When Lawyers Sing

How do cultures change, especially re keys value-laden norms? In a stable society with long established norms, experience in applying those norms should have long given most people pretty clear ideas of what they imply for particular cases. Most people would try to keep their talk and acts consistent with such norms, expecting to suffer penalties that increase with deviation size. In this environment, norms seem unlikely to noticeably change, though they might drift imperceptibly over generations. And this pattern often held in the ancient world.

But in our world today, key norms change quite noticeably over short time periods, and the people seen as most directly responsible for such changes are often celebrated, not censured, for doing so. But how can that make any sense, if we in fact feel very attached to our key norms and penalize deviations from them?

Consider law under a system of precedent. Each new legal case not only applies existing law, it also creates a precedent for future cases. Law uses many abstract concepts, and their application requires many associated choices of bright lines, exceptions, and relative priorities. As a result, it is quite often just not clear what decision is implied by prior precedent. 

Furthermore, the world changes, changing the distribution of cases and introducing new kinds of cases. And many want law to track changes in the culture outside of law. All of this creates room for a range of legal decisions, giving plausible deniability that one is actually changing the law. Not only do individual lawyers try to use these effects to win particular cases, legal advocacy groups plan cases and legal strategies to move law as a whole. Winning advocates are among our most prestigious lawyers.

In addition, law systems usually have central authorities (e.g, supreme courts) whose precedents are supposed to count for more, and who are more allowed or even expected to initiate changes. Such authorities are often selected exactly to induce such changes, though selectors often deny this fact. Legal authorities typically justify changes as correcting prior errors and more coherently applying widely accepted norms. Even so, observers often see them as deliberately changing law.

Now consider informal social norms again. Like legal rules, social norms are also often expressed in terms of abstractions, and their application requires many choices of bright lines, exceptions, and relative priorities. And as in law, recent actions and their evaluations and framings in terms of social norms influence new versions.

However, while lawyers try to create special clearer legal definitions of the words they use, and carefully review prior legal usage, ordinary social norms tend more to use ordinary language interpreted by ordinary folks in light of the ordinary usage. And while law at least pretends to use disinterested intellectual analysis which keeps emotions in check, ordinary norm application is far more interested and emotional, and less intellectual. 

Norm applications are also influenced by perceptions of recent changes in politics and social trends, by recent related art, such as songs and novels, and by “cultural criticism” that interprets and frames all of these things. Norm change is more like what law would be like if lawyers did songs and dances to make their cases. And while culture doesn’t have official authorities the way that law does, prestigious cultural elites do in fact have far more influence over such things, and are seen as prestigious in substantial part because of such influence. We tolerate and even expect them to imitate more larger changes to key norms. 

Why does the modern world see faster norm change than did most ancient worlds? Part if it is that we see higher rates of change in other areas, such as technology, economics, and demography. But a big part must also be that many eagerly seek changes aligned with their particular social factions, and many others withhold judgement, waiting to judge change activists according to the new norms that appear after such fights. So fight winners are judged to be especially good people, while fight losers are seen as especially evil. 

Compared to most ancient worlds, the modern world expects and seeks cultural change, including changes to key norms. Most of the small moves that add up to these big changes are explicitly justified as merely offering better framings and more effective expressions and applications of long accepted norms. But in fact many small moves add up to big changes in the norms themselves. Which seems a good thing to those who evaluate these changes by the standards of the new resulting norms.