High End Nonconformists

From last Sunday's New York Times, a parent's thoughts on her iconoclastic graduate:

As I watched the ceremonies, it occurred to me that anyone who chanced to walk in could not help being struck by the principle of diversity on display that morning. Without indulging in open dissent or looking to rail against the established system, each of the girls was clearly marching to the beat of her own drum, putting a new twist on a school tradition. Thoreau and Emerson, those great American connoisseurs of individualism, would have warmed to the proceedings, and Robert Frost, had he been in attendance, would have realized that more than a few of these girls had already struck out on the road less traveled by, even if it was only by way of a daring accessory.

Then there was my daughter, who was dressed in a demure skirt and blouse that she bought at the last perilous minute, as is her (and my) regrettable habit. A stranger would never have picked her out as a potential rebel; if anything, she has always been determined not to stand out. Except for one fact: Of her senior class, she alone had decided to sidestep the college-application process. This campaign — more an assault than a campaign — to push, prod and expensively tutor one’s teenager into the most auspicious, cocktail-party-ready of colleges has crescendoed in the last few years, fueled by the growing belief on the part of upper-middle-class parents that there are no ungifted offspring in their gilded ranks.

Although this elitist stampede is decried by one and all as being antithetical to the recognition of real talent and to democratic values as a whole, it is nonetheless almost uniformly embraced. And much though the administration of my daughter’s school professed to admire her decision to take a year off after high school, the fact remained that she was the only one of her class who was not heading off to college come the fall.

Which brings me back to my daughter, who, underneath her shy and somewhat diffident exterior, has always harbored the soul of an iconoclast. I might take some credit for having planted this renegade seed — when she was still very young, I invented a nonconformist club to which we were to elect worthy candidates (we found very few) — were it not for the fact that where I am volubly contrarian she has always quietly done her own thing. The truth is, I am of mixed minds about having handed on the mantle of dissent — of keeping a leery distance from the commonly held view — to my daughter. I worry that her instinct to think for herself is as much a curse as a blessing — that she will, despite her capacity to establish close connections, end up standing warily on the sidelines. Although as a culture we bemoan the perils of groupthink, it can be very cold once you move beyond the circle of warmth that is the reward for adding your voice to the collective chorus. We celebrate loners and visionaries, but we tend to do so only after the fact, when the class nerd who sat by himself in the lunchroom ends up writing a best-selling software program. Defiant individualism is fine if it succeeds, but for every misfit who becomes a Charles Bukowski or R. Crumb there is one who becomes Jeffrey Dahmer or the Unabomber. Striking up a different tune has always come with certain costs, beginning with ridicule and ending with social ostracism. A famous loner of a British poet once noted that “our virtues are all social” and that there is always the lurking possibility that what you stand for on your lonesome is nothing more than “a compensating make-believe.”