The Lonely Crowd Read online

  We may indeed be coming to the end of the human story. But if man does survive this period, we think we shall see that plastic man was but one of the stages of historical development, intermediate between the widely variegated social character types of an un-unified world and the even more widely divergent individual character of a unified but less oppressive world.

  Looking backward in history (in Chapter 12) we saw “tradition-directed” centuries in which relatively set forms of social character confront each other, and in which group conflict often has the appearance of a collision between specialized and fixed human breeds. Of course, this is too abstract; these groups did learn from each other, yet they did not dream of imitating or becoming each other. And in our own Western history, as perhaps also at other times and places, a superlatively efficient and impressive social character was created (which we termed “inner-directed”), which gave Portuguese and Spaniards and Dutchmen, Englishmen and Frenchmen, Russians and Americans, power to impose their aims and their very physical characteristics on vast populations (including greatly increased populations of their own kind) over large parts of the globe—so that a Spanish Philippine commander in the sixteenth century could write his superior at home that with six thousand men they could conquer China.13

  We do not in The Lonely Crowd explain how the inner-directed social character came about, though we followed Max Weber’s lead in seeing the Protestant Ethic as linking a Greek type of rationality to a Judeo-Christian type of this-worldly morality. Family structure also seemed to us of decisive importance, since the nuclear family makes possible the bringing up of children with very intense identifications with parental models, although this alone is insufficient to account for that definiteness of set and conviction, that endoskeletal quality and hardness, which makes many inner-directed individuals into “characters” in the colloquial sense. Historical and cross-cultural investigation would be necessary before one could better understand how inner-direction came about—and why it may now be disappearing.

  This incipient disappearance of inner-direction, with a loosening of the sense of personal destiny, seems in part a consequence of those forbiddingly powerful and efficient institutions that inner-directed men conceived, organized, and rendered transportable. One of these institutions was the free market which, in late capitalism, affects not only the market for money and goods but the self-salesmanship of individuals (as Erich Fromm’s term in Man for Himself, “the marketing orientation,” makes clear). The term “other-direction” may emphasize too much the role of specific others (or their surrogates in the mass media) and insufficiently the role of such institutions as the personality market, for whose often implicit directions the “others” are mere agents.14

  Men of conviction have not disappeared; they matter very much at present, precisely because they are relatively rare. And they seem to be most rare among young adults. As we went through our interview materials to select examples for Faces in the Crowd, there were very few respondents under thirty who could not have been put, with qualifications, under the heading “Varieties of Other-direction”; whatever else might be true of them, they had enough plasticity for that. An analysis of interviews with nearly two hundred college seniors, though far less intensive, later gave an even stronger picture of malleability and acquiescence.

  Does it follow that the specific American upper middle-class social character we termed other-directed is also the social character of the young in general elsewhere in the world—of those who have what Daniel Lerner refers to (in The Passing of Traditional Society) as the “mobile sensibility”? Despite the very great differences of culture which persist, from observations and studies done in many countries it seems that students everywhere now begin to resemble each other in basic outlook as well as superficial fads, so that, despite many cleavages, these students are more like each other than any one of them is like his father or mother. They are alike, as we have been suggesting, in their plasticity, their dependence on situation and circumstance and institutions. Indeed, their alikeness has struck many observers who speak of the whole world as becoming “Americanized.”

  But the similarity must not be overstated. For better as well as for worse, the specific types of resonance, anxiety, and sensibility characteristic of many well-educated Americans are seldom to be found in countries which have still to eliminate caste barriers and to suffer the pangs of affluence. The current preoccupation in this country with national purpose is not to be found in the countries whose goal is to share (or overthrow) our prowess. And of course there are many other differences, where local color and character affect the impact of the transcultural institutions, so that a Japanese factory preserves certain traditional values that an American or a Russian factory disrupts.

