Question

Discuss the conformist culture of the 1950s, and include the perils of conformity as part of the discussion and Compare and contrast the issues of alienation and liberation during the 1950s.

Answer 1

There was a sense of uniformity in American society during the 1950s. Compliance was normal, as both young and old adopted community standards instead of setting out on their own. Although during World War II men and women were forced into new employment patterns, traditional roles were reaffirmed once the war was over. Men had to be the breadwinners; women assumed their proper place at home even when they worked, but not all Americans conformed to such cultural norms. But not all Americans have complied with such cultural norms. A number of poets, so-called "beat generation" leaders, rebelled against traditional values. They stressed spontaneity and spirituality, asserting intuition over reason, and Eastern mysticism over Western religion. The "beats" ignored the conventions of respetability and surprised the rest of the world.

Alienation came after World War II to betoken a near-universal mental and religious malaise. It was used by existentialist philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre to describe a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Before the radical division of labor and the inhumane efficiency of the assembly line, work was not merely a means of survival, but something in which pre-capitalist artisans found inherent reward. The final form of alienation includes quashing the community's mutual cohesion, what Marx called the' species being' of human beings, and what was lost with the emergence of competitive individualism.