As soon as enough people lose their fear of disagreeing with a taboo, it disappears. Things of no particular interest in cutting-edge locales, say, the Village, could get you arrested in other parts of the country. And what we do not now consider pornographic, say Indecent Proposal, would have been outlawed a generation ago. Tacit agreement and tacit enforcement of mutually shared values by some threshold percentage of society is what we broadly experience as culture. These community values are our shared symbols the framework through which we communicate, cooperate, coexist.
Impartiality is an impossibility when analyzing culture.
A taboo s normative value depends exclusively on its perceived capacity to facilitate some subjectively defined goal. An outside observer can only weigh the normative value of a society s taboo s based on her own preconceptions and biases. Truly interesting discourse occurs at the margins of American values today, perhaps abortion, homosexuality, pornography. No one knows. The Uncertainty Principle rules because none of us have experienced the alternative, we cannot appraise its value.