The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  This is the price the inner-directed child pays for a situation in which his maturity is not delayed by having to wait for his age-graded peer-group. His parents do not hold him down because, according to “authorities,” he is not ready for something. In Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son we find the assumption that pervades much literature of the earliest industrial period, that the child is simply a young, somewhat inexperienced adult. Lord Chesterfield writes as though his fifteen-year-old son had gained full sexual and intellectual maturity and needed only to ripen in wisdom and to acquire influence in his commerce with adults. The problems of training children to play with other children outside the home or to cooperate amicably with them do not present themselves to the inner-directed adult as part of his parental responsibility.

  As a result the child, surrounded by inner-directed adults, often faces demands that are quite unreasonable. He is not held back but neither is he given a break. The growing child may respond to these demands by guilt and desperate effort to live up to the model or by rebellion in solitude against it; he does not respond, as in the other-directed environment, by using the peer-group as a club to bring anxious adults into line if they have unreasonable or even unusual expectations of him. Indeed, in this era, it is sometimes possible to bring up the child in relative isolation from the peer-group, even though he has formal contact with other children at school. The images of the poor little rich boy and poor little rich girl are creations of this epoch, when children are often the social prisoners of parents and governesses.

  In fact, the location of the home tends to have entirely different meanings in each of the three phases of the population curve. In the phase of high growth potential the home, except among the hunting and nomadic peoples, is fixed. As the locus of most activities in the socialization process, it symbolizes the extended family’s overwhelming importance in that process. In the phase of transitional growth the young adult must navigate the passage from home and found a new home somewhere else. He goes to an undeveloped frontier or an undeveloped city; there he marries and settles down. This new home plays a part of decisive significance in the socialization of his children, though the school and other specialized agencies outside the home also play an increasing part.

  In the phase of incipient population decline people still move around, but in search of frontiers of consumption as well as of production. That is, they look for nice neighborhoods in which their children will meet nice people. Although much of the moving about in America today, within and between cities, is in search of better jobs, it is also increasingly in search of better neighborhoods and the better schools that go with them. Since many others, too, will also be shopping for better neighborhoods, this pressure, combined with the rapid shift of residential values and fashions characteristic of American cities, means that no one can ever settle down assuredly for the rest of life. (For when the children have grown up and make homes of their own, the parents will feel inclined to move again, perhaps in search of such consumption values as sunlight for themselves.) Thus by their very location the other-directed parents show how much store they put on their children’s contacts. And, of course, living in a small space with one child or two, the urban and suburban family needs to use space—physical and emotional space—outside the confined home for the activities of the growing children. (During the same period the working-class family has obtained access to much greater living space than during the earlier stages of industrialization; but it is the history of the middle-class family only that we are discussing here.)

  Returning now to the situation of the inner-directed child, we see that he finds his playmates either among his own brothers and sisters or in an equally wide age range outside the home. This pattern still exists in rural areas, where the gang at the swimming hole or ball field will be widely ranged in age; there are no partitioned playgrounds. However, after an age of “social discretion” is reached, the inner-directed child is expected to confine his friendships to those of approximately his own social class. Class has to be a conscious barrier because neighborhoods are somewhat less carefully restricted along class and ethnic lines than many suburbs are today—just as the southern whites and Negroes still frequently live in close physical proximity. Between five and fifteen, sex is also a barrier for the inner-directed child, since coeducation is infrequent and even where it formally exists little more effort is made to mix the sexes than to mix the social classes: proms for sixth and seventh graders are not yet known. The inner-directed child, limited in his choice of friends and limiting himself by a clear recognition of his status and the status to which he aspires, would seem choosy to many other-directed children of today.

  Within the limits permitted by geography and taboo, then, the inner-directed child approaching his teens seeks out a chum or two. He may find in an older relative or friend someone to imitate and admire. But in many cases he will choose a chum on the basis of an interest in similar games and hobbies—hobbies that tend to be highly idiosyncratic and that are often continued into adult life. One can still observe this pattern at an English boys’ school, where almost everyone has a hobby. Some hobbyists are quite satisfied to be by themselves—their hobby is company enough. Or one will find fast friendships among bird lovers, motorcycle fans, mineral collectors, poetry fanciers.

  As we shall see in Chapter XV, a hobby or craft is not of itself a clear sign of inner-direction: hobbies may be pursued also by children who are other-directed. Even, to a degree, the hobbies of both types may nominally coincide. But the meaning and social context of the hobbies are quite different for the two types of children. The inner-directed child will seldom share his hobby with a large peer-group—though stamp collecting may be an exception—and when hobbyists of this sort meet it is to swap technical details and enthusiasms, as two dairy farmers might swap accounts of their respective favorite breeds. There is nothing anxious about such a meeting: no problem of maintaining marginal differentiation (difference, that is, but not too much) in taste such as we find in other-directed hobbyists. The child is not shaken in his own hobby by the fact that others have a different hobby; rather, he is confirmed in the idiosyncrasy which, within wide limits, is respected.

