In that class there were two boys who had autism which resulted in severe academic and social and communicative impairments. One of them was completely nonverbal and had been his entire life. As I understood it, he had never been capable of speaking or reading, could not dress himself, wore sanitary garments, could not go to the bathroom without assistance. He would occasionally screech very loudly, without clear cause. I believe these days he would be referred to as having Level Three autism, as defined by the DSM. He needed a lot of help, and though he was unable to complete what might conventionally be called academic work the school provided him with structure, support, and time during which his mother didn’t have to care for him. I met her on several occasions when she came to pick him up after school. She would sometimes talk about the difficulties of raising a disabled child in language that would be frowned on today, but I admired how frank and honest she was.
I thought of that mother when I read about the recent cancelation of an academic panel at Harvard. It seems a panel of experts was slated to speak on the subject of how best to help those with autism. But as they planned to speak about treatment, about treating autism as a hindrance to be managed, the event was decried as “violently ableist” by Harvard activists and swiftly shut down. It’s worth looking at the petition that was organized as part of this effort. One part reads
Autism is a neurodevelopmental and neurobiological disability that is not treatable or curable. It is not an illness or disease and most importantly, it is not inherently negative. Autistic people at Harvard and globally have advocated in the face of ableism to defend ourselves from such hateful, eugenicist logic.This is, I think, nonsensical. It asserts that autism is a disability, a dis-ability, but also that it’s not an illness, a disease, or inherently negative. But the very concept of disability depends on the notion that disabilities are inherently negative. If they are not in some sense disabling, the term has no meaning. What’s more, the entire moral and legal logic that underpins the concept of reasonable accommodation - the affordances we make for people with disabilities, mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act - depends on the idea that these things are both unchosen and harmful. If they’re not, then there’s no communal obligation to accommodate them. What would they even need accommodation for? (...)
In the years that followed my brief employment at the school district, the ideology that led to people like King was born. In the early 2010s there was a flurry of interest in autism. Dozens of books and hundreds of essays were written about autism, almost all of which talked about it as a set of valuable personality quirks rather than as a disorder. In article after ponderous article, autism was described as a newer, perhaps better way of thinking, sometimes even a “new evolution” for the human species. Always, always, always, this navel-gazing fixated relentlessly on the highest-functioning people with autism. You could read tens of thousands of words in this genre without ever once being informed about the existence of those whose autism debilitates them. Whenever I read yet another article talking about how some high-achieving computer scientist saw their autism as the key to their success, I would think of those whose autism has prevented them from enjoying all manner of elements of human life. Where were those people in all of that hype? Will Tyler Cowen ever write a book about them? Are they ever going to appear on the cover of Forbes magazine or whatever the fuck? No. They have been replaced; in their stead, we have members of the striving classes whose autism has never prevented them from flourishing at everything they’ve ever tried. And since “autism is not a disorder” has become the enforced opinion, those whose autism plainly is a disorder have to be marginalized - by the very people who complain about the marginalization of the “neurodiverse.” Autism has been gentrified.
This is a dynamic I now cannot stop seeing: once a human attribute like autism or mental illness becomes seen as an identity marker that is useful for social positioning among the chattering class, the conversation about that attribute inevitably becomes fixated on those among that chattering class. It becomes impossible to escape their immense social gravity. The culture of that attribute becomes distorted and bent towards the interests and biases of those who enjoy the privilege of holding society’s microphone. Because you must be able to effectively communicate to take part in the conversation, and because all of the usual privileges of class and circumstance influence whose voice sounds the loudest, the discussion becomes just another playground for college-educated urbanites. To speak you must be able to speak, literally, and you must also enjoy the privileges of communicative competence and educated-class signaling mechanisms. So we will always tend toward a conversation that defaults to the interests of the least afflicted. This is inevitable; it’s baked into the system.
We could overcome this problem if the people in the arena were dedicated to fronting (excuse me, “centering”) the interests of the most afflicted. But we can’t have that. We can’t have that because contemporary disability ideology is obsessively fixated on telling people to center themselves. That is perceived to be the entirety of the work: every individual with a disability must demand that the world sees them as “valid,” that they are just as authentically disabled as anyone else, that their ADHD grants them perfectly equal priority in receiving accommodation as someone who’s paralyzed from the neck down. The whole social culture of disability activism and studies is leveraged to support the individual’s demand for attention and proper respect; it cannot countenance the notion that there are those who we should put before ourselves. And the obvious impulse to say that someone who faces total debilitation from their disorder should, in fact, be a higher priority for the medical and therapeutic communities is treated as the height of bigotry.
I am watching, in real time, as the same process of gentrification that overtook autism overtakes mental illness. (...)
We used to say, “you wouldn’t stigmatize someone with diabetes, would you?” And there was wisdom in that. An obvious corollary is that you wouldn’t make having diabetes core to your identity, either; you wouldn’t try to sell diabetes as the most interesting thing about you. I don’t know why we walked away from that insight. Today we have the usual demand to have it both ways, to be seen as one’s disorder when convenient for differentiating ourselves from the pack and then setting aside that definition when uncomfortable. Again, the truly disabled can’t do this. They do not deftly craft facades from their disorders, lacking the self-control and capacity for social scheming required to do so. They aren’t afforded the possibility of ignoring their condition when convenient. Yet the voice of the ambitious and shameless patient seeking validation and coin for being sick is becoming the voice of mental illness, those unprincipled enough to treat it all as marketing. Mental illness should not be fodder for building your personal brand. (...)
Our mental disorders are a part of us, and thus are inevitably a part of our personalities. I have never said that those who suffer from them should try to excise their mental illnesses from their sense of self or treat it as a troubling secret to be hidden from the world. (That would be weird, if I said that.) I have said that it’s unhealthy to define your essence through what are, I remind you, diseases. For one thing, as I recently pointed out this tactic may seem to provide succor when you’re young but will inevitably fail you when you grow older. For another, there’s this awful, prurient tendency now for young people who want to have careers as “creatives” to leverage their mental illness for book deals and YouTube hits, making themselves spectacles and trading dignity for attention. They splash their diagnoses on every part of their self-presentation online, hoping to appear cool and romantically unstable and fuckable in doing so. (“Dude, I’ve always wanted to hook up with like a really crazy girl!”) I find this psychically perverse, but it also means that their direct incentive is to not get better. If your career is being mentally ill, your financial stability depends on not effectively treating that mental illness.
