Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago spurred me to libertarianism, but I had read another book about mass murder, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil a few years before when I was an undergraduate. I am re-reading Arendt's book and am struck by her controversial claim that the Judenraten, the Jewish administrative agencies that oversaw the holocaust, were in fact absolutely essential to the entire holocaust. In other words, Eichmann and the Nazis had to count not only on the Jews' submission, but on their cooperation, in seeing to their own deaths.
On page 125 Arendt writes:
"But the whole truth was that there existed Jewish community organizations and Jewish party and welfare organizations on both the local and the international level. Wherever Jews lived, there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people. (According to Freudiger's calculations about half of them could have saved themselves if they had not followed the instructions of the Jewish Councils. This is of course a mere estimate, which, however, jibes with the rather reliable figures from Holland and which I owe to Dr. L. de Jong, the head of the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation. In Holland, where the Joodsche Raad like all the Dutch authorities very quickly became an 'instrument of the Nazis,' 103,000 Jews were deported to the death camps...Only five hundred and nineteen Jews returned...In contrast to this figure, ten thousand of those twenty to twenty-five thousand Jews, who escaped the Nazis--and that meant also the Jewish Council--and went underground survived; again forty to fifty per cent...)"
Why the willingness among Jews to comply with a government intent on killing them?
Arendt blames this on Nazism's causing a moral collapse, but I think that claim is incorrect. Similar phenomena were seen in the Soviet Union and China. It is not attributable to Nazism, but rather to the tribalist philosophy of socialism in general, to what Popper calls the "closed society". Moreover, elements of it exist here in the US and have increased in force as the public has become increasingly trusting and obsequious to the state. For example, if the US Supreme Court violates the law and claims the state's right to seize property for corrupt private interests, the public does not see a violent action but rather a justifiable state position.
The socialization of conscience has two additional sources. The first is ordinary conformity that the famous experiments of Stanley Milgram exposes. The second is the other directedness that David Riesman discusses in his Lonely Crowd.
Trust in government, other-directedness and conformity to state directed norms are associated with the socialist mode. In twentieth century Europe, the socialist mentality of compliance and support for the state had extended to a much greater extent than it has here in the United States. What is shocking about this process is that, given sufficient governmental and social pressure, and given Jews' widespread acceptance of the socialist model, Jews were willing to see themselves murdered rather than question the power of the German socialist state.
Should Americans comply with the dictates of government? With the IRS? Do we have a single reason to trust the government of George W. Bush or Barack Obama?
Showing posts with label david riesmann. Show all posts
Showing posts with label david riesmann. Show all posts
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Christophobia: A Left-Wing Bigotry
Fear and hatred of any group of people is wrong for several reasons. First it is unfair. Second it is exclusionary. Third, it is counter-productive. For that reason, I am distressed at the ongoing anti-Christian Christophobia I have been witnessing in libertarian and in left wing circles. The idea that "all Christians are bigots" or that "all Christians are authoritarian" has gained currency among educated urban elites. This parallels the prejudice against the inner directed that David Riesmann displayed in his otherwise classic book Lonely Crowd. The notion that urban consumerists are superior to Christian and Lockean "hicks" has simply gone too far for too long. I am tired of the hate.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Glamour and Barack Obama in David Riesmann's Lonely Crowd
Riesmann (e.g., p. 188) emphasizes the role of the media in creating other-directedness. The inner-directed carry production-related values into politics, the other-directed carry consumption-related values into politics. For the other-directed:
"Politics is to be appraised in terms of consumer preferences. Politicians are people--and the more glamorous the better. Moreover, in imitation of the marketplace, politics becomes a sphere in which the manner and mood of doing things is quite as important as what is done...The mass media of communication are perhaps the most important channels between the other-directed actors on the stage of politics and their audience. The media criticize the actors and the show generally, and both directly and indirectly train the audience in techniques of political consumership."
