Baron-Cohen pages on this site: The Essential Difference | Summary | Comments | Classism | Five Brain Types This page is about the market model of personality already referred to on earlier pages. In particular, it is about classism in Simon Baron-Cohen's recent book, The Essential Difference. This leading autism specialist, a Cambridge psychology professor, offers a normative approach to personality based on contemporary professional middle class conformism. It is something that anybody who is concerned for the path our society is taking should be looking at, given the influence that people like the professor wield. There are two sorts of problems with the Baron-Cohen approach. Firstly, there is the unquestioned assumption that traditional middle class conformism in its twenty-first century incarnation is the normal human behaviour that everybody either already experiences or should aspire to. Secondly, there is matter of the point at which departure from this norm becomes shall we say clinical. I propose to take these matters a bit at a time, starting on this page with classism. Classism in Baron-CohenEarly in The Essential Difference, the author declares: Stereotyping ... is pernicious. We must recognise it as such in the context of racism, sexism, ageism and classism. [p 9]. However, from cover to cover, the book shows almost no awareness that any class exists, other than the professional middle class. There is the same feeling of unreality in the book as in those 1930s and 1940s British films in which the working class characters are played by ex public school boys, who say University mathsThus here is a warning against sexist stereotyping: don't assume that a young woman won't survive the university maths course she has applied for. [p 12] This example would be fine if, as the book progressed, an awareness was shown of the lives of all those young women who do not get A levels and go to university. But that is not the case. A few lines later, exemplifying things women do better, we have Hosting a large party tactfully, making everyone feel included, is just one example of something many men may shy away from. [p 12] For most British women, this must be totally unreal: part of a Ferrero Rocher dream world they might aspire to only if they won the National Lottery. The majority of men are never going to shy away from hosting a large party, because it's not going to be something they will ever be faced with. Supper with friendsHere's another from the same page - I just can't resist it: Those with the female brain prefer to spend their time engaged in coffee mornings or having supper with friends. [p 12] This kind of thing puts me in mind of Beyond the Fringe and the like: the courtroom sketches with judges rightly being derided for being out of touch with the reality of the lives of ordinary defendants. Just what proportion of women spend their time engaged in coffee mornings or having supper with friends? Our nannyBaron-Cohen's whole short second chapter is a set piece in which a mother describes what interested her son and daughter at various stages as they grew up. This is about how boys and girls seem to differ naturally in their interests as they develop. Commenting on her son's early fascination with toy vehicles, which she can't explain, the mother remarks: And our nanny was one of the those gentle people who thought cars were the source of the world's problems. [p 15] The author is presumably oblivious to how patronising that remark sounds. But more importantly, we need to get a grip and ask ourselves how representative of normal child development are children who have had a nanny, whose mothers could afford a nanny, rather than looking after them themselves or having them looked after by granny or by a childminder, say. Summer campIn a second major set piece, the author reports on an anthropologist's survey of the behaviour of adolescents at summer camp, presumably in the USA, contrasting the behaviour of boys and girls. I'm guessing that only affluent Americans send their offspring to summer camp, the same way the affluent British send theirs to boarding school. The aim in both cases is presumably partly to develop the teenagers' personalities. This consideration alone means that the individuals concerned must be essentially atypical. In so far as you are not just being packed off out of the way, meaning your parents don't care for you all that much, you are being sent to summer camp to have your middle class claws sharpened, to increase your prospects of success in the corporate or other jungle that will be your adult life. One way or another, the experience will make you different from the mass of other people in your age group: that's its whole point. Covent GardenA bit later, to illustrate female empathising, Baron-Cohen imagines one woman telling another about a new dress shop she's found: in Covent Garden. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this belong to the world of women with nannies, coffee mornings and supper with friends, rather than that of at least 95% of the female population. A world class mathematicianThe third of the set pieces in the book is Baron-Cohen's work with a fellow Cambridge professor, Richard Borcherds, a mathematician who has the equivalent of a Nobel Prize, work to see whether the professor has Asperger's syndrome. The point here is not the diagnosis, but simply the author's choice of case to feature in his book. It is just another instance of the author's unrelenting focus on the professional middle class. Now it may be that, because his clinic is associated with Cambridge University, Baron-Cohen's own case histories mainly involve the professional middle class. But he has no warrant to assume that he can offer valid generalisations about the human personality on the basis of such atypical evidence. There are no other extended examples other than the three set pieces I have indicated. It's the affluent middle class all the way.
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