Weird and Normal
Weird and Normal
My sister
had two categories growing up: weird and normal. Normal designated her tastes
interests and those of her circle of friends. I will leave you to guess whose
tastes and interests constituted weirdness. Weird and normal are as basic as
raw and cooked, cultivated and wild or any other such Levi-Straussian binary. In
fact, we can plot a kind of curve ranging from full normality to utter
weirdness with various stops on the way. At one end we might posit utter
weirdness as the American author and intellectual prankster Charles Fort did.
Fort was convinced that reason and science were illusions. We might THINK we
see patterns and generalities in the world but this is just selection bias. We
constitute ‘science’ and its realm by filtering out vast amounts of sheer
noise, noise that would swallow all useful ‘info’ if we were not able as human
beings to block it out. Fort spent his life illustrating this lesson by
collecting ‘noise’: odd, trivial and surd events that were random, uncorrelated
and inexplicable within our current frameworks for understanding nature. Thus, he
posited peak weird, the point at which weirdness ceases to be weird and becomes the
norm. Thus, we have a few observed regularities which we elevate into ‘laws’
and a whole lot of meaningless stuff. At the other end of the pole of course are
those who insist on the fact that, saving a few accidents here and there, we
live in a VERY predictable universe: so predictable that we can say with
confidence that if any event LOOKS weird that is only because we have not yet
figured out how to enfold it within order. If, say, we understood the laws of
chemistry and physics sufficiently well ALL of Fort’s weird events could be
explained and shown to be as normal as can be. If we can only do this for a
fraction of events that is because time is finite and we are not super computers.
This is peak normal and even the apparent randomness of the ‘weird’ quantum
world can be averaged out into statistical regularities on the macro-scale.
We can lay
this out in the following manner: at maximum weird we have pure phenomenalism.
There are only single atomized events with no principle connecting them. Babies
are born, dogs bark, frogs rain from the sky, things go bump in the night,
crooked houses defy physics all in the exact same sense. At maximum weird we in
fact have the very deadest normality and if hardly anyone reads Fort nowadays
it is because the endless listing of such random, atomized events becomes
tedious.[1]
If there is no normal to set off weird then weird becomes boring. If ALL we had
were bumps in the night and bedsheets flying around the room these events would
have no interest or significance. As C.S. Lewis once put it, with no stable
backdrop of nature we could not receive a miracle as such. At maximum normal
though we have something a bit richer and more complex and we should probably
prefer maximum normal to maximum weird if we had to choose. This is because we
have two levels of reality not one: we have events and we have entities that
link those events. Thus we have a stream of observed events as before: apples
falling, cats meowing, fires burning, wind blowing and so on. Behind these
events we have a stock of entities that link them: DNA, carbon, quarks,
uranium, gravitons and so on. These are all things that generally and perhaps
even universally happen. These entities we posit have ‘natures’ or at least
‘behaviors’ which make their actions quantifiable and subject to laws which can
be mathematically expressed in formulas such as E=MC2 or F=GMmr2 F = G Mm r 2. Here there are no weird events as behind all
events are a limited stock of entities and a small set of basic laws and
constants. Thus if anything LOOKS weird that is an illusion, a trick of
perspective grounded in the fact that the universe has yet to be fully
described. We can be confident that this is so because peak normal is
constantly making raids on peak weird, explaining frog showers as the result of
tornadoes or sightings of the demonic Mothman as the appearance to excited
humans of a large bat. Of course peak weird can make a few raids too as when
quantum phenomena turn out to be utterly bizarre but the defender of peak
normal is confident that if all these skirmishes are toted up we will find peak
normal forever gaining on peak weird such that if we extrapolate the current
rates of change we shall find that peak weird will eventually have no evidence,
no ‘noise’ to appeal to and weirdness will have no kingdom to rule.
I think most
people are unconvinced by this picture to the endless frustration of peak
normies. Partly this is because people have an emotional, spiritual investment
in having at least SOME weird. Perhaps we could say that people want JUST
ENOUGH weird however much that might be. This is why people tend to assume that
for every weird event that finds a normal explanation there are ten more which
do not (though neither side has really counted). Pascal said that the people
are wise in their folly and it just so happens that in one important respect
the people are here correct. The assumption that the laws of nature will
continue to explain more and more weird events as they have done in the past is
itself quite weird for it has no empirical or scientific grounding whatsoever.
It is the one bit of weird normal can never vanquish. This, of course, is the
problem of induction which is that no finite number of events can ground a
universal law and 20 new weird things may appear tomorrow for every one that we
solve today and these may necessitate a complete change in our account of
nature. I believe this is called a ‘black swan’ event. Gilgamesh in the ancient
epic concluded with exasperation that, alas, he had seen all things and there
was nothing left to know. I think most would say we have learned some extra
details at least in the centuries since.
