Letter #178: Normie Revival

The spiritual horizon of everyday life.

Dad,

The internet is full of great quotes that famous people never said. One of my favorite things G.K. Chesterton probably never said is that “The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”

If he ever had said it, he would have been absolutely right. What we think of as the basic family unit is deceptively unusual in the scope of history. It can only become the norm in a culture whose “rules of morality are clear,” which is something you did say, yesterday, in your letter.

It makes me think of a comedy special we both watched on Netflix recently, by the famously clean and openly Christian comedian Nate Bargatze. To me Bargatze’s comedy represents a “normie revival,” in which the basic assumptions of normal people are becoming acceptable and even aspirational again.

After wallowing for decades in the unfunny grievances of fashionably damaged weirdos like Hannah Gadsby, standup is gravitating back toward older riffs on the charming quirks of domestic life. Like the “wifejak” meme trend, Bargatze’s routine depends on shared mass affection for the way most people, most of the time, want to live.

At the same time, and not coincidentally, debate is raging on Twitter over whether a comfortable middle-class American existence is even possible or desirable anymore. Chris Rufo says yes, times may be tough economically but that’s no reason not to buckle down and build. Dissident celebrity Bronze Age Pervert replies that the wage jobs which used to sustain a happy family have become prohibitively demoralizing and underpaid.

Myself, I can’t help feeling like what’s at issue here is the spiritual horizon of everyday life. It may surprise our readers to learn this, but most people are normal. By definition, we can’t all win extraordinary recognition or wealth. So, also by definition, widespread happiness depends on the possibility of achieving fulfillment without the glamor and excitement of becoming a world-historic figure.

If there's no reward for life on offer besides the worldly goods of money and fame, normalcy becomes drudgery. This is probably why a purely secular society is doomed to generate mass discontent: by its nature, it can never satisfy most of its members.

I think it follows that the test of true religion is whether it can make an adventure out of being merely human. Something Chesterton actually did say is that “even nursery tales only echo an almost pre-natal leap of interest and amazement. These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.”

The fact of existence, rather than nothingness, is itself astonishing. In the same vein, Isaiah once stressed that the messiah would look like any other human, with “nothing in his appearance to attract our attention.” From this I gather that what looks outwardly like normalcy is already, inwardly, a miracle.

Love,
Spencer