The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  In conclusion, when we think of the inner-directed man’s political style, we must always think of the interests he brought to the political sphere. He participated not because he felt obliged to further a highly cooperative group life but because he had something specific at stake: a responsibility to himself or to others or both. In general, and despite its partial compartmentalization, the political sphere served to further the interests of his class position, class aspirations, or class antagonisms. Since politics was regarded as a forum for satisfying needs other than amusement and psychic escape, it was felt to react passively to the pressure of those needs; men were masters of their politics. Conversely, politics could not and did not invade a man’s privacy, since it could only touch him so far as he felt that it was responding, or refusing to respond, to the pressure of what he was sure were his interests. And this is perhaps one major reason why the political was a comparatively well-defined and indeed often overdefined and constricted sphere in the nineteenth as compared to the twentieth century.

  With new developments, the style of the moralizer-in-power is no longer suitable. Politics today refuses to fit into its nineteenth-century compartment. With the mass media behind it, it invades the privacy of the citizen with its noise and claims. This invasion destroys the older, easy transitions from individual to local, local to national, and national to international interests and plunges the individual directly into the complexities of world politics, without any clear-cut notion of where his interests lie.

  At the same time politics becomes more difficult to understand in a purely technical sense, partly because it invades previously semi-independent spheres like economics, partly because of the growing scope and interdependence of political decisions. For instance, in modern war people must understand that higher taxes are necessary, not to meet government expenditures or even to redistribute income, but because industrial and private consumers must be kept from spending too much and fueling inflation and because the government needs to buy goods and services that would be scarce if people were left with money to buy them.

  The incomprehensibility of politics gains momentum not only from the increase in its objective complexity but from what is in some respects a drop in the general level of skills relevant to understanding what goes on in politics. While formal education has increased, the education provided by the effort to run a farm, an independent business, or a shop, has decreased along with the increase in the number of employees; and while there may be little or no decline in the number of independent entrepreneurs, a larger proportion of the factors leading to success or failure is no longer in the hands of those remaining as entrepreneurs. No longer can one judge the work and competence of the political or government administrator from the confident, often overconfident, base line of one’s own work and competence.

  THE STYLE OF THE MORALIZER-IN-RETREAT

  Many moralizers in the nineteenth century already viewed politics not only in a confused and ethically limited but also in a slightly paranoid and autistic way. These men, precursors of the modern displaced inner-directed, did not so much steer politics as permit themselves to be over-steered by their fears, which they projected onto politics. How else can we explain the emotion generated by the recurrent antiforeign crusades, the campaigns against mysterious secret orders, Catholic, Masonic, Phi Beta Kappa? It was often difficult for some Americans to see the difference between the mumbo-jumbo voluntary association such as the Masons, for example, and a social and class conspiracy. Likewise, the feeling of political conservatives that the world will come to an end if “that man” is elected does not make its appearance for the first time under the second Roosevelt.

  Morbid anxiety of this sort is the fruit of an envy and bewilderment that are rooted in character. While the tradition-directed indifferents feel neither helpless about nor invaded by politics, because of the curtain that separates them from the political world, the inner-directed indignants can easily feel helpless and invaded when things do not go well with them. As we saw in Chapter V, the inner-directed man becomes vulnerable to himself when he fails to achieve his internalized goals. Able to forget the invisible hand as long as he is successful, he seeks in his baffled failure to make it visible so that he can smite it. His politics, like his character, becomes curdled when lack of success reveals and renders intolerable his lack of understanding.

  It is in part the indignant person’s baffled incomprehension that makes him see the city slicker as having a great and disagreeable sureness of grasp compared with his own. He envies this, and overrates it. The urban magnates and lawyers of the nineteenth century were, in their character, almost as clearly inner-directed as their rural and small-town enemies. Yet, communications between them, as between regions and classes, were always close to breakdown.

  Today it is often assumed that, because the gap in education between city and country has narrowed and because such mass media as the radio attract both urban and rural audiences, it follows that the gap in character structure has also narrowed. Perhaps in some parts of the country this has occurred. But I think it more likely that the gap between other-directed city dwellers and inner-directed rural folk has increased and that the well-meant efforts to bridge the gap have frequently served only to make the latter feel still more envious and unsure.

  Envy and the feeling of displacement—sources of a political style of curdled indignation—are of course also to be found among those rural immigrants to town who are city dwellers in name only. As long as such people, urban or rural, have political power, their malaise vis-À-vis the other-directed elements in American life may be muted; they can shape their world and force it to make sense to them. But when even this avenue toward understanding is cut off, the curdled indignant lashes out in helpless rage or subsides into the sort of passive, frustrated resistance that we commented on in Chapter I in connection with Erikson’s studies of American Indians.

