The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  This documentary style is one literary index of an era increasingly dependent on inner-direction. There is leisure in such an era for fiction—but little for fantasy. Defoe may be taken as archetypical. He used a variety of techniques, such as first-person narration, elaborate descriptions of food, clothing, and shelter, diary-like accounts of transactions, and collaborative witnesses, to provide a realistic setting for his wildly adventurous tales. In this respect he is certainly the ancestor of the comic book, which excels in exploiting realism of detail as a distraction to hide improbability of situation. Such handling of literary material is connected in subtle ways with the handling of life experiences generally for the inner-directed middle-class Protestant. For him life is lived in its detailed externals; symbolic meanings must be filtered through the strenuously concrete.

  Gradually, the early naturalism of Defoe gives way, both in England and on the continent, to a more detailed handling of the complex interpersonal relations of town life that arise in the era of transitional growth of population when people are pouring into the cities. With the growth of social classes in the modern sense, the novel begins to concern itself with subtle class differences between individuals: rises, falls, and collisions of status are perhaps its prime preoccupation. The child is instructed in an ambiguous social world, into which he will later move, by learning to recognize the subtly individualizing traits that bespeak class position and class morality.4 Thus fiction as well as almanac and manual provide vocational (and status-oriented avocational) guidance.

  To us today many of the individuals in the early Victorian novels, or in American Victorian melodrama like East Lynne or Intolerance—or even in some of Balzac’s novels—appear as stereotypes. To their earliest audiences, however, these studies of personality and class in a society of shifting possibilities—a society of more people, and more people moving around—were perhaps not cliches which hindered understanding but explorations of a confusing world, helping to make sense of that world for the young. One can still attend a modern rural high school production of Aaron Slick of Punkin Crick and see to what extent an unsophisticated inner-directed audience will respond to the characterological “realism” of the play in terms of the older stereotypes of class, ambition, and virtue.

  Biography as well as fiction allows children, in a society dependent on inner-direction, to move in imagination away from home and into a rationalized world—cooperating in this way with the parental installation of internal, self-piloting processes. In the George Washington myth, for instance, little boys learn that they may grow up to be president and are given scales by which to measure and discipline themselves for the job during boyhood: if they do not tell lies, if they work hard, and so on—if, that is, they act in their boyhoods as the legendary Washington acted in his—then they may succeed to his adult role. The role, moreover, by its very nature, is a continuing one; somebody is always president; thus its heroes do not have the once-for-all quality of those in the myths and legends of the earlier era. In fantasy the little boy not only identifies with young Washington in the French and Indian wars but also with the adult role of president—either role will take him far from home, socially and geographically.

  What the story of George Washington could be for a white child the story of Booker T. Washington could be for a black one. Booker T. Washington’s whole career could be described as an effort to turn the Negro away from dependence on tradition-direction toward dependence on inner-direction. One of his books addressed to Negroes was called Character Building; and The Negro Worker, a journal published at Tuskegee, with its strong emphasis on thrift, diligence, and manners, is one of the laggard remnants (of course, under violent attack from northern urban Negroes) of a vast literature concerned not with improving “personality” but with improving “character.”

  THE OVERSTEERED CHILD

  There is, however, a danger for the child in such pious biographical portraits of exemplary persons and roles because of the very fact that he can read in isolation, without the intervention either of adults or peers; he can be “oversteered,” that is, find himself set on a course he cannot realistically follow. The inner-directed child, trying to shape his character according to the ideals presented in print, does not see these models, any more than he sees his parents, in a state of undress. There is none of the familiarity with the hero, even the gods in the guise of heroes, to be found in the orally-mediated myths of the society depending on tradition-direction. Thus, Washington or Cromwell, Garibaldi or Bismarck, Edison or Ford, take on some of the awesome-ness of the Calvinist God. The result for many is a dreadful insecurity as to whether they live up to their exalted models. This insecurity not even the parents (when they do not themselves make matters worse by trying to be such models) can easily assuage.

  Nevertheless, this unmitigated pressure for inner-directed activity in pursuit of goodness and fame succeeded, as we know, in producing in many cases an “adjusted” person because social conditions rewarded inhibitions and solaced insecurities. In other cases, however, the gap between the demand for inner-direction and the capacity for it became too great and the individual broke down—the revival meeting both released and renewed, at one class level, some of the emotional pressures of such a conflict.

  I want to emphasize here the dangers of putting some of the task of socializing the child onto other than the face-to-face adults. Just as the whipping Kachinas of the Hopi Indians can tailor their punishing or initiatory blows to a particularly sensitive child, so the adults in the era of tradition-direction can see to it that the bite of the story is not too grim for any in the audience. The child in the inner-directed era, however, leaves home both to go to school and to go to books and other mass-media; and here such tailoring is no longer possible.

