The writers in this department are generally social scientists, commenting and reporting upon the work of other social scientists on subjects of interest to the general reader. This month, however, the department is given over to two literary critics who, at the invitation of COMMENTARY’s editor, review two recent books by social scientists—one, on the long-range change in the American character, the other, on the adjustment of Puerto Rican migrants to America. Joseph Wood Krutch is Brander Matthews professor of dramatic literature at Columbia University, and the author of The Modern Temper and Samuel Johnson. He was for many years dramatic critic for the Nation. Nathan Glick, a frequent contributor to COMMENTARY, is the movie critic for the Progressive.

_____________

There are some of us who tend to bristle irritably when a sociologist undertakes to discuss character or personality. Only imaginative literature, we say, has ever dealt revealingly with such subjects whose very reality the economist and the sociologist find it convenient to disregard. David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd¹ does deal, not only with character, but with the American character and thus, for a double reason, puts the present reader’s prejudices on the defensive. If in the end these prejudices are largely overcome, it is because the author is a very unusual sociologist with more imagination and a truer sense of the limitations of his method than is common.

“Character” is defined in this book in terms which limit it to a sociologically discussible entity, and before Mr. Riesman outlines the concepts around which the study will turn he enters a warning: “These types are constructions and the richness of human personality, human discontent, and human variety cannot be imprisoned within a typology.” After such an admission even the prejudiced reader may be placated and he will discover, if he permits himself to, that Mr. Riesman’s “construction,” admittedly tentative as well as admittedly limited, puts a large group of phenomena into an intelligible pattern. One could hardly ask for more and it is one of the author’s virtues that more is not claimed.

_____________

Any discussion must begin, as the book itself does, with a statement of certain hypotheses which we are asked to accept as premises that cannot be demonstrated by anything except their usefulness in organizing the material to be presented. In Mr. Riesman’s terminology, “character” means, not the whole of what is sometimes called “personality,” but merely “the more or less permanent, socially and historically conditioned organization of an individual’s drives and satisfactions—those components of personality that also play the principal role in the maintenance of social forms—those that are learned in the lifelong process of socialization.” His first hypothesis is that there are three types of society in each of which is dominant one of three types of “character,” namely what he calls the “tradition-directed,” the “innerdirected,” and the “other-directed.” The second, even more tentative hypothesis (and it amounts almost to a philosophy of history) is that the three types of society are functions of a population curve.

In primitive societies where the birth and death rates are both high, the typical “character” is one whose social conformity is insured by his tendency to follow tradition—to do instinctively what “has always been done.” At the stage where the death rate has declined and the population is increasing, the “inner-directed” character—i.e. that in which the stabilizing principal consists in shared, but individually asserted, moral and social ideas—takes over. Finally, in the stage which he assumes we have now reached, where the birth as well as the death rate has declined and population, though at a high level, is stabilized or decreasing, the “other-directed” character becomes dominant; and it is with this last type that Mr. Riesman is principally concerned.

Since American society began as a transplantation, it never had a genuine “traditiondirected” phase. Until quite recently it was “inner-directed,” which means that the typical American was like other typical Americans because all were pursuing ends defined for them in terms of an inner conviction that certain ideals of either moral character or worldly success were worth realizing. Being a sociologist, Mr. Riesman is compelled to warn that this sense of inner-direction may be in part an illusion; that the inner ideal may in actual fact be sociologically conditioned. But at least the individual had the sense that the ideal came from within. By now, however, this type of American has become old-fashioned. The type now dominant is “other-directed,” which means that the goal that he has before him is not set by something which he feels to be personal and frequently fiercely individual or even defiant, but by his desire to be “normal,” to be, in a word, typically “American,” or “modern,” or whatever happens to be his word for his conception of what the other people of his group are like. Thus though there is nothing which he would more utterly reject than mere tradition he is, actually, like the traditiondirected individual, because conformity with his century, his generation, his age group, his country, and his “set” is his controlling desire.

_____________

However skeptical one may be of the ultimate or exclusive validity of Mr. Riesman’s premises, his terminology, or his philosophy of history, it is obvious that he is here dealing with phenomena whose reality, for good or ill, is pretty generally recognized and it is also obvious that his scheme enables one to bring together and to relate tendencies which have been discussed under categories as different as those employed by people who talk about the decline of individualism and those who rail against the disappearance of ideals. All such phenomena can be considered as phases of the same thing and the richest as well as the longest portion of Mr. Riesman’s book is that in which he does just this. He surveys each scene of the typical American’s life from the time when his parents begin his habit training, through elementary school and adolescence, on down to his business and domestic career; and with considerable documentation he shows how, at every stage, “otherdirection” has replaced “inner-direction.”

