Syntheses about Human Populations
by Howard Gardner
Writers—whether journalists or scholars—occasionally take on big assignments. Such challenges are likely to gain a lot of attention—and to generate controversy. A recent effort in this vein caught my attention and brought back memories of an analogous effort seventy some years ago.
In June 2021, respected American journalist George Packer published Last Great Hope. This book is an ambitious effort to explain the current groups and fissures in American society. Packer proposes that contemporary American society is populated by four discrete groups:
Those who see America as a nation largely free of constraints: Free America
Those who are in high paying jobs and do not mingle much with those from other sectors: Smart America
Those who see America as a land of white individuals, increasingly beleaguered by populations that look and sound different from the current dominant demography: Real America
Those who regard America as a fundamentally flawed nation, which has long mistreated Native Americans, Black people, and immigrants, along with those who are gay, bisexual or transgender: Just America;
I believe that Packer has put forth a persuasive portrait of the fault lines in contemporary American society. He has been justifiably criticized for not recognizing explicitly the millions of working class Americans who have consistently voted for Democratic candidates over the decades and who supported Biden’s run for president. This group does not fit into any of the four categories identified by Packer—we might call them Card Carrying Union Democrats. The same could be said for the many wealthy Republicans who did not like President Trump but who supported more standard conservative policies and politicians —we might call them Country Club Republicans. Points well taken.
Let me characterize Packer’s project. He is engaging in an activity that sociologists have long carried out—the positing of ideal types. Ideal types always involve a stepping back from the inevitable messiness of ordinary life. Exemplifying the vision of pioneering German sociologist Max Weber, sociologists seek to capture the most salient features of a current phenomenon, so that it can be easily identified, characterized, perhaps measured.
The very invocation of the descriptor “ideal” constitutes a concession. One rarely, if ever, finds individuals who are perfect examples of a type. But it should be possible to recognize reasonable instances of each type; to describe individuals who are a combination of types, as well as those who seem to elude the classification scheme. This approach was taken by Wendy Fischman and me in our forthcoming book The Real World of College. Therein we describe contemporary American students as taking one of four distinct attitudes towards college: inertial, transactional, exploratory or transformational.
As I read Packer’s book, I was reminded of a delineation proposed seventy years ago, shortly before I began my studies in the social sciences. With his colleagues Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, lawyer-turned-sociologist David Riesman described three ideal types of individuals who spanned the first four centuries of the United States. Initial settlers were largely tradition-directed; they sought to recreate in the new land the religious and social processes of their homelands. Those who ventured forth from the initial settlements [MOU1] —geographically or psychologically—were inner-directed. They worked out their own set of values (neatly captured by the image of an internal gyroscope) and lived according to those values. By the middle of the 20th century, most Americans had long been settled geographically and many were quite comfortable economically. In that milieu individuals were becoming other-directed. They paid keen attention to what their neighbors were doing—whether observed in the house next door or encountered in the stories and ads that populated radio, television, and in the print media. They sought to be just like these others. (Riesman and his co-authors clearly did not endorse other-directedness, but their critique was not integral to the synopsis, the synthesis that they presenting.)
Another typology has been proposed by historian David Hackett Fischer. This scholar has identified four different groups that settled America. There are the Puritans, religious iconoclasts who wanted to escape the struggles of life in England and therefore founded a New England; the Quakers—also religious escapees, but more moderate, with more capacious senses of justice and tolerance, who settled in Pennsylvania; the Cavaliers, chiefly Southerners, who glorified a patrician style of life: and the Free Borderers, who lived in mountainous regions and celebrated their independence (very much in the spirit of Packer’s Real Americans).
Even though these cohorts migrated to American shores centuries ago, one can still see traces of them in contemporary American society—and, as just suggested, even link them to Packer’s quartet. In other writings, Fischer has also contrasted the United States as a whole with English populations that crossed the seas to New Zealand: The Americans tilt toward freedom (Free Americans, Real Americans), the New Zealanders toward equality (The Just Americans, and, at least in spirit, the Smart Americans).
It should be stressed that Fischer as well as Riesman and colleagues were focusing primarily on white Americans, and perhaps even primarily on those of a British or Western European background. Neither Native Americans, nor Black people, nor more recent immigrants from the various lands across the globe were much on their radar screen. That is a failure, a telling omission.
These authors have something important in common. They are all master synthesizers. Whether by training journalists, sociologists, or historians, these authors have reviewed vast amounts of information from many different sources; they then attempt to put this information together in ways that are illuminating and that may even change the ways that readers construe their own society. Certainly, in my own day, Riesman’s typology was on the minds of many—and my friends and I worried lest we succumb to other-directedness. (When, as a high schooler, my future wife Ellen snuck off to a college party with her peers against her parents’ explicit rules, her professorial mother insisted that she read The Lonely Crowd, lest she become other-directed.) And nowadays, Packer’s readers wonder where they fit in—if they do—and what might be lacking, if they don’t.
But the agendas of the authors also differ in instructive ways. Riesman and his authors were sociologists, seeking to understand the current composition of their society and its trends; Fischer is an historian, attempting to explain the origins, the roots, of manifestations which are still apparent. As a practicing journalist and commentator, Packer is concerned about the direction of American society today and going forward. He does not identify positively with any of the groups (though he recognizes that in the eyes of most, he would be seen as a “Smart”). He believes that unless the United States can somehow blend or bring together these different stances, we may become an armed society, or even one that explodes or disintegrates. He puts forth some possible experiences and conceptualizations which may tie Americans closer together. The “Last Best Hope” of his title builds on practices and beliefs that cut across his four types.
With Packer, the stakes are high!
Of course, whether consciously or not, we all engage in synthesizing—whenever we make generalizations – even though our generalizations are typically not as well thought out and as deftly expressed as those discussed in this essay. Many writers and speakers go public with their typologies—but very few do so with the data , the authority, the conviction, and the influence of the authors that I mentioned.
But as I have suggested, these efforts differ fundamentally from those undertaken in the traditional sciences. When a physicist or chemist defines an element or process, the definition is likely to hold. When a biologist classifies an animal, a plant a virus, a gene, that classification lasts a long time—as long as it takes for biological evolution to unfold.
In contrast, typologies put forth by psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have a much shorter life span. More significantly, the very announcement and delineation of a human typology may help to move a group or a society in another, perhaps unanticipated direction. Riesman’s other-directed society troubled many of us. In a similar vein; Katie Davis and I lamented the tendency of what we dubbed “The App Generation” to become App-dependent rather than App-enabled; and Packer hopes that by delineating the distinctive characteristics of the four Americans—their strengths and their weaknesses, he may also catalyze efforts to bring them closer together. Cultural evolution can occur swiftly, but rarely in ways that can be anticipated.