“What He Found Not Monsters, He Made So”: The I-word and The Bathos of Exclusion
D. Christopher Gabbard [1]
Using the concept of bathos, the essay interrogates a late 2004 installment of Rall, a left-leaning cartoon strip that for political reasons reinscribes the alterity of people with learning disabilities. The trope Rall uses of ascribing mental defect to political opponents is examined and traced back to the Restoration. Contrasting the writings of the royalist Thomas Willis and the Whig John Locke with regard to their analyses of mental disability, the essay argues that political developments in the late-seventeenth century necessitated the formation of a category of not-quite human entities designated by the word idiots.
What is at stake when a speaker pronounces a lofty and complacent sentiment but in articulating the thought inadvertently destabilizes its meaning? Addressing this phenomenon is Alexander Pope in his 1728 “Peri Bathous: or the Art of Sinking in Poetry.” Ventriloquizing through Martinus Scriblerus, the text’s ostensible author, Pope “relentlessly exploit[s] the follies of minor writers,” in particular the ‘low’ writers of Grub Street, by offering what “is both a satire on literary mediocrity, and an analysis of what makes bad poetry bad” (Kramer 80). While the mock treatise provides many illustrations of ‘profound’ writing, it pillories the examples by only supplying instance after instance of a grandly rising thought that punctures itself. Sarcasm constitutes its modus operandi, exemplified at one point when Scriblerus praises a particular author’s “peculiarity” of “invention”: “The author’s pencil, like the wand of Circe, turns all into monsters at a stroke. A great genius takes things in the lump, without stopping at minute considerations [. . .]. With a boldness peculiar to these daring geniuses, what he found not monsters, he made so” (208). Pope strongly suggests that wherever in literature monsters are produced, bathos cannot be far off.
Today, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines bathos as a “Ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech.” Of interest here is what happens when a twenty-first century political cartoonist and a seventeenth-century Whig philosopher categorize a group of people as ‘idiots’ (the I-word), ‘retards,’ ‘changelings,’ or ‘naturals.’ This study will begin by inspecting an item published in the Washington Post, an installment of the cartoon strip Rall that, in order to register its political message, unapologetically reinscribes the alterity of people with learning disabilities. The essay next will consider what assumptions were necessary to be in place for the strip’s rhetorical gesture to become intelligible. The final sections of the study will explore when and why these stereotypes coalesced by returning to the late seventeenth century, the period when the notion that “the cognitive ability of our minds [a]s a defining quality of our species” was just becoming dominant (Martensen 144). John Locke’s definition of the idiot as an entity incapable of reason in effect excludes this figure from membership in the human species. Relevant for contextualizing his definition is one that the OED offers for another word, monster: “a mythical creature which is part animal and part human”—relevant because, as Pope intimates, wherever monsters are being produced, bathos cannot be far off. Locke’s commitments were as much political as philosophical, and if bathos enters into his writing, it does so when, for the purpose of serving a Whig agenda, it is establishing the alterity of people with intellectual disabilities. In sum, the trope Rall and Locke share opens an investigational portal for exploring the cultural history of mental disability. This essay will argue that political developments necessitated the formation of a category of ‘mythical’ (non-existent) quasi-human entities that today is designated by the I-word.
A segment of Rall was published a few years ago in a number of major American newspapers including the Washington Post, a student with a learning disability appears in each of the four frames. In the first frame, a caption announces “The U.S. is like a classroom into which mentally handicapped children are ‘mainstreamed.’” Pictured in the front of a classroom is a drooling and burping child sitting in a wheelchair (his thought bubble reads “Erp!”). A woman informs the class, “I expect everyone to threat Charlie like any other student.” In the second frame, the caption states, “The ‘Special Needs’ kids make people uncomfortable and slow the pace of learning.” With snot dripping from his nose and drool draining from his mouth, Charlie says “GOOMBA GOOM 4 + 3!” The teacher asks, “What’s that, Charlie? Why, Yes! We can go back to the simple one-digit addition!” The third frame’s super title carries the story forward: “But they can’t help being the way they are. So the smart kids make an effort to be nice.” Charlie gestures and utters “Weh!” and another student, worriedly surveying him, inquires “What’s that, Charlie? You need me to help you go to the bathroom? Um . . . Um . . . Ok.” In the final frame, the caption reads “Now, however, that may change.” An adult male figure stands behind Charlie’s wheelchair and declares to the class, “From now on, you have a new teacher: Charlie!” The astonished students look on and a thought bubble for one of them reads “Wait a minute.” The strip thus closes with the apocalyptic conceit of the dunce assuming control of the educational system.
