The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  In this chapter, however, our focus will be less on the media themselves and their patterns of operation and control than on the effects of imagery and storytelling on the child audience. And of course these effects cannot be considered in isolation from the constellation of parents, teachers, and peer-groupers who operate on the assembly Une of character. If we find, for instance, a child who seems more affected by print than by people, it may be because people are so overwhelming for him that he must take refuge in print. Furthermore, cultures differ very much in the perceptions they stress in teaching the child to differentiate among images and to differentiate among people. But in general it seems fair to say that the storytellers are indispensable agents of social They picture the world for the child and thus give both form and limits to his memory and imagination.2

  In exploring this topic we must not confuse the genres of literature with the problem of social-psychological effects. I am going to use “story” broadly in this chapter to include not only poetry and fiction but any fabulous and embroidered account: a “true” newsreel might by this definition be a story.

  Societies in the phase of incipient population decline can afford, can technically provide, and have both the time and the need to receive a bounteous flow of imagery from urban centers of distribution. Industrialism and mass literacy seem to go together. These same societies, moreover, rely more heavily than their predecessors on character-forming agencies outside the home. Hence, as we would expect, the storytellers of the mass media play a considerable role among other-directed children. We can see what has changed in recent generations only by contrasting today’s experience with that of children in societies depending on tradition-direction and inner-direction.

  I. Song and Story in the Stage of Tradition-direction

  Chimney-corner media. Almost by definition, a society depending on tradition-direction makes use of oral traditions, myths, legends, and songs as one of its mechanisms for conveying the relative unity of its values. Ambiguity is not absent from these forms. But since the story is told children by a family member or a person closely connected with the family, it can be modulated for them and indeed, since they can criticize, question, and elaborate, put into a manageable context by them. Storytelling, that is, remains a handicraft industry, carried on in the home and in connection with the other processes of socialization that go on there.

  Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that songs and stories rendered in face-to-face performance among relatives and friends are often baldly cautionary tales; they tell what happens to those who disobey the community or the supernatural authorities. Or they illustrate by reference to the illustrious what kind of person one ought to be in the culture in terms of such traits as bravery and endurance. A surprising number of tales, however, in many cultures depending on tradition-direction are not cautionary in this direct sense. As in the Bible, some tales recount rebellions, successful or tragic, against the powers that be—though in many cases the theme of rebellion is disguised.

  Tales of Norm and “Abnorm.” The rebellious note struck in these tales indicates that even in a society depending on tradition-direction there still remain strivings which are not completely socialized. While people accept the harness of their culture, and can hardly conceive of another, they are not unaware of constraint: their stories, as frequently their dreams, are the refuge and succor of this awareness and help to make it possible to go on with daily life. The communal load of shame and guilt is reduced by the common “confession,” the common release which the myth permits. There is in these myths, then, a good deal of realism about stubborn, unsocialized human nature—this is one reason they appeal to us across the centuries and across the cultural boundaries. They show people to be more fierce, more jealous, more rebellious than appears on the surface.

  Why is this so? It appears that if people were only “adjusted”—if they never had even a thought which transcended the cultural prohibitions—life would have so little savor as to endanger the culture itself. Cultures depending upon tradition-direction usually manage to institutionalize a degree of rebellion not only for their deviants but for everybody. Sometimes this is done on a life-cycle basis. Thus some cultures permit, even encourage, sau-ciness from children only to clamp down on the adult; others allow the older women a bawdiness denied the younger ones. Sometimes there are special days—feast days—when bars are down.

  To the degree that the aperture for rebellion lies in the realm of culturally approved fantasy, the socializing function of the tales and stories which are the predecessors of the mass media is a dual one. The elders use the stories to tell the young: you must be like so-and-so if you are to be admired and to live up to the noble traditions of the group. But the young are also told—sometimes in the very same message—that there have been people like so-and-so who broke the rules, who did many worse things than you ever did, and perhaps ever dreamed of, and whether he lived to tell the tale or not, he did live and we speak of him. This very ambivalence of the stories helps the young to integrate their forbidden impulses by recognizing them as part of their legacy as human beings, making it possible to form an underground connection, via myth, between repressed sectors of the adults and sectors of the young. Finally, these stories make it possible to hold the young to both more and less than what they see around them, either of approved behavior or of behavior which, while disapproved, is still done; in other words, they provide models for behavior not to be found completely in any given face-to-face group.

  And yet it is more complicated than that. Indeed, we may suppose that the change to inner-direction occurs first in circles which, through literacy or otherwise, acquire access to many multiplying ambiguities of direction. As in the mathematical theory of communications all channels mix what is technically called noise with what is technically called information and thus limit the freedom of the sender, so also messages intended or believed to socialize the young cannot help but contain noises which may have diverse effects, effects which may oversocialize or undersocialize them.