  Moreover, the child in a period of rising literacy is much more likely than his parents to be able to read. Thus, while some children learn from books and plays how to act in a career which will be different from that of their parents—or indeed that it is possible to have such a career—other children, less able to conform in the characterologically prescribed ways, less self-disciplined and systematic, for instance, learn from precisely the same media how lost they are. They learn this particularly if their parents are lacking in the proper ethos and have not been able to give them the proper early training in inner-direction. Others may find that print reinforces their feelings of inadequacy vis-À-vis their parents if they are characterological black sheep unable to live up to steep demands of the home.

  While the stream of print has many dangers, it is seldom without some alleviating tendencies, even in the theocratic regimes. Almost always there is an underground of a more picaresque sort in which the growing boy, if not his sister, can take some refuge. To be sure, the power of the parents in an era dependent on inner-direction may keep out such literature, just as the pastors in puritan countries might also keep it out of the community. But they can hardly destroy the refuge of print itself—and we must not forget that the great reading-hour storehouse of the era depending on inner-direction is the Bible and that the Bible is not one book but many, with an inexhaustible variety of messages.

  Such a refuge may encourage and permit the child to free himself from his family and primary group; and he may learn to criticize what he leaves behind, as did the self-emancipating readers of the Polish peasant press. It opens up to him a whole range of models—the “five-foot wardrobe” from which he can try on new roles. The Renaissance is itself testimony to this potency of the written word. Individualistic strivings find support as well as oversupport in the variety of paths of life described in print and drama. To be alone with a book is to be alone in a new way.

  III. The Mass Media in the Stage of Other-direction

  THE CHILD MARKET

  As we have already seen, in the era of incipient decline of population children begin their training as consumers at an increasingly young age. In America middle-class children have allowances of their own at four or
five; they have, as opinion leaders in the home, some say in the family budget. The allowances are expected to be spent, whereas in the earlier era they were often used as cudgels of thrift. Moreover, the monopolistic competition characteristic of this era can afford, and is interested in, building up in the child habits of consumption he will employ as an adult. For he will live long, and so will the monopoly. Monopoly is, in fact, distinguished by this very ability to plan ahead, because it can afford specialists to do the planning as well as resources saved from profits to pay for it and its later implementation.

  For all these reasons, then, it has become worth while for professional storytellers to concentrate on the child market; and as the mass media can afford specialists and market research on the particular age cultures and class cultures involved, the children are more heavily cultivated in their own terms than ever before. But while the educator in earlier eras might use the child’s language to put across an adult message, today the child’s language may be used to put across the advertiser’s and storyteller’s idea of what children are like. No longer is it thought to be the child’s job to understand the adult world as the adult sees it; for one thing, the world as the adult sees it today is perhaps a more complicated one.5 Instead, the mass media ask the child to see the world as “the” child—that is, the other child—sees it. This is partly the result of the technical advances that make it possible for the movies to create the child world of Margaret O’Brien and her compeers, for the radio to have its array of Hardys, Al-driches, and other juveniles, and for advertising and cover art to make use of professional child models. The media have created a picture of what boyhood and girlhood are like (as during the war they created the picture of the GI, again using the considerably edited language of the soldier) and they force children cither to accept or aggressively to resist this picture of themselves.

  The child begins to be bombarded by radio and comics from the moment he can listen and just barely read. The bombardment—which of course inevitably over- and undershoots—hits specifically at very narrow age-grades. For example, there seems to be for many children a regular gradation of comic-reading stages: from the animal stories like Bugs Bunny to invincible heroes like Superman, and from there to heroes like Batman who, human in make-up, are vulnerable, though of course they always win. The study from which the quotation at the head of this chapter is taken finds that the children themselves are aware of the progression, aware of those laggards who still read romper media when they should have gradutaed to blue jeans.

  To be sure, the change from the preceding era of inner-direction in America is not abrupt; such changes never are. Formerly the mass media catered to the child market in at least three fields: school texts or homilies, magazines designed for children, and penny dreadfuls. But when these are compared with the contemporary media we are at once aware of differences. The appraisal of the market by the writers of this earlier literature was amateurish in comparison with market research today. Moreover, they aimed generally to spur incentives and stimulate mobility rather than to effect any socialization of taste. The English boys’ weeklies, as Orwell describes them,6 usually opposed liquor and tobacco—as did the clergyman authors of school and church readers. Such admonitions remind us of the “crime doesn’t pay” lesson of the comics, a facade for messages of more importance. The boys’ weeklies and their American counterparts were involved with training the young for the frontiers of production (including warfare), and as an incident of that training the embryo athlete might eschew smoke and drink. The comparable media today train the young for the frontiers of consumption—to tell the difference between Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola, as later between Old Golds and Chesterfields.

  We may mark the change by citing an old nursery rhyme:

  “This little pig went to market;

  This little pig stayed at home.

