Between the Worlds: Conformity and Liberty

Recently, a school headmistress in Kerala went to court over what she wore to work. She preferred a churidar, but the school management insisted that she wear a saree. The dispute went all the way to the Kerala High Court, which ruled in her favor. A saree may be graceful and traditional, the court observed, but that does not give someone else the right to make it compulsory.

It seems an extraordinary thing to take to court. Yet hardly a week goes by without another argument over what people, particularly women, should wear. Too revealing, too Western, not traditional enough. Elsewhere, women fight for the right to wear a hijab. One woman demands the freedom to discard a convention; another demands the freedom to observe it. Both invoke personal liberty. Why do we care so much about what other people wear? And why do we have conventions in the first place?

A few years ago, I was on a walking tour of an ancient Greek city. Amidst the ruins, our guide stopped beside a pillar and began telling us about Diogenes, a philosopher who lived some twenty-four centuries ago.

Diogenes was an eccentric, even by the generous standards of Greek philosophers. He lived with almost no possessions, reportedly made his home in a large earthen jar, and deliberately violated the conventions of respectable society. He questioned why people should be ashamed of perfectly natural bodily functions, and why they should obey customs merely because everyone else did. When Alexander the Great offered to grant him a favor, Diogenes supposedly asked him to move aside because he was blocking the sunlight.

Diogenes was not content to argue against conventions. He made his life a demonstration of what it meant to reject them. If society demanded that he behave in a particular way, he wanted to know why.

I would have liked Diogenes enormously when I was young.

I disliked formal clothes, was careless about shaving, and saw little reason to observe social conventions. Why should I dress for somebody else’s approval? People who meticulously followed such conventions seemed like mindless followers of rules they had never bothered to question.

A friend once offered a different perspective. “Every man owes society a shave a day,” he said.

I would have laughed at that suggestion. Why should society be entitled to my clean-shaven face? It took me many years to appreciate what he meant.

We do not always observe conventions because we believe in them. Sometimes we do so to make others comfortable. We dress appropriately for an occasion, observe customary greetings, and make small adjustments to accommodate the people around us. These gestures communicate something: I recognize you, I respect you, and I acknowledge that we share this occasion.

A cousin of mine married a modern woman who rarely wore sarees. When they planned to visit his parents, she insisted that she would wear whatever she pleased. Her husband suggested that she wear a saree for the visit. It was only a day or two, he reasoned, and it would make his mother happy. Why not make that small compromise?

I found myself sympathetic to his argument. His mother had no right to dictate what her daughter-in-law should wear, of course. But was it such a terrible sacrifice to make an elderly woman happy for a couple of days? We make small concessions for people we love all the time. We eat food we do not particularly enjoy, attend ceremonies we do not believe in, and listen patiently to stories we have heard many times before.

Yet I can see the other side too. Women have been making these little sacrifices for generations, often without anyone asking whether they wished to make them. What seems like a trivial request to the husband may be another reminder to his wife that she is expected to accommodate everyone else’s preferences.

Where does courtesy end and submission begin?

John Stuart Mill grappled with a version of this problem in On Liberty. He worried about the tyranny of public opinion as much as the tyranny of government. A community may be perfectly willing to let a person live, provided that person lives exactly as the community expects. Mill argued that social disapproval alone is not sufficient justification for restricting individual liberty.

But Mill’s argument does not tell us whether we should observe a convention when nobody has the right to compel us. There is a considerable distance between what others may legitimately demand of us and what we might willingly do for them.

Conventions have purposes beyond making a few elderly relatives happy. We dress differently for weddings and funerals, greet elders in particular ways, and observe rituals whose origins we may not even remember. Through these practices, we recognize one another, affirm our membership in a community, and connect ourselves with previous generations.

Émile Durkheim, the French sociologist, argued that shared rituals help create and sustain social solidarity. We do not merely perform them because we belong to a community. By performing them together, we renew that sense of belonging.

The clothes, gestures, and rituals are often merely symbols. A person attending a wedding in the expected clothes is not necessarily declaring that those clothes are superior. He may simply be acknowledging that the occasion belongs to more people than himself. By accepting a small inconvenience, he signals his willingness to participate in something shared.

There is reciprocity here. We expect others to respect our preferences, but surely we owe them some consideration in return. A society in which everyone insists upon exercising every personal freedom without regard for others would be a rather unpleasant place to live.

But how much consideration? And who decides?

A convention that brings people together can also exclude those who refuse to observe it. The same community that takes care of its members during weddings, illnesses, and funerals may make life miserable for someone who marries outside the caste or refuses an inherited ritual. The expectation of solidarity can become a demand for obedience. And if a convention always requires the same people to make sacrifices, we should ask whether it serves the common good or merely preserves an unequal arrangement.

