The modern pursuit of novelty destabilizes fixed social and legal boundaries

Evidence

A community with strong and effective norms about young persons’ behavior can keep them from “having a good time.” Norms that make it possible to walk alone at night also constrain the activities of criminals (and in some cases of noncriminals as well). Even prescriptive norms that reward certain actions, like the norm in a community that says that a boy who is a good athlete should go out for football, are in effect directing energy away from other activities. Effective norms in an area can reduce innovativeness in an area, not only deviant actions that harm others but also deviant actions that can benefit everyone. — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 110 (#complicates, via linked claim)

We understand struggle and resistance, nowadays, rather better than we do reform and transformation. Yet “transformations” are at the heart of the study of popular culture. I mean the active work on existing traditions and activities, their active reworking, so that they come out a different way: they appear to “persist”—yet, from one period to another, they come to stand in a different relation to the ways working people live and the ways they define their relations to each other, to “the others” and to their conditions of life. Transformation is the key to the long and protracted process of the “moralization” of the laboring classes, and the “demoralization” of the poor, and the “re-education” of the people. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 993 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Culture is the precaution of those who claim to think thought but who steer clear of its chaotic journey. Evolving cultures infer Relation, the overstepping that grounds their unit ydiversity. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 83 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The demand for novelty paradoxically strengthens the conventions it appears to escape — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 100; Capitalist accumulation obeys law-like principles yet produces only illusory novelty — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2145; Administrative planning inadvertently politicizes private life and weakens tradition — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2712 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Effective community norms constrain behavior and suppress beneficial innovation #complicates (0.76) — Coleman, SocialCapitalCreation-1988, 110
• Cultural elements that appear to persist can secretly shift their social meaning and function #complicates (0.72) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 993
• Culture functions as a precaution against thought’s chaotic journey #complicates (0.71) — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 83