The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman

Author:David Riesman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0300088655
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2001-02-07T14:00:00+00:00

II. The Milky Way

In the preceding chapter, I symbolized the ambition of the inner-directed man by referring to a frequent motto of his period: ad astra per aspera. The inner-directed man, socialized with reference to an older model, might choose for emulation a star from the heroes of his field. By contrast, the other-directed person does not so often think of his life in terms of an individualized career. He seeks not fame, which represents limited transcendence of a particular peer-group or a particular culture, but the respect and, more than the respect, the affection, of an amorphous and shifting, though contemporary, jury of peers.

To attain this goal he struggles not with the hardness of the material but with the very antagonistic cooperators who are engaged in the same pursuit and to whom he looks at the same time for values and for judgments of value. Instead of referring himself to the great men of the past and matching himself against his stars, the other-directed person moves in the midst of a veritable Milky Way of almost but not quite indistinguishable contemporaries. This is partly a tribute to the size of the educated middle class in the phase of incipient decline of population.

The uncertainty of life in our day is certainly a factor in the refusal of young people to commit themselves to long-term goals. War, depression, military service, are felt today as obstacles to planning a career far more than in the period prior to World War I. But these changes are not the whole story: the type of man who will not commit himself to long-range goals rationalizes his perspective on the future and his deferral of commitment by pointing to the all too evident uncertainties. We can conceive of people living at a time of equal uncertainty who would, out of ignorance and insensitivity as much as out of strength of character, plow ahead in pursuit of extensive aims. Doubtless, many other factors are also in the air: such as the fact, mentioned in a preceding section, that mobility often depends on leaving one’s craft skill behind; and this very fork in the road which separates avenues within a craft from those achievable only by leaving the craft, suggests itself at an early stage of occupational life and complicates the planning of the mobile youth’s career.

There are certain positive sides to this development. The seemingly sure commitment of many inner-directed youths was based on an unquestioning acceptance of parental orders and parental ranking of occupations. The other-directed youth of today often asks more of a job than that it satisfy conventional status and pecuniary requirements; he is not content with the authoritative rankings of earlier generations. The age of other-direction does open up the possibilities of more individual and satisfying choices of career, once society’s pressure for an early decision, and the person’s feeling of panic if he can make no decision, can be relaxed.

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