Forgotten origins make arbitrary conventions feel like nature’s order

Evidence

This internalization means the origins of most conventions often get lost to the ages. We learn these rules as “the way things are done.” In eighteenth-century France, carriages drove on the left, but the leaders of the French Revolution switched traffic to the right as a “democratic” rejection of the ancien régime. Today the French drive on the right out of habit, not out of antimonarchical sentiment. The more the backstory is forgotten, the more conventions seem to be the “natural” order of the world. Violations consequentially are “unnatural” and require sanctions. — W. David Marx, Status and Culture, 131

Categorization

• FICTION: A world where a forbidden practice’s true rebellious origin is forgotten and only its ‘natural’ purity remembered — good setup for a culture whose founding taboo traces to a revolution nobody recalls.
• XREF: connects to: Aesthetic convention can overrule biological health cues in mate preference — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 135; Humans rationalize arbitrary customs post hoc rather than recognizing their contingency; Conventions set the perceptual frames by which we experience time, color, and music — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 134 (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• Cultural origin connections must be actively recreated rather than inherited naturally #corroborates (0.85)
• Cultural identities are often invented traditions rather than inherited ones #corroborates (0.82)
• Social categories embed buried power relations that etymology can unearth. #expands (0.82)
• Contemporary concepts get meanings by convention, not by ideal form #corroborates (0.75) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 342
• The demand for novelty paradoxically strengthens the conventions it appears to escape #qualifies (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 100
• Some cultures deliberately make their own origins humble and comic #exemplifies (0.72) — , A Year of World Stories, 12308