Cartoonist Ted Rall later defended himself by asserting that the strip reflected his “dismayed reaction to the presidential results” (Ferguson). Indeed, his strip came out six days after the 2004 re-election of George W. Bush. In light of Rall’s left-leaning politics, one must surmise that he is analogizing Charlie with the victorious president and / or his supporters. His point is political allegory, the primary level of which refers to the supposed difficulties of mainstreaming a student with disabilities into a classroom of typically developing children. However, on its second order of signification, it alludes to Democrats having to face the prospect of their mentally sluggish Republican counterparts taking over. The strip becomes legible only when the reader infers the terms that are conspicuous by their absence: Bush and the Republicans are idiots and retards. It is with this message of resistance to Republican rule that the strip attempts to soar. And yet, it sinks into ludicrous incoherence: considering that its point is to divvy up intelligence according to political party, it shows a surprising lack of it by vilifying the disabled—one of the Democratic Party’s constituencies. More importantly, far from expressing a progressive message, it reiterates vestigial prejudices. Simon Dickie has demonstrated that in the eighteenth century people with disabilities “were standing jokes [. . .], almost automatic figures of fun” (14). Thus, the strip incongruously superimposes the language of a forward thinking, post-ADA[2] social agenda on an individual that it clearly suggests is emblematic of, in Martin Halliwell’s phrase, the “degree zero of humanity” (51).
The I-word is a particularly totalizing trope, one especially given to generating bathetic moments such as the one Rall exemplifies, that is, intimations of soaring feeling, tone, or message unexpectedly sinking. One reason for this may have to do with the fact that it remains unclear for what exactly the I-word stands: it does not refer to any clearly definable category bearing ontological significance. Having examined representations associated with the neurodiversity spectrum, Halliwell cautions that idiot and idiocy are highly inexact, writing that idiocy is at “best seen as an overdetermined concept with multiple and complex causes that arise at the intersection of various discourses” (2). And Patrick McDonagh, who has studied idiocy in Victorian literature, questions whether the condition “does in fact exist” (“Literature” 269).[3] Indeed, the I-word may have no meaning at all, at least in the sense of having a stable and coherent referent in the world. And yet, it serves a powerful rhetorical function in that it circulates as a ubiquitous slur, one that is considered socially acceptable in almost all quarters. The I-word as vituperation is strikingly effective because people who use it uncritically assume that the term names something that exists, which is to say that the word’s wide currency can be traced to, using Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase, a “pre-verbal taking-for-granted of the world” (68). Even so, its use manifests a lack of what Ralph Savarese terms “an interpretive humility in the face of the cognitively ‘other’” (424). This is to say, the term reveals far more about the individual directing it than about the person to or against whom it is directed. One important reason why it is invoked so often has to do with its serviceability as a means of self-comprehension and self-definition: it shores up a sensitive aspect of personal identity, namely, in C. F. Goodey’s wording, “our general self-esteem as ‘intelligent’ creatures.” Goodey observes that “not only do we find it hard to escape our preconceptions about a scale of intelligence [. . .], our professional lives and careers often depend on the esteem conferred by being able to appear clever” (“Social History” 17).
Certain conditions had to come into existence for the I-word aspersion to create maximum impact. To be brief: the figure exhibiting mental difference emerged as the poster child for the cognitive Other during the early Enlightenment period when intellectual ability became a decisive factor for species membership. A good place to explore the development of the modern notion of idiocy is in the writings of John Locke. Goodey comments that “we are all Lockean psychologists,” and his statement rings true especially in those moments when the temptation to label someone an idiot proves overwhelming (“Locke” 237). Understanding what Goodey means requires considering Locke’s two most well-known texts, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government, both published in 1690.
