The Twilight of the American Enlightenment

by George Marsden

  Riesman addressed these same sorts of issues, but with a weight of scientific authority that offered historical perspective. He divided all societies into three broad types: “tradition-directed,” “inner-directed,” and “other-directed.” These categories, which he recognized were “ideal types” that glossed over many exceptions, had to do with how each of these sorts of societies most typically shaped the “mode of conformity” or “social character” of its members. Most societies throughout history, including Europe in the Middle Ages, had been “tradition-directed.” In such societies, people typically inherited a fixed status, and their lives were shaped by rituals, routines, and religious beliefs and practices that carried the divine authority of countless ages. Societies in the second category, the “inner-directed” ones, were in transition, notably Europe since the Renaissance and the Reformation. In these societies, economic expansion brought an ever-increasing number of choices and an ever-greater degree of personal mobility. Although there were many varieties of inner-directed people, they typically internalized the traditional and religious ideals and goals of their societies, so that they were guided by a sort of internal moral compass. The Protestant work ethic, which contributed to the rise of capitalism, would be a classic example of the internalization of religiously sanctioned ideals and the extension of them to new settings. Hard work and self-denial were characteristic of successful individuals in such societies when the societies were shaped by expanding industrial production. Inner direction, according to Riesman, had dominated the early modern era and the beginning of the twentieth century, and most Americans had been brought up with something like that ideal.

  In the past few decades, said Riesman, a new type, the “other-directed” person, was emerging, especially among the younger and more well-to-do people in the more progressive urban and suburban population centers. This new middle class, although not yet in the majority, was likely to soon be the most common American type. The distinguishing characteristic shared by other-directed people was that their goals and values were shaped by their contemporaries, either known to them directly or indirectly through the mass media. Their mode of conformity was to internalize perceived current opinion and make it their own. In that respect they resembled the small groups of elites in cultures of the past for whom fashion served as a substitute for custom and morals.

  These types of societies reared their children in different ways. Whereas inner-directed child rearing was directed toward teaching virtues, disciplines, and standards that would build character, other-directed child rearing was more permissive and oriented toward forming the personality. As other-directed children grew up, they would be able to adjust readily to ever-changing fashions and to present themselves as an attractive product by current standards. Often, those standards were shaped by advertisers’ representations of the advantages of what were in fact marginal features of their products. The inner-directed schoolroom might be decorated with pictures of the ruins of Pompeii, or a bust of Caesar, objects that “signal the irrelevance of the school to the emotional problems of the child.” The other-directed school would be much more oriented toward cultivating the personal development of each child. The walls would be decorated with the children’s own artwork, which was part of a program of “the socialization of taste.” Changes such as these signaled a broader cultural change “from morality to morale.”

  The ideal that Riesman took for granted as the antidote to modern conformity was “autonomy.” To be autonomous meant to be an authentic, self-determining, and self-fulfilled person who could transcend the conventions of one’s society. Yet, he was vague as to how that goal was to be accomplished. In his preface to the 1960 edition of The Lonely Crowd, Riesman explained that he was not writing out of nostalgia for a past when inner-directedness was the rule; nor was he equating inner-directedness with autonomy or even arguing that it was necessarily superior to other-directedness. In fact, he did not think that any individual person entirely fit these ideal types. People could achieve autonomy within either framework, particularly if they understood the forces that were shaping them. Social science, then, could be liberating, as it might help people identify the social roots of their problems. But finding a solution that would be consistent with the ideals of self-determination and autonomy seemed to be up to them. Riesman made a point of counting lack of dogmatism as among the virtues of his outlook. “The Lonely Crowd,” he wrote in 1960, “was one of a number of books which in recent years have eschewed dogmatism and fanaticism and preferred openness, pluralism, and empiricism.” Here was another set of words—“openness, pluralism, and empiricism”—that could be taken for granted as representing ideals shared by those who were forward looking. They were ideals that would help ensure autonomy for scientific researchers and other thinkers.9

  In the late 1950s, the danger of losing autonomy to the subtle forces of a capitalist society was a hot topic. The subject inspired a series of best-sellers, beginning with William Whyte’s The Organization Man, which became a “must read” in 1957. Whyte was a journalist who wrote for Fortune, a business magazine. He claimed that he was not writing about “mass man”; or attacking TV sets, ranch wagons, or “gray flannel suits”; or even making a plea for “nonconformity.” Yet his book seemed to be an extended riff on David Riesman’s other-directed man as found among corporate executives and aspiring executives. These “organization men,” Whyte argued, were molded by an “ideology” of the corporation. (“Ideology” in this era was almost always a bad thing.) These were men “who have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life.” They were uprooted and transient in that they would give up all other connections to move whenever the corporation demanded it. They were thus, like priests, part of a collective, and they had internalized the corporation’s “social ethic,” or “a body of thought that makes morally legitimate the pressures of society against the individual.” This ethic included three fundamental propositions: “a belief in the group as the source of creativity; a belief in ‘belongingness’ as the ultimate need of the individual; and a belief in the application of science to achieve the belongingness.”

