Normality and Morality: Is Either Even Desirable?

What does normal mean?  We all know.  What does it mean to be normal?  That’s much trickier.  We have trouble with the second question because what’s normal is always changing.  What’s normal is so dependent on society that nailing down precisely what it is becomes impossible.  Yet we all crave the normal, or at least to be normal.

In learning about different get-out-the-vote methods for my American Politics class, we discovered that the most effective tactic was exerting social pressure.  By exploiting our desire to comply with social norms, these campaigns raised turnout exponentially.  Norms, then, are certainly powerful forces.  But are they beneficial ones?

What does a truly normal person look like?  What if everyone were normal?  Arcade Fire voices the peculiarity of these ideas in its song “Normal Person:”  “Is anything as strange as a normal person? / Is anyone as cruel as a normal person?”  They conclude: “if that’s what’s normal now, I don’t want to know.”  The pull of normality, it seems, is quite dangerous.  What’s normal can have nothing to do with what’s right or what’s helpful, because there’s nothing fundamental or foundational grounding norms.  Further, a society full of normal people is not a society worth striving for.  Socialist economist John Roemer describes a capitalist phenomenon in which every individual owner makes self-interested decisions to pollute, but on the whole everyone wants to eliminate the public bad of pollution.  In other words, acting as individuals, these owners make one decision.  The aggregate of these decisions, however, yields an undesirable result.  I believe the same phenomenon is at work with normality.  Each individual wants to be normal, but if everyone were truly normal, we wouldn’t like the result.

Our word “normative” comes from the same etymological root as our word “normal.”  This shared heritage hints at the action-guiding pull of the normal.  There is a certain sense of “oughtness” to it.  Yet what would a truly normative, or ethical, person look like?  Philosopher Susan Wolf asks this question in her piece entitled “Moral Saints,” concluding that moral sainthood is not desirable.  A person constantly concerned with morality would be annoying and bland.  They would not have any time to develop their own projects, goals and personalities.  A society full of moral saints would be even worse.

So what’s the underlying problem with a normal person and a moral saint?  I think there are two problems.  First, constructing such ideal representative individuals abstracts away from what makes individuals individuals.  We have unique and distinct personalities, and these representatives cannot account for this.  Second, and relatedly, constructing these representatives yields too much ground to society.  Conceptions of the normal are totally based in societal trends.  Similarly, spending all one’s time concerned with morality precludes an individual from cultivated his/her individuality.  Both tendencies harm individual development.  It’s time that we take this ground back from society.  Let’s be individuals again.