I'm Not Normal II

To paraphrase the last post, an abstracted statistical notion derived from an equally abstracted and arbitrary "whole" data set cannot reasonably be applied to specific and particular persons. Galton's "normal," when applied to fragile humans, is ripe for the creation of social pariahs. In the hands of less than perfect persons, it becomes a social truncheon. Tangible enough to sting, but vague enough to allow liberal use. The power of "normal" isn't who it includes, it is who it excludes, which, when applied to everything, is precisely all of us.

One of Galton's great concerns was the improvement of the human race. As such, he was the father of "eugenics," another word he invented. In 1970, I.I. Gottesman, an American Eugenics Society director defined eugenics thusly:"the essence of eugenics is the replacement of 'natural' selection by conscious, premeditated, or artificial selection in the hope of speeding up the evolution of 'desirable' characteristics and the elimination of undesirable ones."1

During Galton's heyday—think just either side of 1900, when the world was awash with the glassy eyed optimism of Modernity—the debate at the Sociological Society of Great Britain wasn't whether one should pursue eugenics, it was how one should go about pursuing eugenics.2

Galton was a proponent of selective breeding. Let's call it an additive approach. He viewed charity to the poor as an unnatural impingement on natural selection. He thought money would be better spent on "encouraging the useful classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation."3 As he saw it, the useful classes had too few children and the un-useful had far too many. If production of useful progeny could be stepped up and surpass that of un-useful progeny, the nation would move, statistically speaking, in the direction of usefulness. This stellar thinking overflowed the well head of Galton's work in human intelligence. Galton's idea of intelligence and his notion of usefulness seem near synonymous.

Counter to Galton's additive eugenic approach is a decidedly reductive approach. It was espoused by H.G. Wells, he being the author of "The Time Machine" and "War of the Worlds." From a eugenics debate published in the American Journal of Sociology, 1904, Wells speaks:

"I believe that now and always the conscious selection of the best for reproduction will be impossible; that to propose it is to display a fundamental misunderstanding of what individuality implies. The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies."3

For reasons we now begin to see, the term "eugenics" is, in the present day, somewhat vilified. Indeed, Hitler, in the pages of Mein Kempf, attributes Galton and various eugenic scientists as the inspiration for the final solution.

This is what I find interesting. Here we stand at the blessed pinnacle of The Present and still we believe this stuff. Certainly not the unpalatable "intolorant" forms of eugenics. We, on this side of the Holocaust and with 20/20 vision of the past, stand agape at equal parts pomposity and naivete found in the Eugenics touting would be do gooders. We are all so over ourselves and that whole Modernity thang.

Yet we are saturated in silent ideas promulgated at the last turn of the century: i.e. that it is somehow useful, in and of itself, to talk about people as numbers. Further, and more importantly—and much more saturated into our psyche—because we feel we can talk about people as numbers we are quite comfortable with a concept at the heart of both our culture and Galton's dreams; that is, moral discourse has no place in civic discourse.

Galton states, "The character depends largely on the proportion between qualities, whose balance may be much influenced by education. We must therefore leave morals as far as possible out of the discussion, not entangling ourselves with the almost hopeless difficulties they raise as to whether a character as a whole is good or bad. Moreover, the goodness or badness of character is not absolute, but relative to the current form of civilization."4

Ah, yes. What what. Much too difficult to sort out the hoary problem of what constitutes good character. Let's just say it is what I say it is on the basis that I am me. Sorry about that, all you poor and whatnot. For the good of Queen and country and all that.

Yet Galton offers a list of, as he saw it, objective and "desirable" qualities to be promoted: "health, energy, ability, manliness, and courteous disposition" His dismissal of unimportant "morals" and profferment of objectively "desirable" civic qualities is a moral action. He may feel able, however thinly, to talk about each quality using only numbers and is therefore in no need of morals. However, one cannot talk about what to talk about using only numbers. Discussions of what we value as persons, as cultures, as nations, is an inescapably moral discussion.

