Normal People

“I do, often, wish I was like... more normal, you know?” (BH, Year 9)

The Pantheon, Rome (architectural cross-section)

Normal. What does it even mean? And why does it mean that? There’s quite a history to the word, it turns out. But untangling the history of the word ‘normal’ has helped me to better understand the history of subjugation that ‘abnormal’ or neurodiverse people have faced for centuries. And it could help us figure out what we should do next.

When Anaximander of Miletus travelled from Greece to Sparta two and a half thousand years ago he brought with him an idea. If you place a rod, he said, perpendicular to the base of an upright hemisphere, then when the sun was out the shadow cast by the rod would tell you how far through the day you were. The rod was known as a gnōmōn, with the prefix gno-: to know; the shaft of the sundial was the part that knew the time of day.

Later, when Roman carpenters were describing the set square used to build their grand edifices (many of which still stand today), they borrowed the word gnomon, latinised it, and thus the norma, or carpenter’s square, was coined. It echoed the perpendicular lines of the gnomon but the meaning expanded to include the principle of consistent measurement. Thus the Pantheon, the colosseum, indeed so much at the heart of the Roman empire, was built on a combination of geometric precision, standardised angles and the norma.

A bronze norma (carpenter’s square) in the museum of Roman Archeology, Canterbury

I get distracted by etymology. Watching words journey through time and place, picking up and shedding meanings as they go. Meanings which themselves are laden with histories of shifting power and control, histories which get jumbled up inside the words, like mismatched cargo tossed chaotically onto a moving ship. I find it fascinating charting the passage of words as they acquire this baggage, die out, evolve, re-emerge, always revealing something new about the waters through which they have traveled and, in turn, about who we are.

I found myself going down lots of etymological rabbit holes the other day while delivering an INSET on learning disabilities and human rights. Did you know, for instance, that ‘idiot’ comes from idios (adj): own, private; hence 'idiosyncratic' - a set of constituents peculiar to a specific individual. The first 'School for Idiots' opened in Paris in 1837. Edmund Burke’s paper of 1912 describes idiots as being just below imbeciles in intelligence - unfortunate souls who have to walk without (in-) a supporting staff (+ baculum). Imbeciles were themselves below morons in the pecking order (from the Greek moros (adj): foolish, one whose nervous disposition has rendered them ‘dull’ or ‘sluggish’).

But of all the terms, it struck me, there’s one term that perhaps needs dismantling more than any. The term against which all these ‘othering’ terms are measured.

L’École Normale opened in Paris in 1794 (45 years prior to the opening of the school for idiots). The decree establishing the school stated that "there will be established in Paris a ‘Normal School’ where, from all the parts of the Republic, citizens shall be called upon to learn, from the best professors in all the disciplines, the art of teaching." With l’École Normale the authorities wanted to lay out a precise, standardised, homogenous set of teaching principles across the country. So they borrowed the word ‘normal’ to mean “that which serves as a model”. The right angles of the Roman Empire, the square-cut marble of the Pantheon, the ‘knowledge’ of the sundial’s rod, all were woven into the fabric used to create the new Republic.

In Britain it was a team of doctors that borrowed the word when, in the 1840s, they needed a term to describe organs that worked how they were supposed to work. Like the French, they too chose to pull the word ‘normal’ out of the geometry books and into common usage. Normal were the organs that worked in the correct manner. But normal was never defined, it was simply aligned with the expectations borne out of the sum of past experiences. As medics, their attentions were focused far more on the pathology of what was ab-normal, those organs which deviated away from the norm. Crucially, as medics they had to invent a fictional line between what was 'normal' (to be left alone) and what was 'abnormal' (that which was to be diagnosed and treated).

"the job of a therapeutic medical science was to do all that it could to reduce the gap between the actual and the normal/ideal.” (Adolphe Quetelet)

At the same time in Belgium Adolphe Quetelet was seeking to extend his expertise in statistical sciences into the realm of sociology. He gathered vast amounts of data on features of individuals within a population - height, weight, intelligence - to find an ‘average’ or ‘normal man’ that could then serve as a model for humanity. Looking back, we see the gaping holes in his methodology. Children, women, black people were all routinely left out of his data sets and thus suddenly found themselves outside of the ‘normal’ category. Blind to these failings (his scientific peers were, after all, also white men), Quetelet soon set the word normal on a new and more sinister path.

"If the average man were perfectly established, one could consider him as the type of beauty. . . . everything that was furthest from resembling his proportions or his manner of being would constitute deformities or illnesses" (Quetelet)

 

Later in the 19th Century, Francis Galton was developing the normal distribution curve, representing graphically how the most commonly occurring properties would cluster around a central 'norm'. He was building on the work of Quetelet, but Galton was also closely following the work of his cousin Charles Darwin, and reading people like Thomas Malthus. It was Galton who would eventually become the first pioneer of eugenics, a term he himself coined (eu-: beautiful + genus: birth).

Galton's thinking was this: Taking into account Darwin’s new theories, the traits of men that clustered around the centre, the most normal, must be the ones that have evolved as the 'ideal'. If the average height of man (and again it was only men they bothered studying) was, say, 5”9, then this must also be, according to the laws of natural selection, the ideal height for man. If it was better for men to be 7", then the very tall men would have prospered, and the average height would go up. The fact that it didn't suggests there must be a cost to being this tall. If after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution the average height of man was 5"9, we can conclude that it must be less desirable to be either shorter or taller than this. Thus the terms normal and ideal became conflated. Eugenics came about because, when looked at from the perspective of 'improving' society, if those individuals too far away from the norm could be discouraged and/or prevented from procreating then it would surely, Galton argued, result in the gradual but inevitable betterment of the human race.

