It's my understanding of the relevant norms that iambic pentameter is perfectly acceptable in Substack comments -- more appropriate for work emails is the haiku (though perhaps these norms are changing? Ugh!)
The thing about moral progress is that it can only be settled in distant hindsight. Eugenics and lobotomies were once considered morally progressive. Who’s to say that some of the examples given will not suffer the same fate?
My small town Ontario Anglican parish is progressive on social issues and has been open to LGBT individuals for at least a decade. While i was away, it was decided to paint the front entrance steps rainbow pride and have rainbow flags at back entrance. This annoyed me although I did not state my annoyance because it was not sufficient annoyance.. I tried to analyze my annoyance and I think it arose from a sense that these symbols are now cultural coercement (required virtue signalling) and that it identifies the parish as 'one issue'. Or maybe I am just old.
I think this is such a good point. What makes us judge an action as "performative" and why does it make it less valid to us? We all enact our moral codes constantly without seeing it as a performance. For example, holding hands in public with a loved one is perfectly "normal." However, if you were in a strict Orthodox environment that condemned holding hands, it would be performative.
What is the line that divides authentic expression of an ethical position from performance? Is it the delta in belief systems between the actor and the observer? Or perhaps the degree of deviation from the norm? Or perhaps performative refers to a difference in the speed of adoption or willingness to accept change. For example, we have a shared position that is subject to alteration and forces acting to alter it (gay marriage, climate risk, gender fluidity). Over the period of evolution of the shared understanding from the "old" to the "new" view, there is a period that can be called performative, followed by a period that is normative.
You may just not be moving at the same speed.
p.s. it is very interesting that you described where you live as a small town. This fact is irrelevant to the story except that it communicates a ruleset that "small towns are conservative and don't like change." This may be a mindset that is self-reinforcing.
I think the difference between honest and performative actions is the degree to which the actor feels compelled to perform them. You can be compelled by a positive ("do X or something bad will happen") or by a negative ("do X or something good will stop happening"). If a congregation paints their church steps because they are enthousiastic about LGBT+ issues, that's honest. If the congregation is enthousiastic about not being targeted by an activist campaign, then it's performative.
Thank you for this. I had such a great conversation with my son (recent college grad) about what performative even means. There is a lot of ambiguity which is interesting!
I think it is a little different. I am disgusted by MAGA folks "rolling coal" or by deliberate, performative non-masking during COVID. These are behaviors which I believe are douchey, but the actors likely believe are virtuous because they are upholding the right to individual freedom.
There is no moral progress without a frame for the objective. That the examples in this article were social good behaviors (vegetarianism, tolerance) might suggest that the issue is about resistance to progress, but I think it is clearly about resistance to changes that threaten the integrity of our moral worldview however self- or other-oriented that worldview may be.
I can see why you believe that you don't make that assumption, given there is a caveat sentence: "The fact that some new norm strikes us as annoying, or that those advancing it strike us as self-righteous, preachy or otherwise offputting, tells us nothing about whether the norm is an improvement or not, whether it represents moral progress or moral backslide."
However, nowhere do you talk about moral backslides or give examples of them, or discuss whether they, too, might happen to be annoying and not simply because they have been judged to be backslides. Starting with the title, "moral progress is annoying," almost every usage of "moral" is combined with either "progress" or some phrase indicative of progress. The article does not address whether the eye-roll heuristic is also a serious obstacle to moral backsliding.
Moral 'features' nicely covers all cases (like passively discovering your dining companion is vegan). However, I'm tempted to go further and suggest the real concern is the making of implicit, broad moral 'claims' via highly portable, culturally contagious affectations. Claims about complex subjects that require study, nuanced understanding, and careful thought. In effect (turning Kelly and Westra's argument on its head) reducing the affective friction that might normally accompany the adoption (or indeed expression) of such positions. This is only one dimension of the problem. The other is the ease with which an individual can be noticed for not participating in any putative social convention (be it pronouns, land acknowledgements, or driving on the wrong side of the road). Claims about anything as fraught and complex as morality or ideology shouldn't be so easily made - or demanded. Distilling these arguments into mere gestures, slogans or hand-shakes frustrates error-checking (think of the recent chanting of college students). Likewise, a thoughtful refusal to participate in one or more of these cultural mating dances shouldn't be interpreted as being against moral progress, but instead, an assertion of the privacy of thought.