Riesmann describes what we now call "mainstream media" (I call it pissant propaganda) as "training" its other-directed audience:
"they include the whole range of contemporary popular culture from comic books to television. They dominate the use of leisure in all American classes except at the very top and perhaps also at the very bottom; and their influence is very great in creating the styles of response compatible with other-direction."
Riesmann notes that first,
1. "Popular culture is a tutor in consumption, it teaches the other-directed man to consume politics and to regard politics and political information and attitudes as consumer goods."
and second,
2. "The media have a stake in tolerance...This attitude of the audience leads to an emphasis not on what the media say in terms of content but on the sincerity of the presentation."
Thus, Riesmann argues, politics becomes an artifact of consumption. "The mass media act as a kind of barker for the political show. These have discovered one sovereign remedy, glamour, to combat the danger of indifference and apathy...glamour in politics, whether as charisma--packaging of the leader--or as the hopped-up treatment of events by the mass media, substitutes for the types of self-interest that governed the inner-directed. In general: wherever we see glamour in the object of attention, we must suspect a basic apathy in the spectator...the wider the electorate...the more glamour tends to displace issues or old fashioned considerations of patronage."
Riesmann argues that because of mass media's need for stable demand for their product (p. 191) they have to appeal to an other-directed audience. The reason is that the indignant (inner-directed) audience is too inflexible and likely to resist moral or intellectual shifts. He interprets this as "intolerance". However, it is also likely that sponsors may object to tendentious political positions on which inner-directed audiences might insist. The market-driven characteristic of advertisers lends itself to an other-directed audience. Hence, inner directeds are systematically excluded from the mainstream media's audience.
The mass media puts more emphasis on news and politics than market demand justifies. Part of the reason is that the other-directed "looks to the mass media for guidance in his design for living and hierarchy of values. He is led to assume that other people must rate politics as the mass media themselves do...The media...could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference."
The mass media do not cater to inner directeds outside of the news (p. 201):
"This gnawing deficit of acceptable mass media would perhaps be less troublesome to the moralizer if the world in which he lived still appeared to be inner directed, to be governed by an invisible hand. But his own experience of life is often disappointing; he is deprived of a feeling of competence and place. Neither his character nor his work is rewarded. In that situation he tends to turn on both--for he is vulnerable to lack of worldly comprehension even more perhaps than to lack of worldly success . In a last desperate effort to turn the country back on its inner-directed course in order to make it habitable for him, he is ready to join a political movement whose basic drive is indignation. A world that refuses him a place--a world that bombards him with messages that make him feel inadequate--may not appear to him worth saving, though his destructiveness may be rationalized by various ideologies."
Riesmann adds:
"The moralizers and inside-dopesters taken together are probably a majority among the better-educated, but surely a minority of the whole population. However, the inside-dopester has little to offer to the indifferents in the way of psychic dividends: his very knowledge leads him to be aware of how little can be accomplished in politics and how fantastic it is to hope to 'get rid of politics'."
The coverage of Barack Obama combined moralizing with glamour. The media aimed to appeal to the indifferents, bringing tradition-directed as well as inner-directed indifferents to Obama through moralizing as well as glamour.
The Republicans since 1980 succeeded through moralizing. Riesmann states that this is a likely outcome. The reason is that other-directeds enjoy moralizing because it amounts to sublimation. They cannot express indignation themselves, so they often enjoy it when they see others do it. A candidate who combines glamour with sincerity is the very candidate that Riesmann would argue is likely to succeed. The media gave this gift to Obama, the appearance of sincerity coupled with glamorous appeal. Note that John McCain was sincere but lacked glamour, a point which many announcers such as CNN's Jack Cafferty hammered home.
The media did not conform to Riesmann's hypothesis of "tolerance" in the recent election. They completely jettisoned the conserative indignation in favor of a "progressive" indignation concerning George Bush conservatism. This failure of tolerance would seem to have been self-destructive for the mass media. Their audience of inner directed conservatives is likely to wilt in the next few years.
One reason might be the advent of the Internet. The power of the mass media is on the wane. Riesmann argues that they did not have much influence anyway. Televsion exacerbated the trends that Riesmann identified, which is probably why the book became so popular in the 1950s.
