University of Virginia Library

Narcissism or the Heroic Self

While Dr. Hadden and I were probing student beliefs, Harvard's David Riesman talked to me about his concept of "privatization." As author of the noted book The Lonely Crowd and of Individualism Reconsidered, Riesman worried about lonely individuals who rely less and less on social institutions yet expect more and more of themselves. Such "privatization," as he called it in an interview for Psychology Today, exposes the private man or woman to more of a burden than one soul can stand without wobbling.

In the years since then, as you know, major national studies show a strong trend toward still more lonely individualism. Americans are losing faith in corporations, government, schools, churches, medicine, political parties, the press, marriage, parenthood—all the traditional institutions. But while giving up faith in institutions, studies show, they continue to demand more and more of themselves in terms of both achievement and that new obsession with self-fulfillment.

In marriage, for instance, a woman now expects herself to be an accomplished bedmate, an intellectual equal, a wise and loving mother, perhaps a fellow jogger and tennis partner and smart tourist, one who continues to grow, a community organizer and co-host, often a co-professional, and almost always a fellow breadwinner. We expect similar miracles from ourselves at work; aside from earning the highest pay ever known, we expect to be sensitive to co-workers, enlarge our education, make a social contribution, and do very little damage to the environment. The average education of the active worker is now that of a college freshman after Christmas, and still going up.

Social critics have tended to look upon such activities as indicators of rampant selfishness. Tom Wolfe's famous essay on "The Me Decade" and Christopher Lasch's book The Culture of Narcissism warned of a hard trend toward such primal selfishness. But there's less selfishness than loneliness in the American psyche today, along with the feeling, of being called upon to do heroic things without warm support from good old reliables like the Democratic party, the Catholic Church, or Good Mother Company. The organizational man who lived and died inside

Good Mother has been replaced by the lonely "mobicentric" who jumps fast from job to job, company to company, and city to city in his or her mobility-centered rush to achievement and fulfillment.

It's as if some idiot had raised the ante on what it takes to be a normal human being. Without noticing the overnight change, most of us strive for the new norm. Sexual behavior provides a sensitive indicator of this revolution in nonmaterial expectations. The true sexual revolution has come, not among the public swingers, but in the privacy of the family bedroom. Princeton studies show that American wives make love to their husbands 21 percent more often than they did five years earlier. Yet many feel that they are doing less than their share, not because they feel deprived but because they fear that they are not living up to the norm. As the country expression puts it, Americans by the million feel sent for and can't get there.

The lonely striver comes to feel that the only resource he or she has to develop in this life is the body and mind, that collection of tissue and talent that's often strained to the limit. It's no accident that jogging has become a national obsession—in what Gallup calls the sharpest behavior reversal he has ever studied—or that the drive for health and physical well-being stays at the top of the rising-demand list identified year after year in the Yankelovich monitor of changing values. Nor is it strange, in a nation turned inward to demand heroic effort from the self rather than outward toward reliance on institutions, that today's mystical surge should focus upon the possible interior powers of the God-given body/ mind and especially upon healing. As life comes to feel more and more like that supreme test of self, the marathon run, our national behavior moves further into the "privatization" trend.

Television becomes the inevitable tool for the lonely striver's worship. Just as media campaigns have taken over from the political party, so the prime-time preachers in their powder-blue suits and cocky smiles have stepped proudly up to deliver the church's sermons. They are smart and tough. Ever more sophisticated in their use of the computer as well as of television—the paired technology that raises millions by its combination of exciting programs and direct mail—the preachers have now gained an earthy new sense of power through their Reagan

victory. Their audiences are far smaller and more regionally confined, in the South and Southwest, than they care to admit, and their chief targets are still among the elderly, who spend longer hours in front of the tube.

But the research laid out clearly in this work by Dr. Hadden and Dr. Swann points more to the future than to the past. Man proposes; God disposes. But whatever turns our spiritual turmoil takes in the Ecstatic Eighties, these celebrity preachers will be a national force to reckon with for years to come.