Moral words
Would you agree with the following sentence?
People with Down syndrome are stupid.
This
sentence is a lot like the famous question about having stopped beating
your wife. For the wife-beating question, the correct answer is "No",
since I haven't even started beating her and thus cannot have stopped
it either, but anyone who is even slightly aware of the social
realities understands the implications that people would infer from
that answer.
Similarly, I understand the social realities but
can't help but agree with the example sentence. If the word "stupid"
has any objective meaning other than "someone who I very much dislike",
and means a person who significantly lacks practical intelligence, then
the people with Down syndrome are clearly and undeniably stupid.
However, pointing this out is somehow wrong. And it doesn't get any
better even if a more neutral term is used, for example, "People with
Down syndrome have low intelligence."
This is revealing in many ways.
For
all the cognitive elite's vehement denial that intelligence differences
exist or are important (I would like to see a critique of the concept
of IQ written by someone whose IQ is under 85, or for that matter, a
person whose IQ is under 85 and who is even aware of the whole IQ
controversy), everyone instinctively understands that it is a pretty
bad and limiting thing to have low intelligence or to be considered
stupid. Unlike low skill in, say, piano playing or figure drawing, it
is almost as if low intelligence it itself a moral failure and thus
makes the person bad. Because people with Down syndrome of course
cannot be bad (in fact, their moral superiority
is one idea that both Left and Right enthusiastically agree on), one
has to necessarily deny that they could be stupid, which in turn
results in this word becoming meaningless.
Once upon a time,
words such as "idiot" and "imbecile" and "moron" were neutral words to
describe low intelligence. Then they gained a moral dimension and had
to be discarded, so today they essentially mean someone who disagrees
with me in important issues and is therefore evil. I am not sure what
the politically correct terms are today, but trying to come with
euphemisms for mental retardation seems to me to be an inherently
losing task. There seems to be this common delusion that if "good"
words were invented to describe something, then that something would be
perceived as good. But that's not how it works at all. When people see
the horrific reality of that something (and mental retardation in its
reality is pretty horrific), they come to associate the new word with
the horrific reality, not the other way around. (For the same reason,
the cutesy-poo euphemisms for obesity such as "plump" and
"full-figured" are doomed to fail as soon as you get to see the people
that these words refer to.)
As an end note, a while back there
was a poster campaign at the school in which the posters listed a large
bunch of words that shouldn't be used to describe persons with
disabilities. Many of these words I can understand why they would want
to eradicate: for example, "tard", "Stevie Wonder" and "Sling Blade".
However, there were also words that I didn't understand at all why they
were supposed to bad. One of these words was "slow", which I think is
actually the least offensive and least judgemental
of all possible words that refer to mental retardation. My advice would
therefore be to keep this word, since the alternatives are sure to be
worse.
Think about it a moment. How do we know that someone is
mentally retarded, and how does this make him different from the
others? We can't see into his brain or measure his thoughts, but can
only observe his actions and reactions. Mentally retarded people need a
longer time to learn and do many important tasks of real life: in other
words, they are slower than
other people. If there is a better word to describe the practical
reality of mental retardation, I would really like to see it.
Comments