The concept of the normal is properly a variant of the concept of the good.
It is that which society has approved. A normal action is one which falls well within the limits of expected behavior for a particular society. Its variability among different peoples is
essentially a function of the variability of the behav- ior patterns that different societies have created for themselves, and can never be wholly divorced from a consideration of culturally institutionalized types of behavior.
Each culture is a more or less elaborate working- out of the potentialities of the segment it has chosen. In so far as a civilization is well integrated and con- sistent within itself, it will tend to carry farther and farther, according to its nature, its initial impulse toward a particular type of action, and from the point of view of any other culture those elaborations will include more and more extreme and aberrant traits.
Each of these traits, in proportion as it reinforces the chosen behavior patterns of that culture, is for that culture normal. Those individuals to whom it is congenial either congenitally, or as the result of childhood sets, are accorded to prestige in that cul- ture, and are not visited with the social contempt or disapproval which their traits would call down upon them in a society that was differently organized. On the other hand, those individuals whose characteris- tics are not congenial to the selected type of human behavior in that community are the deviants, no matter how valued their personality traits may be in a contrasted civilization.
* * * I have spoken of individuals as having sets toward
certain types of behavior, and of these sets as running sometimes counter to the types of behavior which are institutionalized in the culture to which they belong. From all that we know of contrasting cultures it seems clear that differences of temperament occur in every society. The matter has never been made the subject of investigation, but from the available mate- rial it would appear that these temperament types are very likely of universal recurrence. That is, there is an ascertainable range of human behavior that is found wherever a sufficiently large series of individuals is observed. But the proportion in which behavior types stand to one another in different societies is not uni- versal. The vast majority of the individuals in any group are shaped to the fashion of that culture. In other words, most individuals are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are
34 Á PART 1: FUNDAMENTALS
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born. In a society that values trance, as in India, they will have supernormal experience. In a society that institutionalizes homosexuality, they will be homo- sexual. In a society that sets the gathering of posses- sions as the chief human objective, they will amass property. The deviants, whatever the type of behavior the culture has institutionalized, will remain few in number, and there seems no more difficulty in moulding the vast malleable majority to the “nor- mality” of what we consider an aberrant trait, such as
delusions of reference, than to the normality of such accepted behavior patterns as acquisitiveness. The small proportion of the number of the deviants in any culture is not a function of the sure instinct with which that society has built itself upon the funda- mental sanities, but of the universal fact that, hap- pily, the majority of mankind quite readily take any shape that is presented to them.
* * *
CHAPTER 2: SUBJECTIVISM, RELATIVISM, AND EMOTIVISM Á 35
Mary Midgley, “Trying out One’s New Sword” in Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1981), pp. 69–75. Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates.
Trying Out One’s New Sword MARY MIDGLEY
All of us are, more or less, in trouble today about try- ing to understand cultures strange to us. We hear constantly of alien customs. We see changes in our lifetime which would have astonished our parents. I want to discuss here one very short way of dealing with this difficulty, a drastic way which many people now theoretically favour. It consists in simply deny- ing that we can ever understand any culture except our own well enough to make judgements about it. Those who recommend this hold that the world is sharply divided into separate societies, sealed units, each with its own system of thought. They feel that the respect and tolerance due from one system to another forbids us ever to take up a critical position to any other culture. Moral judgment, they suggest, is a kind of coinage valid only in its country of origin.
I shall call this position ‘moral isolationism’. I shall suggest that it is certainly not forced upon us, and indeed that it makes no sense at all. People usu- ally take it up because they think it is a respectful atti- tude to other cultures. In fact, however, it is not respectful. Nobody can respect what is entirely unin-
telligible to them. To respect someone, we have to know enough about him to make a favourable judge- ment, however general and tentative. And we do understand people in other cultures to this extent. Otherwise a great mass of our most valuable thinking would be paralysed.
To show this, I shall take a remote example, because we shall probably find it easier to think calmly about it than we should with a contemporary one, such as female circumcision in Africa or the Chi- nese Cultural Revolution. The principles involved will still be the same. My example is this. There is, it seems, a verb in classical Japanese which means ‘to try out one’s new sword on a chance wayfarer’. (The word is tsujigiri, literally ‘crossroads-cut’.) A samurai sword had to be tried out because, if it was to work properly, it had to slice through someone at a single blow, from the shoulder to the opposite flank. Other- wise, the warrior bungled his stroke. This could injure his honour, offend his ancestors, and even let down his emperor. So tests were needed, and wayfarers had to be expended. Any wayfarer would do—provided, of course, that he was not another Samurai. Scientists will recognize a familiar problem about the rights of experimental subjects.
Now when we hear of a custom like this, we may well reflect that we simply do not understand it; and
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therefore are not qualified to criticize it at all, because we are not members of that culture. But we are not members of any other culture either, except our own. So we extend the principle to cover all extraneous cultures, and we seem therefore to be moral isola- tionists. But this is, as we shall see, an impossible position. Let us ask what it would involve.