THE PEOPLE: Freedom–New Style

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A model sportswoman, the late Mrs. F. Ambrose Clark, used to counsel new horse owners: “Win as if you were used to it and lose as if you liked it.” The U.S. today shows little elation over its abundance, or even over the dawning realization that a disastrous depression is never again likely to halt the march of productivity. At the moment in history when this unique economic achievement was recognized, the U.S. lost its long security against heavy enemy attack; it became the first in the line of paramount nations to live in the knowledge that between any nightfall and morning a fifth of its people and a third of its production centers could be destroyed. Over this prospect the U.S. does not grieve or tremble. In a field of tension between unprecedented poles of security and insecurity, this superlatively blessed and threatened people stands with apparent aplomb. Mrs. Clark would be proud of her countrymen.

Or would she? What seems to be modesty and courage in the present U.S. mood (or lack of mood) might also be a numbness in the body social. Being a sportswoman, Mrs. Clark did not mean to play down the zest and pride of achievement, or to mute the challenge of possible failure. Restraint of expression is different from lack of response and inability to express.

The Pace that Outdates. A society, like an individual, can get out of touch with itself. It “makes sense” or not, depending on the relation between what it is and what it thinks it is and wants to be. In a generation of change so rapid that the pace cannot be appreciated, the American self-picture has gone out of focus. The intellectuals, to whom a society looks for its picture, understandably failed to keep up. In the 1930s they were looking backward at the ruin that war, depression and fascism had made of the 19th century’s high confidence in rationality, progress and perfectibility. Some clung stubbornly to fragments of the exploded dream. More, resolving never again to be taken in by progress, settled for a program of anti-regression; economic stability and antifascism were timid goals. Since World War II, the intellectual climate has been changing. Social scientists, drawn back to the exciting and challenging present, have begun to update the future.

Heuristic Is the Word. One of the updaters is the University of Chicago’s David Riesman, a man with a wide-swinging imagination, a scientist’s disciplined mind, and a burning curiosity about people as they are. Social Scientist Riesman believes U.S. society today to be very different from the picture of it that Americans carry in their heads. To make his point, Riesman presents to his students three primitive societies from Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture: 1) the Pueblo Indians are peaceable and cooperative, with little violent emotion; 2) the Dobu Islanders in the Pacific are suspicious, jealous of women and property; they spend their lives trying to get something for nothing by magic, theft or fraud; 3) the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest are highly competitive, but their rivalry consists in conspicuous consumption: burning up their blankets and even their houses to show off. Riesman asks the class which type the U.S. most resembles. Some say the Dobuan and some the Kwakiutl; almost none say Pueblo—which Riesman thinks is the right answer. To a student who clung to the familiar stereotype, Riesman once said: “If you weren’t so pueblized, you wouldn’t think of the society around you as being so Dobuan or Kwakiutl.”

Riesman believes in individualism as a goal; but he does not believe that the U.S. today is an individualist society in the 19th century sense.

To explain how the individual may attain his freedom in contemporary U.S. society, Riesman has had to examine that society anew. The result is a “construction,” a way of looking at the U.S. which is more presently fruitful than older conceptions such as the class struggle or the frontier v. the seaboard. At the very least, Riesman answers the anguished city editor who cried: “What we need around this place is a new set of cliches.” No mantled prophet with the last word or the definitive system, Riesman describes his notion of character as “heuristic”—and that is the word for Riesman. It means, says Webster, “serving to discover or to stimulate investigation; —of methods of demonstration which tend to lead a person to investigate further by himself.”

On Entering the Zoo. Riesman seems to be leading thousands of Americans on his quest. His central book, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character*, was published four years ago and has already a kind of classic status. Not that it is “accepted”; it draws academic argument and even sneers. But it has become a part of the social-science landscape. A paperback abridged edition issued a year ago has sold 40,000 copies, an enormous sale for a work of this sort, which contains no soothing soul-poultice, no sensationalism, and makes no effort to write down to a lay public. Individualism Reconsidered, a brilliant collection of essays published this year, elaborates some of Riesman’s central themes.

