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TRADITION-DIRECTION is the way social character is formed in societies without prospect of much technological or population change. In such circumstances, each generation feels (usually correctly) that the next generation will live much as it lives. The life of the father is exposed to the son in daily living. This is supplemented by training in the etiquette of specific situations in which the son is sure to find himself. All of Asia has been trained in this way—and all of Europe was, down to the Renaissance-Reformation period. Then, in Western Europe, complex and interdependent factors—population growth, technological progress, the replacement of the feudal system with more fluid social forms, the new lands across the sea—made tradition-direction obsolete. How were the young to be trained for the more varied and expanding new life with its demand for initiative?
INNER-DIRECTION was the answer. The elders implanted early a sense of direction toward lifelong goals. Tradition still helps to guide the inner-directed man by helping him select the goals and the general principles of action by which he is to reach them, rather than by leading him with strict supervision through every step of the way. Where tradition-direction puts him on a well-worn path, inner-direction gives him a gyroscope by which, in all situations, he is expected to find the way toward his goal. Inner-direction appears in Catholic as well as Protestant countries, but the internal gyroscopes best known in the U.S. were designed by the firm of John Calvin & Adam Smith. (Andrew Carnegie's was a wonder.)
The tasks of the time that brought forth the inner-directed man were those of production, a hard struggle with hard things: iron, coal, prairies, machinery. Invention, toil, risk-taking and a driving sense of the goal to be won were necessary to meet the mounting consumer demands of rapidly increasing populations passing from static to more fluid forms of society.
There came a point—roughly fixed by Riesman as about 1920 for the U.S.—when production caught up, and not merely in the sense of a temporary surplus in the business cycle. The gates of immigration banged shut, and population growth slowed down. The productive plant would go on expanding without brilliant strokes of individual invention; technological progress could be achieved by routine, built into the research departments of industry. Hours could be cut. Efficiency could be raised by better organization and by lubricating personal contacts within the plant. Emphasis passed from production to consumption, from the hard struggle with the material world to an easier existence centered around relations with other people. In mining, farming, even manufacturing, employment declined, while it rose in the service trades, i.e., in helping consumers consume.
OTHER-DIRECTION came on the scene to form a more appropriate social character. The inner-directed man's gyroscope of fixed goal and principle is replaced by a radarscope. This is not "set" toward a goal; it does not tell the other-directed man where to go or how to get there, except as changing signals from "the others,"—themselves often "other-directeds" without fixed goals—tell him what he should, for the moment, be or do.