What Plays in Peoria

People used to talk about whether something would “play in Peoria.” I don’t know if it matters anymore. Caterpillar left the city for Deerfield in 2017 (and then left Deerfield for Texas). A few years later, the proverbial center of American normalcy was one of the country’s fastest shrinking cities. When most people leave, how normal are the ones who stay?

Every summer we camp with family at a farm not far from Peoria. On our drive home this year, I saw in the city’s downtown a billboard advertising a therapy business called Occult Mental Health. Along with counseling and crisis intervention, they offer ketamine infusions and medical marijuana. And their slogan, printed in huge dark letters on the billboard, invites potential customers to imagine something even more ambitious than the passing peace of a nice high. “Embrace Your Inner Demons,” the board reads. Is that a permission slip, or is it a command? I wasn’t sure.

It didn’t help that our camping trip had ended on the sour note of an odd dispute about therapy. Apparently, everybody now believes that everybody should have a therapist. The idea is that therapy is not just for troubled souls; therapy is for all souls. In fact, it’s a little weird if you don’t go to therapy. It seems the true virtue of therapy – never mind whether it’s helpful, whether it’s necessary, whether or not it’s a racket – is that it’s a perfectly normal thing to do. And that’s what I want to talk about: not therapy per se, which can be good or bad, and might in some sense be what we most urgently need, as Mike Sauter has argued. Psychotherapist Art Kusserow emphasizes that therapy at its best is “not an echo chamber in which the therapist simply reflects upon and reinforces ingrained but unhealthy behaviors, ideas, and patterns of communication within relationships.” Here I’m more interested in therapy at its worst, which is therapy as a culture – a culture that not only reinforces but normalizes those unhealthy patterns.

If you go to the website for Occult Mental Health, you’ll find little talk of Peorian normalcy. The homepage is a variation on the billboard, although instead of your demons, you’re only required to embrace your weirdness: “Step into a world where your quirks are celebrated and understood. We offer mental healthcare for everyone, because we are all a little weird.” (“$300 off Mood Infusion Series.”)

I guess it’s true that we’re all a little weird. When he heard about somebody being eccentric, my grandpa would always say that “it wouldn’t do for us all to be alike” (sometimes adding “otherwise everybody’d be in love with my wife”). And it’s good to celebrate the fact, as FPR often does. A world of eccentrics is better than a world of conformists, and celebrating eccentricity helps us resist pressures to conform. “Keep Portland Weird,” as they say in the West Coast city we called home for a few years. They even put it on their billboards.

Some people would like to Make Peoria Weird. Last year the New York Times profiled a local booster named Angie Ostaszewski who uses social media to attract new residents by showing them the houses they could buy for cheap. It’s a good idea. Ten years ago in Boston we rented an ugly, cramped little apartment above a noisy plumber’s shop for $1000 a month, which is only a little less than our mortgage payment here in Dubuque, where we live in a nice roomy house on nearly an acre. We were the kind of person this TikTok “influencer” is appealing to, and she’s brought in hundreds of them from the big cities on both coasts.

But the newcomers need certain reassurances that their bigger-city eccentricities will be welcomed by the locals. “What’s novel about Ms. Ostaszewski’s posts is not that she’s highlighting a midsize, Midwestern city as an affordable place to live, but also as a place where a diverse, inclusive community can be formed.” Because the transplants are women of color, they are black and trans, they are artists. They are weird. One of them, a Ms. Damon, “worried about acceptance. ‘Being Black and queer, I’m very wary about places that I go, because you just never know if you’re going to be welcome or not,’ said Ms. Damon . . . But she was pleasantly surprised by the progressive community she found. ‘They’re very big on making sure people feel included, making sure queer people and people of color have their spaces.’”

Normalcy is a weird term. On the one hand, it’s just a word for what most people do: “most people go to therapy.” On the other hand, most people do what they do because it’s normal. “Normal” describes and prescribes at the same time: “everybody should go to therapy.” Normal is a reason for doing this, not that. People live this way, not that way, because this way is normal, and that way is weird. People conform to expectations.

Of course, American people are different: we are individualists. We’re pioneers, we’re trailblazers, we’re Henry David Thoreau on Walden Pond. “The greater part of what my neighbors call good, I know in my heart to be bad,” said Thoreau. We’re non-conformists. Our natural heroes are the motley crew of outcasts and underdogs, the rainbow coalition, the lovable team of misfits, the beleaguered allies. Our natural enemies are jackbooted locksteppers in gray uniforms with numbers in place of names. This guy is our guy.