Locke was composing these texts within political and medical traditions that were governed to significant degree by his predecessors’ utilization of isomorphic metaphors describing the spirit or soul (mind), the body, and the body politic. Useful for understanding Locke’s recourse to these metaphors is Allison Muri’s The Enlightenment Cyborg. She delves into medical, political, and economic treatises and documents written between 1660 and 1830 with an eye for metaphors and imagery describing three items: the soul or driver of the human body, the governing agencies within human societies, and the systems of circulation within both the individual human body and the body politic. Mapping out the “long history of metaphors for the government of the human soul or spirit” and for that of the body politic, she observes that political treatises especially have depended upon an “old analogy” establishing a reciprocity of rhetoric and imagery for correspondences between the individual body and social one in a mystical, macro- and microcosmic connection (91, 103). The concept of the interrelatedness of the macro- and microcosmic natural worlds, she states, originates from the ancient Greek notion of “hylozoism” in which the “life or soul or mind of the individual is the same as the force that animates, unifies, and directs all other aspects of the world, including the state” (103). Various authoritarian social systems such as the one Plato envisions in The Republic have utilized this hylozoistic principle: “Plato imagined both the state and the individual citizen to function best with a centralized rational control and appropriate division of labor by the members of the lower order” (103). In other words, systems such as Plato’s, in which power is arranged on a vertical axis, compared the head or brain or soul of the individual physical body to a society’s governor and ruling elite. Similarly, the body is likened to the base echelons of soldiers, mechanics, servants, women, and slaves. In the well-organized society, the seat of reason (for Plato, the head) rules over the limbs and muscles. The brain of the society is the elite. Disorder erupts with deviations from this scheme: “An unhealthy state, like an unhealthy body, was characterized by the parts’ ‘meddlesomeness and interference with one another’s functions’” (103). Hence, whether the body be individual or political, “the incorporeal soul is a pilot or ruler and all other members of the body are its servants” (103-04).
Another similarly organized, top-down system with which Locke would have been well familiar would have been the one Thomas Hobbes laid out in Leviathan (1651). In reaction to the mid-century mayhem of the English civil wars, Hobbes famously opines that human existence in the original state of nature was characterized by a continual war “of every man against every man” (ch. 13). As a solution he proposes a “social contract” scheme whereby all individuals opt to surrender their rights and prerogatives to a single supreme authority. In return, this authority provides the order and security that makes commerce and commodious living possible. Hobbes’s vision of an authoritarian social structure, in which the head—the governor and the elite—ruled with an iron fist over the various parts of the body, reiterates the old body-politic analogy. Of interest here is not just the comparison of the individual body to the body politic that Hobbes reiterates but also the way he understands information to travel from one part of the body or the nation to another. Of consequence are the metaphors referring to the way ‘news’ flows from the head to the body. Almost always the head stands for the controlling agent, one that sends orders to the organs and extremities. “Tropes of control in the human mind, particularly, consciousness as steersman, governor, or pilot [. . .],” Muri writes, “have been related to communications metaphors applied to social bodies” (164-65). In medical and political texts, the metaphors for describing how the ‘news’ proceeds from the head to the members in social bodies are the same ones used for individual physical bodies. In Leviathan, once the social contract has been established, the subjects cannot challenge the supreme authority; that is, the ‘news’ (of dissent) does not flow upward from the members to the head.
It was in response to such authoritarian, one-way information streams that Locke was writing. In the Two-Treatises, he rejects paternal governmental authority and articulates what would come to be known as classical liberal political philosophy, laying out the reasons why power should devolve from the Stuart monarchy and the Tory aristocracy to a wider array of the king’s subjects. Locke sets out to demolish the essential metaphors of Tory patriarchalism because they legitimized governmental monopolistic practices and mercantilist policies to the exclusion of the Dutch-style, free trade procedures he preferred. Moreover, these metaphors justified the Tory court in retaining complete political control. Locke sought a power dispersal to the Whig commercial traders and merchants as well as to the press, coffee houses, and other extra-monarchical interests in the City of London. To be for decentralizing power in favor of a Habermasian public sphere, as Locke’s Two Treatises vaguely anticipates, meant proposing a model in which information could be exchanged back and forth, with ever changing ‘news’ circulating from head to body and then from body back to the head in a continuous circuit. William Harvey’s discovery of the blood’s circulation decades earlier made thinking in such terms possible. After all, if the old body politic analogy was to remain apropos, it would have to be reconfigured for anatomical accuracy in light of the discoveries the new empirical science was making possible.
