The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  In this fear the folk dancer is near-cousin to a number of other contemporary critics who, though genuinely concerned with autonomy, have no hope of finding it in play—not even, for the most part, in the hard play of crafts or sports. These critics go the folk dancer one better; they look to experiences of enforced hardship in work, or even to social and individual catastrophe, as the only practicable source of group cohesion and individual strength of character. They see men as able to summon and develop their resources only in an extreme or frontier situation, and they would regard my program for the life of Riley in an economy of leisure as inviting psychological disintegration and social danger. Hating the “softness of the personnel”—not seeing how much of this represents a characterological advance—they want to restore artificially (in extreme cases, even by resort to war2) the “hardness of the material.”

  That catastrophes do sometimes evoke unsuspected potentialities in people—potentialities which can then be used for further growth toward autonomy—is undeniable. A serious illness may give a man pause, a time for reverie and resolution. He may recover, as the hero, Laskell, does in Lionel Trilling’s novel, The Middle of the Journey. He may die, as does the Russian official in Tolstoy’s short story, “The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,” who near death, confronts himself and his wasted life honestly for the first time. And the swath of the last war does offer repeated evidence that not only individuals but whole groups and communities can benefit from hardship, where not too overwhelming. An example is reported by Robert K. Merton, Patricia Salter West, and Marie Jahoda in their (unpublished) study of a warworkers’ housing community in New Jersey. The warworkers found themselves living in a jerry-built morass, without communal facilities, without drainage, without a store. Challenged by their circumstances, they responded by energetic improvisation and managed, against all kinds of obstacles, to make a decent, livable, even a lively community for themselves. The dispiriting sequel is familiar: the community, its major problems of sheer existence surmounted, became less interesting to live in, its cooperative store, built by so much energetic and ingenious effort, folded up.

  When one reflects on such instances, one realizes that emergencies in a modern society help recreate social forms into which people can with justification pour their energies. People need justification and, as inner-direction wanes, look for it in the social situation rather than within themselves. European and Asian visitors tell Americans that we must learn to enjoy idleness; they criticize alternately our puritan idealism and the so-called materialism which is a by-product of it. This is not too helpful: for if we are to become autonomous, we must proceed in harmony with our history and character, and these assign us a certain sequence of developmental tasks and pleasures. What we need, then, is a reinterpretation which will allow us to focus on individual character development the puritan demands no longer needed to spur industrial and political organization. We need to realize that each life is an emergency, which only happens once, and the “saving” of which, in terms of character, justifies care and effort. Then, perhaps, we will not need to run to a war or a fire because the daily grist of life itself is not felt as sufficiently challenging, or because external threats and demands can narcotize for us our anxiety about the quality and meaning of individual existence.

  THE NEWER CRITICISM IN THE REALM OF TASTE

  Craftsmanship, whatever part it may play in the leisure of an individual or a group, is obviously not a complete solution to the problems of leisure among the would-be autonomous. While the inner-directed man could solace himself in these pursuits, the other-directed man in search of autonomy has no choice but to pass into and through—to transcend—taste-exchanging—that characteristic process by which the other-directed person relates himself to the peer-groups. Once he has traversed this stage successfully he may be able to value and develop his own standards of taste, even to criticize the taste-making operations in the society as a whole.

  We have already discussed the negative side of this process: the fact, for example, that the other-directed man feels a mistake in taste as a reflection on his self, or at least on what he conceives to be the most vital part of his self, his radar, and that taste-exchanging is consequently often harried and desperate. But now we must look at the positive side of taste-exchanging: the fact that it is also a tremendous experiment, perhaps the most strategic one, in American adult education. The taste of the most advanced sections of the population is ever more rapidly diffused—perhaps Life is the most striking agent in this process—to strata formerly excluded from all but the most primitive exercise of taste, and who are now taught to appreciate, and discriminate between varieties of, modern architecture, modem furniture, and modern art—not to speak of the artistic achievements of other times.3

  Of course, all the other-directed processes we have described play a central role in this development, but I am convinced that real and satisfying competence in taste also increases at the same time. It is interesting to note how old-fashioned American movies of only twenty years ago appear to a contemporary audience. In part, again, this is caused only by changes in film conventions; but in far greater measure, it is the product of an amazingly rapid growth of sophistication as to human motivation and behavior among movie-makers and their audience.

  The speed with which the gradient of taste is being climbed has escaped many critics of the popular arts who fail to observe not only how good American movies, popular novels, and magazines frequently are but also how energetic and understanding are some of the comments of the amateur taste-exchangers who seem at first glance to be part of a very passive, uncreative audience. One of the most interesting examples of this is jazz criticism. I speak here not of such critics as Wilder Hobson and PanassiÉ but of the large number of young people who, all over the country, greeted jazz affectionately and criticized it fondly, on a level of discourse far removed from the facile vocabulary of “sincerity” or “swell.” These people found in jazz, as others have found in the movies or the comic strips, an art form not previously classified by the connoisseurs, the school system, or the official culture. They resisted, often violently, and occasionally with success, the effort of the popular-music industry itself to ticket its products: in the very form of their choices—preference for combos over star soloists, preference for improvisation, distrust of smooth arrangers—they set up their own standards in opposition to standardization. Much like the hot rodders, they developed their own language and culture to go with their new skill.