Noting the illogic is the simplest move you can make here: if your reason for being an “individualist” is that everybody’s an individualist, then you’re not an individualist. Thus when they’re not harping on the straightforward conformism of the small town or the suburb, or suggesting that beneath that boredom dark secrets lie buried, workaday critics of American dreams will make hay from the obvious contradiction. Sartre wrote a good essay about it. “It is in displaying his conformism that [the American] feels freest.”

Clever critics like a good if/then statement; it lets them paint a big picture of “society” without having to know anything about this or that person. It’s true that if your reason for being an individualist is that everybody is, then you’re not one. But the question is whether that’s your reason, or whether, unlike “society,” you have a better one. If you are an individualist not because you want to keep it weird, but because you have convictions, and because you don’t take someone else’s assumption that you’re just keeping it weird as a reason to adjust those convictions – well then, you genuinely aren’t an individualist. You’re an honest-to-god individual.

Of course, the critic’s real idea is often that honest-to-god individuality is impossible, that it’s conformity all the way down, nothing but adjustment to the norm. In which case, the critic isn’t actually criticizing the American. He’s excusing him – maybe even admiring him, as Sartre almost seems to. Everyone conforms, but American conformity is more sophisticated. Our individualism, because it’s an ism, means our left hand doesn’t have to watch what our right hand is doing. Unlike the less civilized cultures, we Americans adjust without friction.

Maybe that’s because we have so much professional help. The official line is that we don’t have enough of it, but official lines make me reach for my gun. When the APA tells me there’s a mental health crisis, and that part of the crisis is the shortage of mental health providers, it sounds a bit like those bankers who shed a lot of tears about the “unbanked.” Still, the part about the mental health crisis seems right, if we change the phrase “mental health” to something less serviceable to the self-interest of the mental health providers. “Mental health” (and now “brain health”) is supposed to be sciency and respectable in a way that “cultural decay” or “spiritual degradation” is not, but the latter terms have the advantage of including a possibility that will always escape every provider of professional services, which is that the providers and the services might be part of the crisis. “Psychoanalysis is the disease of which it believes itself to be the cure,” said Karl Kraus, who could have been talking about any number of contemporary institutions.

The fact that the official-line-writers at the APA are now celebrating “mental health apps” as an elegant solution certainly bolsters my suspicions: “[I]nnovators are exploring interventions that diverge from traditional therapy models. The creative approaches include forms of support that require less time commitment from individuals, can be offered through digital devices, or both.” I don’t know if it’s mentally healthy to spend less time with other people and more time on screens, but doing so will certainly make you more normal, and being normal feels good, so I guess they’re on to something. Freud himself said the point of therapy wasn’t to make people happy, it was to make them ok with being unhappy. Happiness isn’t normal; unhappiness is. Some people don’t accept this, and those people turn weird. The only kind of “happiness” we can have is the kind we get from being normal, and being normal means being unhappy in that ho-hum sort of way that comes from being content with civilization’s discontents. You have to learn to stop worrying and love the Internet. For Freud, therapy was the management (dare I say “repression”?) of malcontentment. But these days there’s an app for that. Do you worry you might be spending too much time on your device? Download TalkSpace and you can text a therapist about it.

Of course, most therapists today aren’t Freudians, and Freud’s books are consigned to the philosophy shelf, “philosophy” being a polite term for speculation and pseudoscience. (Where is this “id” you speak of? Can I see it on an MRI machine?) More to the point, most therapists today certainly aren’t conservatives, and they’d hate to think they might share the fundamentally conservative aim of Freud’s project. Today’s therapists do not repress: they liberate people from repression. Therapy today is self-consciously progressive, doing its part to bend that arc.

But politics these days is pretty weird (which is probably why some politicians promise to make America “great again,” as in, “before the weirdos took over,” while their opponents want to “restore normalcy”). Today’s progressives obviously are today’s conservatives. They’re coded as left-wing, but true leftists do not individualize social problems (they’d rather socialize individual problems). Progressives love to individualize social problems. Progressives will talk about the “social determinants of health” (including mental health), but the social determinants that most interest them are always the ones that they have a private interest in managing. The solution is always to expand the provision of services by a licensing cartel to the individuals suffering from the social problems. Hence the tell-tale talk of “access,” which sometimes seems to be the only tool in the progressive toolbox. “‘The lack of access to mental health care is an equity issue,” said Martyn Whittingham, PhD, a licensed psychologist in Ohio who developed a brief group therapy intervention. ‘Too often people from marginalized communities struggle to access quality psychotherapy, and these innovative strategies can provide support to many more people.’” Martyn Whittingham obviously knows the official line.

