Review by Steve Brady
Where do normal people come from?
In Empire of Normality, Robert Chapman, a British, neurodivergent Marxist, traces the idea of a normal person from the early stages of the industrial revolution. With the dismantling of the feudal agrarian economy, where a weird person still found belonging in family and community, society became a machine, a system where the roles of humans must fit the criteria of the machine, and if the machine adapts to humans at all, it considers an average person. Those who can’t adapt become deviant.
Classic Normality
Chapman traces the change in the meaning of health, from harmony to normal functioning, by looking at key thinkers who helped this process along, starting with Descartes thinking of a human as a machine. This opened the door to evaluating each person according to a ideal of a correct, functional human. This was also the era of what Foucault called the “Great Confinement”, the warehousing of those considered insane or unemployable.
The Belgian statistician Aldolphe Quetelet wrote, L’Homme Moyen (the average man) in 1835, suggesting such a person as the basic interchangeable building block of an army or industry. Francis Galton, 1822-1911, applied statistical methods to human behavior to promote biological racism, social Darwinism (Darwin was his cousin), and eugenics. His idea of “hereditary genius” seems elitist rather than normal-centric at first, but paradoxically most people consider themselves above average.
Galton didn’t claim to be a doctor, but Emil Kraepelin followed up by using his methods to help with the medical discipline of psychiatry. This segued into the normalization of eugenics. The early Eugenics Society included “the economist John Maynard Keynes, the biologist Julian Huxley, and Galton himself.” You could show your child fit for life by cultivating their normality. “better baby” and “fitter family” contests. At the Iowa State Fair in 1911: “You are raising better cattle, better horses, and better hogs, why don’t you raise better babies?”
Modern Normal People
With the Holocaust, eugenics fell from popularity. Non-biological psychology, including Freudian psychoanalysis, returned to the older idea of health as harmony and balance, yet also advanced psychiatry into all aspects of society. And it could also be a tool of elites: Freud’s cousin, Edward Bernays, applied Freud’s concepts of the unconscious to advertising, spawning vast social control.
By the 1960s, the anti-psychiatry of Tomas Szasz, advanced in his pivoted The Myth of Mental Illness, challenged the consensus, and was perceived by many as a path of liberation from psychiatry. But as a conservative libertarian, he divided the mentally ill into those with a measurable medical illness, and those with mere problems in living, who he said sometimes pretended to be ill to get attention and avoid responsibility.
This perverse capitalist response to psychiatry influenced deinstitutionalization in the 1970s and 80s. As the ideal was “personal responsibility”, few resources were available to the liberated patients, who now faced nursing homes, prisons, homelessness and drug addiction. “From the Szaszian perspective, then, the shift from asylum to prison incarceration was a desired outcome, not an unfortunate side-effect.” Ironically, according to Chapman, Szasz’ claim, that so-called mental illness had to be a biological problem to be real, led to a re-medicalization of mental illness, the explosion of medications in our society, and even a return to Galton’s eugenics:
“In her 2008 book The Ethics of Autism, bioethicist Professor Deborah Barnbaum argued that, once prenatal diagnostic technology is capable, there will be a moral obligation to abort autistic foetuses on the grounds that being autistic is inherently incompatible with living a good human life.”
You might think that post-Fordism, the transition from an assembly line economy to more diverse forms of employment might ease the pressure for conformity. But it really diversifies that pressure to many aspects of life. In the service economy, one must always wear the mask. The work-life barrier collapses; one must be accessible to one’s employer by phone or email all the time. Not only is work driving more people to mental illness, but with the level of normality required, more people become classified as disabled relative to the economy.
Weird Resistance
At the end, Chapter reviews the neurodiversity movement, particularly autism acceptance. It expands the social model of disability, which frames disability — physical, mental or otherwise — as a relationship to society rather than individual deficit. The value of a diversity in neurology rather than a normal ideal has been affirmed in business research. “Neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general.” – Harvey Blume.
Yet as a Marxist, Chapman emphasizes the intersectionality of normalism and other oppressions. “Capitalism always has a neurological in-group and an out-group, the boundaries of which shift.” Capitalism always has a surplus proletariat, and the goal shouldn’t be to integrate some “high functioning” autistics and ADHD persons into the middle-class and elite, at the expense of less worthy people who take our place in the surplus.
I have three hopefully constructive criticisms:
1. The emphasis on key thinkers rather than historical processes leads to a “great man [sic]” impression of the history. Especially with Thomas Szasz: Chapman’s detest of him exaggerates his role in the fiasco of deinstitutionalization; the role of the advancement of pharmaceuticals in more people leaving hospitals is neglected. To emphasize the right-libertarian side of anti-psychiatry, major left critics of psychiatry, R.D. Laing and Peter Sedgwick are but mentioned in passing.
2. Chapman’s Marxist background brings a helpful class analysis; he’s right about the dangers of liberal-reformist neurodivergent activism just changing the surplus workers. However, there’s that communist stereotype of setting everything aside to focus on the revolution (which means joining the correct alphabet soup group). Chapter could do more to connect to praxis, and mention the work of autistic activism that is egalitarian and intersectional: read Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism.
3. I wanted more about normalism on the left. Chapter does talk about human standardization and eugenics the USSR under Lenin and Stalin. But I would love to hear his thoughts on normalism in radical communities. As Christian Gajewski writes, the moment one shifts from participant to tolerated presence.
With all that in mind, this is a worthwhile book. I’m not aware of a similar overview tying together such a range of material on normality to create a coherent historical thread, and I hope to see others build on Robert Chapman’s work.