Or, Another American speaking in biased generalities
about complex topics for which he or she does not possess a related
college degree.
Rick Weber's Why? got me thinking.
Why eccentricity?
Because normal and natural are not the same thing.
What's natural is actually somewhere between what we think of as chaos and what we think of as the norm (order). Some tendency toward order is of course innate. Plants, animals, the earth and the endless cosmos always have and do and will behave in ordered fashions, with or without man—what humans did is name, measure and learn to predict that ordered phenomena with math.
All that natural cosmic order is good—it creates a working physical universe, and in animals, the patterns it creates allow the strategic pursuit of comfort and safety—prolonging life and enhancing wellbeing. But, precariously, man also learned to orchestrate that order artificially, extrapolating it to high heaven.
Now, we're taught to behave, and try to behave, for good reason. Civilization cannot be founded or endure without some semblance of that deliberate order, which has to be actively imbued by the individual. But man has taken it a step further than necessary.
We do track and perpetuate patterns in the name of survival—we put our babies in car seats, build tornado shelters in Kansas, and no longer fill our dirigibles with pure hydrogen. But we've normatized every other imaginable pattern of appearance and behavior too. For example, there's no survival benefit to be had by discouraging a man from wearing a skirt (the unlikely and unfortunate testicular mishap notwithstanding), but by god do we judge any man who decides to wear a skirt, simply because most other men don't1.
What is the presumed power of the norm? And conversely, the presumed liability of the unusual?
We forget that what has become common, socialized behavior is not actually born of our natural tendencies. It's not natural for animal organisms to be monogamous2, or eat more than they need to for the fun of it, or retreat behind closed doors to mate, or to save the life of a severely disabled pack member at all costs. It's not even natural for the females of a species to be the prettier, more colorfully decorated ones3.
But no, in the name of ease and comfort and predictability reaching well beyond our basic survival needs, we adhere vigilantly to our norms and expect the same of others. Go to the store in your underwear? No. Get your nose pierced and apply for a job at an investment banking firm? No. Paint a giant phallus on the side of your house? No. Bad nonconformist, bad!
Believe me, I'm sympathetic to the magnetism of the norm—it's comfortable, and thus perilously alluring. I have become less wont to express my "individuality" as I've grown older, have felt less and less need to prove that I'm unique. I could call it laziness, complacency or fatigue, but what the me of ten years ago really never saw coming was that I'm totally okay with the idea that I appear to be boring. I don't know if the joke is on me or society. I don't just settle for the prosaic—I actually love NPR, I actually want to be law-abiding, and I don't feel lame when I get up early and fall asleep early, or that I do paperwork for a living.
But in fairness, I'm weird. I only like green bananas. I didn't wear blue for nearly a decade. I lose sleep over poor grammar and spelling errors. I have seen some episodes of the Simpsons hundreds of times. In my mind, numbers have certain colors and letters are "odd" or "even." Encountering a bird bigger than a parakeet makes me go numb with fear. Meeting me on the street, you'd never know. They're utterly harmless, but weird and all of its synonyms bear a negative connotation, including the e-word. Those things are natural to me, but if I let them shine, they're suddenly eccentricities.
And this is where normal fails us. I'm normal because I appear to be normal, and that's all there is to it. I can hear Mrs.Gump saying something along the lines of "Normal is as normal does." I win.
But here's the real trouble with it—everyone's eccentric in some ways. Yet we've allowed ourselves to develop a distaste for those who can't or won't keep it under wraps. And further talked each other into believing that those who can keep their eccentricities under wraps aren't hiding anything after all. In a society which purports to prize individuality, confidence, braveness and unflinching adherence to one's tenets, we snicker both to ourselves and very much out loud at benign deviations from what we're used to.
I don't know if it's instinct or conscious judgement that leads us to respond unfavorably, even if we don't admit it aloud, to eccentricities.
We covet our stability and order so, and perhaps our sense that eccentricity could actually be any sort of threat to the norm stems from giving ourselves too much credit as custodians of order. Order is a natural, self-preserving state, and all we've done is fenced in a corner of it, pruned the bushes, and called it Normalville.
Weirdness doesn't jeopardize the norm—it validates it. Indeed, the norm needs its eccentric foil. Without the weirdos, what would normal even mean?
I suspect that our jealousy over our normality also stems from every individual's sense that he or she is unusual and that the Norms are somehow The Others—despite the logical and statistical impossibility of everyone being atypical. I can only speculate based on my life experience because of the impossibility of ever knowing someone else's mind—no matter how close you are to someone, you can never be certain what you don't know about their inner workings. But take a second to think about some unusual (and likely benign) desire, fear, fixation, hang-up or habit that you've never told anyone about, even a doctor, and I think you begin to get a sense for just how little we truly know about other people.
