What's the summary of this article? In 2015, Peter Maddox bought a yellow car. Within a few months, people were going ballistic — well, as ballistic as people get in a quaint British village. What the retired Maddox hadn’t considered was that there were rules to living in Bibury. And one of those rules is, “Don’t buy a garishly colored hatchback.”
Bibury is a tourist’s dream: a hamlet of thatched cottages framing a gently babbling brook. Buses full of tourists offload in Bibury every day for selfies, postcards, and overpriced pastries. So, what Bibury didn’t need was Peter Maddox and his yellow car ruining it for everyone else. The thing about small communities like Bibury is that they have mores. “Mores” is a somewhat antiquated word, but it means those intangible expectations a social body places on its individual members. It’s a bit more than etiquette, but a bit less than morality. It’s something more like “rules of behavior.”
And, according to the French sociologist, Émile Durkheim, modernity’s lack of these mores is making us very unhappy, indeed.
Mechanically integrated groups
When you become a parent, you get inexorably dragged into the black hole of “parenting groups.” You go to baby play sessions and get the dubious pleasure of joining innumerable social media groups — all about parenting. Everyone there is united by the single purpose of raising their kids well and trying to stay sane doing so. All the moms and dads, more or less, are doing the same things, in the same way, with the same bags under their eyes. These groups are what Durkheim called “mechanically integrated.”