Food, Sex, and the Future

Afternotes |II| III.B ⋅ Excerpts from The Lonely Crowd

Jul 18, 2021

Hi, I'm Thomas, and this is Soen, a newsletter where I write about bouncing back from adversity—or even the doldrums of mediocrity—to resign oneself to redemption. If someone forwarded you this email, you are invited to join them in the inner sanctum of subscribers by clicking here.

As a follow-up to last letter, I've collected some long “bonus” passages from The Lonely Crowd that gives the reader a better feel for it and may suggest why - outside the catchy title and intuitively interesting central idea - it has proved so popular, and, at least in some quarters, enduring.

On Food Among the Other-direction

…The most popular cookbook today is said to be The Joy of Cooking, and the number of specialized cookbooks—ethnic, chatty, and atmospheric—constantly increases to meet the demand for marginal differentiation. The very change in titles— from the Boston Cooking School Cookbook to How to Cook a Wolf or Food Is a Four Letter Word—reveals the changing attitude. For the other-directed person cannot lean on such objective standards of success as those which guided the inner-directed person: he may be haunted by a feeling that he misses the joy in food or drink which he is supposed to feel. Mealtime must now be "pleasurable"; the new Fireside Cookbook is offered to "people who are not content to regard food just as something one transfers periodically from plate to mouth."

And if one still fails to get much joy out of the recipes given there, he may search in books like Specialite de la Maison to see what "others" are eating —to get the "favorite recipes" of such people as Noel Coward and Lucius Beebe. Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert testify to the delights of new concoctions such as "The Egg and I Julep"; and "There is nothing," writes MacMurray in a little collection of his favorite egg recipes, "so appealing as a pair of fried eggs with their limpid golden eyes gazing fondly at you from the center of a breakfast plate, festooned with strips of crisp bacon or little-pig sausage. Or poached, gaily riding a raft of toast." The most popular translation of an old French cookbook, Tante Marie, is also extremely chatty, and The Joy of Cooking explains its chattiness by saying that originally the recipes were collected and written down for the author's daughter, who in turn thought "other daughters" might like them. (As there is today less teaching of daughters by mothers, the daughter must rely on the instruction of an outsider, if she is to cook at all.) In short, the other-directed person in his approach to food, as in his sexual encounters, is constantly looking for a qualitative element that may elude him. He suffers from what Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites call "fun-morality."

Of course, putting matters this way exaggerates the disadvantages of the shift: undeniably, many more people today really enjoy food and enjoy talk about food than they did when the monotony of the American diet was notorious

Many people, to be sure, follow the new fashions in food without being other-directed in character, just as many personnel directors in industry are zealous inner-directed believers in the glad hand. Even so, if we wanted to demarcate the boundaries of other direction in America, we might find in the analysis of menus a not too inaccurate index... Recently, Russell Lynes, in his article, "Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” sought to delineate the contemporary urban American social system in terms of similar consumption indexes. Thus, the tossed salad is the sign of the high-brow, who may also be tagged by his taste in cars, clothes, and posture. What we really see emerging is an embryonic social system whose criteria of status are inconsistent with the criteria of the more traditional class system. This has been seen by Lloyd Warner, who actually defines class less in terms of wealth or power and more in terms of who is sociable with whom, and of styles of consumer behavior. These observers, however, are exceptional;… most Americans continue to see their social structure in terms of an older one based on wealth, occupation, and position in the society-page sense. But beneath these older rubrics, I believe that a much more amorphous structure is emerging in which opinion leadership is increasingly important, and in which the "brow" hierarchy competes for recognition with the traditional hierarchies based on wealth and occupational position.