The authors are wrong, yes, but for different reasons than you cite. I refuse to feel bad about eating meat because man is an omnivore; many essential nutrients are naturally unavailable to those who reject animal sourced foods. I refuse to use pronouns because there are only two biological genders; before I'm critiqued for neglecting hermaphroditism, I must point out that it's rarity proves the rule.
But then you agree with Paul that the reason the authors are wrong is that there are moral features that their explanation doesn't cover. You simply judge these norm changes to be morally wrong.
I get what you mean, but I think you are confused. Norms cannot be rejected because they are factually wrong in this sense, because they are not attempts to describe the world, but rather regulate behavior. It is not about how the world is, but how it should be. So in order to reject a norm, you need a normative consideration against it — that it is morally wrong, or that it is instrumentally irrational, for instance. For example, in order to reject vegetarianism, you must think it is morally unnecessary, that is, nothing wrong with eating meat _because_ you think humans are naturally omnivores. You can reject a norm because you think it is based on shaky empirical grounds, but not simply because it describes the world inaccurately — it's not what norms do. The same for the pronouns thing. It could be that we have reasons to follow the new norm even though there are only two "biological genders" (to please people for negligible cost, for example). To successfully reject the norm, you'd to add to your remark that because there are only two genders, you think we _should_ not engage in pronoun talk since it is unnecessary and gender nonconforming people are just confused. This is all moral talk in the end
I agree, to a point. The people rejecting the norms are doing so for what they consider moral reasons. The reason their proposals carry any weight in society at all is the same reason they can't recognize that their beliefs are incompatible with reality: a rejection of objective truth aka cultural relativism. Gravity exists; unicorns aren't real.
Yes. Exactly. I actually believe that it’s immoral to call someone the wrong pronoun as it is dishonest and promotes harmful stereotypes based on superficial assumptions.
I looked up affective and friction but I'm still not clear what the term means. Any help?
My having become a vegetarian relatively recently, led a good friend to snap at me when I prefaced every meal I cooked with 'no animals were harmed in the making of this food'. I was grateful for her castigation as (a bit like ex-smokers) we veggies can be awfully smug.
We use it as a term of art to talk about the negative affective responses that emerge in contexts where the norms in the broader environment are misaligned the norms we've internalized, which causes behavioral errors and uncertainty. "Disfluency" is a closely related notion.
This is really great, especially points 1&2. I say this as someone who was vegan for 30+ years and the father of nonbinary person (see how odd that seems?).
Missing in this debate is the question of scale. Outrage seems appropriate when say women are refused the right to vote, or men are arrested for homosexual activity. Mistaken pronouns and the like can provoke a kind of overblown indignation that seems performative and thereby offensive in its falsity. Gentle correction and no-fuss modelling would work better than eye rolling rebukes.
Chill, my vegan and non-binary friends. Assume that most of us want to be given the opportunity to accommodate your preferences respectfully. But change is hard. Be good guides, not snarky masters.
Since the heart of your messages is scale I would suggest that concern about pronouns and concern about billions of suffering animals are not remotely comparable.
Point taken! But these are not my examples. I lifted them from the original pieces. And the authors in turn from the current zeitgeist. I believe they represent reasonably common examples at the public level of eye-roll and not Molotov cocktail.
You provide an excellent example of the difficulty here. There is an implied indignance in what you interpret as my minimizing the suffering of “billions of animals” by association. Do you mean to chastise? I hope not. I have been vegetarian for thirty years! As in Paul’s example, I wonder if you report the neighbour who barbecues a burger in the same way you might report him if he tortures his dog?
If your mission is to change minds and behaviours around animal rights, I recommend a lighter touch.
Epistemic quality was my goal rather than chastisement. I suspect that many people feel like those two issues *are* comparable as if both only risk giving offense to someone’s preferences. In reality billions of suffering animals is among the very worst aspects of life on planet Earth. Not sure how I could possibly have said so more lightly without saying nothing at all.
As for being vegetarian you’re doing better than me since I eat fish once a week.
That statement belies a lack of awareness of literary grammar. It has been completely acceptable to use they in the singular since the 19th century. Edith Wharton and Jane Austen both used it.
Hiding behind 1950s grammar doesn’t help. It isn’t “right” it is just rigid.
The use you’re alluding to is different to the use Steve is reacting to, though. And here again we meet a behaviour that can prompt an eye-roll: disingenuously refusing to engage with the source of irritation and quickly swapping in a strawman that shores up the previous moral high ground. You can see why this behaviour may not encourage sensible discussion.
