THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
their personal troubles in these terms. The values threatened
were plain to see and cherished by all; the structural contradictions
that threatened them also seemed plain. Both were widely
and deeply experienced. It was a political age.
But the values threatened in the era after World War Two
are often neither widely acknowledged as values nor widely felt
to be threatened. Much private uneasiness goes unformulated;
much public malaise and many decisions of enormous structural
relevance never become public issues. For those who accept such
inherited values as reason and freedom, it is the uneasiness itself
that is the trouble; it is the indifference itself that is the issue.
And it is this condition, of uneasiness and indifference, that is the
signal feature of our period.
All this is so striking that it is often interpreted by observers as
a shift in the very kinds of problems that need now to be formulated.
We are frequently told that the problems of our decade, or
even the crises of our period, have shifted from the external realm
of economics and now have to do with the quality of individual
life—in fact with the question of whether there is soon going to
be anything that can properly be called individual life. Not child
labor but comic books, not poverty but mass leisure, are at the
center of concern. Many great public issues as well as many private
troubles are described in terms of 'the psychiatric'—often, it
seems, in a pathetic attempt to avoid the large issues and problems
of modern society. Often this statement seems to rest upon
a provincial narrowing of interest to the Western societies, or
even to the United States—thus ignoring two-thirds of mankind;
often, too, it arbitrarily divorces the individual life from the
larger institutions within which that life is enacted, and which
on occasion bear upon it more grievously than do the intimate
environments of childhood.
Problems of leisure, for example, cannot even be stated without
considering problems of work. Family troubles over comic
books cannot be formulated as problems without considering the
plight of the contemporary family in its new relations with the
newer institutions of the social structure. Neither leisure nor
its debilitating uses can be understood as problems without
recognition of the extent to which malaise and indifference now