The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  The exploration of what is meant by sincerity will take us far toward understanding the ways in which popular culture trains its audience in tolerance. We must remind ourselves that sincerity is one of the qualities by which a retail store may hold a loyal clientele, according to Mr. Clements’ remarks quoted above.2

  In a study of attitudes toward popular music we find again and again such statements as, “I like Dinah Shore because she’s so sincere,” or, “that’s a very sincere record,” or, “You can just feel he [Frank Sinatra] is sincere.” While it is clear that people want to personalize their relationships to their heroes of consumption and that their yearning for sincerity is a grim reminder of how little they can trust themselves or others in daily life, it is less clear just what it is that they find “sincere” in a singer or other performer.3 One element may be the apparent freedom of the entertainer to express emotions that others cannot or dare not express. Again, sincerity means performance in a style which is not aggressive or cynical, which may even be defenseless, as the question-answering or press-conference technique of some politicians appears to be. The performer puts himself at the mercy of both his audience and his emotions. Thus sincerity on the side of the performer evokes the audience’s tolerance for him: it would not be fair to be too critical of the person who has left himself wide open and extended the glad hand of friendliness.

  But the popular emphasis on sincerity means more than this. It means that the source of criteria for judgment has shifted from the content of the performance and its goodness or badness, aesthetically speaking, to the personality of the performer. He is judged for his attitude toward the audience, an attitude which is either sincere or insincere, rather than by his relation to his craft, that is, his honesty and skill.

  By ignoring what the audience believes itself to lack (ability to perform) and emphasizing the qualities that it believes itself secretly to possess (capacity for sincerity), the audience is enabled, to a degree, to patronize the artist just as it patronizes the bumbling participants in a give-away show. It may well be, too, that the audience that emphasizes an emotional quality of a performer, such as sincerity, escapes from the need for emotional response to the performance itself. Though the listener likes a star who, as the teen-ager says, can “send me,” he does not want to go very far; he has his membership card in the consumers’ union to consider. By making sincerity appear as an objective quality, or at least one capable of discussion in the peer-group, he gets some emotional release while preserving safety in numbers. He can “give the little girl a hand” without committing himself to a judgment on her virtuosity. In this sense the sincere artist is like the artist who tries hard.

  Viewing the political scene as a market for comparable emotions, it seems that the appeal of many of our political candidates tends to be of this sort. Forced to choose between skill and sincerity, many in the audience prefer the latter. They are tolerant of bumbles and obvious ineptness if the leader tries hard.4

  Sincerity and cynicism. The other-directed inside-dopester is far from being simply a cynic. Cynicism is a trait compatible with both inner-direction and other-direction, but it has a different bearing in the two constellations. The inner-directed cynic is or can be an opportunist, ruthless in pursuing his goals. Or he may be a disgruntled idealist, still in practice committed to rectitude. In pursuit of his aims, good or bad, he may be quite ready to exploit others, just as the inner-directed moralizer may be quite ready to force others to be moral, too. However, the other-directed person, cynical as he often seems, is generally too dependent on others to be completely cynical about them: he may keep looking for sincerity—that is, for personalities who, if they exploit his emotions, will also involve their own. The desire for a sincere presidential candidate, such as Eisenhower, is then in part a desire to escape from cynicism and apathy into commitment and enthusiasm—an excuse for the return of repressed qualities. What appears here as cynicism is frequently the readiness of the other-directed person tolerantly to accept the norms of whatever adult peer-group he is in. But this limp acceptance is rather a source for his cynicism about himself than for his cynicism about others to whom he clings in search of goals. In fact, the other-directed man’s cynicism about himself is one of the principal reasons that, while he is willing to say what he likes, he cannot believe in himself enough to know what he wants.

  The inner-directed man, when he looks at politics, is likely to be exceedingly cynical about people but not cynical about institutions, constitutions, and, as we saw earlier, the value of politics itself. By contrast, the other-directed man, somewhat sentimental about people, is likely to be quite cynical about legal and political institutions, just as he is about the great game of politics itself. Coupled with this outlook, his concern for sincerity in political personalities becomes a vice. While the concern for sincerity may imply a refusal to be taken in by any abstract notions of good and bad, along with an insistence that the personal emotional tone of the leader is of decisive importance, there are many situations where this orientation leads one astray.

  In the first place, the leader’s warmth or sincerity is not always important; that depends on the situation. The structure of politics and of the electorate may be sufficiently firm to make it unlikely that an insincere candidate could bring about great evils even if he wished to. The other-directed person, focused on people as he is, may overlook such institutional hardness of the material. Thus, just as the moralizer romanticizes a government of laws and not of men, the inside-dopester romanticizes a government of men and not of laws.

  In the second place, it is obviously most difficult to judge sincerity. While the audience which uses the term sincerity thinks that it is escaping, in its tolerant mood, from the difficulty of judging skills, it is actually moving into a domain of considerably greater complexity. Just because such a premium is put on sincerity, a premium is put on faking it.

