Suburbia-a Walk on the Mild Side

...Sometimes these realities break through in the form of "problem" children, or "problem" marriages or even problems arising from loss of control over one's own organism or psyche...

...It is never entirely clear whether they are responding to the actual conditions of suburban life cr to the description of those conditions...

...Family life had already begun to disintegrate, even though the full paraphernalia of status appearances was not yet available...

...As Mr...

...meanwhile he looked out for himself as much as he could...

...Here too the same process was at work...

...He may be able to postpone consciously facing these conflicts but he cannot permanently avoid their consequences...

...It is important to note the self-sealing character of this situation...

...Looking out to their own prospective life cycles, the children soon learn to submerge the spectre of a life that lacks rooted values and creative meanings by throwing themselves into the struggle for status...

...Women usually suffer from these contradictions more than men because they are confronted squarely with an insoluble role conflict...

...By starting from the guidance clinic in the school, they were able to work back into those families where "unmentionable" life problems had cracked through the shell of ap pearances...

...One suspects, or perhaps hopes, that even the career-driven men occasionally feel doubtful about the whole enterprise...

...Dedication to a status-dominated life style deprives individuals of their capacity to establish more complicated identities encompassing a much broader range of human possibilities...

...Middletown became a city with all of the impersonality and atomization that this development implies in twentieth century America...

...It forces them to remain permanently juvenile, regardless of chronological aging...

...The American soldier emerges from this collective portrait as a man without serious commitment...

...The only grain of truth in present day emphasis on "adjustment" lies in its implicit recognition that certain kinds of important human growth can only by achieved by playing major life roles within a community...

...The paradox between busyness and helplessness, between outer bristle and inner chaos, may now become easier to explain: "keeping on the uo" is the prime way for the suburbanite to avoid facing the socio-cultural vacuum in which he lives...

...Children and adults alike develop standardized patterns for restoring some kind of inner balance when their security is threatened...

...The resistance to ideology, stemming partly from the American dream of individual success which not even the depression had been able to destroy, was now reenforced by military experience...

...Their life plans were for the most part, arbitrarily disrupted by vast social upheavals over which they had no control...

...Inevitably, however, it appears that children do gain some sort of insight into the real feelings and dissatisfactions of their parents...

...The mass media brought big-city cultural models into their lives, breaking down local boundaries and loyalties as it did so...

...but it can be hoped that they will consciously confront these anxieties differently...

...It is impossible here to describe fully the institutional transformations taking place in Middletown during this period, but I would suggest that anyone turning to the Lynd's book will find a surprising number of resemblances to the contemporary suburb, perhaps more than he might expect...

...Sociologists have traditionally approached communities by trying to identify the ways whereby the several aspects of life-family, occupation, politics, religion, education and recreation-are given order and meaning through coherent cultural values and networks of social roles...

...But these new possibilities cannot be automatically carried over into the patient's everyday life...

...They had to turn to the Federal government for help and thereby confirmed Middletown's dependent position...

...But before progress can be made, identity must first be seen as problematic and the growth anxieties as real...

...Ten years later, during the depression, the Lynds returned to Middletown and reported their findings in Middletown in Transition...

...If he decides that his own family is inadequate, or even worse, hypocritical, then he will carry a wound that might eventually mark him as a "problem child...

...This discovery itself reflected the widespread breakdown in such relations...

...Immigrant families were exposed to special problems as the discontinuity between the generations was accentuated by cultural differences...

...Husbands, trapped in careers which drain their best energies can look forward to a fate that has become as dreaded as death-that of retirement and free time...

...Perhaps this helps to explain why so many analyses drag on endlessly...

...These professional "helpers" play an increasingly important role in Crestwood Heights...

...Gone too, is the shared sense of having jointly rejected certain old world life styles which the sons of immigrants held in common...

...There is no reason to assume that the problem of identity stops at the boundaries of the suburb...

...There is nothing sadder than the face of an aging man who has gone through life with the emotional equipment of a juvenile...

...The most glaring evidence for this is the genuine crisis in the American suburb over child rearing...

...Readers of Crestwood Heights who have lived in suburbs often report that they find the book unbearably dull...