The Lonely Crowd contains a typological menagerie. The occupants of the cages are not real people, who are almost always a blend of a blend of types. But real people and real politics can be understood better by walking through Riesman’s zoo, reading the signs on the cages, and looking at the occupants.

TRADITION-DIRECTION is the way social character is formed in societies without prospect of much technological or population change. In such circumstances, each generation feels (usually correctly) that the next generation will live much as it lives. The life of the father is exposed to the son in daily living. This is supplemented by training in the etiquette of specific situations in which the son is sure to find himself. All of Asia has been trained in this way—and all of Europe was, down to the Renaissance-Reformation period. Then, in Western Europe, complex and interdependent factors—population growth, technological progress, the replacement of the feudal system with more fluid social forms, the new lands across the sea—made tradition-direction obsolete. How were the young to be trained for the more varied and expanding new life with its demand for initiative?

INNER-DIRECTION was the answer. The elders implanted early a sense of direction toward lifelong goals. Tradition still helps to guide the inner-directed man by helping him select the goals and the general principles of action by which he is to reach them, rather than by leading him with strict supervision through every step of the way. Where tradition-direction puts him on a well-worn path, inner-direction gives him a gyroscope by which, in all situations, he is expected to find the way toward his goal. Inner-direction appears in Catholic as well as Protestant countries, but the internal gyroscopes best known in the U.S. were designed by the firm of John Calvin & Adam Smith. (Andrew Carnegie’s was a wonder.)

The tasks of the time that brought forth the inner-directed man were those of production, a hard struggle with hard things: iron, coal, prairies, machinery. Invention, toil, risk-taking and a driving sense of the goal to be won were necessary to meet the mounting consumer demands of rapidly increasing populations passing from static to more fluid forms of society.

There came a point—roughly fixed by Riesman as about 1920 for the U.S.—when production caught up, and not merely in the sense of a temporary surplus in the business cycle. The gates of immigration banged shut, and population growth slowed down. The productive plant would go on expanding without brilliant strokes of individual invention; technological progress could be achieved by routine, built into the research departments of industry. Hours could be cut. Efficiency could be raised by better organization and by lubricating personal contacts within the plant. Emphasis passed from production to consumption, from the hard struggle with the material world to an easier existence centered around relations with other people. In mining, farming, even manufacturing, employment declined, while it rose in the service trades, i.e., in helping consumers consume.

OTHER-DIRECTION came on the scene to form a more appropriate social character. The inner-directed man’s gyroscope of fixed goal and principle is replaced by a radarscope. This is not “set” toward a goal; it does not tell the other-directed man where to go or how to get there, except as changing signals from “the others,”—themselves often “other-directeds” without fixed goals—tell him what he should, for the moment, be or do.

As Riesman puts it: “What is common to all other-directeds is that their contemporaries are the source of direction for the individual—either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted, through friends and through the mass media. This source is, of course, ‘internalized’ in the sense that dependence on it for guidance in life is implanted early. The goals toward which the other-directed person strives shift with that guidance: it is only the process of striving itself and the process of paying close attention to signals from others that remain unaltered through life.”

Who Is What. Riesman says that in the U.S. only a few tradition-directed islands survive: some Southern Negroes, some unassimilated immigrant groups. Most Americans are still inner-directed.

The working class, largely tradition-directed in the late 19th century, has passed into the inner-directed phase, and the middle class, whose 19th century mode was inner-direction, is now split. The old middle class—farmers, small businessmen, bankers, technically minded engineers—is still largely inner-directed. The new middle class—bureaucrats, salaried business employees—is largely other-directed.

Other-directeds are spreading in numbers and influence. “They are more prominent in New York than in Boston, in Los Angeles than in Spokane, in Cincinnati than in Chillicothe.” And there are, of course, more other-directeds among the young than the old.

