The Pitfalls of Conformity - Essay Example

?The Pitfalls of Conformity Population explosion has made the notion of social order a truly complicated and difficult issue. More people mean more competition in the race towards the top of the food chain, so to speak, or even be simply part of that chain. This further implies greater potential for chaos and anarchy. Historically, society attempts to solve this problem by using the biggest tool it has in its arsenal: collective pressure. As progress and civilization advance, peace and order become a must. To achieve this condition, society is forced to define and impose certain boundaries within which individual behavior is controlled and limited. The struggle for self-survival and the quest for more progress often compromise individualism. The limitations and boundaries imposed by society on its individual members either subtly through various forms of social disapproval or openly through laws and rules affect the freedom of these members to fully express themselves. On the other hand, simply giving in to such limitations and boundaries, labeled derisively as conformism, is often seen as a hindrance to individualism and true personal freedom. A highly conformist society poses danger to itself because it impedes the growth of new or opposing views that question or challenge the validity of the status quo. One of the dangers of a highly conformist society is it discourages individual members from voicing out their own opinions for fear that it would be met with disapproval by the majority. The result could be disastrous because it deprives not only the individuals from expressing what could be better views, but also society from the opportunity of hearing such views. This is illustrated in the short story Shooting an Elephant by Orson Welles (2003) where an English police officer is forced to kill an elephant peacefully eating grass just to meet the approval of the crowd present behind him. Although the elephant is reported to have gone through a rampage in the village earlier, it has obviously spent itself and is already beginning to settle down peacefully. The pressure that the English police officer perceives the crowd to have placed on him forces him to act contrary to what he thinks is right. Although he believes that it is not necessary to kill the elephant and doing so will be costly to its owner, he nevertheless goes on and kills it to please the crowd. This does not mean, however, that the English officer deserves any sympathy. The English have forced themselves on a people who do not relish their intrusion into their sovereign land. The right of the Burmese people to its sovereignty has been violated, which it could not properly vindicate because of their inferior resources. Their only weapon is to make the English feel unwelcome and uncomfortable as much as possible. If at all, successfully pressuring the officer to follow the will of the Burmese villagers is a vindication for them. Nonetheless, although not much sympathy can be heaped upon the English police officer, the killing of the elephant, which turns out to be really brutal as the huge animal refuses to easily die, presents an agonizing experience even to the reader. In the end, the English police officer is deprived by crowd pressure from acting on the matter in accordance to what he thinks is right and proper under the circumstances. The tragedy in this story is not of the English officer alone, but shared by the crowd as well because it deprives them of the opportunity to gain better insight and act accordingly. The ability of a highly conforming society to contain new and opposing views from a very small minority can result in the acceptability of a perspective, which in truth is morally questionable. Moreover, this could lead to an erroneous point-of-view to go through unopposed and eventually be established in the public consciousness as part of custom and tradition. In the dark and chilling short story The Lottery by Jackson (1948), the villagers have accepted as part of village life the annual holding of a lottery where all the families participate in a draw in the village plaza. The ceremony is conducted with much formality and families gather round like it is a normal social gathering, chatting and cracking jokes with one another. The characters and the scenario are lifted from an ordinary American neighborhood, where kids play with each other in the town plaza and loving parents keep a watchful eye on them while socializing with other parents. The ordinary lottery turns into a chilling account when the reader discovers that it is not held to draw valuable prizes, such as a house and lot and household appliances, for the families, but to select which one of them will go through another draw to ultimately determine which family member will be stoned to death. The climax becomes a jolting experience to the reader because of the striking contrast that the preceding account of a normal village social gathering and its ordinary villagers present. The Lottery presents the possibility that too much conformism can make an outrageously depraved act normal and ordinary because an unchallenged act done over and over in the course of time ultimately gives it a sense of normalcy. The extreme impossibility of Jackson’s short story is belied by the experience of the world in the