  Here again, as with the hot rodders, the verbal craftsmanship of jazz lovers’ taste-exchange could not long continue to develop among isolated peer-groups. Jazz has long since been parceled out by a cult or a series of cults using increasingly exacting aesthetic criteria which have often become ends in themselves.

  Unwilling to see that taste-exchanging in popular audiences often is the basis for increasing competence in criticism, writers on popular culture generally view jazz, soap opera, the movies, and television with the same horror with which the inner-directed man was urged to view the brothel and burlesque. Essentially this critique of mass culture is the same as the critique of mass production. But what the critics often fail to observe is that, while in its earlier stages mass production did drive out fine handicrafts and debase taste, we have now a situation better termed class-mass production where our industrial machine has become flexible enough to turn out objects of even greater variety and quality than in the handicraft era. Likewise, the critics of the mass media may fail to observe that, while their first consequences were often destructive of older values, we have today a situation in which it is economically possible for the first time in history to distribute first-class novels and nonfiction, paintings, music, and movies to audiences that can fit them into patterns of great individuality.

  It is these developments which suggest to me that the process of taste-exchanging holds the promise of transcending itself and becoming something quite different, and hence contributing to the devel
opment of autonomy in other-directed man.

  III. The Avocational Counselors

  To bring the individual into unfrightening contact with the new range of opportunities in consumption often requires some guides and signposts. In our urban, specialized society it may demand avocational counselors.

  “Avocational counseling” may seem like a rather clinical term with which to describe the activities undertaken by a number of relatively rapidly growing professions in the United States, including travel agents, hotel men, resort directors, sports teachers and coaches, teachers of the arts, including dancing teachers, and so on. But there are also many counselors who supply advice on play and leisure as a kind of by-product of some other transaction. The interior decorator, for instance, seems at first glance to belong in a different occupational group from the dude-ranch social director. To be sure, most clients of the interior decorator may be looking for the correct design for conspicuous display. But beyond these functions may lie a realm in which the interior decorator is looked to for more basic domestic rearrangements that can facilitate a more comfortable leisure life, more colorful literally and figuratively. The sale of the decorating service may conceal the sale of this significant intangible.

  This function is perhaps even more evident in the work of the domestic architect for the upper middle-class client. True, like the decorator, he still counsels his clients in providing the correct public facade. But a generation ago he would not have dreamed of counseling his clients about the functional interior relationships in the dwelling in terms of anything more than “gracious living.” Today, however, the architect, by interior and exterior planning, can lead as well as follow his clients. Through him and his views there filters a variety of tastes, inclinations, social schemes (as in easily rearranged living rooms), leisure-time ecologies that scarcely existed a generation ago. The architect—and, beyond him, the city planner—brings together opportunities of leisure that might otherwise remain subdivided among a score of specialists.

  Another set of avocational counselors is clustered around the chronological center of American leisure habits, the vacation. The vacation itself, frequently involving the meeting of others who are not members of one’s own peer-group and who may be located outside one’s own experience with the social structure, may be considered as dramatic a symbol of the encounters among people in the population phase of incipient decline as the market place was in the population phase of transitional growth. To be sure, with high wages millions of Americans spend their vacations hunting animals rather than people; other millions putter about that restorative residue of earlier eras—the house-and-garden. But increasingly the vacation serves as a time and place for bringing those who have leisure and money to buy in contact with those who have a skill to sell—riding, swimming, painting, dancing, and so on. But of course avocational counseling here, except perhaps for ship and shore recreational directors, is usually trying to sell a commodity or a service rather than to help the individual find what he wants and might want.

  It is easy to foresee, in the next decades, a great expansion among the avocational counselors. The objection remains that to turn the other-directed man over to an avocational counselor to teach him competence in play is merely to increase the very dependence which keeps him other-directed rather than autonomous. Will not any effort at planning of play rob him of such spontaneity and privacy as he may still retain? This is certainly one possible effect. We can counter it by doing our best to make the avocational counselors as good and as available as possible. The avocational counselor might stimulate, even provoke, the other-directed person to more imaginative play by helping him realize how very important for his own development toward autonomy play is.

  IV. Freeing the Child Market

  Up to now we have talked of what might be done to increase the competence at play of adults, and quite ignored the realities and possibilities of play for children. Yet it is quite clear that it is childhood experience that will be most important in making possible true adult competence at play. Without any intention of exhausting the subject, I want to suggest a more or less fantastic model to stimulate thinking about what might be done, here and now, to alter some of those aspects of children’s play which, as we pointed out in Chapter III, now so often serve to inhibit autonomy. The proposal I want to make should interest producers and advertisers addressing themselves to a child market. I would like to suggest that they set up a fund for the experimental creation of model consumer economies among children.

