Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 1164

To the extent that our sampling of the orientations of American college students in the years 1950 and 1952 may be representative of our culture -- and still valid in 1959 -- we are disposed to question the summary characterization of the current generation as silent, beat, apathetic, or as a mass of other-directed conformists who are guided solely by social radar without benefit of inner gyroscopes.

Our data indicate that these students of today do basically accept the existing institutions of the society, and, in the face of the realities of complex and large-scale economic and political problems, make a wary and ambivalent delegation of trust to those who occupy positions of legitimized responsibility for coping with such collective concerns.

In a real sense they are admittedly conservative, but their conservatism incorporates a traditionalized embodiment of the original `` radicalism '' of 1776.

Although we have no measures of its strength or intensity, the heritage of the doctrine of inalienable rights is retained.

As they move through the college years our young men and women are `` socialized '' into a broadly similar culture, at the level of personal behavior.

In this sense also, they are surely conformists.

It is even true that some among them use the sheer fact of conformity -- `` everyone does it '' -- as a criterion for conduct.

But the extent of ethical robotism is easily overestimated.

Few students are really so faceless in the not-so-lonely crowd of the swelling population in our institutions of higher learning.

And it may be well to recall that to say `` conformity '' is, in part, another way of saying `` orderly human society ''.