...Having already been deprived of a sense of relationship in regard to the factories where they worked, the communities in which they lived, and even the families to which they belonged, the soldiers' natural response to participation in a large-scale organization like the army was a deep-seated skepticism toward its larger purposes, together with an eye for their own prospects...

...The change symbolized an entire shift of values and assumptions...

...Putting up a "front" became harder for both classes during the depression but this fact seems to have reinforced rather than weakened the need for doing so...

...In the past this could be undertaken through interviews and ob servation: the assumption being that members of the community would thus reveal their true values and self-conceptions...

...Insofar as they do this efficiently, they are barred from comprehending their own true situation as well as the true situation of their audiences...

...All social psychiatric descriptions of personality types finding their natural habitat in suburbia emphasize the central role played by anxiety...

...Newman has helped us to side step some of this tedious detail by summarizing the book so as to highlight the more dramatic features of the suburban landscape...

...Their emphasis on the acquisition of property became the model to which workers turned when faced with the collapse of previous patterns of life...

...Sometimes clear cut psychopathological or psychosomatic symptoms appear and justify expensive psychiatric treatment...

...The children become aware of its sting when they discover that they are part of the status equipage of their parents and must comport themselves accordingly...

...IV At this point, we can clearly see the most grievous human loss that life in the suhurhs entails...

...And for a time the patienttherapist relationship offers a real sense of new possibilities...

...The middle class had already adopted the Crestwood Heights pattern of projected happiness and success, while the working class was beginning to follow suit...

...Now it is true that all societies use status, the systematic allocation of prestige and esteem, as a way of motivating people to fill social roles...

...Those performing valued activities in a competent manner receive the awards of respect and approval...

...They usually go on to say that they could have written a better book simply by setting down their own suburban experiences...

...Within the framework of the old craft system, the new business classes had begun to assume a dominant role in the community...

...The role conflicts described in Crestwood Heights wherein basic human identities are distorted by the quest for status, are not the exclusive prerogative cf any social strata...

...There are broad convergences among these various concepts deriving at least in part from the fact that the personality configuration described by all of them emerges from what can conveniently be called "mass" society...

...Yet one doubts that Nicola Chiaromonte's dictum, "the mass situation involves everybody," can be so easily defied...

...I should therefore like to supplement his portrait with a few notes that stress the dynamic aspects of the problem of the suburb: where it comes from, in which direction it seems to be moving and what the possibilities are for internal change...

...Furthermore, they sometimes even sense the complicated system of exploitative emotional relationships that under-cuts the apparently placid surfaces of their family life...

...Unfortunately, it is always easier to settle for the stereotyped juvenile patterns promulgated by the mass media and reinforced by the conditions of modern social life...

...Certainly radicals, if anyone, must stand against the ready-made identities, yet readers of DISSENT sometimes complain that too much space is devoted to discussion of the nature of radicalism and of mass society...

...Of necessity Mr...

...Meanwhile, the craft skills of the older generation lost their market value and social meaning...

...This forces the disordered individual to assume a new identity: he becomes a patient...

...One might argue in reply that clarification of a viable radical identity as well as of the pressures threatening to warp it is the main task facing this kind of magazine...

...Yet the depression did expose Middletowners to new social experiences...

...If he chooses to remain in the suburb where intimate emotional communication is precluded, then he must prolong his therapy, since it becomes the only place he can express his cure...

...He fought because he had to...

...But these shamans cannot remove the underlying causes of the anxiety they temporarily allay...

...Perhaps a glance at some difficulties in establishing radical identities will clarify the direct relevance of this viewpoint...

...Newman has neatly summarized the authors' descriptions of personal relations in Crestwood Heights...

...Or, if they happen to be social scientists, they suggest that the whole picture could have been vastly improved by including some statistical data in place of the deplorably subjective approach adopted by the authors...

...On the one hand it arranges matters so that the daily life of the individual, no matter what his age or sex, is divided into many compelling tasks that leave little or no time for freely chosen activity...

...The social structure of Crestwood Heights is strangely paradoxical...

...Everybody is trained to deprecate his competitors without appearing to do so...

