Having taught adolescent boys for many years, I have observed the thrill of transgression up close many times (after, of course, pushing the envelope myself in all sorts of ways well beyond adolescence). Whether I saw it first hand prefecting the cafeteria or heard about it later after the incident in the locker room or train car had passed, there was often a familiar arc to the story: a few kids get wound up and a number of others get energized by seeing them break some sort of norm. It’s so much fun! But something or someone calms things down, and subsequent disciplinary debriefing reveals a rising level of discomfort throughout the incident by the majority of onlookers.
I’ve been thinking about this since reading James Marriott’s piece in The Times titled Conspiracists are About to Get a Dose of Reality which opines that many of the norm-challenging movements (his subtitle refers to “anti-vaxxers, cranks, and fantasists”) have benefited from societal stability, leaving them unable to imagine a world in which the norms they are challenging are truly no longer there to protect us.
This doesn’t mean that bristling against norms doesn’t come from a legitimate dissatisfaction with the results those norms have wrought. Marriott explains:
The roots of modern conspiracy theories and anti-scientific cults are conventionally (and correctly) attributed to those much-chronicled woes of western democracies: economic stagnation, financial inequality and political sclerosis. But an underrated factor in modern irrationality and zealotry is the West’s stability. Our society has been peaceful and healthy for so long that for many people serious disaster has become inconceivable. You can rattle the bars of the cage as fiercely as you like but you will never actually escape the comfort of the zoo.
There seems to be disagreement about the maxim attributed to Churchill that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others,” but have those on the fence really thought through what “all the others” are actually like? At this point I’ll hand things over to Robert Bolt’s hagiographic version of Thomas More:
What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?…And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!
Laws give us guardrails. So do norms. In my experience with youth, when someone went too far transgressing a rule or a norm, many of the folks involved wanted someone to intervene, not for the sake of the rule but because of their own sense of safety. Of course, this analogy breaks down in two important ways.
First, the norm-challenging communities at this moment in history are not children. There is not some more-mature authority figure ready to swoop in, nor should there be. Adults can’t outsource the observance of norms, at least not in post-modernity. It’s all on us. To quote another maxim, that “it’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” we are the only ones who can summon the good sense to pry our fingers from our own eyes.
Second, we don’t really know where this adherence to norms comes from. I like to believe that there is an innate sense in people young and old that when something starts to harm others it has violated a boundary that isn’t meant to be crossed, and that discomfort with certain forms of transgression comes from this instinct to uphold the boundaries that keep people safe. Of course, it’s possible that this sense is learned, and that promoting the common good is inculcated at such a fundamental level that it feels innate. If this is the case, then we have some work to do forming folks in this value, because too many people don’t share it and I don’t want to live in a world where it is not widespread.
I share Marriott’s observation that this is an imaginative failure. Just as anti-vaxxers can’t imagine a world where people regularly die of preventable diseases, those who transgress the norms supporting the common good only imagine a situation in which they are among those who benefit from an unequal society. We get caught up in the fun of imagining the best possible outcome for burning everything down. But those gobbling up the power and resources will never be sated, and eventually they will come for the educated, they will come for the native-born, they will come for the privileged, and who could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
Photo by Robert Goulston.
