The destruction of America’s political norms.” “Don’t normalize that.” “This just isn’t normal!” “Why can’t you simply be normal?”
The last twenty years have seen a rising attention to normalcy in American public life. Google Trends shows a gradual upward slope—a quadrupling, in truth—in online interest in “normal” between 2004 and 2024.
But anecdotally, I’d say this acceleration has felt more intense since around 2015. Not coincidentally, that was the yr former president Donald Trump first got here to dominate national politics, and it’s also the yr the Supreme Court decided Obergefell v. Hodges, which shifted public discourse on sexuality and gender away from gay marriage and toward recent frontiers, especially on gender identity.
Normalcy has long had some moral valence. Its etymology has to do with the rightness of angles in carpentry, and from there, it’s not a protracted verbal journey to different kinds of rightness: conformity with rules, not only the ruler, and particularly with ethical rules.
Lately it looks as if that moral shade is thickening. In a secularized, fragmented society, we’re running perilously short on widely accepted norms. A panic is rising. No one wants anomie, a norm less culture, but how do you set effective norms if there’s no consensus on what’s normal? On what basis do you mourn or herald the death of old norms or the rise of recent ones? By what rule can we judge and instruct if we’re losing agreed-upon rules?
A captivating case study of this quandary popped up in a recent Atlantic essay from scholar Tyler Austin Harper. Titled “Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad,” its first three-quarters are a critical tour de force.
Harper’s primary interest just isn’t the titular polyamory trend nor even the recently buzzy book—More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage—which he reviews within the piece. Both are subsidiary to a bigger phenomenon that Harper calls “therapeutic libertarianism”: “the assumption that self-improvement is the last word goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints—whether imposed by states, faith systems, or other people—should impede each of us from achieving personal growth.”
Harper explicitly builds this characterization on philosopher Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. There, Taylor contends that our culture is increasingly organized around a notion of “‘authenticity,’ or expressive individualism, by which persons are encouraged to seek out their very own way, discover their very own achievement, ‘do their very own thing.’”
Therapeutic libertarianism might be familiar to anyone who has read Alan Noble’s You Are Not Your Own or Tara Isabella Burton’s Self-Made—or just caught a glimpse of “Instagram face.” Harper even captures the sly way by which this promise of freedom to construct oneself from scratch tends to develop into a grinding obligation, especially once we’ve lost the energy (and physical beauty) of youth:
We are all our own start-ups. We must all adopt a pro-growth mindset for our personhood and deregulate our desires. We must all assess and reassess our own “achievement,” a type of psychological Gross Domestic Product, on a near-constant basis. And just like the GDP, our achievement should increase.
And he works in a category evaluation too, observing that bleeding-edge fads of therapeutic libertarianism, like polyamory, are inclined to trend first in “wealthy, elite” circles, where people have the time and resources to spare for “interminable self-improvement projects, navel-gazing, and sexual peccadilloes.”
All told, it’s the type of takedown that makes me—squeamish vegetarian though I’m—understand the hunter’s impulse to hold a stag’s head on the wall.
But then there’s the last quarter of the essay, where the category evaluation takes a special form. His problem isn’t an ethical one, Harper argues. Though himself “happily, monogamously married,” polyamory doesn’t strike him “as a matter of right or incorrect in any respect,” providing everyone involved is a consenting adult.
No, his problem is that it’s too expensive for poor people. This “brand of ‘free love’ requires the disposable income and time—to pay babysitters and pencil in their panoply of paramours—which can be foreclosed to the laboring masses,” Harper writes. Across the stag’s antlers, a banner drapes: Workers of the world, unite … so that you too may claim the dubious privilege of “searching for absolute freedom” and “find[ing] only abjection.”
This is a disjointed and disappointing end to an otherwise excellent essay. It’s also a striking example of the inadequacy of something like class evaluation to fund effective, large-scale norms.
Class evaluation is a useful thing that usually sheds real light on political and social problems. There are many public conversations in America that it could possibly and does enhance. But the haves have X and the have-nots haven’t isn’t enough to make a decision the merits of X, to set a norm for or against it.
In this case, the evaluation is especially uncompelling because Harper has just spent a whole lot of words making polyamory and the therapeutic libertarian framework sound empty, exhausting, and hopeless. In fact, he makes all of it sound very very like a matter of right and incorrect (as indeed it’s). He makes it sound incorrect and degrading and definitely not an ailing we must always wish on the working class within the name of equity.
I reread the ending of this essay several times, sure I’d misunderstood it. And perhaps I did. Harper desires to set a norm against all this, having accurately observed that those caught on its horns are having a foul time. But, unpossessed of a widely acknowledged moral basis for that norm, he gropes around and comes up with: Well, it’s not fair that only the elite can self-inflict this narcissistic self-making and the strain it entails.
But of all of the troubles he lists, that class split will be the least. The class evaluation isn’t incorrect, nevertheless it’s not enough. It’s not enough to settle what needs to be normal within the sense of right and wrong, actually not at a society-wide scale, on this issue and most others of import. It’s not enough to maintain everyone from doing what is correct in their very own eyes (Judges 21:25), with all of the chaos and enmity that ensues. And the identical could also be said of other bases of judgment tied to comparatively area of interest political, cultural, or religious perspectives.
Even fairly broad visions for moral renewal, like David Brooks has outlined at The Atlantic and The New York Times, are inclined to fail on this count: There’s no reason individuals who don’t already share Brooks’s norms would buy into his proposals. Why surrender the crude form of Trumpism if you happen to don’t have already got some basis for believing cruelty is incorrect? Why embrace moral formation via manners classes and intergenerational service if you happen to don’t already imagine within the goodness of charity?
“Moral communities are fragile things, hard to construct and simple to destroy,” as social psychologist Jonathan Haidt wrote inThe Righteous Mind. Haidt recognized that declining institutional authority and religiosity result in precisely the anomie we now face. “If you reside in a spiritual community, you might be enmeshed in a set of norms, relationships, and institutions” that produce “shared moral matrices,” he explained. Without that moral organization, when all do as they please—well, have you ever read Judges 19–21? Or Reddit?
Haidt, an atheist, doesn’t specify a preferred religious norm machine. He merely recognizes that humans have a “God-shaped hole” in our hearts, and “it must be filled by something—and if you happen to leave it empty, [people] don’t just feel an emptiness. A society that has no sense of the sacred is one by which you’ll have quite a lot of anomie, normlessness, loneliness, hopelessness.”
I am willing to specify. It’s no big reveal that I feel our norms needs to be grounded within the Christian faith, within the revelation that God looks like Jesus dying on the cross, defeating evil, and offering us life and hope, which, yes, comes with quite a lot of moral claims and commands (Col. 1:15–23, 2:9–15, 3:1–14).
But, without precluding the opportunity of some divine intervention—a recent Reformation, one other Great Awakening, the very Second Coming—I also don’t have any near-term expectation that Christianity will someway gain universal acceptance in American society, whether as a living faith or just as a reliable norm generator. Mundanely speaking, the trend lines on this are all exceedingly clear.
I recognize that I’m naysaying to class evaluation and other solutions to our anomie without offering a greater idea. Or moderately, I do have a greater idea—a light-weight to banish anomic darkness—but I do know why and the way our culture has grown wary of its gleam.
Bonnie Kristian is the editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today.