  Another variety of moralizer, those we might term the “enthusiasts,” far from resigning themselves to political frustration, hopefully tackle the most intractable tasks. The changing meaning of the word enthusiast says much about the history of political styles. The enthusiasts in the days of Cromwell and the Long Parliament were the men of spirit and vision, the Quakers or Levellers or Diggers. But in eighteenth-century England the word enthusiast had already begun to lose this religious meaning and to become instead a term of ridicule rather than fear or admiration. It is perhaps part of the same development which has added “do-gooder,” “world improver,” “reformer,” and “Boy Scout” to our colloquial vocabulary as terms of contempt or friendly dismissal: to want to “do good” in politics is obviously to be naÏve!

  The enthusiast resembles the indignant in that his political emotions frequently outweigh his political intelligence; they lead him into half-thought-out crusades. But he differs from the indignant in the quality of these emotions: these are rosy and cheerful as against the darker emotional hue of the indignant.4 In the nineteenth century the enthusiast was unceasingly active. If challenged, he argued, as he would argue today, that there is always work, and political work, for idle hands to do. Such an argument rests on ascetic feelings of obligation about engaging in or concerning oneself with politics and rests also on the American penchant for activity as such—a penchant outlasting the belief in progress which rationalized ceaseless activity for many of the inner-directed in the nineteenth century.

  Wars and technological changes, as well as the shift from inner-direction to other-direction, have brought the moralizing style, in either its indignant or enthusiast versions, into disrepute. The Civil War, itself a complex catharsis of the moral indignation that accompanied the political sphere in the preceding years, initiated a process that has since continued. Probably the few living veterans of the Civil War still retain a fighting faith in the righteousness of their cause. The veterans of World War I are less involved in their cause, though still involved in their experience. The veterans of World War II bring
scarcely a trace of moral righteousness into their scant political participation. These men “ain’t mad at nobody.” It looks as though since the Civil War there has been a decline in the emotionality of political differences, a decline in the histrionic violence of electoral campaigning, and a decline in the reserves of indignation and enthusiasm available to any side of an easily moralized issue.

  Certainly, salient examples of the indignant style remain. The sallies of Mencken in the 20’s hit at the social groups in which most of the extreme moralizing was still to be found: the country people, the midwesterners, the small-town Protestants, the southern APAs, the corn-fed shouting sects, the small lodge-joining businessmen. That such groups have been somewhat more cosmopolitan in recent years during which other-direction has spread, does not mean the older patterns have vanished.

  Today, however, just as inner-direction in character is partly the result of a moralizing political style, so loss of emotion in politics leads to other-direction in character. In other words, politics itself, as it impinges on the lives of people and shapes their experiences and interpretations of them, becomes one of the agencies of character formation. This complex interplay is one reason why, within our broad scheme of character types linked to the curve of population, we find, and would expect to find, different national variants rooted in different national historical experience. For example, both England and America are countries that have arrived at incipient decline of population as the result of industrialization, urbanization, and the spread of contraceptive substitutes for a Malthusian morality. But both countries encountered these historic crises, as they encountered civil war, at very different periods in their political development. Congreve, living in a postwar reign of tolerance, might have been surprised at the recurrence of moralizing in the Victorian Age, when the combination of evangelical revival and the pace and politics of industrialization upset the older political styles. Likewise, in view of the indeterminacies of history, it would be rash to predict that the moralizing style is doomed and that no revival in America is possible. Indeed, if influential men become moralizers, the other-directed person, because he is other-directed, will try to be a moralizer, too.

  III. The Inside-dopesters

  For all the Athenians and strangers which were there spent their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing.

  St. Paul

  The spread of other-direction has brought to the political scene the attitude of the inside-dopester, originating not in the sphere of work but of consumption. This attitude is not entirely new, any more than other-direction is entirely new. Here, again, the change is a matter of degree.

  The other-directed man possesses a rich store of social skills—skills he needs in order to survive and move about in his social environment; some of these he can deploy in the form of political skills. One of these is his ability to hold his emotional fire, which he tries hard to do because of the cooperative pattern of life to which he is committed. This skill is related to his inescapable awareness, lacking in the inner-directed man, that in any situation people are as important as things.

  The inside-dopester may be one who has concluded (with good reason) that since he can do nothing to change politics, he can only understand it. Or he may see all political issues in terms of being able to get some insider on the telephone. That is, some inside-dopesters actually crave to be on the inside, to join an inner circle or invent one; others aim no higher than to know the inside, for whatever peer-group satisfactions this can bring them.

  The inside-dopester of whatever stripe tends to know a great deal about what other people are doing and thinking in the important or “great-issue” spheres of life; he is politically cosmopolitan rather than parochial. If he cannot change the others who dominate his political attention, his characterological drive leads him to manipulate himself in order not to change the others but to resemble them. He will go to great lengths to keep from looking and feeling like the uninformed outsider. Not all other-directed people are inside-dopesters, but perhaps, for the lack of a more mature model, many of them aspire to be.

