It’s not easy to say what makes a human, human. Pretty much every criterion takes a pratfall somehow or other. A featherless biped? Here’s a plucked chicken for you. A beast that talks? What about whales? Or even plants? Tool use? Intelligence? Try ravens. Even the Turing test (can your conversational skills convince a human being that you’re human too?) has been passed by AI. You have to go to higher order social activities, like art, music, religion and the like to get to things that seem unassailably ours (ok, unassailable may be too strong a word – our cousins, the Neanderthals made musical instruments, ritually buried their dead, made art on cave walls). You never know what you might find around the corner, or in that laptop.
Here’s my proposition: ‘human’ is not a description or an essence, it’s a normative instruction, an order: you must be human (or else). To be human is to be part of the communion of human beings, to be part of the group, to be ‘one of us’. But every group that includes, in the same movement, also excludes whatever it is that it’s not. The category ‘human’ is defined by the other-than-human, the less-than-human, the non-human that lives outside its borders: that is, by those who fail to, who are unable to follow that instruction, ‘be human’, to the letter. The details of the instructions are fluid, its content changes over time, or across place. ‘Human’ is a moveable feast.
But the list of those who have, somewhere or somewhen, been found wanting is long and grim – women, people of colour, LGBTQI+, foreigners, refugees, Jews, Muslims, the disabled, the poor – the target varies by time and place. But the targeting is never not there, here, now, and leads to those less-than-human beings being variously defamed, debased, abused, tortured or even killed, and generally just shat on from a great height. To be counted as ‘human’ is to commune with the inhumane, cruel, violent, murderous, whether you want to or not, even if you yourself are none of those things.
I, myself, have never been human, even though I look to fit most of the instructions on the packaging. I’m male, white, middle-class, educated, straight, cis-gendered, employed. I have all the privileges. I have also spent a lot of time and effort trying to pass for human. Here’s how I, in particular, fail at it: I’m autistic, adhd (aka audhd), have long-term treatment resistant depression and generalised anxiety disorder, as well as a plausible case of cPTSD (it’s hard to tell with all my symptoms flying around like trapped bats). I’m what they call ‘multiply neurodivergent’: my brain just doesn’t work the way most people’s does.
Practically speaking, a lot of stuff normal humans do without thinking, I find really hard. Small talk sucks; complex sound environments – think noisy restaurants, staff drinks, large parties – are intolerable; both starting and stopping tasks is hard; perhaps most importantly, I can’t ‘read’ people intuitively (does that raised eyebrow mean ‘fuck you’ or ‘tell me more’?) I have to try and infer what’s going on via context, logic and past experience (so if you’re trying to flirt with me, best come out and say it directly). On the other hand, some stuff that’s challenging for a lot of people, I do without effort (I’m good at synthesising complex information and explaining it simply – hyper-systemizing is very autistic).
I didn’t know about the autism and adhd until my mid-fifties. I just lived my life knowing there was something off about me, though I could never work out what it was exactly. Everyone else saw it too, whatever ‘it’ was: I was weird, didn’t fit, and couldn’t connect. So, inevitably, I was mocked, bullied, excluded, picked last, and just plain left out all the way through school.
At first I would just find a corner and read pulpy space operas (thank you E.E. Doc Smith). Later, I compensated by joining in every structured activity I could find – sport (the non-ball variety – I’m also dyspraxic, and can’t throw, catch or hit a ball to save my life), school plays, musicals, band. But outside those activities, I was still on my own. I just didn’t know how to do ‘human’.
It was as if there were a glass wall between me and life – I could see people on the other side, having lives, being people, but I could never break through the glass and join them. It still feels that way a lot of the time, though I’ve gotten better at passing for normal, mostly (though it’s physically and mentally exhausting to keep it up for long).
That’s what I mean when I say ‘I have never been human’: I’ve never been part of the communion of human beings, as fragile and evanescent as that communion often is. This is not always such a bad thing. Human beings often suck, collectively, though they can be quite nice individually. I don’t know if a world where ‘human’ referred to people like me would necessarily be a better one than this. Though it would be nice to have a choice in the matter.
In case you think I’m being over-dramatic, I should point out that medical science agrees that I’m not fully human. From the original research on autism in the 1940s by Asperger and Kanner, right through to now, autists like me have been and continue to be defined by our deficit of humanity, our fundamental lack or excess with regard to the instructions for being a person (the DSM V criteria for an autism diagnosis are basically: too little communication, too much repetition).