  Plainly, it is the other-directed person’s psychological need, not his political one, that dictates his emphasis on warmth and sincerity. For leadership, the ability to be disagreeable may often be more important. The man who thinks he is sincere, moreover, may deceive himself and others; the man who knows he is not, may watch himself and be watched.5

  III. Do the Media Escape from Politics?

  Hollywood’s discovery of the Negro problem had given the studios a new cycle, and distributors a tough problem: How would the South take to films denouncing racial prejudice? … Having already played nine profitable weeks in Manhattan, Home of the Brave opened in Dallas and Houston … In Dallas, the Negro elevator operator tried to sum up overheard opinion: “Well, I’ll tell you, 99 per cent of the people say it’s educational, the other 1 per cent say it’s good.”

  Time, July 18, 1949

  Critics of the mass media seem generally to suppose that the media foster political apathy, that they permit and encourage the audience to escape from the political and other realities of life, that, by a kind of Gresham’s Law, they drive out the hard money of politics with the soft money of mass entertainment. How can Washington, it is sometimes asked, compete with Hollywood and Broadway?

  Actually, however, the much criticized media—especially the press—seem to have maintained a surprisingly inner-directed attitude toward the political. Indeed, they pay more attention to politics than their audience seems to demand. Even tabloids print headlines and, often, news pictures on the front page, not comics. True, this is often “news” of sex, crime, and politically irrelevant or distracting exposÉ, but a few major political topics figure on occasion. Old Indignant Hearst liked to print “the Chief’s” editorials rather than cheesecake on page one. Local radio stations with disk jockeys build their self-esteem (and please the FCC) by broadcasting news every hour, which, like the commercials, people do not bother to switch off. Likewise, newsreels usually begin with shots of some political personage or event, postponing Lew Lehr or the fashion show to the end of the reel. Thus many of the agencies of mass communication
s give political news a larger play than might be dictated by strict considerations of market research. In this way they help maintain the prestige of politics as a presumed interest on the part of their audience—even though, at the same time, they seldom counter the popular stereotype concerning the disreputability of politicians.

  This position of prestige given to politics is especially important for the other-directed person, since he looks to the mass media for guidance in his design for living and hierarchy of values. He is led to assume that other people must rate politics as the mass media themselves do—that they are politically alert moral-izers even though he is not. He is also encouraged in this assumption by the polls which the press prints. Save for an “inquiring photographer” here and there, these polls ask many questions and report many answers about public issues and rather few about daily living or sports. The media, far from being a conspiracy to dull the political sense of the people, could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference.

  Indeed people in most walks of life are apologetic if they are not up on politics, men especially so. People do not often make the discovery that others are quite as bored or apathetic about politics (or about other things on which the media confer respectability) as they know themselves to be. In the city, where people do not know each other, the “unbelievers” could only be aware of how numerous they are through the mass media, but these are the very channels that give politics priority.6

  One reason for this is the desire of those who work for the mass media to do what is right or considered to be right by those to whom they look for leadership. Just as publishers want to publish prestige books even though they may lose money on them, under various rationalizations of good will, so newspapermen and broadcasters want to raise themselves above “the lowest common denominator” without fully exploring the potential financial profitability of the latter. The movie king who speaks for mere entertainment feels on the defensive with the bold producer of Home of the Brave and similar problem-films.

  For in fact, those who work in the mass communications industries are, despite the moralizing style with which they approach politics, typically other-directed. The hypersensitive radar that is their meal ticket is tuned in spare moments not to the audience to whom they sell but to the intellectual strata around and above them. These strata are frequently contemptuous of popular culture.

  Doubtless, a hierarchy among the different kinds of entertainment has always existed. But whereas the hierarchy in earlier days was based, at least to some extent, on criteria of artistry, the hierarchy today seems to be based somewhat more on topic than on mode of treatment. As the audience itself is asked to move on a constantly uptilting gradient of topic and taste, from the comics of childhood to the commentators of adulthood, so the makers of the media, in their own combination of social mobility and ethical uplift, are always impatient to get to the point where in addition to entertaining they are, in terms of topic, educating and improving. As the slicks are more high class than the pulps, so politics is more high class than sex. The sports writer wants to become a political columnist; the night-club broadcaster moves over first into political chitchat, then into political fire; many a newspaper publisher who begins as a “no-nonsense” businessman ends up as a bit of a political moralizer. Just as the new rich are “educated” to philanthropy by their associates, so the new entrants into the mass media are educated away from the “low” commercial motives to ones of more prestige. To take an example, the older pictorial magazines, such as Life and Look and even some of the less well-known ones, have moved steadily away from pictures, away from cheescake toward art, away from the sensationalism of Sunday supplement journalism toward “serious” reading matter and political exhorting; pictures are only the come-on for social issues.

