In his masterpiece, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), the great Marxist historian, EP Thompson, explained that he was seeking to rescue the labouring poor from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity.’ And with this exhortation the boundaries of history expanded exponentially to include a vast range of subjects usually overlooked, especially in terms of gender, ethnicity, religious belief, sexual orientation, class and so on.
But there is one group which has been almost entirely ignored: namely, people with what we would now call ‘learning disabilities.’ This is partly because of a paucity in the documentary record but more significant, perhaps, is the feeling that such people aren’t very interesting: after all, who wants to read a book about ‘idiots’ when there are so many geniuses to study? But as anyone who loves a learning disabled person will know, if anybody needs rescuing from the ‘condescension of posterity’ it’s this loosely defined group who’ve so often been mocked and abused, neglected and ignored, segregated, sterilised and murdered, all for the crime of lacking the cognitive powers that the rest of us take for granted.
There are many challenges involved in such a history, but one of the biggest is that the language keeps changing. As Simon Jarrett’s title suggests, ‘those they called idiots’ may not be the same people we would call ‘idiots’ today, just as the other terms—'imbecile,’ ‘moron,’ ‘cretin,’ ‘mental defect’, ‘retard’ and so on—all mean something different to when they were first coined. Indeed, they carry such negative connotations that they’re unusable in modern professional practice—if all too common in everyday speech.
Jarrett’s exceptionally readable—and beautifully illustrated—history describes in meticulous detail the way that this group has been treated by a largely uncomprehending world. ‘Idiots,’ he explains, were subjected to a gradual process of institutionalisation in the 200 years between the French Revolution and the coming of Mrs Thatcher; but also that this ‘great incarceration’ was followed by the ‘great return’ when, finally, the worst of the asylums and long-stay hospitals were closed and their inhabitants—many of whom had never lived anywhere else—were moved back into ‘the community,’ where many still live, often with inadequate support and company.
Jarrett emphasises the idealism that informed the early days of the ‘idiot asylums’ but explains how this gradually gave way to something much darker as the learning disabled came to be seen as an inchoate menace to the social order. He also describes the emergence of the eugenics movement, with its conviction that ‘the race’ could be improved if only ‘mental defectives’ were prevented from reproducing, leading to segregation, sterilization and, in Nazi Germany at least, state sponsored murder.
Although Jarrett’s account brings us up to the present day, it’s particularly strong on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and I’m especially grateful to him for two key insights. The first is into the relatively relaxed and tolerant attitudes of Georgian England, where, it seems, the ‘idiot’ was accepted: subject to mockery and jokes, certainly, but also recognized as part of society and celebrated as an expression of those frailties which are fundamental to the human condition. As such, Jarrett argues, the learning disabled—many of whom held down jobs and lived alongside the rest of the population—avoided the categorisation, exclusion and persecution that was such a feature of the worst that soon followed.
His other great insight is into the relationship between nineteenth-century colonialism and the disabled mind, with humanity being divided into three distinct ranks: at the top sat civilised white men, capable of rational thought and, of course, European; next stood barbarians—Chinese, Indian etc—who lived in cities and organized societies but were irrational, greedy and cruel; at the bottom were nomadic savages who seemingly lacked any powers of reason or intellect, ‘idiots’ who couldn’t manage their affairs and had no rights over the territories where they were found. Thus, in championing the great achievements of the European Enlightenment, the very idea of ‘idiocy’ was used to describe ’inferior races’ in ways which are still deeply damaging.
Jarrett’s subtitle is ‘the idea of the disabled mind from 1700 to the present day’ and he tracks with considerable care the way that the learning disabled have provided the rest of us with a contrast group against which we can define ourselves. And he shows in the most elegant way imaginable that the evolution of this idea and its many perversions has not just had incalculable impact on those with learning disabilities, it’s shaped the assumptions that inform our most deeply held beliefs.
The history of learning disabilities matter to us all because in our response we can see a mirror for who we are and what we care about. We should be grateful to Simon Jarrett for telling this complex, compelling and frequently troubling story with such tremendous clarity and style. I can’t recommend this wonderful book highly enough, even if—especially if, perhaps—you have no lived experience of the subject.