The centralization of media that occurred with radio and television has been in steady reversal, first because of cable television and now because of the Internet. The mass media may be in the process of losing its broad tolerance because of competition from the Internet. Fox, CNN and MSNBC are little more than glorified blogs. Hence, they more openly take sides than in prior decades because they need to stake out a market segment. They are no longer so important as sources of opinion and news. The New York Times's decline is similarly symptomatic of decentralization in media. This decentralization has important implications for public opinion. The nation is likely to become more fragmented because the large population and size need to be reconciled with increasingly fragmented opinion. In a society where the largest television station does not command five percent of the audience and there is little reason for the liberal ideological uniformity that has characterized the mass media in recent years, it would seem that America may have trouble continuing to function as a single nation.
"Politics is to be appraised in terms of consumer preferences. Politicians are people--and the more glamorous the better. Moreover, in imitation of the marketplace, politics becomes a sphere in which the manner and mood of doing things is quite as important as what is done...The mass media of communication are perhaps the most important channels between the other-directed actors on the stage of politics and their audience. The media criticize the actors and the show generally, and both directly and indirectly train the audience in techniques of political consumership."
Riesmann describes what we now call "mainstream media" (I call it pissant propaganda) as "training" its other-directed audience:
"they include the whole range of contemporary popular culture from comic books to television. They dominate the use of leisure in all American classes except at the very top and perhaps also at the very bottom; and their influence is very great in creating the styles of response compatible with other-direction."
Riesmann notes that first,
1. "Popular culture is a tutor in consumption, it teaches the other-directed man to consume politics and to regard politics and political information and attitudes as consumer goods."
and second,
2. "The media have a stake in tolerance...This attitude of the audience leads to an emphasis not on what the media say in terms of content but on the sincerity of the presentation."
Thus, Riesmann argues, politics becomes an artifact of consumption. "The mass media act as a kind of barker for the political show. These have discovered one sovereign remedy, glamour, to combat the danger of indifference and apathy...glamour in politics, whether as charisma--packaging of the leader--or as the hopped-up treatment of events by the mass media, substitutes for the types of self-interest that governed the inner-directed. In general: wherever we see glamour in the object of attention, we must suspect a basic apathy in the spectator...the wider the electorate...the more glamour tends to displace issues or old fashioned considerations of patronage."
Riesmann argues that because of mass media's need for stable demand for their product (p. 191) they have to appeal to an other-directed audience. The reason is that the indignant (inner-directed) audience is too inflexible and likely to resist moral or intellectual shifts. He interprets this as "intolerance". However, it is also likely that sponsors may object to tendentious political positions on which inner-directed audiences might insist. The market-driven characteristic of advertisers lends itself to an other-directed audience. Hence, inner directeds are systematically excluded from the mainstream media's audience.
The mass media puts more emphasis on news and politics than market demand justifies. Part of the reason is that the other-directed "looks to the mass media for guidance in his design for living and hierarchy of values. He is led to assume that other people must rate politics as the mass media themselves do...The media...could be viewed as a conspiracy to disguise the extent of political indifference."
The mass media do not cater to inner directeds outside of the news (p. 201):
"This gnawing deficit of acceptable mass media would perhaps be less troublesome to the moralizer if the world in which he lived still appeared to be inner directed, to be governed by an invisible hand. But his own experience of life is often disappointing; he is deprived of a feeling of competence and place. Neither his character nor his work is rewarded. In that situation he tends to turn on both--for he is vulnerable to lack of worldly comprehension even more perhaps than to lack of worldly success . In a last desperate effort to turn the country back on its inner-directed course in order to make it habitable for him, he is ready to join a political movement whose basic drive is indignation. A world that refuses him a place--a world that bombards him with messages that make him feel inadequate--may not appear to him worth saving, though his destructiveness may be rationalized by various ideologies."
