Conformity sounds like a condition one only would find debated earnestly on a Mad Men episode, a throwback to a bygone era of calculated timidity, of learning to sell oneself on the social scene, of cookie-cutting oneself to expectations in a tight job market, of … Hang on, yes, conformity is back, though less sincerely so than in the scared straight 1950s. People conform for all the familiar reasons. One doesn’t notice because they act like everyone else. In many milieus being a conspicuous oddball or dissident can still get you hurt, fired, ridiculed or shunned. Protective coloration, not ripeness, is all.

The advantages of ‘going along to get along’ are dangled. The proving ground in a shrinking middle-class culture is a smooth transition from the campus to the leaner, meaner work place. Once upon a time passing this marathon test with flying colors resulted in bigger paydays, delicious opportunities, approval of similar self-seeking peers and affirmation that you are on the fast track. You even get lauded as a rascally daredevil for performing perfectly tepid acts. They got it covered, those guardians of the status quo, in any time, any culture, any place. Christopher Lasch, as mentioned earlier, skewered cold warriors in the 1960s for their ‘infatuation with consensus.’ 1 Many devotees of ‘The God That Failed,’ soon to form the molten core of the neoconservatives, were more ‘attracted to Marxism in the first place as an elitist and antidemocratic ideology than as a means of analysis which provided not answers, but the beginnings of a critical theory of society.’ How can one begin to lampoon those overwrought international relations journal editors today who fastidiously ban from their periodical any research containing WikiLeaks material, none of which has proved untrue? 2

Over the last few decades, ‘straight’ people diligently rigged the economy, deranged the legal system and purchased the favor of enough pliant members of Congress so as to deny goodies to anyone except bank moguls and crony capitalists. Every ounce of one’s energy and ingenuity propels productivity whose monetary rewards flow to the distant top. 3 This radical rearrangement didn’t happen overnight. The best that any postmodern employee can yearn for is to run in place. It hardly comes as a surprise that in academia many readers misread the sociological implications of Thomas Kuhn ’s most famous work as proving that truth is a majority vote of a scientific community. 4 Conform or quit.

Is conformity innate? Is there a gene for it? The social cues are too powerful for a crucial test ever to be performed that reliably separates cultural from material influences. So youngsters growing up in a post-postindustrial society ache to break into cliques ranging from private clubs to secret college societies to ‘epistemic communities ’ so as to gain an invaluable edge in a race they dare not question. Ivy Leaguers swarmed into Wall Street jobs where they lay their pedigrees at the feet of a suspendered Mammon, managed to sabotage the Western economy, looted it, made the average citizen pay for it and called it progress. 5 Nonetheless, staple-faced Goth bar denizens, no less than the fashionistas in the posh Manhattan bar, are about as nonconformist as a school of tropical fish.

Why it’s positively unhealthy to misbehave. Richard Kraft-Ebbing in 1892 concocted the glorious diagnosis ‘political and reformatory insanity’ to label wayward souls who dared to exhibit ‘an inclination to differ from the mass opinion.’ The incubation period is long, often reaching back to childhood,’ the eminent researcher solemnly estimated. 6 Science , such as it is, marches on. Still, it’s difficult to hold a pose for long—the hypocritical Victorians spawned the rancorous Freud—so ruptures are inevitable.

Must You Conform? is the title of a gloomy tome that I plucked from a library shelf in Champaign-Urbana long ago. 7 That the question needed to be asked said a lot about the period. The University of Illinois then was the largest ‘Greek’ (fraternity and sorority) campus in the USA. Teens competed to impress Cro-Magnon committees and then assiduously to make the right contacts: networking, as it is so sanitarily termed today. Paul Goodman in Growing Up Absurd fretted about a ‘dangerous conformity ’ hardening into a toxic fixture of life. 8 Even billionaire J. Paul Getty, of all people, deplored conformity as a trait that ‘can do the Free World’s cause more harm than a dozen Nikita Khrushchevs.’ 9 In its heyday Mad Magazine, a zany lifeline of critical sanity for many disturbed (by the world) kids, thrived on ridiculing the mania to conform. All this shifted, outwardly, in the late 1960s when crew cut frat rats sprouted Sergeant Pepper mustaches and long hair as they hastened to catch up with what most regarded as the latest fashion. Certainly, in that dispiriting case, John Lennon was on the mark to blurt bitterly that on balance in the 1960s ‘Nothing happened except we all dressed up.’ 10

