The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  To be sure, he may often be too inhibited for that. He may be unable to stop timetabling himself by the internalized pocket watch that he has substituted for the chimes of the Middle Ages. He may be unable to shift his one-price, one-role policy even in dealing with status inferiors, though this, in the explicit class structure of the era, is unusual. Above all, he may feel that, with the reining in and observing of the self on all fronts, he cannot afford to undertake unsanctioned experiments in spontaneity. He may feel his character, covert as well as overt, as a kind of capital that might be dissipated in a catastrophic gamble—all the more dangerous in view of the lifetime goals to which he is committed. We see this complex process rationalized by the puritan in terms of “saving himself.” The puritan treats himself as if he were a firm and, at the same time, the firm’s auditor.

  But we speak in this section of those who, despite internal and external inhibitions, are able to escape in some fashion. Escape as we use it here means a shift of pace and attitude from the nearly all-embracing domain of work. Thus, as we shall see below, it may be escape onto a “higher” level than that of business or professional life, or onto a “lower” level.

  Onward and upward with the arts. The great events of “escape upward” in leisure time are intermittent: Chautauqua, the traveling theater, the Sunday service complete with one antibusiness preacher per year or per city, the itinerant book peddler. To come into contact with them requires some effort, and making the effort is itself a sign of virtue. There is even a change of dress —Sunday-go-to-meeting dress or top hats—to signify the change of role.

  There is, moreover, a good deal of amateur performance. Even more perhaps than plumbing, the piano and the cultivation of amateur musical skills mark the boundary of middle-class aspirations to respectability. At the same time, for the mobile youth from the working class there are the mechanics’ institutes and the many traveling lecturers, from prison reformers to single taxers, who analyze the workings of the system for their eager audiences. We need only recall the tremendous mushrooming of discussion clubs that greeted Bellamy’s Looking Backward.

  Obviously the motives of” such participants are not purely escapist. There is the desire, often thinly disguised, to move onward and upward in the social hierarchy. Through religious revivalism and Bible reading the individual may seek to escape not from this world but from the dangers of the next. Daily life is hard and drab; leisure is an occasional essay at refinement.

  Aspirations for culture make people want to escape into an image of some past heroic period, as inherited from the pre-nine-teenth-century upper class. Thus, the cultivated bourgeois of the nineteenth century looks back in his leisure to an earlier and more heroic quasi-bourgeois epoch, in Periclean Athens or Renaissance Italy. Work-driven, chained to routines, he pictures for himself the swagger and versatility of a Benvenuto Cellini or a Leonardo. As the Chautauqua circuit spreads accounts of contemporary travel and discovery, so there exists a semipopular culture about the achievements of the ancient world—note the popularity of Ben Hut—and of the Renaissance. Very often the occupational hardness of the era has its obverse side in sentimentality concerning the non-work side of life.

  Though fashion, of course, plays a role in the vogue of ancient history, of European travel, and of these other escapist pursuits, it is important, I think, for the security of the inner-directed people that these spheres of interest are remote not only from their work but also from their immediate social concerns. Reading about Greece—even visiting Florence—they are not forced to think about their own epoch or themselves in any realistic sense; such identifications with ancient heroes as there are can be fantastic. We must qualify this only when we arrive at the late Victorian or Edwardian stories of Henry James or E. M. Forster, in which travel in Italy may turn out to be much more emotionally problematic than mere escape upward for Anglo-Saxon ladies and gentlemen. These fictional tourists, concerned with whether they are experiencing to the full the cultural contrasts and sensitivities they seek, find foreshadowed the ambiguities of escape that are typical for other-direction.

  Feet on the rail. The inner-directed person may escape down as well as up. He finds in dime novels, in cock fighting, in trotting races, in barbershop song, a variant from his working role. While some visit Chartres, others visit the hootchy-kootch on the Midway. Despite the efforts of the puritans and womenfolk to drive out of life these recreations that are reminiscent of medieval pastimes, the middle-class men of the nineteenth century make a firm effort to hang on to them.

  Sherwood Anderson’s work is an epic of men coming into the house after midnight on stocking feet. How much of this lore survives was made plain a few years ago by Allen Funt, on one of the “Candid Microphone” programs. Funt stood on a street corner at three in the morning and pretended he was afraid to go home. He buttonholed passing men and asked them to come home with him, to explain to the wife why he was overfilled and over-due. All the men were sympathetic. Though none wanted the role of go-between, each suggested the dodge that he himself had found workable in the same spot. One wanted him to telephone first. Another would help him get bandaged up. Still another thought that a present might fix matters. Some suggested stories, others courage. Most of the men, judging from their voices, seemed to be of middle age. Perhaps the major point of all this is that in earlier generations the strictness of the American proper-female regime gave a glamour to sin that obscured its inevitable limitations.

