On Feeling Normal

I feel kind of normal right now. I’m sitting in my living room, drinking tea, a book of Alice Munro stories face down on the table. Traffic buzzes by. The dog is snoring.

This is an average day, and I expect most days to be something like it. There is a certain feeling that goes along with this expectation, and this feeling persists, strange to say, even when I read the news.

Of course this feeling is a luxury. You don’t need to tell me that.

But is it a dangerous luxury?

When Donald Trump was elected the left declared war on the feeling of normalcy, and many establishment figures joined in. A quick Google search turns up the phrase “This Is Not Normal” (or, more emphatically, “This. Is. Not. Normal”), describing Trump, from:

• Talking Points Memo
• The Huffington Post
• Jezebel
• Salon
• Mother Jones
• John Oliver
• Jimmy Fallon
• Stephen Colbert
• Dan Rather
• Elizabeth Warren
• Charles Blow

Searching for “Trump normalization” yields dozens more articles and blog posts, most warning against normalizing him, a few #slatepitch style articles arguing that maybe the fear of normalizing him is the real danger, and a couple of smug/stupid right-wing pieces about how Trump is somehow progressives’ comeuppance for their own earlier assaults on social norms. (A real National Review headline: “Donald Trump Normalization: Progressives Started It.”)

Much of this conversation, of course, is not explicitly about the feeling of normalcy, but rather about what sorts of historical precedents Trump is and isn’t violating. But, in my corner of the Internet at least, it shades into discussions about complacency. If you think “our institutions will save us,” you’re feeling too complacent. Your blithe optimism gives cover to the enemy. It tricks people into letting down their guard. It’s impossible, at a moment like this, to neatly separate questions of what’s happening or what should be done from questions of how one should or shouldn’t feel.

And the antidote to the dangerous feeling of normalcy, one hears, is a healthy fear. If you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention. Fear will wake you up.

Against Normalcy

Thus, fear is your civic duty. This is the argument of Aleksandar Hemon’s widely shared essay “Stop Making Sense, Or How to Write in the Age of Trump.” Hemon, who is from Bosnia, recalls how, in the leadup to the siege of Sarajevo, his conscious mind, with its need to create stability, repressed his feelings of fear until it was too late. “The pre-war mind was still busy convincing itself that war is, must be, avoidable,” he writes, “because it simply didn’t make sense — who would want war?” Of course this was a terrible mistake, and now Hemon shakes his head sadly as Obama, the day of the election, promises that “no matter what happens, the sun will rise tomorrow.” Hemon warns us to distrust the sense of normalcy, the feeling that some kinds of political rupture are too radical to be seriously considered. Instead, we need to listen to our gut feelings, which, through various literal intestinal manifestations, let us know when our efforts to be reasonable shade into rationalization. “The body keeps the score,” he says. “There is a certain kind of abdominal pain felt only when a catastrophe appears at the door of the world you know and proceeds to bang on it. The sensation could be likened to a steel ball grinding your intestines.”

Unfortunately, Hemon argues, “one of the roles literature often serves in a bourgeois culture is to make a case for this life as endless and universal, as making perfect, if pleasingly complicated, sense, as containing all that is required for the ever comforting processes of our understanding ourselves. Literature becomes ontological propaganda, a machinery for making reality appear unalterable. The vast majority of Anglo-American literary production serves that purpose, confirming what is already agreed upon as knowable.” To combat this realism of complacency, he calls for “a literature that craves the conflict and owns the destruction, a split-mind literature that features fear and handles shock, that keeps self-evident ‘reality’ safely within the quotation marks.” The pleasures of realist fiction, the sense of recognition we get that, yes, these are just the sorts of things that would happen, that is just what such a person would wear, would say, would do, become deeply suspect. “Never should we assume,” writes Hemon, “that America cannot be a fascist state, or that the nice-guy neighbor will not be a murderer because he gives out candy at Halloween.”

Against Fear

This is a powerful argument. But there are also powerful arguments that point the other way, that hold that fear is not our friend. These don’t seem to get as much social media traction, though, perhaps because so many of us on the left feel chastened by our misguided optimism about Clinton’s prospects, and don’t want to err on the side of optimism twice in a row.

The loudest voice against fear belongs to Corey Robin, a political scientist who has been arguing in innumerable articles and blog posts, all expanding on an academic book, that our civic duty is to feel less afraid. “Political fear,” Robin argues, does not arise from the subconscious as a corrective against our misguided thinking. It lives not in the private viscera but in political institutions and social habits.

