Historical context

Robert Gibbs

Hancock

Humanities Bl1,6

March 23 2015

What is the role of conformity and nonconformity in the novel, and how does this connect to the historical setting of the text?  

The role of conformity in this novel is to push back advancement and production in this society, for the reader this becomes quite obvious in (Anthem, part 7) where they see the self advancement of Equality as a large disgrace and disrespect and say that he thinks of himself as higher than his "Brothers". This connects to the time periode because even though this novel was written over 60 years ago the writer wrote the setting of the novel almost 100 years from the present. This makes sense because they look at the past and they see abandoned subways and train stations. We also see as the reader that this novel could almost be seen as a apocalyps scenario which the council say that a scientist advance by himself with no supervision and created something that could destroy the world and did. In the novel we see conformity as something weird but there is a possibility that the council thought that technological advancement was it's worst enime so it puts pressure on the people of the world to see this as a bad thing and that no one person could see themselves differently.

Addition:
In the book anthem we see a strong setting for conformity for example in (Anthem, part 2) where they show that people are burned at the stake for having individual thoughts or not going along with the community. This is how we start to see our first connections to real world problems, there are 4 main problems we face today. These include Israel, Ukraine, the world. If we connect the book to Israel, we see that Iran does not want Israel to be a part of the region, in the book we see that they do not want individuality at all. The reason these two things connect is simple they try to hold onto the past so firmly that they are blinded. With Iran they just look at the time periodes in which the Arab nations had control over the land and do not acknowledge the fact that land once belonged and signified something to Israel. Taking into account that there are three religions that see this land as holy the un tried to get the nations to share the land but in some way the Arab nations saw this as a takeover of their land. Moreover back to the novel we see strong lines of never forgetting the past you came from, we see this as the council always says that the past was bad and we must not repeat it and that we must never look back. The Ukraine crisis could be seen as this because the Ukraine want to move out of its little corner with Russia and flourish with other nations, on the other hand we see Russia holding onto the past and does not want to let go of a former part of the old ussr that is still vulnerable. In the book we see that the council tries to destroy everything to do with the past and does not want people going into depth with is as to not promote individual advancement. Furthermore looking at the world we live in we see many times in which we have the choice to conform or to say no and take our own path. For exampleif someone asks you to vandalize something and there are a group of people they would be inflicting peer pressure on you and you could choose to say yea i will or no. In the book anthem we see that the council has all the citizens with them and since everyone believes that the others are 100% alright with the way the government treats the citizens they induce peer pressure on each other that comes directly from the council. Overall this novel all of these separate parts come together to form the censored novel anthem where the council is controlling and will not let the people of their futuristic society become individual and accomplishes this by, making the citizens inflict peer pressure on their fellow citizens.