They ought to have a law…

The unfortunate consequences of degrading common societal norms.

Around one o’clock in the morning of Monday, April 22, Democratic state Sen. Nicole Mitchell set off on the 200-mile drive from her home in Woodbury to her stepmother’s home in Detroit Lakes. On arrival, dressed all in black and carrying a flashlight covered with a black sock to reduce emitting light, the senator entered the house through a basement window and went to her stepmother’s bedroom. At some point, Sen. Mitchell’s stepmother was awakened and the senator “ran down into the basement.” Mitchell’s stepmother called the police at 4:45 a.m. When officers arrived, they arrested her and, searching her black backpack, found two laptops, a cellphone, and miscellaneous Tupperware. “I know I did something bad,” the senator told the officers. When Sen. Mitchell was given one of the laptops found in her backpack to open, which she claimed was hers, her stepmother’s name appeared on the screen. The senator said the laptop had been given to her “way back when”; her stepmother denies giving the laptop to Sen. Mitchell.  

Upon her release from jail and facing a charge of felony burglary, Sen. Mitchell did not resign from the Minnesota State Senate. Indeed, her DFL colleagues welcomed her and her vote back with smiles and embraces.  

Later that week, the question was raised why there weren’t rules governing what should happen in these circumstances. The answer is that, in Minnesota’s 166 years of statehood, nobody ever considered the possibility that a sitting state senator might drive across the state in the dead of night and break into someone’s house. This behavior departs so far from the norms of behavior hitherto expected from a legislator that it never occurred to anyone to formalize laws for such a scenario.  

Most social life is governed not by written laws but by unwritten norms, which the dictionary defines as “ways of behaving that are considered normal in a particular society.” Most of us refrain from stealing or committing murder, not because there are laws against it, but because there is a societal norm that theft and murder are wrong. If the norm in America was, by contrast, that theft was perfectly acceptable, all the police in the country couldn’t stop the explosion of theft. A successful society largely polices itself by adhering to its norms.  

An optimist would say that the most important norms are widely shared. Christ’s famous biblical instruction to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — commonly known as the Golden Rule — is found in cultures across time and through space, from the ancient Greek “Do not do to others that which angers you when they do it to you” to the Hindu “One should never do something to others that one would regard as an injury to one’s own self.” This is because norms evolve, they are not imposed. This social evolution tends to select the “fittest” norms, those most conducive to social wellbeing, so, like car designs chasing maximum aerodynamism, they converge and homogenize.  

Differences remain, however. The German norm for allocating poolside lounge chairs is to put your towel on the one you want the night before. The British norm, by contrast, is to wake up at the crack of dawn and grab them on a first-come, first-served basis. When different norms collide, trouble can follow, as many an Anglo-German dispute beside many a Spanish swimming pool demonstrates. 

A pessimist would say that norms don’t always change in a positive direction. Metro Transit vehicles now have posters reminding passengers not to defecate on trains or sexually assault other passengers. Not only does this go without saying in most transit systems on the planet, but it used to go without saying in the Twin Cities. Now it does not. Now it needs to be said.  

Just as it now needs to be said that someone who is caught driving across the state in the dead of night to break into someone’s house probably shouldn’t be casting the decisive vote in the state senate — especially not on legislation that would make it more difficult for homeowners to defend themselves from such activities.  

If laws are now required for such circumstances, this increase in the realm of behaviors governed by written laws means a decrease in the realm governed by unwritten norms. It is a signal that the “ways of behaving that are considered normal in a particular society” are diverging. Shared norms, as explained in American Experiment’s recent report “The X-Factor? Social capital and economic well-being: A quantitative analysis,” provide economic as well as social benefits. As those norms are less widely shared, those benefits will shrink.