2
New Norms

In this chapter, I will sketch the shift in our society's norms over the past half century, outlining briefly the normative system of the mid-twentieth century, before dealing in detail with the nature of the succeeding, contemporary normative order that has superseded it and examining how this supersession occurred.

Preliminarily, I will now re-present some of the core claims about norms in general just made in Chapter 1. I have claimed that norms lead to impossible demands for perfection. This unachievability of the norm has been greatly exacerbated by the appearance of the statistical concept of the norm in the late nineteenth century because this invention blurred the meaning of norms and normality, giving all norms and the notion of the normal the appearance of mathematical scientificity, even though in most cases there has been no statistical contribution to their development. This means that, paradoxically, the impossible visions of perfection that norms represent have come to be conceived of as average, which is to say not only demanded, but expected. Thus, even though all of us are to some extent abnormal in relation to the norm, we are all made to feel that being abnormal is not only non-ideal but also atypical.

A 2017 Yale University study of people's beliefs about what is 'normal' showed that these were 'part descriptive, part prescriptive'1 - that is, a mix of a description of what they thought most people did with what they thought people should do. We want to be normal, imagine that most people are normal and feel ourselves intensely unusual in being abnormal as a result, when the plain fact is that everyone diverges from any given norm. We fail to recognize this fact and its inevitability, however, and consequently are trapped in a constant, doomed effort to be normal, which, far from making us normal, actually makes us deeply unhappy (a state that is itself categorized in our society as abnormal). Conversely, the difficulties that beset us, which for most of us are commonplace in our lives - sickness, to give a privileged example, but also bereavement, anxiety, professional and personal setbacks - despite being universal experiences, are never deemed 'normal'. Rather, we define them as abnormal, precisely because they do not conform to the way we think things ought to be.

The Old Norms

By the mid-twentieth century, for most people, the normative vision of perfection had become something like a vision of perfect averageness. Every American male - to give an example that is privileged in every sense - was expected to be the upright family man: married, God-fearing, employed, with children. Although the applicable norm here was, to be sure, an impossibly perfect version of this, which no real man actually reached and in relation to which every man thus felt inadequate, most ordinary men could at least meet its broad coordinates. Fifty years ago, if a man worked hard, provided for and raised a family, went to church, etc., that would be enough for him to feel at least basically respected by his peers and society at large. Of course, broad conformity was never quite enough: one was inevitably aware one did not entirely conform with the norm, hence life in this period was marked by the particular anxiety that nonconformity induces. Moreover, the norm of masculinity certainly did imply a constitutive exclusion of women, to whom a different set of norms applied, bidding them most obviously to bear and care for children and look after the home. While one can criticize this arrangement on the basis that the female norm was a lesser one, that to be a woman was in a sense to be marked as abnormal in a way that being a man was not, and also can criticize both male and female norms on the basis that they enjoined unequal power relations between the sexes, the female-specific norm was itself relatively straightforward to approximate in much the same way that the male one was. It is of course also clearly the case that a substantial minority of people, most obviously perhaps those who are same-sex attracted, had no appropriate norm with which they were even supposed to accord, but rather were simply defined eo ipso as abnormal, and had to effect to be something other than what they were if they wished to avoid legal and other forms of direct persecution.

People today thus regard the norms of the mid-twentieth century with a mixture of nostalgia and horror. We are nostalgic for the certainties of that era, for its relative simplicity, but horrified by how restrictive it was. Indeed, its simplicity was achieved precisely through repressiveness (as well as, Foucault would remind us, by the active production of normal behaviour). Which aspects of that society horrify us tell us much about who we are today: our contemporary norms have been forged precisely in reaction and opposition to those old ones. We can suspect inversely that people of the mid-twentieth century would tend to have an exactly opposite horror if they could see the licence with which people now behave.2

The changes in norms over the past five decades are commonly viewed as the liberation of people from restrictive roles, and indeed restrictions have disappeared. It would be quite wrong, however, to imagine that this has freed us from the tyranny of norms. On the contrary, if anything, it is norms that have been freed to tyrannize us. This is not to say that we should (or can) go back. The old conformism was itself strongly normative and could moreover be blamed for producing our contemporary situation through the development of the norms that were already present in it.

It is hard to gauge when we reached peak conformism, in part because conformism was only ever one prominent tendency in our societies. Our society, however much it may have come to be focused on the norm, has indeed retained elements from its pre-norm past, and these offer some resources to resist norms. While we might think of pre-modern societies as peculiarly constrained in their thinking, intolerant and culturally impoverished compared to our liberal modernity, modern societies' self-image exaggerates their relative tolerance. Medieval Europe, for example, had all kinds of ways of accommodating those who would today be considered freaks and weirdos; while almost everyone then was obliged to belong to a single cult of a single religion, they found within it enormously varied expressions and lifestyles. In addition to the extraordinary forms of religious devotion that existed in that period, there was also the regular overturning of the established order in the carnival, as noted by Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as the de facto toleration of all kinds of behaviour at the wide geographical fringes of that society noted by Foucault, not to mention the survival of pagan superstitions in folk practices. Even in the age of conformism, residual traditional institutional frameworks allow exceptions to conformity, on the one hand (for example, it has remained possible for people to devote their lives to religion, even if some more mystical religious practices have disappeared or been suppressed), and, on the other, spaces of exception from the dominant norms have lingered, be they at society's geographical limit, or in internal spaces of libertinism and bohemianism.

Today, in a sense, bohemianism has gone from being a barely tolerated aberration to become the dominant culture, or at least what the dominant culture imagines itself to be, paradoxically making libertinism and bohemianism compulsory, which is to say, not genuinely libertine or bohemian at all. Indeed, what we see today is the disappearance of traditional frameworks of exception within our society canvassed in the foregoing paragraph, together with the normative colonization or appropriation of formerly exterior spaces. This has produced a society where almost everything appears to be a space of freedom, but which is actually more all-encompassing than any social form that has ever existed before.

Individualism

If there is a single fulcrum around which the late twentieth-century revolution in norms has turned, it is the norm of individualism, inasmuch as this is the most prominent single term in common between the old and the new normative orders. Individualism rose to prominence as a norm, particularly in America, in the early twentieth century. At that time and place, it took the form of a short-lived valorization of 'rugged individualism', and more broadly of the expectation that a man be self-sufficient.

The old, rugged individualism was a conformism of independence. Each man (for this norm applied primarily if not exclusively to men) was supposed to be sufficient unto himself, and the norms of society required him to demonstrate his absolute self-sufficiency as an uncomplaining father, provider and worker. This idealized self-sufficient individual was not supposed to be the author of his own values, however - if he was supposed to be autonomous in this regard, it was only in Immanuel Kant's sense, viz. that he was expected to arrive independently at the same universal values as everyone else, including a belief in rugged individualism itself.

Discontent with the Kantian universalist version of autonomy had been perceptible already in nineteenth-century thought, for example in the writings of Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche, who articulated extreme forms of individualism, arguing that man needed to become the author of his own moral values, a line of thinking seminal to the...