Riesmann adds:
"The moralizers and inside-dopesters taken together are probably a majority among the better-educated, but surely a minority of the whole population. However, the inside-dopester has little to offer to the indifferents in the way of psychic dividends: his very knowledge leads him to be aware of how little can be accomplished in politics and how fantastic it is to hope to 'get rid of politics'."
The coverage of Barack Obama combined moralizing with glamour. The media aimed to appeal to the indifferents, bringing tradition-directed as well as inner-directed indifferents to Obama through moralizing as well as glamour.
The Republicans since 1980 succeeded through moralizing. Riesmann states that this is a likely outcome. The reason is that other-directeds enjoy moralizing because it amounts to sublimation. They cannot express indignation themselves, so they often enjoy it when they see others do it. A candidate who combines glamour with sincerity is the very candidate that Riesmann would argue is likely to succeed. The media gave this gift to Obama, the appearance of sincerity coupled with glamorous appeal. Note that John McCain was sincere but lacked glamour, a point which many announcers such as CNN's Jack Cafferty hammered home.
The media did not conform to Riesmann's hypothesis of "tolerance" in the recent election. They completely jettisoned the conserative indignation in favor of a "progressive" indignation concerning George Bush conservatism. This failure of tolerance would seem to have been self-destructive for the mass media. Their audience of inner directed conservatives is likely to wilt in the next few years.
One reason might be the advent of the Internet. The power of the mass media is on the wane. Riesmann argues that they did not have much influence anyway. Televsion exacerbated the trends that Riesmann identified, which is probably why the book became so popular in the 1950s.
The centralization of media that occurred with radio and television has been in steady reversal, first because of cable television and now because of the Internet. The mass media may be in the process of losing its broad tolerance because of competition from the Internet. Fox, CNN and MSNBC are little more than glorified blogs. Hence, they more openly take sides than in prior decades because they need to stake out a market segment. They are no longer so important as sources of opinion and news. The New York Times's decline is similarly symptomatic of decentralization in media. This decentralization has important implications for public opinion. The nation is likely to become more fragmented because the large population and size need to be reconciled with increasingly fragmented opinion. In a society where the largest television station does not command five percent of the audience and there is little reason for the liberal ideological uniformity that has characterized the mass media in recent years, it would seem that America may have trouble continuing to function as a single nation.
Political Styles in Riesmann's Lonely Crowd, Acorn and the Obama Campaign
In the Lonely Crowed Riesmann (1950) discusses how his famous typology of tradition-, inner- and other-directedness interacts with political styles. Riesmann claims that political mood shifts from inner-directed moralizing to other-directed "inside-dopesterism" that emphasizes inside information and relationships rather than moral issues in political dialogue. He also claims that this shift is related to "power dispersal among many marginally competing pressure groups" in modern society rather than dominance by a ruling class as was the case in the 19th century. He asserts that there are three political types: indifferents, moralizers and inside-dopesters.
Indifferents can be tradition-directed and from marginal or oppressed groups. In 1950, when he wrote the book, Riesmann asserted that "the number of such tradition-directed indifferents remains small." Indifferents may have external locus of control and believe that (p. 167) "politics is someone else's job". In addition to tradition-directed indifferents there is also a larger number of people who are inner-directed or possibly other-directed who are also indifferent. He writes (p. 168):
"It is to a large degree the indifference of people who know enough about politics to reject it, enough about political information to refuse it, enough about their political responsibilities as citizens to evade them. Some of these new-style indifferents we may classify as inner-directed or other-directed people who happen not to have adopted a political style more characteristic for their type."
Old and new style indifferents may account for the majority of Americans (p. 170). Some of the new style indifferents reside in rural or slum communities. Riesmann speculates that some indifferent people may be in transition from tradition to inner directedness and that "Indifferents do not believe that, by virtue of anything they do, know or believe, they can buy a political package that will substantially improve their lives." But:
"Since these new-style indifferents have some education and organizational competence and since they are neither morally committed to political principles nor emotionally related to political events, they are rather easily welded into cadres for political action--much as they are capable of being welded into a modern mechanized and specialized army...The new-style indifferents are attached neither to their privacy, which would make politics intrusive, nor to their class groupings, which would make politics limited: rather...they are socialized, passive and cooperative--not only in politics, of course. Their loyalty is at large, ready to be captured by any movement that can undercut their frequent cynicism or exploit it..."