The neo-medieval era of in loco parentis, dress codes and looking alike is long gone. Now gaze upon rainbow hair, nose rings, ornate tattoos and puncture marks. But those wily marketers always outflank us, issuing artfully opaque slogans about the ‘hip transgressive,’ ‘urban chic’ and so on. 11 Still, some things were agreeably different in those days of yore. Out of savings from summer construction jobs I paid nearly all expenses at a flagship state university. Couldn’t happen now. That generation wasn’t shackled by the indenturing debts of today’s students and so a latitude to experiment scared apprehensive ‘squares’ who, as Tennessee Williams well knew, ‘hate anything not in their book.’ Check the Nixon tape transcripts and find Tricky Dick and his soon-to-be-penitentiaried pals plotting to raze the sources of affordable university education in order to smash youth movements. How can you question anything when the creeps in control keep you deep in hock? 12

‘Rusty wasn’t a bright boy,’ Lieutenant William Calley’s high school principal approvingly remarked, ‘but he did what he was told.’ Obedience was the saving grace of mediocre but willing executioners at My Lai. Nick Turse’s recent Vietnam book affirms what any unblinkered student of that war already knew, that atrocities were commonplace and cover-ups were the norm. 13 Conformists, not misfits, are needed to commit mass atrocities. (To an editor’s request for an article on a multiple murderer, to be entitled ‘Crime of the Century’ Algren spat, ‘I don’t want to go to Vietnam.’ 14 As Andrew Bacevich, a welcome defector, comments, the military ‘did not look kindly on nonconformity. Climbing the ladder of success required a curbing of maverick tendencies; you needed to be a team player.’ 15 Colin Powell, yet to answer for his likely role in covering up My Lai, spoke of the ‘pragmatics’ required in getting ahead, as if ambition excused any and all indecencies accompanying it. Yet Americans always have displayed a deep streak of conformity , a collective longing to be rugged individualists all in the same backwards baseball cap way. Tocqueville witheringly wrote that he ‘knew of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.’ 16

In the early 1950s in a slim manuscript Nonconformity: Writing on Writing, Nelson Algren, fresh from a National Book award for his gritty volume that started as a war novel but transfigured into the gutter-level tragedy of a card sharp junkie, delivered a jeremiad about conformity greasing the skids of American society into the paranoiac McCarthy era. What conformists yearned for ‘was an eternally elusive secure zone in which to live what authorities ordain as a normal life,’ Algren seethed. Yet life is ‘never lived that way, though many people persuade themselves to the contrary.’ 17 Good writers apprise us of what we forgot or never noticed or deliberately ignored. Life in the 1950s Father Knows Best mode was abnormal, a televised fiction, such that this blithe, candy-coated facade was worth peeling away in dyspeptic retrospective films later on, such as Pleasantville, Blue Velvet and A Boy and His Dog. Why did audiences root for Jim Carrey to shatter his intricately ordered artificial ‘life’ in The Truman Show? Many taboos then vanished or are on the wane today for having since been stubbornly and strongly confronted.

At the 1950 National Book Award ceremony Algren, who had signed a New York Times letter ‘Speak up for freedom,’ and chaired the Chicago Committee to Secure Justice in the Rosenberg case, was a marked man, high on the FBI’s list and that of every pseudo-patriotic private snoop. (Peruse KeyWiki, a rightwing website ratting out anyone mad enough to commit senselessly progressive and humane acts). Reactionaries cherish their lists, from the ‘Hollywood Ten’ to ProporNot , tracking who’s been naughty and who’s not been nice enough to them. Algren’s blistering thoughts on conformity first saw light in the Chicago Daily News in 1952. 18 Doubleday commissioned a book on the subject but declined to publish it in 1953, the same year the FBI yanked Algren’s passport. 19 In Nonconformity Algren appraised the impact of this true ‘big chill’ upon writers, but every intimidated or complacent American was his intended audience too.

Algren commences with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s bathetic ‘struggle to write with profundity and at the same time live like a millionaire’—a dizzying doomed acrobatic act. Fitzgerald was left ‘wondering and blinking, as he contemplated his Savoy Hotel bill, whether one could be both a good writer and a good person.’ Algren feared that American writers were slipping and sliding into the ‘inert whirlpool of egotism that is world of the average businessman.’ Overly cautious writers, Algren accused, were abandoning the ‘problem of the heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing.’ A new batch of beady-eyed scribes sees ‘the way things are going, the main things are not problems of the heart but to keep one’s nose clean.’ As one scans mainstream book review pages today one learns that Algren’s complaint still carries a lot of power.