If I'm right, we're all suffering alienation at the hands of our own illusion, and willfully imposing it on others, what's more. Cruel.
If I'm wrong, then there really are mysterious creatures out there who are so satisfied of their own normality that they never feel alienated or unusual. But deliciously, we still couldn't eliminate the possibility that those who feel thoroughly normal were actually the atypical minority, technically rendering them weird.
I'm a proponent of behaving well, at least most of the time, and at least in public, because it has utility. But we live in a society that derides, prohibits and even criminalizes (ostensibly) atypical behaviors that don't harm others and aren't even seen by others. Speaking in very imprecise terms, it's soul-crushing. Sodomizing someone at your local grocery store in the middle of the day? Okay, regulate that. But between (or among) consenting adults, in their private lives? Who gives a fuck? Go nuts!
Given, killing people, eating their flesh and praying to their skulls for power feels natural to some people, but far and away, most eccentricities are just that by definition—not normal only in that they happen to not be shared by 68%, or 95%, or however you measure it, of the population, and nothing more.
Order will persist whether we cultivate it or not, eccentricity will persist whether we discourage it or honor it, and some norm, whatever it happens to be, will always exist. What determines the character of our culture is whether we worship the norm at face value, or evaluate it on its merits.
~~~
1 I have to cop to my Western bias in analyzing and bitching about the idea of "normal" and other things that I think deserve a second look. And to the fact that plenty of my convictions get derailed when I try to take the broadview. In this case, I acknowledge among other things that men wear skirts in plenty of cultures, but I'm hoping you'll entertain my biased examples, knowing that the mechanics of what I'm grumbling about remain the same no matter what form eccentricity and the norm may take.
2 Fun sidenote. It's actually not even normal for human cultures to practice monogamy as the norm. Researchers estimate the proportion of human cultures which prefer monogamy at around 20%.
3 Indeed, throughout the animal kingdom, and in plenty of human eras, the males have been the painted ones.
There
will always be fewer males than females, partly because it's easier for
human embryos to default to a female karyotype if not given the active
cue to become male, and partly because women tend to outlive men. I'll
resist further remarks about stereotypical male occupations,
aggressions, competitiveness and the like also being more risk-prone,
which would sound sexist whether said with tongue in cheek or not. In
humans, the male, who is the majority in all senses except in sheer
population size, will almost always be vying for the female's attention,
so it's a wonder that human females are the ones bothering to put on a
show, and not the other way around.
Rick Weber's Why? got me thinking.
Why eccentricity?
Because normal and natural are not the same thing.
What's natural is actually somewhere between what we think of as chaos and what we think of as the norm (order). Some tendency toward order is of course innate. Plants, animals, the earth and the endless cosmos always have and do and will behave in ordered fashions, with or without man—what humans did is name, measure and learn to predict that ordered phenomena with math.
All that natural cosmic order is good—it creates a working physical universe, and in animals, the patterns it creates allow the strategic pursuit of comfort and safety—prolonging life and enhancing wellbeing. But, precariously, man also learned to orchestrate that order artificially, extrapolating it to high heaven.
Now, we're taught to behave, and try to behave, for good reason. Civilization cannot be founded or endure without some semblance of that deliberate order, which has to be actively imbued by the individual. But man has taken it a step further than necessary.
We do track and perpetuate patterns in the name of survival—we put our babies in car seats, build tornado shelters in Kansas, and no longer fill our dirigibles with pure hydrogen. But we've normatized every other imaginable pattern of appearance and behavior too. For example, there's no survival benefit to be had by discouraging a man from wearing a skirt (the unlikely and unfortunate testicular mishap notwithstanding), but by god do we judge any man who decides to wear a skirt, simply because most other men don't1.
What is the presumed power of the norm? And conversely, the presumed liability of the unusual?
We forget that what has become common, socialized behavior is not actually born of our natural tendencies. It's not natural for animal organisms to be monogamous2, or eat more than they need to for the fun of it, or retreat behind closed doors to mate, or to save the life of a severely disabled pack member at all costs. It's not even natural for the females of a species to be the prettier, more colorfully decorated ones3.
But no, in the name of ease and comfort and predictability reaching well beyond our basic survival needs, we adhere vigilantly to our norms and expect the same of others. Go to the store in your underwear? No. Get your nose pierced and apply for a job at an investment banking firm? No. Paint a giant phallus on the side of your house? No. Bad nonconformist, bad!
Believe me, I'm sympathetic to the magnetism of the norm—it's comfortable, and thus perilously alluring. I have become less wont to express my "individuality" as I've grown older, have felt less and less need to prove that I'm unique. I could call it laziness, complacency or fatigue, but what the me of ten years ago really never saw coming was that I'm totally okay with the idea that I appear to be boring. I don't know if the joke is on me or society. I don't just settle for the prosaic—I actually love NPR, I actually want to be law-abiding, and I don't feel lame when I get up early and fall asleep early, or that I do paperwork for a living.
