The destruction of American political norms.” “Don’t normalize this.” “It is not normal!” “Why can’t you be normal?»
The past two decades have seen increasing attention to the normalcy of American public life. Google Trends shows a steady upward slope:a quadrupling, in fact— in the online interest in “normalcy” between 2004 and 2024.
But anecdotally, I would say that this acceleration has been more intense since around 2015. It’s no coincidence that this was the year former President Donald Trump first came to dominate national politics, and it was also the year the Supreme Court ruled Obergefell v. Hodgeswhich shifted the public discourse on sexuality and gender from same-sex marriage to new frontiers, particularly on gender identity.
Normality has been for a long time a certain moral value. Its etymology aa do with the straightness of angles in carpentry, and from there, it is not a long verbal journey towards other types of straightness: conformity to the rules, not only to the manager, and especially to ethical rules.
Lately, it seems the moral nuance is thickening. In a secularized and fragmented society, we are dangerously short of widely accepted standards. Panic rises. Nobody wants anomiea standard less culture, but how can we establish effective norms if there is no consensus on what is normal? On what basis do you mourn or announce the death of old norms or the emergence of new ones? By what rule can we judge and instruct if we lose agreed rules?
A fascinating case study of this dilemma appeared in a recent Atlantic essay by researcher Tyler Austin Harper. Titled “Polyamory, the latest fashion of the ruling class», its first three quarters constitute a critical tour de force.
Harper’s main interest isn’t the polyamorous trend or even the recently popular book—More: Memoir of an Open Marriage-which he reviews in the article. Both are subsidiary to a larger phenomenon that Harper calls “therapeutic libertarianism”: “the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life and that no formal or informal constraints – whether imposed by States, religious systems or other people – should prevent any of us from achieving personal growth.
Harper explicitly builds this characterization on the theory of philosopher Charles Taylor. A secular era. Taylor argues that our culture is increasingly organized around a notion of “authenticity or expressive individualism, in which people are encouraged to find their own path, to discover their own fulfillment, to “do what ‘they want “.
Therapeutic libertarianism will be familiar to anyone who has read Alan Noble’s work. You are not yours or that of Tara Isabella Burton DIY-or simply preview “Instagram Face.” Harper even describes the sneaky way in which this promise of freedom to build oneself from scratch tends to become an overwhelming obligation, especially once we have lost the energy (and physical beauty) of youth:
We are all our own start-ups. We all need to adopt a growth mindset for our personality and deregulate our desires. We all need to evaluate and reevaluate our own “thriving,” a kind of psychological gross domestic product, on a near-constant basis. And like GDP, our development must always increase.
And he also works in a class analysis, observing that cutting-edge modes of therapeutic libertarianism, like polyamory, tend to develop first in “rich and elite” circles, where people have the time and resources to devote to “endless projects of self-improvement.” , navel-gazing and sexual peccadilloes.
All in all, it’s the kind of withdrawal that makes me understand, even though I’m a vegetarian and squeamish, the hunter’s impulse to hang a deer’s head on the wall.
But then there is the last quarter of the essay, where the class analysis takes a different form. His problem is not moral, Harper says. Although he himself is “monogamously married”, polyamory does not seem “at all a question of right or wrong”, provided that everyone involved is a consenting adult.
No, his problem is that it’s too expensive for the poor. This “brand of free love” requires disposable income and time – to pay for babysitters and children. pencil in their panoply of lovers – which are forbidden to the working masses,” writes Harper. On the deer’s antlers, a banner drapes: Workers of the world, unite… so that you too can claim the dubious privilege of “seeking absolute freedom” and “finding only abjection.”
It’s a disjointed and disappointing ending to an otherwise excellent essay. It is also a striking example of the inability of an approach like class analysis to fund effective standards on a large scale.
Class analysis is a useful thing that often sheds real light on political and social issues. There are many public conversations in America that this can and does improve. But the haves have is not enough to decide the merits of X, to establish a standard for or against.
In this case, the analysis is particularly unconvincing because Harper has just spent hundreds of words making polyamory and the libertarian therapeutic framework seem empty, exhausting, and hopeless. In fact, he makes it all seem a lot like a question of right and wrong (and indeed it is). He makes it seem wrong and demeaning and certainly not an evil we should wish upon the working class in the name of fairness.
I reread the end of this essay several times, sure that I had misunderstood it. And maybe I did. Harper wants to set a standard against all of this, having rightly observed that those caught in its traps have a bad time. But, not having a widely recognized moral basis for this norm, he fumbles and finds: Well, it’s not fair that only the elite can self-inflict this narcissistic self-construction and the tension it entails..
But of all the problems he lists, this class division is perhaps the least. Class analysis is not wrong, but it is not enough. It is not enough to determine what should be normal in a moral sense, and certainly not on a societal level, on this and most other important issues. It is not enough to prevent everyone from doing what is good in their own eyes (Judges 21:25), with all the chaos and enmity that ensues. And the same can be said of other bases of judgment linked to niche politicscultural or religious.
Even fairly broad visions of moral renewal, as David Brooks expounded in Atlantic And The New York Times, tend to fail on this point: there is no reason why people who do not already share Brooks’s standards should adhere to his proposals. Why give up the crude style of Trumpism if you don’t already have reason to believe that cruelty is wrong? Why embrace moral formation through manners classes and intergenerational service if you don’t already believe in the good of charity?
“Moral communities are fragile things, difficult to build and easy to destroy,” according to social psychologist Jonathan Haidt written inThe right mind. Haidt recognized that declining institutional authority and religiosity lead to exactly the anomie we face today. “If you live in a religious community, you are enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions” that produce “shared moral matrices.” he explained. Without this moral organization, when everyone does what they want – well, have you read Judges 19-21? Or Reddit?
Haidt, an atheist, does not specify which religious norms machine is preferred. He simply recognizes that humans have a “God-shaped hole” in our hearts, and “it has to be filled with something – and if you leave it empty, (people) don’t just feel an emptiness. A society that has no sense of the sacred is a society in which there is much anomie, lack of norms, loneliness and despair.
I am ready to clarify. It’s no great revelation that I think our standards should be based on Christian faith, on the revelation that God is like Jesus dying on the cross, defeating evil and offering us life and hope, which , yes, comes with a lot of morals. claims and commandments (Col. 1:15-23, 2:9-15, 3:1-14).
But, without ruling out the possibility of divine intervention – a new Reformation, another Great Awakening, the Second Coming – I also don’t expect Christianity to be universally accepted in the short term. in American society, whether as a living faith or simply as a reliable generator of norms. From a banal point of view, the trend lines on it are all extremely clear.
I admit that I oppose class analysis and other solutions to our anomie without offering a better idea. Or rather, I have a better idea – a light to banish the anomic darkness – but I know why and how our culture has distrusted its glow.
Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity today.