“Mirror, Mirror . . .” Many middle-class parents, aware that they can show a child neither a clear tradition-worn path nor a clear work-shaped goal, ask him merely to “do his best” in any of the unpredictable situations that will face him. What is his best? That which wins the approval of his contemporaries.

Other-directed children go to school earlier to acquire the arts of sociability. They are graded and even seated not by what they know or can do or by temperament—but in accordance with their ability to cooperate. At what? At cooperating. “The children are supposed to learn democracy by underplaying the skills of intellect and overplaying the skills of gregariousness and amiability—skill democracy, in fact, based on ability to do something, tends to survive only in athletics.” The six-year-old group helps form its own other-directed character with the harsh judgment “He thinks he’s big!” Everyone is cut down to size.

When a tradition-directed person fails, he feels shame in departing from the path under the eyes of his fellows; when the inner-directed fails, he feels guilt in departing from his own principles; the other-directed, living in hope of the approval of his peers, is seldom free of a diffuse anxiety lest this approval be withheld. Riesman notes that from the walls of the inner-directed school, the ruins of Pompeii and the bust of Caesar often looked down—reminders of the past from which one learned the moral principles of history, part of the gyroscopic mechanism. These pressed stern standards upon a child —and many children were crushed. But the school for the other-directed has its own mural pressures. “The walls of the modern grade school are decorated with the paintings of the children or their montages from the class in social studies. Thus the competitive and contemporary problems of the children look down on them from walls that, like the teacher herself, are no longer impersonal. This looks progressive, looks like a salute to creativeness and individuality; but again we meet paradox. While the school de-emphasizes grades and report cards, the displays seem almost to ask the children: ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is fairest of us all?’ ”

A Piglet Paradigm. Competition in the world of the young is not all-out; in this, it imitates the adult world of business and politics in which they will move. Modern business competition turns around “marginal differentiation,” i.e., competing products imitate each other, yet call attention to small differences. Increasingly, businesses group themselves in trade associations and businessmen look to their competitors, rather than to their own accounting department, for the signals that mean success. Their attitude toward their own work is not that of producers, but of consumers. Morale is bucked up when a business decision meets the approval (and imitation) of the “antagonistic cooperators” of the adult peer group.

Horatio Alger stories are now considered corny because they are irrelevant. Their function of training the young for the drive toward goals on the frontier of work has been replaced by the mass-media effort to “train the young for the frontiers of consumption—to tell the difference between Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola . . . We may mark the change by citing an old nursery rhyme:

This little pig went to market; This little pig stayed at home; This little pig had roast beef; This little pig had none; This little pig went wee-wee-wee All the way home.

“The rhyme may be taken as a paradigm of individuation and unsocialized behavior among children of an earlier era. Today, however, all little pigs go to market; none stay home; all have roast beef, if any do; and all say ‘we-we.’ ”

Riesman finds the mother who discourages serious interest in music because that might interfere with popularity and normalcy. He notes that youngsters rate many popular entertainers as “sincere,” which evades the issue of whether their performance was good or bad; the child is afraid to make a judgment that will turn out wrong (i.e., unpopular). This prepares the children for an adult life in which they will imitate each other as “antagonistic cooperators,” selling themselves sincerely on the basis of marginal differences in personality—sometimes in jobs where personality is functionally irrelevant. They will be tolerant because they do not much care, not because they understand the value of difference and individuality. They will be amiable, and often incapable of strong emotion or deep love. They will be compulsively gregarious—and lonely. Their play will be deadened by anxious groupiness. Even their daydreams (and this is most important to Riesman) will be flattened by anxiety about what “the others” think. He cites this excerpt from an interview with a twelve-year-old girl.

A. I like Superman better than the others because they can’t do everything Superman can do. Batman can’t fly, and that is very important.