  It seems, therefore, that the mass media, among their highly complex and ambiguous effects, do help prop up the prestige of the political sphere in the United States, and that within this sphere they have the effect of favoring the older, moralizing political styles. This is more true of the press than of the movies and radio, just as within the press it is more true of certain magazines and newspapers than of others. Nevertheless, despite these good intentions the total impact of the mass media on the political attitudes of Americans does more to encourage other-directed tolerance than to preserve inner-directed indignation. The sheer emphasis on consumer skills in the mass media, an emphasis that both encourages and caters to the other-directed, has cumulative effects. One of the most basic of these is that the inner-directed types and their interests are driven out of the media in every sphere except that of politics itself.

  IV. The Reservoir of Indignation

  Outside of politics, indeed, the mass media offer the indignants a rather scanty fare. The moral issues dealt with in the media are posed in increasingly subtle form, and, as we saw in Chapter VII, they reflect problems mainly of personal relationships. Moreover, the pace of the media is too fast, too sophisticated, for many of the readers who remain inner-directed. What are they to make, for instance, of a Billy Rose column about Broadway morals and mores? How are they to translate the specialized lingoes of many comic strips? How can they possibly make sense of the elusiveness and allusiveness of the “A”-grade problem-film? The indignants are apt to find that even horse operas have become pastoral settings for sadism, sex, and social problems, no longer like the old westerns whose chief characters were horses and whose moral problems involved hardly more complicated beings. Soap operas probably seem to casual upper middle-class listeners to be bathed in lachrymose moralizing. But typically their characters are preoccupied with straightening out a complex web of tenuous emotions, often needing the specialized services of the professional or semi-professional helper. The typical curdled indignant, perhaps especially if male, is simply not interested in such things.

  We may note the change in popular-culture fare in another medium altogether, by remarking the transformation a few years ago of the new Scientific American. The old Scientific American used to be read by inner-directed hobbyists of science; now it has become a slick-paper periodical, catering with brilliance and sophistication to the consumers of science, including social science and philosophy; one old subscriber complained that it was no longer edited to be read by men with greasy hands at workbenches—virtually the only hobby column remaining is the astronomy section. Likewise, we might note that Street and Smith, publishers of such moralizing tales as Alger and Nick Carter, in 1948 killed all but one of their remaining pulps, including Detective Story, Western Story, etc., to concentrate on their three booming slicks: Mademoiselle, Charm, and Mademoiselle’s Living. What is the barnacled moralizer to do with them?

  This gnawing deficit of acceptable mass media would perhaps be less troublesome to the moralizer if the world in which he lived still appeared to be inner-directed, to be governed, that is, by an invisible hand. But his own experience of life is often disappointing; he is deprived of a feeling of competence and place. Neither his character nor his work is rewarded. In that situation he tends to turn on both—for he is vulnerable to lack of worldly comprehension even more perhaps than to lack of worldly success—and on the world. In a last desperate effort to turn the country back on its inner-directed course in order to make it habitable for him, he is ready to join a political movement whose basic driving force is indignation. A world that refuses him a place—a world that bombards him with messages that make him feel inadequate—may not appear to him worth saving, though his destructiveness may be rationalized by various ideologies.

  The mass media cater to this attitude in politics, even if they no longer cater to it in other fields. We have seen one reason for this: the fact that many leaders of the media, for prestige and other reasons of their own, espouse a moralizing attitude toward politics rather than an inside-dopesterish one. And we have seen another reason: the fact that the media attract and provide an audience for indignant men with a simple message. While most of
their readers are new-style indifferents who are titillated by political excitement, some are indignants who find their responses welcomed on the editorial page and in the commentator’s columns if nowhere else.

  Moreover, the indignation of the lords of press, comment, and column is not as ineffective with the other-directed readers in their audience as one might suppose at first glance. Many of these have adopted the moralizer’s style as their own—many more of course are only marginally other-directed. But even the tolerant other-directed person is often fascinated by the indignant’s ire, not because it is compatible with his character structure but because it is not. In commercial sports, for instance, he enjoys a rivalry and display of bad temper—even if he knows in a way that it is cooked up for his benefit—that is vanishing or banished from other spheres of his life. As a result, displays of aggression and indignation in the arena of politics are popular with all types —indignants, inside-dopesters, and indifferents. “Pour it on, Harry!” the crowds shouted to President Truman. As Americans, whatever their class or character, can enjoy boxing or a rodeo, so they still look upon a political brawl as very much a part of their American heritage, despite the trend toward tolerance.

  This leads us to the important consideration that the nature of the electioneering process encourages the entry of the indignant on his own terms. In campaigning, a tradition of moralizing survives, in competition with the newer search for glamor. The machines, though sensitive to glamor, are also aware, from past defeats, of the political power of the indignants—those who did go fight city hall. Even other-directed men may vote for moralizing inner-directed politicians because the latter present a more familiar, more dramatized, more seemingly appropriate attitude toward politics.