  Whyte differed from Riesman in one important respect. Whereas Riesman believed that social scientific understandings of the human condition would be liberating, Whyte regarded “scientism” as one source of the problem. Scientism was helping to destroy America’s vaunted tradition of rugged individualism. Ever since Isaac Newton, Whyte observed, people had been claiming that if scientific methods could control nature, they ought to be able to resolve human problems as well. Whyte quoted a typical statement made at a gathering of social scientists: “More than ever, the world’s greatest need is a science of human relationships and an art of human engineering based on the laws of such science.” Often, proponents of such views would observe that if only the money spent on the atom bomb had been spent on human science, the world would be a far better place. Believers in scientism, said Whyte, were happy that modern ethical relativism had removed narrow traditional restraints on human behavior. Social scientists often invoked an ideal for society as though they were medical doctors restoring “equilibrium,” or bringing about “adjustment” in place of conflict and maladjustment. “There is not one section of American life,” Whyte warned, “that has not drunk deeply of the promise of scientism.” Its ideals were in the schools, in aptitude tests, in mass communications, and elsewhere, and surely there were few who had not had “a personal collision with it.”

  Scientism had made inroads into the social fabric because it characteristically appeared only as part of a larger social ethic that presented itself as beneficent. That ethic was especially explicit in the giant corporations that stressed the values of togetherness and belongingness. It was an ethic that declared that individuals found their meaning in groups that worked together and socialized together. Whyte illustrated these ideals extensively in corporate life. He also described the social structures of
the new model suburbs, such as Park Forest, Illinois, or Levittown, Pennsylvania. In the suburbs, uprooted people learned to value the more extroverted parts of their personalities as they sought togetherness in community activities and places of worship. Their greatest desire for their children’s education was that they would learn social skills. America, said Whyte, was cultivating “a generation of technicians” who would be skilled psychologically “to cope with the intricacies of vast organizations.” These “technicians” had learned to accept and understand their roles as the “interchangeables” of corporate society. They were, as they said, “all in the same boat.” But, Whyte added, “where is the boat going? No one seems to have the faintest idea; nor, for that matter, do they see much point in even raising the question.”

  Whyte offered little by way of solution. The forces that were swallowing up the individual were probably not inexorable, he thought. Western society needed to reassert the ideal that had animated it since the end of the Middle Ages, “that the individual rather than society must be the paramount end.” It was essential for individuals who were caught in the corporate web to resist the ideology. “Any real change will be up to the individual himself,” Whyte wrote. People needed education and perspective to recognize the problem. But, other than that, all Whyte had to suggest in his closing paragraph was that, “He must fight The Organization.” Here was autonomy again. The fight would not be crude or in the streets, but from within. The ideology would constantly be asking the individual to surrender to the idea that there was no conflict between the individual and society, but the individual must never believe that. The only answer, then, seemed to be an affirmation of the heroic individual who was willing to be true to himself. In other words, it was all right to dress in a gray flannel suit and drive your station wagon to the suburbs, so long as you had the heart of Thoreau.10

  Whyte’s appeal is as revealing of the times as are his arguments. He oversimplified the trends that he documented, and oversimplifications are the stuff of best-sellers. But for understanding the era, one may ask why these particular oversimplifications would hold such attraction for readers. The popularity of The Organization Man suggests that many Americans who were thoughtful enough to buy this lengthy study (471 pages) were ready to believe that the forces of regimentation in their society were creating a version of Brave New World that was so subtle that the intricacies of its science-driven, soul-destroying tendencies needed to be exposed. A decade later, the children of the suburbs would be taking a similar message to the streets. But even at the height of the 1950s, the unnerving sense that something was going dreadfully wrong in technological civilization was already there, even among the people who read Fortune magazine.

  By the second half of 1957, another national alarm was sounding about the subtle loss of freedom. This time it was in sociologist Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, which held the number-one nonfiction best-seller slot. (The fiction best-seller during this time was Peyton Place, which provided a very different version of the theme that America was not all it seemed on the surface.) The threat from advertising, Packard emphasized, was even greater than most people realized. Packard warned that people should be especially alarmed about how advertising agencies were increasingly using motivational research. Products were not being sold on their merits, but on the basis of researchers’ calculations of people’s most characteristic irrational needs and desires. The marketers were controlling people’s choices through effective image making. In the “disturbing Orwellian configurations of the world through which the persuaders are nudging us,” people were losing their freedom to make rational decisions.11