On Sex Among the Other-Direction

In this phase there is not only a growth of leisure, but work itself becomes both less interesting and less demanding for many; increased supervision and subdivision of tasks routinize the industrial process even beyond what was accomplished in the phase of transitional growth of population. More than before, as job-mindedness declines, sex permeates the daytime as well as the playtime consciousness. It is viewed as a consumption good not only by the old leisure classes but by the modern leisure masses. The other-directed person, who often suffers from low responsiveness, may pursue what looks like a cult of effortlessness in many spheres of life. He may welcome the routinization of his economic role and of his domestic life; the auto companies may tempt him by self-opening windows and self-shifting gears; he may withdraw all emotion from politics. Yet he cannot handle his sex life in this way. Though there is tremendous insecurity about how the game of sex should be played, there is little doubt as to whether it should be played or not. Even when we are consciously bored with sex, we must still obey its drive. Sex, therefore, provides a kind of defense against the threat of total apathy. This is one of the reasons why so much excitement is channeled into sex by the other-directed person. He looks to it for reassurance that he is alive. The inner-directed person, driven by his internal gyroscope and oriented toward the more external problems of production, did not need this evidence…

For the consumption of love, despite all the efforts of the mass media, does remain hidden from public view. If someone else has a new Cadillac, the other-directed person knows what that is, and that he can duplicate the experience, more or less. But if someone else has a new lover, he cannot know what that means. Cadillacs have been democratized. So has sexual glamour, to a degree: without the mass production of good-looking, well-groomed youth, the American pattern of sexual competition could not exist. But there is a difference between Cadillacs and sexual partners in the degree of mystery. And with the loss or submergence of moral shame and inhibitions, but not completely of a certain unconscious innocence, the other-directed person has no defenses against his own envy. He is not ambitious to break the quantitative records of the acquisitive consumers of sex like Don Juan, but he does not want to miss, day in day out, the qualities of experience he tells himself the others are having. In a way this development is paradoxical. For while cookbooks have become more glamorous with the era of other-direction, sex books have become less so. The older marriage manuals, such as that of Van der Velde (still popular, however), breathe an ecstatic tone; they are travelogues of the joy of love. The newer ones, including some high school sex manuals, are matter of fact, toneless, and hygienic—Boston Cooking School style. Nevertheless, much as young people may appear to take sex in stride along with their vitamins, it remains an era of competition and a locus of the search, never completely suppressed, for meaning and emotional response in life. The other-directed person looks to sex not for display but for a test of his or her ability to attract, his or her place in the "rating-dating" scale—and beyond that, in order to experience life and love.

One reason for the change is that women are no longer objects for the acquisitive consumer but are peer-groupers themselves. The relatively unemancipated wife and socially inferior mistresses of the inner-directed man could not seriously challenge the quality of his sexual performance. Today, millions of women, freed by technology from many household tasks, given by technology many "aids to romance," have become pioneers, with men, on the frontier of sex. As they become knowing consumers, the anxiety of men lest they fail to satisfy the women also grows—but at the same time this is another test that attracts men who, in their character, want to be judged by others. The very ability of women to respond in a way that only courtesans were supposed to in an earlier age means, moreover, that qualitative differences of sex experience—the impenetrable mystery—can be sought for night after night, and not only in periodic visits to a mistress or brothel. Whereas the pattern of an earlier era was often to make fun of sex, whether on the level of the music hall or of Balzac's Droll Stories, sex today carries too much psychic freight to be really funny for the other-directed person. By a disguised asceticism it becomes at the same time too anxious a business and too sacred an illusion. This anxious competitiveness in the realm of sex has very little in common with older patterns of social climbing. To be sure, women still use sex as a means to status in spheres controlled by men. But they can do this chiefly in industries that are still competitive in the pre-monopolistic patterns. Thus until recently the theater and the movies were controlled by novi homines who remind us of those early nineteenth-century British mill owners who, before the Factory Acts, relied on their mills as a harem. And Warner, Havighurst, and Loeb in Who Shall Be Educated? describe how women schoolteachers may still cabin-date their way up the relatively unbureaucratized hierarchies of local school systems. These, however, are exceptional cases; the search for experience on the frontier of sex is, in the other-directed era, generally without ulterior motives.

On Work and Play in the Age of Other-direction

All of us are forced, to a degree, to accept… cultural definitions of work and play, just as we are forced to accept certain cultural definitions of class sex, race, and occupational or social role. And the definitions are forced on us by the ways of the culture and by the socialization process we undergo, whether they happen to be timely or anachronistic, useful for or destructive of our resiliency and of our fundamental humanity.

