Traditional Societies Evolve

 Hi – I'm reading "The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century" by Peter Watson and wanted to share this quote with you.

"Riesman was a pupil of Erich Fromm, and therefore indirectly in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. Like them, his ideas owed a lot to Freud, and to Max Weber, insofar as The Lonely Crowd was an attempt to relate individual psychology, and that of the family, to whole societies. His argument was twofold. In the first place, he claimed that as societies develop, they go through three phases relating to changes in population. In older societies, where there is a stable population at fairly low levels, people are ‘tradition-directed.’ In the second phase, populations show a rapid increase in size, and individuals become ‘inner-directed.’ In the third phase, populations level""off at a much higher level, where the people are ‘other-directed.’ The second part of his argument described how the factors that shape character change as these other developments take place. In particular, he saw a decline in the influence and authority of parents and home life, and a rise in the influence of the mass media and the peer group, especially as it concerned the lives of young people.2 By the middle of the twentieth century, Riesman said, countries such as India, Egypt, and China remained tradition-directed. These locations are in many areas sparsely populated, death rates are high, and very often the people are nonliterate. Here life is governed by patterns and an etiquette of relationships that have existed for generations. Youth is regarded as an obvious period of apprenticeship, and admission to adult society is marked by initiation ceremonies that are formal and which everyone must go through. These ceremonies bring on added privilege but also added responsibility. The ‘Three Rs’ of this world are ritual, routine, and religion, with ‘Little energy … directed towards finding new solutions to age-old problems.’3 Riesman did not devote any space to how tradition-oriented societies develop or evolve, but he saw the next phase as clearly marked and predicated upon a rapid increase in population, which creates a change in the relatively stable ratio of births to deaths, which in turn becomes both the cause and consequence of other social changes. It is this imbalance that puts pressure on society’s customary ways of coping. The new society is characterised by increased personal mobility, by the rapid accumulation of capital, and by an almost constant expansion. Such a society (for example, the Renaissance or the Reformation), Riesman says, breeds character types ‘who can manage to live socially without strict and self-evident tradition-direction.’ The concept of ‘inner-direction’ covers a wide range of individuals, but all share the experience that the values that govern their lives and behaviour are implanted early in life by their elders, leading to a distinct individualism marked by a consistency within the individual from one situation to another. Inner-directed people""are aware of tradition, or rather traditions, but each individual may come from a different tradition to which he or she owes allegiance. It is as if, says Riesman, each person has his own ‘internal gyroscope.’ The classic inner-directed society is Victorian Britain.4 As the birth rate begins to follow the death rate down, populations start to stabilise again, but at higher levels than before. Fewer people work on the land, more are in the cities, there is more abundance and leisure, societies are centralised and bureaucratised, and increasingly, ‘other people are the problem, not the material environment.’5 People mix more widely and become more sensitive to each other. This society creates the other-directed person. Riesman thought that the other-directed type was most common and most at home in twentieth-century America, which lacked a feudal past, and especially in American cities, where people were literate, educated, and well provided for in the necessities of life.6 Amid the new abundance, he thought that parental discipline suffered, because in the new, smaller, more biologically stable families it was needed less, and this had two consequences. First, the peer group becomes as important as, if not more important than, the family as a socialising influence – the peer group meaning other children the same age as the child in question. Second, the children in society become a marketing category; they are targeted by both the manufacturers of children’s products and the media that help sell these products. It is this need for direction from, and the approval of, others that creates a modern form of conformity in which the chief area of sensitivity is wanting to be liked by other people – i.e., to be popular.7 This new other-directed group, he said, is more interested in its own psychological development than in work for personal gain, or the greater good of all; it does not want to be esteemed but loved; and its most important aim is to ‘relate’ to others. Riesman went on to qualify and expand this picture, devoting chapters to the changing role of parents, teachers, the print media, the electronic media, the role of economics, and the changing character of work. He thought that the changes he had observed and described had implications for privacy and for politics, and that whatever character type an individual was, there were three fates available – adjustment, anomie, and autonomy.8 Later he recanted some of his claims, conceding he had overstated the change that had come over America. But in one thing he was surely right: his observation that Americans were concerned above all with ‘relationships’ foreshadowed the obsession later in the century with all manner of psychologies specifically designed to help in this area of life. The Lonely Crowd was released in the same year that Senator Joseph McCarthy announced to the Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, that ‘I hold in my hand’ a list of Communist agents in the State Department. Until that point, McCarthy had been an undistinguished Midwestern politician with a drinking problem.9 But his specific allegations now sparked a ‘moral panic’ in America, as it was described, in which 151 actors, writers, musicians, and radio and TV entertainers were accused of Communist affiliations, and the U.S. attorney general issued a list of 179 ‘Totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, subversive and other organisations.’* While McCarthy and the U.S. attorney general were worrying about Communists and ‘subversives,’ others were just as distressed about the whole moral panic itself and what that said about America. In fact, many people – especially refugee scholars from Europe – were by now worried that America itself had the potential to become fascist. It was thinking of this kind that underlay a particular psychological investigation that overlapped with The Lonely Crowd and appeared at more or less the same time."

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