OPINION: The Rules of Nonconforming

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

—Emerson

“There is no more self-righteously, high-mindedly closed a mind than that of a nonconformist,” writes 38-year-old Morris Freedman, longtime freelance writer (New Republic, Harper’s) and associate professor of English at the University of New Mexico. Freedman’s complaint, published in the Phi Beta Kappa American Scholar: nonconformism is getting to be more orthodox than conformism, especially among intellectuals in college communities and in the publishing, advertising and entertainment professions. “The nonconformists are right,” says Freedman, when they accuse the majority of mass thinking and responses. “Yet it may easily be shown that the self-elected nonconformists are culpable on every count on which they attack conformists.”

So strictly orthodox is the nonconformist that it is impossible for him to say “a good word about Dulles, Nixon, Lyndon Johnson . . . James Gould Cozzens, or a bad one about Henry James, Adlai Stevenson, Lionel Trilling or Freud; to express approval of any television show (except Omnibus, Ed Murrow or Sid Caesar) or of any American movie (except the inexpensive and badly lighted ones, or the solemn westerns, like High Noon); to dislike any foreign films (except those imitating American ones); to believe that you can buy ready-made a good hi-fi set; to wear a non-ivy-league suit … to prefer American cars, for any reason, to European; to believe that there may be any justice in the official position on Oppenheimer; to defend Western diplomacy on my basis; to invite company to dinner without candles on the table and without chamber music in the background; to criticize Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams as playwrights or otherwise … to like Tschaikovsky or Irving Berlin, or to dislike Leonard Bernstein or Mozart; to express admiration for Marilyn Monroe or any other American movie star; to disparage Alec Guinness …

“If nonconformity is to have its rightful say in American life, as it did with Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Veblen, it must stop making a fetish of itself. Conformity … may, in the end, prove to have the greater attraction for those genuinely seeking a free and full life. After all, unrestricted amateur nonconformism is one of the honorable paths in American history. In the meanwhile, we must oppose all efforts of the dedicated nonconformists to make us not conform according to their rules.”