Nietzsche called himself an antichrist because he tried to restore some values that Christians had discarded. Nietzsche believed that it was once good to be strong and bad to be weak, but in an effort to make the weak feel better about themselves, Jesus had taught them that it was good to be weak and evil to be strong. Much the same thinking pervades the diversity discourse. You’re not supposed to say one worldview is superior to another, regardless of what you mean by superior. You’re not supposed to say that one person exceeds another on any dimension that has a positive connotation. It’s okay to say that one person is more extraverted than another if you are careful to specify that there’s nothing wrong with introversion. You can say that one person is smarter than another if you add words to the effect that intelligence is some sort of parlor trick, and of course less intelligent people are just as worthy as smart people.
But worthy of what? The Nazis undertook to murder people who were not sufficiently intelligent, so if you suggest that intelligence ought to be a factor in college admissions, you will likely be compared to Nazis. The Nazis thought that mentally retarded individuals were not worthy to live. And, yes, that is still the technical term for them, even if professional multiculturalists insist on “people with mental retardation” to emphasize what doesn’t need emphasizing—that they are people. But it’s possible to think that mentally retarded persons, or even people in the lower half of intelligence, are not worthy to sit on the Supreme Court or not worthy to have their ideas about physics carefully considered without thinking they are not worthy to have their civil rights protected.
And yes, I recognize that “intelligence” is bandied about as a substitute for other traits, and I recognize that it is not always easy to measure intelligence (though nowhere near as hard as you might think) and I loved Stephen Jay Gould’s book, The Mismeasure of Man, about abuses in intelligence testing. But come on, the fact that it is not always easy to tell how smart someone is doesn’t mean that it’s evil to consider the question. Everyone can see plainly that when Will Hunting solves the math problem, it’s a function of his being smarter than most janitors. My mom’s humorous definition of intelligence was “the extent to which other people agree with me,” which captured the problem that Gould wrote about. My definition of intelligence is “how well your brain works.” It isn’t easy to tell how well someone’s brain works, but it’s a concept not substantially different from understanding how well an arm or an immune system works.
“Mentally retarded” has become an offensive term, as have the equally neutral, equally scientific terms that preceded it. These include imbecile, idiot, and moron. “Retarded,” a fancy word for slow, will soon be replaced with “intellectual disability,” and two years from then, you will hear one school kid call another an “I.D.” And then you will refer, in a perfectly professional manner, to someone as a person with I.D., and someone will wag her finger at you and tell you that there’s nothing wrong with being different.
But there is something wrong with being mentally retarded, or well below average in intelligence in a college, or barely average in a graduate school or a profession. The reason the names for being in the bottom 2% (which is the definition of mental retardation) keep turning into insults is that the condition referred to is itself undesirable. That’s what’s meant by the word, disability, which is already in danger of being substituted with “differently abled.”
Some liberals must despise disabled people to go to such lengths to disguise their real impairments with vague language, as if the disability is too horrid to contemplate. Sorry. I should have said, “people with liberal ideas.”
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 
“People with liberal ideas” exemplifies the impact your blog has had on my thinking. I continually catch myself re-phrasing various supposedly derogatory labels in my head. Whether that be people with mental retardation, people with fat, etc…It entertains me.
Wouldn’t behaviorists/ACT people argue that saying “people WITH” implies that the disability exists inside them, as if it’s equivalent to saying people who HAVE anxiety? They would argue that you need to find yet another way to phrase these ideas. How would you respond? Just curious because I find it interesting how caught up we can get in language.
Yup. I once suggested referring to women as people who occasionally behave vaginistically. So adverbs are the answer.
I like it! Now don’t forget about men behaving peniley.
I wanted to “like” your comment on women. Haha.
Don’t encourage him Tessa. This is our chance to make fun of men too. I suggest you take advantage.
I guess if the truth didn’t hurt that much or wasn’t so uncomfortable to bare we wouldn’t try to disguise her all the time in all sorts of ways. We have tried. From straight up blissful ignorance, to denial or even sublimation and altruism (implicit motives questionable), to all the other smoke and mirrors of the ego, to our organized social systems of politics, justice, and religion. No matter how we dress her up she stubbornly remains the same. Dull, dry, flat, barren, empty, sad, pathetic. Deadly. If this torture of eternal boredom is our one true destiny then its understandable why we spice things up a bit while we are still alive and kicking. Not to mention we all have to coexist in this world (remains unresolved) while its rapidly getting smaller and smaller.
