It's my pleasure to welcome m1k3y to the Breaking Time. Our longtime readers might remember him from our comrades in future dissection, Grinding, and as the other side of the Grinder Dialogues from this site's early days. Here he brings us an energetic, eclectic look at the roots of "normal."
Are you a wizard? Seriously, this is a legitimate question. I recently finished reading Alan Moore's incredible, highly mythic comic series Promethea, and it concludes with a very simple message: all we have ever done is sit by some evolution of the campfire — television is just the latest progression — and tell each other stories, literally imagining the world into existence. Unless you've only sat there passively spellbound, you've been a wizard your whole life, from the moment you mastered the first art, the first technology: language.
Our lives are constructed from language, and the words we use matter. One of these most powerful, spelt, words is Normal.
Mr. Forbes' powerfully simple axiom, the tagline for this blog, is "There is no They." Last year, as part of our ongoing dialog, I took the liberty of extending it, to what I dubbed its first corollary: There is no Normal.
What is normal? What makes it a word of power? It's that subject that I seek to explore here, in what will be an occasional series of posts examining this subject from a variety of angles. Today, we start with pharmacology and history.
Taking a pill to feel normal, even a pill sanctioned by the medical profession, led to a strange situation: it made people wonder what “normal” really was. What does it mean when people feel more like themselves with the drug than without it? Does the notion of “feeling like themselves” lose its meaning if they need a drug to get them there?
Normal is the great statistical fiction. A means (that's a pun) of control:
How did Roche convince physicians that it was O.K. to offer their patients a bottled form of serenity? How did the physicians persuade their patients? And how did the company’s success in this venture shape our collective attitudes toward normal versus abnormal, stoic versus foolhardy, and the various ways available to cope with the ups and downs of daily life?
Normal became a weaponised word, a six-letter bludgeon for companies that let them impose their will on a public conditioned to trust the very authority figures they were corrupting; and remember, this piece of post-war history that still casts its shadow across the present was defined by its trust in the state, and its corporate allies:
“A Whole New World ... of Anxiety” read one of the early Roche ads for Librium, featuring a young woman with a pageboy hairdo holding an armload of books, wearing a short stadium coat and heading off to college. The copy made it sound as though every step in this “whole new world” called out for a tranquilizer. “The new college student may be afflicted by a sense of lost identity in a strange environment ... Her newly stimulated intellectual curiosity may make her more sensitive to and apprehensive about unstable national and world conditions.”
The ad lists other sources of “anxiety” in a college student’s life — new friends, new influences, stiff competition for grades and tests of her moral fiber — that could just as easily be seen as growing pains, or as a healthy response to the turbulent world of the 1960s, when this ad appeared in The Journal of the American College Health Association. But Roche wanted doctors to believe that they were problems, not adventures, and that they warranted a prescription for Librium.
The next step was to develop something better — stronger, faster acting, less toxic. The Roche chemist who had originally stumbled upon Librium, Leo Sternbach, went back to the lab and tweaked the compound. Then he tested the drug on humans — in this case, the mothers-in-law of a few Roche executives. The executives thought that the new drug, Valium, rendered their mothers-in-law significantly less annoying.
Now, decades later, the ontological warfare continues. The liberal battle to gain marriage equality for non-heterosexual couples across the Western democracies is framed as deviant vs. normal by its opponents. Opponents who've twisted their own definition of Normal such that, as my partner-in-Grinding, Kevin, put it to me (an Australian, because there's almost a difference), "in America you can successfully argue that not being allowed to deny someone their religious freedom is oppressing your religious freedom."
This leaves aside the debate that the state (having kept the power in the dissolution of its own union with the church) should continue to be vested with the authority to determine a marriage in the first place... or that, hey, a stable, healthy, normal human relationship is only possible with two people.
Part of the lie is that there is a Normal to be found in 'nature' that we've departed from, and (#spoiler) I'll be calling expert witness Dr. Kinsey up to the stand to testify to that fact in the next installment of this series.
