The Peril of Taking Comfort in Alien Norms
Routines reassure us in the monstrous natural order
- “Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.” ― Charles Addams
Charles Addams was the cartoonist who created the Addams family, and technically his example in that quotation shows that normality is relative, not exactly that it’s an illusion.
We can think of the sense of normality as arising from inductive generalizations, as in the philosopher David Hume’s telling. We acquire “habits” or “customs,” Hume said, after repeated observations of how a pattern holds, so we come to expect that the future will resemble the past. Mind you, we never experience a necessary connection between events, but we overstep our perceptions and fill in this blank, which is to say that we impose our expectations onto natural events that are metaphysically inhuman, or neutral towards what we think we understand.
In any case, normality surely differs for spiders and flies in that these insects have different and even opposite expectations. As species, tribes, or individuals, we distinguish ourselves by our habits, and these form from our local circumstances or because our pursuit of goals motivates us to ignore some patterns and fixate on others. As organisms, spiders’ and flies’ goals may be similar, but in the struggle for survival, their life cycles and skillsets lead them to opposite preferences. The spider prefers for prey to be stuck in its web, whereas the prey prefers to be free.
But there’s also a feedback loop as the habit formed from the repeated confirmations of assumptions might contribute to those confirmations. A classic case of this is the dictator who’s used to never being denied by his underlings, and who finds after surrounding himself with sycophants that the fear his political power instills prevents his subordinates from telling him unwanted but useful truths. This is the exception in which something like the New Age “law of attraction” holds. Likewise, the placebo effect shows that our expectations can influence what happens to us.
There are self-organizing processes that become unstoppable after they pass a critical threshold. The sunk-cost fallacy, for instance, shows that despite any objective analysis of the downside, once we’ve invested enough of ourselves in some venture, we stay loyal to it out of habit or fear of the humiliation of having to confess we were wrong to have initiated that course.
The sense of normality is a sign that some such process has taken root and flourished. Individually, once we’ve lived through our formative youth, we accustom ourselves to our established character and sense of personal identity, and that character in turn helps shape our future experiences, if only by filtering our interpretations and selecting the circumstances we’ll encounter. Our character is our personal norm, even if, as Hume would say, there’s at best an inferred psychological necessity in our character-driven choices. We could act out of character, but we generally prefer not to because the norm we call our “self” comforts us. That self is our inner home.
Social norms are established by similar conformities or acts of settling for the comfort of an empowering position. Even enslaved persons might take reassurance from an unjust social order since our conservative instinct compels us to prefer a social order to chaos. The master dominates the slave, but by participating in the social fiction that some classes ought to rule over others, the slave helps prevent an outbreak of nature’s wildness.
In the most extreme case, this comfort in the fulfilment of expectations might mitigate even the tortures in Hell since the dismal patterns that would play out there would at least be patterns that testify to the triumph of a moral order. Even those who would be on the losing side of that triumph could participate vicariously in knowing that some order endures at their expense.
A famous scene from the film The Dark Knight (2008) spells out this implicit reverence for routines. The Joker sits in a hospital room with Harvey Dent and says,
I just did what I do best. I took your little plan, and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drums of gas and a couple of bullets, hmm? You know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I told the press that, like, a gangbanger would get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics. Because it’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everybody loses their minds!
Even an evil plan is better than no plan. Indeed, the horror that drives modern progress is that nature proceeds according to no plan. Still, nature orders itself, and we’ll take order any way we can get it, whether from an intelligent design or monstrous evolution.
The kings and queens of routine, as it were, are those who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder. This disorder shows that even meaningless or absurd routines are reassuring because of their familiarity that counteracts alienation.
True, routine can become a burden, as in the paranoid fear that the front door isn’t locked, or that the fridge isn’t fully closed. Even as the person with obsessive-compulsive disorder meticulously checks and rechecks those doors dozens of times in a row, so that rationally there’s no excuse for the fear, the paranoid thought pops up again: “Are you sure you can trust your eyes? Or what if in sealing the door, you accidentally set it slightly ajar, as your hand left the handle?” This improbable fear triggers another round of checking in a downward spiral that must be ended by a leap of faith, the chanting of some mantra, or a blessed distraction.
OCD, then, is an acute form of the more commonplace way in which we preoccupy ourselves with routines and inductive expectations. Underlying all the order and normality we take for granted, there’s quantum wildness and nature’s general headlessness or blind, mindless creativity. Taking comfort in that source of order would amount to identifying with something alien to us, which would entail our annihilation. If you and something wholly other than you are really one, you’re nothing.
Like the person with OCD, we skate along the surface of our norms, trusting in them without looking the gift horse in the mouth, or pondering the implications of a natural order. Normality is indeed an illusion in that the comfort we find in the persistence of order is precarious and vulnerable to being doubted away. Our subjective expectations of order may cancel out, but nature’s foundational wildness likewise conflicts with our quasi-religious relief when we find that monstrous forces and elements happen to outdo themselves with vast creativity.
I collect my Medium writings in paperback and eBook forms, and I put them up on Amazon. Check them out if you’d like to have them handy and to support my writing. Some recent ones are The Faltering Uplift of Intrepid Apes, Mirages in a Cosmic Wasteland, Our Oddity in Deep Time, Aristocrats in the Wild, and Questing for Epiphanies in a Haunted House, each of which is over 500 pages and is filled with my articles on philosophy, religion, or politics.