How We Misunderstand What Is Normal

The term “normal” once referred to the statistical idea of average (the norm), but in recent decades the word has acquired instead the medical connotation of “healthy.” Even the hard sciences are affected. In good science, the opposite of normal (abnormal) in the statistical sense means “not average”; that is, above average or below average. No judgement is implied. However, when one switches to the frame of reference acquired from medicine, the opposite of normal is “pathological,” and a value judgement is very definitely evident. This switch or drift in the meaning of normal has become practically universal and increasingly harmful.

In actuality, when a person is not normal in the statistical frame of reference that person may, in fact, be extraordinary in some positive way, unusually intelligent for instance, or exceptionally perceptive. However, to be not normal in the current usage of the word implies that a person is somehow dangerous, or at the very least, malfunctioning.

The same has become true for events. When something is not normal, it no longer means unusual – it means something is wrong.

This situation may help explain how the healthcare systems in Western nations come to be so chronically overused. The statistical bell curve is the basis for many medical diagnoses, and only results that fall within the central portion of the curve qualify as “normal.” In other words, the medical professions deem anyone near the edges of the range of possible results as having a disease – even though many show no symptoms and never will. High blood pressure is diagnosed in this way, as are thyroid gland “irregularities.” In the thyroid tests, one in ten falls too far from the centre of the bell curve to count as normal. Consequently, at one fell swoop, a staggering ten percent of the population is ill from just this one “disease.”

Sometimes there is a feedback effect from labelling people in this way. Those diagnosed with hypertension suffer a further rise in their blood pressure after learning they have a problem. Given our current rather morbid preoccupation with our health, this probably should not surprise anyone.

The incorporation of the medical meaning of the term “normal” into everyday usage shows how the preoccupation with health has affected the way people think. Experts in the history of science have pointed out that nothing like this drift in meaning occurs on the side of the physical sciences where thinking must be more rigorously objective and definitions of terms more precise. Yet the confusion surrounding the concept of what is normal is even now creeping into these “hard” sciences.

Serious ramifications arise from redefining the word “normal” along medical lines. By assuming that abnormal must mean something is wrong, we set up a deceiving and self-destructive way of viewing our extremely variable world. Recently, I heard President Obama making one of his many impressive speeches. In it, he mentioned climate change, attributing great significance to the appearance of both drought and super storms in America at the same time. He claimed this could not be just a coincidence.

In other words, Mr. Obama regarded the simultaneous occurrence of two edge-of-the-bell-curve weather events as abnormal and therefore an indication of destructive climate change. Yet ferocious storms and extreme droughts happening in concert is actually a regular occurrence. Drought and powerful storms go naturally together and always have.

Consider the “Dirty Thirties” droughts that brought on the devastating dust bowl conditions, and then recall the huge hurricanes that ravaged American coasts during the same period. For example, the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane was the strongest tropical cyclone of the 1935 Atlantic hurricane season, and the most intense hurricane to make landfall in the United States and the Atlantic Basin in recorded history (Wikipedia). The worst dust bowl years of 1934 and 1936 bracketed the great hurricane. In the 1930s (an earlier warm spell), drought and huge storms occurred together just as they do today.

Storms and droughts are abnormal weather events, but they are not abnormal in the sense that something is wrong with the weather. They are abnormal only in the statistical sense that they are not average weather events.

It is vitally important that we remedy our present misunderstanding of what normal means. President Obama and other leaders who share his confused views are in a position to set incredibly powerful wheels in motion. They enjoy the support of an equally confused electorate. We must soberly remind ourselves that drastic and costly actions taken to head off imaginary threats constitute self-destructive behaviour.