Of course, conventions change. Over the last three decades, many women in South India have adopted the salwar kameez for everyday wear. It is often more convenient than a saree, particularly for commuting and working. I have made my own compromises with convention. I rarely wear a tie if ever, and I prefer comfortable shoes to traditional formal footwear. My Nike Air Force 1s are black, partly because I do not want to attract attention. I can enjoy their comfort while appearing suitably dressed for the occasion.

Perhaps much of social change happens this way, not through dramatic rebellion but through countless small accommodations. What was once unconventional becomes acceptable, then familiar, and eventually traditional. 

But there is a more troubling question. When we say that someone has freely chosen what to wear, what exactly do we mean?

Consider the hijab. Earlier generations of women fought against restrictions that required them to cover themselves. Yet some younger women, including educated and independent women, deliberately choose to wear it. They may see the hijab as an expression of faith, modesty, identity, or even a refusal to be judged primarily by their physical appearance.

Some feminists of an older generation find this bewildering. They fought for women’s freedom to discard such restrictions. Why would another generation voluntarily embrace them? Others question whether the choice is as free as it appears. A woman may sincerely believe that she is expressing her independence while following values that a patriarchal society has taught her to accept. Who decided what modesty means? And why does the burden of modesty fall so heavily upon women?

This question reminds me of an American cigarette advertisement from the 1960s. Philip Morris introduced Virginia Slims with the memorable slogan, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Cigarette smoking was presented as a symbol of women’s liberation. Women could now do what men had long done, including smoke cigarettes. The language of emancipation became the language of advertising.

Of course, wearing a hijab is nothing like smoking a cigarette in its consequences. But the advertisement exposes a weakness in our celebration of choice. A person can sincerely believe she is exercising her independence while expressing desires that others have carefully cultivated.

Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political thinker, examined how power sustains itself not merely through force but through the ideas people accept as natural. We may willingly participate in arrangements that benefit others because we have come to regard them as normal, desirable, or inevitable.

Yet this argument can turn against us. If a woman chooses to wear a hijab, we may dismiss her choice as social conditioning. If she chooses not to wear it, we celebrate her independence. We have arranged matters so that only the choices we approve of count as free choices.

And what makes us so certain that our own preferences are free from conditioning? We are all products of our upbringing, education, religion, language, and history. Fashion, advertising, and peer pressure shape our desires no less than inherited customs. Even our desire to rebel against conventions may be something we learned from others.

Spinoza observed that people believe themselves free because they are conscious of their desires but ignorant of the causes that produce them. We know what we want, but often understand very little about why we want it. Perhaps there is no such thing as an entirely independent choice. We are prisoners of our history, if not our biology.

But surely there is a meaningful difference between a woman who wears a hijab because she would face punishment if she removed it and another who wears it despite pressure to abandon it. The garment is the same. The circumstances are not.

Power changes the meaning of conformity too. An immigrant entering an American workplace may dress like everyone else because she fears being judged as unfamiliar with professional norms. A successful executive with an established reputation may feel free to wear traditional Indian clothes without giving the matter a second thought. What has changed is the wearer’s ability to disregard other people’s expectations.

And sometimes we embrace conventions for reasons that have little to do with either power or obedience. I was once invited to a wedding where traditional dress was suggested. I eventually chose to wear a dhoti like my father used to wear. I had spent much of my life moving away from his world, yet there I was, trying to dress like him. I wore it not because society demanded it, but because it connected me to someone I loved.

Alasdair MacIntyre argued that we cannot understand ourselves apart from the histories and communities to which we belong. We inherit languages, relationships, loyalties, and stories long before we begin making independent choices. We do not necessarily become less individual when we embrace our inheritance. Sometimes we discover something deeply personal within it.

And so I return to Diogenes, challenging everyone to explain why they obeyed conventions. I still admire his audacity. Societies need people who ask uncomfortable questions, reject customs merely because they are old, and demonstrate that other ways of living are possible.

But I no longer believe that rejecting a convention necessarily makes us free, or that observing one makes us submissive. There is a difference between being compelled to conform and choosing to conform. There is also a difference between demanding the right to live as we please and refusing to acknowledge that we owe something to the people among whom we live.

Sometimes what we owe them is a small courtesy, sometimes participation in a common ritual, sometimes the willingness to give up a personal preference for the collective good. And sometimes, perhaps, what we owe society is the courage to challenge its conventions.

Diogenes wanted to free himself from society’s expectations. My friend thought every man owed society a daily shave. I think both understood something important.

After all, if even our desire for independence is shaped by the society in which we grew up, what does it really mean to be free?

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