Science, Social Justice, and Autistic Self-Advocacy

There are two perspectives (and by "perspectives" here, I mean "ways of looking at things") in my head that I sometimes have difficulty harmonizing with one another as far as autistic self-advocacy goes.

One perspective is extremely data-oriented and considers scientific research (ideally performed in collaboration with researchers who are themselves autistic) to be of paramount importance in characterizing autistic neurology and cognition.

As for why this characterization is important in the first place (aside from the science stuff frankly just being really interesting to a brain-geek like me), this perspective also figures that many of the problems faced by autistic people and our families stem from misconceptions about what autism is -- misconceptions which deny our strengths, misconstrue the reasons behind our behavior, and prompt all sorts of ridiculous assumptions about what we must intrinsically lack (e.g., self-insight, capacity for compassion, etc.).

This perspective is also the one from which I often feel compelled to point out, upon encountering people who invoke the standard litany of "will-nevers" ("she will never live in her own apartment or house, she will never make friends, she will never marry, she will never drive, she will never go to college", etc.) in response to learning that someone happens to be autistic, that these "will-nevers" are by no means justified by the facts.

Now, of course some people truly "will never" do one or more of the things on the above list; I'm presently in the "possibly will never drive" zone myself, for instance.

But nevertheless, it is a fact that autistic people (including some who had speech delays or other indicators often assumed to indicate "low functioning" as children) sometimes do end up growing up capable of doing many things nobody could have predicted when they were younger.

It is a fact that research has revealed areas of measurable strength common to many autistics.

And it is also a fact that, from an historical standpoint, the very first documented study of autistics (in which the word "autistic" was used), included the following observation:

Even though most of these children were at one time or another looked upon as feebleminded, they are all unquestioningly endowed with good cognitive potentialities...The astounding vocabulary of the speaking children, the excellent memory for events of several years before, the phenomenal rote memory for poems and names, and the precise recollection of complex patterns and sequences, bespeak good intelligence in the sense in which this word is commonly used.

- Leo Kanner, 1943

So, basically, from a scientific and observational standpoint, the notion that being autistic automatically brings with it a global cognitive deficit is just plain wrong. It was wrong in Kanner's time, and it is still wrong now. And the wrongness of claiming that someone has this or that deficit, in this context, has nothing to do with making value judgments about people and everything to do with perpetuating misconceptions that could lead to some people being essentially "written off" as not worth the time and effort it might take to educate them or provide them with enrichment opportunities.

The other perspective, however, is much more social-justice oriented, figuring that the longstanding disability rights movement (as well as the superset civil rights movement) have already done all the major philosophical work that autistic advocates need to draw on.

Additionally, this social justice perspective is in some ways orthogonal to the question of what autism is -- it is less concerned with trying to figure out how autistic brains work than with trying to figure out how to secure basic civil rights for people currently labeled or identified as autistic. It is even, at times, leery of fixating too much on the data the scientists like so much, as the data-gathering process (even when done well) might be backed by entities with a primary interest in, say, coming up with a means to identify autistic genes for the sole purpose of eugenically preventing future autistic people.

Moreover, there's also the matter of what the scientific perspective's focus on dispelling misconceptions leaves unsaid. If it is wrong to assume that all autistics have global, severe, cognitive deficits, does that make it somehow okay to write off people who do have global, severe cognitive deficits? I would personally say "absolutely not", and I don't think there's anything inherent in the scientific perspective that claims it's okay to abuse or neglect people once they can be considered "sufficiently disabled", but this kind of discussion does come up from time to time, and it does concern me.

A great example of something the social-justice sector of my brain wholeheartedly agrees with is the essay The Thing Itself Is The Abuse, from the Biodiverse Resistance blog.

It's not the inherent wrongness of the treatment that is discussed, it is the supposed "horrible mistake" of subjecting someone to that treatment when that person actually turned out to be not a member of the category of people that it's considered acceptable to do this sort of thing to. No thought is given to why it's supposedly "acceptable" to do it to people who are in that category, despite the fact that, in both cases, the reporting of the incident blatantly begs the question: if it was horrible and inhuman and inacceptable to do this to one person "by mistake", what is it to do it to a whole "Othered" class of people deliberately?

