What Is Nonconformity?

...Exalt independence, originality, heterodoxy, criticism, nonconformity, revolt, dissent, experimentation, freedom, pluralism, inquiry, the pioneering spirit, enterprise, individualism, diversity, voluntary associations, free trade in ideas, and investigation (of the scholarly, not the Congressional variety) ! These words and phrases may suggest the mood behind Professor Commager's stirring plea for the civil liberties of the human mind and spirit...

...The ambiguity comes to a head in the concluding chapter dealing with loyalty...

...Surely Professor Commager is one man who has the scholarship, the idealism and the intellectual capacity to tell us what loyalty is...

...The climax is reached in the fourth chapter, "Guilt by Association," where this notion is shown to be wrong in logic, in law, in practice, in history and in morals...

...Doubtless this helps some people to "innocence by association" with Jesus...

...Explicit acknowledgment of this fact would have enhanced the force of the author's argument here...

...In his discussion of "guilt by association," Professor Commager stresses the gap between membership and responsibility in American institutions, and cites the opinion of the Supreme Court in the Schneiderman case "that under our traditions beliefs are personal and not a matter of mere association, and that men in adhering to a political party or other organization do not subscribe unqualifiedly to all of its platforms or asserted principles...

...Is it really possible that Professor Commager does not appreciate the deep gap between the philosophy of a Justice Holmes and the philosophy of a Jefferson, or a John Brown, or a Tom Paine, or an Abraham Lincoln, or a Woodrow Wilson...

...But he defends sociological jurisprudence against natural-law theory, and he insists on both the diversity and the contradictoriness of our several applications of moral law...

...Perhaps, in our time, we may also speak of a "liberty that illiberates itself...

...He conceives that it "well may be" that some moral values are universal...

...the pertinent suggestion is offered that we might equally well believe in "innocence by association...

...Or, if that makes for too negative an attitude: "Exalt the open mind, tolerance, faith in progress and in the ability of men and women to conquer new worlds of science and politics and economy, to discover new truths of philosophy...

...When we are careless of our own absolutes, we tend to be careless of the enemy's...

...In sum, there are two traditions of nonconformity, and we had better make sure which one we are celebrating...

...Why could he not have answered it...

...It then appears that transcendentalism is the appeal to the "higher law...

...We learn that "loyalty is a principle, and eludes definition except in its own terms...

...He asked the question...

...The heroic tradition of American nonconformity has always had this solid base in the absolute...

...John Milton, whom Professor Commager likes to quote, understood this well enough...

...In the Areopagitica, there is a phrase which speaks of a "law that unlaws itself...

...An appeal is also made to Royce's "loyalty to loyalty," although I feel confident that Royce's particular brand of philosophic idealism would have nauseated both Jefferson and Hamilton...

...Yet, fourteen of the fifteen whom he lists are absolutists in the strictest sense of the term, and the fifteenth, Justice Holmes, simply does not belong in the company of the rest...

...Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch Professor of Christian Ethics, Pacific School of Religion Damn the absolute...

...But the presumption is that Jesus knew what He was doing, whereas the fellow-traveler doesn't...

...Attacking the concept of loyalty as conformity in the last chapter, he calls the roll of the great nonconformists in the American tradition...

...But it is not their tradition...

...But then he chooses to baptize absolutism with the liberal name of transcendentalism, although transcendentalism is to absolutism (Calvinist or Jeffersonian) as rose-water is to bean-soup...

...He reminds us that Jesus was found guilty by association when He consorted with publicans and sinners...

...It is not clear, however, what may be the objective ground of Professor Commager's higher law...

...This reader therefore has the impression that the author, in seeking to domesticate the absolute, has succeeded mainly in devitalizing and disintegrating it...

...It arises in anarchy, and usually issues, in our day as in any other, in subservience to the most tyrannical conformity that is current...

...In any case, the contrite Christian conscience would be more ready to identify itself with Peter who denied, or with Judas who betrayed Christ, than with the crucified Lord himself...

...and that the motives of Jesus were compassion and redemption, while the motives of the other are a fatuous compound of vanity, idealism and gullibility...

...It is unfortunate, also, that Professor Commager should fall in with the current practice of identifying the misunderstood, or misguided, liberal with the crucified Christ...

...Membership in the Communist party has the character of guilt by deliberate commitment, rather than guilt by casual association...

...Most readers will be captivated by the obvious merits of this book—the simple and forceful phrasing, the incisive logic, the well-ordered argument, the ring of eloquence, the relevant use of the resources of history, the powerful moral passion, and the spirit of courage and generosity...

...But, while it is made clear what loyalty is not, we are left a bit uncertain as to what loyalty is...

...Professor Commager admits that the creators of our liberties were absolutists, but he finds that the continuing tradition is nonconformity...

...For the pietist or the atheist of the eighteenth century, the higher law was God's law or Nature's law...

...This contains a brilliant critique of our phony patrioteers...

...There are two paragraphs that enumerate the traditional values of democracy, with the added garnishments of pragmatism, transcendentalism and the higher law...

...Certainly that is our tradition...

...Nevertheless, I laid it down with the uneasy feeling that at one critical point the issue had not been truly joined, and that a fatal ambiguity lay at the heart of its philosophy...

...The first three chapters of his book are an argument in behalf of freedom and experimentation in the realm of ideas...

...This ambiguity has to do with the relationship between the absolute and the pragmatic—a problem with which, so far as I know, only Rein-hold Niebuhr has dealt in forthright fashion...

...There is also a nonconformity which rests on a solid base of the absolute, out of loyalty to which it scorns all lesser loyalties...

...The fifth and final chapter asks the question: "Who Is Loyal to America...

...There is nonconformity for nonconformity's sake...

...Now Professor Commager is well aware that both absolutism and pragmatism enter into the American heritage...