Meditation on 'Normal'

“Vaccines mean a potential return to normalisation.” So said a business pundit on the radio. There is a widespread desire for return to normal. Even while people recognise it will have to be a ‘new’ or ‘novel’ normal, they are desperate for stability, for a style of life, that is familiar, similar to what they have lost: shopping, pubs, socialising. 

However, we must realise that things will not ‘return to normal’. The cat is out of bag. Pandora’s box is open. The virus is in the world. It’s not going away. Vaccines may nevertheless enable us to again go out-and-about, in pursuit of something that will portray a simulacrum of ‘normal’.

But do we really want a ‘return to normal’, that phrase on everyone’s lips? John Harris, writing in The Guardian, asks this question. Injustice, inequality, racism, austerity, ecocide, have all been highlighted by the pandemic. This surely is an opportunity to re-set society; much as after World War Two, it was chance to build the Welfare State.

But will vested interests allow this to happen? Even though it is against their own long-term good, because it causes the destruction of society and the globe, short-term profits, immediate geopolitical advantages, militate against taking strategic decisions for the benefit of the entire population of the planet.

This is perverse. But humanity is trapped in cupidity and concupiscence. Francis Schaeffer often pointed out that the state of our present world is actually ‘abnormal’. Since the Fall, humanity, society and nature, have all been out of joint. So that it is a mistake to derive our beliefs, morals or values from the current position of the societal or natural order.

This means that the Christian must be in rebellion against the order of things. In psychological terms, the inability, or unwillingness, to adapt to reality, to society’s norms, to the rapid rush of accelerating demands on our physical and psychological well-being, in order to perform in a competitive, technocratic, culture, is often labelled as ‘neurotic’. Mental illness can be a sign of not fitting in with the place assigned to us in the societal jigsaw.

Christian, and other, deviants will therefore be increasingly excluded, when they/we refuse to conform to these new norms of the new “normal”. Because the reconstruction post-virus will inevitably mean a ratcheting up of the requirements to fit in with the direction of society. To resist this power will entail a practice of “anormality”, as Christopher Ketcham terms it.

One thing Covid has taught us is that we are not in control. It’s another example of the de-centring the subject; a Copernican revolution in consciousness, removing us from the centre of the universe. We are not God(s). But this is freeing. As my therapist said, only God is perfect, and doesn’t make mistakes. So this gives me permission to accept myself, as a fallible human being.

This will help us in planning for 2021, as we sit loose to our ideas, and hold tight to the providence of God.