If we want a
contrast though we may go back to a period when normal with a dash of weird had
articulate defenders and that was the 17th century. No one wants too
much weird so people have a certain reserve and skepticism but just
occasionally they want to see that skepticism defeated. This entails a layer
cake universe with one level of the cake being the ordinary stream of dogs
barking, apples falling and crops growing. On top of this is a thinner layer of
other events less common but for that reason more striking. These include
things like uneducated people in fits blurting out words and sentences in
languages they don’t know, people spitting up pins, beds mysteriously rising up
off the floor and horses’ manes being braided. These sorts of things still
happen (apparently) plus new ones like mysterious lights in the sky that hover
like flying craft. The 17th Century was not Fortean however. Behind
these events they posited a set of entities such as ghosts, demons, witches and
fairies. These entities are spontaneous relative to physically determined
events but they are not purely capricious; they are social beings in whole or
in part and their kingdoms are run not by natural, deterministic laws but by
social ones. They are not unaffected by physical reality however as distant
laws of ‘sympathy and antipathy’ connect them with the physical world such as
Dracula’s distaste for garlic. What was ‘weird’ was not the two kingdoms
themselves but their interaction which was portentous and unexpected but
nonetheless part of the order of things. This world plays out into four levels
as we have normal events backed up by normal entities and weird events backed
up by weird entities.
A man named
Henry More even worked out a metaphysic to distinguish and unite the normal and
weird realms. He believed in two ‘extensions’ the bodily and spiritual. Spirits
are penetrable indivisible beings and bodies are impenetrable divisible beings.
As such they are distinct yet the permeability and extension of spirits can
interact with bodies both in ordinary and surprising ways. Now of course as bodily
beings we do not have any intuition into the realm of spirits. Our attention is
mostly riveted to the material extension and we depend on it as the origin of
most of our ideas. Thus we are only dimly aware of the laws of spiritual
entities though we can engage in some educated guesswork about them. If we had
the intuition of pure spirits of course we could perceive the law like nature
of that kingdom which would then be as ‘normal’ as ours. Our abilities here are
limited however as is evident from the fact that the precise border between
these two streams of events is difficult to draw: there may well be some
distant and unknown law of nature that causes a Bible to suddenly fly into the
fireplace. Mothman may well turn out to be a huge bat. Still, More is convinced
that the balance of the evidence (which he weighed with some care) points to
two kingdoms with distinct laws of interaction. Neither is ‘weird’ by itself
but the spontaneous and apparently personal intrusions of one kingdom on the
other are ‘weird for us’.
I suspect
that if we conducted a metaphysical poll More’s position or something like it
would win in a landslide for reasons I have speculated on elsewhere (see my
book Whose Beliefs Count?). By and
large we do not like peak normal and we do not like peak weird. We want mostly
normal with some irruptions of weird.[2]
As to where these irruptions come from we have many options ranging from
spirits to strange animals to aliens (who are not really weird but presumed to
be physical entities like us at least by most). This is a tricky balance of
course for the one thing we do not want is to get ‘sucked into’ the weird world
such that we lose contact with the normal one. This can lead to paranoia which
can lead to witch trials and satanic ritual abuse panics. It can lead to the
last couple seasons of The X Files! I
myself have to declare a bias here. I have no contact whatsoever with the weird
though I talk to enough people who do. I do not know why this is so but perhaps
it is a very intuitive sort of thing and I am too given to ratiocination. This
makes me curious though, like sociopaths who are fascinated by morality. It
could be there is some crucial human faculty that I am missing and that makes
me want to know what that is. It may be, to create another category, that I am
a Martian, not committed to peak normal in the angry, reactive way proponents
of normality often are but having no direct contact with weirdness either.
Maybe all philosophers are Martians however, looking at a world of events and
happenings and wondering whether any of them have the significance claimed for
them. A very good source of meditation here would be English poet Craig Raine’s
fine poem about a Martian’s bizarre interpretations of ordinary Earth events
though that is for another day.
[1]
Fort’s turgid style and lack of literary grace don’t help matters. Still, his
position might be boiled down to an extreme nominalism: there is no intrinsic
reason for rain to be one color and not another and that is ‘why’ rain is
sometimes black. If the odds are even though you might think black and
non-black rains should fall at the ratio of one to one. The Fortean will reply
that this ‘law of averages’ is still too much of a law for our surd reality and
that is ‘why’ rain is mostly clear but occasionally black.
[2]
This is shown by the fact that neither More nor his contemporaries lived
immersed in weirdness. The nature of weird events had to be assessed and
evaluated like other events because there was no default assumption about them.
They were a subject of lively debate and disagreement (more so than they are
now). One crucial thing to note is that then as now those who suffered from
‘supernatural visitations’ feared ridicule and skepticism and this is often a
built in feature of the ghost narrative. The ‘huffers and witlings’ scoff at
first but are then forced to change their tune by extraordinary events. In
fact, minus this element of friction the typical ghost narrative loses dramatic
interest for part of the fun is to see the sceptic discomfited. If even a
hardened sceptic converts, then that too reinforces the authority of the tale.
The skeptic is essential to the entire process.
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