Clearly, there are at least two main "things" going on in all this -- first of all, there's the question of what it means for a person to be autistic (and the implications of this for advocacy, for who is considered "qualified" to self-advocate as an autistic person, etc.). And second of all, there are the very real (and extremely distressing) problems of abuse and neglect of, and failure to educate and provide opportunities to, individuals with all types of disabilities.

I want to be able to acknowledge and deal with both these things without having my efforts to do so come across as somehow being ignorant of the other -- e.g., if I point out that plenty of autistic people do actually go on to learn to type or speak, and make friends, I don't want this to come across as denigrating those who cannot type or speak even as adults. I care about them, too, and I would hope that anyone advocating for more ethical treatment of disabled persons would agree that it is not any particular "ability level" in anything that grants a person the "right not to be abused", but that the fundamental problem here lies in the assumption that certain kinds of people can and even should be subject to "extreme aversives" or levels of tranquilizers sufficient to stupefy them.

I have been trying for ages to figure out if these perspectives (the scientific and the social-justice) are compatible, and fundamentally I guess I believe that on some level they are, but it's so difficult to navigate the language around this stuff that I sometimes despair of ever being able to explain why and how my own overall perspective makes sense, even to me.

The closest I can get to that right now, I suppose, is saying that while social justice has nothing to fear from truth (as revealed by properly-done science), science is still a human endeavor, and therefore subject to untoward influence as far as how experiments are designed, conducted, and interpreted. And far from being "anti-scientific", autistic self-advocacy can directly support scientific endeavors by asserting ourselves as stakeholders, even as we work in other contexts toward better ethical standards for all people, regardless of presence, type, or level of disability.

Like It Or Not, Everyone Needs Stuff

The quote below from Whose Planet Is It Anyway? caught my eye today:

What's such a big deal, anyway, about the simple fact that it costs money to educate us [autistic/disabled/atypical/etc. people] and to provide the services and products that we need? Guess what, the same is true of your family, pal. The only difference is that society has categorized your family's educational and other needs as "normal," while arbitrarily excluding others from that privileged caste. You're no more deserving and no less expensive than anyone else—you just have the home field advantage.

Read it, folks. And if you don't get it, read it again.

Bottom line: Everyone needs resources to survive. Yes, even really really rich people who meet or exceed contemporary standards of attractiveness. We all need to eat, sleep, breathe, and excrete. We all need protection from the elements and other dangers that would otherwise threaten our vulnerable meatbodies. And we all ought to have access to appropriate opportunities for education, cultural participation, and enrichment.

There is no way around using resources -- for anyone. And I have had it up to here (places hand at forehead level) with people making alarmist claims about the "cost" of caring for or educating one group or another. I get that stuff and time are both limited, and I also get that practical factors will invariably come into play as far as figuring out how to distribute resources. But there is no good reason to presume that because a given person or group has nonstandard needs that the mere existence of that kind of person constitutes a "crisis".

If there are really THAT many people with atypical needs, maybe that ought to be taken as a sign that something is wrong with the way our society is structured -- NOT that the world has been inundated with supposed "defectives".

I will consider it a good day indeed when the supposedly-inclusive "we" so often invoked in discussions of what "we" need to do about autism or anything along those lines actually includes the people being talked about.

"We" are not interlopers in "your" society -- society consists of all of us, and it seems hideously wrong for some to sequester themselves off in some kind of "well, we're okay!" bubble while the rest are assumed to be nothing more than parasites or interlopers. Like it or not, different people have different needs. If you don't like that, fine -- but at least come clean with the fact that you don't like it, rather than couching your assertions in the language of "helping".

And finally, I'm all about trying to find ways to use resources more efficiently. Sustainability is a growing concern of mine, and I do not deny the fact that resources are limited (in the absolute sense that the universe contains a finite amount of matter and energy; I'm pretty sure that there's more than enough "stuff" on Earth to quite comfortably support the existing population, and that distribution problems are primarily political and logistical in nature as opposed to functions of absolute scarcities).

But I do not think it is necessary or ethically responsible to invoke the widespread devaluation of people with atypical needs as a "sustainability strategy".