  II. The Socializing Functions of Print in the Stage of Inner-direction

  When societies enter the phase of transitional growth of population, formal schooling increases, in part to train people for the new, more specialized tasks of industry and agriculture, in part to absorb the young who are no longer needed on farms and whose schooling can be supported by the greater productivity of the society. Of course, these young people learn to read. But old as well as young are affected by the excitement and novelty of literacy: there is a widespread hunger for the press and for books—a hunger that the technology and distributive facilities arouse but do not entirely satisfy. This excitement, this hunger, is a sign of the characterological revolution which is accompanying the industrial one.

  In the United States, as in other countries of incipient population decline, this hunger has abated; indeed, it has been succeeded for many by a kind of satiety with serious print, coupled with insatiability for the amusements and agenda of popular culture. To remind ourselves of the older pattern we can look at countries such as Mexico and Russia, now undergoing industrialization, where the old are avid for print and the young admired for learning. Some of this we can still see among the largely self-educated Negroes of the deep South who live among our surviving stratum of white and black illiterates.

  How this development aided the shift from tradition-direction to inner-direction can be vividly traced in Thomas and Znaniecki’s Polish Peasant.3 These writers describe the way in which the Polish rural press helped to restructure attitudes and values among the peasantry at the turn of the last century. They show that an individual peasant who learned to read at that time did not merely acquire a skill with little impact on his character; rather he made a decisive break with the primary group, with tradition-direction. The press picked him up at this turning point and supported his uncertain steps away from the primary group by criticizing the values of that group and by giving him a sense of having a
llies, albeit anonymous ones, in this move.

  In this way the press helped link the newly individuated person to the newly forming society. The Polish press also supported very specific “character-building” measures, such as temperance and thrift, and fostered scientific farming as the American agricultural extension services have done; science was viewed as a kind of inner-directed morality as against the superstition of the remaining, tradition-directed peasantry. These attitudes, expounded in newspaper nonfiction, were reinforced in the same media by highly moralistic fiction.

  Thus the reader could escape into print from the criticisms of his neighbors and could test his inner-direction against the models given in the press. And by writing for the press himself, as he occasionally might do as local correspondent, he could bring his performance up for approval before an audience which believed in the magic attached to print itself—much like the Americans who, in the last century, contributed poetry to the local press. By this public performance, no longer for a face-to-face audience, the former peasant confirmed himself on his inner-directed course

  THE WHIP OF THE WORD

  The tradition-directed person had not only a traditional standard of living but a traditional standard of how hard and long he should work; and print serves, along with other agencies of socialization, to destroy both of these standards. The inner-directed man, open to “reason” via print, often develops a character structure which drives him to work longer hours and to live on lower budgets of leisure and laxity than would have been deemed possible before. He can be driven because he is ready to drive himself.

  Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us, they socialize or unsocialize us. Doubtless the printing press alone cannot completely assure any particular form of social coercion—and of course not all children, even in the inner-directed middle class, are readers. But print can powerfully rationalize the models which tell people what they ought to be like. Reaching children directly as well as through their parents and teachers, it can take the process of socialization out of the communal chimney corner of the era depending on tradition-direction and penetrate into the private bedrooms and libraries of the rising middle class: the child is allowed to gird himself for the battle of life in the small circle of light cast by his reading lamp or candle.

  To understand this more fully we must realize that the rise of literacy affects not only the content and style of the literary and journalistic genres but also their reception by the audience. The increased quantitative flow of content brings about an enormous increase in each child’s power to select, as compared with the era of tradition-direction. As a result, more and more of the readers begin to see messages not meant for them. And they read them in situations no longer controlled and structured by the teller—or by their own participation. This increase in the number, variety, and “scatter” of the messages, along with the general im-personalization in print which induces these specific effects, becomes one of the powerful factors in social change. The classic instance in western history, of course, is the translation of the Vulgate into the spoken languages, a translation which allowed the people to read a book which only the priests could read before.

  Some of the difficulties of discussing the shift from the era depending on tradition-direction to that of inner-direction arise from the teleological drift of the language we are likely to use. For example, we are prone to overlook the unintended audience because it is always easier to assume that a given medium was deliberately aimed at the audience it actually succeeded in reaching. Yet there is no proof that the media have ever been so accurate in aim. The very impersonality of the situation in which print is absorbed helps to increase the chances of under-reception or over-reception. Thus the aristocrats were often displeased by what they considered the over-reception to ideas of mobility in many they would have liked to keep “in their place.”