To what degree does ACORN exploit this hypothesis in its organizing efforts?
Riesmann also does a good job of capturing the inner-directed, moralizing pattern and the inside-dopester pattern of other-directedness. My questions there are as follows:
1. To what degree did the differences between the Red States and the Blue States in 2000, 50 years after the Lonely Crowd was published, reflect persistent differences in inner and other directedness?
2. To what degree has other-directedness been supplanted by a pattern that Riesmann notes in the book, namely indignation or moralizing by radical other-directeds? In other words, other-directedness suggests a concern for the feelings of others. Today, in political discourse, the special interest groups that Riesmann observed in 1950 seem to have transformed that pattern. Other-directedness now applies within the group whereas indignation and morlizing applies to those outside the group. Thus, social democracy has replaced inner-directedness with group-directedness, a fixation on a group's moral compass that has elements of a reformulated tradition direction but also elements of other-directedness.
For example, in universities much emphasis has been placed on "collegiality". This would be the equivalent of "interpersonal skills" emphasized in corporations. But collegiality is limited to those who share the political views of the privileged class of academics. Those who deviate are excluded and shunned. So while academics are primarily other-directed (arguably, the entire transition from inner to other directedness reflects the influence of universities, imbued with peer review and conformity pressure) their fixation on political ideology leads them to group directedness. Anyone who questions the goals of "social change", "social justice" and the like is viewed as "lacking collegiality" because they threaten the group-directedness.
In contrast to the indifferents, "because the inner-directed man is work driven and work oriented his profoundest feelings wrapped up in work and the competence with which work is done, when he turns to politics he sees it as a field of work." But because the inner directed person is wound tight, he has trouble adjusting to the fluidity of political realities. "He does not see it as a game to be watched for its human interest" (p. 173). Inner-directeds participate in politics because of because of a sense of responsibility (p. 175).
Riesmann does not believe that the inner-directed personality suits modern politics. Mass media invades privacy, and blurs individual interests. Inner directeds get involved in politics to further a specific goal, so they do not feel comfortable if politics invades their privacy. Politics in the modern world does not, in Riesmann's opinion, lend itself to clear analysis.
Riesmann adds:
"The incomprehensibility of politics gains momentum not only from the increase in its objective complexity but from what is, in some respects a drop in the general level of skills relevant to understanding what goes on in politics. While formal education has increased, the education provided by the effort to run a farm, an independent business, or a shop, has decreased along with the increase in the number of employees; and while there may be little or no decline in the number of independent entrepreneurs, a larger proportion of the factors leading to success or failure is no longer in the hands of those remaining as entrepreneurs. No longer can one judge the work and competence of the political or government administrator from the confident, often overconfident, base line of one's own work and competence."
Moreover, "the inner-directed indignants can easily feel helpless and invaded when things do not go well with them. As we saw in Chapter V, the inner-directed man becomes vulnerable to himself when he fails to achieve his internalized goals...the gap between other-directed city dwellers and inner-directed rural folk has increased and that the well-meant efforts to bridge the gap have frequently served only to make the latter feel still more envious and unsure...Envy and feeling of displacement--sources of a political style of curdled indignation--are of course also to be found among those rural immigrants to town who are city dwellers in name only. As long as such peole, urban or rural, have political power, their malaise vis-a-vis the other-directed elements in American life may be muted; they can shape their world and force it to make sense to them. But when even this avenue toward understanding is cut off, the curdled indignant lashes out in helpless rage or subsidies into...passive, frustrated resistance..." (Sounds to me like talk radio.)
In contrast to the indignant inner-directed and tradition-directed, the minority of Americans who have all the power but are other-directed are inside-dopesters who view politics as consumption (Riesmann doesn't seem to notice an incongruity there, that he is saying that a majority are indifferents who are largely in transition between tradition and inner or other directedness, and all the rural people are inner directed, so it is only the university-educated city dwellers who are other-directed. What puzzles me is why the majority continues to put up with it.)
