We raised this question about ‘normal’ simply because it seems that we take it for granted.

Our argument is simple. What if the ‘normal’ that we take is wrong, or false? So, are we now living in a ‘new wrong’ or a ‘new false’, and move on with it? This cannot be!! We must know what is ‘normal’ before we proceed with living in the ‘New Normal’.

In an ever-changing world, nothing remains the same. So, what is normal today may not be so tomorrow. Hence, what is the ‘normal’, and how is the ‘normal’ decided. This writing is meant to provoke some thoughts on the ‘normal’ from few different perspectives.

The etymology and origin

Where did the word ‘normal’ come from, and why does it have the power it does in our lives, in our institutions, in our world? How did it become like air—invisible, essential, all around us? Look up normal in any English dictionary and the definition is “usual, regular, common, typical.” There are people who study this kind of stuff, and have written books and articles about it. These books, articles and others, have knocked normal off the pedestal and into the dirt. Because normal is contingent—on history, on power, and, most of all, on humans to determine.

As the scholars have noted, the word normal entered the English language in the mid-1840s, followed by normality in 1849, and normalcy in 1857. This is shocking for a word that masquerades as an ever-present universal truth. When normal was first used it had nothing to do with people, or society, or human behavior. Norm and normal were Latin words used by mathematicians. Normal comes from the Latin word norma which refers to a carpenter’s square, or T-square. Building off the Latin, normal first meant “perpendicular” or “at right angles.”

Normal, however, even as a distinct word in geometry, is more complicated than it seems. On the one hand, normal is describing a fact in the world—a line may be orthogonal, or normal, or it may not. Normal is an objective description of that line. But a right angle, in geometry, is also good, is desirable, is a universal mathematical truth that many mathematicians, then and now, describe as a type of beauty and perfection. Here we see two facets of normal that are familiar to us now and make it so powerful. Normal is both a fact in the world and a judgment of what is right. As Ian Hacking wrote, “One can, than, use the word ‘normal’ to say how things are, but also to say how they ought to be.”

A bunch of other words out there were looking to rival normal: natural, common, ordinary, typical, straight, perfect, and ideal. The list goes on. But here’s the thing, normal had a key advantage because it could mean more than one thing. Its ambiguity was its strength.

It’s scary to think, but it’s true: We have normal today not because of some deliberate process, or even an organized conspiracy, but because it worked better than other words. People started using normal in many different contexts and in many different ways because it was there, because it helped them do something, because other people were using it, because it rolled of the tongue, because it gave them power.

When normal was first used it had nothing to do with people, or society, or human behavior. It meant “perpendicular.”

So who used normal, and why, and how? Normal was first used outside a mathematical context in the mid-1800s by a group of men (gender pronoun alert—everyone in this history of normalcy is a man) in the academic disciplines of comparative anatomy and physiology. These two fields, by the 19th century, had professional dominion over the human body.

It was this crew that first used the word normal outside of a mathematical context, and eventually they used the term “normal state” to describe functioning organs and other systems inside the body. And why did they choose “normal state?” Who knows? Maybe they found the conflation of the factual with the value-driven useful. Maybe there was a professional advantage in appropriating a term associated with mathematical rigor. (At the time, doctors were not hot shit the way they are now. A doctor’s cure for the common cold was leeches; headaches were alleviated by bleeding people, a treatment that killed many, which is a kind of cure; and masturbation was “treated” with castration.) Or maybe they just liked the way it sounded. The historical record is unclear. But use it they did—with great abundance and little rigor—sort of like we do with all words in our ambitious pursuit of creative spelling.

For these guys, “normal state” was used to describe bodies and organs that were “perfect” or “ideal” and also to name certain states as “natural”; and of course, to judge an organ as healthy. We don’t blame them for using normal instead of perfect, ideal, natural, and all the other words they could have used. This wasn’t a grand conspiracy. So many words. So little time. Probably, they just got lazy, said screw it, normal will do. One word is better than five.

The ‘Normal’ in Islamic Tradition (from HERE)

In the Islamic traditions, the nafs (soul or self) results when God “breathes of His Spirit into man.” This is God’s greatest gift to man – the divine gift of life and consciousness or of a soul. The nafs, in that moment of creation, is man’s original nature and is also known as fiṭrah.This is his normal or natural nature. And, that natural nature knows itself and its Creator. It is the standard or norm according to which God created man. The nafs is in-between, wavering between the spirit and body, being more or less subtle or dense depending on where it might be between the two poles.

In this traditional view, the man is a sacred being. But this view of what is normal is not the view of the masses because they have lost touch with their fiṭrah or the perfection mirrored within them. As the typical and commonplace have been conflated, normalcy then is no longer measured by an inner sense of norm that is universal, but projected outwards in the universality of consensus (or standards set by the masses in society), with the average becoming the norm. In contemporary modern society, this practice has become accepted for knowledge no longer has its mooring in the metaphysical. Over time, this is what is acknowledged as the “normal.” But there is a problem with this external criterion of normalcy—it is contrived and dependent on many outside influences like motives, interests, among others. (Lakhani, 2006). In this case, the real quest of normalcy—the aim for transcendence or perfection—is lost.

In other words, this aspiration to perfection has been veiled by the very act of creation, so instead of focusing on the Centre (inward heart) that is the “normal,” man gets enticed by the peripheral. Thus, to be completely normal is to be spiritually awake, to see things as they are, i.e., meaning beyond form. Though such awakened souls should be the “normal,” they are rare. This is so because what is uncommon, though unnatural, has become the common or the normal.
We live in a world of modernism, but modernism denies the transcendence. As such, it opposes a normativity based on divine existence, the principles of which are stamped onto our hearts. As a result, this “new normal” (or “ab-normal”) will always be subjected to the whims and fancies of time. Put differently, the ethos of modernism with its three entwined trends—materialism or the reduction of reality to only the sensory or the immeasurable to only the measurable, secularization or the desacralisation of the public sphere or the erosion of conscience as reflected in the reduction of morality to the pragmatic as well as the marginalization of religion, and scientism that reduces all epistemology to empirical rationalism—has estranged man from his innermost self or Centre (Al-Attas, 1995).

Henceforth, the “new normal/ab-normal” is the loss of one’s Centre and as a result, of order itself. This is so because order and harmony originate from the Centre, and the loss of centrality generates disorder and disharmony (and inwardly, virtue). Thus, modernism in severing man from his Centre has disconnected or given rise to disorder within man and consequently in his outward self (Lakhani, 2006).

Put differently, the fiṭrah, the primordial nature (or the standard upon which that God created man) is the essence of what is normal. This norm that we carry within ourselves is a transcendent “faculty of discernment by which humanity is able to perceive its spiritual origin and to recognize the pervasive radiance of the spiritual presence within itself and in all things…” (Lakhani, 2006, 35).

The loss of transcendence is at root, basically a spiritual disorder, for without a Centre no person can remain normal. To compensate for this loss, the self or ego takes over as the Centre. But the ego cannot be the Centre because it lies only within the psyche and thus cannot transcend itself. Its reality is only at the psycho-physical.

Thus, what it means to be truly human is to transcend oneself and ascend to the norm that lies within us, back to our primordial nature, when “God breathes of His Spirit into us.” To be “normal” then is to be spiritually sound, to be awake and conscious of God for the soul of every human being is the spirit of God (Razi 1982).