Q. Would you like to be able to fly?

A. I would like to be able to fly if everybody else did, but otherwise it would be kind of conspicuous.

The Style of Politics. The niggling anxiety about “the others” that grounds personal daydreams also grounds social and political daydreams—the pictures people make of what they would like their society and their world to be. Riesman examines the U.S. political scene in terms of the “style” of politics rather than the content. He is less interested in the opinions people have on specific issues than in how opinions are formed and expressed, how people relate themselves to politics. His analysis of style throws considerable heuristic light on the political scene. The basic political style of the inner-directed is, as might be expected, that of a producer. Other-directeds do not think of themselves as producing politics; they consume it. Here are some Riesman types that illustrate political style:

THE MORALIZER (e.g., Gladstone) is the appropriate style of the inner-directed man when his type is politically dominant. He sees politics as a task, a way to further his interests, material or ideal. He has no difficulty relating his political goals with what he sees as right, with his “picture” of what should be. He thinks he can do something about them; usually, in his day, he could.

THE INDIGNANT (e.g., Westbrook Pegler) is the moralizer-in-retreat. He senses that this new world, no longer production-minded, is not his. He cannot connect with it through work, or clearly through interest. Often he hates politics. He rants and storms. Politically, his emotional effect is higher than his competence. He cares—or thinks he cares—but he is too out of touch to play a constructive role. His “picture” is out of date.

THE OLD-STYLE INDIFFERENT (e.g., Uncle Tom) in the U.S. is found mainly in the islands of tradition-direction. He has not rejected politics; he simply does not think it was ever available to him. He lacks the knowledge and the basic organizational skill to enter politics.

THE NEW-STYLE INDIFFERENT is an other-directed type. In a Vermont town, interviewers found that the older generation had inner-directed attitudes toward politics; they knew quite a lot; they thought they could influence political causes (and some felt guilty because they did not). The younger generation contained many new-style indifferents, “who know enough about politics to reject it, enough about political information to refuse it, enough about their political responsibilities as citizens to evade them.” Riesman believes that more than half the adults in the U.S. are Indifferents—Old Style or New Style.

THE INSIDE-DOPESTER is an other-directed type who in political style is just the opposite of the inner-directed indignant. The inside-dopester knows, but he doesn’t care. (High competence, low affect.) Riesman takes his text for the inside-dopesters from St. Paul, Acts 17:21: “(For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new things).”

One subdivision of this species wants to be on the inside. With his competence, his sensitive other-directed radarscope, he can rise quite high in government. But his style, even at high levels, will be as a consumer of inside information, not a producer of policy.

Another variety of inside-dopester wants to know the inside dope because it helps him get status and approval in his peer group. Inside-dopesters frequently change the content of their politics in response to changed fads in their peer groups.

The New Tribunes. When indignants, who are interesting and exciting from the viewpoint of the political consumer, find a good show that will pull the indifferents into active politics, an explosive political crisis may arise. But there are dangers short of explosion—and they may be as serious. Riesman finds much of current politics turning around “the Veto groups,” which are much more clear about what they don’t want than about where they want the society to go.

Contemporary veto groups—ethnic, sectarian, regional, occupational—are more shapeless and more numerous than the old American interest groups, which had clear ideas about their goals. The new ones spread their pressures beyond the field of politics into, for instance, movie censoring. Their leadership is heavy with inside-dopesters. Their membership ranks are swelled by new-style indifferents, driven thence by well-meaning moralizers, who are always railing at the indifferents for not taking part in politics. Anxious to conform, the indifferent finds a group— but remains at heart an indifferent. Vetogroup leaders can manipulate the indifferents, but usually for negative, not positive, ends. “By their very nature,” says Riesman, “the veto groups exist as defense groups, not as leadership groups.” Each group has “a power to stop things conceivably inimical to its interests, and, within far narrower limits, a power to start things.”

Some Political Specifics. Riesman’s “construction,” from nursery school to veto group, can obviously be used to lay bare the causes of specific defects in American political life (although he does not do so). If politics is heavily influenced by inside-dopesterism and veto-groupism, the observer would expect to find great difficulty in the formation and expression of clear goals, and that is what observers have found in U.S. peacetime policy of the last 20 years, including the last two. The U.S., anxious for approval, listens closely to the signals of the others in the peer group of cooperating nations. It should and must. But it will not, for instance, find goals or policies in the preoccupation explained by an article in this week’s New York Times Magazine headed “Do the British Really Dislike Us?”