It's hard to fathom sometimes how people who by all marks and measures seem to fancy themselves "intelligent" and "civilized" persist in perpetuating what amount to the lowest forms of common barbarism, however dressed up in the verbiage of "compassion" and "progress" they might be.

---

PS: I'm not interested in any comments along the lines of, "But you don't understand! Some people do cost more than others to care for, and we can't ignore that fact!"

I'm not suggesting that fact should be ignored -- I'm just saying that the issues around that kind of thing are more complex than a lot of people seem to think they are, and I'm also trying to encourage people to think in terms of how social and cultural structures might be changed so as to be more flexible and inclusive.

I can't imagine that humanity has exhausted its creativity in this regard yet, which is why I'm rather confounded by the seeming emphasis these days on trying to alter or "prevent" certain kinds of people -- people who themselves have asserted that no, they are not "suffering" for the mere fact of being configured the way they are. To me, it seems terribly defeatist to presume that "oh well, we can't change the world or fight prejudice anyway, so let's just try and mold people according to the status quo and all the prejudices it currently contains." I mean, talk about an unimaginative approach!

What Needs To Be Said

There's a lot that needs to be said (and realized, and done differently) with regard to the ways different kinds of people are thought of, treated, and considered from an ethical standpoint.

A lot of it is very difficult to say, though, because it doesn't tend to fit into some tidy, fully self-consistent ideological framework.

And there's this weird bias I've noticed that seems to cause lots of really important points to go ignored (or even blatantly disregarded) because they can't easily be shoved into this-ism or that-ism (or because they seem to superficially contradict something "nobody would argue with", even when the points being made are a lot more nuanced than they might seem at first).

Dale Carrico puts some of what needs to be said very well in a recent post (emphasis mine):

It is not only those who go so far as to actively advocate involuntary modification who are typically described as eugenicist in my understanding. There are disciplinary pressures beneath the threshold of conspicuous coercion that will yield eugenic effects just as surely (and more efficaciously) than blatant force will do. Certainly programs of involuntary medical intervention constitute the most hideous and heartbreaking end of the eugenicist spectrum, but one can easily observe comparable homogenizing and restrictive effects arising from popular misinformation, from social stigma, from mass mediated promulgation of norms, from uncritical and inertial workings of orthodox institutional healthcare mechanisms, and so on...

Not everybody needs, as some "transhumanists" [and, I might add, others in general who claim no allegiances to any particular subculture, but whose views are essentially mainstream] apparently seem to do, to literally see a Nazi cracking a whip in the service of genocide before they will grant that even now society is conspiring unnecessarily and at great human cost to cast certain perfectly liveable and dignified and legible human capacities, morphologies, and lifeways as less-than-human, as offenses to humanity demanding "remedy" whatever those who incarnate them might have to say in the matter, and so on.

What he said.

I think a lot of people ignore the fact that the entire culture that would necessarily have to spring up in the service of enforcing "compassionate" involuntary modification would, in and of itself, comprise a terrible abuse racket. In some ways, such a culture already exists, and every time someone tries to make a claim that yet another neutral, non-deadly variation or state of being ought to be pathologized, this culture is bolstered rather than weakened.

So, sorry to rain on your utility function, but I'll have no hand in promoting the kind of culture that would have more and more people locked up for not "curing" their children of nonfatal variations, and that would perpetuate the revocation and diminishment of assistive services on the basis of a distorted, backward belief that these somehow drain the coffers of "deserving" normals.

The reality encompassing all sentient persons is huge, messy, complicated, beautiful, and yes, dangerous. Certainly, this reality could be improved in some respects, and I'm all for doing so when doing so allows more people to live outside the shadow of painful, deadly conditions (cancer, poverty, etc.). But beware the trap of feeling like good intentions alone are enough to justify whatever you do. And also beware the trap of trying to frame everything that makes you vaguely uncomfortable as an "emergency". There are enough real, deadly, actual emergencies in the world already. And the existence of a diverse range of live and conscious animals is not one of them.

Intelligence, Assumptions, and the g Conundrum

Cosma Shalizi at Three-Toed Sloth has written a long (but well worth the read) article entitled g, A Statistical Myth.

