Riesman—Abundance For What?

David Riesman
Abundance For What? and Other Essays
(1964)

"Work and Leisure: Fusion or Polarity"
(with Warner Bloomberg, Jr., 1957)
(pp. 147-161)

[149] Some workers responded to the exhausting demands of the workplace by a heroic effort to build up a counterlife outside the plant... Some retired into a close-knit family life and to home-improvement rather than self-improvement...

Where no other escape existed, the factory workers tended, like sailors, to fall back on the common denominator of the male sex as defining their leisure: gambling, fighting, whoring. ... Men became habituated to the factory, as children to school, but this "second nature" never overtook them completely nor turned them into enthusiastic addicts of monotony.

No wonder that a counterattack soon began against the central place of work on the simplest level of demanding shorter hours, with men choosing to take part of their increasing productivity in the form of time off rather than of an increase in real income. ...

[150] At a certain point, however, workers seem to want to buy leisure inside rather than outside the plant. No doubt this in part reflects still operative conventions as to a proper working day... And in part men may fear to have too much time outside—time perhaps on which their wives could make demands.

...

[155] ...the worker, as a parvenu, tends to have a more unequivocal relation to consumer goods than do people who have had a longer exposure to them. One of us supervised a study which illustrates this point. Working-class and middle-class parents were interviewed concerning their attitudes toward TV: for the former, this was an extrapolation of radio and the movies, and indubitably and good thing in a world of things, whereas for many middle-class parents TV presented a problem in self-definition, as well as in its possibly harmful effects on children.

This adherence to the tangible, then, characterizes working-class leisure activities in a wide gamut: the garden harvest which, like the fishing catch, can be counted and weighed; the travel mileages and car horsepowers which can be compared; and sex (whether marital or not), drinking, sports, and betting, which are all felt as essentially palpable. To be sure, we do not want to exaggerate...the lack of abstraction, nuance, and shadings of taste among factory workers. We know that even where the objects are the same, the meanings we assume to be attached to them

[156]

are of course attached only to their human possessors and that there is great variety here. ..

Beyond that, it is our impression that the simplicities of working-class leisure are under pressure not only from the tastes of the better educated strata as class consciousness and cultural encapsulation decline, but also from what we might term the feminizing of leisure. ...

"Leisure and Work in Postindustrial Society"
(1958)
(pp. 162-183)

[169] An informal poll a union local...found that the leaders did want a shorter work week whereas the rank and file did not. This was interpreted as suggesting that the leaders, better educated and more enterprising, feel cramped for time to do everything they want to do... Such men already had many hobbies... But the less active members...had no similar feeling of wanting the days to be longer. Such men, asked what they would do with an extra day, sometimes say, "sleep"; others could use it in hunting season—and already did so, to the dismay of the foreman. . . .

[In another study] some 80 per cent of industrial workers stated that they, in effect, kept on working for lack of alternatives, not for positive satisfactions. ... This clinging to the job is not simply a legacy of the Puritan ethic: it is rather a legacy of industrialism itself, of the old structures it has destroyed and the new structures it has created. Nor is it merely the feeling of shame in not having a job that is involved (although this is certainly an element). Work may not be an active presence in the life of American workers, but its absence would be an active absence. Or, more accurately, it is not so much work that would be missed as having a job...[as in] the self-definition (these data refer only to male workers) that comes from holding a job and the punctuations of life provided by regular employment.

...

[175] I have the impression that a general decline is occurring in the zest for work, a decline which is affecting even [certain] professional and intellectual groups... ...there is some slight evidence that application lists to medical school are no

[176]

longer so full, a decline which is attributed to the belief among young people that medical education is too arduous and takes too long before one is stabilized on a plateau of suburban life and domesticity. ... [In one study of medical students] three quarters of them are married, and, instead of sitting around waiting for night duty or talking about their work, they are eager to go home, help the wife get dinner, and relax with television.

Indeed, when I was an undergrad at The U, many of the grad students were both married and quite eager to go home. This meant, among other things, that you couldn't expect to get a practice room before 5pm, and that scheduling rehearsals was always difficult. It also was, already to me at that age, just really annoying to find music being treated like just another job. (I hadn't seen nothin' yet.)

[178] I have largely been discussing the uneven distribution of leisure in terms of differential attitudes toward work in different occupational groups. In comparison with the achievements of our occupational sociology, however, we have little comparable information concerning the sociology of leisure. ... A more systematic study than most...found that radio and TV listening were the top two activities for both upper and lower prestige groups, followed by studying in the upper group

[179]

and do-it-yourself activities in the lower. The latter spend much more time just driving around, as well as polishing the car; they also spend much more time in taverns. Only in the upper group do people go out to parties, as against simply dropping in on a neighbor... In both groups, commercial recreation outside the home, such as going to the movies, plays little part. This and other, more impressionistic studies point to the conclusion that the busier people, the professionals and executives and better-educated groups generally, also lead a more active life in their time away from work; as the saying goes, they work hard and play hard. ... Contrastingly, at the other end of the social scale, the unemployed as we know from several studies have in a psychological sense no leisure time at all...

