Social Research: An International Quarterly

THE BIRTH OF THE LONELY CROWD

The twentieth century is the century of crowds, masses, mobs, and swarms, coproduced in the familiar marriage of sociology and social life, and enabled by the social construction of sociology. Ever since Tönnies, Weber, Durkheim, and various lesser fathers of Western sociology pondered (and bemoaned) the victory of the routinization of mass society over the charms of earlier, more intimate social bonds, humans in the aggregate have been the source of much anxiety. The mass human or the human mass has been studied by Gustave Le Bon, Ortega y Gasset, the leaders of the Frankfurt School, and many other luminaries of social science. Fears of humans becoming machines, of the organic becoming mechanical, of crowds becoming mobs had a special terror for liberal democrats, for whom masses were the hidden underbelly of democracy in the age of elections, parties, and the expansion of the right to vote. Nazism and its various European and American versions, along with Soviet Communism, offered the comfort of suggesting that these terrible forms of collectivization were the results of totalitarianism and not of democracy. Now, almost a century later, Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, and many other elected tyrants have ended that illusion.

But the 1950s, especially in the United States, had two sides. One was the utopia of suburban lawns, Reader's Digest, imitative consumerism, Levittown, and the fantasy of the United States as composed of a population of Ozzie-and-Harriet households, with Blacks, cities, communists, and aliens from outer space safely outside the realities [End Page 362] of ordinary middle-class life. But the "dangers" of these "alien" forces were never far away, and they animated a spate of major studies on the dangers of corporate homogenization and Stepford suburbanism for the most cherished American ideals of individualism, freedom, adventure, and self-creation. No book in this vein was more important or influential than The Lonely Crowd (1950), coauthored by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney, but largely credited to the brilliance of Riesman. Along with a landmark study of the American middle classes by C. Wright Mills, the great Marxist sociologist (1951), this book later opened the space for important books like the best-selling novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson (1955) and the pathbreaking sociological study The Organization Man (1956) by William F. Whyte. Many less forceful books, articles, and opinion pieces in the 1950s subsequently echoed this strain of American noir sociology and laid the grounds for much of the oeuvre of John Updike (exemplified by the series of novels about Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom), J. D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield relentlessly spotting "phonies," and most recently, Jonathan Franzen's elegy to solitude, How to Be Alone (2002).

This 2002 collection by Franzen is a flashback to the romanticism of the eighteenth century, the enemy of the sublime now being not crowds but the digitalization of privacy, the publicity of confession, the shrinking of public space, and the possible death of the novel, all because solitude has shrunk (again), leaving the lonely crowd without the resources to write real prose or poetry. Even so ultramodern a writer as Don DeLillo was enlisted to allay Franzen's despair and to show him that we must keep up the search for writerly solitude in the age of a shrinking public sphere (Adams 2002). DeLillo is today's Wordsworth, a measure of how hard we have to run just to stay in place. Yet while Franzen was mourning the cult of privacy and the shrinkage of the public sphere, Robert Putnam, only a few years earlier, was being hailed as the new David Riesman for his work on social capital, loneliness, and the erosion of civil life in America. Riesman's "other-oriented" Americans, who listened only [End Page 363] to the bugle call of conformity and had lost touch with their inner individualism, were by the late 1990s seen by Putnam as woefully under-socialized, too lonely for their civic good, inadequate generators of social capital, zombies on a lonely planet. The other-oriented had begun to bowl alone. It is not within my remit to speculate on whether this change over a half century was due to tectonic sociocultural changes in American society or came from some melancholia within American social science, especially among its Tocquevillian voices. What is clear is that Americans, at least when they had the leisure to reflect on themselves, did not know the boundary between loneliness and healthy individualism, or between being dressed in gray flannel and being civic beings. Some of this ambivalence casts light on the recently ended Trump presidency and Trump's fascinating disdain for the "image," the latter being another key trope of the American 1950s and its concern with the attention of others and with sociability through self-promotion.

