The Lonely Crowd

Home > Other > The Lonely Crowd > Page 32
The Lonely Crowd Page 32

by David Riesman


  To be sure, some came to the same result by the route of a democratic tradition of civilian dominance. Very likely, it was a good thing for the country that the services were so self-restrained. I do not here deal with the matter on the merits but use it as an illustration of changing character and changing social structure.

  All this may lead to the question: well, who really runs things? What people fail to see is that, while it may take leadership to start things running, or to stop them, very little leadership is needed once things are under way—that, indeed, things can get terribly snarled up and still go on running. If one studies a factory, an army group, or other large organization, one wonders how things get done at all, with the lack of leadership and with all the feather-bedding. Perhaps they get done because we are still trading on our reserves of inner-direction, especially in the lower ranks. At any rate, the fact they do get done is no proof that there is someone in charge.

  There are, of course, still some veto groups that have more power than others and some individuals who have more power than others. But the determination of who these are has to be made all over again for our time: we cannot be satisfied with the answers given by Marx, Mosca, Michels, Pareto, Weber, Veblen, or Burnham, though we can learn from all of them.

  There are also phenomena in this vast country that evade all of them (and surely, too, evade my collaborators and me). One example is the immense power, both political and economic, possessed by Artie Samish, allegedly the veto-group boss of California. Samish is a new-type lobbyist, who represents not one but scores of interests, often competing ones, from truckers to chiropractors, and who plays one veto group off against others to shake them down and strengthen his own power: he has learned how the other-orientation of the established veto groups will lead them to call still other groups into being through his auspices. Since the old-line parties have little power in California, there is no way of reaching a clear-cut decision for or against a particular veto group through the party system; instead, the state officials have become dependent on Samish for electoral support, or at least nonopposition, through his herded groups of voters and their cash contributions; moreover, he knows how to go directly to the people through the democratic plebiscite machinery.4

  Carey McWilliams has observed that Samish’s power rests both on the peculiar election machinery of the state and on the fact that no one industry or allied group of industries, no one union, one ethnic group or region, is dominant. The situation is very different in a state like Montana, where copper is pivotal, and one must be either for the union or for Anaconda. It is different again in Virginia where, as V. O. Key shows in Southern Politics, the setup of the state constitution favors control by the old courthouse crowd. In view of these divergences, rooted in local legal niceties as well as in major social and economic factors, it is apparent that any discussion of class and power on the national scene can at best be only an approximation. Yet I would venture to say that the United States is on the whole more like California in its variety—but without its veto boss—than like Montana and Virginia in their particularity. The vaster number of veto groups, and their greater power, mean that no one man or small group of men can amass the power nationally that Artie Samish and, in earlier days, Huey Long, have held locally.

  Rather, power on the national scene must be viewed in terms of issues. It is possible that, where an issue involves only two or three veto groups, themselves tiny minorities, the official or unofficial broker among the groups can be quite powerful—but only on that issue. However, where the issue involves the country as a whole, no individual or group leadership is likely to be very effective, because the entrenched veto groups cannot be budged: unlike a party that may be defeated at the polls, or a class that may be replaced by another class, the veto groups are always “in.”

  One might ask whether one would not find, over a long period of time, that decisions in America favored one group or class—thereby, by definition, the ruling group or class—over others. Does not wealth exert its pull in the long run? In the past this has been so; for the future I doubt it. The future seems to be in the hands of the small business and professional men who control Congress, such as realtors, lawyers, car salesmen, undertakers, and so on; of the military men who control defense and, in part, foreign policy; of the big business managers and their lawyers, finance-committee men, and other counselors who decide on plant investment and influence the rate of technological change; of the labor leaders who control worker productivity and worker votes; of the black belt whites who have the greatest stake in southern politics; of the Poles, Italians, Jews, and Irishmen who have stakes in foreign policy, city jobs, and ethnic religious and cultural organizations; of the editorializers and storytellers who help socialize the young, tease and train the adult, and amuse and annoy the aged; of the farmers—themselves a warring congeries of cattlemen, corn men, dairymen, cotton men, and so on—who control key departments and committees and who, as the living representatives of our inner-directed past, control many of our memories; of the Russians and, to a lesser degree, other foreign powers who control much of our agenda of attention; and so on. The reader can complete the list. Power in America seems to me situational and mercurial; it resists attempts to locate it the way a molecule, under the Heisenberg principle, resists attempts simultaneously to locate it and time its velocity.

  But people are afraid of this indeterminacy and amorphousness in the cosmology of power. Even those intellectuals, for instance, who feel themselves very much out of power and who are frightened of those who they think have the power, prefer to be scared by the power structures they conjure up than to face the possibility that the power structure they believe exists has largely evaporated. Most people prefer to suffer with interpretations that give their world meaning than to relax in the cave without an Ariadne’s thread.