What you are talking about is just bigotry which you are wrapping in the term “grammar” like putting feces inside a donut.
If you have hatred, then you have hatred. I feel bad for you because it makes you cruel.
But it doesn’t make you smart. Actually knowing things and thinking makes you smart. But here is a little more on the subject, which, who knows, might make you a bit smarter:
The straw man is clearly coming from the person stating that refusing the use of "they/them" of the recent trend where it is demanded by people that are naturally revealed and assessed as being a man or a woman is the same as opposing the literary use of "they/them" for a person whose gender is undisclosed.
Actual literate people would think your position is illiterate. My guess is you didn’t study literature or a liberal art, or you would know that they has been commonly used in writing for almost 200 years.
I mean, maybe Jane Austen is illiterate and you aren’t? I suppose there is a world where that is the case.
More likely your literacy was formed in elementary school my Ms. Schoobie who thoughtfully taught you 1950s grammar.
"Progress " means going forward towards an end. What is the foundation, and what is the goal towards which our secular culture is supposedly morally progressing?
Those that reject transcendance will have a hard time justifying any notion of the "good ", let alone , why it matters that we should accept it as progress.
And a lot of the so called benefits of the examples they give (veganism and neo-pronouns), and the claim that their enactments being objective net positives, are controversial and contested, too.
With the technology amplifying our capacity for social contagion and virtue signaling, allow me to be skeptical of the latest "this is moral progress" claims.
Interesting! So, I think it's both. I think it starts as a common, evolutionary moment of being startled and concerned by something out of the norm. (Caveman say, "Will scary new thing kill me?" Gah!) But then when someone notes after that first second of being startled that the issue DOES threaten their moral, psychological, theological, physical self they double down on the knee-jerk reaction with a more heightened sense of horror and defend themselves (necessarily or not).
Interesting mental exercise! It sure underscores the need to make these reactions more realistic and less moralistic for sure. 💕 Being defensive isn't always a good look. More often than not these days, things we find scary aren't actually hurting us. In the US, we don't have a lot in our lives ( the lucky ones, anyway) that actually endangers us. It's why some people from the Eisenhower era used to say, " All this country needs is a good war." Yep, there's the solution 😭🤣. Nothing like a good, common enemy to unite a country again. 🤮
I certainly agree with you that there is a huge difference between a requirement to advocate a middle east cease fire AND looking the wrong way. Timately we're dealing with areas under researched and over anecdotalised. Probably not a word. Hope readers experience affective friction.
The distinction between "affective friction" and the deeper feeling/expression of disgust towards a new "shibboleth" or behavior norm is interesting and I believe meaningful. I have never felt anger in a novel social situation, only confusion and embarrassment. That is materially different from the rage that can be triggered by shifting norms that convey moral baggage.
I think it is a mistake to ignore the role of deliberate cultural coding in this discussion. We do not come upon our beliefs and habits by happenstance, we are inculcated by reinforcement by social structures and authority, and we find our place within the hierarchies and networks that are represented by the normative behavior. We learn "to be good" (even if the behavior could be seen as objectively "bad" by another standard), and a challenge is an explicit chastisement.
The best example right now is Israel. We have sublimated the concept of Israel as inherently virtuous such that we cannot separate it from the idea of our own virtuosity or morality - in essence, if Israel is bad, I am bad. Moreover, we have been deeply inculcated with the notion that Muslims are bad (terrorists), and if they are good, we are bad. Our thought structures may be artificially created and socially reinforced, but they are also very, very tough. One might say we are addicted to our thinking.
Obviously, critical thinking is the tool we should use to get through this.
I found the piece a pleasure to peruse,
Yet grasp not why you'd shun poetic mail.
What harm in verses sent through cyberspace?
Why spurn the bard's beat in our swift exchange?
ha! (I'm impressed by the joke, but also how FAST you got that out!)
I will be very honest. I wrote a shite version and had Claude fix it. In my defense, I used 3.5 Sonnet so it is completely kosher.
It's my understanding of the relevant norms that iambic pentameter is perfectly acceptable in Substack comments -- more appropriate for work emails is the haiku (though perhaps these norms are changing? Ugh!)
In Facebook it is no longer even ok to use paragraphs. It is all stream of consciousness now.
The thing about moral progress is that it can only be settled in distant hindsight. Eugenics and lobotomies were once considered morally progressive. Who’s to say that some of the examples given will not suffer the same fate?
