The Rise of the Social

On blurry lines, autism parents, & meltdown videos (part 2 of 3)

Madonna in “Borderline” — (image created by author on Canva)

“Autism parents” and sharenting

This is part two of a 3-part series. If you missed part one, I recommended starting there!

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Blurred borderlines

In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote, “The emergence of society… into the light of the public sphere… blurred the old borderline between private and political”. Arendt explains that during the late Roman Empire, the concept of privacy meant to be deprived, originating from the Italian verb, privare, which means to “deprive, rob, or strip” of something. In an age where the personal and political realms were distinctly separate, to be “peculiar” or “isolated” was to be lacking something, to be set apart from one’s fellow humans.

In contrast, when there is an almost imperceptible difference between our public and private lives, privacy offers a temporary refuge from constant scrutiny — a momentary reprieve which may seem a scarce luxury. Arendt further explains that with “the rise of mass society… distinction and difference have become private matters of the individual”.

While people are “constantly trying to distinguish [themselves] from all others”, we must do so within an acceptable range of conformism, as social beings are called upon to follow “certain patterns of behaviour” so as to maintain social order. Society imposes “innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave… so that those who [do] not keep the rules [can] be considered to be asocial or abnormal”.

Disabled and Autistic children are granted admission into the public sphere only when they conform to social norms and expectations. While putting the worst images of our children out into the public sphere might allow them — and us — to be seen, we may be alienating our children in the process by presenting them as one-dimensional caricatures and playing into existing stereotypes. To be accepted into the public sphere, we must behave in line with the “common interest”, for the common good, because “modern equality” means the majority rules.

With the ever-increasing size of our public sphere, we see “a marked decrease in deviation” because “the more people there are, the more likely they are to behave and the less likely to tolerate non-behaviour”.

For Autistic and disabled children, this means they must learn to present themselves as ‘normal’ as possible, hiding and masking their differences for the comfort of others, embracing “the assumed one opinion of polite society”. Rather than accepting and valuing these differences, society demands a “change in the psychology of human beings — their so-called behaviour patterns — not a change of the world they move in”.