The leftist thinks the system is the problem (which is why I get along so well with leftists). The progressive thinks the problem is insufficient access to the system they run. For the progressive, the system’s reach must expand: this is called “diversity. The system eliminates unfair advantages and rebalances the social equation: this is called “equity.” People who have been left out of the system (because they are too diverse) must be brought in: this is called “inclusion.”

Where’s a hippie when you need one? We’re talking about the System, with a capital ‘S’! We’re talking about the Man, man. But the Man has learned: now the Man wears the tie-dye (straightened out to make a rainbow, of course) and shouts “you do you,” and all the young kids who should be marching on the Man start chanting his lines like charms against an evil spell. If anyone who lives differently challenges them to live differently, the system is there to validate their hardwon identity as one face in a crowd that now comes in multiple colors and therefore represents Progress. “You must change your life,” says Holderlin. “No thanks,” say the kids. They feel way too included for that.

In the warm light of the System, it makes sense to link therapy with the occult, as in Occult Mental Health. There’s a real complementarity between occult or New Age spirituality and progressive politics, something Tara Burton explores in Strange Rites (where she also examines the equally real complementarity between occult spirituality and the online Neitzscheans of the post-Christian right: a topic for another day). After all, the occult is devoted to making contact with what’s weird, with what’s out-there, with the uncanny edge of the real. Occult practice is all about flipping the relation between the center and the margin – a practice that fits naturally with the progressive project of “centering marginalized voices” by decentering the other ones. The witch uses magic to center the margin and dreams of a little tarot shop to call her own, while the progressive thinks “science is real” and envisions a full-blown therapeutic state (as Thomas Szasz called it). So yes, there are differences (I’d rather hang out with the witch). But if it’s hard to imagine a practicing witch who believes marriage is between a man and a woman (let alone that men can’t become women), that might be because witches tend to share this inversive sensibility that draws power from the process of normalizing the abnormal – a magic ritual that is the official business of therapists in particular, though most of the other professions are just as happy to share in this general “triumph of the therapeutic.” To normalize therapy is to normalize normalization.

It’s important to understand why this process works. Many a defender of normalcy scoffs at the progressive doctrine of social construction and dismisses “wokeness” as intellectual chicanery, as sophistry. To be sure, much of it is. But the process works because “normal” really is an unstable category: it derives its meaning from its opposite. Normal is whatever is not abnormal; abnormal is whatever is not normal. It’s relative, it changes over time. What’s more, normalcy really does confer benefits on those who fit in its bounds, while those seen as “abnormal” really do suffer from stigma, or worse. I have a student whose killer argument against the progressive extreme is just “because it’s weird.” (I’m looking at you, Grant.) There’s something refreshing about that. It cuts to the chase and captures an intuition. But I still have to remind him that it’s not an argument. At my house, we eat sardines for breakfast and sleep on the floor. That’s pretty weird, too. Are we part of this problem?

Just as some people would like to Make Peoria Weird, others would like to go back to Peoria – back to the before-times, when the old normal reigned, and nobody went to therapy. It won’t work. You can’t oppose the normalization of weird with an appeal to normalcy: the whole point is that weird is the new normal. Both the old and the new are in their time “normal.” One is not more “normal” than the other. You have to have some higher standard. The question isn’t “what’s normal”? The question is “what ought to be normal?”

This, I think, is where many conservatives who oppose progressives by appealing to “tradition” go wrong. By “tradition” they often mean nothing more than “normalcy,” by which they just mean “what most people (used to) do.” Tradition is something more robust; if it’s really going to be tradition, it’s got to make contact with the permanent things, even if it gives them a particular form. The problem with therapy culture is not that it’s normalizing “weirdness,” it’s that the weirdness it normalizes is a rejection, not of what happens to have been normal, but of any suggestion that some things are permanent things. It’s a rejection of the idea that some things ought to be normal and others not, and that the distinction can be made. (The war on stigma always ends up as a war against such distinctions. “Being Black and queer,” Ms. Damon has to worry about whether she’ll be welcomed. But I’d like to insist that “Black” ought to be normal, and that if Black wouldn’t play in the old Peoria, so much the worse for Peoria; while at the same time I’d suggest that “queer” ought not to be normal. I might be wrong about the latter, but that’s not the point. What do these two things have to do with each other? Mainly it’s the morally irrelevant fact that both have at some point been stigmatized. But in therapy culture, stigma is the only morally relevant fact.)

