Quotes About Norms

Culture is the sum total of shared habits and expectations

Every place has a deep-seated culture as to how things are done. Culture is the sum total of shared habits and expectations.

I get a feeling that American standards are sort of an unspoken norm, and that whether one resists them, or whether one adopts them, they are there to be reckoned with

Somewhere, on the edge of consciousness, there is what I call a mythical norm, which each of us within our hearts knows 'that is not me.

También en este punto el modelo procedía de arriba: las parejas dirigentes vivían frecuentemente separadas155. Estaba mal visto que una madre dedicase demasiado tiempo a su hijo, incluso pequeño. Se anuló la autoridad de los maridos sobre sus mujeres y de los padres sobre su descendencia. Uno podía ser ejecutado por haber abofeteado a la esposa, ser denunciado por los hijos por haberles pegado

The big problem is how hard it is to achieve equal relationships in a society whose work policies, school schedules, and social programs were constructed on the assumption that male breadwinner families would always be the norm. Tensions between men and women today stem less from different aspirations than from the difficulties they face translating their ideals into practice.

While they lasted, male friendships included much more physical contact and emotional intensity than most heterosexual men are comfortable with today. James Blake, for example, noted from time to time in his diary that he and his friend, while roommates, shared a bed. "We retired early," he recorded one day in 1851, "and in each other's arms did friendship sink peacefully to sleep." Such behavior did not bother the fiancée of Blake's roommate a bit.25

The cultural consensus that everyone should marry and form a male breadwinner family was like a steamroller that crushed every alternative view. By the end of the 1950s even people who had grown up in completely different family systems had come to believe that universal marriage at a young age into a male breadwinner family was the traditional and permanent form of marriage.

The idea that in prehistoric times a man would spend his life hunting only for the benefit of his own wife and children, who were dependent solely upon his hunting prowess for survival, is simply a projection of 1950s marital norms onto the past.

But all these examples of differing marital and sexual norms make it difficult to claim there is some universal model for the success or happiness of a marriage.

Those who advocate that today's youth should be taught abstinence or deferred gratification rather than sex education will find no 1950s model for such restraint. 'Heavy petting' became a norm of dating in this period, while the proportion of white brides who were pregnant at marriage more than doubled. Teen birthrates soar, reaching highs that have not been equaled since.

A date took place in the public sphere, away from home. It involved money, because when you moved from drinking mother's lemonade on the front porch to buying Cokes at a restaurant, someone had to pay. And because in the context of women's second-class economic status, the boy would have to pay, a girl could not ask a boy to take her out. The initiative thus shifted from the girl and her family to the boy.

Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.

Men expected women to be calm, collected, cooperative, and chaste. Eccentric conduct was frowned upon, and any female who got too far out of line could be in serious trouble. Virginia Culin Roberts, 'The Women Was Too Tough

We see ourselves as nonconformist, but I think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age.

Heck, I remember that I used to dress up to take an airplane flight; today, it looks homeless people fill up the planes.

Putting this all together, it makes sense that WEIRD philosophers since Kant and Mill have mostly generated moral systems that are individualistic, rule-based, and universalist. That's the morality you need to govern a society of autonomous individuals.

More specifically, moral capital refers to the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.

Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD).

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.66

Humans construct moral communities out of shared norms, institutions, and gods that, even in the twenty-first century, they fight, kill, and die to defend.

Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness) and wrote, in 1897, that "man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs.

Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible.

We name and talk of a problematic 'transvestism,' the desire to dress in the clothes of the other sex. We do not usually name and speak of the strong desire to dress in the clothes of one's own sex. But why would most of us feel intense anxiety at dressing publicly in the clothes of the other sex? Does not our fervid desire to dress in the clothes of our own sex suggest a mystery to be explored?