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(from the Doubleday paperback edition, 1954)
This is a book about social character and about the differences in social character between men of different regions, eras, and groups. It considers the ways in which different social types, once they are formed at the knee of society, are then deployed in the work, play, politics, and child-rearing activities of society. More particularly, it is about the way in which one kind of social character, which dominated America in the nineteenth century, is gradually being replaced by a social character of a quite different sort. Just why this happened; how it happened; what are its consequences in some major areas of life: this is the subject of this book. (p. 17)  | |
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(2)
... Character, in this sense, is the more or less permanent socially and historically conditioned organization of an individual's drives and satisfactions--the kind of "set" with which he approaches the world and people.
"Social character" is that part of "character" which is shared among significant social groups and which, as most contemporary social scientists define it, is the product of the experience of these groups. The notion of social character permits us to speak, as I do throughout this book, of the character of classes, groups, regions, and nations. (p. 18) (3) Population curves and economic structures are only a part of the ecology of character formation. Interposed between them and the resultant social character are the human agents of character formation: the parents, the teachers, the members of the peer-group, and the story-tellers. These are the transmitters of of the social heritage, and they wield great infuence over the lives of children and hence on the whole society. For children live at the wave front of the successive population phases and are the partially plastic receivers of the social character of the future. (p. 54) See also Citation #10 at The Waning of Humaneness by Konrad Lorenz, ( http://www.librarything.com/work/9866...) . (4) Each new historical phase on the curve of population is marked by an increase in the length of life and in the period of socialization--that is, the period before full entry into one's adult social and economic role. At the same time there is an increase in the responsibility placed on character-forming agents outside the home, the clan or the village. (p. 55) (5) All these tendencies are reinforced when the roles become more complicated as the division of labor progresses. The acceleration of the division of labor means that increasing numbers of children can no longer take their parents' roles as models. (p. 58) (6) Yet, while parents in the stage of transitional growth of population cannot be sure of what the adult working role and mode of life of their children will be, neither can conformity to that role be left to chance and behavioural opportunism. To possess the drive that is required to fulfill demanding and ever more demanding roles calls for greater attention to formal character training. Especially in the Protestant countries character training becomes an important part of education, though of course, this does not mean that most parents consciously undertake to produce children to meet new social specifications.
The new situation created by increased social mobility implies that children must frequently be socialized in such a way as to be unfitted for their parents’ roles, while being fitted for roles not as yet fully determined. Homing pigeons can be taught to fly home, but the inner-directed child must be taught to fly a straight course away from home, with destination unknown; naturally, many meet the fate of Icarus. Nevertheless, the drive instilled in the child is to live up to ideals and to test his ability to be on his own by continuous experiments in self-mastery—instead of by following tradition. (p. 59) (7) The social and spatial arrangements of middle-class life make it hard for the child to see through, let alone evade, the pressures put upon him to become inner-directed. As compared with the one-room house of the peasant or the “long house” of many primitive tribes, he grows up within walls that are physical symbols of the privacy of parental dominance. Walls separate parents from children, office from home, and make it hard if not impossible for the children to criticize the parents’ injunctions by an “undress” view of the parents or of other parents. What the parents say becomes more real in many cases than what they do—significant training for a society in which words become increasingly important as a means of exchange, direction, and control. The conversation between parents and children, interrupted by the social distance that separates them, is continued by the child with himself in private. (p. 61) (8)
As the growing child take over from his parents the duty of self-observation and character training, he becomes prepared to face and meet situations that are novel. Indeed, if he rises in the occupational hierarchy that becomes increasingly elaborated in the phase of transitional growth or if he moves toward the various opening frontiers, he finds that he can flexibly adapt his behavior precisely because he need not change his character. He can separate the two by virtue of the fact that he is an individual with a historically new level of self-awareness.
This awareness of the self is cause and consequence of the fact that choice is no longer automatically provided—or, rather, excluded—by the social setting of the primary group. Under the new conditions the individual must decide what to do—and therefore what to do with himself. This feeling of personal responsibility, this feeling that he matters as an individual, apart from his family or clan, makes him sensitive to the signals emanating from his internalized ideal. If the ideal, as in the puritan, is to be “good” or, as in the child of the Renaissance, to be “great,” what must he do to fulfill the injunction? And how does he know that he has fulfilled these difficult self-demands? As Max Weber and R.H. Tawney saw very clearly in their portraits of the puritan, little rest is available to those who ask themselves such questions.
The relative uncomfortableness of the more powerfully inner-directed homes—the lack of indulgence and casualness in dealing with children—prepares the child for the loneliness and psychic uncomfortableness of such questions and of the social situations that he may confront. Or, more exactly, the child’s character is such that he feels comfortable in an environment which, like his home, is demanding and which he struggles to master.
