His usage of the word is correct and appropriate. Exceptions exist, obviously. So do norms. Valuing your family first and foremost is normal--thank god!
You are misunderstanding. I am not saying that valuing family is not normal, I am saying that because a person does not do so, given certain circumstances, does not make them abnormal. Family is a part of someone's life, and if you choose to define that person based on their family relationships, that is a mistake. There are so many people who are perfectly normal, and do not have close ties to a majority of their family. I have friends who are absolutely like brothers and sisters to me, and my kids will know and hear about them as well.
If you think people having abnormal families is a exception, you need to step outside your front door. I would say almost every family has people that other family members would not go out of the way for, and the circumstances are all that can define those situations, not a blanket "family is everything" statement.
> I am not saying that valuing family is not normal, I am saying that because a person does not do so, given certain circumstances, does not make them abnormal
I'm abnormal, in various ways. Some of those are (at least partially) my fault, some of them are entirely the fault of people other than me, some of them are nobody's fault. Everyone is abnormal, in at least a few ways. All families are abnormal–in some respects. Whether anybody should be ashamed to be abnormal depends entirely on the details of the specific abnormalities we are talking about.
People don't have relationships with their families for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, their family deserves all the blame, and they are an innocent victim. Sometimes, they deserve all the blame, and their family is an innocent victim. Sometimes, everyone is to blame. Maybe, sometimes, nobody is to blame. All those situations are abnormal (in the sense that normatively they should not occur), and a person or family in an abnormal situation is (in a certain sense) themselves abnormal. But, as I said, whether anyone ought to be ashamed of that abnormality depends on all those details, of how exactly they ended up in that situation.
The initial sentiment was not discussing the details in which people are normal or abnormal, but the aggregate understanding of what a "normal person" might be. You can't say everyone is abnormal, it becomes a meaningless baseline, which could just be what this whole discussion boils down to anyways. Otherwise, I agree with all of your points.
> You can't say everyone is abnormal, it becomes a meaningless baseline
You can't meaningfully say everyone is abnormal in the same way.
You can meaningfully say everyone is abnormal in lots of different ways, if for each of those individual ways, only a small minority of people (say <5%) is abnormal in that way.
Consider the variable "number of deceased older siblings at time of birth". For most people, that's zero. For a small minority of people, that's 1. For me, it is 5. That's extremely abnormal, I expect there'd be less than 0.001% of the population for whom that variable is so high. I'd be rather surprised if you were abnormal in that particular way, although surely there are other ways in which you are abnormal but I am not.
I am saying when you walk up to a person, know nothing about them, what actions do or do not make them normal in general...not in a very very specific parameter? If that person says "I don't really talk to my family"...does that make them an abnormal person in the most general sense?
I am happy to be abnormal then. I value friends first and foremost, family dead last. If my family wants something from me, they can line up with everyone else; if I consider them a friend I'll value them like all my other friends.
Put another way, I don't treat blood ties as anything special because doing so leads to bullshit. If that's abnormal, so be it; not my loss or problem.
he is talking about blood ties, that means siblings, parents and other relatives, not his wife.
i have a good relationship to one of my brothers, and no relationship at all to the other. likewise i have no relationship at all with my dads family. mostly because they are all much older. the few cousins my age i wasn't able to connect to for unknown reasons, even though i went to school with at least one of them. on the other hand i have a fabulous relationship with one of the cousins on my mothers side, despite not growing up together, nor having seen each other for decades. the difference? character and upbringing i guess. i also have a great relationship with his parents despite serious religious differences. my own parents? loyal, supportive but distant. i do have few good friends, who are quite clearly closer than many relatives. how could it even be otherwise? the closest is my partner, well, because, she wouldn't be my partner otherwise.
all-in-all, i am not very close to most of my family, something which my partner and their family could not understand at all. the mere idea of not being close to family was completely alien to them.
and in the end, this lack of closeness affected me greatly throughout my life.
so i value those that appreciate my presence. regardless of how we are related.