This article really elucidates a lot of the issues I have with the usual attempts to quantify "intelligence" and explain what causes it. An excerpt:

the case for g rests on a statistical technique, factor analysis, which works solely on correlations between tests. Factor analysis is handy for summarizing data, but can't tell us where the correlations came from; it always says that there is a general factor whenever there only positive correlations. The appearance of g is a trivial reflection of that correlation structure. A clear example, known since 1916, shows that factor analysis can give the appearance of a general factor when there are actually many thousands of completely independent and equally strong causes at work. Heritability doesn't distinguish these alternatives either. Exploratory factor analysis being no good at discovering causal structure, it provides no support for the reality of g.

These purely methodological points don't, themselves, give reason to doubt the reality and importance of g, but do show that a certain line of argument is invalid and some supposed evidence is irrelevant. Since that's about the only case which anyone does advance for g, however, which accords very poorly with other evidence, from neuroscience and cognitive psychology, about the structure of the mind, it is very hard for me to find any reason to believe in the importance of g, and many to reject it. These are all pretty elementary points, and the persistence of the debates, and in particular the fossilized invocation of ancient statistical methods, is really pretty damn depressing.

I've avoided writing much about this particular subject so far, because I wanted to wait until I either wrote or found something that would make it clear that I am not basing my opinions on intelligence on mere "political correctness", or on emotional appeals to some notion that every individual has the exact same set of abilities (which obviously isn't true).

I've read a lot of literature on theories of intelligence, including a fair number of papers on g and on psychometrics. I've also been professionally tested twice (on the Weschler Pre-School and Primary Scale of Intelligence at age 4, and on the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale at age 20), so I have direct experience with at least one type of IQ test.

I don't dispute the fact that people who score well on certain types of tests are statistically more likely to, say, graduate from college or hold down a particular kind of job, but I do dispute the utility of IQ testing in evaluating an individual's "potential" or their ability to eventually process and understand intellectual and practical problems. It just has always seemed to me as if much of the "intelligence" literature doesn't tell the whole story, and is rife with implicit assumptions that are rarely ever examined.

One thing that gives me some hope that this might not always be the case, though, is that some studies are approaching intelligence in a way that does demonstrate awareness of some of these assumptions. This article in Science Daily describes a study meant to (at least in part) bypass the language difficulties commonly observed in autistic persons:

Led by psychologist Laurent Mottron of the University of Montreal, the team gave both autistic kids and normal kids two of the most popular IQ tests used in schools. The two tests are both highly regarded, but they are very different. The so-called WISC relies heavily on language, which is why the psychologists were suspicious of it. The other, known as the Raven's Progressive Matrices, is considered the preeminent test of what's called "fluid intelligence," that is, the ability to infer rules, to set and manage goals, to do high-level abstractions. Basically the test presents arrays of complicated patterns with one missing, and test takers are required to choose the one that would logically complete the series. The test demands a good memory, focused attention and other "executive skills," but--unlike the WISC--it doesn't require much language.

The idea was that the autistic kids' true intelligence might shine through if they could bypass the language deficit. And that's exactly what happened.

The difference between their scores on the WISC and the Raven's test was striking: For example, not a single autistic child scored in the "high intelligence" range of the WISC, yet fully a third did on the Raven's. Similarly, a third of the autistics had WISC scores in the mentally retarded range, whereas only one in 20 scored that low on the Raven's test. The normal kids had basically the same results on both tests.

EDIT: Here's a link to the paper describing the study referenced in the Science Daily article. Recommended reading, since researcher Michelle Dawson has pointed out a few clarifications with regard to the paper and how it was described in the press release.

I'd be curious to know what some of you statistically-minded folk think of the idea of "g as a statistical myth", as described in the first article I linked to. I've noticed that a lot of discussions of intelligence and "g" I read around the Web are dominated by those who seem to have high confidence in factor analysis as far as its ability to support the notion of g, but I would like to know whether that confidence also translates to assuming that supposedly "g-loaded" tasks are probably accomplished as a function of the same "property".

It seems to me that to make such an assumption, a person would have to ignore all the evidence pointing to the fact that different kinds of brains may, in fact, operate and solve problems differently (and that while one skill might correlate with another in a typical person, this isn't necessarily the case for a less typical person).

