578
PAR.TISAN REVIEW
DR:
Even more powerfully. Parents - or usually now "a parent," since a
large proportion of children are not growing up with both of their actual
parents - and their children are much more vulnerable to the peer cul–
ture. But I really should say "peer cultures" because contrary to the vision
of
The Lonely Crowd,
I see now something which is, in some respects, less
attractive than the "other-directeds." The "other-directed" person was
receptive to a large constituency of others. What I see now is a group of
people connected, not always by physical presence, but by network, who
despise the "others," and who see themselves not as massified but as
something else. The example I sometimes use is the movies today, where
we have not one movie being shown in a huge theater for everybody, but
instead different movies in small theaters for half a dozen different, seg–
mented groups. A certain clannishness or zip code or area code America.
People who think of themselves as independent thinkers because they're
not those"others."
DB:
When
The Lonely Crowd
was published you were ambivalent about
the value of the social character you identified as "other-directed."
However, in other articles you published, you made a clearly negative
judgment, seeing "other-direction" as a barrier or threat to free expres–
sion and independent thought. Is that correct?
DR:
Yes, I think that's right.
DB:
Was the trend toward "other-direction," in part, the result of a re–
newed egalitarian spirit and the breakdown of traditional authority, both
of which were perhaps transformed by the technological sophistication of
the modern world?
DR:
Well, that's a very good question. The Second World War uprooted
people. It sent millions to the university; moved women out of the home
to work, and then, of course, sent them back when the men returned.
But the war, for those who took part in it of course, dramatically reshaped
their milieu.
It
shook up America like a salt cellar and then deposited its
contents variously about the country. It renewed the egalitarian spirit.
One of the astonishing things about the war was the near unanimity of
support it had. Before the war, I had been very alert to the isolationists
and had actually written an article, "What's Wrong with the
Interventionists?" for
Common Sense,
a journal edited by Selden Rodman,
who
~as
one of the isolationists more characteristic of Yale than of
Harvard. Some isolationists feared that if America went to war it would
