Normal Has an Expiry Date
What a 450-year-old list tells us about the things we're certain of today
Almost everything we call normal wasn’t always normal.
And a lot of what we now find absurd was once as ordinary as brushing your teeth.
In the 1570s, a French philosopher named Montaigne sat in a stone tower reading accounts of faraway societies, and started keeping a list of things entire civilisations were certain were normal.
One entry was very interesting to me.
In some cultures, blackening your teeth was polite.
The done thing.
White teeth were considered ugly.
Which means somewhere out there was a teenager staring into a mirror, quietly worried that his teeth were coming in too white. That was his “am I weird?” moment.
Nobody in that world thought they were being strange.
They thought they were being normal.
Same as us, right now.
Normal isn’t a fixed thing. It’s a snapshot of whatever the room agreed on in the year you happened to be born.
Now, the point isn't to be weird for the sake of it. The point is that normal was never a verdict. It was just the room's opinion, and you're allowed to disagree with the room.
So the question I’m pondering now: how many things we treat as obviously normal today will look insane to someone reading the records 400 years from now?
I don’t have the answer, but my guess is the list is longer than we’d like.
All of this comes from a piece by George Mack that I read this week.
It’ll poke at a few beliefs you didn’t know you were holding.
Read here:
Worth your Sunday.
Manoj
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