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Some Political Specifics. Riesman's "construction," from nursery school to veto group, can obviously be used to lay bare the causes of specific defects in American political life (although he does not do so). If politics is heavily influenced by inside-dopesterism and veto-groupism, the observer would expect to find great difficulty in the formation and expression of clear goals, and that is what observers have found in U.S. peacetime policy of the last 20 years, including the last two. The U.S., anxious for approval, listens closely to the signals of the others in the peer group of cooperating nations. It should and must. But it will not, for instance, find goals or policies in the preoccupation explained by an article in this week's New York Times Magazine headed "Do the British Really Dislike Us?"
The Communists, everyone has noticed, seem better able to define their goals and pursue them with relentless energy. That again is to be expected. The Communist scarcity economy is still work-oriented. Red leaders are inner-directed (completely gyroscoped by Marx, Lenin and Stalin); most of their subjects are old-style indifferents. But the Communists, says Riesman, "have become perhaps the most reactionary and most menacing force in world politics" precisely because their picture of the world, while sharply focused, is out of date, and history will not run backward.
The Communists are not the only ones who try to put it in reverse. Riesman is annoyed at those who pick up his biting criticism of progressive schools as they are today and use it to attack Philosopher John Dewey and the whole movement of progressive education—which in Dewey's time, Riesman believes, was a liberating force working against the main lines of a culture where character was inner-directed. Educational reactionaries who want to go back to the little red schoolhouse have set themselves an impossible task. They cannot return to inner-direction because the U.S. cannot return to the days when technology and the population situation made inner-direction appropriate.
The Roads to Freedom. Where does all this leave Riesman's earnest reader? If the reader recoils from the other-directed man and cannot go back to inner-direction, where can he turn in search of morality and freedom in personal life or in politics?
Riesman believes that in each of the three historical kinds of character direction, some men will adjust, some will fail to adjust and some will rise above adjustments. Those who fail he calls anomic (ruleless, directionless); the years of transition between two kinds of direction (inner and other) will produce many anomics. Those who transcend adjustment he calls autonomous. Their social radar is good and they use it when they choose; but they can turn it off and develop the ability to make choices out of their own individuality.
Autonomous men are especially important in a culture of other-directeds; they provide models that call the attention of those who are merely adjusted to the variety of which men are capable. Without such reminders of variety or choice, freedom becomes meaningless.