> i have a good relationship to one of my brothers, and no relationship at all to the other. likewise i have no relationship at all with my dads family. mostly because they are all much older. the few cousins my age i wasn't able to connect to for unknown reasons, even though i went to school with at least one of them.
I've always wished I was closer to my cousins than I am. Some of it is my fault, much of it is nobody's fault. But, I've never thought this was "normal". Well, in a descriptive sense, it probably is quite normal, in contemporary Western societies – while far less normal when compared to human history as a whole. Normatively, however, I don't think it is how the world should ideally be, and so in that sense it is abnormal, and hence (in that respect) I am abnormal.
I've always been least close to one of my brothers. There's reasons for that. In the last year or so, we've both been actively trying to improve our relationship. But again, I say that in ideal circumstances we would have always been closer, so in that sense I say our relationship has been normatively abnormal, which is another way in which I am normatively abnormal.
i never felt that it wasn't normal not to be close to anyone. it was my normal, but i did run unto people who did not understand at all that my brothers and me could not work together well. it wasn't that we didn't get along. we did, but everyone was doing their own thing more or less.
it is only now that i understand how not having people close to me when i grew up affected me throughout my life. it affects my relationship with my partner. how and who i look for as friends. how i treat my children, both positive and negative. (the negative being that i repeat mistakes of my parents, the positive that i am more mindful about how that will affect them)
> His usage of the word is correct and appropriate. Exceptions exist, obviously. So do norms. Valuing your family first and foremost is normal--thank god!
Yet, so many normal people do atrocious things- countless examples of normal mothers and fathers who abuse their kids, etc. You can say they are not normal, but that is just falling into the true scotsman fallacy.
> Yet, so many normal people do atrocious things- countless examples of normal mothers and fathers who abuse their kids, etc.
The problem is the word "normal" is ambiguous. It has both descriptive senses (e.g. "normal" as within two standard deviations of the mean) and normative senses ("normal" as conforming to norms which tell us how things should be), and people often shift between the two or mix them up without making that distinction clear.
> You can say they are not normal, but that is just falling into the true scotsman fallacy.
I don't think this is the "no true Scotsman fallacy" at all. Whether child abuse is "normal" in a descriptive sense is a factual question–I don't know the answer, but there are means available to produce one non-fallaciously (e.g. prevalence surveys). Whether child abuse is "normal" in the normative sense (conforming to norms of how things should be)–I hope we can all agree that "no, it isn't", and there is no fallacy in saying that.
Yes, I think you see my point. Talking about normality in regard to human behavior is incredibly superficial. Normality in that sense is more like a mask that is put on, which the wearer is often unaware they are doing. We are herd animals, and trying to blend into the herd is a behavior many of us feel compelled to do (and can involve as much self-deception as it can deception of others).
In my experience, the normal distribution of people I have met are from families that have problems (some more severe than others), yet that is the last thing they would share. They feel compelled to be normal and present themselves as happy, normal families.
Normality isn’t some mask it’s what you get from reasonably typical genetics and reasonably typical environments. Most people have something unusual about them, and the existence of such divination is completely normal because there’s so many different criteria. Similarly, the vast majority of 90 year olds have multiple significant health issues even if there isn’t a specific issue that’s nearly as universal.
It’s therefore normal for people to speak at least one language even if no specific language is universal.
PS: Humans aren’t herd animals, we’re social animals but there’s many kinds of social species. Ants, wolves, gorilla, and prairie dogs all have very distinct social structures from each other while cows, elk, etc have quite a lot in common with each other.
We are back to the ambiguity that affects all conversations about this. In my experience, most of the time when people are referring to what is normal, they are not actually referring to normal distribution, but to how they believe things should be concerning human behavior. Outside of ethicists who might be concerned with specifying norms, this is usually based upon group belief that they have adopted without reflection (i.e., herd behavior, trying to blend in, fit other people's expectations, etc).
