A History of Intelligence and ""Intellectual Disability Review

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A History of Intelligence and ""Intellectual Disability ReviewThe recent publication of *A History of Intelligence and "Intellectual Disability"* constitutes a major event. Anyone interested in psychology, philosophy, ethics, and English literature, as well as medieval, early modern, eighteenth-century, and disability studies should take note of it. Twenty years of research went into this book, which presents a history of ideas ranging from the ancient Greeks to the current period. It is thorough, rigorous, comprehensive, and painstaking in its analysis while also being simultaneously measured and provocative in its conclusions.
A cultural historian investigating the intertwined origins of modern biology, psychology, and ethics--origins he locates primarily in the early modern period--C. F. Goodey rejects both positivist and social constructionist approaches when addressing intelligence and intellectual disability. He argues that positivism and social constructionism, each in its own way, assume an a-historical human essence--an imbedded natural human characteristic, namely, a universal abstracting, logically reasoning, and information-processing intelligence. Likewise, positivism and social constructionism presuppose an equally universal absence of intelligence in certain human types: the intellectually disabled, with varying names labels: idiots, fools, changelings, naturals, autists, feeble-minded, cretins, morons, imbeciles, special people, etc. By absence of intelligence is meant an inability to reason abstractly and logically, to process information quickly, and to be aware of oneself in time and space.
Goodey is not a deconstructionist; he is deconstructing neither intelligence nor disability. And his critique goes well beyond attacking the validity of IQ tests. Rather, he questions the assumptions most of us hold about intelligence and how these assumptions make it difficult to think outside of a sphere in which being smart is the main business. If "man is a rational animal" (a statement Goodey contends Aristotle never made, at least not in so many words and not with the meanings medieval philosophers attributed to it), then we rational humans must assume that those whom we have decided are not rational also are not human, and we definitely do not want to be confused with this group.
Goodey maintains that the concepts of intelligence and intellectual disability are mutually dependent. We cannot deem ourselves clever without at the same time imagining a group against which to compare our elevated intelligence. And yet, it is not so much intelligence (and its absence) that matters. What does matter is dirt, disorder, and pollution. We fluff ourselves up about our own (and our species') brilliance, and we fear lack of intelligence in others, not because intelligence in itself matters, but because of the dirt, disorder, and pollution we imagine will be stirred up by those whom we have decided a priori are devoid of intelligence. Hence, scapegoating, stigmatization, ritual avoidance, segregation, and annihilation occur. We abort fetuses with an extra chromosome because we fear pollution.
Goodey describes claims to (high) intelligence as a mode of bidding for social acceptance or status. This status-bidding mode is just that--an attempt to shore up our self-esteem and to have others affirm this self-assessment. An intelligence-based bidding mode predominates today. Once upon a time, the common claim had been that one was among the elect (recipient of God's special grace). Also once predominant had been the honor-based claim. In other words, election and honor prevailed in the medieval and early modern periods. During the seventeenth-century, internal developments within the election and honor systems, together with the partial merger of the two, led by century's end to the ascendance of intelligence as the premier social-bidding mode. This development was articulated in John Locke's 1690 *Essay Concerning Human Understanding.* Goodey not only identifies the claim to intelligence as being today's chief bidding mode (a change in part attributable to Locke), but he also compels us to recognize that intelligence as a bidding mode has no more substance than the previously prevailing ones invoking honor and election.
Eventuating in a powerful, compelling case, Goodey begins with Plato, Aristotle, and the Sophists, delves into the Scholastic medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus and the Arab thinkers Averroes and Avicenna, dwells at length on the Protestant debates surrounding election, reprobation, and free will carried on between predestinarians and Arminians, incorporates medical history (i.e., Thomas Willis), philosophy (Descartes), literature (Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Sterne, etc.), and concludes with a penetrating analysis of Locke's *Essay* and its implications.
