Lots of questions about non-conformists

“Following a riot in the city in 1274, Norwich has the distinction of being the only English city to be excommunicated by the Pope.”

This quote is lifted directly from Wikipedia about the history of Norwich, the fine old city that was once the second city in England behind London. My wife’s family have roots in Norwich and Norfolk and are rightly proud of coming from the city. As you enter the city there are signs that say ‘Welcome to Norwich – A Fine City’, and I believe them. It’s not a bad piece of PR from some councillor with an over-inflated sense of his (or her) own importance.

I had the good fortune to be educated (in every sense) in Norwich in the early 1990s and even though I did not take all of the opportunities that were offered to me in that time, I still look back with great fondness on my time there. Part of that might be to do with my years coinciding with the greatest in thehistory of Norwich City FC, but there are many other reasons.

One of the main things that is special about the city is that it has been a centre for non-conformism for more than five hundred years. It has been populated by people who think and believe in different things.

The original meaning of non-conformist in England was a person who refused to follow the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. In 1662 the Act ofUniformity ejected about two thousand preachers who refused to conform to the provisions of the Act. Long before the Act, and after it, Norwich was home to men like Robert Browne and William Bridge, who in their own ways demonstrated their wish to behave, worship and live according to their own rules.

By the time I lived in Norwich in the 1990s many of the non-conformist chapels were little used, and the choice of living differently was most visibly expressed by men with dogs on ropes drinking White Lightning outside the Tesco on the market square.

Throughout my adult life I have had an interest in the alternative thinkers, who are often also the ones on the edge of society.

I went from Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg to Gary Snyder to Wendell Berry. I realised quickly that none of them came from around here. Why not?

What makes them different? How much tolerance should there be in any city for those who want to behave in a way that sits uncomfortably outside the accepted rules? What value do such people have, and what happens when their ideas seep into the mainstream of our thinking and behaviour? Why do some areas of public life, such as art, sculpture and music, attract the unorthodox; whilst others such remain steadfastly cautious?

As I age and find myself sounding increasingly like my father, what place does ageing have on my views?

And most importantly, is society now being shaped in such a way that dissenting voices are snuffed out much sooner than in the past? Do we now live in a time when the real non-conformists and dissenters have no voice at all? And what implications does this have for the future of ideas? Where are the supposedly controversial ideas going to come from in the Twenty-First Century?

Everyone lies on a scale between active non-conformist and Martin from ‘Ever Decreasing Circles’. I think how non-conformist a person is in adulthood depends on a number of factors from childhood to first employment. Some of us are told not be quite so silly by our parents and from then on tread a path in their footsteps. Some arrive in Secondary School and have the stuffing knocked out of us by a particularly brutal regime. Some have a period of enlightenment from sixteen to twenty-one, whether away from home at a college or in first employment; and it fizzles out when we leave home, squashed by the commitment of a first home.

For most, it is a financial pressure that makes us conform. You need the job, so you cut your hair and put on a shirt and tie or a sensible skirt. Or both, if you are Eddie Izzard.

What I have found worrying in the last ten years or so is that I still look for the non-conformists all the time, and I see them snuffed out not by a particularly nasty school teacher or a mortgage, but just drowned under a flood of banality that is offered us by large companies from London, Paris, New York and Beijing. We cannot escape the ‘words from the sponsor’.

I go to work, I pay my taxes, I go to Church on a Sunday (itself quite a non-conformist act in 2014) and I am overwhelmed by the beige nature of what the major companies like us to believe is ‘culture’.

I am surprised how all-pervading the soma of modern life is. We are becoming defined by the products that we buy instead of the books that we read. We are placed into target categories by political scientists so that our votes can be better harvested according to the television stations we watch.

I can already hear the voices of several close friends who will be telling me to pull myself together, and that I still have choices, and that I don’t have to end my days watching re-runs of ‘Friends’ and eating crisps. My point really is how much choice do I really have?

So I have devised some simple questions to make an attempt to classify or clarify the choices that I have, and see how easily I could choose an intelligent alternative.

If it isn’t on the internet, how easy is it now to find the information?

If I want to buy food grown near where I live, how easy is it to buy in Sainsbury’s or Tesco?

If I feel strongly about something going on in my town, how easy is it to have my voice heard by someone in power?

If I want to hear music that is not endorsed and massaged by a multinational corporation, which radio stations offer it?

I am proud that I am from the same country as Thomas Becket, William Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, Mary Shelley, David Attenborough, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, John Peel, Tony Benn and Joe Strummer. I may not agree with everything that these people did or said, but my pride comes from the fact that they were allowed to say it.

I am not proud that I live in a country in which popular protest at dysfunctional government is viewed in the same light as football hooliganism. And in which people pay money to watch John Terry play football.

Somewhere in the middle ground lies a place in which the odd-balls, freaks and eccentrics in our society are tolerated. As the Stranglers said, ‘Whatever happened to the heroes?’ I think they are still there but because Ant and Dec are presenting another Jungle Challenge we may not get the chance to hear from them. We are poorer for it.