The Twilight of the American Enlightenment (12 page)

The pervasiveness of new products, of new choices, and of expert advice on using them was multiplied by the commercial interests involved and the ever-present advertising. The classic case of how scientific authority might be mobilized to shape individual behavior was in cigarette advertising. In the
early 1950s, the makers of Lucky Strike and Camel, two of the
most popular brands, sent free samples to doctors and then vied with each other in their ads over which was preferred by the most physicians. So common were doctors in ads celebrating the health benefits of various brands that Old Gold, which tasted too strong to compete as healthful, countered with a long-standing ad: “If you want a Treat instead of a Treatment, smoke Old Gold.” Chesterfield provided an archetypical combination of American reverence for both science and personal choice in its ads, depicting a scientist looking into a microscope while holding a cigarette in one hand: “SCIENCE discovered it. YOU can Prove it. No unpleasant after-taste.” By the latter part of the 1950s, when health claims were being questioned, Viceroy, which touted a scientifically developed
filter, also played the popular nonconformity card, saying, in
its 1958 ad, “The Man who Thinks for Himself Knows . . . Only Viceroy has a thinking Man's Filter . . . a Smoking Man's Taste.”

Experts were helping to change sexual mores as well. As had
been true of most societies, in the United States of the 1950s there was a large gap between the professed public standards
of morality and the actual behavior of ordinary people. Since at least the 1920s, one of the functions of the scientific expert had been to challenge restrictive conventional moralities. Freudianism, for instance, had been widely interpreted as an attack on sexual repression. Standard anthropological texts, such as Margaret Mead's
Coming of Age in Samoa
or Ruth Benedict's
Patterns of Culture
, helped relativize traditional Western assumptions about morality by showing that other societies thrived on very different views. In the postwar era, the most influential scientific studies reinforcing changing standards regarding sexuality were Alfred Kinsey's
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
, published in 1948, and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, published in 1953, together known as the Kinsey Reports. Both books, but especially the latter, because it discussed women, elicited a public outcry, a response that propelled the hefty volumes into becoming sensational best-sellers. The objections were not so much to the findings of the reports as to Kinsey's stance as the dispassionate scientific observer of the behavior of the human animal (he was a professor of zoology at Indiana University). What was entirely lacking in the reports, the critics pointed out, was any moral consideration. Rather, Kinsey documented that premarital and extramarital sex were not only commonplace, but might also be associated with health and happiness.
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The 1950s are sometimes thought of as being morally conservative—and in many ways they were, compared with what happened a generation later. But they can also be seen as a time of emerging permissiveness. World War II helped to loosen acceptable standards of behavior in all sorts of ways
so that values were rapidly changing. The sexual revolution of the 1960s can be seen as an acceleration of trends that already were well under way. In 1953, Hugh Hefner launched
Playboy
magazine, propelled in its first issue by what became an iconic nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe. Some feared that publication of the photograph would ruin her movie career, but instead it helped to raise her to superstardom. Another sign of the times was that in 1956, Grace Metalious's first novel,
Peyton Place
, became a runaway best-seller, with more than 8 million copies in print by 1958.
Peyton Place
, like the Kinsey Reports, was not great literature, but it had a similar attraction in making public the kinds of sexual secrets, affairs, and premarital pregnancies that everyone knew about but was not supposed to talk about in small town America. By 1958, an American publisher dared to release Vladimir Nabokov's
Lolita
, the story of a middle-aged man's affair with a girl in her early teens. The novel, which was exceptional as literature, had been completed in 1953 but turned down by American publishers. It was published in France in 1956 but subsequently suppressed in both Great Britain and France. Yet it passed without censorship in the United States in 1958 and became yet another best-selling sensation. By the next year, a judge had allowed for the American publication of the original version of D. H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
, a 1928 work that had long been banned as pornographic. American movies were still relatively tame, largely because of censorship that was especially responsive to Roman Catholic concerns, but by the end of the decade American public culture was on the verge of definitions of freedom that in a few years would include sexual freedom.
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Clearly, then, the experts did not create the revolution in mores. Rather, as was evident in the case of Kinsey, they simultaneously reflected the trends already in progress and provided them with scientifically based authority. Sexual mores were changing for many reasons, including increased social mobility, massive commercial interests that used sexual innuendo to sell products, and the simple propensities of human nature. Individual freedom was a long-standing ideal, and many people found it attractive to add sexual freedom to their list of natural rights. Nevertheless, scientific and social scientific studies were also providing sanctions for progressive views that said that individual self-determination was a preeminent value.