While on the surface the arguments Locke presents in the Essay seem unrelated to the political concerns of the Two Treatises, the two texts go hand-in-hand. For the most part, the former looks at the connection between the senses and the mind to form an epistemology of how reasoning takes place. In conducting this investigation, Locke creates, to borrow phrasing from Kenny Fries, a neurotypical “fantasy of the ideal” (23). Muri’s observation concerning the “[t]ropes of control in the human mind” becomes important here for discussing this “fantasy of the ideal” because the ability to reason well bears greatly on the sound judgment of the “steersman, governor, or pilot”—that crucial figure occupying the leadership position in both the individual body and society (164). The image of the “steersman, governor, or pilot” comes into play in the Essay when Locke distinguishes the human from the animal based on the ability to reason: it is the quality of reasoning that establishes both the soundness of judgment and the threshold of humanity. A brief synopsis of the Essay is in order: Locke posits that, while all ideas come from sense experience, it is the mind’s associating of these ideas that generates the reasoning process, which in turn depends upon a felicitous combination of four factors—memory, language, learning capability, and the ability to think abstractly. In illustrating two instances in which this felicitous combination does not occur, he distinguishes between idiocy and lunacy, conditions that heretofore have been grouped together (except in English law) in the common locutions “fools and madmen” and “lunatics and idiots.” He writes:
the defect in Naturals [idiots] seems to proceed from want of quickness, activity, and motion, in the intellectual Faculties, whereby they are deprived of Reason: Whereas mad Men, on the other side, seem to suffer by the other Extreme. (2.11.13)
Having too many ideas and associating them wrongly characterizes the madman while having too few of them distinguishes the idiot. He goes on to say that madness often is temporary but that idiocy is lasting. Locke constructs idiocy as a permanent condition (education cannot ameliorate it) in which the mind functions slowly (the “intellectual Faculties” are unable to quickly sort through both immediate sensory data and the older data stored in the memory) and is “deprived of Reason” (lacking is the ability to think abstractly—that is, to associate ideas). Locke’s seemingly innocuous distinguishing of “Naturals” from “mad Men” will have serious ramifications, for if, as he states elsewhere in the Essay, rationality distinguishes humans from animals, those who can not think abstractly and who lack the potential ever to do so must be assigned to a category apart from the human. Goodey argues that his text in effect establishes a separate category for “naturals” and “changelings” (idiots), one existing somewhere between humans and beasts (“Locke” and “Psychopolitics”). While not claiming that the Essay explicitly presents a case for excluding idiots from species membership, Goodey convincingly demonstrates that Locke’s text repeatedly employs the example of the idiot when clarifying a position and that many of these positions are presented in response to the era’s religious and political controversies. The Essay overall fashions a secular basis for ostracizing the mentally disabled as the ‘other’: the alterity can take the form of a syllogism: if the human is distinguished by the ability to think abstractly, and the idiot cannot think abstractly, then the idiot is not human.
The Essay in effect establishes an intellectual litmus test for deciding who will be deemed competent and, therefore, qualified to participate in the redistribution of power argued for in the Two Treatises. Locke devotes a part of the Two Treatises to refuting Robert Filmer, who, writing in the late 1630s, was addressing the increasingly serious breach taking place between parliament and the Stuart regime.[4] In doing so, Filmer employs the concept of hylozoism by broadly likening the legitimacy and absolute authority of (Stuart) kingly governance over the nation (England) to that of a father’s rule over his family. Asserting that paternal authority resembles that of the king and vice versa, Filmer claims that the “subjection of children is the only fountain of all regal authority, by the ordination of God himself” (7). Michael McKeon writes that Filmer’s patriarchalism was “based on a hierarchical notion of authority that is implicitly analogical: as in the microcosm, so in the macrocosm” (296). Politically, this ideology served the important mechanism of sanctioning hereditary lineage at the national level while also neatly interlocking with royalists’ legitimization claims for divine-right monarchy and absolute authority. Such a comprehension of authority did not survive the century. Forces with whom Locke sympathized deposed the patriarchalist Stuart regime in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, replacing James II with the Dutch stadhouder,William of Orange; in 1689, the Dutchman, now ‘William III,’ signed a Bill of Rights with Parliament (Israel). In the Two Treatises, published the following year, Locke demolishes Filmer’s old king-father analogy by pointing out that eventually, in the world of lived experience, a father’s child grows up. The subject that formerly had existed as the perpetual ‘child’ of Stuart patriarchalism, had suddenly grown up to become a post-Bill-of-Rights English adult. This new version of the subject now was expected to demonstrate an ability to make contracts with his fellows, participate in civil discourse, and give (or withhold) consent.