This emphasis on politics as consumption fascinates me because I teach business. If politics is consumption, why hasn't the focus been on better meeting consumer needs rather than regulation? Why isn't there a politics of consumption? I believe that there is a huge opportunity for conservatives here. The underlying impulse is consumption. Progressives package a government based on moral obligation (social justice, for instance) which suggests a conscience-based obligation rather than a relationship-based focus on consumption.
What Reagan understood is that politics is consumption, and therefore needs to be packaged. This has ramifications that have never been explored. For instance, political units can be re-divided in terms of market segmentation rather than primitive geographic units. There is much to do here as this has not been discussed. All political paradigms are rooted in power relationships rather than consumption, but the trend in the world has been toward consumption, not power. A new politics based on choice could transcend the conflict between other-directed progressivism and inner-directed moralism.
In Riesmann's view, the archetypal other directed is an inside dopester. This reflects a limited view of politics. Why not a consumer of political services, or of the self-image of moralizing. Might not the contributions of George Soros or the activism of Michael Bloomberg be viewed in consumption terms? These super-consumers of American politics may provide a model--that there are different kinds of consumption that different Americans prefer, and different political approaches via the states or groups of states might be preferable to the groups, resulting in more optimal arrangements.
Politics in the age of inner-direction focused on individual rights and liberty. Corporate power was viewed as a threat to individual rights. Politics in the age of other-direction focused on group rights and corporate power. Corporate power was viewed as a source of consumption and a powerful actor that dominates the lives of workers and consumers. Corporate power in the age of choice is itself a consumption variable. Consumers can choose created environments in which corporations have one or another degree of power. Progressives can choose a highly centralized, corporatist society. Conservatives an individualist one. The mode of production need not be restrained by scale or relationship to the state. Quality management can make small firms more efficient and large ones equally so.
Inner dopesters, in Riesmann's definition are people who enjoy politics for being able to show off what they know to their peer-group. It is important to the inside-dopester to look like an informed insider. Other-directeds often aspire to (but are not really) this type of person. "Politics indeed serves the inside-dopester chiefly as a means for group conformity. He must have acceptable opinions, and where he engages in politics he must do so in acceptable ways. In the upper class, as among radical groups, the influence of the moralizing style is still strong, and many people who set the cultural patterns carry on with an ideology of political responsibility; they act as if politics were a meaningful sphere for them...These inside-dopesters of the upper middle class should be contrasted with those found in small towns and rural areas who are in easy contact with their local and even state officials...there are striking similarities between the tradition-directed and the other-directed. Both groups feel helpless vis-a-vis politics, and both have resorted to varieties of fatalism which the inner-directed moralizer would sternly reject. However, there are important differences. The inside-dopester, unlike the indifferent, is subordinate to a peer group in which politics is an important consumable and in which the correct--that is, the unemotional--attitude toward one's consumption is equally important."
Thus, (p. 188) "The inner-directed moralizer brings to policies an attitude derived from the sphere of production. The other-directed inside-dopester brings to politics an attitude derived from the sphere of consumption. Politics is to be appraised in terms of consumer preferences. Politicians are people--and the more galmorous the better.
This leads into a discussion of glamour and politics, which relates directly to Barack Obama.
Indifferents can be tradition-directed and from marginal or oppressed groups. In 1950, when he wrote the book, Riesmann asserted that "the number of such tradition-directed indifferents remains small." Indifferents may have external locus of control and believe that (p. 167) "politics is someone else's job". In addition to tradition-directed indifferents there is also a larger number of people who are inner-directed or possibly other-directed who are also indifferent. He writes (p. 168):
"It is to a large degree the indifference of people who know enough about politics to reject it, enough about political information to refuse it, enough about their political responsibilities as citizens to evade them. Some of these new-style indifferents we may classify as inner-directed or other-directed people who happen not to have adopted a political style more characteristic for their type."