...This presumes, however, that there are some stable roles which receive acclaim...

...111 Contemporary social psychiatric theory is just beginning to explore the many special problems raised by this kind of community...

...David Riesman's "other directed orientation," Harry Stack Sullivan's "exaggerated security operations," Erik Erikson's "identity diffusion" and even the thoroughly unsavory "authoritarian personality...

...Similarly, in a mass society that blurs all political distinctions, serious attempts have to be made to distinguish radical from liberal views, just because merging the two does justice to neither...

...But the people of Crestwood Heights are certainly not radicals: they can hardly search for cures as long as they take the symptoms of social illness as signs of personal health...

...The barrenness of their lives cannot be completely concealed and as they approach the "male menopause" this emptiness may even penetrate their own consciousness...

...They were moved to new locations and there forced to associate with people they had never seen before...

...In his article on "Subtopia," William Newman has provided a vivid picture of the modern suburb...

...That people should want to be a part of a community in which they encounter others in dignified human contexts-occupational, familial, political, aesthetic and perhaps even religious roles-is simply to say that people today want no more and no less than at any other time in history...

...Second generation children of immigrant fathers found themselves in even greater opposition to their parents' way of life than did the children of Middletown craftsmen...

...Housewives, taught to desire careers but trapped in the home, cannot lower their fixed grins for fear they will never be able to raise them again...

...In Crestwood Heights, as our authors describe it, even the family is no longer a primary group...

...This anxiety is rarely recognized as such, although it governs the suburbanites' self-marketing operations...

...The victim's cries may not necessarily name his disease properly, but they do indicate that he needs help...

...he also has to spend a tremendous amount of time and energy trying to find out which status models the Joneses are themselves currently keeping up with...

...Because they cannot face their own anxiety and its origin in their life routines, they are unable to visualize other solutions...

...Their busy schedules prevent them from having too much time on their hands in which to feel dissatisfied or envious but when they do there is always one of the ubiquitous psychological experts to turn to...

...Yet it would be a mistake to assume that the typical suburbanite's anxious preoccupation with status as well as his anxious avoidance of genuine experience insulate him completely from the real conflicts in his life...

...It is worth noting that many of the most vehement objections to the army were based on the fact that it violated the "American system" of competitive social display: officers had preferential access to consumer privileges which the ranks were inherently unable to match...

...There is massive covert ccmpetition, always with its thin veneer of friendliness in the relations between children in the school, women in their clubs and men at their businesses...

...Small wonder that the child begins to see himself in depersonalized, almost schizoid, terms even going so far as to develop paranoid attitudes toward his parents and the adult world...

...All of the vital roles wherein the human drama used to be played out-mother-son, father-daughter, worker-player, adult-child, male-female-have been levelled...

...It is important to note, however, that this assumption of industrial roles was itself rooted in the disintegration of a round of communal life...

...In this context, the findings of the Research Branch of the United States Army during World War II, as reported in the several volumes of The American Soldier, are very important...

...Some people do find their way through the banalities of social life to something better...

...Yet they cannot use this insight for growth because doing so would force them to repudiate the only basis for security, such as it is, that they have...

...But it is here that the suburb begins to present some unusual problems...

...Few people reared in modern America manage to escape the pressures toward acceptance of stereotyped selfidentities that provide a temporary resting point in the status struggle but prevent further emotional or intellectual growth...

...Finally, radicals are by no means immune from the status panic and role conflicts that beset suburbia...

...There are no groups of buddies as in the army, nor does there seem to be that minimal sense of shared experience that Middletowners preserved out of their desperate struggle to survive the ravages of industrialization and economic depression...

...We face a curious and probably unprecedented situation here: a society of material comfort and apparent security in which the most fundamental of human relationships, that between mother and child, has become at the very least problematical...

...While all this was happening, sociologists were busy discovering the importance of "primary group relations" in such diverse contexts as the city neighborhood, the factory and the army...

...Families abandoned distinctive cultural life styles in order to pick up the American minimum package built entirely around acquiring and displaying commodities appropriately...

...They became aware of the fact that their destinies could be radically altered by forces that transcended local, regional and even national boundaries...

