Abnormal

Societies have multiple ways of enforcing their norms. Many of them, from the gravely serious to the remarkably trivial are formally encoded into laws. These are often enforced with varying degrees of consistency and enthusiasm. Here in the United States, the body of law is vast, so much so that many laws are routinely ignored and it's likely that many more are routinely transgressed by people who have no idea that they're committing a criminal act. And there is the ever-present suspicion that some people, for whatever reason, have simply been granted a pass from statutes that are binding on "the common person."

Despite the length and breadth of the legal system, there are still plenty of situations that some or another group of people understand to be wrong to a degree, but do not rise to the level of illegality. And how societies deal with those is an open question. The phenomenon of "cancel culture" is one such way that portions of society make their displeasure known; although how effective it is can be open to interpretation. At its core, "cancel culture" is little more than an expansive boycott, or threat thereof. Institutions capitulate when they find that standing up for someone or something is not in their interests. One could make the case that the sort of public shaming that "cancel culture" trades in is different than a boycott, but the outcome is basically the same; people threatening to take their business elsewhere. But this, of course, exposes one of the flaws of boycotts; they're ineffective in the face of persons and organizations who need nothing from the would-be boycotters. In effect, threats to take one's business elsewhere aren't really a problem for someone that one is already not doing business with, or won't miss the lost revenue.

And this creates a gap that can be difficult to fill. Sometimes, a person or organization can be forced to change their behavior through direct action, but unless those actions are themselves scrupulously legal (and sometimes even when they are), they can subject to legal action.

Heterogeneous societies, like the United States, I think, have a more difficult time enforcing norms on the large scale, because the various groups that comprise the society aren't always going to agree on whether a given norm suits people's purposes. A lot has been made recently of violations of norms, especially in the political arena, but I wonder how much consideration has been given to whether the people who were called upon to enforce the norms saw that enforcement as being in their interests. In other words, are people really being called upon to defend their norms, or those of other people who just happen to live in the same nation?

I suspect that I was a child the last time I saw the United States as being a genuinely unified nation, in the sense that there were broad, mutually understood goals that people were working together to achieve. Of course, it could be, by that definition, that no nations are unified. But this is the one that I have direct experience with. In any event, I wonder if it's past time that the United States abandons the idea of shared national norms, given that don't appear to be any shared national goals. It strikes me as a more realistic outlook on things than is currently in evidence. Although perhaps exceptionalism means never having to be all that realistic.

Still, it strikes me that a clear-eyed understanding that there are many different facets to the United States and its cultures might allow for a more constructive means of looking both at norms and the various failures of them. If it's understood that there are few to no genuinely national norms, perhaps people can avoid losing so much time to lamenting perceived violations.