Well this phrase keeps coming up here and there and indeed it has come up in regard to the Coronavirus and the lockdowns. Though its not the first I have heard people talk about a "new normal".
It reminded me of a interesting passage in CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength, in which one of the protagonists Mark Studdock has been taken to the objective room at Belbury - he is being put through an initiation for entry into the innermost circle of its elite planners.
The objective room was a strange place but yet not totally strange or weird, and in many respects it was like an ordinary committee room, all the same Mark begins to notice peculiar aspects including the proportions of the room itself, and other unusual things like spots on the ceiling and spots on a table in the room. Its like these oddities are provoking him to figure them out, either to count the spots on the ceiling or find some regularity in them or find a correspondence between the ones on the ceiling and the ones on the table, - such that he has to keep checking himself from puzzling over them. There are also pictures on the walls, some surrealist, some religious (but some alteration has been made to them), but as he examines them there is something about them too he cannot put is finger on but which he finds tends to wither his mind the more he looks at them. So he turns from them.
What I want to mention about all this is that in this strange environment an idea comes to Mark which is the idea of the Straight or the Normal. Here is a couple of short excerpts from the book:
"But after an hour or so this long, high coffin of a room began to produce on Mark an effect which his instructor had probably not anticipated. There was no return of the attack which he had suffered last night in the cell. Whether because he had already survived that attack, or because the imminence of death had drawn the tooth of his lifelong desire for the esoteric, or because he had (in a fashion) called very urgently for help, the built and painted perversity of this room had the effect of making him aware, as he had never been aware before, of this room's opposite. As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else - something he vaguely called the 'Normal' apparently existed. He had never thought about it before. But there it was - solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and the sunlight, and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. He was not thinking in moral terms at all; or else (what is much the same thing) he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal. "All that", as he called it, was what he chose. If the scientific point of view led away from 'all that', then be damned to the scientific point of view! The vehemence of hi choice almost took his breath away; he had not had such a sensation before. For the moment he hardly cared if Frost and Wither killed him."
***
"And day by day, as the process went on, that idea of the Straight or the Normal which had occurred to him during his first visit to this room, grew stronger and more solid in his mind till it had become a kind of mountain. He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one's own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him - something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to."
Later in his training or initiation, Mark (who by the way we are told in the story has never been a believer in christianity, unlike his wife Jane who was for a time in childhood) is taken back to the objective room and on the floor is laid an almost life size crucifix, "a work of art in the Spanish tradition, ghastly and realistic" He is instructed by Frost to trample on it and insult it other ways.
"Mark himself was surprised at the emotions he was undergoing. He did not regard the image with anything at all like a religious feeling. Most emphatically it did not belong to that idea of the Straight or Normal or Wholesome which had, for the last few days, been his support against what he now knew of the innermost circle at Belbury. The horrible vigour of its realism was indeed, in its own way as remote from that Idea as anything else in the room. That was one source of his reluctance. To insult even a carved image of such agony seemed an abominable act. But it was not the only source. With the introduction of this Christian symbol the whole situation had somehow altered. The thing was becoming incalcuable. His simple antithesis of the Normal and the Diseased had obviously failed to take something into account. Why was the crucifix there? Why were more than half the poison-pictures religious? He had a sense of new parties to the conflict - potential allies and enemies which he had not suspected before. "If I take a step in any direction," he thought, "I may step over a precipice." A donkey-like determination to plant hoofs and stay still at all costs arose in his mind."
Frost presses him to make haste and continue with the exercises. Mark is almost overcome because he is used to obeying Frost's quiet commands. He begins to look at the crucifix in a new way and though still no believer in christianity he doesn't doubt the man called Jesus lived and had been executed by the Belbury of that time.
"And that, as he suddenly saw, explained why this image, though not itself an image of the Straight or Normal, was yet in opposition to crooked Belbury. It was a picture of what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight - what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross."
Well i was thinking and would like others input, and not just from CS Lewis, but if you want to mention any other authors on this. We have life in this world which is fallen and it has its struggles - digging a garden takes efforts and sweat. But how does that norm compare with life in Jesus' Kingdom? And what of these 'new norms' they cannot become permanent, but how do we cope spiritually in the meantime? I spend a good deal of time alone anyway, living by myself.
But its seems at times like there are some who would attempt if they could to establish a new scientific norm in society, but if Lewis's That Hideous Strength is anything to go by that will not succeed, at least not for long.
Of course depending on ones reading of the Bible and interpretation of the End Times, one might think all believing christians will be taken away by a rapture and then a something like a fully technically planned society would be established under Antichrist, until Jesus Christ returns with the Armies of Heaven to vanquish the Devil, the AntiChrist and False Prophet once and for all.
In Lewis's story, Ransom and the remnant of Logres would not likely have been raptured they'd have been exterminated as pests (though have gone to glory) if Belbury had not been defeated by Heavenly Powers. Thus Ransom thought so in the story when he said: "Don't be cast down Margaret. If they kill Cecil, we shall none of us be let live many hours after him. It will be a shorter separation than you could have hoped for in the course of Nature."
Was it Burn's who said "The best laid plans o' mice and men often go awry." Well in That Hideous Strength, Belbury's plans very much go awry!
So that is some interesting stuff from Lewis, with a few musings of my own.
You are welcome to if you wish to add your own thoughts on any of the above.
It reminded me of a interesting passage in CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength, in which one of the protagonists Mark Studdock has been taken to the objective room at Belbury - he is being put through an initiation for entry into the innermost circle of its elite planners.
