The Myth of Normal 11

For better or worse, we humans have a genius for getting used to things, especially when the changes are incremental. The newfangled verb “to normalize” refers to the mechanism by which something previously aberrant becomes normal enough that it passes beneath our radar. On a societal level, then, “normal” often means “nothing to see here”: all systems are functioning as they should, no further inquiry needed. The truth as I see it is quite different. The late David Foster Wallace, master wordsmith, author, and essayist, once opened a commencement speech with a droll parable that well illustrates the trouble with normality. The story concerns two fish crossing aquatic paths with an elder of their species, who greets them jovially: “‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?’” The point Wallace wanted to leave his audience pondering was that “the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones hardest to see and talk about.” On its surface, he allowed, that might sound like “a banal platitude” but “in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life-or-death importance.” He could have been articulating this book’s thesis. Indeed, the lives, and the deaths, of individual human beings—their quality and in many cases their duration—are intimately bound up with the aspects of modern society that are “hardest to see and talk about”; phenomena that are, like water to fish, both too vast and too near to be appreciated. In other words, those features of daily life that appear to us now as normal are the ones crying out the loudest for our scrutiny. That is my central contention. My core intention, accordingly, is to offer a new way of seeing and talking about these phenomena, bringing them from the background to the foreground so we might more swiftly find their much-needed remedies. I will make the case that much of what passes for normal in our society is neither healthy nor natural, and that to meet modern society’s criteria for normality is, in many ways, to conform to requirements that are profoundly abnormal in regard to our Nature-given needs—which is to say, unhealthy and harmful on the physiological, mental, and even spiritual levels.