There’s something fascinating about a study of contemporary society written long ago. Partly it’s that one can look back with the benefit of hindsight– did social change really go in the direction the authors foresaw? Partly it’s that one can look back to see things that have been obscured by popular historical narratives that sometimes pass for hindsight: The way events are remembered is not necessarily how they were experienced at the time.
Regarding the latter, Yuval Levin has written about how popular views of prior decades reflect the cultural influence of the baby boomer generation. Hence the 1950s, the time of their childhood, is seen a period of innocence and stability. But this has less to do with what was actually happening during that decade than with the age at which they experienced it. T. Greer at Scholar’s Stage discusses this misperception, noting that it is easily revealed as such by reading the books written during those years, by people who experienced them as adults – and with the cynical and weary eyes of those who had seen the rise of fascism and communism, world wars, and a global economic depression. For someone who was an adult during the 1950s, was anything but a time of innocence, stability, and tradition.
One gets something of that view from the 1950 book The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, by Harvard sociologist David Riesman (with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, and with contributions by Richard Sennett -- the “with” and “with contributions by” credit is how it appears in the book. For brevity I’ll refer to Riesman as the primary author). The book doesn’t get much by attention from sociologists these days, but it was a big deal in its own time. It even made Riesman the kind of public intellectual who appears on the cover of magazines.
The book presents a postwar America undergoing a major transition to a very new kind of culture with new personalities in it. The basic thesis of the book is that structural and demographic changes lead to changes in childhood socialization. This in turn effects the character of individuals, which, in aggregate, shape the culture – or national character -- of the entire society. Reisman saw the America of his day undergoing a major shift in character.
Types of Character
By character or character structure he means “a more or less permanent, socially and historically conditioned organization of an individual’s drives and satisfactions” (p.4). It’s something narrower than personality, but perhaps we could call it an aspect of personality. Riesman distinguishes three different types of character: Tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed. Each corresponds to a type of culture in which it is most common. The types are defined by the ways in which people conform to social norms or expectations.
Tradition-directed people conform to manners and customs handed down over the generations, doing things as their parents and grandparents did. Societies where this character is the norm are societies where change is fairly slow. This type of culture and personality dominated most periods of human history, and it was the overall character of American society prior to the industrial revolution. It is the character of the farmer.
Inner-directed people are guided less by tradition and custom than by a narrow set of goals they acquire early in life. Whereas tradition-directed people are more focused on the means – the particular steps and rituals that tradition demands -- inner-directed people are more focused on the goals. Inner-directed personalities are thus better adapted to societies with rapid social change, where traditions rapidly fall into obsolescence and disuse, and the specific means available to your parents and grandparents are likely gone with the wind.
For the inner-directed, the emphasis is less on conforming to a particular pattern of conduct than conforming to one’s mission in life, choosing whatever pattern of conduct best realizes this in a given setting. A relatively rigid set of goals or values acts as an internal “psychological gyroscope” that allows people to act consistently across a variety of novel situations. The so-called Protestant Ethic of hard work and thrift described by sociologist Max Weber is an example of such a set of internalized goals and values. Not coincidentally, the inner-directed character was the dominant type of industrializing America. It is the culture of builders in an economy focused on material production.