by Colin Wilson
In fact, it is clear that, if one accepts the sociological method of Riesman and Whyte, it will be difficult to go beyond their conclusions. They end with a demand for more individualism; this could hardly be promoted by “social remedies,” although social remedies might clear the way for a reassertion of it. If the question is one of remedies, it is back to the individual that the emphasis must be directed.
The real problem is the attitude of the individual towards himself. Riesman’s conclusions about the Found Generation might indicate that the modern American college graduate is shrewd, sane, and well-adjusted, an altogether wiser man than those young people of thirty years ago, the Lost Generation, of whom Malcolm Cowley wrote in Exile’s Return. But the case might also be that they are more afraid of insecurity than of boredom; that they are a browbeaten generation, lacking enterprise and a spirit of adventure. The point is a delicate one, and deserves closer scrutiny. It arises, for example, in The Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead by Lucien Price. Whitehead had commented that English students seem better informed, more self-confident, than American students.
Price answered that this was because the cultural soil of Europe is deeper. Whitehead disagreed. “You place too much stress on soil. It isn’t soil. You are the same people as the Europeans. You have access to the whole of European history. Americans are too diffident” (my italics). Whitehead offered no suggestion to account for this; he simply observed it as a fact.
Kingsley Amis has recently commented that if the American male is “basically insecure,” he makes a very good job of concealing it. But perhaps insecurity is the wrong word. What is in question is not so much insecurity as a deeply ingrained habit of other-direction. The “insignificance” that De Tocqueville spoke of is not, however, a conscious inferiority complex: this species of self-mistrust is taken too much for granted to qualify as a complex. It is at once a man’s attitude towards himself and his belief about the world; it conceals, that is, a generalization about mankind, a judgment about the stature of man. The other-directed tend to divide the world into ordinary men and extraordinary men. (Many European celebrities have noticed the respect with which the American treats anyone who is regarded as extraordinary—the case of Dylan Thomas offers a recent example.) The extraordinary man seems to belong almost to a different species.
It is no accident that the Americans prefer to use the word “genius” as an exclusive description rather than adjectively. (Edison and Shakespeare were “geniuses,” not “men of genius.”) When used adjectively, genius is a quality that anyone might possess or attempt to develop; on the other hand, one is born a genius as one might be born with two heads. So the gulf between the ordinary and the extraordinary is emphasized. This amounts to a fundamental self-depreciation: an other-direction that takes itself so much for granted that it has become a sort of self-confidence. De Tocqueville had pointed this out in a section in which he speaks of the high-flown language of American politicians:
I have frequently remarked that the Americans, who generally treat of business in plain, clear language… are apt to become inflated as soon as they attempt a more poetical diction. They then vent their pomposity from one end of a harangue to the other… The cause of this may be pointed out without much difficulty. In democratic communities, each citizen is habitually engaged in contemplation of a very puny object, namely himself [my italics]. If he ever raised his looks higher, he then perceives nothing but the immense form of society at large, or the still more imposing aspect of mankind. His ideas are all either extremely minute and clear, or extremely general and vague; what lies between is an open void.
The “realism” that, as De Tocqueville observed, makes Americans “treat of business in plain, clear language” is also the realism that makes the individual face his own unimportance, a realism that prevents him from even attempting anything extraordinary, since he acts upon the premise that he is not extraordinary and never can be. The result of this dubious realism (dubious because it does not really face facts, but only a self-chosen set of facts that lead to self-depreciation) is a loss of the drive that comes from self-belief. There will be more to be said of this attitude, as exemplified by American writers, in a later section; for the moment, it is worth remarking that one could hardly imagine a James Joyce or a Robert Musil springing from an American background. In the case of both Joyce and Musil, there was an immense act of self-belief that had to sustain years of neglect. Both were born in small countries—Joyce in Ireland, Musil in Austria—where there was still a strong tradition of inner-direction. The disadvantages under which Joyce produced Ulysses and Musil Der Mann ohne Eugenschaften (The Man without Qualities) were great enough; imagine their case if an American upbringing had added to these all the weight of American diffidence and other-direction.
I have said that the unconscious assumptions that underlie other-direction conceal a generalization about mankind. An example may help to clarify my meaning. In his Conversations with Goethe, Eckermann tells how Goethe was asked what he would have done if he had been born in less fortunate circumstances, and, instead of “drawing the big prize” in the lottery, had “drawn a blank.” Goethe replied: “Not everybody is made for the big prize. Do you think I should have done such a stupid thing as to draw a blank?”
Goethe’s comment reveals more than a certainty of his own powers; it reveals a confidence about his luck, his destiny; the ancients would have put it that he was certain of the favor of the gods. Implied in his reply is an assumption about the relation between a man and his “destiny” (to use the term for want of a better). Such an assertion, indeed, has many implications. To begin with, it could never be based on the premise that man is a worm who longs for meaning and purpose in a universe that has neither; there is no sense of tragic irony here, no feeling of man’s insignificance in a hostile or indifferent universe (as with Thomas Hardy). Nor does the remark “Not everybody is made for the big prize” indicate that Goethe considered himself a different species from the rest of mankind; he was not a man to feel that he had achieved his eminence by pure luck, by the accident of being born a genius. On the contrary, it implies a denial of luck, a belief that, for the man who understands the workings of destiny and trusts himself, eminence is only a matter of hard work and determination.
