>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.
i actually got the irony. you chose to use it to flame ppl by way of suggesting that they were anti-worker.
>So let
>me put it in quite plain English.
>
>Conformity is a virtue, not a weakness.
there is no such thing as a virtue shorn of it's social context. if you learn anything from aristotle, carrol, that ought to be it!
>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.
well, sorry, but you're not telling me anything new: it's a basic insight of sociology and has been explored since, gee, de tocqueville! :)
>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.
what in hell it literary theory anyway? whatever i've been exposed to is just sociological theory without statistics and ethnography and, even then, some of the stuff i've heard at conferences ends up using ethnography?!
i abstractly know what it is or, rather, what people have claimed that it is, but just because i'd like to entertain various responses to the question, i pose it.
kelley
>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