My small town Ontario Anglican parish is progressive on social issues and has been open to LGBT individuals for at least a decade. While i was away, it was decided to paint the front entrance steps rainbow pride and have rainbow flags at back entrance. This annoyed me although I did not state my annoyance because it was not sufficient annoyance.. I tried to analyze my annoyance and I think it arose from a sense that these symbols are now cultural coercement (required virtue signalling) and that it identifies the parish as 'one issue'. Or maybe I am just old.
I think this is such a good point. What makes us judge an action as "performative" and why does it make it less valid to us? We all enact our moral codes constantly without seeing it as a performance. For example, holding hands in public with a loved one is perfectly "normal." However, if you were in a strict Orthodox environment that condemned holding hands, it would be performative.
What is the line that divides authentic expression of an ethical position from performance? Is it the delta in belief systems between the actor and the observer? Or perhaps the degree of deviation from the norm? Or perhaps performative refers to a difference in the speed of adoption or willingness to accept change. For example, we have a shared position that is subject to alteration and forces acting to alter it (gay marriage, climate risk, gender fluidity). Over the period of evolution of the shared understanding from the "old" to the "new" view, there is a period that can be called performative, followed by a period that is normative.
You may just not be moving at the same speed.
p.s. it is very interesting that you described where you live as a small town. This fact is irrelevant to the story except that it communicates a ruleset that "small towns are conservative and don't like change." This may be a mindset that is self-reinforcing.
I think the difference between honest and performative actions is the degree to which the actor feels compelled to perform them. You can be compelled by a positive ("do X or something bad will happen") or by a negative ("do X or something good will stop happening"). If a congregation paints their church steps because they are enthousiastic about LGBT+ issues, that's honest. If the congregation is enthousiastic about not being targeted by an activist campaign, then it's performative.
Thank you for this. I had such a great conversation with my son (recent college grad) about what performative even means. There is a lot of ambiguity which is interesting!
What bothered me about the original article is the assumption that moral change equates with moral progress.
I think it is a little different. I am disgusted by MAGA folks "rolling coal" or by deliberate, performative non-masking during COVID. These are behaviors which I believe are douchey, but the actors likely believe are virtuous because they are upholding the right to individual freedom.
There is no moral progress without a frame for the objective. That the examples in this article were social good behaviors (vegetarianism, tolerance) might suggest that the issue is about resistance to progress, but I think it is clearly about resistance to changes that threaten the integrity of our moral worldview however self- or other-oriented that worldview may be.
We don't make that assumption. We just think that moral progress usually requires norm change. We don't think all norm changes are progressive.
I can see why you believe that you don't make that assumption, given there is a caveat sentence: "The fact that some new norm strikes us as annoying, or that those advancing it strike us as self-righteous, preachy or otherwise offputting, tells us nothing about whether the norm is an improvement or not, whether it represents moral progress or moral backslide."
However, nowhere do you talk about moral backslides or give examples of them, or discuss whether they, too, might happen to be annoying and not simply because they have been judged to be backslides. Starting with the title, "moral progress is annoying," almost every usage of "moral" is combined with either "progress" or some phrase indicative of progress. The article does not address whether the eye-roll heuristic is also a serious obstacle to moral backsliding.
So are you fine with people rolling their eyes at norm changes that are not progressive?
Moral 'features' nicely covers all cases (like passively discovering your dining companion is vegan). However, I'm tempted to go further and suggest the real concern is the making of implicit, broad moral 'claims' via highly portable, culturally contagious affectations. Claims about complex subjects that require study, nuanced understanding, and careful thought. In effect (turning Kelly and Westra's argument on its head) reducing the affective friction that might normally accompany the adoption (or indeed expression) of such positions. This is only one dimension of the problem. The other is the ease with which an individual can be noticed for not participating in any putative social convention (be it pronouns, land acknowledgements, or driving on the wrong side of the road). Claims about anything as fraught and complex as morality or ideology shouldn't be so easily made - or demanded. Distilling these arguments into mere gestures, slogans or hand-shakes frustrates error-checking (think of the recent chanting of college students). Likewise, a thoughtful refusal to participate in one or more of these cultural mating dances shouldn't be interpreted as being against moral progress, but instead, an assertion of the privacy of thought.
