Normophobia

From the standpoint of social development, the family cannot be considered the basis of the authoritarian state, only as one of the most important institutions which support it. It is, however, its central reactionary germ cell, the most important place of reproduction of the reactionary and conservative individual. Being itself caused by the authoritarian system, the family becomes the most important institution for its conservation.

—Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933)

We’re all familiar with the policy debates that surround the family. How does the tax code interact with family stability and the needs of children? Who should care for children, and how is this care to be supported? What are the ethical implications of fertility technology? But behind all these issues is the hard problem of human nature. Thinking about the family—and especially about children—we soon find ourselves tripping over the question of what a family is, what its normative patterns are, and why. In other words, questions of human nature. What is a person? Do we have a nature? Does normal even exist?

At the inception of modernity, Francis Bacon set out to put nature “to the question.” The scientific revolution heralded by Bacon’s words enabled an explosion of innovation and commerce, alongside a growing sense that we were no longer bound by the givens of creation but destined to master them.

The modern belief in “progress” emanates from this interrogative and—as it soon became—exploitative relationship to nature. This relationship has been worked out through the commercial and technological dissolution, enclosure, and mastery of every unchosen structure or limit, all in the name of freedom. This working-out has, in turn, been justified morally by the belief that we are entitled to use any and every means to transcend our givens. And since the mid-twentieth century, the drive for transcendence has turned inward to human bodies, cultures, and relationships, a turn that has elicited a further explosion of innovation and commerce.

With this explosion has come a sense that the old givens of our bodies and relationships need no longer bind us. Or—in its still more radical form—that there are no such givens at all, just a matrix of contingent and culturally constructed patterns that appear given. This moral narrative treats the resulting release of energy (understood as resources, freedom, innovation, etc.) as always better than whatever came before (understood as scarcity, authoritarianism, or the primitive). It thereby legitimizes the sacrifices “progress” always entails. To argue that we have a nature at all, notwithstanding these efforts, is to oppose progress—to be “on the wrong side of history.”

This worldview is endemic in Anglophone culture today, on both sides of the political aisle, which makes it a difficult phenomenon to see clearly, let alone critique. But the core structures of “family,” for millennia the site of the creation and formation of children, are predicated on unchosenness. And as such, to the extent that we wage war on unchosenness, we wage war on our ability even to think about family.

So instead of writing a policy paper on how to shore up family life against a solvent tide, I want to address the ideological basis of this problem: namely, the contemporary consensus that makes an enemy of the unchosen, the normal, and the given. In the spirit of the age, let’s name this consensus uncharitably, and with our own rhetorical interests in mind. Let us dismiss the self-justifications about inclusion, marginalization, and so on that lubricate its spread. Let’s call it bigotry, a fear of the normal. Normophobia.

Normophobia frames everything conventional, average, given, assumed, traditional, and normative—whether its origin be physiological or cultural—as arbitrarily and coercively constructed to support vested interests, particularly those of white, Christian, heterosexual men. Radical normophobes describe their aim explicitly as the total eradication of this (they claim) artificially naturalized domain of the “natural,” in favor of untrammeled, free-floating, individual desire.

Family is at best weakly defended against normophobia. Normophobic consensus operates by smearing every argument from normativity or nature by association with the specter of fascism. And as Wilhelm Reich implied in the words I have used as an epigraph, the very givenness of family patterns aligns the family with constraint, with limitations on desire, and hence—in the moral landscape of progress-as-freedom—with the authoritarian bogeyman.

It is easy to find instances of radical normophobia. In one recent academic paper, for example, Harper Keenan and “Lil Miss Hot Mess” characterize the Drag Queen Story Hour phenomenon as a “model for learning not simply about queer lives, but how to live queerly.” In turn, living queerly is defined as “an embodied political resistance to confining constructs of gender and sexuality as they are produced by the institutions and social relations that govern our lives.” The aim of “Drag Pedagogy,” then, is to redirect education from the formation of children to the inculcation of a reflexive distaste for physiological, social, and institutional norms of every kind; in other words, to the creation of the next generation of normophobes. And as we shall see, this is far from the only way in which the normophobic order implicates children.

Radical normophobic vanguardism marches in lockstep with a more everyday, mainstream variant, which is much harder to detect. This worldview predominates among knowledge-class women (the real audience for Drag Queen Story Hour), and it appears with surprising frequency among self-identifying conservatives. Let us call this subtype of normophobia “Hancockism,” in honor of the conservative-identified politician Matt Hancock, notorious in British politics for being caught on camera in an extramarital in-office affair with aide Gina Coladangelo, a married mother of three. The revelation prompted Hancock’s resignation as health secretary and the breakup of both his and Coladangelo’s marriages.