  The inside-dopester is competent in the way that the school system and the mass media of communication have taught him to be competent. Ideology demands that, living in a politically saturated milieu, he know the political score as he must know the score in other fields of entertainment, such as sports.

  The majority of inside-dopesters take no active part in politics, but there are those who do. Thus, we find many government and party officials who handle the political news in the way encouraged by their jobs, in fragments of office gossip. There are political newsmen and broadcasters who, after long training, have succeeded in eliminating all emotional response to politics and who pride themselves on achieving the inside-dopesters’ goal: never to be taken in by any person, cause, or event. On the other hand, some feeders on inside dope, particularly those elements influenced by Stalinism, in its various disguises, seem to fall among the political indignants. Frequently, they use their inside knowledge simply as a means of getting themselves worked up about American political abuses: they have a positive tropism to evidences of race discrimination, police brutality, corporate skulduggery, etc. This political stance becomes de rigueur among some groups; in these circles conformity to the group leads not to tolerance and political consumption but to indignation and political action. This seeming paradox can serve as a reminder that I speak of other-direction in terms of patterns of conformity and response to others, and not in terms of the ideological and behavioral content of that response. Usually, there will be compatibility between the mechanism of conformity and the values and realities to which one tries to conform, but this is only a tendency and there are many cases, such as this one, where successful other-direction leads to behavior which simulates inner-direction (we shall encounter other examples in Chapter XV).

  THE BALANCE SHEET OF INSIDE DOPE

  In the days of his power, the inner-directed moralizer had great confidence in the continuance of the social structure—the concept of the invisible hand symbolizes this—even when and perhaps especially when he did not understand how it worked. The inside-dopester, on the contrary, knows too much about politics to be so easily comforted, while still knowing too little to appreciate the opportunities for change available to him. For his understanding is cramped by his preoccupation with the highly selective classification of events handed out as the inside story, or made still moire alluring by being stamped as classified or confidential information. Concerned with being “right,” fearing to be taken in, or to be thought guilty of wishful thinking (which he equates with any introduction of his humaneness into his judgments), the inside-dopester deprives himself of one of the best yardsticks he could use actively to control his experience, namely his own reactions as a sensitive participant in the political life of his time. It is not only that he withdraws emotional allegiance from a political scene which strikes him as too complex and too unmanageable—it strikes him so in part precisely because he has withdrawn.5

  Furthermore, in order to keep up with the political branch of the consumers’ union, the inside-dopester must be prepared for rapid changes of line. In this respect he is like the negotiator whom we discussed earlier, who is better able to bring home the bacon of good will if he is hazy about and has not pressed his legal rights in the matter; the inside-dopester can change his opinions more easily if he has lost the moralizer’s ability to relate political events to himself and his practical interests. That is perhaps why the portrait of the inside-dopester as an official, in Anna Karenina (the image of Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky as quoted in Chapter I), of Bilibin in War and Peace, and of Ivan Ilyitch in Tolstoy’s short story “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch”—why these nineteenth-century Russians, attuned to the class media of the court, seem under their strange names so very contemporary.

  There is evidence that in America rapid fluctuation of opinion is to be found primarily in the better educated groups, the
groups in which we also expect to find the inside-dopesters. Thus, the very interesting study made at the Harvard Department of Social Relations of attitudes toward Russia provides evidence that middle-class opinion vis-À-vis Russia has swung much more widely than lower-class opinion, which was always hostile and suspicious. For the middle class, Russia became a wartime ally and, for a time, a postwar friend; this has been succeeded by violent hostility. Other studies show the same thing with respect to isolationism and war. On all these matters the middle classes, being caught up in politics and, on the whole, susceptible to the way the mass media present events, are capable of attending to a much more rapid change of signals than the lower classes.

  Politics, indeed, serves the inside-dopester chiefly as a means for group conformity. He must have acceptable opinions, and where he engages in politics he must do so in acceptable ways. In the upper class, as among radical groups, the influence of the moralizing style is still strong, and many people who set the cultural patterns carry on with an ideology of political responsibility; they act as if politics were a meaningful sphere for them. The college student or young professional or businessman of the upper middle class may take up politics as he takes up golf or any other acceptable hobby: it is a fulfillment of social role and in addition it is good fun, good business, and a way to meet interesting people. It happens, of course, that people who enter politics, on one or another level, with inside-dopester motivations, may find themselves becoming emotionally involved, and stay for quite other reasons. More common, probably, are those inside-dopesters who use their political experience to justify their emotional anemia, drawing on their acquaintance with the inside story to look down on those who get excited.