Work has the greater prestige; moreover, it is thought of as alien to man—it is a sort of disciplined salvage operation, rescuing a useful social product from chaos and the disorders of man's innate laziness. The same era, that of transitional growth of population, that saw the most astounding increase in man's mastery over nature, took it as axiomatic, echoing a series of writers from Malthus to Sumner and Freud, that people had to be driven to work by economic necessity. Today, knowing more about the nature of man and of work, we still nevertheless tend to accept the psychological premise that work and productivity are disciplines exerted against the grain of man's nature. We do not quite see, though we are close to seeing, that what looks like laziness may be a reaction against the kind of work people are forced to do and the way in which they are forced to define it.

….The depression did not lead to a redefinition of work but on the contrary made work seem not only precious but problematic—precious because problematic. It is significant that we have now taken full employment, rather than full nonemployment, or leisure, as the economic goal to which we cling in desperation. This is not surprising when we realize how stunted were the play opportunities for the man unemployed in the depression. We could see then, in the clearest form, how often leisure is defined as a permissive residue left over from the demands of work-time. Even financially adequate relief could not remove this moral blockage of play, any more than retirement pay can remove it for the forcibly retired oldsters. For the prestige of work operates as a badge entitling the holder to draw on the society's resources. Even the adolescent who is engaged in "producing himself" suffers emotional discomfort if he cannot demonstrate that he is at work or training assiduously for narrowly defined work aims. In sum, taking together the young, the unemployed, the postemployment old, the housewife, and the guilty featherbedders, not to speak of the "idle rich," we may have a great number who more or less unconsciously feel some uneasiness in play—because by cultural definition the right to play belongs to those who work.

On the Enforced Privatization of Women

…The heroine of "Let's Go Out Tonight," for example, is frozen into her suburban cottage, cut off from the whole friendship market of both men and women—except those she can meet socially with her husband. Many suburbanites, not to speak of farm wives, are much worse off. The husband drives to work in the only car and leaves his wife a prisoner at home with the small children, the telephone, and the radio or television. Such women can easily become so uninteresting that they will remain psychological prisoners even when the physical and economic handicaps to their mobility are removed. And this privatization in turn limits the friendship choices and increases the guilts of everyone else. As we saw earlier, the war helped deprivatize many women who welcomed work in industry or other war work as a real increase in their sociability. Even in those cases where earnings are not vital to the established living standards of a family, the working woman frequently does find her way to an independence that would hardly be recognizable by the middle-class woman of the nineteenth century. This independence lays the groundwork for some autonomy in play, even when the work remains, as it does for most working women, routine

Of course, some middle- and upper middle-class women do have time to play. Such women can move into the peer-groups of the bridge players, the garden clubbers, any of the other groups of pastimers. The transition sounds easy. The difficulty is that women are being driven out of many of the areas in which they formerly occupied their leisure with amateur competence. For example, they are no longer welcome as ladies bountiful; the social workers have so professionalized the field of helping people that any intrusion by benevolent amateurs is deeply resisted and resented. Likewise, amateurs can no longer help such people, unless they are willing, as nurse's aids, to help registered nurses be professionals by doing all the dirty work for them. They cannot help others enjoy themselves, because settlement work and recreational activities have also been professionalized. While local chapters of the League of Women Voters and the Y.W.C.A. have a good deal of leeway in developing programs and have an opportunity to relate these to local needs, there is considerable reluctance to try out innovating programs that have not been tested elsewhere or suggested by the national offices. Thus, although with important exceptions, everywhere women turn to put their part-time energies to work, they face a veto group and its insistence that, to participate, they must go through channels or become slaveys and money-raisers for those who control the channels. And money-raising itself is now increasingly professionalized, with only the money-giving left to the "participants." Reacting to this situation, the women either sink back into indifference or conclude, like their working-class sisters, that only through a job, a culturally defined job, will they be liberated. Instead of moving toward autonomy in play, an autonomy toward which they could also help their men, they often simply add to their own domestic problems all the anxieties men endure at work.

On the Temptations of the Retro-ism of “Craftmanship”

It is important to see the limitations of the answer of craftsmanship, because otherwise we may be tempted to place more stock in it than is warranted. This temptation is particularly strong among those who try to deal with the challenge of modern leisure by filling it with styles of play drawn from the past in Europe or America. Indeed, there is a widespread trend today to warn Americans against relaxing in the featherbed of plenty, in the pulpy recreations of popular culture, in the delights of bar and coke bar, and so on. In these warnings any leisure that looks easy is suspect, and craftsmanship does not look easy.