A Few Brief Thoughts

In looking back over my posting history here on Existence is Wonderful, it is very interesting to see how my own attitudes have shifted over time. There are still some fundamental principles I adhere to: e.g., "Life is a good thing", and "All different kinds of people are valuable", but lately I've been coming to terms with some of the "affiliation uneasiness" that has been bothering me in the background throughout my public writing endeavors so far.

As of now, I'm still OK with using the term "transhumanism" to describe some of my take on technosocial development. I do believe that radical longevity is a great goal (and one that I will continue to advocate fiercely for). I find talking about robots and cyborgs, etc., to be fascinating and a lot of fun. I'm all for continuing the human process of shaping our environment (with sustainability in mind) to suit our needs and creative energies, and for enabling consensual "augmentation" and modification without regard for unexamined, parochial notions of what is "natural".

But here's the thing: I am massively social-libertarian when it comes to the issue of morphological freedom -- one of the things that strikes me as tremendously important in any movement that wants to "push" for positive outcomes in society involving the individual's rights to control his/her own form and function is the notion that we have to be radically tolerant of people who choose forms and functions that we ourselves would not. Which includes forms and functions that we (as in, any one of us) might even find bizarre or aesthetically displeasing.

I'm finding myself increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of being associated with people who can't understand how power relationships work, and who think that disability activism is "extremism" despite the wealth of good, cogent disability literature out there (which has much in common with transhumanist-themed morphological freedom literature).

Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean I'm getting annoyed at "transhumanists", per se -- I in fact think that many emerging mainstream attitudes are quite akin to early eugenic attitudes (e.g., the drive toward prenatal testing causing a shift away from trying to help keep all kinds of children alive once they are born), and that in the mainstream, these attitudes are probably more pernicious and powerful due to being examined less frequently and less consciously than in culturally critical and speculative movements.

I guess I'm just getting annoyed with how so much has been written on the nature of power dynamics, on the real reasons behind the need for disability activism (e.g., so that vulnerable populations are not continually depersonalized, and so that more people understand the nature of interdependence in society), and on similar stuff, but how some people still don't seem to be able to get past the status quo. I want to help shape a future that is truly "better" than the present, as opposed to just an extreme, exaggerated version of current fashion.

I don't know if this is even possible, given the complexity of the tasks at hand, but I do get the sense that a better future (one in which people enjoy increased liberty, tolerance, and safety from environmental and other risks) isn't going to happen through assuming too much about what forms and functionalities are "acceptable" for the future to contain.

On Advocacy and Semantics

Nick Tarleton commented on my last post, saying:

Conjecture: some people, through some psychological quirk, interpret "opposition to X" as "not wanting any instance of X to exist" - so if you're opposed to aging, you must want to eliminate all instances of aging in the world, i.e. kill old people.

Conjecture 2: some people conflate judgments about the desirability of traits or states with judgments about the inherent worth of people with those traits/in those states. Evaluating aging as bad is tantamount to evaluating aged people as worth less than the young.

I've been thinking about these conjectures since yesterday, and I really do think Nick has hit the proverbial nail on the head here. While the people who oppose longevity medicine obviously vary in terms of their reasons for doing so, I am wondering now if perhaps some of that opposition is rooted in a sense that it is wrong to "medicalize" aging. And as someone who generally prefers the social model of disability to the medical model, I can understand, if not sympathize completely, with this viewpoint.

Here's why: if I take Nick's conjectures above and re-word them thusly:

Conjecture: some people, through some psychological quirk, interpret "opposition to X" as "not wanting any instance of X to exist" - so if you're opposed to autism, you must want to eliminate all instances of autism in the world, i.e. kill autistic people.

Conjecture 2: some people conflate judgments about the desirability of traits or states with judgments about the inherent worth of people with those traits/in those states. Evaluating autism as bad is tantamount to evaluating autistic people as worth less than the nonautistic.

...they start looking eerily familiar. I've seen very similar arguments coming from people who insist that yes, of course they value their autistic child (or brother, or sister, or neighbor, etc.) as a person, but that they would "remove the autism" from that person if they could. And that if they'd known of a way to prevent the autistic person from being born autistic, they would have chosen it "in a heartbeat".