Old and new style indifferents may account for the majority of Americans (p. 170). Some of the new style indifferents reside in rural or slum communities. Riesmann speculates that some indifferent people may be in transition from tradition to inner directedness and that "Indifferents do not believe that, by virtue of anything they do, know or believe, they can buy a political package that will substantially improve their lives." But:
"Since these new-style indifferents have some education and organizational competence and since they are neither morally committed to political principles nor emotionally related to political events, they are rather easily welded into cadres for political action--much as they are capable of being welded into a modern mechanized and specialized army...The new-style indifferents are attached neither to their privacy, which would make politics intrusive, nor to their class groupings, which would make politics limited: rather...they are socialized, passive and cooperative--not only in politics, of course. Their loyalty is at large, ready to be captured by any movement that can undercut their frequent cynicism or exploit it..."
To what degree does ACORN exploit this hypothesis in its organizing efforts?
Riesmann also does a good job of capturing the inner-directed, moralizing pattern and the inside-dopester pattern of other-directedness. My questions there are as follows:
1. To what degree did the differences between the Red States and the Blue States in 2000, 50 years after the Lonely Crowd was published, reflect persistent differences in inner and other directedness?
2. To what degree has other-directedness been supplanted by a pattern that Riesmann notes in the book, namely indignation or moralizing by radical other-directeds? In other words, other-directedness suggests a concern for the feelings of others. Today, in political discourse, the special interest groups that Riesmann observed in 1950 seem to have transformed that pattern. Other-directedness now applies within the group whereas indignation and morlizing applies to those outside the group. Thus, social democracy has replaced inner-directedness with group-directedness, a fixation on a group's moral compass that has elements of a reformulated tradition direction but also elements of other-directedness.
For example, in universities much emphasis has been placed on "collegiality". This would be the equivalent of "interpersonal skills" emphasized in corporations. But collegiality is limited to those who share the political views of the privileged class of academics. Those who deviate are excluded and shunned. So while academics are primarily other-directed (arguably, the entire transition from inner to other directedness reflects the influence of universities, imbued with peer review and conformity pressure) their fixation on political ideology leads them to group directedness. Anyone who questions the goals of "social change", "social justice" and the like is viewed as "lacking collegiality" because they threaten the group-directedness.
In contrast to the indifferents, "because the inner-directed man is work driven and work oriented his profoundest feelings wrapped up in work and the competence with which work is done, when he turns to politics he sees it as a field of work." But because the inner directed person is wound tight, he has trouble adjusting to the fluidity of political realities. "He does not see it as a game to be watched for its human interest" (p. 173). Inner-directeds participate in politics because of because of a sense of responsibility (p. 175).
Riesmann does not believe that the inner-directed personality suits modern politics. Mass media invades privacy, and blurs individual interests. Inner directeds get involved in politics to further a specific goal, so they do not feel comfortable if politics invades their privacy. Politics in the modern world does not, in Riesmann's opinion, lend itself to clear analysis.
Riesmann adds:
"The incomprehensibility of politics gains momentum not only from the increase in its objective complexity but from what is, in some respects a drop in the general level of skills relevant to understanding what goes on in politics. While formal education has increased, the education provided by the effort to run a farm, an independent business, or a shop, has decreased along with the increase in the number of employees; and while there may be little or no decline in the number of independent entrepreneurs, a larger proportion of the factors leading to success or failure is no longer in the hands of those remaining as entrepreneurs. No longer can one judge the work and competence of the political or government administrator from the confident, often overconfident, base line of one's own work and competence."
Moreover, "the inner-directed indignants can easily feel helpless and invaded when things do not go well with them. As we saw in Chapter V, the inner-directed man becomes vulnerable to himself when he fails to achieve his internalized goals...the gap between other-directed city dwellers and inner-directed rural folk has increased and that the well-meant efforts to bridge the gap have frequently served only to make the latter feel still more envious and unsure...Envy and feeling of displacement--sources of a political style of curdled indignation--are of course also to be found among those rural immigrants to town who are city dwellers in name only. As long as such peole, urban or rural, have political power, their malaise vis-a-vis the other-directed elements in American life may be muted; they can shape their world and force it to make sense to them. But when even this avenue toward understanding is cut off, the curdled indignant lashes out in helpless rage or subsidies into...passive, frustrated resistance..." (Sounds to me like talk radio.)