And because we autists, by diagnostic definition, don’t or can’t communicate, we can only ever be objects of study, never agents of action. No point asking us anything – we can’t communicate. This is assumption is starting to shift, slowly, due to the efforts of neurodivergent activists, writers and communicators to point out that differences in communication style are not the same thing as the absence of communication. But it’s still there in the DSM, in the literal definition of autism.
Probably the most famous, and notorious, statement of the autist’s lack of humanity comes from psychologist Ivor Lovaas:
Lovaas was pretty much a monster, of course. He played an important role in the development of gay conversion ‘therapy’, and was the founder of Applied Behavioural Analysis, or ABA (which is just Skinnerian operant conditioning for the neurodivergent). Back in the 1970s, he proudly used electric cattle prods on autistic children to eliminate ‘unwanted’ (i.e., autistic looking) behaviours, to train them into looking (from the outside, at least) like a person, like a human being.
ABA is still the most common ‘treatment’ offered to parents of autistic kids in the US right now – less so in Australia, but variants of it are still common. The cattle prods are mostly gone, replaced by less violent ‘aversives’, or by the withholding of rewards to ‘encourage’ compliance – but not entirely. Electric shocks are still used at the Judge Rotenberg Center in Massachusetts on their ‘patients’. Lovaas’ legacy lives on.
But the reality is that living as a neurodivergent person in a world made for and run by neurotypicals is a form of never-ending ABA: if you act like an autistic person in public, you will be punished for it, not with electric shocks, but through ostracism and exclusion, and occasionally with violence. People will either pretend you’re not there, walk in the other direction, infantilise you, get angry at you, or just call the police on you – which in some places can be deadly, especially if you’re not white.
Unless you can learn to ‘pass’ for neurotypical, you will never be accepted by, or be allowed to function in, mainstream society, not because neurotypicals are individually bad people – but because the normative order to be normal, be human defines how society operates collectively. To be in the group, you have to follow the rules of what normal is, what human is. ‘Masking’ your autism is a fundamental survival skill for the autist, akin to people of colour ‘passing’ for white, or queer people ‘passing’ for being straight in the bad old days. But it’s incredibly draining, and destructive of your sense of self. It’s one of the reasons depression and anxiety rates are much higher for the neurodivergent than the neurotypical among us.
The idea that autists ain’t people runs deep and wide. For example, one popular theory among (neurotypical) autism researchers in the 1990s (and that may now be having a comeback) was that autists have no theory of mind – neither with regard to other people, nor ourselves. The argument was that autists not only didn’t understand how other people might think or feel, but that we also lacked a sense of our own self, and so were incapable of introspection or reflective thinking.
So, in An Anthropologist on Mars, Oliver Sacks writes about his initial doubts that autistic academic and animal behaviourist Temple Grandin could have been the real author of her autobiographical writings for just this reason.
He was convinced, eventually, not by talking to her (which he did, at length and with great respect), but by the consistency of her style across her many publications. Never underestimate the importance of style.
Of course, things are changing, a bit. Since the start of the neurodiversity movement in the late 1990’s, the medical fraternity’s pathologisation of autism has been challenged by a range of neurodivergent writers and thinkers who frame neurodivergence not as a deficit, but as a difference: brains come in a range of flavours, and vanilla isn’t inherently better than pistachio. There’s a growing movement urging research about autistic people to actually involve autistic people in the design and practice of that research, on the principle ‘nothing about us without us‘, and sometimes this actually happens. Damien Milton’s notion of the double empathy problem is getting some traction. This is the idea that autism has a specific communication style, that’s different to the neurotypical one – and that neurotypicals are as bad at understanding us as we are at understanding them (I would say worse, since we autists have no choice but to try and master the mysteries of neurotypical communication, as best we can).
Does this mean I will one day be human? Perhaps. The rules can change, take on new meanings, new nuances. Like I said, it’s a moveable feast. But the order ‘be human’ will always be a chauvinist one, always rely on some inhuman remainder to define itself by. Perhaps AI will one day come to take the place of the new unhuman that allows the communion of human beings to assert itself. In which case, the ‘flesh fairs’ of the Spielberg/Kubrick film A.I., where baying crowds affirm their own humanity by watching their artificial counterparts get torn apart as entertainment, may end up more as prediction than fiction.
Empty Head 