Algren was a meticulous chronicler of the 10% or so scrabbling at the rock bottom of the social scale ‘where everyone has to win every round just to stay alive.’ Algren acquired some of the rude savoir-faire of the streets, but only so much. ‘I was a fairly good mark, not too good a mark,’ Algren recalls about his costly mingling with junkies and hustlers. 20 Algren’s lamentation on conformity resonated with kindred critics such as Erich Fromm. ‘The average individual does not permit himself to be aware of thoughts or feelings that are incompatible with the patterns of his culture , and hence he is forced to repress them,’ Fromm observed, perhaps a tad too clinically. ‘To that degree to which a person—because of his own intellectual and spiritual development—feels his solidarity with humanity, can he tolerate social ostracism, and vice versa.’ Fromm’s next sentence, though, captured Algren himself: ‘The ability to act according to one’s conscience depends on the degree to which one has transcended the limits of one’s society and has become a citizen of the world.’ Presto—the incorrigible nonconformist. Poor house, here I come.

Algren revisits the profoundly emetic spectacles of director Elias Kazan, actor Jose Ferrer and playwright Maxwell Anderson on bended knees before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Algren warns those likewise tempted to genuflect to pea-brained bullies that ‘he knows enough of the heart that it cannot conform,’ not without exacting a very high price. 21 Are there any extenuating circumstances ? Algren cited Finley Peter Dunne’s fictitious worldly wise barkeeper Mr. Dooley about ‘turning on the gas [light] in the darkest heart you’d find they had a ‘good raison for th’ worst things it done’ which include ‘needin’ th’ money.’ While Algren had a renowned soft spot for ‘lonesome monsters,’ the profit motive by itself was never a valid alibi. 22 Sociopathic traits were no alibi either. Glance at Hervey Cleckley’s The Mask of Sanity, written at the time, and you’ll find prophetic descriptions of the psychopathology of a Dick Cheney, Donald Trump and any Wall Street honcho you care to name. 23

Nonconformity, posthumously published in 1998, was composed during the Korean War or near enough, about ‘five years after we have begun to rearm.’ 24 Algren rhetorically asks regarding the military-industrial complex : Are we more secure for ‘putting a hot-car thief in charge of a parking lot?’ No nation even comes close to the US level of carefully misnomered ‘defense’ and ‘homeland security’ expenditures. Iran today terrifies our policy makers. Really? Algren mauled ‘long-remaindered intellectuals on short leashes’ who obligingly burble that things are ‘worse in Russia , as if it helps.’ Things are worse in Greece and Spain right now. Feel better? And Greece is coming to a neighborhood near you if aficionados of austerity continue to get their cynical way. Contemporary ‘intellectuals on short leashes’ infest news programs: George and David and Cokie and the rest of the glossy chattering corporate cheerleaders. A forerunner of theirs in the 1950s, Norman Podhoretz, whose book Making It celebrates himself as an envious outsider aching to become a WASP establishment minion, assaulted Algren for his ‘boozy sentimentality.’ Scorn from affluent pipsqueak quarters is normal .

Algren praises Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, Thorstein Veblen, Lincoln Steffens and Sinclair Lewis. Our singular American genius Mark Twain towers among even that fine company. Algren skewers popular novelists who yearn ‘to give pleasure to the reading public’ and craftily plead that they have ‘no right to impose [their] views on race and religion.’ So, Algren shrewdly deduces, ‘if it isn’t the writer’s [or, I would add, social scientist’s] task to relate mankind to the things of the earth, it must be his job to keep them unrelated.’ Repelled by the businessman’s creed that ‘no values are greater than thrift, self-preservation, and piety,’ Algren speaks witheringly of the tinselly show, of a ‘neon wilderness’ dominated by whitewashed high-rise sepulchers brimming with effervescent schemers. He accused the middle class of adoring ‘personal comfort as an end in itself’ which ‘is, in essence, a denial of life.’ 25 He detested ingrown literary cliques, pulling themselves up the ladder by each other’s Gucci bootstraps. ‘When [a writer] sees scarcely anyone except other writers,’ says Algren, ‘he is ready for New York’ and what Algren terms ‘bellhop writing’—writing to order. ‘No book was ever worth writing that wasn’t done with the attitude that ‘This ain’t what you rung for, Jack—but its what you’re damned well getting.’