What it comes to is this: in the simplest statement about one’s own nature there is an assumption about the whole of humanity. A man need hold no conscious philosophy; his attitude emerges from the whole texture of his everyday life. For this reason, a playwright like Arthur Miller can say as much about American society in Death of a Salesman as Riesman or Whyte can say in carefully documented social studies. Underlying the “success philosophy” that Miller puts into the mouth of Willy Loman, there is a pessimistic assumption about Willy’s own stature and his relation to society. (Perhaps the success of Death of a Salesman in the United States is a symptom of an unconscious revolt against other-direction, just as the slump in the sale of big cars in 1957 may indicate a revolt against the “hidden persuaders.”) And mention of Willy’s success philosophy suggests another interesting point: the gradual change in the American conception of success. Whyte uses the expression “Protestant ethic” for the typical nineteenth-century success philosophy; “plenty of room at the top,” “don’t be afraid to start on the bottom rung,” and so forth. But success in the twentieth century involves being a good organization man, socially well-adjusted, and all the rest of it. The organization man is expected to be ambitious—but in a balanced, well-adjusted way. Here is another aspect of the insignificance premise. It is all very well for a James Joyce to possess the ambition that eventually produces a Ulysses, because Joyce was born a “genius”; but it would be improper, or just “cracked,” for an “ordinary man” to set his ambitions on anything so unusual.
Inner-Direction and Insanity
All this emerges very clearly in a case cited by the psychiatrist, Frederick Wertham, in his book The Show of Violence. Robert Irwin had tried to amputate his penis. He
gave as his reason that he was attempting to kill his sexual appetite, which, he believed, was stealing energy from a far more important project. This project was a rigorous dicipline of his own mind, with a view to intensifying the power of his memory; for Irwin had noted that the memory retains everything a man has ever done or ever thought, and yet that only a minute part of this store can be tapped and put to use. Irwin called his discipline “visualizing.”2 But he had no particular skills, and so was forced to take on the most frustrating and boring of jobs; and after years of defeat he finally committed a triple murder. This was not a case of sexual assault or “irresistible impulse”; a suicidal impulse turned into a gesture of disgust with society, the disgust of a man who had been suffering from years of strain. The court rejected Dr. Wertham’s plea of insanity (rightly, perhaps), but agreed so far as to impose a sentence of life imprisonment rather than of death.
Although Wertham tells the story with sympathy, he clearly considers Irwin insane in the fullest sense of the word, and his obsession with “visualizing” as sufficient evidence of this insanity. And yet it seems possible that if Irwin had been born, like Marcel Proust, of rich parents, his project might have led him to major creative achievement; at least, it would almost certainly not have led him to triple murder. But at no point in his narrative does Wertham appear to indicate that Irwin’s visualizing might have been an obsession of the same type as that which led Joyce to write Ulysses or Columbus to discover America; and it is apparent that this was the general attitude of society towards Irwin’s curiously touching concentration on his project.
I am not, of course, suggesting that if Irwin had been born in Ireland or Austria, instead of in Los Angeles, his obsession would have met with greater sympathy than in America or would have come to some kind of positive fruition. But there seems no reason to doubt that his American background was an additional handicap and contributed to his final defeat. Fanatical inner-direction is always regarded as a little “queer” by any society (until it has made itself respectable by visible success), but in America it would appear to be a sign of nothing less than insanity.
The same point is made by Whyte in a chapter called "The Fight Against Genius” (Chapter 16 of The Organization Man). After observing that recent years have witnessed an increasing emphasis on scientific teamwork and a suspicion of the “lone wolf” scientist, Whyte goes on to analyze the question of scientists in industry.3 The only industrial laboratories that can boast “top scientists,” he points out, are those that allow their researchers the maximum freedom; most big organizations distrust undirected research, and “to some management people, the desire to do free work is a downright defect, a symptom of maladjustment that demands cure. The failure to recognize the virtue of purposelessness,” he continues, “is the starting point of industry’s problem… By its very nature, discovery has an accidental quality.” He might have added that a certain element, not merely of independence but of downright anarchy, is necessary to the life of the creative worker. The kind of conformity now being demanded by the organization sounds, indeed, increasingly like some of the propaganda in Brave New World, with its motto, “Community, Identity, Stability”; and Whyte, when examining what happens when the organization tries to dominate not merely the employee but his family, too, actually evokes Orwell’s 1984, with its vision of totalitarian uniformity, and compares the tactics of the organization to those of Big Brother. The fact is that although Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and Zamyatin’s We are all satires on communism, their line of attack has a great deal of relevance to the organization. Nor have we in England any reason to congratulate ourselves on the idea that our insularity and tradition of personal independence make the warnings of The Organization Man and The Hidden Persuaders irrelevant. The trends may be less advanced over here, but they are here all the same. In “A Note on Billy Graham” in his collection of essays, Thoughts in the Wilderness, J. B. Priestley finishes by observing: “The truth is that now the British crowd is more easily enticed and dominated by mass-communication, showmanship and ballyhoo than the American crowd is. The Americans have had a great deal more of it, and for years were far more responsive to it, but while there is in them still a strain of the gullible and hysterical, there is also the work of a powerful antibody, the strain of the sceptical… The satirical journalist and the jeering comic are figures of power in America… But the newly arrived British… are bowled over by the new nonsense as easily as the Martian invaders, in Wells’s story, fell victim to the strange bacteria of the world. Their minds are wide open as well as being empty.” And Mr. Priestley’s talk of empty minds is surely only another way of observing that the English, like the Americans, are changing their character and being other-directed instead of inner-directed. His essay, on the other hand, suggests a ray of hope: namely, that some process of resistance may be unconsciously going forward, and may blaze up as revolt before the 1984 stage is reached. But perhaps, at this stage, it is more politic to ignore the hope and concentrate on the danger.
