Relational

Once, we judged nature, plants, animals and people by what we observed: reputation was everything. Then, with the spread of reading and scholarship and education, we governed our behaviors and choices with more or less explicit norms. But norms weakened and were discarded: some had to do with wealth, with race, with sex, and we regarded the abandonment of those norms as progress. Today we see norms breached every day and the world becomes more alarming because of it. I find it increasingly plausible that I might be blinded by my complacent acceptance of the previous order as natural and inevitable, and current trends might just be demonstrating to me how wrong that is.