Hancock is understandably resistant to claims that there might be better and worse ways to order family life, or that a consensus along these lines might be transmitted by coherent social norms. Responding to Conservative MP Danny Kruger’s advocacy for “the normative family,” Hancock denounced Kruger’s arguments as “so offensive” and “so wrong,” and declared that a wish to prioritize intact heterosexual marriages was “a completely fringe view within the Conservative Party.”

Whatever the accuracy of that last point, Hancock’s assumption was clear: There is no better or worse way to structure a family. But this is simply untrue. Were modern governments genuinely interested in “evidence-based policy,” they would be making every effort to support stable heterosexual marriages. Numerous studies have shown that fatherlessness, for example, is linked to a greater risk of children’s growing up in poverty, experiencing anxiety and depression, underperforming at school, joining gangs, abusing drugs, and being sexually abused, to name but a few adverse outcomes.

Why is this misery being ignored? The short answer is that normophobia is the high-status norm among Western elites, because it largely suits their interests. Since John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, the supposedly stifling moral preoccupations of the petit bourgeoisie have been subject to an ongoing revolution from the top, in which elites demanded the right to conduct Millian “experiments in living.” And the resulting attrition of norms has created immense opportunity for those with the wherewithal to seize it. This is clear in social fields from workplace participation to sexual liberty, where the dissolution of previously strong social norms has generated benefits accruing most generously to those at the top of the social scale.

Middle- and upper-class women, for example, have led the charge against older norms regarding sexual continence, behavioral expectations, and sex segregation, in a moral transformation that delivered significant dividends of status and financial opportunity to their sex and class. The largest subset of mainstream normophobes is drawn from this demographic. But conservative-identified normophobes also bear some responsibility. Their attachment to economic growth means that they do not wish to see the workforce shrink, and an outraged defense of women’s freedom to defy oppressive, heteronormative, patriarchal norms affords a righteous frame for making this case.

Mill made it clear that “experiments in living” were for the exceptional. But as Patrick Deneen argues in Why Liberalism Failed, the resulting abolition of social guardrails yields asymmetric dividends: positive freedom for the elites, chaos for those with less social and economic capital. Theodore Dalrymple showed in Life at the Bottom (2001) that it’s one thing to privilege individual choice and desire over norms and obligations if you are rich and educated and enjoy a support network, but another thing altogether if you are poor, undereducated, or lacking in impulse control.

In Britain, the grim case of Carla Foster, recently jailed after using “pills by post” abortion to kill her unborn baby at eight months’ gestation, illustrates what this asymmetry looks like in practice—and who pays the price. Foster, who already had three sons, became pregnant by another man before moving back in with her estranged partner, and she took the pills because she was afraid of what he would do when he discovered that she had had another relationship during their separation. 

The Hancockist looks away from such catastrophes. Generalizing from his own normophobia, he demands that we dethrone stable marriage as a social norm society-wide, even for those without his financial and cultural cushion. And Hancock exemplifies the kind of people who win from this revolution: those well-placed to enjoy an expansion of freedom, while swerving most of the pitfalls.

The losers are those already at a disadvantage—those who might flourish with clear guardrails but (perhaps like Carla Foster) risk foundering without them. People, in short, without the cultural or economic capital to recover from missteps. Incarcerated women who find themselves sharing prison cells with trans-identified men, for example, or women who are exploited by the porn industry after drug experimentation becomes addiction, and whose families can’t pay for stints in rehab.

But above all, it is children who pay the price. Though the effects of divorce are mitigated by wealth, studies show that even the children of well-off demographics (such as, say, politicians) are harmed when their parents break up. And the impact of normophobia on children extends well beyond family structure. As children’s rights campaigner Katy Faust has observed, a central feature of this ideology is its inversion of the normal caregiving relation between adults and children. That is, it asks children to make sacrifices in the name of adult desires.

Ground zero for this inverted caregiving relationship is the legal privileging, since the 1960s, of a woman’s desire for freedom over the life of her unborn child. A less extreme instance is third-party childcare, which requires young children and sometimes babies to sacrifice their normative need for attuned maternal presence—sometimes due to economic necessity, but often for the sake of the mother’s self-actualization. A more futuristic instance is “assisted reproduction,” a basket of technologies that offer to close the gap between normally fertile and infertile heterosexual couples, for instance by means of gestational surrogacy. These practices increasingly adopt normophobic moral overtones, as they address their treatments not only to infertile heterosexuals but to the givens of normal human reproduction. Here, adults who desire a child but in the normal course of things would not be able to conceive—such as lone men, same-sex couples, even throuples—are understood to suffer “situational infertility.”