Other-Directed Religion
Apropos of Billy Graham, it might be of interest to glance at the religious revivals of our age. Graham himself is a depressing symptom of other-direction, and his immense success in England is one more sign that we are not far behind the Americans in a character change that will make Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd as applicable here as there. His evangelistic methods consist of straightforward Bible-bashing; when Whitehead said, “Religion is what a man does with his own solitariness,” he was not thinking of the Billy Graham variety. I have attended only one of Graham’s meetings at Harringay. The show had the quality of a high-standard American musical. The music was syncopated, jazzy; the hymns sounded no more like the hymns we sang at school than Bing Crosby’s “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” sounds like a Christmas carol. Graham’s preaching had a colloquial freshness, an easy man-to-man appeal, that fitted in with the high quality of the rest of the show, and imposed no strain on the listener. He retold some parable from the New Testament (I cannot now remember which, though I do remember his explanation that a “publican” was the equivalent of a modern gangster), emphasized that heaven and salvation were round the corner for every single one of his audience, and glossed lightly over the “burning pit” that would be the lot of those others who failed to take advantage of his offer. By this time the singing was like something out of Showboat, and Graham invited converts to come forward and be accepted into the arms of Jesus.4
Graham’s appeal, as far as I could judge, consisted in giving his audience (who had been steeling themselves for a chunk of old-fashioned Methodism) an unexpectedly pleasant evening and then utilizing the good will that resulted for his man-to-man plea that they should come forward and be saved. The effect of the show was that of a large whiskey. The preaching aimed solely at suggesting that Christianity was a simple, obvious way of “getting right with God” and going to heaven, while Graham’s boyish charm and colloquial language combined with the soothing music to make the listener feel that religion was no more remote and otherworldly than his favorite television program. Here was the technique of mass media—films and TV—applied to conversion. It depended for its success, as J. B. Priestley has observed, upon the receptivity of its film-and-television-trained audience and upon the emptiness of their minds.
Of the other religious sects of our time, Jehovah’s Witnesses, one of the most successful, rely in the same way on the emptiness of their converts. Unlike the Quakerism preached by George Fox, their creed knows nothing of an “inner light.” Again, my interest in this sect led me to attend some of their meetings. I was chiefly struck by their emphasis on the “Law.” Whole meetings were devoted to discussing the Law as laid down in the Old Testament and to insisting on rigorous obedience to its letter. Their appeal (if such a militant demand can be called an appeal) depended on their assertion that the Day of Judgment would occur within the lifetime of people alive in 1914, (that is, before 1990) and that only Jehovah�
��s Witnesses would be saved. I was reminded irresistibly of Peter Verkovensky, in Dostoevsky’s The Devils, who gained converts for his revolution by assuring them that it was already organized and would inevitably take place within the next few months, and by implying that liquidation awaited anyone who declined the invitation. The Witnesses made no call to inner-direction. Everything had been laid down in the Bible; salvation consisted in allowing oneself to be completely and unreservedly dominated by it—or rather by the extraordinary interpretations they put upon it.5 As to the Day of Judgment, no one seemed to be aware that two earlier Judgment Days (as predicted by Judge Russell, the founder) had arrived and passed without incident.
There is, I think, no need to emphasize further that these “religious revivals” depend upon a complete lack of inner-direction on the part of their converts: upon an appeal, in fact, to authority. This explains the power of Frank Buchman’s Moral Rearmament movement, with its emphasis on society (especially “high society”), and the esoteric appeal of the British Israelites, who apparently believe that the British race is a descendant of the ten lost tribes of Israel.
In all these cases, the organization that seeks to dominate is a religious organization; otherwise, the pattern is the same as in the secular organization, and the observations of Whyte and Riesman are confirmed. The inner light, like Riesman’s inner direction, is out. Kierkegaard’s “Truth is subjectivity” has no relevance here, for the people concerned possess no subjectivity, or none to speak of. It is merely a matter of plunging into the mystique of the community (in this case, the “little flock of Jesus”). Religion as a highly organized and concentrated form of inner-direction is disappearing in the twentieth century. If religion is “what the individual does with his solitude,” then the definition excludes these mass movements. There has been no religious revival in our time.