TRUMP AND THE DEATH OF THE IMAGE

For decades, starting in the 1950s, critical social scientists and public intellectuals moaned and groaned about the hegemony of the "image" in American life. They included Daniel Boorstin and Kenneth Boulding, as well as numerous critics of advertising and consumerism, all alarmed by the rise of "the man in the gray flannel suit" and "the organization man." These opinion makers were worried that the United States had lost touch with honest communication and unmediated truth. The growing domination of the image in all domains of American life was seen as a special concern in regard to democracy, elections, and political speeches by politicians who were increasingly driven by the maintenance of their images and the value of these images for their electability. The counterpart of this concern was an idea of the real, the non-curated, and the authentic, which was quite innocent by our current standards. The crucial element that created the conditions of this broad anxiety about the image was television, which took off as a media technology after World War II and became [End Page 364] the defining edge of news, entertainment, communication, and advertising. It was the critical technology of what Michael Schudson decades ago called "capitalist realism" (Schudson 1984).

Since the 1950s there has been a steady differentiation in this anxiety about the power of the image in American life, but it has never been dissolved or displaced. There were of course mechanical images and advertising before then, but television brought images, news, advertisements, and entertainment into the American living room in a manner that changed the logic of representation (in both the electoral and visual sense) in American public life. Until about the beginning of this century, what we witnessed was a refinement in the techniques of image production. In the realm of digital images, "photoshop" entered the English language to refer to a host of applications that could let us doctor photographs and images of all sorts. Improvements in video technology allowed millions of ordinary people to picture themselves as they pleased, at work, at play, at sex, and at religion. YouTube revolutionized the speed and reach of demotic image production, and TikTok has added a further self-to-self mode of entertainment as commerce, self-promotion, and grassroots celebrity. Instagram has changed the image of images, putting images and image-sharing at the center of the attention economy, and bringing about the rise of "influencers."

In all these moments in the story of the image in American politics since the 1950s, we see that Roland Barthes may have been right that images (especially those tied to the news) take on their full force in a field of narrative texts. The visual and the linguistic elements work together. Trump, being indifferent to the visual and a serial abuser of words, sentences, and elementary grammar, produces a connotative miasma through his public images and statements, leaving only his most loathsome qualities to make the Trump myth legible. His utter indifference to how best to use images to represent himself cuts the ground out from under modernist worries about hypocrisy and sincerity. By closing the gap between self and image to a vulgar ground zero, Trump plays on the idea that he is the only sincere [End Page 365] person in a world of hypocrites and that even his hypocrisies are evidence of an untutored sincerity.

Most important, we saw the birth of "fakeness," the deliberate production of manufactured images designed to distort, falsify, embellish, or sidestep almost any variety of documentary image. These doctored images were often in the service of news, propaganda, and hate, both on mainstream and social media. We know now that "fakeness" in politics, commerce, and social life has acquired a social ontology of its own, and is now a parallel university of ersatz facticity. This new regime of quasi-truth thrives on the speed with which viewer and sender are connected, leaving no time for reflection, criticism, or skepticism, but only for instant communication or miscommunication. Thus "real" images and "fake" images have become each other's props rather than genuine ontological antagonists.

Donald Trump, since 2016, has exemplified a new phenomenon that signals the end of the image in modern politics. This may seem a silly statement, given his pathetic efforts to manage his tan, his blond hair, his dangerously plunging tie length, his verbal idiocies, his mass rallies, and his absurd press conferences. He has worked hard to doctor some of his public statements and appearances. He picks his favored media tools (such as Sean Hannity) carefully; he exaggerates his business acumen, his intellect, and his "genius" in most worldly affairs. But we should not mistake Trump's strategy for yet another chapter in the long history of image management in American politics, going back to the famous five-o'clock shadow on Nixon's face during the debate with Kennedy in 1960.