The authors are wrong, yes, but for different reasons than you cite. I refuse to feel bad about eating meat because man is an omnivore; many essential nutrients are naturally unavailable to those who reject animal sourced foods. I refuse to use pronouns because there are only two biological genders; before I'm critiqued for neglecting hermaphroditism, I must point out that it's rarity proves the rule.
But then you agree with Paul that the reason the authors are wrong is that there are moral features that their explanation doesn't cover. You simply judge these norm changes to be morally wrong.
Not morally. Factually.
I get what you mean, but I think you are confused. Norms cannot be rejected because they are factually wrong in this sense, because they are not attempts to describe the world, but rather regulate behavior. It is not about how the world is, but how it should be. So in order to reject a norm, you need a normative consideration against it — that it is morally wrong, or that it is instrumentally irrational, for instance. For example, in order to reject vegetarianism, you must think it is morally unnecessary, that is, nothing wrong with eating meat _because_ you think humans are naturally omnivores. You can reject a norm because you think it is based on shaky empirical grounds, but not simply because it describes the world inaccurately — it's not what norms do. The same for the pronouns thing. It could be that we have reasons to follow the new norm even though there are only two "biological genders" (to please people for negligible cost, for example). To successfully reject the norm, you'd to add to your remark that because there are only two genders, you think we _should_ not engage in pronoun talk since it is unnecessary and gender nonconforming people are just confused. This is all moral talk in the end
I agree, to a point. The people rejecting the norms are doing so for what they consider moral reasons. The reason their proposals carry any weight in society at all is the same reason they can't recognize that their beliefs are incompatible with reality: a rejection of objective truth aka cultural relativism. Gravity exists; unicorns aren't real.
Haha, yeah basically I do agree
Yes. Exactly. I actually believe that it’s immoral to call someone the wrong pronoun as it is dishonest and promotes harmful stereotypes based on superficial assumptions.
I looked up affective and friction but I'm still not clear what the term means. Any help?
My having become a vegetarian relatively recently, led a good friend to snap at me when I prefaced every meal I cooked with 'no animals were harmed in the making of this food'. I was grateful for her castigation as (a bit like ex-smokers) we veggies can be awfully smug.
We use it as a term of art to talk about the negative affective responses that emerge in contexts where the norms in the broader environment are misaligned the norms we've internalized, which causes behavioral errors and uncertainty. "Disfluency" is a closely related notion.
This is really great, especially points 1&2. I say this as someone who was vegan for 30+ years and the father of nonbinary person (see how odd that seems?).
I think many vegans are annoying because they are so angry. But I now think a problem is making "vegan" your identity and simply a tool for reducing suffering. https://www.mattball.org/2024/03/the-end-of-veganism-from-losing-my.html
Missing in this debate is the question of scale. Outrage seems appropriate when say women are refused the right to vote, or men are arrested for homosexual activity. Mistaken pronouns and the like can provoke a kind of overblown indignation that seems performative and thereby offensive in its falsity. Gentle correction and no-fuss modelling would work better than eye rolling rebukes.
Chill, my vegan and non-binary friends. Assume that most of us want to be given the opportunity to accommodate your preferences respectfully. But change is hard. Be good guides, not snarky masters.
Since the heart of your messages is scale I would suggest that concern about pronouns and concern about billions of suffering animals are not remotely comparable.
Point taken! But these are not my examples. I lifted them from the original pieces. And the authors in turn from the current zeitgeist. I believe they represent reasonably common examples at the public level of eye-roll and not Molotov cocktail.
You provide an excellent example of the difficulty here. There is an implied indignance in what you interpret as my minimizing the suffering of “billions of animals” by association. Do you mean to chastise? I hope not. I have been vegetarian for thirty years! As in Paul’s example, I wonder if you report the neighbour who barbecues a burger in the same way you might report him if he tortures his dog?
If your mission is to change minds and behaviours around animal rights, I recommend a lighter touch.
Epistemic quality was my goal rather than chastisement. I suspect that many people feel like those two issues *are* comparable as if both only risk giving offense to someone’s preferences. In reality billions of suffering animals is among the very worst aspects of life on planet Earth. Not sure how I could possibly have said so more lightly without saying nothing at all.
As for being vegetarian you’re doing better than me since I eat fish once a week.
I refuse to use a plural pronoun when referring to a single person because maybe a few would think I'm cool, but most would think I'm illiterate.
That statement belies a lack of awareness of literary grammar. It has been completely acceptable to use they in the singular since the 19th century. Edith Wharton and Jane Austen both used it.