The human race is like a teenager playing their Sex Pistols and Pink Floyd records too loud in a flat in Birmingham back in the late 70’s. We haven’t figured out yet how to enjoy and express ourselves without offending others around us. Call it homeostasis, or natural selection, or whatever the complementary reaction is, the pendulum swings back eventually and there is a world of pain and hurt that comes with it. War, famine, genocide, mass extermination. You just arrived at the same deadly place you were trying to avoid in the first place. Oops…
In our quest to spice things up we don’t know how to regulate. For me this begs the question if we can be humble but have some fun at the same time. Thank God, or as I like to say thank Nietzsche, for whoever invented headphones! If we were able to find a medium that keeps the angry teenager and the elder neighbors both happy, perhaps we can find a better way to make true comparisons with others on our differences and not offend or personalize the outcome too much. Perhaps even offend and be offended, but not kill each other in the process. Not take things that seriously. Its a difficult undertaking but not an impossible one.
Avoiding comparisons is the poorest solution. I mean its not a solution at all. Sort of like multiculturalism in practice, at least the way its been presented to me in grad school. Its a bit like dogma. Insert Communism or Christianity, National Socialism, whatever dogma you like. These are all wonderful theories on paper, but very dangerous when applied to real life. A lot of people have died in their name. This said, I see all efforts at social justice seen through this fancy new lens of multiculturalism (yet another article of clothing to dress the same truth) to be as much of an illusion of a solution of everyone getting along as is the illusion of control the ego lets us think we have over life. The multicultural agenda reminds me of humans trying to do the same exact thing expecting better results. Insanity…
The medium I propose is to embrace the schizophrenogenic nature of our existence rather than dismiss it or (even worse) be guilt-driven about it. There is a Nazi in all of us just as there is a Ghandi. Lets talk about that openly without pretenses. For example, how is modern fetus screening and subsequent abortion in the likelihood that certain mental disability syndromes are discovered different from the practices of the ancient Spartans (i.e., discarding babies found wanting in the legendary Kaiadas)? Not so much. In fact I think we may even have regressed because we don’t dare admit some of these similarities today.
Choice is ours, but we can’t disguise our inner Nazi for very long. He ll come out and play eventually, so perhaps we can learn to regulate him a little better. The paradox is that by expressing him loudly and openly rather than suppressing him (in fear of judgment of not being PC), we actually get closer to our inner Ghandi! True acceptance of our vile potential comes with a level of humility and genuine compassion to respect all diverse expressions of life.
Now the catch and irony with all of this is that a higher level of intelligence (or none at all – in which case you are a mere follower in the pack) is a necessary prerequisite for all this stuff to work well. Not being afraid to call a spade a spade or to disappoint, I believe most people out there just don’t have the intelligence and maturity necessary to do this. They will probably resist and call people like me racist and offensive. We are in desperate need of Jesus 2.0 because the world can’t tolerate any more Hitlers.
As tempting as it is to call you racist and offensive, I applaud instead, even though I don’t think my sense of the truth of existence is bleak like the one you describe here. A bit Sophoclean, if you don’t mind my saying so. Also, I’m not sure how smart people are in general, but I’m hopeful. My benchmark is whether a person can understand the proposition that there is a 80% chance of rain on Sunday. When I hear people say that it will either rain or it won’t, or that, having not rained, the weather bureau was wrong, I tremble for our species. (In case anyone doesn’t know what the proposition asserts but is curious, it means that on 80% of similar days, it rains. The weather bureau is right whether it rains or not this Sunday if you can look back at the last 100 days they said the chance of rain was 80% and find that it rained on about 80 of those days.) This is my benchmark because probability theory defeats superstition.
I like your benchmark. If my sense of the truth is as Sophoclean as yours is Skinnerian then maybe we agree some folks out there are about as intelligent as pigeons (with the irony being they don’t even have a clue about that much like Sophocles’ protagonists). Its kind of scary, but I m starting to see the comedy in the tragedy.
Here’s my benchmark. Milgram’s experiment. Out of a random sample of 100 people in this world how many do you think would not conform (i.e., get up and leave the room prior to administering the lethal dose of electric shock), and save instead of take a human life in the name of the hegemony at hand? I think the sadists in this sample would be a very small minority, although my pessimism has to do with my belief that the vast majority probably wouldn’t pass muster.
Uh, zero, if by get up and leave, you mean get up and leave without permission. Milgram found two-thirds carried through to the final shock, but of the third who stopped administering what they thought was a shock, none demanded the experiment end, checked on the stooge, on left the room without first obtaining permission. This is why questioning authority (that is, questioning rules and decrees; that is, critical thinking) is so important!