The Four Powers of Norms
And how they harden or soften rules
Around the year 530 AD, Benedict of Nursia, later known as Saint Benedict, wrote one of the most influential books in the Christian world, The Rule of Saint Benedict (Regula Sancti Benedicti). This book of precepts regulating monastic life has been used by Benedictines for 15 centuries.
The book has 73 chapters containing rules about the necessary qualifications, rights and obligations of the abbot, the tools of the spiritual craft, what monks should do in each part of the day, the order of prayers, rules about meals, supplies, works, sleeping, and how to treat guests, the young, the sick, and the old.
Chapters 39 and 40 are about meals. Each monk is allowed two daily meals, both of which include two cooked dishes. If that doesn’t correspond to your understanding of ascetic life, wait till you hear the severity of the punishment if one is late for a meal.
This is a post in the Autonomy and Cohesion series. It doesn’t depend on all previous in the series. I even tried to make it self-sufficient. Yet, if you need more context, checking the first two posts in the series will be enough.
Each monk is permitted one hemina of wine (270ml) at every meal. That means the first hemina of wine is given most days of the year on the sixth hour, which is around noon.
If a monk is late for a meal, he receives a warning, and on the second offense, a severe punishment: he is deprived of his portion of wine (Chapter 43).
You may wonder why wine was allowed in the first place, and already at noon. I wondered too. And St Benedict provided a clear explanation. Before reviewing that explanation, let’s first see why the Rule of St Benedict is an interesting text for understanding the Autonomy-Cohesion balance and, more particularly, for the intricacies of some cohesion mechanisms.
Cohesion Mechanisms
All socio-technical systems need to maintain the balance between autonomy and cohesion to remain viable.
The order of St Benedict did that well. At first glance, Benedictines maintained high internal cohesion and high external autonomy, the former enabling the latter. But a closer look reveals a balance both within and between monasteries.
The tools for the internal cohesion were the Rule, the clock (horarium) and the abbot. Still, there was a balance between autonomy and cohesion. The abbots were elected by the monks. Important decisions were taken collectively. Furthermore, the monk’s spiritual journey is highly individual. And the balance is already in the Rule, which provides a middle ground between individual zeal and institutional constraints. That middle ground is what made the order so popular and long-lasting.
Unlike the Jesuits or Dominicans, who operate with high central cohesion, Benedictine houses were very autonomous. Yet, they were well coordinated and maintained remarkable cohesion, although monasteries were hundreds or thousands miles apart.
In the Cohesion Forces and Tools, I provided an overview of the main cohesion mechanisms.
Some of them act at a personal level, like the need for safety, to belong, to reduce uncertainty, and to increase self-esteem.
Others act at the social level. Without distinguishing between forces and tools, the social cohesion list includes: social identity, compassion, loyalty, empathy, language, rituals, norms, rules, standards, laws, protocols, uniforms, goals, plans, decisions, reports, meetings, and coordination tools. Most of these work in any kind of organization, together with operational dependencies, social identity, and efficiency pressures. In social networks, shared interests, shared aversions, memes, and algospeak are the main mechanisms of cohesion, complementing the forces at play at the personal level.
All cohesion forces and tools provide constraints. In this essay, the focus is on two of them, rules and norms.
Rules are tools of codification, establishing explicit boundaries that achieve unity through compulsion. Norms operate as organic forces, relying on internalization to guide behavior.
But norms are even more special than that.
Norms Are a Special Species
Now back to the Rule of St Benedict, and why wine was allowed, not only that, but a good portion of it, and already at noon? St Benedict explains:
[W]ine is by no means a drink for monks; but since the monks of our day cannot be persuaded of this, let us at least agree to drink sparingly and not to satiety
Now, in the spectrum from no-wine to wine according to the discretion of the friar, the expected potential rule “no-wine” as emphasized by St. Benedict with “wine is by no means a drink for monks” is reduced as severity to “one hemina per meal”, because of the norm “the monks of our day cannot be persuaded of this.”
It turns out that, while both rules and norms restrict autonomy, norms can also enable autonomy, support or be converted to rules, and, as the example above shows, reduce the severity of a rule.
It’s worth looking at these four cases individually.
Norms restrict autonomy. Unlike rules, they don’t do that through codified punishment, but through social friction. We join the back of a queue not because a guard is present to make sure we do, but because a fair waiting norm and a queuing protocol restrict our autonomy to walk straight to the counter. The norm and the protocol act as coordination mechanisms.
Norms enable autonomy. The norm “to improvise” enables the autonomy of the soloing jazz musician, but that only works because of the constraints of the tempo, key, chord progression and turn-taking.
Norms make rules work by enhancing them. The library rule to be quiet is weak on its own unless enforced by the collective glare one receives when their phone rings. It is similar to the traffic. No police force will be sufficient to ensure rule-following if the rules are not massively internalized as norms.
Norms make rules work by softening them. After the pandemic, working from home was no longer supported by the force of the global crisis, but since it was turned into a norm, it brought hybrid office rules.
That last one was similar to the way the norm, “the monks of our day cannot be persuaded of this,” pushed the default rule of no wine to one hemina of wine. By doing so, the norm did not just make the rule acceptable. Although rules are listed as tools for cohesion, they are not such by themselves. In the case of the one-hemina-per-meal rule, it was only the balancing act of the norm that made it a cohesive tool.