"Some Issues in the Future of Leisure"
(with Robert S. Weiss, 1961)
(pp. 184-195)

[188] While for a few [industrial workers] this [response that given an extra hour in the day they would "sleep"] may bespeak an overfull life, and for others a general irritation with a nettling or silly question, the answer seems to us to symbolize the lack of interests and resources that could give point to the leisure time that is now available. ...

[189]

... This relative indifference has not always been the case: in the period before the Civil War, energetic workmen, in a burst of enthusiasm for science and literacy, created and attended the Mechanics Institutes. Presently our education system tends to siphon off from the working class the more literate and ambitious...

It is discomfitting to reflect on the complexity and scope of the programs that would be required to overcome this legacy of passivity and aimlessness. ...

At the level of the society the problems are no less grave. Where

[190]

the recreationist works for the public rather than the private sector, he has as little leverage at his disposal as the city planner has. One of us has recently had the chance to observe the enormous resistance that developed in a small Vermont community to a recreation leader's idea that the town should build a swimming pool, rather than some monument, as a war memorial: the project was fought by the town's elders as frivolous and a waste of money, in spite of the fact that the nearby rivers had become too polluted for swimming. Only great civic effort finally carried the project through, and now "everyone" can see what a boon it is to children and their parents, to farmers and workers after a hot day, and to otherwise idle teenagers, who can display themselves on the high dives, or, if they swim well enough, make a little money and gain some sense of responsibility from helping act as lifeguards around the pool. One consequence of the political weakness of public recreation is a tendency to overideologize particular leisure-time activities, exaggerating their importance and their potential contribution to individual character and the fabric of society. The President's campaign for physical fitness as a way of beating the Russians is an illustration. College sports may have suffered in the same way; it has repeatedly been shown, in novels and in the newspapers, that football or basketball do not inevitably build character. Yet it is hard to see how social forms adequate to the new leisure can be developed without an ideology that will mobilize people and strengthen the power of the few groups who are now concerned with the preservation of wilderness areas, the setting aside of land in our sprawling metropolitan belts for the play of adults and children, and the general release of resources other than commercial ones for experimentation and research in the field of leisure.

In comparison with the organizational forms developed for the integration of effort at work, there barely exist the social forms within which the energies of leisure might be developed or even illustatrated. Yet such comments evoke the whole paradox of planning for the use of what is an uncommitted part of one's life. Leisure is supposed to be informal, spontaneous, and unplanned, and is often defined as unobligated time, not only free of the job but free of social or civic obligations, moolighting, or more or less requisite do-it-yourself activities. One re-

[191]

sult of this outlook, however, is to discourage whatever planning is possible (except, perhaps, in terms of the family, not always the optimal unit for leisure when one thinks of the development of its individual members). When we confront such problems, we are inclined to think that significant changes in the organization of leisure are not likely to come in the absence of changes in the whole society: in its work, its political forms, and its cultural style.

Riesman on Public Performance

In "progressive schools",

Above all, the walls change their look. The walls of the modern grade school are decorated with the paintings of the children or their montages from the class in social studies. Thus the competitive and contemporary problems of the children look down on them from walls which, like the teacher herself, are no longer impersonal. This looks progressive, looks like a salute to creativeness and individuality; but again we meet paradox. While the school de-emphasizes grades and report cards, the displays seem almost to ask the children: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is fairest of us all?" ...

[now in a footnote]

Still more paradoxically, it often happens that those schools that insist most strongly that the child be original and creative by this very demand make it more difficult for him to be so. He dare not imitate an established master nor, in some cases, even imitate his own earlier work. Though the introduction of the arts into the school opens up the whole art world to many children, who would have no time or stimulation outside, other children are forced to socialize performances that would earlier have gone unnoticed by peers and adults.

David Riesman
The Lonely Crowd
("Abridged edition with a 1969 preface")
(orig. 1950)
p. 62

The last point is crucial and, in spite of the many ways this warhorse work has not aged well, this point still is not adequately reckoned with. In fact I would conjecture that it is less adequately reckoned with now than in 1950 when all of this still looked (to some old-fashioned observers) like the radical change that it is.

Wexler (Brain and Culture, 2008) reports that "average national scores on a variety of different intelligence tests have risen steadily and substantially ever since the tests were first developed." (70) "The causes of this...are not well understood" (72), but the expansion of education and the burgeoning complexity of daily and occupational life seem likely to play a role, while increased practice at taking the tests can safely be ruled out.