  The over-effects I have most in mind, however, are those in individuals whose characterological guilts and tensions were increased by the pressure of print. Their character structure simply could not handle the demand put upon them in a society depending on inner-direction. Their gyroscopes spun wildly and erratically. Not finding justification in print—not finding, as many modern readers do, a “union of sinners,” the “One Big Union” of mankind extending back through the past—they experienced print simply as an intensified proof of their maladjustment. A colonial divine armed with print could get his readers to cast themselves into hell-fire on weekdays, even if he could only address them in person on Sundays.

  Thus, while the myths and symbolism of the societies depending on tradition-direction support the tradition by integrating the rebellious tendencies of the listener into a pattern of the culture, the word-in-print may disorient as well as orient its audience. This is evident in the cry for censorship which goes up as soon as literacy becomes widespread. And not only formal censorship. In America the increasing piety of print, if we compare, for instance, today’s press with that of the early republic, may be in part explained by the sheer weight of the informal pressure put by near-universal literacy on editors who take their responsibility seriously. As the editor of a metropolitan paper used to say if his staff verged on bawdry: “Don’t forget, gentlemen, that this paper goes into the homes.” Or as the New York Times puts it: “All the news that’s fit to print.”

  While it is beyond my ability to measure precisely to what degree the media of the early capitalist period might have been dysfunctional, by reaching unintended audiences in unintended ways, it seems reasonable to suppose that print contains more noise along its channels than does oral, face-to-face transmission.

  MODELS IN PRINT

  One main purpose of print in the period dependent on inner-direction is to teach the child something about the variety of adult roles he may enter upon and to permit him to try on these roles in fantasy. Life during the period of transitional population growth differs from earlier epochs in that the adult frequently engages in activities which the growing child no longer observes or understands. He needs not only the rich vicariousness of print but also a mode of internal direction other than tradition to guide him in unaccustomed places and situations. Both the printed media and other forms of popular culture meet this need by adding their own spurs to the parents’ admonitions on behalf of ambition as well as by offering more specific guidance about the variety of new paths to success.

  These new paths, in both northern and southern lands after the Renaissance, are conceived and described in adult terms. For in the earlier stages of population growth adult life is not long, on the average; the age difference—and perhaps the difference in maturity—between the literate child and the full-grown adult is less than in the period of incipient decline of population. Moreover, while the distribution of imagery and print becomes wider and cheaper than ever before, there are still many people excluded by poverty from the storyteller’s market; some of these are also the overworked young. In such a society the adult stories and adult styles of narrative are often made to do for children. Even when the trick, later so prevalent, of using the child’s own language, gets started, the storyteller works on the notion that he can more successfully instill adult ideas if he uses the language of children.

  Among the earliest signposts erected on the printed path to success, aside from the indirect guides of catechism and religious teaching, were the great authorities on etiquette. A volume like Castiglione’s The Courtier, for example, was meant for adults; but there was nothing else on the subject for the near-adult to read. At the same time people were willing to assume, as Lord Chesterfield did, that the young man was ready in his teens to operate successfully in situations requiring etiquette. In the Protestant lands and classes however, after 1600 or so, the purpose of print is concerned more and more directly with how to succeed not in love or diplomacy but in business. Then follows the commercial inspirational literature that reached a sort of climax in Victorian England with the success biographies written by Samuel
Smiles—and in the United States with the Horatio Alger books, which come closer to being slanted for the teen-age market.

  Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack, the text selected by Max Weber as a typical self-inspirational document of the period of the Protestant ethic, was preceded by books such as Pilgrim’s Progress or Robinson Crusoe which, while not explicitly concerned with proper conduct for would-be enterprisers, nevertheless purvey many similar exhortations. Thus, in Pilgrim’s Progress we can trace the motive of social election and salvation which can so easily become secularized, while in Robinson Crusoe the motive of economic self-sufficiency is expressed in its classical paradigm. Both works aim to fire the ambition and Élan, spiritual and adventurous, of inner-directed youth. Thus, with an expanding bourgeois market, marked changes occur in the style of myth, as contrasted with the pre-industrial era dependent on tradition-direction. In the Middle Ages, for example, the individual learns about human nature from accounts no less realistic because couched in symbolic language—whether Christian, classical, or folk. Often, as is well known, they are not in verbal form at all, like the superabundance of messages in the glass and stone of a cathedral. The child is trained to understand—or, better, he is not trained away from understanding—symbolic meanings. As against this, the rising middle class dependent on inner-direction establishes for itself a new style of realism from which any direct use of symbolism is rigorously excluded.