This short article, Conformists may kill civilizations is about an effort to find, in archaeological and evolutionary biological terms, a way of speaking of the odd fact that the residents of a once successful but collapsing civilization will go on acting the same way they, or their ancestors, did when that civilization was prosperous and growing. It’s hardly surprising that those who’ve studied the mindlessly habitual behavior of Mayans as their civilization was being destroyed by environmental damage would see the likelihood that most human beings are conformists who don’t even see the need to act differently from their habitual ways. As we can see in the current financial and political disasters of the United States and some European countries, even those who are as aggressive as wolves are still sheep in the sense of conforming to once successful models of behavior even as the evidence grows that fundamental change is needed.
Banks are only one of many institutions which are failing and responding by trying to do what hasn’t worked lately but to maybe do it more intensely and more efficiently. There are schools, churches at various levels of organizations, government at all levels in the United States, publishers of newspapers and also publishers of books. Schools are particularly important since they’re responsible for teaching the susceptible many to march along in a herd and for doing what they can to restrict the development of those inclined to think on their own. I remember learning in fifth grade that I had to watch The Monkees if I wished to be able to talk with my classmates during recess.
In the modern West, especially during the American dominated years following World War I, innovators haven’t been particularly valued unless they produced new products and services for an increasingly passive citizenry, passive in an intellectual and spiritual sense. This, of course, has led to a frightening homogenization of speech patterns, entertainment habits, professed political beliefs, etc. across large swaths of the earth’s surface. This wasn’t a new phenomenon, but rather a maturation of a problem which Tocqueville saw when he came to the United States in the 1830s and observed the new man of the liberal democratic masses, but the loss of a coherent European cultural foundation to Western Civilization, as Frenchmen and Germans and others moved in herds to commit a sort of continental suicide, unleashed Americans to create that bottom-up totalitarian society that Ray Bradbury wrote about in Fahrenheit 451. As political crises and economic crises reinforced each other in the 1930s, it became obvious that what had been good in the West was being lost. And it also became obvious that the established elite had no desire to open up the system to innovators. The masses showed a liking for men of the moral caliber of Hitler and Roosevelt and Churchill, exploitive and cruel men who had no solutions but to form the herds into ever greater herds, aiming perhaps at one herd upon Earth.
But there are deeper matters than those which most label as ‘politics’ and ‘economics’. A complex economy and a sophisticated political system are structures built upon a foundation of ideas about reality, ideas made manifest in the truly great literary works of a civilization — not the genteel ones produced by trained writers during periods of decadence but the works like The Iliad and Don Quixote and Moby Dick, the raw and powerful works exploring our relationships to some significant aspects of Creation. Those sorts of works, along with some more abstract works about Creation and its Creator, such as Plato’s dialogs and Augustine’s The City of God and Nietzsche’s explorations of the mindlessness and soullessness of the post-Christian West, shape our ideas of time and space and matter and movement and human nature. We’ve not yet seen the Augustine of the modern world who can help us to make sense of the desires of that pretty young woman and also of the exotic physics which lies behind MRIs or even old-fashioned solid-state electronics, unless I’m that thinker or someone else who’s being ignored by the mainstream.
Shakespeare was at least of comparable importance to William the Conqueror and Henry VIII in the creation of England as we know her. At a time when England was still a collection of local cultures, Shakespeare provided a call for the residents of those local cultures to join some hitherto non-existent herd of Englishmen. The jingoism of the drama Henry V made Cecil Rhodes and the other British empire-builders possible. Arguably, Shakespeare was himself riding a powerful wave and another might have done that work if the Bard of Avon had never lived or had decided to preach something other than a self-righteous English nationalism. In the United States, we had Emerson’s and Thoreau’s glorification of a certain selfishness and self-centeredness which Melville labeled as a spiritualized materialism, and that suited us Americans fine. We don’t even want to be responsible for our children or our elderly parents and Emerson provided a pseudo-rational justification for the public school system and eventually the Social Security system. The counter-culture crowd seems to think of Thoreau as one of them, but he and his teacher were perfect philosophers for a nation of crooked bankers, brainless machine-politicians, and ordinary citizens who tolerated such because they hoped to win that odds-against lottery to join the ranks of the exploitive. On the whole, we Americans, and perhaps all modern citizens of the modern liberal democracies, revealed ourselves as having that trait Tocqueville feared he saw in us: we have never met a fact that we can’t ignore if it’s inconvenient to our purposes. Even if that fact threatens to kill us, we’ll ignore it rather than revise our understanding of reality.
For reasons I’ve not yet discovered, Melville created an Emersonian hero in Captain Ahab who had the guts to attack Creation and to try to get past what wouldn’t respond to his desires. Captain Ahab strove to attack the Creator rather than sitting in a Cambridge study and whining. Americans over the years since Emerson have been a mix of the two, brutal but squeamishly looking away from their own actions and the actions of the harpooners they send out against God’s creatures. I should note that there are some serious Southern thinkers, alive and dead, who have seen this moral disease as located in the New England soul. They’re more right than wrong, but the disease seems to have spread throughout the West because it’s the perfect mind-set for conformists, self-justification presented as philosophy. The American attitude was showing clearly during King Phillip’s War as I discussed in The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding. Puritan thinkers failed to properly abstract from their own morality with the result that they associated their ways of thought and of life with absolute truth. This is to say that their concrete ways provided a false abstraction of human nature and human possibilities, but a very convenient abstraction. Men of the modern West can be willfully ignorant and culpably stupid while speaking in grandiose moral terms.
We need new ways of thought, respecting the past for what we best understand it to be, but responding to a changed world and we need to start at a fundamental level where physics and mathematics have enriched our understanding of time and space and matter and movement and the nature of thought. Those new ways of thought won’t save the West in the short-term. If the West continues its collapse into barbarism, those new ways of thought won’t lead to any obvious signs of a new civilization before the next election of an American President. Between the end of the High Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, Europeans suffered through a century of stupidity and disease and famine and brutal violence.
The spiritualized materialism which Melville diagnosed in the thoughts of Emerson and Thoreau is founded upon a poisonous but powerful way of thought that can be described with equal strangeness as an idealized particularism. United with the conformist tendencies of the majority of human beings and financed, so to speak, by the spectacular prosperity of economic and political forms which encourage conformism of a sort which can be labeled a decentralized totalitarianism, we end with a mass of humanity in the modern West which is remarkably resistant to reality. They are frightened by change, but that’s a normal human response which I also feel. More importantly to those of us who are puzzled by the ongoing repetition of what’s not working, conformist man is blind to the need or even possibility of true change.