  But these differences are all under pressure of the discovery— as important as Darwinism in changing the face of the world, and in the West in part reflecting Darwinism—that cultures and religions hold no absolute truth, authority, self-evidentness. Fixed social characters could be maintained by fixed beliefs. Inner-direction wedded fixed social character to flexible behavior, but not to relativistic values. Inner-directed men were able, for a relatively brief historical period, to act as if the Chinese, Indians, Malayans, Africans they encountered were radically different from themselves (and from each other); they could act this way because they were obviously so much superior in power and hence, in many encounters, in poise as well. If they were missionaries they might ask of the others, even in the heart of darkness, that they learn to act like white men; and—astonishingly, as it now seems to us—millions sought to do so and were converted, impressed by the rectitude as well as the power of their captors and models. It has now become difficult for thoughtful Western men, not encapsulated by prejudice and ignorance, to take their own cultures and practices as absolutes; they cannot, by merely willing it, take them with deadly seriousness—in fact, the current wave of talk about the American Way of Life is a propagandist’s vain defensiveness against this very discovery.

  Another way of looking at this development is to see that, beneath all or virtually all cultural absolutes, has lain a basic human ambivalence. Anthropologists understandably regret the disintegration of most nonliterate cultures with the coming of the white man (or, today, the white-influenced man of any color); and we, too, feel that many of these cultures have created values our own society lacks. But a great number of nonliterates, not subject to physical coercion or dispersal, have plainly concluded that their once seemingly given culture lacked something; they have gone off, singly or in groups, to join the Big Parade— often meeting the more disenchanted Westerners going the other way. To repeat: the most important passion left in the world is not for distinctive practices, cultures, and beliefs, but for certain achievements—the technology and organization of the West— whose immediate consequence is the dissolution of all distinctive practices, cultures, and beliefs. If this is so, then it is possible that the cast of national characters is finished: men have too many to choose from to be committed to one, and as their circumstances become more similar, so will many attributes held in common, as against those unique to particular countries. Increasingly, the differences among men will operate across and within national boundaries, so that already we can see, in studies of occupational values in industrial societies, that the group character of managers or doctors—or artists—becomes more salient than the group character of Russians or Americans or Japanese, or indeed the conscious ideologies held in these societies.

  It would of course be premature to say that nations are no longer important, when they have the power of life and death over us all; and when, since social and national character is a legacy of history, there will remain for a long time differences in national character just as great as differences arising from occupation, sex, and style of life. So, too, relics of parochialism can persist —although as soon as a group or tribe seeks to protect its unique historical legacy by a nativist or revivalist movement, this
very effort (as suggested in Faces in the Crowd) betokens the end of unself-conscious, taken-for-granted rituals, and hence paradoxically speeds initiation into the modern world where tradition itself becomes an ideology, an aspect of deracination. Modernization thus appears to proceed with an almost irreversible impact, and no tribe or nation has found a place to hide.

  In an age when many educated Americans are preoccupied with the nature of their own identities and values, many non-professional readers have come to The Lonely Crowd for clues as to what they are like and how they might live. Indeed, many have read it as a test of their character, in the old-fashioned and nontechnical sense of the word “character.” We did not anticipate such an audience, not only when the book was first published by a university press, but later when it was one of the first “quality paperbacks,” for we and the publishers alike thought it might sell a few thousand copies as a reading in social science courses. While the professional academic reader would easily locate the book in the tradition of work in culture and personality, the untrained reader often tended to give us too much credit, or to assume that we spoke with the authentic univocal accent of sociology. We explained in the Preface to the first paperback edition what is still true for this one; namely, that we were not only preparing an abridgment (about four-fifths as long as the original) but to some extent a new edition with many passages rewritten and others rearranged. However, in editing, we aimed only at greater clarity and conciseness: we did not try to take into account the criticisms made of the original work, so that the reader may be assured that any critique he may have read of the original work holds also for the paperback editions; what we have taken out has been removed for convenience in understanding, and not to minimize controversy.

