Time, money, brains and children

There's a lot floating through my head these days, making it difficult sometimes to figure out how to make sense of it all. A couple of threads came together for me as I was reading an article on public perceptions of genetic technologies. From "What Do You Think About Genetic Medicine?", a paragraph stood out. It's the statement of a woman participating in a focus group of parents of children with genetic diseases such as cystic fibrosis:

You have an imperfect child in this society and its a real handicap, its the money, its your time. The demands on a woman’s time [are] profound. If you have a handicapped child, then you’re looking at the heartbreak if she loses that child [and] all the investment. And these mums develop a very excellent and moving characteristic that makes humans human you know. They’ve got their feet on the ground and they can see the way things really are. That’s the mothers who have a child that’s disabled within the family. It does develop part of you that if you’ve never had to look at you’ve just not grown up . . . perhaps it keeps us being human. I don’t know how boring we’d all be and how dangerous we’d be if we were all a mob of intellectuals.

It's the last sentence that really got my attention. I don’t know how boring we’d all be and how dangerous we’d be if we were all a mob of intellectuals. The juxtaposition of boring and dangerous seems to border on oxymoron - danger tends to be thrilling, does it not? But that's not what my first response was. My first response was to wonder about this woman's need to contrast human-ness with intellectualism. Mothers who care for disabled children are kept "human" while intellectuals are not. Aside from the gendered bias of her statement, which of course brings up the question of where the fathers are, and whether they can be kept more "human" by caring for their disabled children as well, her statement is interesting.

As a mother and an intellectual, I feel like I have the authority to respond to this kind of sentiment. This kind of anti-intellectual rhetoric is not unusual, and I've certainly heard my share of it. In its most common expression, it opposes intellectualism to common sense, or life skills of some sort. The intellectual is derided for an inability to read a map, use a hammer, cook a meal, or other "basic" human skills.

Now I don't wish to take issue with this generalization as a generalization. I agree that there are plenty of intellectuals - myself included - who fail miserably at tasks that many people find simple. Sometimes it's because we over-complicate things, but more often I think it just comes from a lack of experience. In some cases, intellectuals (and others lacking common skills) are like children who just haven't had enough experience with something to develop a real competence at it. Even when intellectuals engage in routine or everyday activities, I suspect there are times when their attention is elsewhere, and thus they never pay close enough attention to those tasks to really get them right. I know that there are many times I'm not paying real close attention to mundane activities, and sometimes I find myself at a loss when I suddenly realize that I haven't been paying attention. You can be inexperienced at something because you haven't undertaken that task before, or you can inexperienced at it because you've never taken the time or energy to really pay attention to the task and learn it well. Of course you can also just be plain old incompetent, but that quality seems not to be limited to any single socio-economic factor.

I will give the author of the above quote credit for identifying a difference between the mother of a disabled child and an intellectual, but she's misplaced the nature of that difference. She identifies the difference as levels of "human-ness" but I think the primary difference between the two lies more simply in activity.

The activities of the mother of a disabled child are largely physical - caring for the child, working to secure funds, resources, and other necessary items in order to raise that child. In kind, this isn't much different from what parents of able-bodied children do. In quantity however, the workload of a parent of a disabled child is far greater. Everything takes more time and energy (and money). Although I don't have a disabled child myself, I know from the stories told to me by parents of disabled children that they have to expend far more effort to provide for their disabled child's needs than I do for any of mine.

The activities of an intellectual are largely mental. In fact, it's one of the things I sometimes find the hardest about an intellectual life - sitting still for the kinds of time that solid intellectual inquiry requires. (It's also what makes the life of the intellectual and the life of the parent clash so often)

I think it would be more accurate to oppose physical and mental activity as the hallmarks of the mother of a disabled child and the intellectual, than assigning humanity to the mother and inhumanity (that's what I read the dangerousness to be a sign of) to the intellectual.

But as human beings, are we not both physical organisms and thinking creatures?

I realize the humanist characterization of 'man as thinking creature' is outdated, but that's mostly because it defined 'man' as man, not as a dual-gendered humanity. If you let women into the thinking creature category, then the definition of humans as thinking creatures does seem fairly inclusive as well as definitive, marking off human from animal in a clear and reasonable way.

I'm starting to get a little lost in my own argument to some extent at this point, but I'm also trying to puzzle out this idea of the "dangerous" intellectual because I think it's critical to the kinds of public discourses we need to be having in our society with the emergence of so many potent biotechnologies - biotechnologies that the woman quoted above was responding to. Is the "dangerous" intellectual in this case based on the "mad scientist" stereotype of a man (not a woman) in a lab, trying to create life in a test tube? Is the speaker in the quote above actually making an opposition between women (who take care of disabled children) and men (who build dangerous technologies)? Or is it more simply as I first thought, an opposition between "real" people, and intellectuals?

I don't know that I have the answer. Unfortunately, the article I was reading gave no additional information beyond the quote I've reproduced above. I do know from other research that has been conducted, that there is a real opposition between the general public's concerns over biotechnology and the biotechnologists embrace of it. Certainly for researchers in biotechnology, there is the tendency, driven by curiosity (a strong human characteristic) to see how far the research can go, without necessarily stepping back to take a look at the big picture. The research also shows that there is no correlation between genetic knowledge and concern about biotechnologies - people who know their genetics are just as concerned as those who don't - so that it is not actually a case of those in the know being against those who don't know.

How pervasive are these assumptions - the stereotype of the mad scientist - or the equally damaging stereotype of the martyr-like mother who expends all her energy on her child? And more importantly, how do they get in the way of our understanding of each other? I don't know. As a mother and an intellectual, I can understand both, but identify with neither. Perhaps I'm just an oddball that way.