Statistical characteristics of a normal distribution

It wasn’t long before this casual dismissal of those who deviated from the norm was to have devastating real world consequences. Galton’s theory of eugenics was picked up first in California, where tens of thousands of people considered to be ‘feeble-minded’, statistical outliers in intellectual functioning, were forcibly sterilised between 1909 and 1981 (yes, 1981), under the auspices of the “human betterment foundation”.

And it was picked up by doctors and scientists working in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Under the Aktion T4 programme, teams of physicians took part in a program of mass murder through involuntary euthenasia (eu: beautiful + thanos: death), killing up to 300,000 people whose abnormalities rendered them ‘Lebensunwertes Leben’, or ‘behindern’.

Lebensunwertes Leben: literally 'life unworthy of life'

Behindern: handicapped, from be+ hinder, of a hindrance

Pinned to a board at the Kansas Free Fair, 1929

So why do I think this long-winded journey is worth taking? Why now?

We like to draw a line between us and the past, but we do so at our peril. Every bit of cargo these words pick up and drop-off, leave behind a ghostly imprint that persists into our present-day consciousness.

In preparing a piece on neurodiversity for the school newsletter, I asked some of my more neurodiverse students what it meant to them. I had run a few group sessions with them on neurodiversity so they understood the term. Yet still, four out of six of them ended up articulating their desire to be more normal. And why wouldn’t they? For centuries we have cemented the idea of the primacy of the normal. The notion that, socially at least, you should aspire to be as close as possible to the centre of the bell curve. To act, dress, speak in a way that conforms to what is recognised as suitable by the largest number of people.

My instinct was to balk at their aspirations of normality. In my neurotypical circles normality is more derogatory than ‘weirdness’. But of course it is. Deviating from normality is a privilege afforded to those with secure bases on which they can fall if it goes wrong. Those who do not feel this security derive a sense of safety instead from being close to the centre, where the majority of people are. Given the way that ‘normal’ has been elevated, and given what has happened historically to the ‘abnormal’, this shouldn’t be surprising.

We still had ESN (Educationally Subnormal) schools well into the 1970s, the ugly term coming from a 1944 Education Act which sought to place a duty on local education authorities to keep a register of all educationally subnormal children in their area and provide for them the “appropriate form of special educational treatment.” The Act itself was a largely progressive one, yet this term ‘subnormal’, with its oppressive, belittling prefix has probably done more to damage the status of those with learning differences than any of the slurs routinely thrown their way.

We lost the term educationally subnormal, along with a lot of other unhelpful terms, with the Warnock report in 1978 which finally began to steer the educational establishment away from the medical model and towards a social model of understanding difference. Words evolve, but old meanings linger.

I’m writing this because it feels like a lot of my students are still suffering because they think they should be more normal. I’m writing because as a SENCO I’m worried about what I might be missing, in their exhausting attempts to cover up the differences that could warrant the attention they are so keen to avoid. Autism in girls, for instance, is notoriously under-diagnosed, such is the skill with which girls are able to mask their underlying differences, often at huge cost to their mental health. What if the notion of normal hadn’t come to be so revered? I know I’ve had kids who have passed through my school having missed out on an autism diagnosis, and when this happens they miss out on all sorts of support and interventions. But to my mind one of the most important things they miss out on is the lesson we try always to teach them, every day they are here. That being different is ok. That being different can be great. That they don’t have to try and be normal.

What I admire about the neurodiversity movement is its willingness to take down the supremacy of the ‘normal’. Its goal is not to replace the language of disability but to deconstruct the entire concept. It is not simply offering a new term for learning difficulties, it is instead trying to uproot the very structures that have given rise to these terms for millenia. Taking those ancient buildings apart, line by line, brick by brick.

And it is the right time for this. Because we are moving away from the primacy of ancient, geometric structures, and towards the fluidity of the abstract, the intangible. The new empire is built on flows of data not on stone squares. And in this new world conformity to fixed right angles won't be the most desirable trait. In this new world it is precisely a deviation from the ‘normal’ that is often what is most needed. Those who are able to think outside of the normal boxes will be those who emerge with the innovative ideas we so desperately need.

And we need to be vigilant against those all around us, right now, who are threatening the progress that has been made. Vigilant against presidents who openly mock disabled reporters. Against salesmen advertising ‘cures’ for autism. We need to be vigilant against those who, as of today, have raised $150,000 on Kickstarter so they can develop a collar for children with Autism or ADHD that beeps when they lose focus. We need to speak out against EHCP targets that seem to have been set by neurotypical people with a view only to making the child appear more ‘normal’.

Because normal doesn’t exist. I suppose that’s what I wanted to say to the girl who came out with the quote that opened this piece. Normal is an artificial construct that emerged 200 years ago from the minds of men such as Quetelet and Galton, who decided to draw lines around people so that they could know who was inside and who was out, who was them and who was us. Men who stole a word that was only ever meant for stone, and who ultimately sought to sculpt populations in their own image.