But in fairness, I'm weird. I only like green bananas. I didn't wear blue for nearly a decade. I lose sleep over poor grammar and spelling errors. I have seen some episodes of the Simpsons hundreds of times. In my mind, numbers have certain colors and letters are "odd" or "even." Encountering a bird bigger than a parakeet makes me go numb with fear. Meeting me on the street, you'd never know. They're utterly harmless, but weird and all of its synonyms bear a negative connotation, including the e-word. Those things are natural to me, but if I let them shine, they're suddenly eccentricities.
And this is where normal fails us. I'm normal because I appear to be normal, and that's all there is to it. I can hear Mrs.Gump saying something along the lines of "Normal is as normal does." I win.
But here's the real trouble with it—everyone's eccentric in some ways. Yet we've allowed ourselves to develop a distaste for those who can't or won't keep it under wraps. And further talked each other into believing that those who can keep their eccentricities under wraps aren't hiding anything after all. In a society which purports to prize individuality, confidence, braveness and unflinching adherence to one's tenets, we snicker both to ourselves and very much out loud at benign deviations from what we're used to.
I don't know if it's instinct or conscious judgement that leads us to respond unfavorably, even if we don't admit it aloud, to eccentricities.
We covet our stability and order so, and perhaps our sense that eccentricity could actually be any sort of threat to the norm stems from giving ourselves too much credit as custodians of order. Order is a natural, self-preserving state, and all we've done is fenced in a corner of it, pruned the bushes, and called it Normalville.
Weirdness doesn't jeopardize the norm—it validates it. Indeed, the norm needs its eccentric foil. Without the weirdos, what would normal even mean?
I suspect that our jealousy over our normality also stems from every individual's sense that he or she is unusual and that the Norms are somehow The Others—despite the logical and statistical impossibility of everyone being atypical. I can only speculate based on my life experience because of the impossibility of ever knowing someone else's mind—no matter how close you are to someone, you can never be certain what you don't know about their inner workings. But take a second to think about some unusual (and likely benign) desire, fear, fixation, hang-up or habit that you've never told anyone about, even a doctor, and I think you begin to get a sense for just how little we truly know about other people.
If I'm right, we're all suffering alienation at the hands of our own illusion, and willfully imposing it on others, what's more. Cruel.
If I'm wrong, then there really are mysterious creatures out there who are so satisfied of their own normality that they never feel alienated or unusual. But deliciously, we still couldn't eliminate the possibility that those who feel thoroughly normal were actually the atypical minority, technically rendering them weird.
I'm a proponent of behaving well, at least most of the time, and at least in public, because it has utility. But we live in a society that derides, prohibits and even criminalizes (ostensibly) atypical behaviors that don't harm others and aren't even seen by others. Speaking in very imprecise terms, it's soul-crushing. Sodomizing someone at your local grocery store in the middle of the day? Okay, regulate that. But between (or among) consenting adults, in their private lives? Who gives a fuck? Go nuts!
Given, killing people, eating their flesh and praying to their skulls for power feels natural to some people, but far and away, most eccentricities are just that by definition—not normal only in that they happen to not be shared by 68%, or 95%, or however you measure it, of the population, and nothing more.
Order will persist whether we cultivate it or not, eccentricity will persist whether we discourage it or honor it, and some norm, whatever it happens to be, will always exist. What determines the character of our culture is whether we worship the norm at face value, or evaluate it on its merits.
~~~
1 I have to cop to my Western bias in analyzing and bitching about the idea of "normal" and other things that I think deserve a second look. And to the fact that plenty of my convictions get derailed when I try to take the broadview. In this case, I acknowledge among other things that men wear skirts in plenty of cultures, but I'm hoping you'll entertain my biased examples, knowing that the mechanics of what I'm grumbling about remain the same no matter what form eccentricity and the norm may take.
2 Fun sidenote. It's actually not even normal for human cultures to practice monogamy as the norm. Researchers estimate the proportion of human cultures which prefer monogamy at around 20%.
3 Indeed, throughout the animal kingdom, and in plenty of human eras, the males have been the painted ones.
There
will always be fewer males than females, partly because it's easier for
human embryos to default to a female karyotype if not given the active
cue to become male, and partly because women tend to outlive men. I'll
resist further remarks about stereotypical male occupations,
aggressions, competitiveness and the like also being more risk-prone,
which would sound sexist whether said with tongue in cheek or not. In
humans, the male, who is the majority in all senses except in sheer
population size, will almost always be vying for the female's attention,
so it's a wonder that human females are the ones bothering to put on a
show, and not the other way around.
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