“That world is gone. There are no shared norms.”
So claims Mary Harrington in the piece I worked from in the last post, and there is no doubt, she is correct. From whence come norms? What happened to the ones we had? Where did they go? Can we get norms back? What are the costs of living in a norm-less world? Can we even have a world absent of norms? What is a norm in the first place?
Norms are models, patterns, and standards. Not to be too cute, but they are normal, as in typical and everyday. But even “typical” evokes type or typos: a model for action or emulation. Norms are those exemplars from which we model our own behavior. They “rule” us, both in our ability to create and to judge. Rulers rule.
My first claim is that norms are inevitable.
Despite the cry of the various “alt” crowds, we have norms, we need norms, we cannot escape norms. We are living through an extended period in which norms are not only questioned and undermined, but that norms are somehow malignant or even “fascistic.” All the talk of “dismantling and disrupting systems and structures” is in essence norm-bashing. The very idea of norms is considered by a majority of our cultural manufacturing class as colonialist and patriarchal and evil. These norms are some nasty “legacy code” that needs to be rooted out and forgotten, banished into the void of forgetting. “If we are to make progress,” the thought runs, “we must free ourselves from the shackles of outmoded norms.” Norms are the enemy.
My second claim is that norms are necessary.
In our attempts to transcend or supersede these alleged fascistic vestiges of a bygone era, we render ourselves incapable of genuine living. We are unable to flourish nor are we able to create or pass on. We are unable to complete the puzzle. Without norms we cannot act. Or, to put it another way, norms are culture, and culture is an inheritance.
There has been a great breakdown in transmission. Instead of passing on an inheritance we have settled for impotent rebellion. That which must be “given” has not been granted. To be technical, we have taken for granted that which has been withheld. The gift has been both withheld and refused. This is a perilous situation. Absent transmission, we are unable to transition to maturity in all senses of that word.
In our current time, we are transitioning. We are always transitioning. Technically. You can only transition from something if you know where you are, and you can only transition to something if you have some sense of where you are hoping to arrive. Without norms—standards—we do not have a realizable sense or picture of what we are aiming for.
We have lost faith in our norms, and not merely our particular norms, but the very concept of norms itself. For my entire life it has been de rigueur to mic-drop with the withering rhetorical flourish: “what IS normal, anyway, huh?”
It is not a question.
It is a dogmatic statement.
It is shallow.
Stupid.
But here we are.
Norms have received a bad rap. Even from my own childhood, way back in the 70’s and 80’s, the idea of normal was held with a certain degree of contempt. How many antagonists in our movies were stuff-shirt losers on power trips, intent on busting up folks who want to be true or real or fun?
“Eeeed Rooney.”
The gift of Boomer-gen is the idea that all adults are “squares.” Conventions chafe our authenticity; the hyper-conformism of the adult world keeps one from living out their “secret sacred self.”
The great scene in the archetypal film The Graduate captures the banality of “normal.”
PLASTICS. Really. Watch the clip.
In 1967 everyone got it. The adult world of business and enterprise was absurd, self-important, and totally blind to its own meaninglessness. And fair enough.
Ben Braddock has just graduated from college and he has no idea what to do with himself. All he knows is that he feels lied to. Abandoned by those who should have taken care of him, preyed upon by those who should have cared. The artificial world of college artificially prepared him for an even more absurd and artificial world of adults.
Mr. McGuire takes him aside and lets him in on the secret.
Plastics.
But, there’s a double joke in all this. Plastics are just that: plastic. Material infinitely malleable and formless, perfectly manipulable and seemingly infinite. Shaped when heated; hardened when cooled. Created from polymers in a lab. There is no essence; only accident. No telos; only happenstance. Ex nihilo ad nihilo.
Dustin Hoffman’s Ben has graduated from nothing; he has graduated to nothing. He is as plastic—shapeable and fake—as the adults who populate his world.
Plastic has become synonymous with synthetic, or lab-generated, and sometimes even ominously inauthentic. Mr. McGuire’s pitch invokes “the future,” and Ben has been invited to play the role of junior master of the universe. Ben’s deadpan question and look really captures it all. I do not wish here to stan for the world Mr. McGuire has made. Indeed, the world constructed by our mid-century forefathers has been disastrous, precisely in the offloading of costs to “the future” he so ardently wishes Ben to be a part of. They have transmitted nothing of the deeper meanings; only mindless industry—getting and spending.
And Mrs. Robinson is as bad. Her nihilistic dabbling’s in sexual adventurism point to the flip-side of the dark void of meaninglessness. Mr. McGuire’s world is plastic; Mrs. Robinson’s is bleak, furtive and transgressive pleasure. These are two adults who "misunderstood the assignment.” What inheritance are they passing on to the next generation?