  In thinking of the meaning of escape for the inner-directed man we must not, however, put too much emphasis on the merely convention-breaking patterns of Victorian amusement, vice, and sinful fantasy. Even where the conventions were absent or fragile, another issue was involved. This was the issue of competence in the enjoyment and judgment of recreation.

  On the one hand, the American inner-directed man was committed in every generation to face increasingly the demand that his escape be upward with the arts. Sometimes he sought out this escape on his own. More usually, perhaps, mobility strivings and feminine influence put pressure on the man to go beyond the sphere where he felt competent: the sleepy businessman dragged to the opera sung in a language he could not understand. But on the other hand, he combatted becoming merely a passive consumer by protecting, as a rebel in shirt sleeves, his escape downward to the lower arts of drink mixing and drink holding, poker, fancy women, and fancy mummery. Thus he protected in his minor sphere of play, as in his major sphere of work, his feeling of competence in the living of life. The separateness of the play sphere was dramatized precisely because the personal competence involved in these downward escapes could contribute little, or negatively, to his social status in the world of work and family. Because competence in play could not be directly geared to the production economy, the inner-directed man was somewhat less likely than other-directed men today to exploit his recreation by telling himself that he owed it to himself to have fun. If he went to baseball games (one of the few sports where the other-directed the game), it was not part of an act designed to prove himself “one of the boys.”

  However, we must not exaggerate these distinctions between inner-directed and other-directed escapes. Many inner-directed men worked painfully hard to maintain their showing of recreational competence. The Reverend Endicott Peabody, later founder of Groton, established himself as the hero of a western frontier town in which he held a pastorate by getting up a baseball team. A similar strategy, with its roots in an era depending on tradition-direction, appears in the modern movie characterization of the Catholic priest, brother, or nun who is a good sport—as in Bing Crosby’s Going My Way. Moreover, many inner-directed American business and professional men exploited, and still exploit, their leisure to make contacts. Their golf game was anything but an escape, and their wives’ gardening was often harnessed to the same drives for mobility. Such men had a great deal at stake economically, even if they had less at stake psychologically than the other-directed.

  But there were often psyc
hological stakes, too. The over-steered men of the period, unable either to throw off or accept their inhibitions, were not always able to guard them by withdrawal into privacy. Where there was pressure to prove oneself a good fellow in tavern or brothel, their bodies sometimes betrayed them into nausea or impotence—in the effort to be competent weakness of the flesh gave away unwillingness of the spirit. On the whole, however, the inner-directed man was much less susceptible than men are today to the requirement that he be liked for his recreations and loved for his vices.

  III. The Struggle for Self-approval

  We may sum up much that is significant about inner-direction by saying that, in a society where it is dominant, its tendency is to protect the individual against the others at the price of leaving him vulnerable to himself.

  One bit of evidence for this is in the widespread fear of and attack upon apathy which seems to date from the era of inner-direction. The monastic orders had faced the problem of sloth or accidie as psychological dangers to their regimen—dangers of which St. Augustine was acutely aware in his own struggle with himself. When puritanism, as Max Weber put it, turned the world into a monastery, the fear of this inner danger began to plague whole social classes and not merely a few select monks. The puritan inner-directed man was made to feel as if he had constantly to hold on to himself; that without ceaseless vigilance he would let go and drift—on the assumption that one can let go if one wills or, rather, if one stops willing. It is as if his character, despite its seeming stability, did not feel stable and, indeed, the puritan, in a theological projection of this inner feeling, had constantly to fight against doubts concerning his state of grace or election.

  Out of his continuing battle against the Demon of Sloth that sometimes turned into a hypochondria about apathy, he built up a myth, still very much with us, that the tradition-directed person is completely easy going, lacking “get up and go.” This attack against others as apathetic—as today, for instance, in the constant complaints over political and civic apathy—sometimes served as a way of fighting against apathy in oneself. In fact, the inner-directed person testifies to his unconscious awareness that his gyroscope is not his but is installed by others through his chronic panic fear that it will stop spinning, that he is really not a self-starter, that life itself is not a process of renewal but an effortful staving off of psychic death.

  Moreover, for easier bookkeeping in the control of apathy, the inner-directed person frequently divides his life into sectors, in each of which he can test his psychic defenses against it. Within himself he remains the child, committed early to goals and ideals that may transcend his powers. If these drives are demanding, no amount of contemporary acclaim can drown the feeling of inadequacy: the acclaim of others may in fact be the by-product of efforts to satisfy the self. Within himself he must find justification not only in what he does but in what he is—not by works but by faith is he saved. And while clever bookkeeping can transmute works into faith, self-criticism is seldom completely silenced. Mere behavioral conformity cannot meet the characterological ideal.

