The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  Sex. What is here the autonomous path? Resistance to the seemingly casual demand of the sophisticated peer group that one’s achievements be taken casually, or acceptance of this “advanced” attitude? What models is one to take? One’s forefathers, who were surrounded by chaste and modest women? Or the contemporary Kinsey athletes who boast of “freedom” and “experience”? And, as women become more knowing consumers, the question of whether or when to assume the initiative becomes a matter for anxious speculation. Perhaps even more difficult roles are forced upon women. Also pioneers of the sex frontier, they must foster aggressiveness and simulate modesty. They have less chance to escape the frontier even temporarily through their work, for, if they have a profession, both men and women are apt to think that their skill detracts from their sexual life or that their sexual life detracts from their skill. Many middle-class women appear to have turned back, in a futile effort to recapture the older and seemingly more secure patterns.

  Tolerance. Tolerance is no problem when there is a wide gap between the tolerant and the tolerated. The mere expression of good will, and perhaps a contribution now and then, is all that is demanded. But when the slaves become freed men, and the proletarians self-respecting workers, tolerance in this earlier sense must be replaced by a more subtle and appropriate attitude. Again, the would-be autonomous individual is hard put to it to approximate this.

  One frequently observes that, in emancipated circles, everything is forgiven Negroes who have behaved badly, because they are Negroes and have been put upon. This sails dangerously close to prejudice in reverse. Moral issues are befogged on both sides of the race line, since neither whites nor Negroes are expected to react as individuals striving for autonomy but only as members of the tolerating or the tolerated race. Plainly, to sort out what is valid today in the mood of tolerance from what is suspect requires a high level of self-consciousness.

  This heightened self-consciousness, above all else, constitutes the insignia of the autonomous in an era dependent on other-direction. For, as the inner-directed man is more self-conscious than his tradition-directed predecessor and as the other-directed man is more self-conscious still, the autonomous man growing up under conditions that encourage self-consciousness can disentangle himself from the adjusted others only by a further move toward even greater self-consciousness. His autonomy depends not upon the ease with which he may deny or disguise his emotions but, on the contrary, upon the success of his effort to recognize and respect his own feelings, his own potentialities, his own limitations. This is not a quantitative matter, but in part an awareness of the problem of self-consciousness itself, an achievement of a higher order of abstraction.

  As we know all too well, such an achievement is a difficult thing; many of those who attain it cannot manage to mold it into the structure of an autonomous life but succumb to anomie. Yet perhaps the anomie of such processes is preferable to the less self-conscious, though socially supported, anxiety of the adjusted who refuse to distort or reinterpret their culture and end by distorting themselves.

  The characterological struggle that holds the center of the stage today is that between other-direction and inner-direction, as against a background in which tradition-direction gradually disappears from the planet. Now we already discern on the horizon a new polarization between those who cling to a compulsive adjustment via other-direction and those who will strive to overcome this milieu by autonomy. But it seems to me unlikely that the struggle between those striving for autonomy and those other-directed persons not capable of becoming autonomous or not desirous of allowing others so to become could be a ferocious one. For other-direction gives men a sensitivity and rapidity of movement which under prevailing American institutions provide a large opportunity to explore the resources of character—larger, as I shall try to show in the following chapters, than is now generally realized—and these suggest to me at least the possibility of an organic development of autonomy out of other-direction.

  XIII

  False personalization: obstacles to autonomy in work

  Only man can be an enemy for man; only he can rob him of the meaning of his acts and his life because it also belongs only to him to confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom … my freedom, in order to fulfill itself, requires that it emerge into an open future: it is other men who open the future to me, it is they who, setting up the world of tomorrow, define my future; but if, instead of allowing me to participate in this constructive movement, they oblige me to consume my transcendence in vain, if they keep me below the level which they have conquered and on the basis of which new conquests will be achieved, then they are cutting me off from the future, they are changing me into a thing…

  Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

  I. Cultural Definitions of Work

  The emotional reserves of the other-directed are the possible sources of increased autonomy. But it should be clear from the discussion of the work, the play, and the politics of the other-directed man that his reserves, while perhaps more flexible than those of the inner-directed man, are constantly exhausted by his social organization. These reserves are especially exhausted by our current cultural definitions of work and play and the relations between them—definitions which, as we saw, introduce much strenuous “play” into the glad handers’ work and much group-adjustive “work” into their play. All of us are forced, to a degree, to accept these cultural definitions of work and play, just as we are forced to accept certain cultural definitions of class, sex, race, and occupational or social role. And the definitions are forced on us by the ways of the culture and by the socialization process we undergo, whether they happen to be timely or anachronistic, useful for or destructive of our resiliency and of our fundamental humanity.