The Communists, everyone has noticed, seem better able to define their goals and pursue them with relentless energy. That again is to be expected. The Communist scarcity economy is still work-oriented. Red leaders are inner-directed (completely gyroscoped by Marx, Lenin and Stalin); most of their subjects are old-style indifferents. But the Communists, says Riesman, “have become perhaps the most reactionary and most menacing force in world politics” precisely because their picture of the world, while sharply focused, is out of date, and history will not run backward.

The Communists are not the only ones who try to put it in reverse. Riesman is annoyed at those who pick up his biting criticism of progressive schools as they are today and use it to attack Philosopher John Dewey and the whole movement of progressive education—which in Dewey’s time, Riesman believes, was a liberating force working against the main lines of a culture where character was inner-directed. Educational reactionaries who want to go back to the little red schoolhouse have set themselves an impossible task. They cannot return to inner-direction because the U.S. cannot return to the days when technology and the population situation made inner-direction appropriate.

The Roads to Freedom. Where does all this leave Riesman’s earnest reader? If the reader recoils from the other-directed man and cannot go back to inner-direction, where can he turn in search of morality and freedom in personal life or in politics?

Riesman believes that in each of the three historical kinds of character direction, some men will adjust, some will fail to adjust and some will rise above adjustments. Those who fail he calls anomic (ruleless, directionless); the years of transition between two kinds of direction (inner and other) will produce many anomics. Those who transcend adjustment he calls autonomous. Their social radar is good and they use it when they choose; but they can turn it off and develop the ability to make choices out of their own individuality.

Autonomous men are especially important in a culture of other-directeds; they provide models that call the attention of those who are merely adjusted to the variety of which men are capable. Without such reminders of variety or choice, freedom becomes meaningless.

Riesman thinks that the best roads to personal autonomy lead through “play,” meaning the whole area of life that is not getting-a-living work. A man who becomes competent to consume the arts, entertainment or sport with his own tastes and judgment learns there the meaning of competence. If he learns to care about art, entertainment or sport, he learns what it means to care. He can (although he need not) return to politics as another and much better kind of consumer—connected with it by his competence and emotional involvement.

From such models, from men who respect and try to follow daydreams about their own lives, society may learn again to make social daydreams, those models called Utopias. The utopianism of the 19th century, bold and fruitful as much of it was, tended to confuse dream and reality. When some calamitous realities of the 20th century exploded that kind of utopianism, people were frightened away from any social dreaming. But they need it to clarify their values in the real world, to define their ends. Says Riesman: “The fervently repeated American cold-war formula that the end does not justify the means tends to become more than a wholly proper critique of Soviet ruthlessness; it encourages us to forget that we do need ends, precisely to justify, and criticize, our means. The contradiction between ends and means, the inescapable tension, is what Marxism and like ideologies pretend to evaporate.”

The Nerve of Failure. Riesman has counseled his fellow intellectuals to stop worrying about whether their judgments are approved in the market place or the ballot box, to pursue the truth as independent men, affecting society as models of autonomy, not as victors on this public issue or that. He notes that the young TV audience tells the “good guys” from the “bad guys” simply because the “good guys” are winning. This he deplores.

No defeatist, no pessimist, he urges intellectuals to cultivate “the nerve of failure,” to live with the possibility of disapproval and defeat. Neither in life nor in politics is this a formula for victory. But in both it may be a help in reducing numbness and restoring zest—which is the appropriate style of freedom.

*The Lonely Crowd (373 pp.)—with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer—Yale ($4). Others: Faces in the Crowd (741 pp.)—Yale ($5); Thorstein Veblen (209 pp.)—Scribner ($2.75); The Lonely Crowd (349 pp.)—Doubleday (95¢); Individualism Reconsidered (507 pp.) —Free Press ($6).