Quick Thoughts
I'm reading Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt for school and I had an interesting thought about it. It's one of those books that was part of the fabulous explosion of literature from the 1920s. It's not bad, although not fantastic either; it spends a huge amount of time lamenting the superficiality of the era, and particularly criticizes conformance.
This is all well and good, and I agree that a strong conformitory environment is bad for society, but something occurred to me. In Babbitt and many other similar novels, conformance is portrayed as an effect of modernity. I got to thinking about this, and it is completely false. Yes, there was strong conformance in the early 20th century modernization (and still is today), but this conformance has existed in most preceding societies. Major societies from Europe to Asia have exhibited a strong tendency toward encouraging the herd instinct. There have long been strict orthodox religions and strong family traditions in the west and the east. Even more ancient societies (i.e. hunter/gather) show the same trend, albeit manifested in a different way. Cultural conformance is very important in these societies and traditions are held sacred in a way that is akin to conformance. Therefore, although I don't have much time to do so (need to pack for ASE conference at OSU), I would argue that the (post)modernist literary perspective of conformance being a consequence of modernization is largely false. It seems to me that conformance is merely a human instinct: the herd instinct. In fact, I'm beginning to believe that the only reason why this conformance in modern society is so apparent to us is because it is beginning to be challenged. One of the fundamental conflicts of modern societies is balancing tradition with the need for progress. Progress challenges tradition and conformance, and therefore that force within society is much more obvious to the acute modern observer.
We tried out the new cell design today and it is really cool. It's way better than the old design and hopefully should give respectable mass loss. The excess heat results for the day were strong, but were coming from the opposite cell that should have produced it, based on about 35 hours of previous electrolysis data. In any case, Dash was pretty excited about it all.
That is an interesting thought about modernization. Btw, don't read Ralph Waldo Emerson (except his speeches). There are many better authors and philosophers to choose from. He refuses to say what me means and just addresses issues in an unconvincing roundabout manner.
I think it's another issue of humans overcoming their natural barriers so completely that we need to find other challanges. If you can't breath/eat/drink/survive, nothing else matters. But once survival is basically guarenteed, as it is for most of us today, then we need to overcome new challanges to meet our human need for progress. So to me, it seems not so much of an issue of more people conforming, but more people realizing that conforming isn't always a good thing. I'm beginning to even confuse myself now, but I'll keep going. Need for survival and fear drive people to conform, and when survival is not the most pressing issue, we can afford to be individuals and laugh at those who can't. So basically, Sinclair Lewis was just a lucky bum who could afford to break away from the mold.
Wow that came out poorly.
On the contrary, that's an excellent observation with which I agree wholeheartedly (my African American brother. Sorry, had to slip that in.). I guess that humans have always conformed, but it is only now that we are getting the state in which we can understand the pressure of conformance and its pitfalls. Good point... not that this makes me any more optimistic about humanity.