  Let me warn the reader, however, not to view all this too nostalgically with, say Penrod or Huckleberry Finn or even perhaps his own idealized childhood, in mind. In sports and studies the peer-group can become fiercely competitive, aided and abetted by coaches, teachers, and other adults. Many boys and girls who win honors in grade school are crushed when they do not surmount the tougher competition of high school. Much is at stake—and still more seems to be at stake—in such contests; and the inner-directed child cannot easily, sour-grapes fashion, change the instilled goals when they loom unattainable. Moreover, parents and teachers in their psychological naÏvetÉ may hold up as models the detestable young who work hard, dress neatly, and are polite.

  Beyond all that, the fate of many inner-directed children is loneliness in and outside the home. Home, school, and way-stations between may be places for hazing, persecution, misunderstanding. No adult intervenes on behalf of the lonely or hazed child to proffer sympathy, ask questions, or give advice. Adults do not think children’s play is very important anyway; they will criticize children who seem too much concerned with play and too little with work. No sociometrically inclined teacher will try to break up cliques in school to see that no one is left out. How savagely snobbish boys and girls can be is typified by the story, in the Lynds’ Middletown, of the daughter who quit high school because her mother could not afford to give her silk stockings. Often the children, unaware that they have rights to friendship, understanding, or agreeable play—unaware, indeed, that the adults could be greatly interested in such matters—suffer in silence and submit to the intolerable.

  Only with the perspective of today can we see the advantages of these disadvantages. We can see that in a society which values inner-direction loneliness and even persecution are not thought of as
the worst of fates. Parents, sometimes even teachers, may have crushing moral authority, but the peer-group has less moral weight, glamorous or menacing though it may be. While adults seldom intervene to guide and help the child, neither do they tell him that he should be part of a crowd and must have fun.

  II. The Peer-group in the Stage of Other-direction

  The parents in the era dominated by other-direction lose their once undisputed role; the old man is no longer “the governor”—and the installer of governors. Other adult authorities such as the governess and grandmother either almost disappear or, like the teacher, take on the new role of peer-group facilitator and mediator—a role not too different perhaps from that of many clergymen who, in the adult congregation, move from morality to morale.

  As already indicated, moreover, the city in which the other-directed child grows up is large enough and stratified enough—taking into account its ring of suburbs—to create an age- and class-graded group for him. It will be possible to put him into school and playground, and camp in the summer, with other children of virtually the same age and social position. If the adults are the judge, these peers are the jury. And, as in America the judge is hemmed in by rules which give the jury a power it has in no other common-law land, so the American peer-group, too, cannot be matched for power throughout the middle-class world.

  The Trial. While the inner-directed parent frequently forced the pace of the child in its home “duties,” as, for example, in habits of cleanliness and toilet-training, the other-directed parent, more apt to be permissive in such matters, forces the pace, with like impatience, in the child’s social life, though often hardly aware of doing so. Parents today are the stage managers for the meetings of three- and four-year-olds, just as, in earlier eras, the adults managed marriages. Hence, while self-demand feeding schedules are gaining ground for infants, self-demand is not observed when it comes to socialization outside the home. The daily schedule is an effort, with mother as chauffeur and booking agent, to cultivate all the currently essential talents, especially the gregarious ones. It is inconceivable to some supervising adults that a child might prefer his own company or that of just one other child.

  The child is thus confronted by what we have termed his socio-metric peers and is not surrounded by those who are his peers in less visible matters, such as temperament and taste. Yet since there are no visible differences he is hard put to it to justify, even to be aware of, these invisible differences. On the overt level the situation is highly standardized: any given child faces the culture of the fives or the sixes at a particular moment of the fashion cycle in child-training and child-amusement practices. Indeed it is this very standardization which, as we saw, weakens the power of the parents, whose deviation from the standards is felt by them and by the child to demonstrate their inexperience and inadequacy. In this setting the adults are anxious that the child succeed in the peer-group and therefore are concerned with his adjustment. They, too, tend to ignore and even suppress invisible differences between their child and the children of others. Such differences might cast doubt on their own adjustment, their own correct tuning to the signals concerning child rearing.

  The majority of children learn very fast under these conditions; the same adult authorities who patronize children’s intellects (and therefore slow them down) are perhaps not sufficiently impressed with how poised in many social situations modern other-directed children are. These children are not shy, either with adults or with the opposite sex whom they have accompanied to proms and parties and seen daily in and out of school. This adaptability, moreover, prepares the child for a type of social mobility somewhat different from the social-climbing experiences of the parvenu in an inner-directed environment. The latter only rarely acquired the intellectual and social graces of his new associates—or he ridiculously accentuated them. He either kept his rough and lowly manners or painfully tried to learn new ones as he moved up; in either case the standard, limited code of conduct expected of him was unequivocal. In contrast with this the other-directed child is able to move among new associates with an almost automatic adjustment to the subtlest insignia of status.