Wexler's is a valuable scientific entree to the first half of Milo's observation,

each succeeding generation has "improved" technical wiring...

while Riesman's speculation is one angle in on the denouement,

This is much more inevitable than it is admirable; a natural progression of technique, but, of course, not necessarily resonance.

I do not wish to suggest that either the art or the children themselves should be taken out of school entirely. Clearly, however, the success of "improved technical wiring" is useless (dangerous, actually) without addressing the concurrent failure to develop the second- or third- order faculties of "judgment" (Sennett on pentatonics), "continence" (Mumford on everything), "resonance" (Milo above), etc. I'm just a dabbler, but I have spent a fair amount of time in public schools working with students, both individually and in small breakout groups, often during the school day, and I actually don't think I have ever seen the scenario Riesman describes play itself out in any concrete event that comes easily to mind. Quite to the contrary, I have found it very difficult (no doubt as a consequence of the inscrutability of large brass instruments, especially when the kids are barely large enough to hold onto them) to inspire any kind of personal investment at all in the endeavor. Tweens and adolescents often strongly resist "socializing" their performances, but not at all for the same reasons a self-regarding professional might. This quite precludes the teaching of "judgment" or "continence" in artmaking, of teaching the importance of the "kill ratio" to many great artists' great reputations, of its importance to art as an ecosystem. You can try just telling the 8th grade trombone section that the musical world is an "ecosystem." Don't hold your breath! But the message is paramount because clearly, later, something changes for many students, both those who continue with formal arts study and those who strike out on their own, leading to something like the "oversharing" phenomenon. ("Incontinence" is more expressive but doesn't quite work for this part.)

In short, I know not how to teach these virtues, only how to exemplify them. The culture wars have forced people on the Left to fall hard into line on the side of teaching and the teachers without giving enough thought to this distinction. Of course "role model" is a phrase that administrators love and which kids hear constantly at school (or at least I did). Like their better-paid counterparts in pro sports, new band teachers taking over in challenging circumstances often speak of "building a culture" as the most decisive challenge. They're right of course, but we shouldn't have to design it in a laboratory when there's a whole "culture" out there on the outside for students to reckon with. The context in which someone becomes a role model is very important. The culture-at-large may also be lacking in any number of ways, but its subjects are playing for keeps. That is where I cannot avoid agreeing with JT Gatto, though it goes against everything I was raised to believe, that we now need less school and not more. Not no school, and not just school, which is the false dichotomy bequeathed to us by the culture wars. Personally I'd vote for just barely enough school and as much as possible of everything else. If this is so offensive to the teachers, then just make the second half of the school day completely unstructured and keep the whole bloated bureaucracy situation as it is, let people keep their full-salary pensions, etc. Let's just admit that it's postindustrial day care and lean into the positive potentials of that. Give the teachers a chance to exemplify rather than just teach; it'll be as good for them as it will for their charges. After a couple of classes and a healthy lunch, let all the cool kids go hang out with the cool teacher as much as they want, then let them realize that no one is totally cool or totally uncool, and then let them realize how totally uncool it is to be part of the crowd that hasn't figured this out. Lean into their other-direction! My experience is that kids far more so than adults will pretty quickly have an "aha" moment in a scenario like this. And if not, is the worst case anywhere near as bad as what we currently have?

I realize that none of this is going to happen anytime soon, but thanks for humoring my idealism, again.

---

I vividly recall a moment in 1st grade which takes Riesman's observation a step further into Progressive modernity. Sitting in Sue Allen's first grade classroom, in what was, for the time being, a Montessori magnet in Minneapolis' very rough near-Northside, I became fascinated not with the art on the walls but with a giant wall chart documenting everyone's progress in completing assignments. Some students had hardly turned in anything while others had done so much extra credit that they had lapped the field (i.e. when their row was completely filled from left to right, the teacher restarted at the left side with a new/different series of markings or stickers in the boxes). If the point was to shame-motivate the laggards, it didn't work at all. But if the point was to awaken any latent armchair sociologists, then it worked on me, because one day I found myself wondering why some kids hardly did any work while others did all the work. And why did a few do an incomprehensible amount of extra work above and beyond the limit of extra credit to influence their actual grade? I certainly have thought more about this memory after the fact than I did at age six, so the standard caveats apply. But I'm sure that I did ask myself a question in that moment, and of course it's a question that has confounded many brilliant adults too, and hence remains unanswered. 

Later on, the district sabotaged the magnet program and I mostly observed fights instead of wall charts. I effectively had no "education" from third through fifth grade save for Mom teaching me long division in a pinch, though I had plenty of the "complex" non-academic stimulation that Wexler says can build up your wiring. What's really amazing to me now is that I even had friends. One of them fought a bully on my behalf. Yet somehow I grew up to be a misanthrope and to write this blog. This also raises some interesting developmental questions.