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.