Explication of a parallel concern seems in order. To paraphrase the overall jist of Janice Gross Stein in "The Cult of Efficiency": One puts 3 eggs into a process and out the other end one produces a cake. If one can find a way to put 2 eggs into the process and still get a cake that is just as good, one has created a more efficient cake making process. The predator lying in wait, which continually bites us in our civic ass, is that "just as good as" is a value statement, which means it is implicitly of moral concern. If we don't talk about what constitutes "just as good as" and only talk about efficiency in term of numbers we are no longer dealing with human concerns, and are thus operating as a cult. A cult of efficiency.

We can't use numbers to talk about value statements. Value statements speak to our humanness, our moral, and, if you will, spiritual dimension as persons. Normal was always offered to me as a human trait. It isn't, it is a numerical trait. I choose to not be defined by numbers. I'm still not normal.

I'm Not Normal

I am not normal. I am not normal because I am not numbers. In its original and properly contained context, the word "normal" originally described a statistical phenomenon. But because we, of the twenty first century, are saturated in numbers, it seems quite natural to us that a word used to describe numerical groupings of things should be used to describe individual specific things. Yes, to us "normal" seems to have been around since the creation of the universe. However, the word "normal" along with the idea of "normal" was invented 1877 by one Sir Francis Galton.

Galton was an eminent scientist of his day noted for his wide ranging interests. He was the first to posit meteorologic anticyclonic action and was the first person to utilize the questionaire. By statistically tracking inheritance he became the father of "biometric" genetics. He was also the first to statistically map human intelligence—or at least his version of human intelligence—and found what we now call a classic bell curve. It is the bell curve from whence Galton arrived at the idea of "normal," likely deriving the word from the Latin "norma," which refers to a carpenter's square.

In Galton's terms "normal" referred to the statistical majority who lay within the pronounced peak of a bell curve. If one's intelligence lay within the major part of the bell curve one was "normal." Normal was desirable. On either end of the "normal" curve one found statistically small samples of morons and geniuses respectively. To Galton's mind the term normal was understood as a statistical descriptor. It described a naturally occurring phenomenon in genetic distribution as pertains to Galton's definition of intelligence.

By Galton's own definition, either end of the curve would be populated by over-desirable and under-desirable people, both violations of the "norm." His whole purpose in tracking intelligence was borne of a desire to move civilization—read England—toward ever greater intelligence. He seems fatally inured to the idea that persons are inviolably indisposed to being socially outside of anything. He had made pariahs of even the positive "desirable" side of his curve, defined and codified as "not like most of us." He seems also to have missed, amongst all his detached objective observations, that "desirable" is an implicitly value laden term. More on that later.

If intelligence were the only sphere of human existence, we could map Galton's curve, say who's normal and who isnt' and be done with it. But, human existence is much richer than Galton and his contemporaries might have imagined. Fortunately for us, standing stridently this side of modernism, the idea of reducing humanity to simplistic intellect seems naive and gauche. Unfortunately for us, Galton's simplistic notion of "normal" grew like fungal mold in the petri dish of Modernity: "Everything is measurable. Everything is controllable. Everything is numbers. Yay! Modernity!" This fungal mold of normal has been spread as liberally as butter over every nook and cranny of our being. It has spilled its larder and smeared itself everywhere. Not only that, it has wiggled free of its statistical connotations and has somehow wriggled itself into our lexicon as an individual and particular attribute. We have come to think I can be normal. You can be normal. But no such thing exists! Normal is a statistical amalgam. Normal is Kierkegaard's Untruthful Crowd. It is No One.

Here's the rub—so well lubricated by normal we scarcely feel it—we all, in some sphere of human existence, feel outside normal. If the idea of normal is applied to everything, then we all are, in something, not normal.

Therein lies the fallacy; normal intrinsically only applies to the interrelationship of a large number of individuals viewed as an arbitrary whole. It is a statistical term and as such it cannot be applied to an individual as a characteristic. Yet in our current context we repeatedly and pervasively apply normal in precisely this way. And therein lies the fearsome power of normal. We all fear, individually, that we are not, individually, normal; even though, in truth, we cannot be "individually" "normal," the two terms are antithetical.

Normality has become a crippling disease, and it is a disease borne of falacy. Thus, I choose not to be defined by an affable English gentleman of the late 19th century. Rather I choose to be defined by The Creator, chosen as His child.