We may say, then, that parents who are themselves inner-directed install a psychological gyroscope in their child and set it going; it is built to their own and other authoritative specifications; if the child has good luck, the governor will spin neither too fast, with the danger of hysteric outcomes, nor too slow, with the danger of social failure. (p. 62, 63) (9) There is, therefore, a curious resemblance between the role of the teacher in the small-class modern school—a role that has spread from the progressive private schools to a good number of the public schools—and the role of the industrial relations department in a modern factory. The latter is also increasingly concerned with cooperation between men and men and between men and management, as technical skill becomes less and less of a major concern. In a few of the more advanced plants there is even a pattern of democratic decision in moot matters—occasionally important because it affects piecework rates and seniority rules, but usually as trivial as the similar decisions of grammar-school government. Thus the other-directed child is taught at school to take his place in a society where the concern of the group is less with what it produces than with its internal group relations, its morale. (p. 85) (10) Beyond all that, the fate of many inner-directed children is loneliness in and outside the home. Home, school, and way-stations between may be places for hazing, persecution, misunderstanding. No adult intervenes on behalf of the lonely or hazed child to proffer sympathy, ask questions, or give advice. Adults do not think children’s play is very important anyway; they will criticize children who seem too much concerned with play and too little with work. No sociometrically inclined teacher will try to break up friendship cliques in school to see that no one is left out. How savagely snobbish boys and girls can be is typified by the story, in the Lynds’ Middletown, of the daughter who quit high school because her mother could not afford to give her silk stockings. Often the children, unaware that they have rights to friendship, understanding, or agreeable play—unaware, indeed, that adults could be greatly interested in such matters—suffer in silence and submit to the intolerable.
Only with the perspective of today can we see the advantages of these disadvantages. We can see that in a society which values inner-direction loneliness and even persecution are not thought of as the worst of fates. Parents, sometimes even teachers, may have crushing moral authority, but the peer-group has less moral weight, glamorous or menacing though it may be. While adults seldom intervene to guide and help the child, neither do they tell him that he should be part of a crowd and must have fun. (p. 90) (11) Temper, manifest jealousy, moodiness—these, too, are offenses in the code of the peer-group. All “knobby” or idiosyncratic qualities and vices are more or less eliminated or repressed. And judgements of others by peer-group members are so clearly matters of taste that their expression has to resort to the vaguest phrases, constantly changed: cute, lousy, square, darling, good guy, honey, swell, bitch (without precise meaning), etc. Sociometry reflects this situation when it asks children about such things as whom they like to sit next to, to have for a friend, a leader, and so on. The judgments can be meaningfully scaled because, and only because, they are based on uncomplicated continua of taste, on which the children are constantly ranking each other.
But to say that judgments of peer-groups are matters of taste, not of morality or even opportunism, is not to say that any particular child can afford to ignore these judgments. On the contrary he is, as never before, at their mercy. If the peer-group were—and we continue to deal here with the urban middle-classes only—a wild, torturing, obviously vicious group, the individual child might still feel moral indignation as a defense against its commands. But like adult authorities in the other-directed socialization process, the peer-group is friendly and tolerant. It stresses fair play. Its conditions for entry seem reasonable and well meaning. But even where this is not so, moral indignation is out of fashion. The child is therefore exposed to trial by jury without any defenses either from the side of its own morality or from the adults. All the morality is the group’s. Indeed, even the fact that it is a morality is concealed by the confusing notion that the function of the group is to have fun, to play; the deadly seriousness of the business, which might justify the child in making an issue of it, is therefore hidden. (p. 94) (12) “The Talk of the Town”: The Socialization of Preferences. In the eyes of the jury of peers one may be a good guy one day, a stinker the next. Toleration, let alone leadership, depends on having a highly sensitive response to swings of fashion. This ability is sought in several ways. One way is to surrender any claim to independence of judgment and taste—a kind of plea of nolo contendere. Another is to build a plea for special consideration by acquiring unusual facility in one’s duties as a consumer—in performance, that is, of the leisure arts. With good luck one may even become a taste and opinion leader, with great influence over the jury.
Each particular peer-group has its fandoms and lingoes. Safety consists not in mastering a difficult craft but in mastering a battery of taste preferences and the mode of their expression. The preferences are for articles or “heroes” of consumption and for members of the group itself. The proper mode of expression requires feeling out with skill and sensitivity the probable tastes of the others and then swapping mutual likes and dislikes to maneuver intimacy. (p. 94) | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (1)
▾LibraryThing members' description ▾Book descriptions Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0300088655, Paperback)
The Lonely Crowd is considered by many to be the most influential book of the twentieth century. Its now-classic analysis of the "new middle class" in terms of inner-directed and other-directed social character opened exciting new dimensions in our understanding of the psychological, political, and economic problems that confront the individual in contemporary American society. The 1969 abridged and revised edition of the book is now reissued with a new foreword by Todd Gitlin that explains why the book is still relevant to our own era. (retrieved from Amazon Wed, 27 Oct 2010 14:39:24 -0400) ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. |
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1
The sociological explanation being that in the fifties of the last century society was on a fast track to the consumer society with its mass media. In the mean time creating people that 'know what they like, but don't know what they want'. And all of that was quite new at that time (