  Let me now summarize the argument in the preceding chapters. The inner-directed person, if he is political at all, is related to the political scene either by his morality, his well-defined interests, or both. His relationship to his opinions is close, not peripheral. The opinions are means of defending certain principles of politics. They may be highly charged and personal, as in the political discussion in the first pages of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or they may be highly charged and impersonal—a means of defending one’s proper Bostonianship or other class position. In either case one’s own opinions are felt to matter and to have some direct relationship to the objective world in which one lives.

  As against this, the other-directed person, if he is political, is related to the political scene as a member of a veto group. He leaves it to the group to defend his interests, cooperating when called on to vote, to apply pressure, and so on. These pressure tactics seem to make his opinions manifest on the political level, but they actually help make it possible for him to be detached from his opinions. No longer operating as an “independent voter”—mostly an amiable fiction even in the era dependent on inner-direction—his political opinions, as such, are not felt to be related to his political function. Thus, they can serve him as a social counter in his role as a peer-group consumer of the political news-of-the-day. He can be tolerant of other opinions not only because of his characterological tolerance but also because they are “mere” opinions, interesting or amusing perhaps, but lacking the weight of even a partial, let alone a total, commitment to one’s political role or action. They are “mere” opinions, moreover, because so intractable is the political world of the veto groups that opinion as such is felt to be almost irrelevant.

  The inner-directed political moralizer has a firm grip—often much too firm—on the gamut of judgments that he is willing to apply anywhere and everywhere. The other-directed inside-dopester is unable to fortify any particular judgment with conviction springing from a summarized and organized emotional tone. It could be argued that the suppressed affect or emotional tone is still there, remaining hidden. Freudian doctrine would predict the return o
f the repressed. But it seems more likely, social habit being as powerful as it is, that the repeated suppression of such enthusiasm or moral indignation as the inner-directed man would consider natural permanently decreases the capacity of the other-directed man for those forms of response. The other-directed man may even begin as an inner-directed man who plays at being other-directed. He ends up being what he plays, and his mask becomes the perhaps inescapable reality of his style of life.

  XI

  Americans and Kwakiutls

  Moralists are constantly complaining that the ruling vice of the present time is pride. This is true in one sense, for indeed everybody thinks that he is better than his neighbor or refuses to obey his superior; but it is extremely false in another, for the same man who cannot endure subordination or equality has so contemptible an opinion of himself that he thinks he is born only to indulge in vulgar pleasures. He willingly takes up with low desires without daring to embark on lofty enterpises, of which he scarcely dreams.

  Thus, far from thinking that humility ought to be preached to our contemporaries, I would have endeavors made to give them a more enlarged idea of themselves and of their kind. Humility is unwholesome to them; what they most want is, in my opinion, pride.

  Tocqueville, Democracy in America

  The image of power in contemporary America presented in the preceding chapters departs from current discussions of power which are usually based on a search for a ruling class (for instance, Burnham’s discovery of the managers, Mills’s of the labor leaders and others). And Americans themselves, rather than being the mild and cooperative people I have portrayed, are, to many observers and to themselves, power-obsessed or money-mad or concerned with conspicuous display. Or, as in the parable I shall use to illustrate my argument, Americans are felt, and feel themselves to be, more like rivalrous Kwakiutl Indian chiefs and their followers, than like peaceable, cooperative Pueblo agriculturists. Perhaps by further pursuing these images of power and personality the discrepancies (as they seem to me) between political fact and political ideology may be somewhat better understood.

  Ruth Benedict’s book, Patterns of Culture, describes in vivid detail three primitive societies: the Pueblo (ZuÑi) Indians of the southwest, the people of the Island of Dobu in the Pacific, and the Kwakiutl Indians of the northwest coast of America.1

  The Pueblo Indians are pictured as a peaceable, cooperative society, in which no one wishes to be thought a great man and everyone wishes to be thought a good fellow. Sexual relations evoke little jealousy or other violent response; infidelity is not severely punished. Death, too, is taken in stride, with little violent emotion; in general, emotion is subdued. While there are considerable variations in economic status, there is little display of economic power and even less of political power; there is a spirit of cooperation with family and community.

  The Dobu, by contrast, are portrayed as virtually a society of paranoids in which each man’s hand is against his neighbor’s in sorcery, theft, and abuse; in which husband and wife alternate as captives of the spouse’s kin; and in which infidelity is deeply resented. Dobuan economic life is built on sharp practice in inter-island trading, on an intense feeling for property rights, and on a hope of getting something for nothing through theft, magic, and fraud.

  The third society, the Kwakiutl, is also intensely rivalrous. But the rivalry consists primarily in conspicuous consumption, typified by feasts called “potlatches,” at which chiefs outdo each other in providing food and in burning up the blankets and sheets of copper which are the main counters of wealth in the society; sometimes even a house or a canoe is sent up in flames in a final bid for glory. Indeed, the society is a caricature of Veblen’s conspicuous consumption; certainly, the potlatches of the Kwakiutl chiefs serve “as the legitimate channel by which the community’s surplus product has been drained off and consumed, to the greater spiritual comfort of all parties concerned.” Veblen was, in fact, familiar with these northwest-coast “coming-out parties.”