Often, the people who make these arguments have a terrible time seeing how there could possibly be anything offensive about what they are saying. And when autistic self-advocates tell these folks that they find the notion that they ought to be "cured" (for their own good, for the good of society) insulting -- let's just say that the conversations don't always end with hearts and flowers.

I've stayed out of most of the major flamewars I've witnessed on the advocacy pages I read, but I've certainly read enough of them to get a sense of the common arguments that get made (and how those arguments fit in with my own various philosophical and ethical leanings).

And overall, I've gotten the distinct sense that there's a pretty clear difference between "disability" and "disease", as well as between "things that kill you" and "things that make you different". Put in those terms, autism and aging fall into very different categories, since while autistic people might be more vulnerable than nonautistic people in various ways, autism will not kill you. Aging, however, will.

But: on the other hand, there is a framing system in which autism and aging do fall into the same category -- and that is the one in which both "states" (aged, autistic) grant a person membership in a group devalued by those in society who hold the majority of the political and effective power.

Autistic and elderly people also share some common fears ("will I be institutionalized?") and common problems (employment discrimination, etc.). From within this framing system, it seems obvious that reducing the degree to which persons in the disenfranchised groups are treated as pathologies will help improve the lot of such people.

Have you ever been pathologized?

I have, and believe me, it's no fun. Not helpful, either. There was a professional who tried to insist that I needed to "work harder at being normal", and who refused to note any of the progress I'd made in learning to communicate more effectively and take care of myself physically at one point.

This was not only disparaging to my efforts, but dangerous -- if I'd had less presence of mind, or if I'd let this person intimidate me, I might have ended up returning to prior, unhealthy patterns of forgetting to eat and neglecting important aspects of self-care (because I was channeling too much energy into trying to maintain a facade of "standard" operation).

It was really only when I came to a point of self-acceptance -- as in, I started becoming better able to see myself as a healthy autistic-spectrum person as opposed to a "damaged" version of a neurotypical person -- that I started really branching out in my activities. I used to spend my weekends wandering in circles in the living room or fretting over the fact that I still couldn't manage driving a car at my age, but now I spend them writing, researching, editing, and even attending the occasional seminar or conference.

So, on the basis of that experience (and others, when I was growing up, in which certain teachers decided to single me out as a Behavior Problem rather than a kid who was simply developing atypically) I am very, very reluctant to think in "medicalized" terms when it comes to things that don't directly hurt or kill people.

I think that medicalizing things that shouldn't be medicalized can make people end up in worse condition than however they started out prior to seeking (or being put into) "treatment". And I think that treating any person as a "walking disease" and failing to see the person past whatever their challenges might be means you're running the risk of losing your ability to perceive the person at all.

Which is where the need for semantic clarification comes in.

When some people say "aging", they mean, "getting older" in the sense of accumulating birthdays.

When put in those terms, I am definitely "pro-aging" because I most certainly think that people should be enabled to experience as many birthdays as possible!

But when others refer to "aging", they mean, "the underlying bodily processes that lead to stroke, heart disease, immune collapse, dementia, and death".

When put in those terms, I am "anti-aging". (And those processes -- the nasty ones that kill you -- are the ones discussed in Ending Aging, which I highly recommend for anyone who wants to learn more about the science of SENS.)

So basically, I see aging as both a pathology and not a pathology, depending on the context in which it is used and on how it is defined.

I don't think old people are a pathology -- I think that the things that kill old people are pathologies. And I think it would be unfortunate indeed if people coming across longevity advocacy saw the whole thing as an attempt to pathologize the elderly and define them as "gross" and "scary".

I don't know if that's actually the impression people get or not, but if it is, I would like to know so I can work on explaining longevity advocacy better and emphasizing the fact that the goal is to help people survive and maintain their preferred health-state (defined according to individual criteria, not some arbitrary "optimality" measure) for as long as possible.

Now, returning back to the subject of autism for a moment, I want to make it clear that I do not think that autism can be defined (as I think aging can) as simultaneously, or alternately, "a pathology or not a pathology, depending on context".

Despite the similar social and political challenges faced by elderly and autistic people, and the common experience of lacking power as compared to the young and/or neurotypical (which should certainly be acknowledged), autism does not share with aging the "it'll kill you if you don't do something about it" component. And that's a very important component -- one that cannot be trivialized or argued away as a social construct.