The objective room was a strange place but yet not totally strange or weird, and in many respects it was like an ordinary committee room, all the same Mark begins to notice peculiar aspects including the proportions of the room itself, and other unusual things like spots on the ceiling and spots on a table in the room. Its like these oddities are provoking him to figure them out, either to count the spots on the ceiling or find some regularity in them or find a correspondence between the ones on the ceiling and the ones on the table, - such that he has to keep checking himself from puzzling over them. There are also pictures on the walls, some surrealist, some religious (but some alteration has been made to them), but as he examines them there is something about them too he cannot put is finger on but which he finds tends to wither his mind the more he looks at them. So he turns from them.
What I want to mention about all this is that in this strange environment an idea comes to Mark which is the idea of the Straight or the Normal. Here is a couple of short excerpts from the book:
"But after an hour or so this long, high coffin of a room began to produce on Mark an effect which his instructor had probably not anticipated. There was no return of the attack which he had suffered last night in the cell. Whether because he had already survived that attack, or because the imminence of death had drawn the tooth of his lifelong desire for the esoteric, or because he had (in a fashion) called very urgently for help, the built and painted perversity of this room had the effect of making him aware, as he had never been aware before, of this room's opposite. As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else - something he vaguely called the 'Normal' apparently existed. He had never thought about it before. But there it was - solid, massive, with a shape of its own, almost like something you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with. It was all mixed up with Jane and fried eggs and soap and the sunlight, and the rooks cawing at Cure Hardy and the thought that, somewhere outside, daylight was going on at that moment. He was not thinking in moral terms at all; or else (what is much the same thing) he was having his first deeply moral experience. He was choosing a side: the Normal. "All that", as he called it, was what he chose. If the scientific point of view led away from 'all that', then be damned to the scientific point of view! The vehemence of hi choice almost took his breath away; he had not had such a sensation before. For the moment he hardly cared if Frost and Wither killed him."
***
"And day by day, as the process went on, that idea of the Straight or the Normal which had occurred to him during his first visit to this room, grew stronger and more solid in his mind till it had become a kind of mountain. He had never before known what an Idea meant: he had always thought till now that they were things inside one's own head. But now, when his head was continually attacked and often completely filled with the clinging corruption of the training, this Idea towered up above him - something which obviously existed quite independently of himself and had hard rock surfaces which would not give, surfaces he could cling to."
Later in his training or initiation, Mark (who by the way we are told in the story has never been a believer in christianity, unlike his wife Jane who was for a time in childhood) is taken back to the objective room and on the floor is laid an almost life size crucifix, "a work of art in the Spanish tradition, ghastly and realistic" He is instructed by Frost to trample on it and insult it other ways.
"Mark himself was surprised at the emotions he was undergoing. He did not regard the image with anything at all like a religious feeling. Most emphatically it did not belong to that idea of the Straight or Normal or Wholesome which had, for the last few days, been his support against what he now knew of the innermost circle at Belbury. The horrible vigour of its realism was indeed, in its own way as remote from that Idea as anything else in the room. That was one source of his reluctance. To insult even a carved image of such agony seemed an abominable act. But it was not the only source. With the introduction of this Christian symbol the whole situation had somehow altered. The thing was becoming incalcuable. His simple antithesis of the Normal and the Diseased had obviously failed to take something into account. Why was the crucifix there? Why were more than half the poison-pictures religious? He had a sense of new parties to the conflict - potential allies and enemies which he had not suspected before. "If I take a step in any direction," he thought, "I may step over a precipice." A donkey-like determination to plant hoofs and stay still at all costs arose in his mind."
Frost presses him to make haste and continue with the exercises. Mark is almost overcome because he is used to obeying Frost's quiet commands. He begins to look at the crucifix in a new way and though still no believer in christianity he doesn't doubt the man called Jesus lived and had been executed by the Belbury of that time.
"And that, as he suddenly saw, explained why this image, though not itself an image of the Straight or Normal, was yet in opposition to crooked Belbury. It was a picture of what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight - what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross."
Well i was thinking and would like others input, and not just from CS Lewis, but if you want to mention any other authors on this. We have life in this world which is fallen and it has its struggles - digging a garden takes efforts and sweat. But how does that norm compare with life in Jesus' Kingdom? And what of these 'new norms' they cannot become permanent, but how do we cope spiritually in the meantime? I spend a good deal of time alone anyway, living by myself.
But its seems at times like there are some who would attempt if they could to establish a new scientific norm in society, but if Lewis's That Hideous Strength is anything to go by that will not succeed, at least not for long.
Of course depending on ones reading of the Bible and interpretation of the End Times, one might think all believing christians will be taken away by a rapture and then a something like a fully technically planned society would be established under Antichrist, until Jesus Christ returns with the Armies of Heaven to vanquish the Devil, the AntiChrist and False Prophet once and for all.
In Lewis's story, Ransom and the remnant of Logres would not likely have been raptured they'd have been exterminated as pests (though have gone to glory) if Belbury had not been defeated by Heavenly Powers. Thus Ransom thought so in the story when he said: "Don't be cast down Margaret. If they kill Cecil, we shall none of us be let live many hours after him. It will be a shorter separation than you could have hoped for in the course of Nature."
Was it Burn's who said "The best laid plans o' mice and men often go awry." Well in That Hideous Strength, Belbury's plans very much go awry!
So that is some interesting stuff from Lewis, with a few musings of my own.
You are welcome to if you wish to add your own thoughts on any of the above.
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