  For example, scrip might be issued to groups of children, allowing them to patronize some central store—a kind of everyday world’s fair—where a variety of luxury goods ranging from rare foods to musical instruments would be available for their purchase. At this “point of sale” there would stand market researchers, able and willing to help children make their selections but having no particularly frightening charisma or overbearing charm or any interest on the employers’ side in pushing one thing rather than another. The point of these “experiment stations” would be to reveal something about what happens to childhood taste when it is given a free track away from the taste gradients and “reasons,” as well as freedom from the financial hobbles of a given peer-group. In precisely such situations children might find the opportunity to criticize and reshape in their own minds the values of objects. In the “free store” they would find private alcoves where they might enjoy books and music, candy and comics, in some privacy.3 It would be interesting to see whether children who had had the luck to express themselves through free consumer choice released from ethnic and class and peer-group limitations, might develop into much more imaginative critics of the leisure economy than most adults of today are.

  One can conceive of other such model “economies of abundance” in which every effort would be made, on an experimental basis, to free children and other privatized people from group and media pressure. Indeed, market research has for many years seemed to me one of the most promising channels for democratic control of our economy. Market researchers know as well as anyone that their methods need not be used simply to manipulate people into buying the goods and cultural definitions that already exist or to dress them up in marginal differentiations, but can be employed to find out not so much what people want but what with liberated fantasy they might want.4 Without mock-ups and pilot models people rarely enough make this leap in the imagination.

  XVI

  Autonomy and utopia

  Time, events, or the unaided individual action of the mind will sometimes undermine or destroy an opinion, without any outward sign of the change. It has not been openly assailed, no conspiracy has been formed to make war on it, but its followers one by one noiselessly secede; day by day a few of them abandon it, until at last it is only professed by a minority. In this state it will still continue to prevail. As its enemies remain mute or only interchange their thoughts by stealth, they are themselves unaware for a long period that a great revolution has actually been effected; and in this state of uncertainty they take no steps; they observe one another and are silent. The majority have ceased to believe what they believed before, but they still affect to believe, and this empty phantom of public opinion is strong enough to chill innovators and to keep them silent and at a respectful distance.

  Tocqueville, Democracy in America

  In these last chapters I have set forth some thoughts about the middle-class world of work and play, in the hope of finding ways in which a more autonomous type of social character might develop. I cannot be satisfied that I have moved very far along these lines. It is difficult enough to consider how we may remove the barriers of false personalization and enforced privatization. It is enormously more difficult to descry, after these barriers are overcome, what in man may lead him to autonomy, or to invent and create the means that will help him to autonomy. In the end, our few suggestions are paltry ones, and we can only conclude our discussion by saying that a vastly greater stream of creative, Utopian thinking i
s needed before we can see more clearly the goal we dimly suggest by the word “autonomy.”

  The reader who recalls our beginnings with the large, blind movements of population growth and economic and technological change may ask whether we seriously expect Utopian thinking, no matter how inspired, to counter whatever fate for man these movements have in store. Indeed, I believe that only certain ideas will be generated and catch on, under any given socioeconomic conditions. And character, with all its intractabilities and self-reproducing tendencies, will largely dictate the way ideas are received. But despite the massed obstacles to change inherent in social structure and character structure, I believe that ideas can make a decisive historical contribution. Marx, who himself denied that ideas are very important and dismissed the Utopian speculations of his predecessor socialists, himself supplied an irrefutable example of the power of ideas in history. As we all know, he did not leave the working class to be emancipated only by events. In his alternate role as propagandist, he tried himself to shape the ideological and institutional environment in which workers would live.

  I think we need to insist today on bringing to consciousness the kind of environments that Marx dismissed as Utopian, in contrast to the mechanical and passive approach to the possibilities of man’s environment that he helped, in his most influential works, to foster. However, since we live in a time of disenchantment, such thinking, where it is rational in aim and method and not simply escapism, is not easy. It is easier to concentrate on programs for choosing among lesser evils. We are well aware of the “damned wantlessness of the poor”; the rich as well, as I have tried to show in this book, have inhibited their claims for a decent world. Both rich and poor avoid any goals, personal or social, that seem out of step with peer-group aspirations. The politically operative inside-dopester seldom commits himself to aims beyond those that common sense proposes to him. Actually, however, in a dynamic political context, it is the modest, commonsensical goals of the insiders and the “constructive” critics that are unattainable. It often seems that the retention of a given status quo is a modest hope; many lawyers, political scientists, and economists occupy themselves by suggesting the minimal changes which are necessary to stand still; yet today this hope is almost invariably disappointed; the status quo proves the most illusory of goals.