The logic of the image for the last seven decades was the effort to disguise flaws and broadcast the cleanest, most dignified, most broadly acceptable versions of a politician's face, messages, and life history. Trump rightly concluded that the only people he needs to worry about in regard to his image are the tiny sliver of people who are electoral fence-sitters, since he has utter contempt for liberals, Democrats, progressives, and leftists of any type. Outside of this tiny sliver, there is an even bigger reason Trump is simply uninterested in [End Page 366] any traditional idea of the image: 40 percent of the electorate loves him because of—not in spite of—his vulgarity, his misogyny, his lies, his cheating, and his daylight robbery of other people's assets. They do not want him to be cleaned up, dressed up, or made up. They do not want lipstick on their pig. Trump has killed the image because his followers hated it. They want him as unvarnished as possible. We must not mistake his occasional efforts to clean up his act (largely against his own instincts and those of his followers) for a deep interest in his public persona. Image maintenance is for losers, even if he is sometimes forced to do it.

Trump's image is indeed identical with a lack of interest in the management of appearance. Volatility, abuse, and lying are who and what he is, and those who surround him gradually learned that there is no reason to clean up this appearance. Trump speaks truth to power, for power, and of power. He thus had no reason to waste time on genuine image management, which has historically involved careful speechwriting, engineered public statements, elaborate PR campaigns, strategic handling of press relations, and massive attention to airbrushing gaffes, obvious errors, and poor media appearances for any leader in politics, commerce, or media. Trump has bid goodbye to all that. And in January 2021, the United States bid goodbye to him.

He challenged us to question his most abominable habits, actions, and beliefs. He revels in his lack of need for any sort of doctoring of his thoughts, feelings, and prejudices. He represented Power against the Image, not the power of the image. This is why he achieved a big step on the road from immunity to impunity, the dream of every autocrat in these times. He does not care about what he seems to be, except to make sure that it meets the hunger of his followers for raw Trump, Trump on the rocks, uncut, unmixed, undiluted. Trump and his followers are only slowed down, befuddled, or embarrassed when they are drawn into the space of image management—when he has been accused of endangering some primary Trump value, such as whiteness, patriarchy, nepotism, or thuggery, by mismanaging his image. For the rest, both Trump and his followers operate outside the [End Page 367] domain of the image and have thus sidestepped the cardinal principle of American politics, commerce, and even law. The kind of racist, hypermasculine, angry male persona that Trump is happy to present to the public is built on his misogyny. His contempt for the image is grounded in his contempt for women, whom he only grabs, insults, or penetrates. Trump is placing all his bets on American male culture today, where image management is literally for pussies. That bet might return to haunt us as Trump contemplates his remaining eight lives in politics.

The events of the few weeks between the attack on the US Capitol of January 6, 2021, and Joseph Biden's inauguration on January 21 did not offer us any evidence of a different Trump. In the grotesque debates with Biden, he reveled in his undoctored and untutored self: his interruptions, his abusive style of attack, his reckless disregard for facts, his bullying instincts. He made no concessions to any idea of presidential demeanor, temperament, or balance. And in the horrifying farce attending his diagnosis with COVID-19, he doubled down on being himself: unafraid to appear in disheveled clothing, sometimes gasping for breath, rasping about his immortality. Even as his closest advisers and family members toppled like flies, he boasted about his recovery, lied about his symptoms, and fudged the truth about his need for constant medical support. Even this latest karmic twist did not raise any doubt in Trump about how he appears. What he is and what he does are not two separate things, whose distance needs curation.