The other-directed man in the upper social strata often finds a certain appeal in taking the side of craftsmanship against consumption. Yet in general it is a blind alley for the other-directed man to try to adapt his styles in leisure to those which grew out of an earlier character and an earlier social situation; in the process he is almost certain to become a caricature. This revivalist tendency is particularly clear in the type of energetic craft hobbyist we might term the folk dancer. The folk dancer is often an other-directed urbanite or suburbanite who, in search of an inner-directed stance, becomes artsy and craftsy in his recreations and consumer tastes. He goes native, with or without regional variations. He shuts out the mass media as best he can. He never wearies of attacking from the pulpit of his English bicycle the plush and chrome of the new-model cars. He is proud of not listening to the radio, and television is his bugbear.

The vogue of the folk dancer is real testimony to people's search for meaningful, creative leisure, as is, too, the revival of craftsmanship. The folk dancer wants something better but does not know where to look for it. He abandons the Utopian possibilities of the future because, in his hatred of the American present, as he interprets it, he is driven to fall back on the vain effort to resuscitate the European or American past as a model for play. Like many other people who carry the "ancestor within" of an inner-directed character and ideology, he fears the dangerous avalanche of leisure that is coming down on the Americans.

On Hardship and Redemption

…a number of contemporary critics…, though genuinely concerned with autonomy, have no hope of finding it in play—not even, for the most part, in the hard play of crafts or sports. These critics… look to experiences of enforced hardship in work, or even to social and individual catastrophe, as the only practicable source of group cohesion and individual strength of character. They see men as able to summon and develop their resources only in an extreme or frontier situation, and they would regard my program for the life of Riley in an economy of leisure as inviting psychological disintegration and social danger. Hating the "softness of the personnel"—not seeing how much of this represents a characterological advance—they want to restore artificially (in extreme cases, even by resort to war) the "hardness of the material."

That catastrophes do sometimes evoke unsuspected potentialities in people—potentialities which can then be used for further growth toward autonomy—is undeniable. A serious illness may give a man pause, a time for reverie and resolution. He may recover, as the hero, Laskell, does in Lionel Trilling's novel, The Middle of the Journey. He may die, as does the Russian official in Tolstoy's short story, "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch," who near death, confronts himself and his wasted life honestly for the first time. And the swath of the last war does offer repeated evidence that not only individuals but whole groups and communities can benefit from hardship, where not too overwhelming. An example is reported by Robert K. Merton, Patricia Salter West, and Marie Jahoda in their (unpublished) study of a warworkers' housing community in New Jersey. The warworkers found themselves living in a jerry-built morass, without communal facilities, without drainage, without a store. Challenged by their circumstances, they responded by energetic improvisation and managed, against all kinds of obstacles, to make a decent, livable, even a lively community for themselves. The dispiriting sequel is familiar: the community, its major problems of sheer existence surmounted, became less interesting to live in, its cooperative store, built by so much energetic and ingenious effort, folded up.

When one reflects on such instances, one realizes that emergencies in a modern society help recreate social forms into which people can with justification pour their energies. People need justification and, as inner-direction wanes, look for it in the social situation rather than within themselves. European and Asian visitors tell Americans that we must learn to enjoy idleness; they criticize alternately our puritan idealism and the so-called materialism which is a by-product of it. This is not too helpful: for if we are to become autonomous, we must proceed in harmony with our history and character, and these assign us a certain sequence of developmental tasks and pleasures. What we need, then, is a reinterpretation which will allow us to focus on individual character development the puritan demands no longer needed to spur industrial and political organization. We need to realize that each life is an emergency, which only happens once, and the "saving" of which, in terms of character, justifies care and effort. Then, perhaps, we will not need to run to a war or a fire because the daily grist of life itself is not felt as sufficiently challenging, or because external threats and demands can narcotize for us our anxiety about the quality and meaning of individual existence.

