Read Online The Twilight of the American Enlightenment by George Marsden - Free Book Online Page B

thinkers of the eighteenth-century enlightenment as having too naïvely trusted in reason and for neglecting the irrational, he nonetheless shared with them the confidence that, with proper scientific analysis of the human condition, it should be possible to construct an enlightened society in which peace, brotherhood, and cooperation would prevail .
    More immediately, Fromm’s ideas resonated with the mainstream American conversation of the mid-1950s because heprovided an engaging diagnosis of a malady that one of his former students, David Riesman, had already named in the title of his famous 1950 book The Lonely Crowd . Riesman wrote as an academic sociologist, and not in as accessible a style as Fromm’s, but, like his former teacher, he offered to the general reader a wide-ranging historical and contemporary analysis framed into a few easy-to-remember categories. Despite the academic character of the work, his categories caught on, and by 1954 Riesman had reached what at the time was the closest thing to canonization in America by appearing on the cover of Time . As one commentator remarked at the end of the decade, “ The Lonely Crowd is like a lot of books that have permanently changed men’s minds”: far more people knew its thesis or had looked into it than had actually read it. 7
    Why did the basic motifs of Riesman’s rather turgid analysis resonate so well with middlebrow audiences? The answer is that he was addressing, with a scientific aura, one of the most compelling questions regarding the human condition, a question that had already attracted the interest of many thoughtful people. The question was whether the typical “modern man” had become alienated, inauthentic, conformist, and phony. Every educated person would have been familiar with the theme, as it had appeared in recent popular works of literature. Arthur Miller’s long-running 1949 play Death of a Salesman was among the most prominent of these. Willie Loman, the salesman dominated by his hopes for economic success and being “well liked,” became a symbol of the emptiness of modern times. Countless other literary and artistic works, both at home and abroad, presented complementary themes. One could reflect on the emptiness of modern life in Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit , for example, where hell is to get what one always wanted in life: to be regarded in the perception of others. Or, in Albert Camus’s The Stranger , one might contemplate the meaninglessness of modern existence. Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man in 1952 offered an African American depiction of the artificiality and alienation in the modern world. For middle -class college students who were fretting about becoming conformists, no text was more canonical than J. D. Salinger’s 1951 book The Catcher in the Rye , with its depiction of the phoniness of adult life. No longer was it easy to believe, as it had been in the 1930s, that politics and ideologies might offer real answers. Just as the title of the 1955 novel and 1956 film The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit became another catchphrase to summarize the problem, so the title of the immensely popular 1955 James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause came to encapsulate the worry that there might not be a solution. 8
    Riesman addressed these same sorts of issues, but with a weight of scienti f ic authority that offered historical perspective. He divided all societies into three broad types: “tradition -directed,” “inner-directed,” and “other-directed.” These categories, which he recognized were “ideal types” that glossed over many exceptions, had to do with how each of these sorts of societies most typically shaped the “mode of conformity” or “social character” of its members. Most societies throughout history, including Europe in the Middle Ages, had been “tradition-directed.” In such societies, people typically