But first, how we got here:
In Statistics on the Table, ace science historian Stephen W. Stigler pegs Normal as “a one-word oxymoron,” representing both the unremarkable middle and the peak of superiority. George Carlin put it another way: “Everyone driving slower than you is an idiot. Anyone driving faster than you is a maniac.” So Normal is you. It just has a little more history.
In her article in Abuse Your Illusions, “The Man Who Invented Normal,” Lucy Gwin sketches out that history. Where the pharmaceutical industry of the 1960s was solving the 'problem' of a stressed consumer society, nearly a century earlier a response was being formed to a far deeper problem: maintaining order in an Empire processing the implications of Evolution.
Coined by Francis Galton, cousin to Charles Darwin, in 1877, it is intimately connected to another word: Eugenics. Galton named his fellow 'well-born' elite, “Eugenes”; those that were to his mind the Fittest of humankind, destined to rule, definitely not to be questioned. The powers that would fight to continue to be.
Eugenics, the codeword for taking up God's hammer and shaping the human populace, lest they return to Rousseau's anarchic state of nature. Better yet, seizing God's pruning shears, snipping away at those branches of humanity's Tree of Life that, viewed through their lens, they feared might rot back to its root, as they put it publicly in the very discourse they controlled. No doubt privately terrified that at the hour of the wolf they'd be shaken from the highest boughs, hurtling back to Earth with only the noose to break their fall. Eugenics was never anything but a defense strategy — nay an offensive strategy — with Normal as its shield.
But how to spin all this to a public where revolution was more than still in vogue? How to convince them to let their self-appointed betters play doctor, nay architect with the human race? With another conjuring trick, the greatest lie of all: statistics.
For Galton not only gave rise to one of the 'soft sciences' used to justify the actions of fascism and sterilizers, but also familiar and key instruments of modern democracy: opinion polls, the Bell Curve (briefly known as the Galton Curve), and punch cards.
Galton's biographer and chief disciple Karl Pearson provided another weapon in the statistical arsenal: standard deviation. A term that immediately suggests an acceptable, normal range of difference; and those outside it being deviants. That's another weaponised word, wielded today by both Christian and Islamic fundamentalists, against anything outside their shared worldview: atheism, homosexuality, multiculturalism... the list goes on, whether in Arabic or English.
The so-called normalising drugs of the 1960s deceived the growing and supposedly prospering middle class; interrupting any self-examination towards Knowing Thyself or further critique of their condition. As the NY Times piece conclude, "the oxymoronic attainment, through using drugs to make you feel more like yourself, of an artificially induced normal."
Just like the goal of the invention of normal in the 1870s, the purpose was to pacify and control the thoughts of the masses. Spellbound. Galton & co. feared the mob; as all entrenched powers have overtly or covertly. Post-WWII, the mob was blamed for the rise of fascism.
After the success of the modern factory in helping the Allies defeat the Axis powers, another normalization machine, first developed in the mid-1800s, was perfected: the modern school system. This behemoth took in raw children, wearing into them the necessary grooves of literacy, mathematics, and science enough to produce a productive workforce. Meanwhile those too violent, infirm, disabled or unintelligent fell aside into prisons or hospitals, the streets or manual labor. For the child at the middle of the Bell Curve it is just a challenge; for the Strange, the Outsider, it can be hell on earth.
Even worse, with democracy saved, but forever fearful of overthrow, the ruling class was allowed to justify the continuation of their treatment of those marginalised or criminalised for the betterment of the state. Emboldened with their “scientific” justification they found new methods — such as the Stolen Generations and other abhorrent acts specific to each country — to perpetrate a delusional greater good. This continued well past the middle of the 20th century and still goes on today, in many cases.
Normal became a new whip, and we still flinch at its sting, when really we should take pride in the scars of difference to become the perfect realisation of ourselves.
We are defined by our uniqueness. Tyler Durden was wrong; we are each a unique snowflake. It is the great strength not just of our species, but life itself. The future that lies on the other side of the myth of the Singularity may just be radically individual.
If there are still false idols to be destroyed, the concept of Normal stands at the fore; enemy of progress and container of horrors. Remember, it didn't say Normalize Thyself at the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. You are The Wizard that Makes the Grass Green. Don't fall under the spell of the powers that would continue to be: There is no Normal.