...During this interval a fairly coherent society premised on the continued functioning of a craft economy gave way to a much less coherent system shaped by the developing economy of mass production and consumption...

...They coped with this by segregating themselves in their own up-to-date "second-generation ghettos" or losing themselves in the anonymous regions of the city...

...The establishment of productive masculine identities covering the various phases of the life cycle is as precarious among workers as among managers, and the wives of both groups struggle with the problems of femininity...

...For not only does the suburbanite have to keep up with the Joneses...

...they were the carriers of the life style that was to emerge with industrialization...

...Helen and Robert Lynd in their classic study, Middletown, reported on the effects of industrialization on a medium sized midwestern town between 1880 and 1924...

...but surely it should be cause for some dismay to find it habitual, as the authors of Crestwood Heights report, that mothers re card suburban children as "cases"the moment they lag behind the hiuhly formalised routines of their mates or show signs of distinctive individuality...

...Like modern industrial life, which it fundamentally resembles, the suburb is frantically devoted to the rhythm of keeping busy...

...Otherwise, his feelings are suppressed and the child inducted into the ways of responsible adulthood...

...It should he stressed, however, that such terms lose their specifically psychopathological implications when we deal with a community in which these responses can hardly he avoided...

...People can't sleep, or they sleep too much, or they overeat...

...When this demand, however, can only be expressed as a desire to fit into a way of life that is inherently incapable of satisfying it, then we have a truly tragic misdirection of human energies...

...As the age of obsolescence nears, the old compulsive preoccupations lose their power to divert attention from the realities of their existence...

...Since no other activities are finally valued in and of themselves apart from this quest for status, it soon becomes obsessive...

...It is worth noting that none of them ever contest the accuracy of the reported picture and most agree that in its larger outlines it is applicable to the communities with which they are familiar...

...This carefully manipulated public image rather than the human relationships sustaining it receives the bulk of attention...

...Its residents are so accustomed to projecting images of themselves as supremely happy and successful that the researcher finds it extremely difficult to pene trate this facade...

...Not to perform these roles is to lose one's place, but sadly enough, performing them can never give one a place...

...Now in the fifties, our suburbs embody the most advanced forms of urban impersonality...

...By then, it is usually too late to do much about it...

...Continual distractions provided by busy schedules and supplemented by heavy doses of mass entertainment may turn attention away from the real problems of life, but the half dreaded, half desired moments of unavoidable- reverie cannot be entirely suppressed...

...however, it must be noted that the price paid for this restored equilibrium is an impoverished emotional life...

...Hence, the peculiarly painful fact that in suburbanite society, for all that it is so conspicuously child-centered and for all that parents habitually make sacrifices in order to get "the best things" for their children, it is an unusual mother who really knows her own child...

...The problem seems partly to be that life in the sub urb consists in a silent conspiracy directed toward mutual deception...

...The Lynds showed how this emerging eco nomic system transformed every area of institutional life so that tradi tional relationships were badly disrupted...

...One looks to the suburb for the real life counterparts of such familiar conceptions as Erich Fromm's "marketing orientation...

...In doing so he has made it a bit less familiar, perhaps rendering it more like something that is happening to others rather than to us...

...Their specific contents making them channels for realizing a particular set of human possibilities have been bartered for an ephemeral and empty sense of status...

...It is important, however, to recognize that the "human material" -just because it is human-does not completely adapt to the pressures or embrace the substitutes...

...Status becomes an autonomous motive and mode of life...

...Newman's picture forms a kind of static cross-section of the suburb...

...They begin to look like modern shamans exorcising the tribal ghosts so that the routines of living can be maintained without interference...

...Church attendance declined as workers and businessmen alike acquired automobiles and elected to enjoy as well as display these on the day formerly reserved for religious services...

...Trade unions and political parties remained for the most part instrumental "counter-bureaucracies" providing occasional protection against equally impersonal big business and big government without commanding any deeper loyalties than either of the latter...

...Even the playtime of the children is routinized, and many families find that the separate schedules of the various members leave no time for intimate moments with one another...

