“If autism isn’t caused by environmental factors and is natural why didn’t we ever see it in the past?”
We did, except it wasn’t called autism it was called “Little Jonathan is a r*tarded halfwit who bangs his head on things and can’t speak so we’re taking him into the middle of the cold dark forest and leaving him there to die.”
Or “little Jonathan doesn’t talk but does a good job herding the sheep, contributes to the community in his own way, and is, all around, a decent guy.” That happened a lot, too, especially before the 19th century.
Or, backing up FURTHER
and lots of people think this very likely,
“Oh little Sionnat has obviously been taken by the fairies and they’ve left us a Changeling Child who knows too much, and asks strange questions, and uses words she shouldn’t know, and watches everything with her big dark eyes, clearly a Fairy Child and not a Human Like Us.”
The Myth of the Changeling child, a human baby apparently replaced at a young age by a toddler who “suddenly” acts “strange and fey” is an almost textbook depiction of autistic children.
To this day, “autism warrior mommies” talk about autism “stealing” their “sweet normal child” and have this idea of “getting their real baby back” which (in the face of modern science) indicates how the human psyche actually does deal with finding out their kid acts unlike what they expected.
Given this evidence, and how common we now know autism actually is, the Changeling myth is almost definitely the result of people’s confusion at the development of autistic children.
Weirdly enough, that legend is now comforting to me.
I think it’s worth noting that many like me, who are diagnosed with ASD now, would probably have been seen as just a bit odd in centuries past. I’m only a little bit autistic; I can pass for neurotypical for short periods if I work really hard at it. I have a lack of talent in social situations, and I’m prone to sensory overload or you might notice me stimming.
But here’s the thing: life is louder, brighter and more intense and confusing than it has ever been. I live on the edge of London and I rarely go into the centre of town because it’s too overwhelming. If I went back in time and lived on a farm somewhere, would anyone even notice there was anything odd about me? No police sirens, no crowded streets that go on for miles and miles, no flickery electric lights. Working on a farm has a clear routine. I’d be a badass at spinning cloth or churning butter because I find endless repetition soothing rather than boring.
I’m not trying to romanticise the past because I know it was hard, dirty work with a constant risk of premature death. I don’t actually want to be a 16th century farmer! What I’m saying is that disability exists in the context of the environment. Our environment isn’t making people autistic in the sense of some chemical causing brain damage. But we have created a modern environment which is hostile to autistic people in many ways, which effectively makes us more disabled. When you make people more disabled, you start to see more people struggling, failing at school because they’re overwhelmed, freaking out at the sound of electric hand dryers and so on. And suddenly it looks like there’s millions more autistic people than existed before.
“…disability exists in the context of the environment.”
Of course! See, modern animals have a lot of muscles, fat, fluff, etc, and end up looking very little like their actual skeleton. For example, look at how much fluff owls have:
However, lots of palaeoartists completely ignore this! They basically stretch skin over the bones and call it a day. One especially bad example that was featured on @palaeofail is this poor pterosaur:
It barely has room for its digestive system. It’s definitely missing the air sac system that allows it to breathe. It’s got virtually no muscles on the arms – how does it fly?? – on the head (no wonder its mouth is open. It has no jaw muscles to close it!), on the torso (it needs to flap), or on the legs (walking) It doesn’t have any fat at all, so it’s definitely starving (maybe because it can’t fly or close its moth?). The skin is much too thin; you can see all of the bones and its wing membranes should be much, much thicker. And it’s missing the hair-like pycnofibres that should be covering its body!
Many palaeoartists have started to strike back at this by drawing modern animals like we might draw them if we found their bones:
I wonder if there will be a mandala effect uproar in the future (a la Berenstain Bears) over what the name of the robot butler in Fallout 4 was called.
It’s Cogsworth, right? He’s a robot, after all. It makes perfect sense. A neat little play on words to enhance the charm of the 50s aesthetic.
Well. No. It’s Codsworth. It was always Codsworth and it and it bothered me from day one.
I don’t know what Bethesda is playing at, but if you’re going to dodge an obvious pun then make the name something completely different so we don’t have to suffer the almost-greatness of an almost-joke.
I think the issue w a lot of people invested in like “SJ” sorts of things is that they conceptualize ethics as *only* being abt these structural oppressions, so as long as you are acting in accordance w those precepts you literally cannot do anything unethical.
But like, you can be completely Right Politically in a situation and still be acting in a cruel, greedy, careless, vicious, or harmful way. And that doesn’t give that complete absolution.
We need to like, not mistake structural analysis w ethical formation, tho they are obviously connected
I think that’s a part of what’s been so like, volatile about SJ spaces for the last couple of years: people think that if you sublimate your individual ethics into some kinda framework that you’re good and that you can act like an incredibly petty asshole
yeah it’s like people were told ‘you can’t be reverse racist because that is not how the social structure of oppression works’ and heard ‘anything you do to someone who’s more privileged than you is righteous’ which is… not great
This is the issue I have with Richard Dawkins – the guy is smart as hell and says logical, well reasoned things about atheism as a concept but he’s also a fucking jerk to people who do have faith.
The man is such a dick that 15% of UK scientists surveyed by a research team mentioned that they hated him without any prompting whatsoever. I’m an athiest through and through but there’s no need to be an ass about it.
“And how hard is it to land even a minimum-wage job? This year, the Ivy League college admissions acceptance rate was 8.9%. Last year, when Walmart opened its first store in Washington, D.C., there were more than 23,000 applications for 600 jobs, which resulted in an acceptance rate of 2.6%, making the big box store about twice as selective as Harvard and five times as choosy as Cornell. Telling unemployed people to get off their couches (or out of the cars they live in or the shelters where they sleep) and get a job makes as much sense as telling them to go study at Harvard.”
callanswall 