  Bearing in mind these positive achievements of other-directed sociability, let us turn our attention from what the peer-group teaches and evokes to what it represses. Today six-year-olds and up have a phrase—“he [or she] thinks he’s big” (or “he thinks he’s something”)—which symbolizes the role of the peer-group in the creation of other-directed types. The effort is to cut everyone down to size who stands up or stands out in any direction. Beginning with the very young and going on from there, overt vanity is treated as one of the worst offenses, as perhaps dishonesty would have been in an earlier day. Being high-hat is forbidden.

  Temper, manifest jealousy, moodiness—these, too, are offenses in the code of the peer-group. All knobby or idiosyncratic qualities and vices are more or less eliminated or repressed. And judgments of others by peer-group members are so clearly matters of taste that their expression has to resort to the vaguest phrases, constantly changed: cute, lousy, square, darling, good guy, honey, swell, bitch (without precise meaning), etc. Sociometry reflects this situation when it asks children about such things as whom they like to sit next to or not to sit next to, to have for a friend, a leader, and so on. The judgments can be meaningfully scaled because, and only because, they are all based on uncomplicated continua of taste, on which the children are constantly ranking each other.

  But to say that judgments of peer-groupers are matters of taste, not of morality or even opportunism, is not to say that any particular child can afford to ignore these judgments. On the contrary he is, as never before, at their mercy. If the peer-group were —and we continue to deal here with the urban middle classes only —a wild, torturing, obviously vicious group, the individual child might still feel moral indignation as a defense against its commands. But like adult authorities in other-directed processes of socialization, the peer-group is friendly and tolerant. It stresses fair play. Its conditions for entry seem reasonable and well meaning. But even where this is not so, moral indignation is out of fashion. The child is therefore exposed to trial by jury without any defenses either from the side of its own morality or from the adults. All the morality is the group’s. Indeed, even the fact that it is a morality is concealed by the confusing notion that the function of the group is to have fun, to play; the deadly seriousness of the business, which might justify the child in making an issue of it, is therefore hidden.

  “The Talk of the Town”: The Socialization of Preferences. In the eyes of the jury of peers one may be a good guy one day, a stinker the next. Toleration, let alone leadership, depends on having a highly sensitive response to swings of fashion. This ability is sought in several ways. One way is to surrender any claim to independence of judgment and taste—a kind of plea of nolo contendere. Another is to build a plea for special consideration by acquiring unusual facility in one’s duties as a consumer—in performance, that is, of the leisurely arts. With good luck one may even become a taste and opinion leader, with great influence over the jury.

  Each particular peer-group has its fandoms and lingoes. Safety consists not in mastering a difficult craft but in mastering a battery of consumer preferences and the mode of their expression. The preferences are for articles or “heroes” of consumption and for members of the group itself. The proper mode of expression requires feeling out with skill and sensitivity the probable tastes of the others and then swapping mutual likes and dislikes to maneuver intimacy.

  Now some of this is familiar even in the period depending on inner-direction; it is important, therefore, to realize the degree to which training in consumer taste has replaced training in etiquette. Formal etiquette may be thought of as a means of handling relations with people with whom one does not seek intimacy. It is particularly useful when adults and young, men and women, upper classes and lower classes, are sharply separated and when a code is necessary to mediate exchanges across these li
nes. Thus etiquette can be at the same time a means of approaching people and of staying clear of them. For some, etiquette may be a matter of little emotional weight—an easy behavioral cloak; for others the ordering of human relations through etiquette can become highly charged emotionally—an evidence of characterlogical compulsiveness. But in either case etiquette is concerned not with encounters between individuals as such but with encounters between them as representatives of their carefully graded social roles.

  In comparison with this, training in consumer taste, which tends to replace etiquette among the other-directed, is useful not so much across age and social class lines as within the jury room of one’s peers in age and social class. As in some groups—children as well as adults—discussion turns to the marginal differentiation between Cadillacs and Lincoln’s, so in other groups discussion centers on Fords and Chevrolets. What matters in either case is an ability for continual sniffing out of others’ tastes, often a far more intrusive process than the exchange of courtesies and pleasantries required by etiquette. Not, of course, that the child always gets close to the others with whom he is exchanging and ratifying preferences—these exchanges are often mere gossip about goods. Yet a certain emotional energy, even excitement, permeates the transaction. For one thing, the other-directed person acquires an intense interest in the ephemeral tastes of the “others”—an interest inconceivable to the tradition-directed or inner-directed child whose tastes have undergone a less differentiated socialization. For another thing, the other-directed child is concerned with learning from these interchanges whether his radar equipment is in proper order.