...He has based his picture on Crestwood Heights, a remarkable and extremely important book which has thus far received much attention from sociologists but not nearly enough from the general intellectual public...

...The patient's life commitments undo any beneficial effects of the therapeutic relationship and this paradoxically renders the patient even more dependent on it...

...Anxious mothers, uncertain as to how to raise their children, turn to scientific cxnerts to find out if their children are normal or even more important, what the standard of normality might be...

...Whether they choose housekeeping, careers, or a combination of both, they must sacrifice something of themselves...

...Their most striking observation was that Middletowners had clung to the success formula in spite of the social crises brought about by the depression, largely because they were unable to question a basic premise which seemed to provide them with the only sense of place and continuity they possessed...

...Still, growth happens...

...Crestwood Heights, however, is distinguished by the absence of this kind of consensus...

...As the depression furthered the transition to an industrial economy, local bases for "belonginess" disappeared...

...As they rise through the complex status structures, careful manipulation of their own personalities remains the main stockintrade...

...The child cannot turn to his relative or to the more accessible families of his friends because they too are busy keeping the mask of happiness propped in front of their faces...

...Americans in larger cities experienced similar transitions...

...Though disturbed at the loss of the work satisfactions their crafts had provided them, the workers in Middletown had little choice but to assume the new industrial roles...

...Wives and mothers formerly confined to the home now took jobs to augment the all-important purchasing power of the family...

...Mr...

...They are loved for what they do rather than what they are and this becomes especially bewildering and devastating because their parents constantly insist that the opposite is the case...

...II The preoccupation with status as an end in itself has deep roots in the earlier experiences of the American community...

...The authors of Crestwood Heights have succeeded in capturing the delicate interplay between appearances and reality as the two are woven together to form the fabric of suburban social life...

...Mr...

...Soldiers fighting for democracy found themselves serving under a tremendously authoritarian military caste system which they justifiably despised...

...And the suburb is a better place in which to study this human type than most other city neighborhoods, even though all of them contain some form of the species...

...The experiences of Americans in military service during the forties were quite continuous with their experiences during the depresison...

...No one is surprised to discover that businessmen treat each other in impersonal and manipulative terms...

...Their very starting point, the problem of mental health, which forms a crucial means of getting past the facade of contented suburbia, forced them to pay atten tion to the underlying realities...

...Perhaps segments of the urban proletariat did develop some kind of "class consciousness," but hindsight suggests that even this was permeated by our perculiar brand of individualism...

...Adults in the community, committed to precariously maintained status postures, must continually reiterate to each other and to their children their proclaimed success and happiness...

...for the purpose of his presentation he writes as if-and rightly so-the suburb had neither a history in the past nor possible inner conflicts in the future...

...One can still hope that some of them occasionally feel dissatisfied and lonely...

...Everything is blurred, but above all perception of self...

...The anxieties that cue these responses must remain well below the threshold of awareness...

...otherwise, they would leave the individual in an unbearably agitated state...

...In moments of special vulnerability, like most of us, they must yearn to be members of a genuine community...

...On the other hand, while people are so desperately busy, they do not know or have forgotten how to perform some of the most elemental human tasks...

...For example, the collapse of the craft hierarchy, and the emergence of industrial employment made it possible for sons, previously subordinate to their fathers, to assume higher paying and more valued jobs...

...Each member looks out for his own interests and the only shared value resides in their mutual concern with the impressions they make on their neighbors...

...Its citizens found themselves caught up in the workings of impersonal bureaucratic structures so that the intimacies of small town life soon became dim and possibly ideal ized memories...

...Today's adjustment peddlers-whether they be theologians, psychologists, or novelists-seize on a perfectly legitimate impulse, and it is important to recognize this when criticizing them...

...We have reached here the result of that process within bourgeois society which, call it alienation with Marx or anomie with Durkheim, transforms the human being into an object-and this, strikingly enough, at the very moment when human beings in the suburb believe they have triumpliantly won the battle to gain control over material objects...

...Newman has shown, no one in the suburb really has to know anyone else as long as appearances are kept up...

...Human relationships are valued only as sources of status rather than status being the sign of having successfully become a valued kind of human being...