Hiding behind 1950s grammar doesn’t help. It isn’t “right” it is just rigid.
The use you’re alluding to is different to the use Steve is reacting to, though. And here again we meet a behaviour that can prompt an eye-roll: disingenuously refusing to engage with the source of irritation and quickly swapping in a strawman that shores up the previous moral high ground. You can see why this behaviour may not encourage sensible discussion.
What you are talking about is just bigotry which you are wrapping in the term “grammar” like putting feces inside a donut.
If you have hatred, then you have hatred. I feel bad for you because it makes you cruel.
But it doesn’t make you smart. Actually knowing things and thinking makes you smart. But here is a little more on the subject, which, who knows, might make you a bit smarter:
https://www.oed.com/discover/a-brief-history-of-singular-they/?tl=true
Haha, you carry on with that strawman. I’ll roll my eyes. And a very good evening to you - I have a landslide to celebrate!
I am not sure who is doing the strawman here
The straw man is clearly coming from the person stating that refusing the use of "they/them" of the recent trend where it is demanded by people that are naturally revealed and assessed as being a man or a woman is the same as opposing the literary use of "they/them" for a person whose gender is undisclosed.
Actual literate people would think your position is illiterate. My guess is you didn’t study literature or a liberal art, or you would know that they has been commonly used in writing for almost 200 years.
I mean, maybe Jane Austen is illiterate and you aren’t? I suppose there is a world where that is the case.
More likely your literacy was formed in elementary school my Ms. Schoobie who thoughtfully taught you 1950s grammar.
They as a third person singular, for clarity’s sake.
The only thing worse that having your error pointed out by someone who is right is having it done by someone who is...*UGH!*, reasonable.
"Progress " means going forward towards an end. What is the foundation, and what is the goal towards which our secular culture is supposedly morally progressing?
Those that reject transcendance will have a hard time justifying any notion of the "good ", let alone , why it matters that we should accept it as progress.
And a lot of the so called benefits of the examples they give (veganism and neo-pronouns), and the claim that their enactments being objective net positives, are controversial and contested, too.
With the technology amplifying our capacity for social contagion and virtue signaling, allow me to be skeptical of the latest "this is moral progress" claims.
Interesting! So, I think it's both. I think it starts as a common, evolutionary moment of being startled and concerned by something out of the norm. (Caveman say, "Will scary new thing kill me?" Gah!) But then when someone notes after that first second of being startled that the issue DOES threaten their moral, psychological, theological, physical self they double down on the knee-jerk reaction with a more heightened sense of horror and defend themselves (necessarily or not).
Interesting mental exercise! It sure underscores the need to make these reactions more realistic and less moralistic for sure. 💕 Being defensive isn't always a good look. More often than not these days, things we find scary aren't actually hurting us. In the US, we don't have a lot in our lives ( the lucky ones, anyway) that actually endangers us. It's why some people from the Eisenhower era used to say, " All this country needs is a good war." Yep, there's the solution 😭🤣. Nothing like a good, common enemy to unite a country again. 🤮
I certainly agree with you that there is a huge difference between a requirement to advocate a middle east cease fire AND looking the wrong way. Timately we're dealing with areas under researched and over anecdotalised. Probably not a word. Hope readers experience affective friction.
On a more serious note.
The distinction between "affective friction" and the deeper feeling/expression of disgust towards a new "shibboleth" or behavior norm is interesting and I believe meaningful. I have never felt anger in a novel social situation, only confusion and embarrassment. That is materially different from the rage that can be triggered by shifting norms that convey moral baggage.
I think it is a mistake to ignore the role of deliberate cultural coding in this discussion. We do not come upon our beliefs and habits by happenstance, we are inculcated by reinforcement by social structures and authority, and we find our place within the hierarchies and networks that are represented by the normative behavior. We learn "to be good" (even if the behavior could be seen as objectively "bad" by another standard), and a challenge is an explicit chastisement.
The best example right now is Israel. We have sublimated the concept of Israel as inherently virtuous such that we cannot separate it from the idea of our own virtuosity or morality - in essence, if Israel is bad, I am bad. Moreover, we have been deeply inculcated with the notion that Muslims are bad (terrorists), and if they are good, we are bad. Our thought structures may be artificially created and socially reinforced, but they are also very, very tough. One might say we are addicted to our thinking.
Obviously, critical thinking is the tool we should use to get through this.