  Of course, all this was said on the assumption that student readers would be familiar with the controversy concerning the method, the interpretations, and the value judgments of the book. For those who want a reasonable sampling of these, let me again refer to the volume of criticisms edited by professors Lipset and Lowenthal. I want now to turn to a few of the items where the book seems to me a dozen years later to be probably wrong, quite beyond the general considerations about the importance of social character which have just been discussed. I shall take these up in more or less the order in which they appear in the book.

  Population. My collaborators and I were well aware, before we published The Lonely Crowd, that our linkage of stages of historical development to stages on the S-curve of population, posited by such demographers as Notestein, was rather shaky; readers of our manuscript reminded us that the concepts of tradition-direction, inner-direction, and other-direction might be useful, even if there were no such deterministic historical sequence as the first chapter of our book propounds.15 Moreover, our speculations concerning population had already been thrown in doubt almost as soon as they had been formed. Shortly before The Lonely Crowd went to press in 1949, we read the pamphlet of Joseph Davis, of the Stanford Food Research Institute, derisively criticizing the demographers, such as Notestein, on whom we had relied, and insisting that the post-World War II baby boom had destroyed the theory of incipient decline. (Davis himself ventured no alternative theory of population shifts, but merely hooted at the demographers’ wrong guess in the past.) We debated among ourselves whether we should seek to take account of Davis’ views and of the mounting evidence of a decisive change, not merely a temporary fluctuation, in the value placed by the middle class on having more children as against the value placed on saving or on acquiring consumer goods. Only later did it strike us that the option for children rather than more saving or splendor could be regarded as itself a demonstration of the change away from conspicuous consumption and toward a high value on personal relations that we (along with Parsons and White) regard as marking a distinction between Tocqueville’s and Veblen’s externally oriented Americans and the more internally resonant and “softer” descendants of today. In any event, in 1949 we felt that we should not try at the last minute to take account of this issue, but simply to present the population hypothesis as an interesting but unproved idea.

  There was, too, another element in our decision to retain the population theory despite our own misgivings and the cogent argument of friends who had read the manuscript that it was not essential to the book. One of these, an anthropologist, said in effect: “It doesn’t matter what the actual birth and death rates in a country are, or its actual population, but what people believe about it: thus, if the Rumanians think they have the same population pyramid as the Germans, it will have a comparable influence on character structure.” However, as Margaret Mead rightly states, the demographic hypothesis “may be regarded as a choice among possible ways of asserting the significance of large-scale historical trends, such as the progress of technology, which become, at least in part, independent of the characterological peculiarities of the peoples caught in their sweep.”16 Ours was an effort to say that there is a real as well as a perceived world; however, our use of the population cycle as an illustration of this position is probably less effective than would have been discussion of economic development, urbanization, and the spread of education.

  We were not, it should be understood, suggesting that the shape of a population pyramid caused a particular social character to emerge; social-psychological developments are always mediated through institutions. Yet, just as Karl Wittfogel has argued (in Oriental Despotism) that, where water is scarce, individuals cannot survive without an interdependent social fabric to preserve the water (whereas if food is periodically scarce the imperatives are less unequivocal and pressing), so in a less clear-cut way patterns of population growth or stability tend to go together with societal patterns to meet the requirements of that stage. At present, the technologically advanced societies such as our own have reached a situation of interdependence analogous to that of the Hopi, who will all die if they do not collectively preserve the rain-fall. Indeed, the very fact that human beings can destroy themselves and their society illustrates why ecological and technological requirements may narrow the alternatives within which social character is formed but can never create a society which is a simple reflex of what “has to” be done; thus, all “hydraulic societies” are cooperative, but the cooperation is assured by very different mechanisms and beliefs among the Hopi and among the Chinese or the traditional Egyptians.