Arguably, the most influential expert in all of this was Dr. Benjamin Spock. His book
The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
, first published in 1946, quickly became a best-seller, and eventually, “Dr. Spock,” as the book was known, was seemingly the universal child-care book of the era. It was so widely recognized that it was used as the basis of a controversy between Lucy and Ricky on an
I Love Lucy
show. And like the other experts, he was providing scientific authority that both reflected and shaped America's increasingly individualistic mores.
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Dr. Spock was a particularly appealing scientifically based
expert because he questioned the authority of experts. Child-rearing experts of the previous generation had promoted overly technical models for infant care, stressing the necessity of routine and discouraging old-fashioned instinctual practices, including breast-feeding. Dr. Spock's opening message, by contrast, was quintessentially American and midcentury: “
Trust yourself
.
” He assured new parents, in his preamble, “
You know more than you think
you know
.” The experts may have calculated scientifically based routines for your child, but new parents should not be overwhelmed. They should trust their common sense. And the counterpart to trusting yourself was to trust your child. As if to counter any lingering Calvinism, Spock, a New Englander himself, assured readers, “Your baby is born to be a reasonable, friendly human being.” That philosophy translated into advice to abandon the harsh methods of discipline that were often common in child rearing up to that time. Parents should not shame their children; spankings should be rare, at most; and far more could be accomplished by demonstrations of love than by punishment, which could
create resentment and maladjustment. Dr. Spock's outlook included elements that combined B. F. Skinner and Carl Rogers. One should use positive reinforcement techniques, but also trust oneself and trust one's child.
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Sydney Hoff, May 24, 1958,
The New Yorker

These trends that were so
characteristic of the 1950s would have a lasting cultural impact. “Trust yourself” had been around at least since the days of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but at midcentury the advice came not just from exceptional individualists, but from almost everywhere, and with the authority of modern science. Social scientists of many stripes were proclaiming that conformity was the problem and nonconformity the solution, and so was almost everyone else, including contemporary artists, novelists, playwrights, poets,
humanists, existentialists, and an assortment of pundits and
clergy.

The meaning of life, everyone seemed to agree, could be found not by looking to tradition or to community, either past or present, but rather, by looking within. This midcentury consensus recommended that people free themselves, often with the authority of modern science, from traditionalist moralities and mythologies. Individual development, individuality, and self-fulfillment should be preeminent goals.

The resulting outlook has been nowhere better characterized than it was in the late 1970s by Christopher Lasch as “the culture of narcissism.” Lasch, who came of age in the 1950s, grew up in a politically progressive family and spent his career critiquing the defects of the progressive liberal culture that had emerged since midcentury. Outlooks such as those of Carl Rogers were especially subject to his withering gaze.
“Economic man himself,” he wrote, “has given way to the psychological man of our times—the final product of bourgeois individualism. The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety.” By way of contrast, he said, nineteenth-century American individualism and the cult of success were not so much based on competition as on “an abstract ideal of discipline and self-denial.” In the twentieth century, success became increasingly defined as victory over one's competitors, so that people “wish to be not so much esteemed as admired. They crave not fame but the glamour and excitement of celebrity.” The new media greatly enhanced such attitudes. Advertising had created a culture in which people were more fascinated by images of things than they were by the things themselves.

Yet this new narcissistic culture, as Lasch described it, was not purely individualistic, because it also had to suit the needs of bureaucratic capitalism, which helped produce it. Bureaucratic culture (or that regulated in detail by administrators) came to favor the person who, much like David Riesman's “other-directed man” or William Whyte's “organization man,” was skilled at manipulating personal relationships, but had no deep attachments. Society also developed what Lasch characterized as a “new paternalism”—directed by the expert, often supported by the government, and offering scientifically based advice on almost every conceivable dimension of human activity. B. F. Skinner might be seen as at least a minor prophet of that side of the culture. Almost every waking moment, in play as much as at work, in personal relationships, in home life, and in matters of health, was considered to be at its best when it was guided by the benevolent advice of the expert.
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As Lasch and others have observed, the two sides of the emerging culture, both narcissistic individualism and regulation by bureaucrats, are not as contradictory as they might seem, but can be complementary. When communities become almost entirely ad hoc—that is, they exist for particular limited purposes, whether for work, personal relationships, or recreation—the individual can reign supreme as at least in principle the designer of his or her own “lifestyle.” Work may be governed by administrators and technical methodologies, but work also has the potential to provide one with the financial means and freedom to select one's own set of lifestyle activities. What frequently becomes problematic in this often attractive arrangement is the question of meaning. To what extent can meaning be found in the endless quest for competitive advancement, consumer goods, and entertainment? In a culture of self-fulfillment, what is actually fulfilling? As sociologist Robert Bellah and his coauthors wrote in their classic book
Habits of the Heart
, in describing the prevailing American culture as it had evolved by the 1980s, American culture revolved around two poles: the manager and the therapist. “The goal of living,” observed Bellah, “is to achieve some combination of occupation and ‘lifestyle' that is economically possible and psychically tolerable, that ‘works.' The therapist, like the manager, takes the ends as they are given; the focus is on the effectiveness of the means.” As Bellah put it, the “center is the autonomous individual, presumed able to choose the roles he will play and the commitments he will make, not on the basis of higher truths but according to the criterion of life-effectiveness as the individual judges it.”
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At midcentury, two of the great ideals inherited from the enlightenment era—faith in scientific instrumental reason and faith in the individual—were among the most widely shared beliefs in the culture. In the upheavals of the late 1960s, many young people protested against the seeming contradictions of the two, as in countercultural outcries against the technocracy of capitalism and the military, against scientific planning and control, and against the myth of objectivity in Western linear thought—all in the name of individual freedom. But when after a few years members of the countercultural generation were settling down and getting jobs, they reentered a culture in which the two ideals, scientific instrumental reason and individualism, were both still alive and well. Rather than being shaped by a community or a tradition, people might choose their own lifestyle. In such a society, the two ideals could be complementary, at least practically speaking. In “the culture of narcissism,” free individuals would be guided by the manager and the therapist.