In contrast to the indignant inner-directed and tradition-directed, the minority of Americans who have all the power but are other-directed are inside-dopesters who view politics as consumption (Riesmann doesn't seem to notice an incongruity there, that he is saying that a majority are indifferents who are largely in transition between tradition and inner or other directedness, and all the rural people are inner directed, so it is only the university-educated city dwellers who are other-directed. What puzzles me is why the majority continues to put up with it.)
This emphasis on politics as consumption fascinates me because I teach business. If politics is consumption, why hasn't the focus been on better meeting consumer needs rather than regulation? Why isn't there a politics of consumption? I believe that there is a huge opportunity for conservatives here. The underlying impulse is consumption. Progressives package a government based on moral obligation (social justice, for instance) which suggests a conscience-based obligation rather than a relationship-based focus on consumption.
What Reagan understood is that politics is consumption, and therefore needs to be packaged. This has ramifications that have never been explored. For instance, political units can be re-divided in terms of market segmentation rather than primitive geographic units. There is much to do here as this has not been discussed. All political paradigms are rooted in power relationships rather than consumption, but the trend in the world has been toward consumption, not power. A new politics based on choice could transcend the conflict between other-directed progressivism and inner-directed moralism.
In Riesmann's view, the archetypal other directed is an inside dopester. This reflects a limited view of politics. Why not a consumer of political services, or of the self-image of moralizing. Might not the contributions of George Soros or the activism of Michael Bloomberg be viewed in consumption terms? These super-consumers of American politics may provide a model--that there are different kinds of consumption that different Americans prefer, and different political approaches via the states or groups of states might be preferable to the groups, resulting in more optimal arrangements.
Politics in the age of inner-direction focused on individual rights and liberty. Corporate power was viewed as a threat to individual rights. Politics in the age of other-direction focused on group rights and corporate power. Corporate power was viewed as a source of consumption and a powerful actor that dominates the lives of workers and consumers. Corporate power in the age of choice is itself a consumption variable. Consumers can choose created environments in which corporations have one or another degree of power. Progressives can choose a highly centralized, corporatist society. Conservatives an individualist one. The mode of production need not be restrained by scale or relationship to the state. Quality management can make small firms more efficient and large ones equally so.
Inner dopesters, in Riesmann's definition are people who enjoy politics for being able to show off what they know to their peer-group. It is important to the inside-dopester to look like an informed insider. Other-directeds often aspire to (but are not really) this type of person. "Politics indeed serves the inside-dopester chiefly as a means for group conformity. He must have acceptable opinions, and where he engages in politics he must do so in acceptable ways. In the upper class, as among radical groups, the influence of the moralizing style is still strong, and many people who set the cultural patterns carry on with an ideology of political responsibility; they act as if politics were a meaningful sphere for them...These inside-dopesters of the upper middle class should be contrasted with those found in small towns and rural areas who are in easy contact with their local and even state officials...there are striking similarities between the tradition-directed and the other-directed. Both groups feel helpless vis-a-vis politics, and both have resorted to varieties of fatalism which the inner-directed moralizer would sternly reject. However, there are important differences. The inside-dopester, unlike the indifferent, is subordinate to a peer group in which politics is an important consumable and in which the correct--that is, the unemotional--attitude toward one's consumption is equally important."
Thus, (p. 188) "The inner-directed moralizer brings to policies an attitude derived from the sphere of production. The other-directed inside-dopester brings to politics an attitude derived from the sphere of consumption. Politics is to be appraised in terms of consumer preferences. Politicians are people--and the more galmorous the better.
This leads into a discussion of glamour and politics, which relates directly to Barack Obama.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