Fitzgerald put ‘one little drop of something—not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story.’ What Algren looked for in writing was not just pity but ‘vindictiveness’ of a certain kind. (For Algren the moralist it didn’t count if the cause you champion is only your own interests.) ‘A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery’—summed in the frank furious urge ‘to get even.’ 26 Of course, Algren concedes, he most likely won’t get even but it’s worth trying. ‘The artist must approach his work in the sane frame of mind in which the criminal commits his deed.’ In this moneychanger’s paradise ‘it’s easier to make people mean than to make them kind [and] society is organized so meanly that man cannot help but perpetrate villainies.’ (Consider Algren’s pulverizingly poetic Chicago: City On The Make.) Joe Bageant wrote in the same spirit about crushed and choleric denizens in small towns and in rural America. 27 ‘Americans everywhere face gunfire better than guilt.’ 28 Moral courage may not be in shorter supply than physical courage, but it certainly gets less publicity and approval. Maybe it’s why we hear so little of Algren these days.

No one is entirely immune to the lure of the bright lights blazing around a refined cutthroat system of getting and spending. ‘From the coolest zoot-suit cat getting leaping drunk on straight gin to the gentlest suburban matron getting discreetly tipsy on Alexanders, the feeling is that of having too much of something not really needed, and nothing at all of something desperately needed. They both want to live and neither knows how,’ Algren writes, and ‘that is the trap.’ As for most therapists, we may ask, ‘Doctor, what’s my problem?’ And the doctor cannot speak the truth [because] to stiff-arm a customer with the alarm that his trouble is something as simple as cowardice, or as hopeless as a spiritual void, would be only to lose that [fee] to a competitor with a more flattering tale to tell.’ Few resist the advantage of ‘being on the side of the house.’ As for the other end of the scale where junkies and down-and-outs dwell, when authorities ‘bear down they make our risk bigger, and the cost goes higher … So the junkies got to come up with more gold than ever, and the only one place to get it. Off the square.’ So much for our supposedly straight-laced war on drugs.

‘We presume the accused to be guilty by the act of having been accused’—all the better to strike them with sneaky drones or imprison them via stage-managed Star Chambers. McCarthyism stank of ‘the same sickness as that of Salem’ where we ‘exorcize our devils by destroying the dissenters or odd fish of the tribe.’ The syndrome that we ‘boast about our strength yet display our fear’ never quite dissipated in a nation that elected Donald Trump, even if as the joker in the pack of candidates officially on offer.

Nor have the ‘smokescreens with which we ingeniously conceal our true condition from ourselves’ dispersed. And ‘our assumption of happiness through mechanical ingenuity is nonetheless tragic for being naïve.’ 29 It has taken a generation or two to soak for that one to sink in. Ultimately, ‘when we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don’t have enough,’ diagnosed Algren. One didn’t need a crystal ball, or even Thomas Piketty’s recent book, to discern what the 1% were up to. 30

Algren was no saint in a threadbare cassock but he stuck, however crankily, to his vocation. Perhaps he might have treated his women, including Simone De Beauvoir, a tad better. The streetwise author got his pockets picked with the greatest of ease by average Hollywood hucksters. Algren, a poker addict, could not resist trying to ‘fill the inside straight,’ a mentality any worthwhile writer knows and needs, though not at the card table. 31 In all the arts an inveterate will to gamble is the supreme asset, and it remains the case in our Mahagonny world where no motive other than gain is deemed entirely sane. Conformists play the percentages, and rational choice proponents adore those who do. Hence, in the social sciences , from behaviorism in psychology to rational choice in political science, we recurrently encounter a ‘doctrine of causality which, with respect to human conduct, requires at the outset the categorical exclusion of conscious experience,’ Matson surmises. 32 Consciousness—the capacity for critical self-reflection—introduces disorder, and authoritarians in whatever field want none of that.

Societies, as some sullen wit aptly remarked, honor their conformists when they are alive and their troublemakers when they are dead. Yet no one remembers the conformists, the sycophants or those who in Kuhn’s sense ‘mop up’ in, or rigidly color within the lines of, a dominant paradigm, except exactly as the mediocrities they were. What Algrendetected in Irish playwright Brendan Behan’s chubby face reflected his own venturesome soul: Behan, he wrote, ‘deploys defiance while concealing pity’ and so ‘his intellectual belief in the class struggle is modified by his emotional conviction that the only class is Mankind.’ 33 Literature is fundamentally a rebel’s trade because, Algren urged, it ‘is made on any occasion when a challenge is made to the legal apparatus by a conscience in touch with humanity.’ Any trade can be a rebel’s trade, even and especially the social sciences. As Lasch long ago argued, there is no need for intellectuals to ‘deprive themselves of the real influence they could have as [people] who refuse to judge the validity of ideas by the requirements of national power or any other entrenched interest.’ 34 A ‘conscience in touch with humanity’ is what must animate their crafts too in order for them to count.

