In the affluent nations, he writes, 'most people have enough to eat and are reasonably well housed. Having achieved this thousand-year-old dream of humanity, they now reach out for further satisfactions. They want to travel, discover, be at least physically independent. The automobile is the mobile symbol of mobility ...' In fact, the last thing that any family wishes to surrender, when hardpressed by financial hardship, is the automobile, and the worst punishment an American parent can mete out to a teen-ager is to 'ground' him – i.e., deprive him of the use of an automobile.
Young girls in the United States, when asked what they regard as important about a boy, immediately list a car. Sixty-seven percent of those interviewed in a recent survey said a car is 'essential,' and a nineteen-year-old boy, Alfred Uranga of Albuquerque, N. M., confirmed gloomily that 'If a guy doesn't have a car, he doesn't have a girl.' Just how deep this passion for automobility runs among the youth is tragically illustrated by the suicide of a seventeen-year-old Wisconsin boy, William Nebel, who was 'grounded' by his father after his driver's license was suspended for speeding. Before putting a .22 caliber rifle bullet in his brain, the boy penned a note that ended, 'Without a license, I don't have my car, job or social life. So I think that it is better to end it all right now.' It is clear that millions of young people all over the technological world agree with the poet Marinetti who, more than half a century ago, shouted: 'A roaring racing car ... is more beautiful than the Winged Victory.'
Freedom from fixed social position is linked so closely with freedom from fixed geographical position, that when super-industrial man feels socially constricted his first impulse is to relocate. This idea seldom occurs to the peasant raised in his village or the coalminer toiling away in the black deeps. 'A lot of problems are solved by migration. Go. Travel!' said a student of mine before rushing off to join the Peace Corps. But movement becomes a positive value in its own right, an assertion of freedom, not merely a response to or escape from outside pressures. A survey of 539 subscribers to
An extreme manifestation of this urge to move is found among the female hitch-hikers who are beginning to form a recognizable sociological category of their own. Thus a young Catholic girl in England gives up her job selling advertising space for a magazine and goes off with a friend intending to hitchhike to Turkey. In Hamburg the girls split up. The first girl, Jackie, cruises the Greek Islands, reaches Istanbul, and at length returns to England, where she takes a job with another magazine. She stays only long enough to finance another trip. After that she comes back and works as a waitress, rejecting promotion to hostess on grounds that 'I don't expect to be in England very long.' At twenty-three Jackie is a confirmed hitch-hiker, thumbing her way indefatigably all over Europe with a gas pistol in her rucksack, returning to England for six or eight months, then starting out again. Ruth, twenty-eight, has been living this way for years, her longest stay in any one place having been three years. Hitchhiking as a way of life, she says, is fine because while it is possible to meet people, 'you don't get too involved.'
Teen-age girls in particular – perhaps eager to escape restrictive home environments – are passionately keen travelers. A survey of girls who read
This positive attitude toward movement is reflected in survey findings that Americans tend to admire travelers. Thus researchers at the University of Michigan have found that respondents frequently term travelers 'lucky' or 'happy.' To travel is to gain status, which explains why so many American travelers keep ragged airline tags on their luggage or attache cases long after their return from a trip. One wag has suggested that someone set up a business washing and ironing old airline tags for status-conscious travelers.
Moving one's household, on the other hand, is a cause for commiseration rather than congratulations. Everyone makes ritual comments about the hardships of moving. Yet the fact is that those who have moved once are much more likely to move again than those who have never moved. The French sociologist Alain Touraine explains that 'having already made one change and being less attached to the community, they are the readier to move again ...' And a British trade-union official, R. Clark, not long ago told an international manpower conference that mobility might well be a habit formed in student days. He pointed out that those who spent their college years away from home move in less restricted circles than uneducated and more home-bound manual workers. Not only do these college people move more in later life, but he suggested, they pass on to their children attitudes that facilitate mobility. While for many worker families relocation is a dreaded necessity, a consequence of unemployment or other hardships, for the middle and upper classes moving is most often associated with the extension of the good life. For them, traveling is a joy, and moving out usually means moving up.
In short, throughout the nations in transition to super-industrialism, among the people of the future, movement is a way of life, a liberation from the constrictions of the past, a step into the still more affluent future.
Dramatically different attitudes, however, are evinced by the 'immobiles.' It is not only the agricultural villager in India or Iran who remains fixed in one place for most or all of his life. The same is true of millions of blue-collar workers, particularly those in backward industries. As technological change roars through the advanced economies, outmoding whole industries and creating new ones almost overnight, millions of unskilled and semiskilled workers find themselves compelled to relocate. The economy demands mobility, and most Western governments – notably Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and the United States – spend large sums to encourage workers to retrain for new jobs and leave their homes in pursuit of them. For coalminers in Appalachia or textile workers in the French provinces, however, this proves to be excruciatingly painful. Even for big-city workers uprooted by urban renewal and relocated quite near to their former homes, the disruption is often agonizing.
'It is quite precise to speak of their reactions,' says Dr. Marc Fried of the Center for Community Studies, Massachusetts General Hospital, 'as expressions of
Sociologist Monique Viot, of the French Ministry of Social Affairs, says: 'The French are very attached to their geographical backgrounds. For jobs even thirty or forty kilometers away they are reluctant – extremely reluctant – to move. The unions call such moves 'deportations.''
Even some educated and affluent movers show signs of distress when they are called upon to relocate. The author Clifton Fadiman, telling of his move from a restful Connecticut town to Los Angeles, reports that he was shortly 'felled by a shotgun burst of odd physical and mental ailments ... In the course of six months my illness got straightened out. The neurologist ... diagnosed my trouble as 'culture shock' ...' For relocation of one's home, even under the most favorable circumstances, entails a series of difficult psychological readjustments.
In a famous study of a Canadian suburb they call Crestwood Heights, sociologists J. R. Seeley, R. A. Sim, and E. W. Loosley, state: 'The rapidity with which the transition has to be accomplished, and the depth to which change must penetrate the personality are such as to call for the greatest flexibility of behavior and stability of personality. Ideology, speech sometimes, food habits, and preferences in decor must be made over with relative suddenness and in the absence of unmistakable clues as to the behavior to be adopted.'
The steps by which people make such adjustments have been mapped out by psychiatrist James S. Tyhurst of the University of British Columbia. 'In field studies of individuals following immigration,' he says, 'a fairly consistent pattern can ... be defined. Initially, the person is concerned with the immediate present, with an attempt to find work, make money, and find shelter. These features are often accompanied by restlessness and increased psychomotor activity ...'
As the person's sense of strangeness or incongruity in the new surroundings grows, a second phase, 'psychological arrival,' takes place. 'Characteristic of this are increasing anxiety and depression; increasing self- preoccupation, often with somatic preoccupations and somatic symptoms; general withdrawal from the society in contrast to previous activity; and some degree of hostility and suspicion. The sense of difference and helplessness becomes increasingly intense and the period is characterized by marked discomfort and turmoil. This period of more or less disturbance may last for ... one to several months.'