  Work has the greater prestige; moreover, it is thought of as alien to man—it is a sort of disciplined salvage operation, rescuing a useful social product from chaos and the disorders of man’s innate laziness. The same era, that of transitional growth of population, that saw the most astounding increase in man’s mastery over nature, took it as axiomatic, echoing a series of writers from Malthus to Sumner and Freud, that people had to be driven to work by economic necessity. Today, knowing more about the nature of man and of work, we still nevertheless tend to accept the psychological premise that work and productivity are disciplines exerted against the grain of man’s nature. We do not quite see, though we are close to seeing, that what looks like laziness may be a reaction against the kind of work people are forced to do and the way in which they are forced to define it.

  Because work is considered more important than play, it has been traditional to take most seriously the work that looks least like play, that is, the more obviously physical or physically productive work. This is one of the reasons why the prestige of the tertiary occupations, particularly the distributive trades, is generally low.

  Our definitions of work also mean that the housewife, though producing a social work-product, does not find her work explicitly defined and totaled, either as an hour product or a dollar product, in the national census or in people’s minds. And since her work is not defined as work, she is exhausted at the end of the day without feeling any right to be, insult thus being added to injury. In contrast, the workers in the Detroit plant who finish their day’s production goal in three hours and take the rest of the day off in loafing around the factory, are defined as eight-hour-per-day workers by themselves, by their wives, by the census.

  These cultural definitions of work have curious implications for the health of the economy as a whole and, therefore, derivatively for the chances of autonomy in living. We tend to emphasize the importance of expanding those parts of the economy that have prestige and to overlook economic opportunities in the parts closer to play. For example, in the days of the CCC camps, it was widely assumed that CCC work on fire trails was more important than CCC work on recreational areas, just as the WPA Federal Theater was considered as less import
ant economically than the stalwart Georgian public buildings of the PWA.

  In our society, consumption is defined as a means rather than an end. This implies we consume in order to achieve full employment—and we look for full employment through more production of production rather than through an increased production of the enormous variety of recreational resources our leisure, our training in consumption, and our educational plant allow us to develop. However, by thinking of expansion of consumption in terms of the market for durable and semi-durable consumer goods —with the skies eagerly scanned for such new gadgets as television to hurl into the Keynesian multiplier formula—we are left open to an antiquated set of economic habits and assumptions. By clinging to them, one heavy-draft, politically feasible outlet remains for the overexpanded primary and secondary spheres: a war economy.

  Indeed, the struggle for autonomy, for a personally productive orientation1 based on the human need for active participation in a creative task, has become more exigent because we live in a period when the solution of the technical problems of production is in sight. The institutions and character of the inner-directed man combined to prevent him from choosing his work, and made him accept it as a Malthusian necessity. Both the institutions and character of the other-directed man give him a potentially greater degree of flexibility in redefining and restructuring the field of work. Objectively, the new situation surrounding work permits a reduction of hours; subjectively, it permits a withdrawal of the concern work demanded in the earlier era and the investment of this concern in non-work. Instead of attempting to undertake this revolution, however, other-directed man prefers to throw into work all the resources of personalization, of glad handing, of which his character is capable, and just because he puts so much energy and effort into work, he reaps the benefit of being able to continue thinking it important.

  II. Glamorizers, Featherbedders, Indispensables

  We turn now to the first of a pair of twin concepts that will concern us in this and the following chapter. The one, I shall call “false personalization”; the other, “enforced privatization.” We have met false personalization in this book before, in the form of the spurious and effortful glad hand. I see false personalization as a principal barrier to autonomy in the sphere of work: it is this, more than such technical problems of production as still remain, that exhausts the emotional energies of the other-directed man. Enforced privatization is a principal barrier to autonomy but, as we shall see, by no means the only one in the sphere of play. Privatization will be our generic term for the restrictions— economic, ethnic, hierarchical, familial—that keep people from adequate opportunities for leisure, including friendship. To some degree those who suffer most from false personalization at work also suffer most from enforced privatization at play.

  There is a dialectic of social and individual advance that makes it likely that, if these barriers to autonomy should be overcome, we would then be privileged to become aware of still others. Man’s freedom, since it must be won anew in each generation, is only slightly a cumulative growth. Yet it makes sense to point to some apparent major difficulties which block autonomy today by draining energies that could be more productively used, even while granting that we scarcely know what autonomy will look like, or require, with these blockages removed.

  WHITE-COLLAR PERSONALIZATION: TOWARD GLAMOR

  The inner-directed manager never “saw” his secretary. The latter, as a member of a different class and, often, a different ethnic-group, also seldom “saw” the boss as an individual. Brought together by the invisible hand, both were concentrated on the work, not on each other, save as a benevolent but insensitive paternalism bridged the social gap. By contrast, the other-directed manager, while he still patronizes his white-collar employees, is compelled to personalize his relations with the office force whether he wants to or not because he is part of a system that has sold the white-collar class as a whole on the superior values of personalization. The personalization is false, even where it is not intentionally exploitative, because of its compulsory character: like the antagonistic cooperation of which it forms a part, it is a mandate for manipulation and self-manipulation among those in the white-collar ranks and above.

