by Colin Wilson
A hallmark of all organizations, in Whyte’s view, is “the failure to recognize the virtue of purposelessness.” Whyte adds: “To the managers and engineers who set the dominant tone in industry, purposeless is anathema, and all their impulses incline them to highly planned, systematized development in which the problem is clearly defined.” Whyte arrives at what is almost a Blakean aphorism: “Rationalize curiosity too early, and you kill it.” Now a society that classifies human beings as a resource, that encourages their assimilation to a common, bland pattern, that discourages individuality and contemplation, and finally that tries to seal off the transcendent so that its vertical attraction will not disturb the efficient arrangement of things on the horizontal plane—such a society, it seems obvious, will kill curiosity. Such a society will also kill the vitality from which curiosity springs. If that society’s welfare arrangement and its entertainment industry function well, most people will be content with their lot in it, but a general malaise will inevitably, even if slowly, give rise to a sense of vague but irresolvable frustration. The mood will eventually give rise to restlessness among the many. In those whose understanding of their frustration is clearest, the mood will be a call to revolt—to undertake what amounts to heroic activity. Wilson’s mid-century assessment of the Western prospect was realistic and therefore somewhat pessimistic, but he clearly saw that the age that discouraged heroism needed heroism like none other if humanity, distinguishing that quality from the mere biological species, were to survive. The theme of the hero functions as the centerpiece of The Age.
Introduction to the 2001 Paupers’ Press Edition
It is perhaps this wrong connection of ideas [that the earth is a mere point in the universe] which has led men to the still falser notion that they are not worthy of the Creator’s regard. They have believed themselves to be obeying the dictates of humility when they have denied that the earth and all that the universe contains exists only on man’s account, on the ground that the admission of such an idea would be only conceit. But they have not been afraid of the laziness and cowardice which are the inevitable results of this affected modesty. The present-day avoidance of the belief that we are the highest in the universe is the reason that we have not the courage to work in order to justify that title, that the duties springing from it seem too laborious, and that we would rather abdicate our position and our rights than realize them in all their consequences. Where is the pilot that will guide us between these hidden reefs of conceit and false humility?
SAINT MARTIN, quoted from
Strindberg’s Legends
Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge the help of Negley Farson (who, among other things, first drew my attention to The Lonely Crowd), Hugh Heckstall Smith and Bill Hopkins, who offered suggestions for improvement, and Joy Wilson and Dorothy Welford who helped in preparing the manuscript for press. Also to thank Philip Thody, of Belfast University, for suggestions and criticisms on the Sartre chapter.
Introduction. The Vanishing Hero
The problem that forms the subject of this book first presented itself to me as a question of literature. When I tried to find a phrase that would express it concisely, I hit upon “the unheroic hypothesis.” This seemed to define what I was thinking about: the sense of defeat, or disaster, or futility, that seems to underlie so much modern writing. It is not merely that contemporary authors seem to feel bound to deal with the “ordinary man” and his problems; it is that most of them seem incapable of dealing with anything but the most ordinary states of mind.
But when I came to consider the reasons for this unheroic premise, I became aware of an attitude of mind that seems to permeate the whole of modern society. I found this more difficult to characterize. As an approximation, I would say that it is a general sense of insignificance.
De Tocqueville put his finger on it in Democracy in America, when he said of the American: “When he comes to survey the totality of his fellows, and to place himself in contrast to so huge a body, he is instantly overwhelmed by his own insignificance and weakness.” And I began to realize that more was in question than a purely literary problem. If the heroes of modern fiction seem negative and defeated, they are only reflecting the world in which their creators live. The first step in understanding the problem of “the vanishing hero” must be an attempt to gain an insight into the “insignificance premise” in modern society. But this in turn needs explaining in terms of the social crises of the twentieth century. Not entirely in terms of these crises, of couse; who now accepts the Marxist notion that economics explains everything, even religion? In fact, the problem of the hero provides the ideal refutation of the extreme Marxist position. Social factors can shed an immense amount of light on the subject, but a point comes where there is no alternative but to consider the “metaphysical” problems of the individual. Communism, however sympathetically understood, cannot claim to have solved all the problems.
These were the reasons that led me to begin my study of the hero with the evidence of sociology.
Part 1. The Evidence of Sociology
It is the task of history to display the types of compulsion and of violence characteristic of each age.
A. N. WHITEHEAD: Adventures of Ideas
It is also my impression that the conditions I believe to be responsible for other-direction are affecting increasing numbers of people in the metropolitan centers of advanced industrial countries. My analysis of the other-directed character is thus at once an analysis of the American and of contemporary man.