  Politics: the veto groups and the power elite. The Lonely Crowd grew out of a critical view of American public life, but at the same time one that rejected many interpretations that were current among intellectuals. We were writing at a time when the miasma that settled in on the land during the era of the Cold War and the Eisenhower Administration was not yet at hand; complacency about America combined with anti-Communism had not yet been merged into the American Way. It was not then heretical to regard America as a land ruled by a few big businessmen and their political stooges and allies; it will be recalled that Henry Wallace’s followers, many of whom proclaimed that view, garnered a million votes, while the Communist party in 1948, although already discredited among avant-garde intellectuals, had more than fifty thousand members and was only beginning to lose its influence in the labor movement. Furthermore, many radicals who saw America as a country ruled by Wall Street joined many conservatives who neither knew nor cared how it was ruled, in regarding it as a cultural desert in which a few isolated figures maintained an authentic personal vision amid the corruption wrought by consumer goods and the mass media. Neither culturally nor politically were the authors of The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd at ease with the dominant styles of life in the United States, but we were convinced that to interpret what was wrong by a combination of Marxist class-analysis and aristocratic cultural disdain looked backward to an age that was already disappearing. (Cultural disdain is not necessarily mistaken because it is aristocratic; rather, our point is that this traditional outlook missed creative although as yet uncodified elements in American popular culture.) Undoubtedly, our skeptical
impatience arose not only out of a vivid curiosity about contemporary life but also out of a too great readiness to consider traditional interpretations as dated.

  Thus we rejected as explanations of American malaise, especially among the more privileged, the usual complaints about the power and greed of the business classes, nor did we think that the shallowness, the lack of conviction, of many Americans reflected merely the loss of hegemony by a traditional and aristocratic upper class, or the violations of democratic procedures by corrupt politicians. In stressing the passivity and joylessness of Americans, their obedience to unsatisfying values, we followed in the wake of other observers, notably Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, Harold Lasswell, C. Wright Mills, and John Dollard. In emphasizing cultural and psychological matters, we implicitly made clear our lack of confidence in easy political remedies, although in urging individuals to “feel free,” we understated the depth of our political despair. Our understatement reflected not only lack of moral clarity but genuine doubt about contradictory trends in American life. There is great generosity among Americans; there is also enormous meanness and mindlessness. There has been an immense increase of openness, tolerance, and empathy—not only an equality resulting from envy and the fear of eminence but also from a more humane and accommodating responsiveness; this increase must be balanced against the political passivity and personal limpness which The Lonely Crowd attacks.

  The Lonely Crowd was one of a number of books which in recent years have eschewed dogmatism and fanaticism and preferred openness, pluralism, and empiricism. Many intellectuals, influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr or George Kennan, have done battle against American tendencies to unrealistic moralizing with its implications of total engagement in war and politics. We ourselves in The Lonely Crowd sought to indicate, for example, that political bossism in America was not entirely evil and certainly not as evil as are attempts to extirpate it totally. So too, we saw the veto groups as giving a certain leeway for freedom in their interstices. Speaking for myself, I have always felt it important to think on two levels simultaneously: a middle level area of reformist concerns and possibilities where one works within the given system, and a more long-run Utopian concern with fundamental transformations. It would simplify both understanding and action to merge these two levels into an uncompromising attack on the status quo, and the need over the course of years to resist the temptation to simplify was an element in the severity of The Lonely Crowd’s critique of political fanaticism, enthusiasm, and moral indignation. I like fanaticism no better than I did, when it is brought to the mindless defense of vested ideological interests, whether in our own South, or in the nation as a whole, or in totalitarian enclaves or countries. Yet it was a mistake to link fanaticism and the kind of moral indignation that is an outlet for sadism and authoritarianism with only seemingly similar qualities in those who protest against injustice and oppression or wasted life. A dozen years later, at the tail end of the Eisenhower regime, “extreme” political feelings are a danger in some quarters, but the fear of them is a danger in others, and the ravages extremism can make of individual and group life have become almost too well recognized. In its attitude toward politics, The Lonely Crowd may have overemphasized the peripheral and the complicated at the expense of the obvious.