The Return of the Conformist

DIY

In EM Forster's  A Room With A View … the heroine Lucy Honeychurch brings a curious application of will to her life with regards to men … that illustrates a matter of great social significance today. In perceiving a peculiar block in her gender disposition … she grew into a personality … that sought to overcome that block … with her sexuality as the instrument of will. Her relations with her father … and then her lover … came to be entwined in a passion … that was fully the work of contrivance … and rested precariously at the cliff''s edge of oblivion.

 

The issue has a personal note for me. In my young days … I met the acquaintance of a gal … whose manner of personality … gestures … smile … and eye contact … created a great appeal to my intelligence. It affirmed love … by the hallmarks of reason … and caused me to think … that I was experiencing … love with a full rationality of its causes. It caused my heart to pound in my chest … on the occasions when I met her.

 

The experience put me in contact with a most strange sensation of truth about love … and to this day … I keep telling myself … if that was contrivance … then there's nothing natural in the whole wide world. Or perhaps I have to change what I had thought was contrivance. It also engages the issue of a man's will … with regards to the matter … to differentiate reality from illusion … and to engage in only those matters … that are consistent with social order … not the pejoratives of love.

 

Its the credo of the conformist … steeped in the isolated walls … of the search for the meaning of life. And who returns with the view of man's individual condition as being entirely his own … and all else an obligation to the social decorum of life. He makes for a great administrator anywhere … in government … business … or any other vocation. But as a humanitarian his nature is not necessarily lived in denial of love … but the realization of what love is.

 

Cicero suggested … ' A woman's ambition is to love ' … and that is certainly reflective of the way of the world. It defines the way our human condition perceives a block to his higher accomplishment … and the way in which we make two points meet … in the ethical experience of such an accomplishment. We set it as law and order … and our practices of public policy … reflect our will to ensure that it applies to all individuals … nations … and faiths.

 

To the man … naïve as to the institutionalized nature of society … our policies seem to suggest a stupidity … in the way man creates the awkward suggestion of limiting himself … in the possibilities of his own achievement. But left to his own personal improvisations … the man raises a following to his cult personality … that draws the will of his admirers … and leaves them like children … with no responsibility for thinking on their own.

 

We are reminded however that cult organizations did … at one time … create a powerful worldwide impact. Christianity … Buddhism … and Hinduism … relied on the personality of one individual to convey a message that was universal as regards the condition of man. It proposed certain guidelines that has proved invaluable to the preservation of social order and identity. And it is no doubt the father of the modern society today.

 

A man today who discovers such an origin to society in our past … may come to repeat the experience of the cult following. However … his work is quite clear as to its objective. His accomplishment lies in persuading his followers that such is the way our faiths began … and to have them clear … that its founded in the experience of one man with regards to the world. Thereafter he may well advise his followers to follow their individual wills on the issue.

 

Its not uncommon … in these times … to find in the father role … an experience that is reflective of such a condition … even in respect of children and wife. It is the nature of our faith and mind. They offer it to the man … on account of the natural inclination of our instruments … and thereafter … seek to be free of the attachment … and to realize their own will.

 

My own separation from the family … is consistent with such an experience … and I had offered no resistance to the suggestion of separation when it occurred. It was clear as day to me … where the love of father … I received originated. But I couldn't get past the issue of volition and will. I certainly did not intent to enforce mine. Its is the hope however … that where a father returns to union with his family … it will be amidst smiles … regarding an experience well learnt … about the human condition.

 

I find on occasion … that man is too hard on himself … on issues that are a long time in the making of our histories. Perhaps we think we can make a difference … and we create a powerful dismissal of the viability of societies in our experiences. No doubt … in the context of our young lives … such views are absolutely correct … and validated by the pain of estrangement. But have we also granted the benefit of the doubt … to the insistence of  love in our lives?

 

In the animal kingdom … the wild and free  nature of individual wills are well recorded. A preponderance to a close relation on account of individual will may sometimes be met with the bare fangs of disapproval. In human society … we moderate such dismissals for as long as we are able … and then the fangs emerge. In the meantime we seek a better way to manage the issue … for in human society … love overcomes hatred … and is an essential criteria for survival.