DAVID RIESMAN: The Lonely Crowd
In his disturbing study of American advertising, The Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard writes: “In 1953, a leading advertising researcher concluded that Americans would have to live a third better if they were to keep pace with growing production and permit the United States economy to hit a $400,000,000,000 gross national product in 1958.” It is the phrase “live a third better” that is important here. It means that the American consumer will have to be persuaded to spend a third more money on things he does not really need. It means bigger time-payment schemes, bigger refrigerators and cars and insurance policies. It will follow that he must then make bigger concessions to the need for security, and to the organization that employs him, and must learn to conform more rigorously to its demands for efficiency. In fact, “live a third better” means, in actuality, make the merry-go-round whirl a third faster. Or to use a less festive simile, work the treadmill a third harder.
J. K. Galbraith has called this “the dependence effect.” He sees in it the central fallacy of modern American economics. The fallacy runs like this: “A higher standard of living depends on higher production. Higher production is dependent on higher consumption. Therefore, the best way to improve society is to step up production, and to persuade everyone to consume more.” This type of fallacy depends upon taking a premise which is true up to a point, and extending it until it has become false. For instance, it is true that an army fights on its stomach. If an economist then went on to say: “Therefore, we must produce more and more food; and we must all learn to eat more than ever before: in this way we shall become unconquerable,” he would be ignoring the fact that over-eating is more likely to produce a nation of ulcerated stomachs than a race of efficient soldiers. The Hidden Persuaders makes it apparent that one of the results of persuading Americans to “live a third better” is a kind of moral dyspepsia whose results are quite as harmful as those of widespread poverty.
Vance Packard makes no bones about his reasons for objecting to the “consumer fallacy.” He quotes Bernice Allen of Ohio University: “We have no proof that more material goods, such as more cars or gadgets, has made anyone happier.” Galbraith is more cautious: “The question of happiness and what adds to it has been evaded.” He is only concerned with pointing out that the consumer fallacy is wasteful and inefficient as a social philosophy. “The same week the Russians launched the first earth satellite, we launched a magnificent selection of car
models, including the uniquely elegant new Edsel.” He suggests that a higher proportion of the national income should be diverted to social uses—schools, parks, research—and that this could easily be done by imposing a higher purchase tax on luxury goods. However, Galbraith’s economic theories are outside the range of this essay. What is interesting to note, at this point, is his analysis of the diseases that attack an “affluent society.” Galbraith is only one of many American sociologists who feel that something strange and dangerous is happening in America today. And what is happening is only an outcome of the high-powered technical civilization that aims at higher material standards. This form of society is spreading all over the globe; so that, unless a world war calls a halt, there seems no reason why the problems of the affluent society should not reach every country in the world in the course of time.
The problems I wish to touch on in the first part of this essay are not problems of economics, they are problems of the effect upon the individual of increased material security. In 1956 the suicide rate in Sweden was 1 to every 4460 of the population; in Denmark 1 to every 4431. This is more than twice as high as the English rate. These countries are also “affluent societies.” Denmark is probably the most highly organized welfare state in the world, so that the high suicide rate can hardly be due to social insecurity. Moreover, as a report in the American Sociological Review points out, suicide rates tend to drop during wars. This is a further blow to the insecurity hypothesis. The conclusion would seem to be that too much security has the effect of slackening the vital tension and weakening the urge to live: a conclusion confirmed by Galbraith, who reports that after the RAF bombing raids on Hamburg in 1943—raids in which between sixty thousand and a hundred thousand people were killed and half the city was burned to the ground—Hamburg’s war production rose. The living standard of the workers had slumped, but their efficiency was unimpaired. Insecurity made no difference.1
What attention should above all be focused on is the state of mind that permeates an “affluent society.” Men clock in and clock out of work; they look at television screens and go to see films based on best-selling novels. The result is an increasing emphasis on man as a member of society. John Donne’s “No Man is an Island” becomes a commonplace of the conventional wisdom, and the Buddha’s “Let each man be unto himself an island” is an insight to be suspected and feared. There is a planing-down process. Society comes first, the individual second. This is not a consciously held notion in most people; it is an attitude that comes naturally and infiltrates itself into every aspect of the individual’s work and recreation.
Inner-Direction and Other-Direction
In recent years, two American sociologists have published important studies in this attitude, and I shall borrow from their terminology. The first is David Riesman of Harvard, whose essay The Lonely Crowd has the subtitle: “A Study in the Changing American Character.” The second is William H. Whyte, whose book The Organization Man is perhaps the most important study of the American character since De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was published over a century ago.