I didn't find rayiner's original comment which spawned this tangent about "normality" that ambiguous myself – because I've read enough of his other comments, I have some idea of how he thinks, and I read what he says in light of that understanding. I can see how it could be seen as much more ambiguous by someone who lacks that background.
I read rayiner as, first and foremost, talking about the norms and values to which he subscribes, which he believes to be correct. And to the extent he was talking descriptively, I think his emphasis was on the central tendency of global human society, not the central tendency of the contemporary United States (or West more broadly). And I think that's true – most societies in human history have put enormous emphasis on family ties, and that's still true in the majority of countries worldwide – their recent de-emphasis in the contemporary West is a significant deviation from the (descriptive) norm of human history as a whole.
I’ve spoken to many people from many different backgrounds about their beliefs and it’s extremely unusual for people to not reflect on their beliefs.
However it’s easy to miss that frameworks of belief are self reinforcing. By which I mean belief in X increases the likelihood to believe in Y, and believing in Y increases the likelihood of believing in X. Therefore examining individual beliefs doesn’t necessarily accomplish anything and it’s much easier to swap to a new self consistent belief system than to adopt something unique to you yourself.
> In my experience, the normal distribution of people I have met are from families that have problems (some more severe than others), yet that is the last thing they would share. They feel compelled to be normal and present themselves as happy, normal families.
I think you are now talking about a third thing – "normality" as an appearance to which one feels social pressure to conform.
In many cultures, it is viewed as inappropriate to "air one's dirty laundry" with acquaintances, work colleagues, etc – "oversharing" – something which should be limited to close friends/family.
Yes, this is why I cringe whenever I hear someone use the word normal when referring to human behavior. It is used uncritically, and loaded with meaning stolen from other contexts, and has caused real harm.
Addendum: I'm not able to reply to your comment below, so I will add this here. Anytime you ground your argument on what normal people do, you are almost certainly deluding yourself. This is not an objective statement you can make. It is a subjective statement about your own beliefs that you have puffed up by appealing to your impression that other people share them. Real harm has been done and continues to be done for the sake of "normalness". I felt the need to poke that hole because it really bothers me that in this day, most folks still are unreflective about this.
> Addendum: I'm not able to reply to your comment below
Did you try clicking on the "X minutes ago" link? Usually, even if the reply link is hidden on the comment, it is visible if you go to the comment's individual page.
> Anytime you ground your argument on what normal people do, you are almost certainly deluding yourself. This is not an objective statement you can make.
I don't agree appeals to "normality" are necessarily self-delusion. I prefer not to use that kind of language myself, due to its ambiguity. But, I believe in the principle of charitable interpretation, which means I try to understand what a person meant by what they were saying (based on my background knowledge of how they think), and attempt to prefer the strongest possible reading of what someone else says (seek to steelman rather than strawman).
To say that putting strong emphasis on family ties is descriptively normal in terms of the bulk of human history–I think that is an objective factual claim which is true. If you think it is incorrect, I'm interested to know your evidence for that. As I said, I'd prefer to make this point without unqualified use of the ambiguous word "normal", but a point is not incorrect just because it was stated in a potentially ambiguous way.
If we are talking about normative senses, well that depends on what ethics one adopts, which in turn depends on what metaethics one adopts. Many people believe that ethics is inherently subjective, but I don't agree with them. Not a "self-delusion" unless you apply that label to anyone who adopts different axioms than you do – in which case they can throw it right back at you.
> Real harm has been done and continues to be done for the sake of "normalness"
I think it is true that harm is sometimes done in the name of the "normal" – but conversely, one can also argue that some harm has been caused by the rejection of that concept. Which harm is greater is determined both by one's ethical values, and also one's conclusions on disputed factual questions.
If you think people having abnormal families is a exception, you need to step outside your front door. I would say almost every family has people that other family members would not go out of the way for, and the circumstances are all that can define those situations, not a blanket "family is everything" statement.