Norms - For Conformity or Action

Such a skill involves recognizing the conditional reality of “norms" -- an instance of (objectivity).

Norms can be good or bad: pleasing manners are norms (say “hello” when you see someone you know); racism, too, is a set of norms. By “norms” I mean certain impersonal “forms” of behavior that are acknowledged by some group of people — they can be the result of unconscious consensus or of explicit agreement. "In this group, people do not speak about their feelings." "In this group, people don't wear jeans." "In this group, if someone says 'hello' to a second person there is no expectation that the second person should respond." Norms concern "people in general." A norm establishes a group: a norm concerns a general behavior in a general set of circumstances and general responses to the behavior.

I call norms impersonal, because they are linguistic-behavioral structures that any person can take up and dwell in or act on the basis of, like language. (In fact, as I suggest below, I understand words themselves to be a kind of norm. We are acting on the basis of a word when we say it, in order to dwell in a thought or communicate a meaning.)

Being impersonal — that is, not a property of individual persons, but a way of behaving any individual person can “take up” — norms create a kind of place, a relation, where we can “meet,” where we can bring the wild, irrational and exciting parts of ourselves into contact with one another, and yet do so upon a shared platform, so that human relationships can be sustained even while we are making contact (and, one hopes, friends) with “wild”, unexplored or unarticulated domains of Being. The norm is a mutual construct on which we stand by means of which we can look outward together on the yet-unexplored.

Through norms we constitute the “normal.” However, I do not take norms, or the “normal,” to be objectively-existing standards to which we should conform. When people understand norms in this way, they make the normal into a tool of oppression. Instead, I view norms — at least when they are shared and mutually accepted — as useful references by which we are able to reasonably predict the consequences of certain behaviors (they enable us to expect certain responses from others to certain behaviors). Such “predictability” can be used either in the service of conformity or in the service of change. Norms enable or they stifle. [depending on ... what?] (A special kind of behavior, “action,” changes norms themselves. In order to change something, one must bring to it another something from a different domain. So, in order to change a norm, we must bring something else to that norm. What might that be? We can hold this question for later.)

When not shared, i.e. when people who are interacting are independently referencing different norms, norms can become sources of confusion and misunderstanding. Conversely, when we agree that a behavior shall have such and such a meaning, or when we agree on a certain set of boundaries, we have a shared basis for communicating. Every norm is a shared platform from which we can approach the “not normal,” together — together being a key. But when we are relying on a norm that the other person does not acknowledge, for whatever reason, then we are liable to get confused in our communications.

Knowing together includes having and holding to mutually accepted norms.

Whenever we communicate with someone else, we consciously or unconciously feel out “norms.” Words themselves, in fact, are a kind of norm. Words and norms are impersonal behaviors serving as platforms of agreed-upon meaning that anyone can access from a public domain.

When we communicate or receive words, we reference a set of norms, explicit or implicit. These norms can collectively be conceived of as a “platform of understanding,” which is to say, the collective of norms we reference consist in something very much like an imaginary “any person” to whom we are speaking and who will understand whatever we say through reference to some set of norms, expectations, experiences, feelings and understandings. In our communication with someone else, we refer to how this “any person" (or the "group person") might “likely” respond to what we say. But this imagined “ANY person” is itself a norm, a figment, something that people together agree, although usually unconsciously, to fabricate, to facilitate communication, trust and confidence in one another. This "any person" is ourselves.