  The larger force destroying freedom, as Packard elaborated in two sequels, The Status Seekers of 1959 and The Waste Makers of 1961, was consumerism. In a time of unprecedented abundance, powerful economic interests were dedicated to maximizing consumption. These interests were armed with technical expertise directed toward manipulating almost every aspect of American life. As Packard summarized the threat at the end of The Status Seekers (which also was a number-one best-seller): “The forces of the times seem to be squeezing individuality and spontaneity from us.” Drawing on a motif of the end-of-decade anxieties over possible lost American ideals (as in “Our National Purpose” or “Have We Gone Soft?”), Packard affirmed that “we profess to be guided in our attitudes by the body of ideals set forth by our Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers would wish us to be individualists, free thinkers, independent in mind and spirit.”12

  By the end of the decade, warnings against conformity had become standard American wisdom. A typical example was a 1958 Reader’s Digest article, originally from Woman’s Day, on “The Danger of Being Too Well-Adjusted.” The article pointed out that great men often were not well adjusted, so women should be flexible in their expectations for their children. The author quoted a psychologist who claimed “we’ve made conformity into a religion.” The psychologist assured mothers that each child was different “and ought to be.” Notably, Woman’s Day was not applying the lesson to the roles of women themselves.13

  Of all the popular analyses of “modern man,” however, a late entry, Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, proved to have by far the most traceable impact in fostering social change. One of the great unspoken assumptions of the social discourse of midcentury America, an assumption intertwined with the enlightenment trust in rationality and the individual, was that the discourse was essentially about males. Friedan herself used the term “modern man,” but when she used it, the great difference was that she insisted on the genuinely inclusive sense of the term. So when Friedan, like the other analysts, examined self-realization versus self-alienating conformity, she applied the diagnosis to the other half of the “modern” population that was invisible in most of the other analyses.14

  Mischa Richter, June 14, 1958, The New Yorker

  Like many of the other social commentators, Friedan was alarmed by the conformity and uniformity of the suburbs, but in her case the concern arose from her own experience. Betty Goldstein (her maiden name) had been an honors graduate from Smith College in 1942. During and after the war, she had lived in Greenwich Village and worked as a reporter for a labor magazine. She married Carl Friedan in 1947, and after her pregnancy with their second child was forced to give up her job. She and Carl, a theater producer, moved to various suburbs, where she raised a family and attempted to do a little reporting on the side. Her illumination came in 1957, when she was asked by the women’s magazine McCall’s to write an article on the fifteenth anniversary of her Smith graduating class. She found that many of her classmates shared her frustrations with raising children in the suburbs and living in the shadow of their husbands’ more exciting worlds. She also found the members of the class of 1957 to be passive and conformist. So instead of writing the article on the “togetherness” of women that McCall’s wanted, she issued a sharp call for liberation that none of the women’s magazines would publish. She did find an editor at Norton who liked her idea as a book, however, and after five years of research and writing she finished her game-changing task.15

  Since Friedan’s point of reference was her own experience as a college-educated woman living in the suburbs, when she spoke of modern “man,” she, like the other analysts, was not thinking of a wide and diverse range of American men and women, but rather of the “modern” middle-class person of the cities and suburbs. Friedan was distressed mainly by the psychological implications of the mystique that insisted that educated women were best fulfilled by living through their husbands and children. She saw this ideology of domesticity as having been greatly revived just after World War II. After a famous chapter in which she compared the way in which the “women who live in the image of the feminine mystique trapped themselves within the narrow walls of their homes” to the way in which prisoners learned to “adjust” to concentration camps, Friedan turned to the alternative. All sorts of scientists of human behavior
, she pointed out, had been moving toward a consensus that a basic human need was to grow. It was “man’s will to be all that is in him to be.” Her list included Fromm and Riesman, and also a dozen other leaders in psychology, such as Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Gordon Allport, Karen Horney, and Rollo May. Each of these, she said, as well as theologians such as Paul Tillich and many existential philosophers, agreed on the need for the organism to grow to self-realization, or “will to power,” “self-assertion,” dominance,” or “autonomy.”

  Friedan recognized better than some of the social scientists that this ideal was not so much established by scientific research as it was the postulate on which some promising research was based. But she did take as accepted science “the fact that there is an evolutionary scale or hierarchy of needs in man (and thus in woman), ranging from the needs usually called instincts because they are shared with animals, to needs that come later in human development.” Women were being blocked from the highest sort of personal growth and development. “Despite the glorification of ‘Occupation housewife,’” Friedan declared, “if that occupation does not demand, or permit, realization of woman’s full abilities, it cannot provide adequate self-esteem, much less pave the way to a higher level of self-realization.” In one of the few studies in which these sorts of categories had even been applied to women, Abraham Maslow had confirmed that what he called “the high-dominance woman,” or one who was more akin to men in her attitudes, “was more psychologically free—more autonomous.” By contrast, “the low-dominance woman was not free to be herself, she was other-directed.” High-dominance women, said Maslow, were even better fulfilled sexually than low-dominance women. Riesman had observed that men in mass society needed meaningful work; just the same, said Friedan, applied to women. Enlisting the term that just recently had come into vogue, housewives had lost touch with their true selves and were suffering from an “identity crisis.”16