*A History* asks us to imagine a world beyond intelligence status bidding and gives us strong motivation for doing so by demonstrating how historically contingent and flimsy are our notions of intelligence and intellectual disability. (As the father of a child labeled 'profoundly retarded' under the medical model, I am grateful to have a resource to which to turn when seeking to shift the balance of argument regarding my son's equivocal human status. I am thinking in particular of Goodey's section addressing Peter Singer's line of argument.)
With regard to disability studies, I suggest that this book ranks among its best scholarship. It is up there with Lennard Davis' *Enforcing Normalcy,* Simi Linton's *Claiming Disability,* Rosemarie Garland Thomson's *Extraordinary Bodies,* Mitchell and Snyder's *Narrative Prosthesis,* Henri-Jacques Stiker's *A History of Disability,* Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum's *"Defects": Engendering the Modern Body,* Tobin Siebers *Disability Theory* and *Disability Aesthetics,* to name a few. Though Goodey would resist being pigeon-holed as a disability studies scholar, he is familiar with, uses, and respects disability studies' concepts.
I further suggest that this is the MOST significant book coming out of disability studies to focus exclusively on intellectual disability. There is no other critical disability studies project interrogating the origins of ideas attaching to intellectual disability, with the exception of Martin Halliwell's *Images of Idiocy* (Ashgate 2008), and Patrick McDonagh's *Idiocy: A Cultural History* (Liverpool Univ. Press 2008). Halliwell's and McDonagh's are good books, but both focus on the 19th century onwards. What Goodey's book makes a case for, to borrow wording from Lennard Davis, is this: the problem is not the mentally disabled person (Goodey states that it is not at all clear who this person is); the problem is the general notion of mental disability that the modern concept of intelligence invokes. More importantly, no other study exists (that I know of at least) that goes to the tremendous lengths (breadth, depth, complexity, layering, self-questioning) that this one does, and so successfully. "A History" cannot help but make us inquire into everything we think we know about intellectual disability (and its myriad cognate terms). By doing so, it puts on the defensive those who glibly philosophize or make facile public policy pronouncements about mentally disabled people. If the glib and facile wish to continue having even a modicum of credibility, they first must acknowledge (if not begin to answer) Goodey's powerful arguments.
In terms of style, Goodey knows his way around a metaphor and at times can be humorous. The writing alone makes this an enjoyable read. Still, A History is dense and demanding. Goodey ultimately presents the reader with a seemingly overwhelmingly challenge, one so fundamental it is difficult to grasp: he wants us to question what we most value in ourselves, in others, and in our species. In the final analysis, Goodey is as provocative as his nemesis, Peter Singer, on the same subject, but in the other direction. Goodey wants us to reevaluate intelligence as a form of status bidding not because it forces us to traffic in a muddy concept (which it does), but because every time we engage in it, we unwittingly are taking for granted a category of person woefully intellectually deficient, a category of entity so cognitively lacking that its species membership comes into doubt. And what ordinarily do we think we have the right to do with non-human entities? Answer: if it suits our interest, we believe we have the right to kill them. Which is to say, there is much at stake in his challenge to us to start thinking differently about intelligence , for, as Goodey makes clear in the book's opening paragraph, the killing of people identified as intellectually disabled began long ago and continues today.
Is Goodey's proposal--that we move beyond intelligence as the chief mode of social bidding--impossible to implement? Is it Utopian? Quixotic? Is it even conceivable? I don't know. As someone who has thought much about this topic, I cannot quite picture what a viable, socially widespread alternative would look like. And yet, even if what he proposes is Utopian, why should its apparent impracticality stop us from trying? Now that he has put this idea out there for our attention, we are ethically obligated at least to consider its merit and possibility and to try to envision something else, something better, if for no other reason than for argument's sake. Goodey himself is not naive about the enormity of his proposition. At the close of his introduction, he writes,
Accessibility is not just a matter of understanding the historical material, but of being morally prepared for what one has access to. While there are hard facts to be established, there are also hard truths to be faced. Of these, truths about our self-esteem . . . are among the hardest. (12)...Read more›A History of Intelligence and ""Intellectual Disability Overview

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