thanks so much for making yourself available tonight and sharing your ideas online.

Thanks, Clare.(Happily married and too poor to need a pre-nup!)

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman would probably argue that the piece of the pie chart that is a fxn of SN v MN is the smallest now that it has ever been, and decreasing. In his Foreword to his 2000 work “Liquid Modernity” he writes:

“the famous phrase ‘melting the solids’, coined a century and a half ago by the authors of The Communist Manifesto, referred to the treatment which the self-confident and exuberant modern spirit awarded the society it found much too stagnant for its taste and much too resistant to shift and mould [Baumant's a Brit] for is ambitions — since it was frozen in its habitual ways…

“The first solids to be melted and the first sacreds to be profaned were traditional loyalties, customary rights and obligations which bound hand and feet, hindered moves and cramped the enterprise… ‘Melting the solids’ meant first and foremost shedding the ‘irrelevant’ obligations standing in the way of rational calculation of effects [read: social norms]; as Max Weber put it, liberating business enterprise from the shackles of the family; or, as Thomas Carlyle would have it, leaving solely the ‘cash nexus’ of the many bonds underlying human mutuality and mutual responsibilities. By the same token, that kind of ‘melting the solids’ left the whole complex network of social relations unstuck — bare, unprotected, unarmed and exposed, impotent to resist the business-inspired rules of action and business-shaped criteria of rationality…

“The melting of solids lead to the progressive untying of economy from its traditional political, ethical and cultural entanglements. It sedimented a new order, defined primarily in economic terms [read: market norms].”

(see also tangential yet related: Glaesser on subversion of justice and rise of regulatory state)

Bauman continues that, in effect, we stripped out these social norms on our own, and it was not some dystopian Zamyatin-esque State that did it to us. We asked for this:

“The present-day situation emerged out of the radical melting of the fetters and manacles rightly or wrongly suspected of limiting the individual freedom and choose and to act. Rigidity of order is the artefact and sediment of the human agents’ freedom.”

Considering this and your write-up:

1. I wonder if there’s a cusp point going on in our society where we are realizing that the market-optimizing calculus to which we have dutifully and increasingly paid obeisance since arguably the late 1800s needs to take into account additional variables –> perhaps, in recognition of the probability of minimizing future lawsuits, attention to social norms is simply the way to still stand at attention to market norms?

2. I wonder if this solid-melting idea of Bauman’s is on to something, given the fact that being honest and human is something that’s newsworthy. If it was the norm to behave as such, there probably wouldn’t be an article about it in the Times … ?