What this is talking about is basically what's called the "superego" in Freudian writing.
Anyway, basically agree with the OP that societies try to find a stable configuration for it, but I like to think of it in physics terms: it's a stable attractor in the space of moral configurations, not exactly uniform everywhere but something that has a "pressure" keeping it close to a set of norms so that everything feels more-or-less safe and predictable. Perturbations are tolerated as long as their magnitudes are small and they die out over time.
Fads and changes of moral fashion, then, act like waves propagating in this substrate, as everyone's moral compasses realign slightly to account for the new concepts. Complete social revolutions, and likely physical revolutions, are "phase changes" in which the local inconsistencies become so great that they blow up to global transformations that reconfigure the whole thing at once.
Anyway, basically agree with the OP that societies try to find a stable configuration for it, but I like to think of it in physics terms: it's a stable attractor in the space of moral configurations, not exactly uniform everywhere but something that has a "pressure" keeping it close to a set of norms so that everything feels more-or-less safe and predictable. Perturbations are tolerated as long as their magnitudes are small and they die out over time.
Fads and changes of moral fashion, then, act like waves propagating in this substrate, as everyone's moral compasses realign slightly to account for the new concepts. Complete social revolutions, and likely physical revolutions, are "phase changes" in which the local inconsistencies become so great that they blow up to global transformations that reconfigure the whole thing at once.
Basically um society is a gas of moral compasses.