Mainly written before the Glorious Revolution, Locke’s Essay and Two Treatises attempt to articulate what will constitute the new subject in the post-revolutionary nation, one whose identity will not be constructed within a vertical hierarchy vis-à-vis the king but rather on a horizontal axis in relation to one’s fellow subjects. In conjunction with others like oneself, the new subject will pilot, steer, or govern the emerging society. This change represents a radical shift in the conception of the subject, and in light of this change Goodey’s main point becomes germane: it is on account of the Essay’s rhetorical strategies that the idiot winds up becoming the sine qua non for the post-1688, social-contract subject. If the new steersman, governor, or pilot cannot reason, then he cannot operate independently and so must remain a dependent within Filmer’s state of patriarchalism. In political terms, then, the idiot correlates with, from a Whig perspective, the “idiotic idolaters” (Tories and later the Jacobites) who choose slavish reliance upon absolutist authority (Goodey “Psychopolitics 111). Therefore, purposeful and historically specific ideological construction is not far off in the launching of the modern notion of the idiot. Terry Eagleton defines ideology as “the processes whereby interests of a certain kind become masked, rationalized, naturalized, universalized, legitimated in the name of certain forms of political power” (202). In the final analysis, both Locke’s new subject and its corrolary, the idiot, are Whig ideological constructions.
Much in Locke depends upon the existence of the idiot, but does this figure exist? His creation has roots in jurisprudence: G.E. Berrios writes that, in medieval court records, idiocy was “associated with qualifiers such as congenital and irreversible,” and congenital and irreversible supply the type of qualifiers Locke needs to formulate his abstraction (226).[5] In Locke’s defense, one could offer that in the 1670s and 1680s (when he was assembling notes and writing the Essay) he lacked access to today’s genetic testing, etiological classifications, and diagnostic criteria. Still, it must be noted that, in the generation prior, Thomas Willis (1621-1675), the physician “credited with founding the field of neurophysiology,” made major breakthroughs concerning the brain and nervous system and produced “a physiologically sophisticated notion of reason,” one that was a surprisingly holistic and inclusive view of people with mental disabilities (Cranefield 307; Martensen 152). In his neurocentric paradigm, the workings of the brain and nervous system owe something to Harvey’s circulating blood. As Muri explains, Willis “describes the [animal] spirits as distributed throughout the nervous stock from the brain’s foundation, but stationed throughout the nervous system to send ‘news’ to and from the brain” (135). Willis makes cautious “usage of the body politic analogy” in that he updates and adapts it: his treatises “reinvented [the analogy] as a circuit of communication and commerce” (Muri 108, 112). What is particularly telling about Willis’s metaphoric construction, Muri maintains, is the fact that he does not confine the brain to the skull but extends it throughout the body by means of the nervous system. Thus, the brain is not separate or detached from the body; rather, it operates in intimate conjunction with and through the body, and vice versa. The brain is decentralized. This is to say that Willis was consciously breaking from Cartesian dualism in which the mind and the body are separate: Willis’s “explication of the government of the human body was eminently distinct from that of Descartes” (Muri 25-26). In Willis’s conception, within this extended brain, ‘news’ goes back and forth between head and body. Also telling is the fact that, though Willis does not differentiate between motor and sensory nerves, he does describe various bodily functions as taking place on their own: they are “orderly disposed . . . without any driver, which may govern or moderate their motions” (qtd in Muri 124). The fact that the brain does not consciously control all physical operations has a political application, as Muri points out: “Not only do the ‘subtil little bodies’ of this body-nation influence the monarch-soul, but they also have freedoms not controlled by the monarch” (125). As a matter of establishing context, she explains that the royalist Willis was “working out his system of neuroanatomy during the interregnum following the execution of Charles I” and that his realization—that the “king seated in the brain did not have absolute power over the body”— may have been born of these troubled times (105, 109).