Powerful political actors, he explains, deliberately cultivate fear, both fear OF the government and fear FOR the government, fear of its ability to hurt you and fear of its being too weak to protect you. Studying the Hollywood blacklist affair, he concludes that it’s the strategic combination of these fears, more than either of them in isolation, that compelled people to betray their friends to House Un-American Activities Committee.

At the same time, Robin observes, fear is buttressed by the “bottom-up” forces of neighborly association. “Our everyday connections can echo or amplify our inner counsels of fear,” he writes, and quotes the words of Mino Akhtar, a Pakistani American whose Muslim friends warned him to stop speaking out against the Bush administration: “They tell me to be careful, that I’m taking risks. They say that if my face and name keep coming up in public I won’t get any more consulting jobs. I think about that sometimes. You work hard to establish yourself, you have the good job, big home, these mortgage payments; it’s scary to think you can lose it all.” Akhtar was less fearful before he turned to his friends. Hobbes, Robin reminds us, holds that people never bow to their rulers simply because they are powerful; rather, their submission is always conditioned by what their “teachers and preachers” have to say. Nowadays we are all teachers and preachers to each other, and our echo chambers can amplify fears that have no “natural” right to exist.

Robin’s polemical point is that fear is not a privileged source of knowledge, speaking from the wisdom of the body or the subconscious. It is, rather, something that people inflict on each other for their own conscious, calculating reasons. And fear, Robin insists, is never a purely rational reaction to events; it always also implicates one’s moral values. Describing a man who gave names to HUAC because he feared that his family would suffer if he were unable to provide for them, Robin notes that “this fear entailed a complex moral judgment — that Huggins had a duty, trumping all others, to his family, that that duty was primarily financial, and that it was he who was responsible for their economic well-being. Huggins did not consider that his wife could have worked. Nor did he believe that he might have a duty to teach his children the virtue of making personal sacrifices for freedom or of not informing on former friends and comrades.” Which do you fear more: that your kids will have to skip meals, or that they will grow up to be morally weak? Fear itself contains no truth — it all depends on what you fear.

A Summary of the Debate, Such as It Is

Hemon and Robin are clearly talking about very different aspects of fear. Hemon is interested in fear as a kind of alertness, as something that wakes you up. Robin is interested in fear as a kind of paralysis, as something that can shut you down. For Hemon, not to fear is the dumb herd reaction, and fear is what sets your personal consciousness free. For Robin, both fear and the absence of fear are socially conditioned feelings, and the goal is not to break free from the herd but to turn our social spheres into support networks that make us less, not more, afraid to act. So, in some sense, there might be no real argument between them. They might both agree that Hemon’s kind of fear is good and Robin’s is bad, and that the important thing is to feel the right kind of fear.

But the extent to which they are actually at odds comes out in their attitudes toward fear’s opposite, the sense of normalcy. Where Hemon wants us to stop assuming that tomorrow will resemble yesterday, Robin often points out that, far from being unprecedented, almost everything Trump does has direct parallels in American history. By doing this, he hopes to stave off panic.

So who is right? Should we more deeply feel the parallels or the ruptures in history? Is our duty to embrace fear or to resist it? And how are we to decide that? The answers will depend not just on how we read the political winds, but on what we think emotions are, and are for. What is a feeling, anyhow?

What Are Feelings For?

1.

Sometimes emotions are diagnoses, or predictions. When we “have a bad feeling about this,” we mean that our emotion is giving us some kind of information that our conscious mind doesn’t know how to properly organize. The interesting thing about these sorts of emotions is that, because they’re predictions, they can be right or wrong. This is Hemon’s turf: the feeling of normalcy is, essentially, a prediction of normalcy, and the feeling of fear is a prediction of disaster. One of these predictions will be right, the other wrong.

2.

But sometimes, instead of making a claim about what will happen, emotions make things happen. J.L. Austin famously describes “performative utterances,” statements like “I now pronounce you man and wife,” which, rather than describing the world, change it. Stanley Cavell proposes another kind of speech, “passionate utterances,” of which he writes: “A performative utterance is an offer of participation in the order of law. And perhaps we can say: A passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire.” Strong expressions of fear, or love, or outrage, or contempt rearrange our interpersonal force fields. They grab you by the collar, and demand a response. If you are silent, your silence is no longer neutral; they make your silence mean something new. They’re a-callin’ you out. If there is a “right” thing to feel in this situation, we are dealing with something more like moral reasoning than instrumental reasoning, asking not “what will work?” but “where are the lines that I cannot cross?” Robin understands this dimension of emotion better than Hemon, the way that fear can rearrange not just our perception of reality, but our whole moral landscape.

3.

