Mos maiorum: on the crucial importance of social norms

[image: Senatus Populusque Romanus, the people and the senate of Rome, Wikipedia]

One of the first things I noticed after moving to the United States in the now very distant 1990 was just how litigious American society is. It seems that the answer to every problem is “I’ll sue you!” I’ll leave it to social psychologists and political scientists to figure out why this is the case, but I suspect one reason is the decreasing relevance in the United States of what the ancient…