It is within this framework of creating a new, neurocentric model that Willis develops one of the early systematic discussions of mental imperfection. In chapter thirteen of the 1672 De anima brutorum, he ascribes human neurotypicality—in his terms, a well functioning memory and imagination—not to metaphysics but to a lack of disruption in either the “Animal Spirits” (blood flow in conjunction with the heart’s heating operation) or the brain’s structure. Conversely, intellectual impairment springs not from any unnatural curse, demon possession, fairy intervention, or astrological influence but from “biological abnormality” (Cranefield 305). Put differently, idiocy is a condition ascribable to physiological grounds, specifically, to malfunctions in the brain and / or the central nervous system. Moreover, he delineates a number of causes and ranks them in terms of a spectrum of capabilities. A determinist and a materialist to the extent that he believes that individual human behavior derives to a great extent from physiology, he distinguishes degrees of mental impairment and expresses the belief that some people with cognitive disabilities can be educated. “Stupidity [. . .] hath many degrees,” he writes, “for some are accounted unfit or incapable, as to all things, and others as to some things only” (212).[6] Willis finds gradations and differences in what previously had been perceived to be a homogeneous group (212). Most importantly, he proposes that mental disability should not be regarded as a hopelessly static, permanent condition. Rather, he argues that it should be considered as having the potential for improvement and afforded the chance to develop through education. Willis radically proposes that idiots’ mental faculties can be “amended” through the education of a “Physician and a Teacher” (213). Depending on the level of the impairment and the type of instruction applied, a large number of people with cognitive impairments are capable of having their scope of understanding enlarged. Importantly, he stresses repetition (“the same things are again and again to be inculcated to them” [213]) rather than trying to instill relatively abstract thought in which language serves as the primary vehicle for imparting the ideas. In sum, he maintains that the “wit” need not be permanently limited but may be “trimmed” “in a little measure,” at least to the extent that such people may make “use of reason in a little measure” and so “be accounted out of the number of Brutes” (213). In proposing education, Willis is unprecedented.
Locke knew Willis and would have had to have read De anima brutorum. After all, this “was a widely read and influential treatise—going through eight editions between 1672 and 1683—printed at Oxford, London, Amsterdam, Lyon, and Cologne” before being translated into English in 1683 as Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes (Muri 131). In addition, Willis held Oxford’s endowed Sedleian chair, and Locke, “then an Oxford student intending for medicine, attended Willis’s [natural] philosophy lectures and the occasional post-mortum” (Martensen 147, 153). Moreover, Locke took his degree in medicine in 1674, two years after the first edition in Latin appeared. It is interesting, then, that he implicitly brushes Willis aside by stating on the opening page of the Essay that “I shall not at present meddle with the Physical Consideration of the Mind” (1.1.2). Instead, he chooses to engage in abstract speculations concerning the formation and association of ideas, treating the mind as though it were almost as distinct from the body as Descartes had treated it several decades earlier (1.1.2). Thus, writing in the following generation, Locke eschews Willisian physiology to produce instead his peculiarly disembodied epistemology. Even more interesting is the fact that, throughout the text, Locke leaves no opening whatsoever for idiots to be brought to “reason in a little measure” (Willis 213).