  This little pig had roast beef;

  This little pig had none.

  This little pig went wee-wee-wee

  All the way home.”

  The rhyme may be taken as a paradigm of individuation and unsocialized behavior among children of an earlier era. Today, however, all little pigs go to market; none stay home; all have roast beef, if any do; and all say “we-we.”

  WINNER TAKE ALL?

  Yet perhaps the most important change is the shift in the situation in which listening and reading occur. In contrast with the lone reader of the era of inner-direction, we have the group of kids today, lying on the floor, reading and trading comics and preferences among comics, or listening to “The Lone Ranger.” When reading and listening are not communal in fact, they are apt to be so in feeling: one is almost always conscious of the brooding omnipresence of the peer-group. Thus the Superman fan quoted at the head of the chapter cannot allow herself to identify with Superman—the others would think her foolish—while they would not think her foolish for believing that flying is very important.

  In a society dependent on tradition-direction children are, as we have seen, introduced to stories by adult storytellers. The latter do not feel themselves to be in critical competition with the young. Hence they can encourage, or at least patronize, children’s unsophisticated reactions of alarm or excitement at the tales they are told—and, later on, encourage the youngster’s own tall talk and embroidery. But the peer-groupers who read or listen together without the protective presence of adults are in no such cozy relation of “listen my children and you shall hear …” They cannot afford to let go—to fly.

  One correlate is that the comic book differs from the fairy tale in several important respects. In the fairy tale the protagonist is frequently an underdog figure, a younger child, an ugly duckling, a commoner, while the villain is frequently an authority figure, a king, a giant, a stepmother. In the comics the protagonist is apt to be an invulnerable or near-invulnerable adult who is equipped, if not with supernatural powers, at least with two guns and a tall, terrific physique. Magical aid comes to the underdog—who remains a peripheral character—only through the mediation of this figure. Thus, whereas Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk gains magical assistance chiefly through his own daring, curiosity, and luck, a comic-book Jack would gain magical assistance chiefly through an all-powerful helper. While vaguely similar themes may be found in the stories of Robin Hood and Sir Galahad, the comics show a quantitative increase in the role of the more or less invulnerable authority-hero.

  The relative change in this pattern7 is not the fault of the comics. These merely play into a style of reception that is fitted to peer-group reading. Indeed, if other-directed child comic fans read or hear stories that are not comics they will read them as if they were comics. They will tend to focus on who won and to miss the internal complexities of the tale, of a moral sort or otherwise. If one asks them, then, how they distinguish the “good guys” from the “bad guys” in the mass media, it usually boils down to the fact that the former always win; they are good guys by definition.

  But of course the child wants to anticipate the result and so looks for external clues which will help him pick the winner. In the comics this is seldom a problem: the good guys look it, being square-jawed, clear-eyed, tall men; the bad guys also look it, being, for reasons of piety, of no recognizable ethnic group but rather of a generally messy southern European frame—oafish and unshaven or cadaverous and oversmooth. But in movies (and in some comics with slinky beauties in them) this identification is not easy: the very types that are good guys in most comics may turn out to be villains after all. A striking example I have observed is the bafflement of several young comic fans at the movie portrayal of the Countess de Winter (Lana Turner) in The Three Musketeers. If she looked so nice, how could she be so mean?

  Thus we come to a paradox. The other-directed child is trained to be sensitive to interpersonal relations, and often he understands these with a sophistication few adults had in the era of inner-direction. Yet he can be strikingly insensitive to problems of character as presented by his favorite storyte
llers; he tends to race through the story for its ending, or to read the ending first, and to miss just those problems of personal development that are not telltale clues to the outcome. It looks as though the situation of group reading, of having to sit on the jury that passes out Hooper ratings, forces the pace for the other-directed child. He cannot afford to linger on irrelevant detail or to daydream about the heroes. To trade preferences in reading and listening he needs to know no more about the heroes than the stamp trader needs to know about the countries the stamps come from.

  Fairy tales and the Frank Merriwell books also emphasize winning; hence it is important to see the precise differences introduced by the contemporary media as well as by the changed focus of the readers. One striking difference is that between the older ambition and newer antagonistic cooperation. Ambition I define as the striving for clear goals characteristic of the period of inner-direction; it may be a striving for fame or for goodness: to get the job, to win the battle, to build the bridge. Competition in the era depending on inner-direction is frequently ruthless, but at the same time people are in no doubt as to their place in the race—and that there is a race. If they feel guilt it is when they fail, not when they succeed. By contrast, antagonistic cooperation may be defined as an inculcated striving characteristic of the groups affected by other-direction. Here the goal is less important than the relationship to the “others.” In this new-style competition people are often in doubt whether there is a race at all, and if so, what its goals are. Since they are supposed to be cooperative rather than rivalrous, they may well feel guilt about success and even a certain responsibility for others’ failure.