Word for the Day: Hypernormalization
Hypernormalization.
That’s my word for the day. Actually, for the week. Well, actually actually, for months.
It’s a mouthful. Though it’s new to me, Upworthy reports that it appeared in a 2005 book by historian Alexei Yurchak. Yurchak used the term to refer to the sense of things in the last years of the Soviet Union, “when everyone [in the Soviet Union] knew the system was failing, but since no one could imagine a possible alternative to the status quo, politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society.”
Last week I posted an excerpt from Lauren Markham’s book Immemorial as a commonplace:
…to be alive on today’s planet is, as Daisy Hildyard writes, to hold two selves, to inhabit two bodies. “You have an individual body,” she writes, “in which you exist, eat, sleep, and go about your day-to-day life. You also have a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales.” You can just be sitting somewhere in, say, Marseille, as she sees it, while your second body is “floating above a pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of the city, it is inside a freight container on the docks, and it is also thousands of miles away, on a flood plain in Bangladesh, in another man’s lungs.” Essayist Elvia Wilk refers to this second body as “the ecosystem body,” which both influences and is influenced by “ecologies beyond the individual self.” We may or may not be aware of body number two, but the split is unavoidable, we inhabit both at once: the innocent and the implicated (p. 57).
She’s talking there about our living in the midst of a climate crisis; I rather suspect she’d agree that the natural world around us is not the only system that’s failing. In the United States and other countries we face explicit and more and more concrete attacks on anything even close to a functioning democracy. The financial system is more and more unstable, leaving many people on the edge of financial collapse.
In some ways, I live the normal day-to-day life of someone fortunate and privileged enough to have a place to sleep and no immediate concerns about food, intellectual stimulation, and medical care. At the same time, I know that my simple day-to-day routines, despite my attempts to simplify and reduce, continue to damage the larger environment. Despite living without a car, relying instead on walking, cycling, or mass transit to get around the city, I consume more than my share of resources. Despite the fact that I’m retired and no longer working, my partner and I have saved enough over the years that we are unlikely to run out of resources before we die.
Still, the world around me seems to be falling apart.
A friend told me recently that when someone in her family was near death, she called her sister to ask if they could go together to be with their dying relative. The sister said something like “I’m not sure I can do that. I just put a pot of soup on to cook.” Of course the sister decided pretty quickly that she wanted to be with her family and the dying relative. But the immediate response captures something of the sense of hypernormalization: how do I take care of day-to-day matters when it seems that things are falling apart around me?
I know that I’m fortunate and privileged. I know that there are people being seized on the street and whisked away to gulags in other countries and in the United States. I know that when I hit the streets in one of the major protests against the current administration it’s more than likely that I’ll return safely that night to my bed, and that I’ll have something for breakfast the next morning. I know that my giving money to support political causes, independent journalists, and those less fortunate than I am doesn’t mean that I’ll be living on the street myself.
The challenge I put to myself is the challenge to see what’s going on around me as decidedly not normal, even when I’m able to maintain something like normality in my day-to-day life. Or, to put the point in terms of Markham’s contrast between the innocent self and the implicated self, the challenge I face is to align those two selves more closely to form an integrated self more likely to nurture a cultural and natural world whose systems support the florishing not only of all human beings, but also of what Robin Wall Kimmerer and others call the more-than-human world.