  We can see the change in comparing the attitudes toward women’s office work signified by two Chicago dailies. One, the Tribune, stands by the older values of job-mindedness; the other, the Sun-Times, speaks implicitly for the newer values of personalization. The Tribune conducts a regular daily column called “White Collar Girl,” which preaches the virtues of efficiency and loyalty. Its tone suggests that it is written for the office girl who wants a paternalistic response from a somewhat distant boss but does not expect much more. It is beamed at readers who on the whole accept the classic inner-directed pattern of office management—though just the same they would not mind if the boss personalized a bit more, while staying definitely boss.

  The Sun-Times speaks to a presumably somewhat more liberal and progressive group in the same occupational stratum but under the general classification of the “career girl.” The career girl is appealed to not in a single column focused on the employee relationship but in a variety of columns emphasizing careers, successful self-promotion by glamorous women, and articles on the psychology of office relationships. These articles project the sense of a personnel-managed economy in which most executives are dutifully other-directed and, whether male or female executives, interested in the girls as more than the “help,” in fact, as glamor-exuding personalities.

  The Sun-Times makes a much closer connection between styles of sociability at leisure and at the work place than the Tribune does. It conveys the idea that the boss is personalizing all the time, and as well as he knows how, and that the problem—virtually the only problem—for the white-collar girl is to determine the style in which to respond to the boss and to make him responsive. The Tribune, far less interested in what we may call mood engineering, retains respect for the nonglamorous skills of shorthand and typing.

  Where there is apathy about politics, we expect to find an appeal to glamor. So here, where there is apathy about work, the appeal is again to glamor, which depends less on the work itself than on whom one does it for. Most unpopular of all is work in a pool, which minimizes glamor, or work for a woman boss, which inhibits it. It appears that the women actually wish to throw their emotional reserves into the office situation, rather than to protect them for the play situation. And we must conclude from this that neither their work nor their play is very meaningful in itself.

  This puts the boss, in effect, in the position of having to satisfy an almost limitless demand for personalization that is partly based on the unsatisfactory nature of the white-collar girls’ life outside the office. There enforced privatization often prevails: despite an urban milieu, white-collar girls seldom have the resources—educational, financial, simply spatial—to vary their circles of friendship and their recreations. Grasping at glamor, these women are driven to find it while at work, in the boss and in the superstructure of emotions they weave into the office situation. That the other-directed manager helped start this chain of personalization because he, too, holds skill in disrepute is not much comfort to him when he must personalize, not only as a banker selling bonds, a statesman selling an idea, or an administrator selling a program, but also simply as a boss or customer surrounded by white-collar girls.

  This new sensitivity, moreover, to those of lower status makes it difficult for people to extricate themselves from chains of false personalization by wearing a completely alien work mask. Some inner-directed people can do this: they simply do not see the others as people, or as highly differentiated and complicated people. But the other-directed managers, professionals, and white-collar workers cannot so easily separate coercive friendliness on the job from a spontaneous expression of genuine friendliness off the job.

  THE CONVERSATION OF THE CLASSES: FACTORY MODEL

  The white-collar worker imitates, even caricatures, the s
tyle of the other-directed upper middle class. The factory worker, on the other hand, is from Missouri: he has to be sold on the virtues of the glad hand. And to date, he has not been. On the whole, the manager has an uphill fight in getting factory workers in large unionized plants to accept the proffered glad hand, and this very resistance furnishes him with a virtually unlimited agenda for the devouring of the energies that he can devote to work. As we saw earlier, he can go on endlessly adding people to the management group—training directors, counselors, and other morale builders —and he can also become involved in arranging research on morale to test the efficacy of these men and measures.

  Just as the factory worker, when he was at school, regarded the teachers as management and went on strike or slowdown against their well-intentioned or class-biased efforts, so in the factory he does not take the glad hand held out by the personnel department. Indeed, while the manager believes that high production attests high morale, the opposite may be the case: high morale can coexist with low production via featherbedding. For if the workers feel united in solidarity and mutual understanding —which they would define as high morale—the conditions exist for facilitating slowdowns and the systematic punishing of rate-busters.

  There are many managers, however, who do not content themselves with allowing top management and the personnel department to tell workers that they have a stake in the output and that their work is important and glamorous—whether it is or not. Many sincerely seek to put plans into operation that give workers an actually greater share by rearrangement of ownership, production planning, and control. One aim of these proposals is to introduce emotional vitality, or a gamelike spirit, into the factory. Both results, along with higher productivity, are often attained.