mutual enquiry and mutual attention — through the

awareness of the Other, who in turn is aware of partners. This solidarity
has to be intersubjectively just (whatever that may mean in its particular,
tangible context). Only in this way can the care for the Other become the
care for one another. This community is discursive and provisional, it is a
product of actions and of negotiation. This kind of community is in need
of revision, and it implies the obligation to revise it, but this partnership
also needs some of the rules and routines that become deeply ingrained,
which mark the spiral of continuous reflexivity.
Thirdly, living one's individual lives for one another thus also means
living an experimental life. Community is understood and practised as a
search for community. Here a change of identity is no disturbance or
threat to be punished, but it is intended, it is mutually encouraged and
supported. Groups of people set out for ever new voyages of discovery,
while each member also leads his own life of discovery and exploration.
People know that this is what they are doing, and, therefore, they know
that conflict and turmoil lie ahead and have to be dealt with. Happiness
is not treated, nor mistaken, as congruous with harmony, but is seen to
lie in the experience of difference and diversity, with all its conflicts and
friction.
Fourthly, this attentive care for one another presupposes a conscious
and well-considered balance between certainty and doubt. Certainty is
felt with regard to the activity of a nigh imperturbable trust, which the
Other enjoys in one's own thoughts and actions. Come what may — he
or she can rely on it. This imperturbable trust implies understanding and
forgiveness — not approval — of even the most severe mistake or breach
of trust. For the explorer of his own individual life, who inevitably has to
face the uneasy question of 'What happens if I turn out to be a murderer,
if I get lost, or if I lose myself?', this kind of trust provides the answer
most desired: 'In that case I'll look for you and find you where you are -
be it in prison, under a bridge or in any of those madhouses that
imprison us overtly or covertly'.
 124 UlrichBeck

Fifthly, this radical, almost impossible certainty that sustains and

protects us is made possible by, and goes hand in hand with, the ability
to doubt and the mercy of self-doubt. The awareness of one's own flaws
opens the door to a community made up of individual lives: Dubito ergo
sum. I doubt, therefore I am. I doubt, therefore I am becoming. I doubt,
therefore I give you space. You doubt, therefore you give me space. You
and me doubt, therefore we are. We doubt, therefore we become
possible.
The culture of doubt (not of desperation) opens up space for others,
for other (and one's own) lives, other experiences and — in the
unfolding of the Other — for me and my own individual life. Thus the
social morality of an individual life becomes (can, or could become) the
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active care for others.

Do not the divorce rates disprove the practicability of this
philosophy? No. This renewal of family solidarity is, in fact, compatible
with the diversity of all forms of community outside marriage, as they
are explored in all highly industrialised societies. It is family solidarity in
the widest sense possible, which must not be confused with the limits
and norms of traditional family values. The official and unofficial
divorce rates will remain high. They are the tangible result of the
experiment which the connection of individual lives has irrevocably
become. Divorce does not have to destroy the solidarity between
individual lives; it can, in fact, enrich and expand it. The
acknowledgement of the fact that children have their own lives, that
parents should enable them and support them in their effort to live their
own individual lives is exactly what can become the basis of a solidarity
between divorcees. This opens up our eyes for something that may seem
paradoxical at first glance: divorce can be the basis for a multiplication
of new kinship relations, the painful birth of the post-familial extended
family and new forms of solidarity. In it several parental and step-
parental dyads are harnessed together with their own and other people's
children, with step-children, their children's step-children, their step-
children's children, and so forth. With dwindling birth rates the exact
opposite of a loss of family values could thus occur: every child has
several parents, parents engage in several marriages and thus have
(despite decreasing absolute numbers) many children. This is no doubt
Utopian. The reality is bleakly characterised by a thirst for revenge and
embittered battles between divorcees. Nevertheless this Utopia becomes
real in its passage through individual lives, even if it does not become
reality.
However, is it not true that the culture of doubt opens the way to a
relativism of values? Is it not true that the morals of an individual life
have to be regarded as the most extreme counterpoint to a life that takes
responsibility for the common good — a common good that can no
longer be confined to class or nation, but which has to be extended to life
 The Social Morals of an Individual Life 125

on this planet? How can a morality which is, in its final consequence,
directed towards the small intimate details of an individual life cope
with a challenge of this scale? Does it not inevitably lead to a negation of
this challenge?
Again: No. Embedded in the individual life is a perception of
universal values, which can be experienced individually and is engraved
in the perception of the Self and the Other. The experience of
catastrophes like Chernobyl makes the individual life realise the life of
the Other. Individuals experience that their own individual life depends
on the decisions of remote Others, for example, about the use of
resources on the other side of the globe. The individual life is equally
endangered by these remote decisions as it is by the collapse of the
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welfare system and the employment market 'at home'.

The individual life does not at all exclude cosmopolitan values and
identities. On the contrary, it is the first form of community in history
that allows people to experience — in the face of impending, actual and
creeping catastrophes — their own fate, and that of others, in the context
of human-made dangers and uncertainties. The horizon of values that
opens up here might best be described in Hans Jonas's words as the
'heuristics of angst'. We become aware of these horizons initially as a
threat, which humankind has created, and which humankind has
become. "The most pressing issue', Jonas argues, 'is the need for an ethic
of sustainability and averting danger, not progress and perfection.' What
is missing is an ethic of prevention.
Values of the inviolability of human life, of universal human rights,
of the care for life, and for present and future generations may be
brought to our consciousness through their violation. However, these
are not just negative values. Rather they imply an ethic of individual and
collective responsibility, which could place us in a position to bridge
diverse interests. Responsibility does not mean duty, that duty which has
led many to believe mat they do not have a power strong enough to face
the challenge. In contrast to duty, responsibility presupposes the spelling
out of reasons; it rules out loyalty on request and blind consensus.
Responsibility is the opposite of fanaticism. But it can be infectious
because it is based on voluntary subscription which has more power to
convince and unite people than regulations, which have to be prescribed
and enforced from above. This is true at least with regard to the cultures
of individual lives. To put one's trust in responsibility as an answer to
the global challenge may appear to be — or is — a tenuous hope. But did
not the communist leaders believe that their subjects' sense of
responsibility was weak — until they were swept away by it?

Translation by Monica Busher

 126 Ulrich Beck

Ulrich Beck is Professor of Sociology at Munich University. He is author

of Risk Society (1992) and Ecological Politics (1995); co-author of Reflexive
Modernisation (1994), The Chaos of Love (1995), and
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