Autonomy and Utopia

In these last chapters I have set forth some thoughts about the middle-class world of work and play, in the hope of finding ways in which a more autonomous type of social character might develop. I cannot be satisfied that I have moved very far along these lines… In the end, our few suggestions are paltry ones, and we can only conclude our discussion by saying that a vastly greater stream of creative, Utopian thinking is needed before we can see more clearly the goal we dimly suggest by the word "autonomy.”

The reader who recalls our beginnings with the large, blind movements of population growth and economic and technological change may ask whether we seriously expect Utopian thinking, no matter how inspired, to counter whatever fate for man these movements have in store. Indeed, I believe that only certain ideas will be generated and catch on, under any given socioeconomic conditions. And character, with all its intractabilities and selfreproducing tendencies, will largely dictate the way ideas are received. But despite the massed obstacles to change inherent in social structure and character structure, I believe that ideas can make a decisive historical contribution. Marx, who himself denied that ideas are very important and dismissed the Utopian speculations of his predecessor socialists, himself supplied an irrefutable example of the power of ideas in history. As we all know, he did not leave the working class to be emancipated only by events. In his alternate role as propagandist, he tried himself to shape the ideological and institutional environment in which workers would live.

I think we need to insist today on bringing to consciousness the kind of environments that Marx dismissed as Utopian, in contrast to the mechanical and passive approach to the possibilities of man's environment that he helped, in his most influential works, to foster. However, since we live in a time of disenchantment, such thinking, where it is rational in aim and method and not simply escapism, is not easy. It is easier to concentrate on programs for choosing among lesser evils…. It often seems that the retention of a given status quo is a modest hope; many lawyers, political scientists, and economists occupy themselves by suggesting the minimal changes which are necessary to stand still; yet today this hope is almost invariably disappointed; the status quo proves the most illusory of goals.

Is it conceivable that these economically privileged Americans will some day wake up to the fact that they overconform? Wake up to the discovery that a host of behavioral rituals are the result, not of an inescapable social imperative but of an image of society that, though false, provides certain secondary gains for the people who believe in it? Since character structure is, if anything, even more tenacious than social structure, such an awakening is exceedingly unlikely—and we know that many thinkers before us have seen the false dawns of freedom while their compatriots stubbornly continued to close their eyes to the alternatives that were, in principle, available. But to put the question may at least raise doubts in the minds of some.

Occasionally city planners put such questions… In their best work, we see expressed in physical form a view of life which is not narrowly job-minded. It is a view of the city as a setting for leisure and amenity as well as for work. But at present the power of the local veto groups puts even the most imaginative of city planners under great pressure to show that they are practical, hardheaded fellows, barely to be distinguished from traffic engineers.

However, just as there is in my opinion a greater variety of attitudes toward leisure in contemporary America than appears on the surface, so also the sources of Utopian political thinking may be hidden and constantly changing, constantly disguising themselves. While political curiosity and interest have been largely driven out of the accepted sphere of the political in recent years by the focus of the press and of the more responsible sectors of public life on crisis, people may, in what is left of their private lives, be nurturing newly critical and creative standards. If these people are not strait-jacketed before they get started—by the elaboration and forced feeding of a set of official doctrines— people may some day learn to buy not only packages of groceries or books but the larger package of a neighborhood, a society, and a way of life.

If the other-directed people should discover how much needless work they do, discover that their own thoughts and their own lives are quite as interesting as other people's, that, indeed, they no more assuage their loneliness in a crowd of peers than one can assuage one's thirst by drinking sea water, then we might expect them to become more attentive to their own feelings and aspirations.

This possibility may sound remote, and perhaps it is. But undeniably many currents of change in America escape the notice of the reporters of this best-reported nation on earth. We have inadequate indexes for the things we would like to find out, especially about such intangibles as character, political styles, and the uses of leisure. America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests marches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese. By the same token, what my collaborators and I have to say may be very wide of the mark. Inevitably, our own character, our own geography, our own illusions, limit our view. But while I have said many things in this book of which I am unsure, of one thing I am sure: the enormous potentialities for diversity in nature's bounty and men's capacity to differentiate their experience can become valued by the individual himself, so that he will not be tempted and coerced into adjustment or, failing adjustment, into anomie. The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

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