The Long Road Back to Conformity:
BELL, AARON
The Long Road Back to Conformity Confessions of a Conformist By Morris Freedman. Norton. 224 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Aaron Bell Lecturer on Social Philosophy, New York University The dust...
...It is wearying work picking up the straw men Freedman knocks down...
...Whenever possible, he deliberately likes things the nonconformists don't like...
...His argument sounds like a high-school debater taking the affirmative: Resolved that the automobile has done more good than harm...
...I am an admitted nonconformist...
...For Freedman, it was paradoxical that several hundred persons at the time applauded "in unison a speech urging nonconformity...
...But his conceptual framework is so vague and inconsistent that one is finally left only with an inventory of his opinions and prejudices...
...I found the examples of "good" advertising cited quite bad...
...But soon after Freedman says he is "not talking about [the] serious and sober critique of religion carried on by such thinkers as Will Herberg and Sidney Hook...
...I am not working my passage back home...
...He doesn't like New York City any more, and he hopes he never comes back...
...It is positively disreputable in many intellectual and all nonconformist circles to bring up seriously the question of God," Freedman asserts...
...The nonconformist visà-vis mass culture and society generally is a conformist within his own clique, elite-group or minority...
...In attacking an idea, one first labels it as nonconformist...
...Most of Freedman's arguments are based on personal experience...
...For example, criticizing advertising, according to Freedman, is nonconformist...
...Was it really so indefensible for Keats to complain that American automobiles are too big, too shiny and too tinny...
...to me it seems as if he's dying to get back to New York City and won't admit it...
...Instead of defining nonconformity, Freedman denounces "the professional working nonconformist who wears his label with a flamboyant proudness, insists that only departure from convention, the championing of the unusual, the automatic rejection of the majority, will guarantee enlightenment or progress...
...But somehow I do mind Freedman forcing himself to like advertising by searching for examples of billboards which would meet his standards of taste in art...
...I used to be a leopard myself...
...Is anyone really taking the negative...
...Attacking another strawman, John Keats, author of The Insolent Chariots, Freedman finds it necessary to defend automobiles...
...I don't care how many other nonconformists like chamber music along with me...
...He defines a "conformist" as "simply one who takes a conventional, usual, generally "majority' position...
...To expose such two-facedness, Freedman embarked upon the project of denouncing the so-called nonconformists...
...Yet Freedman himself criticizes "the chatter that passes for talk" at big-city cocktail parties and notes that our time has been "ingenious in inventing reasons for social gatherings where pure talk would be held to a minimum...
...He criticizes Jacques Barzun for lamenting the passing of the art of conversation, and wonders whether the drawing rooms of William Congreve and William Wycherley or Jane Austen or Oscar Wilde really better satisfied "the human need to gather in groups" than do contemporary bridge parties...
...But I am hard to please...
...He recalls, for example, Robert M. Hutchins denouncing the blight of conformism in the United States and bewailing" the loss of true individualism, while he himself looked like "the very model of a model executive"—a neat, threebutton blue suit, a plain tie, precisely coiffured graying hair, erect carriage...
...for one proudly to call himself a conformist is a switch—and also the reason for this book...
...Freedman performs a curious ritual, working his passage back home to a place he has never been and where he doesn't want to go...
...Perhaps Freedman protests too much...
...Throughout the book Freedman doggedly polarizes everything as either nonconformist or conformist...
...If the nonconformist criticizes advertising, advertising must be defended...
...The manifest content of the Confessions is a series of defenses of what nonconformists are supposed to be attacking...
...Then he quotes Sidney Hook disparaging the "God-seeking intellectuals" (after referring to Hook as a "leading professional intellectual...
...I remember a Herblock cartoon of the McCarthy days, a leopard denouncing a spotted horse and meanwhile dousing himself with whitewash saying, "I know leopards...
...Who is he talking about...
...intellectually, he seems to agree with Barzun...
...Intellectuals, of course, generally consider themselves nonconformists...
...Thus Freedman writes: "I like American movies, jazz, television, radio (including soap operas and disc jockeys), popular songs, animated cartoons, Broadway and Hollywood musicals, baseball, football, several mass-circulation magazines...
...Freedman also criticizes "the nonconformist attack on religion...
...I keep it turned off because of what I saw when I kept it...
...In the end, it is the attitude rather than the idea he finds faulty...
...Freedman's rhetorical strategy seems obvious...
...Then one defends the opposite view...
...Freedman's first chapter, "The Dangers of Nonconformism," recognizes that the terms "conformity" and "nonconformity" have been greatly abused in the past...
...In characteristic nonconformist fashion, they make no distinctions between the "mass-production" religionists like the Reader's Digest, Norman Vincent Peale and Joshua Loth Liebman on the one hand, and Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Buber and Karl Barth on the other...
...A former editor of Commentary magazine, he moved away from the big city to the "wonderful country" of New Mexico where he now teaches English at the State University...
...Out in the open spaces and in the small towns, he proclaims, there are real individuals, unlike the phony "professional nonconformists" in the big city...
...In short, I like much of popular culture, the things that millions of people are entertained by...
...In separating the good conformists from the bad (nonconforming) conformists, Freedman boxes himself into the defense of a college teacher "who did not have his contract renewed at least in part for his persistent advocacy of the conformist Southern position on segregation...
...The book's thesis is that the alleged nonconformist is really a conformist...
...According to his judgment, all nonconformists dismiss religion "offhand...
...Reviewed by Aaron Bell Lecturer on Social Philosophy, New York University The dust jacket informs us that in Confessions of a Conformist "an intellectual turns on the professional nonconformists and bites off a chunk of their shibboleths...
...I don't keep my TV turned off because of a prejudice against TV...
...Freedman is a native New Yorker, educated at City College of New York and Columbia University...
...He also doesn't like hot-house, self-labeling nonconformists or snobs who go in for Mozart, hi-fi, sports cars and "little" magazines...
...Thus, Freedman, by pursuing his logic, finds himself lauding the "good" conformity of the Southern segregationist...
Vol. 44 • April 1961 • No. 16