World War II, where millions of Jews were annihilated by the Nazis under the orders of Hitler. It is often wondered how the Nazis were able to conduct the genocide and annihilation when these necessarily entailed the participation of a significant number of people who could have leaked out these activities to the public. Yet, these activities did not merit public outcry within Germany at that time, but on the contrary Hitler was given continued popular support. Jackson’s The Lottery maybe an explanation of it. It is possible that like the characters in the story, many Germans at that time had accepted the Jews genocide as nothing out of the ordinary considering their long hatred for the race, which was further fanned by Hitler’s propaganda. The Lottery and the Nazi experience in WWII seem to illustrate that conformity has a dark side, which if unchecked can bring about shame to the history of the human race. Too much conformism, moreover, brings about stagnation and deprives society of the necessary balance that opposing voices provide to encourage growth and progress. Often, a market of ideas pitted against one another provides a filtering mechanism that sifts brilliant ideas from less worthy ones. Brilliant ideas provide the basis of progress in science and technology that could push civilization to greater heights. In The Lottery, for example, the village would remain mired in its brutal practice if no one dares question the validity and the morality of the practice. Since the custom pits family members against each other, it could tear families apart, which is not beneficial to society considering that the family is its basic unit and any weakness sustained in that level would ultimately weaken the entire social structure. In Shooting an Elephant, the Burmese village is likely to remain backward and impractical if no one dares raises a voice against the inappropriateness of some of its practices as the people may never be exposed to different and opposing perspectives that could help raise their level of maturity and wisdom. The growth and advancement that society could benefit by taking itself out from a mentality of too much conformism or by encouraging too much conformism, is reinforced by Erikson’s (2005) article on The Sociology of Deviance. Here, deviance is defined as simply a value that society has chosen to assign in a given period. If this definition is correct, its implication is that deviance is a variable that changes from time to time depending on the circumstances that society finds itself rather than an inherent wrong that survives the test of time. This would present a problem to a highly conformist society because it will not have the opportunity to test and discover whether what it considers deviant for the moment is truly a wrong or merely a temporary superficial irregularity that does not actually pose real harm to society. As too much conformism is not beneficial to society, so is over- tolerance of deviant behavior. It is not, for example, accurate to say that society should tolerate deviance that clearly poses danger to its members simply because the non-conformism represented by deviant behavior “creates a sense of mutuality among the people of a community by supplying a focus for group feeling” (Erikson 4). There must be a distinction between deviance that is a wrong in itself and deviance that society has, by whim, so presently declares, but does not pose a real and tangible threat to its members. After all, society has a right to perpetuate itself and thereby protect itself from destruction by defining limits and boundaries upon its members. This must, however, be balanced by the right of the individual to express his individuality and the rights of others to hear what he has to say. As Erikson noted, what may qualify as an offence in one society may qualify for sainthood in another (5). It is a fact that conformity, to a certain extent, creates order in society and order paves an easy way to progress. Nevertheless, a highly conformist society may also steer a course in the opposite direction. The pitfalls of conformity are clearly illustrated in the works of Orwell and Jackson. In Shooting an Elephant, Orwell shows, in addition to his censure of imperialism, that the inability to rise above the common opinion and thereby, conveniently sinking into the pit of conformity may lead to the perpetuation of a falsity and the consignment of the truth to the background. To please the crowd and assure its approval of him, the Englishman, supposedly more educated and civilized than the crowd, is forced to kill a feeding elephant even if his mind tells him of its injustice to the animal and its owner. In The Lottery, Jackson hints at how conformity can ultimately make a clearly depraved act become an acceptable part of ordinary life. Here, the villagers annually participate, with enthusiasm, in the selection of persons to be stoned to death as if they are selecting the homecoming queen. Cited Works Erikson, Kai. ‘On the Sociology of Deviance’ Wayward Puritans: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance. Boston: Pearson/Allyn & Bacon, 2005. Jackson, Shirley. ‘The Lottery’ The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction by Charters, Ann. 1948. Welles, Orson. Shooting an Elephant. Harcourt Brace and Company and Heath & Co., 2003. Read More