The Culture of Conformity
Culture is the label that anthropologists give to the structured customs and underlying worldview assumptions that govern people’s lives (Kraft, 1998). It can also be interpreted as people’s way of life, their design for living, and their way of coping with their biological, physical and social environment. The attributes that define culture include language, social structures, skills, customs, norms, values, beliefs, attitudes, expectations, cognitions, conventional artifacts, technological know- how and worldview of a group.
During the 1950s, many cultural commentators pointed out that a sense of uniformity pervaded American society. Conformity, they asserted, was numbingly common. Though men and women had been forced into new employment patterns during World War II, once the war was over, traditional roles were reaffirmed. Men expected to be the breadwinners in each family; women, even when they worked, assumed their proper place was at home. In his influential book, The Lonely Crowd, sociologist David Riesman called this new society “other-directed,” characterized by conformity, but also by stability. Television, still very limited in the choices it gave its viewers, contributed to the homogenizing cultural trend by providing young and old with a shared experience reflecting accepted social patterns.
Biological variation was appropriated to the causes of commercial profit and of lifestyle and political conformity, and normative quality assurance that focused on the body as an object is part of this. In an increasingly consumerist society, people were encouraged to seek “the best” both now and in the future. Nothing can be left to chance, every risk must be minimised and the emphasis was on control.
The culture of conformity pays lip service to autonomy and choice but it is clear that the individual is only really free to make the choice which is approved by society. It was assumed that once the “healthy choice” is pointed out, everyone will select it and little account was taken of the very differing circumstances and aspirations of different people’s lives.
The workplace promoted a culture of conformity and discouraged reflective and critical thinking. Education is meant to prepare learners to make sense of how the world works; to think critically and independently; and to lead responsible and productive lives in a culture that is increasingly shaped by science and technology. Teacher-centered pedagogical practices, the culture of conformity, and unquestioned obedience to teachers and authority figures were among the barriers to democratic education.
Postwar housing tracts became popular subjects of study among sociologists and psychologists, as well as novelists and screenwriters, who identified a host of pathologies behind the trim houses and wellkept front lawns. Nonfiction books like The Lonely Crowd (1950) addressed issues of conformity and individuality, as did novels such as The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit (1955). One of the most popular and influential books on this theme was William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), a study of the rapidly expanding managerial and technical class employed by large American corporations. Whyte was critical of excessive deference to the Organization as stifling of individual initiative, but his book is analytical and dispassionate, without the alarmist tone of many other works. Most of Whyte’s book is devoted to the Organization Man at work, but Part VII is titled "The New Suburbia: Organization Man at Home". The author identifies postwar housing tracts as the dormitories of the Organization and describes the ways in which these tracts serve the needs of the Organization Man and reflect his values.
Yet beneath this seemingly bland surface, important segments of American society seethed with rebellion. A number of writers, collectively known as the “Beat Generation,” went out of their way to challenge the patterns of respectability and shock the rest of the culture. Stressing spontaneity and spirituality, they preferred intuition over reason, Eastern mysticism over Western institutionalized religion.
The literary work of the beats displayed their sense of alienation and quest for self-realization. Jack Kerouac typed his best-selling novel On the Road on a 75-meter roll of paper. Lacking traditional punctuation and paragraph structure, the book glorified the possibilities of the free life. Poet Allen Ginsberg gained similar notoriety for his poem “Howl,” a scathing critique of modern, mechanized civilization. When police charged that it was obscene and seized the published version, Ginsberg successfully challenged the ruling in court.
Musicians and artists rebelled as well. Tennessee singer Elvis Presley was the most successful of several white performers who popularized a sensual and pulsating style of African-American music, which began to be called “rock and roll.” At first, he outraged middle-class Americans with his ducktail haircut and undulating hips. But in a few years his performances would seem relatively tame alongside the antics of later performances such as the British Rolling Stones. Similarly, it was in the 1950s that painters like Jackson Pollock discarded easels and laid out gigantic canvases on the floor, then applied paint, sand, and other materials in wild splashes of color. All of these artists and authors, whatever the medium, provided models for the wider and more deeply felt social revolution of the 1960s.
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