Society's (Good) Conformity

Man must be careful when speaking about "conformity" because one cannot pronounce it categorically or wholly as a bad. In a more cultural left-liberal and socialist sense, I would say, it is a bad. In a cultural traditional-conservative (but non-coercive) and capitalist sense, in contrast, it is a good.

The reality is that conformity, that arrives spontaneously in the free interactions, associations and institutions of man, is a necessary part of any civilized and orderly society. Society, being defined as freely cooperating men, expresses itself in the division of labor, which gets its being from men working together towards common goals.

It is in society that a framework develops. This framework begets conformity in terms of language, norms, manners, morals, rules, and so forth. It makes interactions, because a framework exists, possible and has the effect of strengthening these interactions.

Henry Hazlitt, the great Austrian School economist, wrote an article in 1970 defending this kind of conformity in The Intercollegiate Review. You can download and read that here [pdf].

As he wrote, this kind of free market conformity brings "harmony." He gives the example of time schedules. Without them, no one could conduct orderly business with another.  A parallel example to this would be the culturally conservative work ethic of showing up on time. Certainly, it cannot be said, as some left-libertarians do(!), that the free market does not promote such conservatism in a "conformist" way. Thus, a libertarian society, in many, many ways, implies the development of conformity in manners. What one wears to a special event, for example. Or the way man behaves when listening to a lecturer. One can thus see the development, in a free society, of many prejudices, so to speak, and customs.

Moreover, the development of science, or the progress of science, is dependent not on "dissent simply for dissent's sake," but through a working within the organically developed structure of science. The same is true with the arts. It changes conservatively through old forms.

To quote Hazlitt:

But in pointing to the indispensableness of conformity I am not trying to disparage nonconformity, or diversity, or independence, and certainly not individuality or originality. . . . True individualism and originality can flourish only within a basically cooperative system.

As you will see, Hazlitt's short essay is to some extent similar to Robert Nisbet's "The Nemesis of Authority" and a few of the topics covered in Nisbet's outstanding book Twilight of Authority. (See my entry: Power Destroys Civil Society.)

Beyond this, and to expand this topic a bit, this discussion also connects or overlaps with natural law or natural rights.

Briefly, I believe that natural law is something static in that it is to be discovered, through reason (rationalism), and cannot be invented arbitrarily.  (For man it works from the beginning of time to the end, and at any location.) (Natural law brings conformity.) However, because it is something to be discovered, it is therefore possible for new things to be found about natural law over time. New discoveries, though, are rare. It is a slow process. There should accordingly be skepticism about those claiming to have found something genuinely new.

(Law was once looked at and thought of in a symmetrical manner as libertarians see it. Today's idea of legislation is the relatively new thing.)

Obviously, anti-State libertarian philosophy, in some ways, is something still being "worked out." But this is an organic thing that works through the basic starting principles. (Again, it is consequently a "conservative" thing in this regards. Even the physical, empirical sciences change conservatively or organically, as covered above.)*

Murray Rothbard defended, for instance, intellectual property. Yet today there have been scholarly papers on the subject that reason that such property is not property at all. That is to say, man cannot own ideas. Ideas are not scarce or physically tangible. And intellectual "property" creates, rather than eliminates, conflict. If I invented the word "hello," then it makes little sense to say that I own it, and that people must get permission, from me, to say it.

See Also: Hayek & Tradition.

*While it is true that we can draw some kind of analogousness between natural laws, the laws of physics, mathematics, and economics, we have to remember, or keep in mind, that they are necessarily different in the way we discover them.

Physics, while it actually has a rationalistic basis to it (viz., kinematics and its foundation in calculus), is an empirical science. We can derive equations about the motion of a ball, but to then try to do the same with human action is something completely different. And for pure mathematics, clearly it is a deductive science and requires no empirical testing.

Economics and mathematics overlap in the sense that they are deductive sciences, even though economics can only objectively deal with ordinal numbers versus cardinal numbers (and, hence, cannot be subjected to algebra). But economics does input certain empirical assumptions about the world.

Natural law, I think, can be seen most close with economics. It inputs certain empirical assumptions about the world and is rationalistic.