Reasoning appears to be an all-or-nothing affair: either people can do it, or they cannot (and if they cannot, then they must not be people). And yet, his reification of the condition of idiocy as permanent and hopeless amounts to little more than an exaggerated picture of mindlessness, a phantom figure lacking in complexity and gradation, in essence, a sort of Theophrastan character. The Theophrastan character was a prose genre that was in vogue in England during the first half of the seventeenth century and that eventually disappeared but not before it was incorporated into various genres, including the novel.[7] English collections of characters delivered “generalized but detailed descriptions of the behavior and appearance of a class or type; they were on the whole short, succinct, pointed, and less discursive than the essay” (Oxford 186). Benjamin Boyce identifies these set, one-dimensional pieces as “static descriptions of people” (117). Typical titles were “The Married Man,” “The Pretender to Learning,” “The Pinch-Penny,” and “The Hypocrite.” Locke’s gross oversimplification of individuals who exhibit a “want of quickness, activity, and motion, in the intellectual Faculties, whereby they are deprived of Reason” amounts to just such a literary creation: “The Idiot” (2.11.13).
Just as Locke’s lack of specificity is strangely at variance with the Essay’s empirical pretensions, so too is his implicit recourse to an antiquated literary form (outmoded even in his own day) at odds with his purportedly forward looking politics. In this latter regard—the politics—he and Willis came from opposite ends of the spectrum, and this difference helps explain why Locke indirectly dismisses Willis on the Essay’s opening page. Born of Puritan parents, Locke had been forced to flee to Holland in 1683 on account of his association with his patron, the Whig leader Shaftesbury. Willis was a supporter of the crown; the “Restoration of the Stuarts boosted Willis’ fortunes,” and it was through his connection with the ascendant royalists that he obtained his Oxford appointment, the endowed Sedleian chair (Furdell 244). Furthermore, according to Martensen, “Willis’s published anatomies gave prominent place to the noble,” a fact suggesting that Willis moved in circles antithetical to Locke (158).
More is at stake here though than merely Locke’s Whig sympathies and Willis’s monarchist leanings, for what is crucial is the way the two men’s differing views of idiocy inflect (in opposite ways) the old body-politic analogy. While Willis does not explicitly make this claim, a close examiner of his work easily could surmise that the elements in the individual body’s communications system that cause news to travel poorly (turbulence brought on by roughly textured brain tissue or poorly conducting nervous tissue) can be likened to those social elements (political partisans with views opposing one’s own) who retard society’s operation. With regard to individuals, if the nervous system or the cortex has suffered damage, modest repairs can be effected through education. Similarly, on the political level, remediation can re-establish some level of working order. Overall, then, concerning both idiocy and political opposition, Willis’s medical understanding of the modes of internal communication, applied to both the physical body and the body politic, would be holistic, inclusive, and restorative. More importantly, his discoveries regarding information flow in both sectors would tend toward circulatory and non-authoritarian explanations: the head does not necessarily consciously control every bodily process. Power is decentralized. News travels from the head to the body and back to the head, continuously, and if disruptions occur in this circuit, repairs can be made to those parts in order to restore the system. The key word (and pun) here is ‘Restoration.’
Locke was formulating his ideas during the Restoration, mainly in the 1670’s and 1680’s, the same decades in which England’s Whig and Tory party politics was just coming into formation. With the 1690 publication of the Essay and the Two Treatises, he does the ideological work of appropriating intelligence for the Whigs: as Goodey points out, in Locke’s formulations the “mind is Whig” (“Psychopolitics” 107). For Locke, shoring up one’s own side in the new Tory and Whig political dichotomy requires theorizing a class of people who, on the basis of inferior intellect, do not qualify as ‘us.’ And yet, if the mind can be aligned with one political party over the other, then residing on the opposite side of the political divide among the “idiotic idolaters” of absolutist authority would have to have been the royalist Willis (“Psychopolitics 111). And yet, if an ‘idiot’ such as Willis can discover how information flows back and forth between the brain and nervous system, as he had done, then ‘idiocy’ must be very subjective indeed. Had Locke chosen to avail himself of Willis’s groundbreaking discoveries in neuroanatomy, they would have supplied him with a richly empirical model for illustrating the way that ‘news’ should circulate in the post-1688 body politic. In other words, Willis’s circulatory paradigm of the nerves (with its auxiliary recommendations for restoring communications along the nervous system’s damaged lines), would have been particularly apt for exemplifying the classical liberal agenda Locke wished to promote. Willis’s circulatory paradigm would have been apt because it would have portrayed through physical analogy the concept of power decentralized and continuously flowing from the court toward a wider population of thinking subjects and then back again in a continuous circuit. In such a model, power never would reside for long in any one place.