FormalPara Notes
  1. 1.

    Christopher Lasch, ‘The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom’ in Barton J. Bernstein, ed. Towards a New Past: Dissenting Essays in American History (New York: Vintage, 1969), pp. 323, 338. Also see Peter Steinfels, The Neoconservatives (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979).

  2. 2.

    The finicky journal is International Studies Quarterly. See The WikiLeaks Files (London: Verso, 2015), pp. 10–11.

  3. 3.

    ‘Recovery in US is lifting Profits, But not Adding Jobs.’ New York Times 3 March 2013.

  4. 4.

    See Wes Sharrock and Rupert Read, Kuhn: Philosopher of Scientific Revolutions (Oxford: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 223–226.

  5. 5.

    See Karen Ho, Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street (Durham: Duke University, 2009).

  6. 6.

    Thomas Roder et al., Psychiatrists—The Men Behind Hitler (LA: Freedom Publishers, 1995), p. 23.

  7. 7.

    Robert Lindner, Must You Conform? (New York: Rinehart, 1956).

  8. 8.

    Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System (Random House, 1960), p. 80.

  9. 9.

    Quoted in Erich Fromm, May Man Prevail? (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962), p. 79, fn18.

  10. 10.

    ‘The same bastards are in control,’ Lennon continued. ‘The same people are running everything.’ Quoted in John Lahr, Automatic Vaudeville: Essays on Star Turns (London: Metheun, 1985), p. 109.

  11. 11.

    Elizabeth Wilson, Bohemians: The Glamorous Outsiders (London: IB Tauris, 2000), p. 233.

  12. 12.

    See the 1971 Lewis Powell memo, a ‘call-to-arms for corporations’ according to Bill Moyers, which predicted or, indeed, served as a template for establishment strategy for the next half a century so as to suppress voices lower on the social ladder. http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/ Also see Michel J. Crozier, Samuel Huntington, Joji Watanuki, eds. The Crisis of Democracy (New York: New York University Press, 1975).

  13. 13.

    Nick Turse, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2013).

  14. 14.

    Nelson Algren, Algren at Sea: Notes from A Sea Diary & Who Lost an American? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2008), p. 332.

  15. 15.

    Andrew Bacevich, ‘The Unmaking of a Company Man’ accessed at http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/26-6.

  16. 16.

    Alexis de Tocqueville Democracy in America, Volume 1 (New York: Aeterna, 2011), p. 208.

  17. 17.

    H. E. F. O’Donohue, Conversations with Nelson Algren (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), p. 22.

  18. 18.

    Algren, Nonconformity, p. 99.

  19. 19.

    Bettina Drew, Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), p. 237. See also Mary Wisniewski, Algren: A Life (Chicago: Chicago Press Review, 2016).

  20. 20.

    ‘Nelson Algren Interview’ Paris Review (Winter 1955), p. 6.

  21. 21.

    Algren, Nonconformity, p. 4.

  22. 22.

    ‘The stories that follow have the common hope that ever man, no matter how lonesome nor what a monster, is deserving of understanding by us other lonesome monsters.’ Nelson Algren, Nelson Algren’s own Book of Lonesome Monsters (New York: Lancer Books, 1962).

  23. 23.

    Hervey Cleckley, The Mask Of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify some Issues about the So-Called Psychopathic Personality (St Louis: Mosby, 1955).

  24. 24.

    Algren, Nonconformity, p. 10.

  25. 25.

    Algren, Nonconformity, p. 20.

  26. 26.

    Algren, Nonconformity, p. 34.

  27. 27.

    Joe Bageant, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War (New York: Crown, 2007) and Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir (New York: Scribe Publications, 2011).

  28. 28.

    Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on the Make (Garden City: Doubleday, 1951), p. 95.

  29. 29.

    Algren, Nonconformity, p. 76.

  30. 30.

    Thomas Piketty, Capital in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Harvard Belknap Press, 2014).

  31. 31.

    Drew, Nelson Algren, p. 257.

  32. 32.

    Floyd Matson, The Broken Image, p. 37.

  33. 33.

    Algren, Algren at Sea, p. 57.

  34. 34.

    Lasch, ‘The Cultural Cold War,’ p. 356.