In this sense, Trump is the first political leader who has no real interest in either communication or miscommunication, for both belong to the realm of the image. One of the great American social scientists of the twentieth century, Erving Goffman (1959), showed that society as a whole rested on an elaborate set of masks, rituals, and signals through which humans showed their competence to be considered social, and thus human. We "present" ourselves in everyday life and take pains to master the elementary rules of social life, even when we are alone, invisible, or thoroughly marginal. Everyone has [End Page 368] a face to present and to save. Even total institutions (such as prisons, asylums, and hospitals), according to Goffman, have elaborate rules for the etiquette of daily interactions, the ignorance of which puts one at risk of being seen as inhuman. This set of performances is the key to social order, and only the child, the sociopath, and the completely feral human being fail to try to do well on this social stage. Goffman's view introduced the metaphor of drama to our sense of ordinary social life, and thus made the politician, the celebrity, and the star only the most intense practitioners of an art—image building—that was vital to every social human being. Thus, Trump got rid of an elementary requirement not just of politics but also of sociality and humanity. The normally decorous and image-conscious Margaret Thatcher famously said in 1987 that "there is no such thing" as society. She intended her radical ethical atomism to be the takeaway from this pithy remark. Trump not only literally believes that collective institutional arrangements for the social good are bankrupt (as Thatcher did) but also lacks either a social conscience or consciousness. Trump is Thatcher minus her Tory convictions and her petty bourgeois proprieties.

We might be tempted to say that every populist appears to reject the ordinary rules of social life and seems to be a sort of Übermensch to his followers, bound neither by law nor by etiquette. In some ways this is the inner logic of what the great German social thinker Max Weber called charisma. But Trump is not in the Übermensch game. This view might seem to be contradicted by his exaggerated claims about his wealth, his magnetic attraction to (though not for) the opposite sex, his outsize buildings, resorts, and crowds, and his self-reported phallic endowment. But these claims are not his idea of evidence of his being superior to the rest of humanity. His rejection of the labor of image building and image maintenance is about his total immunity from the demands of sociality. His exaggerations about his assets (physical and economic) are a send-up not of normalcy but of normativity. [End Page 369]

Hence Trump's open contempt for all the key American institutions—the judiciary, the legislature, and the free press—as well as for teachers, military personnel, and scientists, is a radical claim to independence from the very idea that there is an abstraction called society, which is what makes us comply with any sort of morality at all and makes us both social and human. The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued that this inner voice, which regulates the unchecked impulses of the individual self, is no less than society inside each of us, a force so heavy, so unquestionable, and so sacred that we indeed often identify it with some form of divinity. It is this sense of the social from which Trump declared his independence. And thus, his sense of both immunity and impunity in regard to law, public opinion, and simple decency was not just a matter of his contempt for democratic institutions. It was his contempt for the social, and indeed for the human itself. His followers do not theorize this impulse, but it is the unspoken canopy under which they can continue to justify their sense of racial privilege, their hatred of minorities, their contempt for science, and their worship of armed force. They worship in Trump his utter indifference to the social and the sociable. In this regard, they are victims of the paradox that somewhere in their hearts, they know that Trump must have equal contempt for them, but they are too far into the Valley of Death to admit this or to turn back.

Thus, the death of the image that Trump both inaugurated and exemplifies is a turn against the social itself. No decent society can do without an elementary scaffolding of regard for some code of conduct, some fundamental respect for the social order, and some principle of social responsibility. The regime of the image that the United States enshrined culturally, starting in the 1950s, was rife with manipulation, subterfuge, and profiteering. Nevertheless, it rested on a profound recognition that promotion and image building work because they are derived from the most elementary social impulse, which is to be recognizable, credible, and comprehensible to one's social others. This fundamental principle is what Trump and his followers have abandoned. The political chaos, the near anarchy, the [End Page 370] invitations to murder and mayhem that they have made respectable follow from this radical departure, reflected in their loss of interest in the image. Although we watched the attack on Capitol Hill of January 6, 2021, the subsequent inauguration of Joe Biden, and the second acquittal of Trump by the Senate after his impeachment by the House, all through images, the fact remains that Trump managed to create a new relationship between his attack on sociality and his contempt for all "others" from his closest kin and followers to his most hated and demonized enemies. This contempt for the social, which created a new way for people to turn their political loneliness into a perverse social movement, was not imaginable without the ubiquity of digital media, to whose relationship with loneliness I turn in my final section.

