We may think that we are a nation of laws, and that it is those laws that govern the society we live in. In actuality, the laws exist only as a backdrop to what really rules our day to day existence, societal norms.
If you think that it is a law against robbery and a police force to enforce that law, that keeps you from worrying about someone smashing in your front door and robbing you, think again. Your security comes from the fact that the norm of behavior within our society is to refrain from such behavior. This is an extreme example, but in every aspect of our lives we are living according to a set of norms, on the road, at work, in the store, at school, even within our own homes.
Maintaining these norms is critical to the ongoing functionality of our society. Sadly we seem to be in the process of destroying many of the most critical ones, and some of the ones that it will be most difficult to rebuild.
In many areas of behavior, norms simply work to create a more workable environment, but don’t conflict with any basic human trait. Traffic rules would be a good example. As such rebuilding a damaged norm or creating a new one may be time consuming but is not difficult. The wearing of seat belts would be an example; a behavior which is now a norm, a behavior maintained through the norm rather than the existence of a law, although of course there is one.
In contrast some norms have developed to curtail innate human tendencies that threaten societal cohesiveness. Here the prime example would be racism. As an animal, we are inherently predisposed to create and belong to a group. The group can be defined in a multitude of ways. Take the test; write down a description of yourself and you’ll immediately see the primary groups that you feel you belong to. (Old, white, anglo-saxon, male) Over time we have succeeded in creating a norm that we subjugate our racial grouping in dealing with other races, so as to be able to coexist. That is not to say that everyone adopted the norm as their behavioral standard, but society as a whole adopted it. Now, thanks to the actions of a few politicians using the potential of the innate racial grouping to rise to power, that societal norm is in danger of being destroyed. And, once it is destroyed or even seriously damaged, the effort required to resurrect it when doing so requires overcoming the evolutionary driven racist pressure may be too great for it to be revived in a generation.
The need then is to fight to maintain the norms that hold us together, to avoid the slide into a less civilized world. This means speaking out against breaches of the norms, whenever and by whomever committed. Calling out racist acts and speech, condemning lying, demanding consideration of the needs of those least able to defend themselves, are not promotion of divisiveness. They are the effort we need to make to protect the norms that hold our society together.