  I have asked students who have read Ruth Benedict’s book which of these three cultures in their opinion most closely resembles the more highly differentiated culture of the United States. The great majority see Americans as Kwakiutls. They emphasize American business rivalry, jealousy over sex and status, and the drive for power. They see Americans as individualists, primarily interested in the display of wealth and station.

  A minority of students, usually the more politically radical, say that America is more like Dobu. They emphasize the sharp practice of American business life, point to great jealousy and bitterness in family relations, and see American politics, domestic and international, as hardly less aggressive than Hobbes’s state of nature.

  No students I have talked with have argued that there are significant resemblances between the culture of the Hopi and ZuÑi Pueblos and American culture—many wish that there were.

  Yet when we turn then to examine the culture patterns of these very students, we see little evidence either of Dobu or Kwakiutl ways. The wealthy students go to great lengths not to be conspicuous—things are very different from the coon-coated days of the 20’s. The proper uniform is one of purposeful shabbiness. In fact, none among the students except a very rare Lucullus dares to be thought uppity. Just as no modern Vanderbilt says “the public be damned,” so no modern parent would say: “Where Vanderbilt sits, there is the head of the table. I teach my son to be rich.”2

  It is, moreover, not only in the virtual disappearance of conspicuous consumption that the students have abandoned Kwakiutl-like modes of life. Other displays of gifts, native or acquired, have also become more subdued. A leading college swimming star told me: “I get sore at the guys I’m competing against. Something’s wrong with me. I wish I could be like X who really cooperates with the other fellows. He doesn’t care so much about winning.”

  There seems to be a discrepancy between the America that students make for themselves as students and the America they think they will move into when they leave the campus. Their image of the latter is based to a large extent on legends about America that are preserved in our literature. For example, many of our novelists and critics still believe that America, as compared with other cultures, is a materialistic nation of would-be Kwakiutl chiefs. There may have been some truth in this picture in the Gilded Age, though Henry James saw how ambiguous the issue of materialism was between America and Europe even then.

  The materialism of these older cultures has been hidden by their status systems and by the fact that they had inherited many values from the era dependent on tradition-direction. The European masses simply have not had the money and leisure, until recent years, to duplicate American patterns of consumption; when they do, they are, if anything, sometimes more vulgar, more materialistic.

  The Europeans, nevertheless, have been only too glad to tell Americans that they were materialistic; and the Americans, feeling themselves nouveaux riches during the last century, paid to be told. They still pay: it is not only my students who fail to see that it is the turn of the rest of the world to be nouveaux riches, to be excited over the gadgets of an industrial age, while millions of Americans have turned away in boredom from attaching much emotional significance to the consumer-goods frontier.3

  When, however, I try to point these things out to students who compare Americans with Kwakiutls, they answer that the advertisements show how much emotion is attached to the consumption of goods. But, when I ask them if they believe the ads themselves, they say scornfully that they do not. And when I ask if they know people who do, they find it hard to give examples, at least in the middle class. (If the advertisements powerfully affected people in the impoverished lower class who had small hope of mobility, there would surely be a revolution!) Yet the advertisements must be reaching somebody, the students insist. Why, I ask, why isn’t it possible that advertising as a whole is a fantastic fraud, presenting an image of America taken seriously by no one, least of all by the advertising men who create it? Just
as the mass media persuade people that other people think politics is important, so they persuade people that everyone else cannot wait for his new refrigerator or car or suit of clothes. In neither case can people believe that the others are as apathetic as they feel themselves to be. And, while their indifference to politics may make people feel on the defensive, their indifference to advertising may allow them to feel superior. In fact, I think that a study of American advertising during the last quarter century would show that the advertising men themselves at least implicitly realize the consumer’s loss of emotional enthusiasm. Where once car and refrigerator advertisements showed the housewife or husband exulting in the new possessions, today it is often only children in the ads who exult over the new Nash their father has just bought. In many contemporary ads the possession itself recedes into the background or is handled abstractly, surrealistically; it no longer throws off sparks or exclamation points; copy itself has become subtler or more matter of fact.

  Of course many old-fashioned enthusiasts of consumption remain in America who have not yet been affected by the spread of other-directed consumer sophistication and repression of emotional response. A wonderful example is the small-town Irish mother in the movie, A Letter to Three Wives, whose greatest pride and joy in her dingy railroad-side home is the big, shiny, new, not-yet-paid-for refrigerator. And it may be argued that even middle-class Americans have only covered over their materialism with a veneer of good taste, without altering their fundamental drives. Nevertheless, the other-directed person, oriented as he is toward people, is simply unable to be as materialistic as many inner-directed people were. For genuine inner-directed materialism—real acquisitive attachment to things—one must go to the Dutch bourgeois or French peasant or others for whom older ways endure.

 

‹ Prev