The better response, which may or may not be accurately called a “conservative” response, is in this context going to look pretty weird. It’s going to look weird to live like an individual, according to strange convictions about those permanent things that transcend individual preferences. In a lot of cases it’s going to look like you’re being weird for the sake of being weird. One thing that might set you apart is that you’re not going to be very interested in normalizing your weirdness, in “fighting the stigma” by joining some anti-stigma movement (are there any movements these days that aren’t about fighting stigma?) But in general you can’t be too concerned with normalizing it or not normalizing it, with fighting some culture war aimed at producing a Peoria where you’ll be “welcomed” and “included,” where you’ll have your own “spaces.” You have to be mainly concerned with just living it.

There’s a question worth debating here. Sure, maybe it’s not about what is or isn’t normal, it’s about what ought to be normal. Maybe you should pursue that ought whether or not it’s normal to do so: “normal” is different from “moral” (which is why the phrase “moral norms” always annoys me: seems like an oxymoron). Still, don’t we all want to live in a world where what’s moral is also what’s normal, where what’s normal is also what’s good? Staring at your phone is normal, for example, and I’d like to live in a world where staring at your phone is abnormal. That would make it easier for me to avoid staring at my phone. Everybody would look at me funny, and that would help me stop doing it. Don’t we even have some kind of moral and political obligation to try to build that world?

The idea that we do have such a duty is one of the healthier reasons for fighting a culture war. Presumably we all have an interest in the culture we have to live in, because culture – our shared habits of thinking and feeling and acting, our shared sense of normal – can make it easier or harder to be moral. Therapy culture starts with the opposite intuition, which is that we all have an interest in making it easier – by making it more normal – to be weird. “Step into a world where your quirks are celebrated and understood.” In other words: step into a world where there is no shared sense of “normal” (except therapy itself: therapy is normal!), precisely because there is no shared sense of moral,” precisely because there is no sense of “moral” to share. It’s all norms, all the way down. It’s “anti-culture,” as Philip Rieff termed it. A culture of no-culture.

I do think culture matters. (And I think that if it matters enough to fight for, it matters enough to fight in the right way). But I think there’s a limit to this logic, a tension that’s probably ineliminable. Suppose Peoria got it all right: everything that once played in Peoria was what ought to have played in Peoria. That doesn’t mean the Peorians were doing what they ought to do. The more normal it is to be a good person, the harder it might get to actually be a good person: you can just do what everybody else does, and get by. At the same time, being surrounded by good people might make it easier to become good. So building a good culture is tricky. It can make it easier to be good, but it can also make it easier to merely look good. And looking good is something else. Being good might look good, or it might look bad, depending on the circumstances.

Good culture or bad culture, old normal or new normal, “individuals” will always have to struggle to become individuals. It’s only the obstacle that changes. You don’t have to be normal. You don’t have to be weird. You just have to be a person – which is a moral ideal, not a fact of nature – and let the chips fall.

The kicker is that you can only really be a person if you’ve got other people to be a person with. (No man is an island; were you raised by wolves?) And of course, when people get together, they make a culture, which brings us back to that debatable question. The main localist insight here is that it’s easier to become a real person when the group is the right size, which means, not too big. Sure, a small group full of small people causes its own problems for its members. But localists think that by and large, small groups are more likely to grow big souls who love what’s good whether or not it’s what’s normal. So it’s no accident that the mass age is an age of therapy culture. I won’t say all, but I will say that many people today need therapists because many people don’t have people. “We offer mental health care for everyone, because we are all a little weird.” If being weird is something to be celebrated, why do you need therapy for it? I think what they really mean is: we offer mental health care for everyone, because everyone is a little lonely. But if you’re just lonely, you don’t need a therapist. You need a friend. Friends don’t charge you any money.

At the same time, there are going to be times when some people have to go off into the wilderness in order to bring back a prophetic word that cuts through the bullshit (and I mean bullshit, in the technical sense, because that’s mostly what we’ve got now: not so much “fake news” and “real news” as a lot of fake concern about the difference). You need other people to become a person; you also need solitude. That’s another localist insight, too, or at least it should be. Solitude requires a place; in the mass age, places become “spaces,” and there’s no solitude in space, because there’s no you in space: it’s a vacuum, and you can’t survive in a vacuum. So solitude is another thing that’s missing from therapy culture: time and space to be alone, time and space to learn to enjoy being alone. If you can enjoy being alone, you probably don’t need a therapist, because you’re friends with yourself. You don’t charge yourself any money, either.

I’m not saying people today don’t need therapy. Some people do; maybe a lot of people do. I’m saying a lot of people today need therapy because we live in a therapy culture, where everything is valid but none of it matters, where all the professional sturm und drang goes into normalizing what’s weird, and there’s no passion left for participating in what’s good, regardless of whether it plays in Peoria.

Image via Flickr