Torrey Orton
Oct. 8, 2013
Normal, standard, common, regular,
typical… A restart
Normal, standard,
common, regular, typical…all are words we use to establish an expectation for
ourselves, about ourselves, others, and so on. Am I normal? Is this normal?…Well,
I normally have trouble getting things going and keeping them going. It’s taken
me two months from promising to start “What’s normal now” to starting it. I’ve
struggled and not told anyone I was doing so. I’ve made gestures at starting like
creating a topic page for a wiki, mentioning to people that I am going to do
this and then gone back into not doing it. How normal is that? A linguistic
formula whose systemic ambiguity invites its own denial!!
Are we heading for a
future where the new normal is the norm? Maybe we are already in it and its
arrival hasn’t been noticed. One probability is that whatever has been
superseded by fashion may itself be superseded by the fashion it replaced. Try
the history of fashion in sunglasses for the last 40 years, or 80! My aviators
are back in.
Describing
someone/something as ‘normal’ is a basic assessment that someone or something
is alright, OK, workable, etc. and as such is a basis for the conduct of
everyday life. The key word is ‘conduct’. Hence, when we feel not normal –
abnormal, bad normal, etc. – we may also feel compromised in our personal and
social capacity to act. If we feel not-normal in too many ways or too intensely
our performance collapses. The same applies to our worlds – physical,
spiritual, etc.
Challenges
of the normal
There will be some
challenges pursuing the question ‘What’s normal now?’. For instance, by what
authority can anyone say anything is ‘normal’, including themselves? Another is
that there are normal things which are also clearly (I say authoritatively)
bad, dangerous, damaging, etc. (e.g. alcohol, over-reliance on a narrow set of
capabilities; excess focus (obsessiveness by successful people) And yet another
is how to distinguish the normal from other factors which tend to present in
cloying clusters in human events. For example, a single norm like marriage, has
personal, interpersonal, social and material aspects (and, also, subjective and
objective faces with substantive cultural variations). Then there is the fact
that norms (another challenge) are implicit in matters labelled ‘normal’. Finally,
the normal and its associated norms are often about dilemmas and paradoxes
which are hard to norm.
And I haven’t even
mentioned a huge range of natural normals and norms which provide the basis for
our understanding of what the world really is, failing which our intentions
will be waylaid by it. That is, the sciences, human and physical, with
spiritual systems nearer or farther from view as fits your comfort.
I know some of why this
is normal for me and of course, for the positive spin people out there, it is
not totally me by quite a way. So, (a normalising conjunction), it is
appropriate to me that I start by acknowledging this damaged part of me and
invite you to help create the first class of normals: broken or damaged
ones. Some starters are below. Small steps and all that!!
Broken
normals/ declining normals, in ‘advanced’, anglo economies etc.
•
Marriage – 45% failure rate
•
Job insecurity, signalled in various
ways
•
Religious affiliation / participation – actual
attendance = <20 o:p="" overall="">
•
Grotesque income disparities, again
especially in the Anglosphere
•
Single occupancy living increases in
Australia, especially for over 35’s and women
•
Personal health – the obesity challenge.
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