  These internalized standards of the inner-directed man allow him, on the other hand, a certain freedom to fail in the eyes of the others without being convinced by them of his own inadequacy. Like Edison he will try and try again, sustained by his internal judgment of his worth. For while the others cannot protect him against self-criticism, self-criticism can protect him against the others. The inner-directed man can justify his existence not only by what he has done but what he will do. But this holds only up to a point. If repeated failures destroy his hope of future accomplishment, then it is likely that his internal strengths can no longer hold the fort against the external evidence. Overwhelmed with guilt, he will despise himself for his failures and inadequacies. The judgment, though set off by external happenings, is all the more severe for being internalized. Durkheim was right to see comparatively high suicide rates in the advanced industrial countries as symptoms of a psychological malaise uncontrolled by any cultural tradition.

  VI

  The other-directed round of life: from invisible hand to glad hand

  Since sociability in its pure form has no ulterior end, no content and no result outside itself, it is oriented completely about personalities…. But precisely because all is oriented about them, the personalities must not emphasize themselves too individually.

  Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Sociability

  The inner-directed person is not only chained to the endless demands of the production sphere; he must also spend his entire life in the internal production of his own character. The discomforts of this internal frontier are as inexhaustible as the discomforts of the frontier of work itself. Like the fear of being retired or unemployed in the economic realm, apathy in many sectors of his inner or outer life is felt as underemployment of characterological resources. The inner-directed man has a generalized need to master resource exploitation on all the fronts of which he is conscious. He is job-minded.

  The frontiers for the other-directed man are people; he is people-minded. Hence both work and pleasure are felt as activities involving people. Many of the job titles that exist today existed in the earlier era; many recreations likewise. My effort is to see how change of character is connected with change of meaning in the same pursuits as well as with development of new pursuits.

  I. The Economic Problem: the Human Element

  As the phase of transitional growth drew to an end in America, the “no help wanted” sign was posted on the frontier in 1890, in imagination if not in actual land-grant practice, and the same sign was hung out on our borders in 1924 with the virtual cutting off of immigration from Europe. With these valedictories a great symbol of hope and movement in the western world was destroyed. The combination of curtailed immigration and a falling birth rate eventually altered the population profile of the country; and, in the ways already hinted at, its characterological profile as well. Today it is the “softness” of men rather than the “hardness” of material that calls on talent and opens new channels of social mobility.

  Whereas the production frontier, and even the land frontier, may actually be roomy even in the phase of incipient population decline, it nevertheless feels crowded; and certainly the society is no longer felt to be a wilderness or jungle as it often was earlier.

  This is particularly true in industry and the professions. Take, for example, the position of the foreman. He no longer stands alone, a straw boss in a clear hierarchy, but is surrounded with people. He is a two-way communication channel between the men under him and a host of experts above and around him: personnel men, safety directors, production engineers, comptroller’s representatives, and all the rest of the indirect managerial work force. The plant manager is hardly better off for emotional el-bowroom: he is confronted not only with the elaborate intra-plant hierarchy but with the public outside: the trade association group, the unions, consumers, suppliers, the government, and public opinion. Likewise, the professional man feels surrounded by a swarm of competitors, turned out by the vastly expanded educational system of a society whose capital plant is in such good shape that it can afford to devote—in fact, can hardly help devoting—a large share of the national income to the service trades and professions and to education for their proper use.

  People, therefore, become the central problem of industry. This does not mean that the older revolutions in tooling, the machine process, and factory organization come to a halt. Rather, advances here are increasingly routinized; the continuing increment in productivity becomes a by-product of institutional forms. However, the newer industrial revolution which has reached its greatest force in America (although it is also beginning to be manifest elsewhere, as in England) is concerned with techniques of communication and control, not of tooling or factory layout. It is symbolized by the telephone, the servomechanism, the IBM machine, the electronic calculator, and modern statistical methods of controlling the quality of products; by the Hawthorne counseling experime
nt and the general preoccupation with industrial morale. The era of economic abundance and incipient population decline calls for the work of men whose tool is symbolism and whose aim is some observable response from people. These manipulators, of course, are not necessarily other-directed in character. Many inner-directed people are successful manipulators of people; often, their very inner-direction makes them unaware of how much they do manipulate and exploit others. Nevertheless, for manipulating others, there is a somewhat greater compatibility between characterological other-direction and sensitivity to others’ subtler wants.

  This can be explained more clearly by reference to one of our interviews. The man interviewed is the vice-president for sales and advertising of a large west coast machine-tool company, and he is also head of one of the leading trade associations for his industry. In origin he is the son of a Congregationalist preacher in a small midwestern town. His background, his mobility drive, his initial technical orientation are typical for the inner-directed; but his situation calls for the negotiating skill and interpersonal sensitivity more characteristic of the other-directed. This conflict produces strain. Asked about political issues on which he has recently changed his mind, he says:

  I don’t think this fits the category you’re working on now, but I’ve become a great deal more tolerant of labor leaders and organizers [then catching himself]—not agitators, necessarily. I’ve come to appreciate what they’re doing. They don’t have much choice in taking the particular methods and means sometimes. I need a psychoanalyst.