Riesman’s book argues that there are three types of social character, which he labels “tradition-directed,” “inner-directed,” and “other-directed.” The society of the Middle Ages was mainly tradition-directed (that is, directed by ritual, social routine, religion). The inner-directed type of man is the man with pioneer qualities; in an expanding and changing society he can cope with the confusion because he possesses the self-discipline to drive towards a goal he has himself chosen. American literature in the nineteenth century is rich in this type: Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Dana, Poe.
The other-directed man cares more for what the neighbors think than for what he wants in his own person; in fact, his wants eventually become synonymous with what the neighbors think. Riesman believes that American character is slowly changing from inner-directed to other-directed. The other-directed man demands security, and all his desires and ambitions are oriented towards society. Riesman writes of the other-directed man, “other people are the problem” (my italics).
Whyte’s book, The Organization Man, is also a study in the increasing tendency to other-direction, but is particularly concerned with the man who works for a big-business organization. It demonstrates how the organization imposes an ethic of conformity on its employees. But this is not all. The terrifying part of this study is not merely the observation that men are willing to swallow the organization ethic; it is the fact that they swallow it and like it. Although the subject may sound narrower than that of The Lonely Crowd, Whyte’s analysis actually ranges over every aspect of modern American life and culture.
These two books, like Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, are arguing that the great danger is to over-emphasize the social virtues until most men think of nothing but “what the neighbors think.” Whyte says, “I am going to argue that he [the organization man] should fight the organization. But not self-destructively. He may tell the boss to go to hell, but he is going to have another boss.” In the same way, De Tocqueville had concluded his study of democracy by acknowledging that democracy has immense virtues and that these virtues will persist so long as the balance is maintained between the spirit of equality and the spirit of individualism. Riesman, Whyte, Packard, Galbraith feel that the balance is now being lost very quickly indeed. The necessity is to re-emphasize the importance of inner-direction. Whyte suggests, with a lightness of touch that should not be mistaken for flippancy, that university research teams might take a rest from studying how to fit the individual to the group and try studying such topics as the tyranny of the happy-work team, the adverse effects of high morale.
Whyte claims to show, among other things, that this ethic of conformity is, in many ways, self-destructive. For example: after devoting a great many pages to the “testing of the organization man” (tests of intelligence and conformity that have to be taken by candidates for jobs), he goes on to reveal that when some of the bosses took these tests they failed. The conclusion is not that the bosses lacked the efficiency they demand from their employees, but that the qualities demanded of a boss have very little to do with conformity, and a great deal to do with individual drive and enterprise.
Meanwhile, the ethic of conformity steadily gains a deeper hold. David Riesman has published an article called “The Found Generation,” an analysis of the aims and ambitions of American college students. It reveals that most American students possess the “organization mentality” to a degree that ought to gratify their future bosses. Their ideas of the future have a monotonously similar pattern: a home, a wife, a good job in some big organization (big organizations are “safer”), a car in two years, a house in five, a large family, a wife who is a home-girl… No interest whatever, he found, was shown in politics or religion. Riesman comments that a world run by these young people will be an eminently safe world; no one will drop atom bombs or start world wars. But although his comments have a professional detachment, he finds it difficult to conceal his astonishment at the complete lack of desire for adventure and of the feeling that the future is full of vast yet undefined possibilities. He even intimates that a similar cross section of his own generation (in the early 1930’s) would have yielded a very different result.
Neither Whyte nor Riesman, nor Packard, has any definite solution to offer. I have already quoted Whyte’s suggestions. Packard concludes that “we can choose not to be persuaded,” and hopes that “this book may contribute to the general awareness.” Riesman put it like this:
If the other-directed people should discover how much needless work they do, discover that their own thoughts and their own lives are quite as interesting as other people’s, that, indeed, they no more assuage their loneliness in a crowd of peers than one can assuage one’s thirst by drinking sea-water, then we might expect them to become more attentive to their own thoughts and aspirations.
But he has no suggestions as to how this might be brought about. He writes oddly like Eme
rson, in the essay “Self-Reliance”; but what can a self-reliant man do but urge others to become self-reliant?
Galbraith, as has already been noted, reaches conclusions that are purely economic, tending towards socialism. Socialism, however, though it might put an end to the consumer fallacy, can hardly be expected to go deeper. A novel like Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone shows that Russia has the same kind of problems as America; in this case, the organization is the Soviet government and the bureaucracy it supports.