Defining Normal Down

A children's television program in Denmark has adults with a variety of different types of bodies strip, including overweight and obese bodies, strip naked in front of a group of children, telling the audience, "I hope you will understand that normal bodies look like this." The avowed goal is to show children that "people are different and have different bodies."

When they say "normal bodies look like this," they are playing with the ambiguous meaning of the word "normal." The word has a normative sense, meaning healthy or acceptable, and it has a descriptive sense, meaning common or usual. 

Often the two meanings are close. For example, 98.6 is the normal temperature, meaning the temperature that is healthy, and it is also the temperature that almost all people have.

But the ambiguity becomes dangerous when destructive or self-destructive behavior becomes common - for example, when it becomes common for people to be obese. If we teach children that different people have different bodies and obese bodies are just another type of normal body, then when those children grow up, they are less likely to make the effort needed to avoid obesity. 

This is a familiar habit of the modern left. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called it "Defining Deviancy Down." As the amount of deviant or destructive behavior in a community increases, behavior that would have been considered deviant in the past is redefined as normal. 

We can see how destructive this misuse of the word normal is, if we imagine people applying it to other issues in the past. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they would have reasoned that slavery is common, which means it is normal, with means it is acceptable. At the beginning of the twentieth century, they would have reasoned that subordination of women is common, which means it is normal, which means it is acceptable. It is no stranger than reasoning at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when obesity is a major public health problem, that obesity is common, which means it is normal, which means it is acceptable.