132
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
RIESMAN CONSIDERED AGAIN
CULTURE AND SOCIAL CHARACTER. The work of David Riesman
reo
viewed, appraised end criticized by his contemporaries in Social Sciences.
Edited by Seymour Lipset and Leo Lowenthal. The Free Press. $7.50.
Our prosperous, unique, odd society was wild we felt, but
splendid, too, like a run-away horse. Right after the war, the therapy
for all our moral discomforts was a daily recitation of the sins of Com–
munism and the Soviet Union and the subsequent healthy enjoyment
of our own virtues, or at least of our absent sins, Nothing much was asked
of us beyond that, no other sacrifice beyond reminding ourselves how
good we were as a people and a system and how little we needed to suffer
the infection of despairing self-criticism. These easy days did not last
long. How quickly we showed an unexpected vulnerability, from within
first-the "quality of our prosperity"-and from without in the vexing
technological success of the Soviet Union. Our hopes seemed to fall
away.
It
was as if we had bought one of those brilliant gardenia plants
too soon before Easter and had watched the rudely forced green buds,
with the white petals tightly curled inside, fall off one by one, without
coming to bloom.
Sometimes one has the feeling of an almost supernatural character
to the shifts and changes in our national mood. They appear beyond
the prose of cause and effect and to live through them is to know the
ineffable pain and fascination of tragedy.
It
was such a short, short
time. We were all ready, as a people, to
go
in for a monumental, historic
relaxation of soul and even of muscle, a relaxtion of effort that was
truly new and whose ultimate meaning one could not even guess at.
Then, suddenly, in the blinking of an eye, we were asked to calculate
how many millions we could lose and still "survive."
Our happier days had been described, with great cleverness and
zest, and in the properly complicated, ambiguous manner by David
Riesman, particularly in
The Lonely Crowd.
He had, or so it seemed,
made the sort of adjustment that allowed him to accept much that
others shrank from assimilating. Riesman saw everything dangerous, but
he did not take the defects of our society with too great a seriousness. He
was, rather, often amused by them and the reader of his books was
somehow invited to get with it, too.
I remember a windy night last spring and the small group of people
gathered in midtown Manhattan for a meeting of the Committee for
Cultural Freedom. (I hope it is not unfair to remember this occasion and
the mood of it. The opinions expressed were not-or so I believe-secret
