Norms or laws: which is worse?

In the last of his Reith lectures, Daniel Barenboim said something extraordinary, which nevertheless probably speaks to an idea deeply embedded in popular thought these days. He said there was noting worse than norms and a good society was not possible unless taboos were expunged.

Well, one can see where this comes from. A liberal democracy leaves people free to regulate their own lives, and social norms and taboos provide an informal constraint on that freedom. And yet, it seems to me a remarkable claim. Assent to norms and taboos provides group identity, for the Jews as much as anybody. At the least, one should say that norms are yet far better than social preferences being encoded into law, such that they cannot be escaped. Think of poor Abdul Rahman, sentenced to death for converting to Christianity in Afghanistan. A norm pushes one in a certain direction, but it cannot be enforced.

And if we wish to say (as Barenboim didn't), yes, norms are less bad than legal infringement on natural freedoms, but nevertheless we would be better without them altogether, do we really mean it? For one, such a policy is hard to enforce, normative emergence being natural to human groups, so that it will require extreme legal interventions in favour of re-education and the curtailment of speech and drift towards cutting back on those natural freedoms in the name of which the well-meant actions are taken. In the second place, to deny the value of norms is give up on wisdom as a useful source of human knowledge. The idea that life possesses traps for the unwary that those who have passed the same way can warn us against in advance, that this capacity can help us in situations where our own reason in insufficient, is longstanding and not lightly to be set aside. As a corollary, such a position may well drift from saying we each must try our own experiments and enjoy the consequences (which being so our family and friends would be duty bound to exercise normative pressure on us to conform to more reliable paths of action and only extreme legal penalties will prevent them) , to saying that we each must follow our impulses and yet all impulses are equal so whatever consequences follow the state must cushion us against. At that point our freedom and dignity are again eaten: what we choose makes no difference, or we feel that it does and must be treated as if it doesn't. This kind of doublethink is confusing at best, patronising and malign at worst, keeping its subjects in that childlike state which Aristotle thought no one could prefer, for all the pleasures of childhood, if the cost were the loss of the power to fashion one's own best life through reason. There is a hidden sense in such thinking of course that norms are all taboos of the most irrational kind, which is to say they bear no relation to consequences at all. This seems unlikely at the most cursory glance, considering where normative pressure is most brought to bear: in matters of sexual conduct, whose consequences can be lifelong and shattering.

Thirdly, it may be that norms are important for us to react against. After all, they are by definition not legally binding. They say, 'danger: keep off,' and as such warn away the merely curious. But this encourages the true adventurer. Going into the forbidden may be unwise, but the willingness to do so, knowing the risks and ready to bear the consequences, this is an act of true character and courage. And surely some norms are foolish, or have been kept up through mere empty tradition. We need adventurers to take on the risk of finding out for us. If they are wrong, we will see. If they are right, we can give up the norm and follow them. We find our freedom in seeing that we live in a world of guidelines, rather than rules. Better this than a world of strict law. Better this than a world of pure anarchy that offers us nothing to decide for or against, trapped in a solipsistic paradox of freedom that cuts us off from the wisdom of our fellow human beings, prisoners of the same nature but locked from us by the fear of the norm.

Finally, as in a recent post, to give up on norms is to give up on truth. It says there is no wisdom to be had, and therefore no room for debate. In a world of norms, people give me advice and I must then decide for myself: I argue my way along in life and learn to fight my own corner. Without norms, no advice is possible or permitted. No discussion is meaningful. And even retrospectively, I cannot learn from mistakes because the state has erected safety nets everywhere since it has prejudged that there can be no difference between my choices. In such an environment is it any surprise if some fools decide on a thirst for truth at any cost, and try to explode a hole in this world that so benevolently dispenses with the norm?