Although the older conformism and the newer individualism are superficially opposites, there are deep continuities between them. They are united by a baseline demand for conformity to norms and also by a valorization of individuality, albeit that the explicit emphasis has shifted absolutely away from conformity towards individuality. Perhaps their most fundamental commonality is that they are both profoundly essentialist, but where the older conformism primarily enjoined people to conform to categorial essences, the newer individualism enjoins us each to conform to our own idiosyncratic individual essence. The earlier conformism involved different norms for people of different sexes and different classes, but enjoined certain norms, such as Christianity and heterosexuality, uniformly. A great shift then took place across the late twentieth century involving the explicit (but not ultimate) rejection of the ideas both that anyone should be treated differently to anyone else due to accidents of birth (which is to say that there cannot be any norm that treats some people as inherently abnormal), and that there is any norm that pertains uniformly to everyone. Every individual is now rather enjoined to express their individuality in whatever way seems appropriate to them, albeit within certain constitutive normative limits entailing respect for the individuality of others. The supposed abolition of conformism therefore established hedonistic individualism as our new meta-norm, because seeking individual self-satisfaction becomes the only possible goal.
Where once we were expected simply to obey the rules, we were then expected to conform to norms associated with our categorial natures, and now we are expected to discover our own nature and publicly confess and perform it. Where once we could rail against authority, then against conformity, we are now under an invisible conformity that consists precisely in demanding that we reject the vestiges of an older conformity in the name of our own self-satisfaction. This new conformity is profoundly difficult to reject because it is so hard to identify, particularly if, in rejecting it, one does not want simply to reassert the now-vestigial older forms.
Method
In what follows, I will flesh out the claims I have just outlined by examining the way that these new norms shape our lives today in a series of different areas, all of which are enormously contentious. These areas and the norms that govern them are closely interlinked, and I do not mean to imply, by treating them under different headings, that they are somehow so neatly divided in reality. Rather, this is principally a device for managing the material in the book.
I will aim here to be as objective as possible rather than being normative. I take it, following Foucault, that a critical understanding of norms cannot proceed by cleaving to existing norms but must do so by making some kind of effort to step outside them through objective analysis. In this respect, I am at odds with advocates of ‘immanent critique’, who think the best approach is to invoke some of our current norms against others.
Despite my now denying it, however, I expect some will think that what I am doing here is condemning all the norms I describe and will then ask what alternative I am proposing, much as they have done in response to Foucault’s critiques. While I certainly do have ideas in this regard, I have tried to put them aside. In many of the specific areas I will discuss, I think most readers will simply say that what I describe as the contemporary norm is the only appropriate way to behave. I can only sympathize with this view: since I am part of this normative order, it is difficult for me to imagine any other way of doing things myself. But the fact that it seems this way to us is, I think, simply part and parcel of our social norms being what they are. The norms that obtain in our society will eo ipso appear to be obvious and natural and right. The historical evidence, as presented in the following chapter, suggests, however, that our current norms are not very old, and hence we have no particular reason to expect they will be around for much longer.
Despite my aim of objective neutrality, however, in one key respect my method here will be highly subjective, since, on my conception, a norm is generally not a precisely measurable object. Since, on my account, no one ever actually accords with any given norm, quantitative empirical data is generally inapt to provide evidence of norms. What might count as evidence would not be studies of actual behaviour, then, but attitudinal surveys that show what most people think they should do, the kind of thing that is studied in the field of empirical ethics. However, on my account people are not even reliably consciously aware of norms – rather, the norm could be said to be largely unconscious. In Freudian terms, norms surely belong primarily to the superego, which implies that people who have them may or may not be conscious of them. This to some extent puts me in the psychoanalytic position of auto-analysis, trying to divine norms by analysing not only society around me, but also my own feelings and behaviour. Indeed, to an uncomfortable extent, this book might be said to be a critique of my own attitude to life over the past several decades. While the subjectivity of my approach might lead me to idiosyncratic judgements, it is generally the case that, as a member of society, I should have as good an access to our norms as anyone, even if the mechanism of this awareness is rather obscure.
Of course, my perspective can be presumed to be different from others, in particular those who belong to (sub)cultural groups in which different norms are operative. This book is thus explicitly a study of ‘Western’ norms, and might be said to be more narrowly focused on Anglospheric ones (I am a British and Australian dual citizen) – which actually entails a focus on the United States of America qua the numerical mainstay and cultural centre of the Anglosphere.16 There can be little doubt though that the United States constitutes a peerlessly influential and weighty example not only for the Anglosphere, but for the entire West and, indeed, to a lesser extent, for the entire world. Still, what I say here can be assumed to apply less to other parts of the West, and also may be presumed to apply less to immigrant and other minority groups in the Anglosphere than to the culture of white English-language speakers, the group to which I myself belong.17 That noted, I am wary of claiming, for example, that this is specifically a study of ‘White norms’ or anything of that sort, so I will leave this boundary deliberately undefined rather than explicitly posit a dubious racial index in any given area. I thus do not claim that the norms I describe are exclusively ‘White’, but also acknowledge that I, as a white (and also male, etc.) researcher, am in a poor position to comment on the norms of others.
I must also acknowledge the variability of the use of the concepts that I place at the centre of my argument here. Like any word of natural, living language, the term ‘normal’ in particular is used in practice by different people in different ways. I do not claim that every person who uses the word means by it the same thing that I do here. In particular, people clearly do sometimes use the word ‘normal’ to mean ‘average’. I am not saying that you should only use the word ‘normal’ in a certain way or that every use of the term is ‘problematic’. I do however think that this word is the original name for a pervasive social tendency that I mean to critique, and that one of the problems with this pervasive concept is that it blurs the distinction between the average and the ideal. The phenomenon that I refer to with the word ‘normal’ is inherent in our society, a dynamic in the way we relate to one another and to ourselves. I certainly think this phenomenon has a close relation to the historical usage of the word, but in the end the name it goes by is not what is important.
Lastly, given that I have spent my academic career to date writing primarily on the thought of Michel Foucault, and given that Foucault is a privileged reference point in this book, readers might reasonably take the account I am presenting