Like the search for a universal definition of consciousness, a comprehensive global understanding of what constitutes normality remains elusive. We, the people, do not know what consciousness is, or even if only humans have such consciousness, or whether, as the panpsychists tell us, 'the glitter is in everything'. Some definitions of consciousness point to self-awareness and/or a metacognition that seems to stand outside and look in at a situation, or else it can be seen as the ghost in the machinery of humankind. But here I am interested in exploring the slippery nature of normality, of what is required for 'us' to designate something as normal and something else as not. Who knows? Perhaps the two quests are joined like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
Norms giveth and norms taketh away. They can provide useful standards of measure. They may provide reliability and certainty, and muscle-up our expectations for future events. But what is normal is almost always a term that describes a continuum and range of possibilities. For instance, when the three towers came down in near freefall time in Manhattan on 9/11 many observers wondered if it was normal for them to pancake like that? Some viewers noted exploding caps such as those used in demolition take-downs of buildings and this caused consternation; many were unsettled. But Popular Mechanics said, No, yeah, those were just rivets bursting -- totally normal. So we went phew and relaxed. I mean, it's Popular Mechanix!
Sometimes, though, trying to establish norms can reveal the unseemly side of a society or culture. Take, for instance, the now fairly well owned up to fact that standardized IQ tests are culturally biased. An IQ, or intelligence quotient, is made up of chronological age over mental age. The score 100 is regarded as normal. It indicates the chrono and mental are copacetic. A score of 150 means your mental age is above your chrono. (Who'd want to date you?) But socio-economic factors, such as race and poverty, and even religion, can affect the outcome and distort the norm. In a multicultural society, there may be multiple IQa and, hence, norms. I'd tell you my IQ, but you wouldn't believe it. I will say that I confused the Koran with the coin krone and feel I have lived in a fatwah situation ever since. And forget dates.
Over millennia there have been many definitions of what constitutes normal. American Heritage Dictionary, for instance, tells us that the adjective means: "Conforming with, adhering to, or constituting a norm, standard, pattern, level, or type; typical." And they provide useful examples: "normal room temperature; one's normal weight; normal diplomatic relations." The word conforming sticks out like a sore thumb, newly hammered. But normal doesn't necessarily equate to Good. One thinks of James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause (1955) one of the first films that made you think about America's existential crisis. I mean, what would happen if my sleeve got caught in a door handle and I column't jump and everyone thought I was a wonderful anti-hero?
And it makes one wonder aloud about mental illness. I recall from my undergrad years reading excerpts about normal from the Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing. He wrote in The Politics of Experience (1967):
Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years. (p.28)
Wow. Kind of makes you think, doesn't it?
More recently I have been reading material about what constituted a norm in Ancient Greece, specifically in the depictions and expectations of males versus females. In Love, Sex, and Tragedy by Simon Goldhill, the author writes,
As in a modern context, a politician has a vested interest in appearing acceptably normal. Here is Aeschines, a fourth-century politician, who is a married man, and acting as a prosecutor in a steamy sex trial: 'my opponents are going to ask if I am not ashamed that I am a pest in the gymnasium and have been a lover to so many boys. . . but I don't find any fault with proper love . . . Nor do I deny that I have been prone to falling in love like that and still do so today.' (p.56)
If only we had such forthcoming pollies today, huh?
Slowly, slowly, today, we are returning to a norm where it is okay to be homosexual in one's desires, albeit we must still leave those kids alone. They'll be seventeen soon enough. Let that be your ethos. Handsomeness today means asserting oneself like a gay, strident Achilles on a battlefield, wearing a trojan, and there to take back the knight. It is expressed in that gallant formula that captures the imagination and won't let go: LGBTQA+ Letters will keep getting added until all the oppressed are represented, leaving only the stiff upper lips without a seat at the table and needing a right-steady spanking of chastisement. As the feminist Pat Benatar once sang, Love Is A Battlefield. Often it's a case of Norma Rae or Norman Bates, and someone is off their rocker in the fruit cellar.
We can look to Plato's Republicfor an ideal representation of what is normal in the specific roles we play within society. Take soldiering, which most Americans would be familiar with by now, either because they know someone who has served or because America has been at war somewhere for about 100 years. Plato sets standard -- the norm still largely followed -- for how good soldiers should be set up:
First, none of them should possess any private property that is not wholly necessary. Second, none should have living quarters or storerooms that are not open for all to enter at will. Such provisions as are required by temperate and courageous men, who are warrior-athletes, they should receive from the other citizens as wages for their guardianship, the amount being fixed so that there is neither as shortfall nor a surplus at the end of the year. (p. 379)
And there gymnasium membership should be free of charge.
In another class reading, Michel Foucault's "Docile Bodies," we get a 17th century rendering of soldierliness worth noting:
To begin with, the soldier was someone who could be recognized from afar; he bore certain signs: the natural signs of his strength and his courage, the marks, too, of his pride; his body was the blazon of his strength and valor; and although it is true that he had to learn the profession of arms little by little - generally in actual fighting - movements like marching and attitudes like the bearing of the head belonged for the most part to a bodily rhetoric of honor; (p.135)
Foucault's take on the normal is a description of what is not what should be, necessarily, reminiscent for this reader of Machiavelli's description of the good prince. But one remembers that, whatever normal is, it's not the same as justified. Perhaps it's merely an AI app? I don't know what that means. It just erupted like a fart.
Definitions will continue to disappear into one another as the next stage of human homogeneity continues, onward christened soldiers into the jungles of AI domination, and night; and as we struggle, as a society, to rebound from the onslaught (once welcome) of relativism and post-post-modernism we will invent, with the help of apps, new norms and evaluative transgressions to ponder.
But start with the obvious, as Socrates would make you do: Are you normal? What makes you say so? What about the f*cker across from you? Normal? Why not? One day we will be forced to wear our IQs on our wrists, like concentration camp temporary residents; the number will emerge like a tattoo from our skin -- the byproduct of CRISPR manipulation. And then we'll know where we belong and which toilet we can use.
Do you remember the shower scene?
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REFERENCES
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition, online, accessed on February 4, 2024. Click Here
Foucault, Michel (1995). "Docile Bodies." Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage Books.
Goldhill, Simon (2004). Love, Sex, and Tragedy: How the Ancient World Shapes Our Lives. University of Chicago Press.
Laing, R.D. (1967). The Politics of Experience. New York, Ballantine. Accessed online at the Internet Archive. Click Here
Reeve, CDC and Patrick Lee Miller (2015). Introductory Readings In Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy. Indianapolis, Hackett.