The normal social transitions of schooling and marriage are massively disrupted. The closing scene functions as a tragic-comic masque: the wedding is so normal: banal organ accompanying a banal rite for banal reasons. Ben disrupts, chaos ensues: ripped clothing, angry adults, swinging crucifixes, and clueless bus riders. Ben and Elaine ride off into the Sound of Silence. Hauntingly perfect, and the message is clear: norms are for suckers and scolds, enforced by hypocritical adults.
In other words, the adults have lost the thread. Instead of the important business of manufacturing meaning, they indulge in the manufacture of distraction. And we are their children.
We are heirs to the world they created. No wonder we are miserable. We do not know what we are for, so we do not know how to act. We have little access to meaningful action in the world because norms have both lost their power and the norms are no longer enforced.
Jordan Peterson got in a boatload of trouble a few years back because of his use of the standard social-science phrase “enforced monogamy.” What he meant versus how he was taken to mean will be the meat of another post. But in order to have a fully functioning community we need norms. Additionally, these norms must be both goals and governors.
That is to say, our norms must give us something to aim for and our norms must be somehow incentivize right behavior. Normal behavior. We must be “normed.”
But Ben’s dissatisfaction with these particular fathers, as right as it seems in this context, has been scaled out from the particular to the universal. Instead of critiquing THESE fathers and their world of plastic busy-ness, we have now done away with their necessary function. We are alienated from them. We are embarrassed by them, yet still tragically trapped by them.
We cannot live in a world without fathers, for without fathers we have no world, or to be more precise, no cosmos. Our fathers, ideally, connect us to an inherited world which we are brought into, in a specific time and a specific place. Right fathers, normal fathers, connect us to something larger and older. We must be bequeathed the horizontal and vertical axes—an inheritance that gathers past and future, but immanent and transcendent. And we must accept the gift.
Ben’s dissatisfaction is understandable and even commendable. But there is more to it all than mere critique. His “aw screw it” at the end of the movie is as puerile and meaningless as Mr. McGuire’s claim that the future is plastics.
In a world that has abandoned norms and abandoned the wisdom that should properly inform norms, what options do we have? This is the brutal truth latent in Mary’s claim above. The world is gone and we have no norms.
What solution do we have to this crisis? For that, we must return to Chaucer’s Knight.
[editor’s note: part 2 and 3 of the Knight Builds the World forthcoming]
To add to your point about father's norming us, it brings to mind that Latin word for "father," which is "pater," serves as the base for our English word "pattern." A father serves as the pattern for how his children should live their lives. They serve as transmitters of tradition by their example.
And, in healthy societies, there are national fathers who do the same on a large scale. For instance, Abraham served as the pattern for the faithful follower of the LORD in Ancient Isreal, Aneaus served as the ideal Roman citizen to the Anceint Romans, etc. These cultures I mentioned lasted for centuries for as long as they followed the patterns laid by their fathers. But, it's interesting to notice that the Isrealites are taken into captivity by the Babylonians when they neglected following "the faith of their fathers" and that the Roman Empire in the West crumbled when the roles of Roman citizenship were disregarded.
Obviously, I think America, denigrating our fathers, both modern day and ancient, is in a very precarious position. That's my two cents on the matter, anyway.
This is good, Mr. Zelden. I appreciate that you wrestle with real things, rather than exclusively propagate a party line. I guess I shouldn’t suppose you are wrestling; maybe you are just diagnosing and positing alternatives. From what I gather, you are a teacher, formally so, not just by nature only. I intuit a very good one at that. (I’ve wondered before just what in the hell the chalkboard on your Twitter header is depicting.) I often enjoy your tweets, TGE (though I’m rather ambivalent about Dreher), and some of your Substack posts that you share. I’ve not yet subscribed, but may at some point bc the content deserves that respect.
Your post. Very dialectical. There is real stretch, real tension between the “plastic” life Ben is resisting, ultimately rebelling against, and what the pattern is or should be. In some ways, Ben is entirely right to see the fraudulent life style. But…even these “authority” figures speak a small measure of truth, though banal and with misplayed trust in cultural consumerism. It’s redolent of the conversations between Holden and Mr. Spencer and Holden and Mr. Antolini. Of course, Holden is waaay more spiritually “awake” or sensitive than Ben. This scene (below) from TG shows the opposite perspective of the chaos Ben embraces (understandable in some ways) and the “order” being reasonably proposed. I see both sides.
https://youtu.be/b6G4bPNBrJ0
Btw, a quick rec and share, if I may: a genuinely beautiful and fave movie of mine that highlights much of the same you lament here, but offers an opposing “old-school” model or prescription (w/o being nutty rad-trad). You may enjoy it. It was the first film Gibson directed.
https://youtu.be/0kLAuJIm79o