You can, after all, be happy, healthy, and autistic.

You cannot be healthy, happy, and dead.

There is no "social model" for death, and I think that anyone who claims to champion the rights of any given group cannot seek to define that group as "obligated to die"!

Longevity advocates, therefore, have a very interesting challenge -- one that entails both discouraging age discrimination (especially with regard to health care) and at the same time, promoting the idea that we ought to develop treatments allowing older people to make their bodies function more like younger bodies.

I can see the political thorniness here and I'm frankly not sure what to do about it at the moment, except perhaps to say that I don't think that older people should be made to feel as if they have to embrace their own age-related death in order to accept themselves as people. To define "not being near death" as the exclusive province of the young seems a rather horrid proposition.

Political Compass, For What It's Worth

(I'm working on a bunch of different things right now, including the rest of my Summit commentary -- which is taking forever -- but figured I'd post this in the meantime).

My Political Compass results:

Economic Left/Right: -4.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.26



I've noticed that most of the people whose blogs I read tend to fall along either extreme left/democrat/socialist lines, or along libertarian lines. (I have no idea why that is, it's just the way things seem to have worked out -- but still, I am very surprised that I don't get more comments along the lines of, "Why do you bother with anything so-and-so says? They're one of them!") And all of them occasionally say things I agree with, as well as things I disagree with.

The thing that frustrates me most about politics is the fact that you're almost expected to (a) choose a side, and (b) think of the "other side" as entirely consisting of clueless people. There's almost a kind of alarmism among the strongly partisan, as if somehow, the Other Side is going to destroy the universe with their ideology if it isn't kept in check. I honestly don't know if any particular party is "dangerous" -- I know that there are dangerous ideas, and dangerous precedents, but it's very difficult for me to fully embrace or write off any particular system without understanding it deeply.

I sometimes feel guilty about this, especially since some people are so emphatically convinced of how damaging Viewpoint A is, but until I've fully grokked why, it's difficult for me to get fired up. (And I do get fired up about certain things -- people who think that old people should be denied lifesaving medicine just because they are old, or who think that autistics "lack the essential features of being human", or who are Nazis, will be spared no vitriol from me!)

Whatever my "compass score" says about me, I definitely plan to keep doing things as I have been all along: that is, considering individual issues as they come up and weighing them not in reference to some pre-fab party template, but against the ethical framework I've been developing ever since I started thinking about the world outside my own head. While I do understand the need to take "big picture" views and occasionally align with groups I may not agree with 100% in order to accomplish certain goals, overall, I find most pre-existing systems extremely limiting.

And not only are they limiting, they tend to have these huge, gaping holes that it's difficult to get anyone to acknowledge. Like disability rights -- where does that fit in? Most liberals ignore disability issues, despite being generally supportive of civil rights as they apply to women, minorities, and LGBT individuals. And though conservatives might occasionally pay lip service to "disability rights", the arguments they use (and the bizarro agendas they tie in -- "human exceptionalism" comes to mind) are often simplistic, offensive, and downright embarrassing.

This is one primary reason that the only "isms" I've lately found some utility in are "transhumanism" and "technoprogressivism", because it has been through the study of the topic-space surrounding these terms that I've discovered useful principles like morphological freedom. It's just amusing (and slightly scary) to have people hear some of my views on morphological freedom and assume that I'm either a pro-life wingnut or a product of some lazy, overly permissive, hippie mentality (and obviously a communist).

Granted, this doesn't happen too often anymore, but still, one reason I focus more on specific issues than on partisan stuff is because it's exhausting to have to constantly anticipate (and put forth disclaimers) for every possible little thing that might swing someone's assumption-o-meter in some extreme direction that has practically nothing to do with what I actually think. If you want to know what I actually think, you're probably in for a lot of reading, but hopefully you can at least manage to check your assumptions on the way in!

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EDIT: Speaking of politics, I've been greatly enjoying listening to Prof. Courtney Brown's course on 'Science Fiction and Politics lately, which is available at the link in MP3 format (or you can subscribe using iTunes). Though some of the student comments are pretty ridiculous, it's still a decent listen overall.