Then there is emotional labor, which is something else. Neither a sophisticated kind of prediction nor a dramatic assertion of where one stands, emotional labor typically has to do with the simple bookkeeping of positive and negative feelings. Most commonly, emotional labor just means helping people feel better somehow. If they are despairing, you emote hope; if they’re afraid, you emote courage; if they’re tired, you emote energy. Having the “right” feeling in the context of emotional labor is more like doing your chores than making the right decision. Again, Robin seems to get this better than Hemon, the way that the regular performance of an emotion can gradually lift or sink people’s spirits.

4.

And then, let’s be honest, sometimes an emotion is just who you are. Maybe you’re just a fearful person. We can use the language of mental illness here, or just call it temperament, but some people are chronically sad, or anxious, or stoical. Everybody has a certain range of emotions that are within easy reach for them, and others that aren’t. If fear is the “right” response to a situation (whatever that might mean), and you just don’t really “do” fear, then what are you to do? Neither Hemon nor Robin reckons with this issue. I would say, in such a case, the question isn’t how you should feel, but how you can put the feelings you’re stuck with to good use. And you should remember, if you should take it upon yourself to uphold some emotion as the one necessary response to events, that some people will just be constitutionally unequipped to feel it.

Fear Again

So, OK, there are many different ways to conceive of feelings. What are we to feel, then, when what seems right on one conception seems wrong on another? Let’s suppose, for example, that Hemon is right that fear is the correct diagnostic emotion, that it makes the right predictions about the future. But suppose that fear also turns out not to be the emotion we need when it comes to passionate utterance or emotional labor. How are we to handle this? Do we alternate between periods of fear and periods without it? Do we cultivate hybrid emotions, say, determined fear or loving fear? We do both, I think. What we shouldn’t do is to insist that a certain particular kind of fear is exactly what everyone needs to be feeling. I’m reminded of this passage from “The Book of the Grotesque,” the frame story in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio:

“There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful.

And then the people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.”

Even if fear is called for, let’s not be grotesque about it.

What Good Is It to Feel Normal?

Now what about the feeling of normalcy? My own temperament strongly inclines to this feeling. The comfort of the daily routine, the sense of ritual about it, the relationships that form when you see the same people in more or less the same situation over and over again, building up an everyday world. The potential political liabilities of this feeling are plain as day. It can blinker you, make you complacent. But, I think, I am destined to feel it regardless.

So is there anything useful about the feeling of normalcy at a time like this? Consider this passage, another from Stanley Cavell, about a sea voyage in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit:

“When Dickens depicts Mark Tapley’s seasickness, he depicts him as possessing just that sea of experiences possessed by everyone around him, but without inflecting himself toward it as the others do, e.g., without their sea-moans and their wild languors of misery; instead, he moves about the ship, as it were in the valleys between swells of nausea, attending to the others. This man does not even judge the others wanting in not being able to inflect themselves his way. To me this seems an image of freedom.”

The boat is tossed wildly on the sea — say that’s us, our lives, tossed about by history. Our hero does not ignore or minimize this tossing, and it makes him as sick as it does everybody else. But he perseveres. For Cavell, the striking thing here is Tapley’s care for others despite his own suffering. But let’s look at it slightly differently, and say that the striking thing is that he is just going about his normal business. He keeps on brushing his teeth, making small talk with the other passengers (between retching), and so on. That is how the feeling of normalcy can be. It can persist in the most extraordinary situations, filling in the spaces between exigencies. This is not a kind of complacency.

But why bother? What good is the feeling of normalcy? The easiest answer is that it’s a form of self-care: if it gives me energy to carry on my work, and doesn’t hurt anyone else, then what’s the problem?

But it’s more than that. The everyday, the world of normalcy, is where life gets its thickness, its texture. William James writes that he is “with the invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, stealing in through the crannies of the world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water, and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give them time.” The everyday is the soil in which these soft rootlets grow, this fragile tissue of interpersonal connectedness, as indescribable and ungovernable as the subconscious. Ralph Ellison speaks of the ideal democrat as one who can hear every “hemi-semi-demi-quaver” in the speech, the gestures, the glances of his fellows. Sometimes, as Hemon says, fear can heighten our senses, and perhaps it can let us hear these quaverings that might otherwise escape us. But, rather than a heightening of the senses, think of the everyday as a room that is quiet enough for such notes to be heard, even by the sensorily un-gifted, which would be drowned in the din of dramatic action.

If there are at least four different dimensions of emotion — and of course there are many more — then political feeling itself is destined to be a matter of hemi-semi-demi-quavers. We will never feel a simple fear. One value of the feeling of normalcy is that it creates the quiet mental space in which to get in touch with our own quavering emotional responses, and those of others — a space that the urgency of fear, for all its virtues, seems to foreclose.