A ZOOM OF ONE'S OWN

Sherry Turkle's widely cited book Alone Together (2011) is the clearest marker of the ongoing life of the Augustinian tradition, which sees in the noise of the social an obstacle to the company of God and of the early modern Romantic Sublime in which Nature (and its special sort of solitude) is opposed to the gregariousness of social life. Turkle stands out as an eloquent voice of the dangers of technological companionship, especially in the form of toys, simulations, and digital friendship. She fears the end of human emotional depth, of primary forms of company and connectivity, and a growing realm of ersatz sociality due to the ubiquity of machinic forms of comfort and leisure. Turkle is not alone in this thinking, and her concerns have many precedents in earlier critics of new technologies. Likewise, she marks the beginnings of a slew of harsh critics of the digital era (e.g., Chun 2016; Morozov 2013; Vaidyanathan 2011) who see the new technologies, both visible and invisible, as threats to our social values, our human connections, our sense of competence, and our privacy.

These criticisms of the digital era aim to correct the early euphoria about the potential of the internet and its many applications, platforms, and affordances to be inclusive, transparent, and connective, [End Page 371] at a scale traditional social life had never seen. The claim to create a utopia of connectivity was touted as a solution to geographical isolation, social exclusion, and psychological loneliness. It has proved to be none of these, as we now know, in spite of second lives, digital personae, chat rooms, and most recently, the new paradise in which each of us can enjoy a Zoom of our own.

As recently as 2013, the sociologist Eric Klinenberg helped us to see that those who chose to live alone as "singles" were not necessarily lonely, isolated, or alienated. This widely reviewed study was a healthy anecdote to the Putnamist complaint about the erosion of public life due to the increase in living alone. For Klinenberg, living alone did not mean being alone. But unlike Turkle, Klinenberg was not watching the growth in digital loneliness, the increase in a demographic category that was either alone together or together alone, as when a group of young adults goes to a restaurant together only to look incessantly at their own phones, or when people compulsively take selfies when out in public spaces and celebrations, forever seeking to establish their own claim to individuality by exploiting what we might call the "sources of the selfie," a subject Charles Taylor did not quite see coming in his study of modernity. Klinenberg lies somewhere in the space between Riesman's lonely crowd and Turkle's lonely cloud, marking a space for an older form of gregariousness built on the freedom of "going solo."

The major development that seems to tilt us toward anomic loneliness rather than new connectivities is the apparatus of surveillance, both corporate and governmental. Whether one lives in the United States, in China, in Europe, or in societies like India and Egypt, the eyes of officialdom (and its corporate enablers) are able to track one's physical whereabouts, one's Twitter posts, and one's shopping habits, friends, political affiliation, financial status, and more. Privacy is increasingly available only off the grid, and the grid is virtually everywhere. One does not need the modern European valorization of privacy as the key to health, morality, and freedom to see that being on view around the clock, and in respect to the whole 360 degrees of [End Page 372] one's life, is somehow spirit deadening. The worldwide shrinkage of privacy is the price of digital connectivity, and loneliness is available only to the homeless, the indigent, and the abandoned, who are not seen as worth monitoring.

The recent explosion of platforms like Zoom, with their boom economy of conferences, meetings, family celebrations, business negotiations, and more, has changed the nature of work and play under the COVID regime, especially for those with access to adequate bandwidth and computer equipment. Loneliness in the time of COVID-19 is the new normal for security, prudence, and compliance with the edicts of the state. We must be alone, or as alone as possible, if we do not want to get sick or die. Thus, the condition of future sociability is current loneliness. This is the first time in history that social distance and isolation have become the critical requirements of a deferred normality. In a strange way, in the COVID era, the lines between loneliness, solitude, and isolation have once again become blurred. And our only relief from this condition is neither Augustine's God nor Wordsworth's Nature but a Zoom of our own. Or, put another way, as in biblical times, the God we will find as we distance ourselves socially is none other than the latest golem of our making.