The goal always held before this new type of American, the thing which he is asked to form his sociological “character” by learning, is not an ideal of righteousness, or superior moral or intellectual excellence, or even outstanding effectiveness, wealth, or power. The key phrase has become “successful adjustment.” Even in the kindergarten he is taught to “adjust himself to his age group” which means to learn to like to do what the others like to do. The very standards of artistic excellence held up to him are furnished, not by the classics, but by the paintings of his fellow pupils hung on the wall and the literary compositions of his fellow pupils read aloud. If he is taught music it is not as something which will serve as an inner refuge or as a source of intense individual delight but as a sort of community ritual which will encourage more “group participation.”

Very soon the movies, the radio, and the comic book take over. The adolescent has become more conscious of what is here called his “peer group” than of anything else. His chief desire is to be an “in” rather than an “out” and society now encourages instead of opposing this tendency. Neither tradition on the one hand nor the possible inner ideals of the parents on the other are held up to him, since his parents themselves accept, for the children at least, the ideal of “adjustment”; and as one said in an interview, “You know you can’t punish your children too much or they begin to think you are mean and other children tell them you are mean.” Certain popular tunes, radio programs, and comic-book heroes achieve an otherwise incomprehensible vogue simply because it has become supremely important to demonstrate “belonging” by admiring at exactly the right time and to exactly the right degree what one’s fellows do. When the adolescent grows into a man he carries his “other-directed” character with him, and this furnishes the all-inclusive explanation of that tendency toward the “standardization of American life” which has been discussed, piecemeal, in connection with everything from breakfast foods to literary taste.

_____________

One of the current ideals in both sociology and anthropology is objectivity and detachment carried to the point where any value judgment is likely to be regarded as a manifestation of mere prejudice. In conformity with this ideal, Mr. Riesman never says how he himself feels about the “inner” versus the “other” directed character. Though I think it is clearly enough discernible between the lines that he finds at least the contemporary manifestations of the “other-directed” man extremely depressing, he never says so, and he thus provides an occasion for the present reviewer to make a point which he would very much like to be permitted to make. It is simply this: The whole contemporary tendency to study everything in sociological terms is itself a part of the phenomenon with which this particular study is concerned. Its author is, I repeat, an inner-directed character. Had he lived in an age when that character was dominant he would have written a book whose core was a value judgment and he would have both exalted and made a plea for inner direction. As it is he writes instead a sociological treatise.

Mr. Riesman has to a very unusual degree the power to see all around his subject and to realize the extent to which a method is likely in itself to determine the conclusions reached. He is therefore careful to define the measure to which he believes sociological conditioning to be an efficient cause of human phenomena, and he rejects any air-tight deterministic scheme. Yet it is hardly possible to treat “objectively” and “sociologically” subjects like his without at the same time making concessions to determinism and without strictly limiting possible attitudes towards them.

What would be the use of urging standardized Americans to be more like Emerson or Thoreau; what, indeed, would be the good of even asking whether or not Emerson and Thoreau were admirable if one assumes, not that Emerson and Thoreau decided to become what they were, but rather that they are phenomena inevitably produced by a society which has reached a certain point on the population curve? If on this assumption it is possible to do anything at all to check standardization, the possibility must lie, not in any appeal to the intellect, but in the manipulation of sociological factors, including the birth and death rates. And that is the sort of thing which “other” rather than “inner” directed characters go in for.

This is, moreover, not the only way in which the contemporary dominance of the otherdirected man and the sociological methods which it encourages affect the nature of the conclusions reached. Mr. Riesman is concerned with mass phenomena and the concern with mass phenomena is itself a phenomenon of the age. He talks exclusively about the “average man.” All his references to the arts are to the most popular of the popular arts. Yet though it is true that the comic book is probably the most widely consumed form of literature, the classics are still available in cheap editions which sell extensively. Though it is true that records of jazz and Hill-billy music outsell all others, the fact remains that what the average other-directed man will be careful to call “longhair discs” are bought in astonishing numbers. In a different age this would be regarded as the really interesting, the really significant fact; perhaps, indeed, the only one worth talking about. The commentator would discuss and eulogize “the saving remnant.” But our society, being other-directed, does not believe that salvation through remnants is possible. It may be right. But that does not change either the fact that this is itself a sociological phenomenon or that the dominance of the sociological approach tends to promote the very tendencies which a sociologist like Mr. Riesman seems to disapprove of. A survivor from another segment of the population curve might even be imagined to say: “The masses are no vulgarer than they ever were. The only difference is that you concentrate your attention upon them and believe that they are supremely important.”

To Mr. Riesman’s own qualifications and caveats we may, then, add two others: first, that the difference between our age and others may be somewhat less than the methods chosen to examine them may suggest; second, that the more one concentrates one’s attention on mass phenomena the greater the weight that will be given them, not only in judging, but also in planning, especially in planning such social institutions as the school. But when all qualifications have been made and all caveats have been heeded, there is still rather too much inescapable truth in the picture which The Lonely Crowd presents.

_____________

¹ The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. By David Riesman in collaboration with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer. Yale University Press. 386 pp. $4.00.