But the “cure” for our normative reproductive nature is not cost-free, and the cost is paid by the very youngest children. Though healthcare providers emphasize the importance of prenatal bonding to the mental health of babies as well as mothers, such realities are ignored by those who pursue “fertility equality.” They would compel every surrogate-born baby to sacrifice the continuity of his or her maternal bond, from gestation to infancy, in order to meet the needs of the commissioning adults.

Reality TV star Khloé Kardashian acknowledged this cost with startling frankness recently after acquiring a baby boy by means of surrogacy. She described her taking possession of the baby after his birth as “a transactional experience” that was “not about him,” and she admitted that she struggled to bond with him. But with the self-excusing moral flaccidity of the committed Hancockist, Kardashian shied from making the clear ethical inference. “It doesn’t mean it is bad or good,” she said. “It is just very different.”

Commissioning a baby to order is not just “different.” Our organismic nature has a consistent baseline, one that is flexible but not infinitely malleable. Sex remains dimorphic; every baby has a mother; every child has a normal developmental pathway.

Normophobia is parasitic on human nature, whose givens it promises to abolish in the name of individual desire, even as it uses the resilience of social structures and normal physiology to its own depredations as evidence of its own harmlessness. And over the last half-century or so, conservatives have ceded almost all ground to this parasite ideology, taking comfort from that apparent resilience even as (in many a Hancockian case) they reaped the spoils and externalized the costs. In turn, the Hancockist normophobes carry water for the vanguardist variety, leaving them free to entrench the moral unassailability of normophobia as our sociocultural baseline.

There is very little left standing against them now, save the figure at the heart of family, and the aspect of human nature most resistant to abolition: the child. Children’s needs have not changed just because adult desires have grown more unruly. We might, I suppose, be able to re-engineer the human organism, such that our children no longer need love in infancy. But we must hope even the most zealous Hancockist would agree that the resulting entity would probably not mature into a psychologically normal member of human society. Absent (God willing) such monstrous experiments, then, when we enforce culture-wide bigotry against social and embodied norms in the name of emancipation, we should be clear about what we’re doing. We are asking children to accept less so that we, the adults, may have more, and hoping their resilience will be enough.

Even when it is enough, more or less, we can’t infer from the persistence of normative human patterns in the face of assault that the assaults are of no consequence. A great many single parents do their best in sometimes very trying circumstances and should be lauded for it. Acknowledging this fact does not make it less true, pace Hancock, that intact married families are more likely to afford good outcomes. Similarly, as I know personally, longing for a child can be acutely painful. When an individual is same-sex attracted, there is no natural possibility of forming a family that is genetically related to both parents. Against such longing, a normophilic case against gamete donation and surrogacy may seem callous. But acknowledging adult pain and longing does not legitimize shifting that burden of pain and longing to a child, by imposing on him or her the identity confusion faced by donor-conceived children, or the mother-loss inextricable from surrogacy.

We must transfer our collective faculty for care and compassion from thwarted or struggling adults to those children who need us. This need not be a matter of cruelty or stigma, but rather of reordering our priorities to what we know to be true. This is urgent: If we can’t even mount a normophilic defense of a baby’s need for his or her mother, we will have few resources left to defend our own organismic fundamentals in the face of the seemingly endless ambitions of biotech. Some are already preselecting IVF embryos based on genome analysis. Others propose the accelerated “evolution” of humans by means of in vitro gametogenesis. Others again propose gene-editing embryos. Just recently a breakthrough was announced in the synthetic creation of human embryos: in theory, children wholly without ancestors.

No one is coming to save us. We cannot wait for the “silent majority” to rise up and demand a return to common sense, or mumble about postponing action until we’ve re-Christianized the West, or until we’ve devised a fully worked-out post-Christian metaphysics of human nature. We may lament the Christianity-shaped hole in our discourse, but just because much of modern culture is post-Christian doesn’t mean we no longer have a nature. All we’ve lost is our common framework for naming that nature. We must speak the truth anyway. And wherever possible, we must redirect law and policy from the abolition of human nature to its flourishing.

Should this project be accused of oppressing or stigmatizing “the vulnerable,” we must recall that in reasserting the necessity of norms we are not attacking the most vulnerable. We are defending them. Normophobia imposed on babies and children an obligation to sacrifice their needs for the sake of our wayward desires. We must lift this burden from their little shoulders.

Mary Harrington is a columnist at UnHerd.

Image by stecy2001, public domain. Image cropped.