kelley wrote:
>
> A
>
> hee. you might want to direct this at carrol. he was the one calling
> conformity banal.
Caught! Oh well, it's evidence that I'm right in claiming that on the whole it doesn't pay to use irony/sarcasm in political discourse. So let me put it in quite plain English.
Conformity is a virtue, not a weakness. In the cases where it is a vice/weakness the error lies in what is conformed to -- voting for the Democratic Party, for example. One cannot blame Democratic voters for being that. It is up to leftists to create a left which can generate a program which will lead people to reconsider their conformity to 8th grade civics standards and rally around, push forward a new standard _to which they conform_.
One of the more obnoxious freshman theme topics of the '50s, and I got enough in three years at the U. of Mich. to last more than a lifetime, were the ones attacking conformity. Attacks on conformity I realized then (long before I dreamt of becoming a marxist) were _always_ (no exceptions) conformity to the expectations of a superficial individualism. Everyone was going crazy trying to figure out how to be different. But you can't be different. You can only choose what you want to conform to.
I was very serious in those quotations from Pope. They seem to me true literary theory, and true for political thought as well. Avoid being different! Avoid originality (except for the originality of finding the best way, in a given context, to reexpress (or rediscover) what is already known.
Yet another way. EVeryone without exception follows a "party line." Some just kid themselves into thinking that they are not as others. (I'm trying to plagiarize a line from the Christians, it's somewhere in the N.T., but I can't remember where.)
Carrol