From Social norms: the downside by David Hugh-Jones.  The subheading is "Surely under well-defined circumstances, ye CAN push yer grannie off a bus?"  An entertaining musing on social norms.  

The Yimby (“Yes In My Back Yard”) movement in the US has sprung up to fight for less restrictive zoning and more housing, often coming up against Nimby (“Not In My Back Yard”) opponents. Broadly, this is a contest of ideals against self-interest, and broadly I think the Yimbies are right. But the self-interest of Nimbies also carries some moral weight — it’s genuinely a loss to people when transport systems get more crowded, it’s even genuinely a loss when a given neighbourhood gets less “exclusive” than it was! I don’t expect Yimbies to be good at calculating the perhaps rare cases when that loss outweighs the gain.

A reasonable model of politics is that left-wing parties are norm-driven and right-wing parties are driven by self-interest. I speak as a conservative! It may really be true that, as Tony Blair once said, people on the left are “pretty straight guys”. The downside of being ideal-driven is that your activists’ ideals may not involve much cost-benefit analysis. Canny right-wing politicians can slice off chunks of their opponents’ support by embracing idealistic causes that have little or no cost, and perhaps little or no benefit. David Cameron was great at this. Gay marriage, foreign aid and global warming were all ways to rebrand the Tory party. Some of these are unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Others are important, but carried serious costs only in the post-David-Cameron future, which arrived sooner than he expected. But the left wing is also quite capable of doing this to itself. The Scottish National Party has just spent scarce parliamentary time making it easier for teenagers to choose their gender. This is a non-issue for almost every person in Scotland, but presumably it makes SNP activists feel good.

In extreme cases, cost-free norms can become really absurd. On a flight to Bombay in the 1990s, the inflight magazine had an article: Is India Racist? The investigation proceeded by sending a black guy into various high-class shops to see how he was treated. 1990s India was a country of almost a billion people. The number of Africans or African Americans, even including ethnic groups like the Siddi who have been in India for centuries, is essentially a rounding error. By contrast it contained hundreds of millions of low-caste people, facing discrimination, entrenched poverty, debt bondage, you name it; and about a hundred million Muslims, who then as now were quite often — never mind discriminated against! — persecuted and murdered. But in the very rich US, people care about anti-black racism, and it’s important to be like the very rich US. So: how did Bombay shop assistants treat a black guy? With startled amazement, I suppose.

 I consider social norms as a coding mechanism which transmits knowledge and behaviors inter-generationally, covering the gap between evolved nature and changed context and circumstances.  The gap is always there and the nature of the gap also drives a path dependency in the evolution of those social norms.

Hugh-Jones is correct that for all the benefits of social norms in individuals and collectives to adapt to changed circumstances as well as social norms which facilitate non-genetic fit for purpose knowledge and behaviors, they are not without cost.  They are usually net-beneficial but we should not simply assume into existence a net benefit which might not be there.  Context and circumstance are changing far too quickly for that assumption to rest easy. 

The last paragraph above calls to mind a piece I read in the Daily Telegraph a few days ago.  From It’s time to admit it: Black Lives Matter hysteria made fools of us all by Michael Deacon.  The subheading is As a British protest organiser admits fraud, it’s hard to help wondering: what exactly came over us in summer 2020? 

Remember the Black Lives Matter protest in Bristol? The one where the mob tipped the statue into the harbour? In court this week, one of its organisers admitted fraud, after £30,000 in donations from Black Lives Matter supporters went missing.

Those donors will be shaking their heads. But I suspect they won’t be the only ones. Because, three years on, it feels like an appropriate time to reflect on what happened during that mad summer of 2020 – and to ask: what exactly came over us?

We all recall what happened. For almost a month, mass protests raged all over Britain. Outside Downing Street, a policeman took the knee while on duty. The Labour leader, and his deputy, posed for a photograph in which they solemnly took the knee inside Parliament.

Then the England football team started taking the knee, too. In fact, they continued to perform this American gesture long after American sportsmen had stopped. Hence the peculiar spectacle before the England v USA match at last year’s World Cup. The England team took the knee – but the US team didn’t.

All of the above happened in response to a single event: the murder of an African-American man by a white American policeman in the American state of Minnesota, 4,000 miles away. The murder was of course appalling. But how come such huge protests against US cops erupted in Britain, too?

Deacon thinks the madness was a response to the tensions from Covid lockdown.  This ignores that British academia have for some decades been susceptible to parroting the more extreme social justice nonsense of their American brethren even when the fit is poor.