However, Locke rejects the illustrative power of Willisian physiology when he refuses in the Essay to “meddle with the Physical Consideration of the Mind” (1.1.2). If it is true that a royalist’s medical breakthroughs remained off limits to a Whig philosopher, then ascribing ‘idiocy’ probably is not just subjective but also political. By divesting his musings of material considerations, Locke attempts to soar into the realm of ideas, and it is in this attempt that he sinks. This sinking becomes evident in the way his peculiarly disembodied epistemology, considered along with the Two Treatises, replicates the earlier head-driven or top-down, authoritarian schemes of the body-politic offered by Hobbes and Plato. In other words, the political iconography of Locke’s supposedly innovative political theorizing turns out to replicate what had come before, at least in the sense that it winds up doing what other theories before had done, namely, assigning power to the ‘head.’ What turns out to be different in Locke’s theory is where he places the emphasis in his ‘head’-driven regime. For Locke, the emphasis falls on fetishizing the intellect.
While it would be both presumptuous and overstating the case to characterize Locke’s overall argument as bathetic, his argument does situate itself precariously on the cusp of bathos in at least two ways. First, incongruity becomes apparent in the way it fashions a body politic that allows the mind to rule, but then, in this privileging of intellect, rejects out-of-hand significant contemporary scientific knowledge, namely, the knowledge pertaining to the human brain and nervous system as they were understood in his own time. And second, its legitimizing of the post-1688 ‘social contract’ subject depends upon creating an antithesis to this subject—the idiot who cannot make contracts. Locke’s argument for empowering the new subject depends upon positing such an entity. And yet, of this idiot figure Locke presents only an insubstantial, one-dimensional description, the very reductiveness of which calls to mind the Theophrastan character, a genre sketching types in such broad strokes that the people it names cannot possibly exist. And because this particular type is situated somewhere on a spectrum between the human and the animal, the OED’s definition of monster becomes operative: “a mythical creature which is part animal and part human.” As Pope’s Scriblerus had intoned, “what he found not monsters, he made so” (208). Locke’s quasi-human idiot amounts to nothing other than a ‘mythical’ being, the product of a vestigial genre and mindset, a linguistic creation with no referent in the world. And yet, for Locke’s Whig purposes, the idiot proved absolutely necessary, serving as a ‘fictional truth’ because it helped to demarcate an ‘us’ and ‘them’ in the new party politics of the late seventeenth century.
Specific political developments contributed to the modern understanding of the idiot. And just as Locke the Whig needed “idiotic idolaters” of the king in order to distinguish his party from its Tory opponents, so too does Rall today require Republican idiots to legitimize an ‘intelligent’ Democratic alternative. In the final analysis, this study finds that who winds up being labeled with the I-word pretty much is a matter of who controls language and which political agenda needs to be served. Along these lines, Kenny Fries asks, “Who is disabled? Who decides? Sometimes [. . .] the decision is made by someone who seizes the power of naming” (24). Locke seized this power while doing the ideological work of Whig partisan politics. Judging from Rall’s strip in which intelligence and idiocy, once again, are divvied up according to party, the legacy of Locke’s act of naming remains strong.
Notes
[1] D. Christopher Gabbard, Department of English, University of North Florida.
[2] The ADA or Americans with Disabilities Act was passed into law in the United States in 1991 as an important piece of federal civil rights legislation for people with disabilities.
[3] McDonagh clarifies that he is not denying that people experience ADHD, Down’s syndrome, autism, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or the like; it is the popular notion that has “been formulated and applied to certain individuals” that does not have a basis in reality (“Literature” 269).
[4] Patriarcha originally was written in 1638.
[5] For more on the medieval and early modern perception of the permanence or immutability of idiocy, see Andrews 80-89.
[6] Quotations are taken from the 1683 English translation entitled, Two Discourses concerning The Soul of Brutes.
[7] This type of writing took its name from a Greek botanist, Theophrastus (373-284 B.C.E.), whose Charaktêres satirized contemporary types in Athenian society.
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