Recently I read something which reminded me of a quotation whose author I can’t remember “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.”

I am writing in response to this news story <span about Alex Barton, a five-year-old whose teacher told his class to ridicule him before "voting him out" of the class. The teacher's official excuse for this was that the class was “learning about tallies”.

There has been widespread disgust about this on the blogosphere. Some of the best posts are here, here here and here. If you don’t have time to read them all, I would like to highlight this part of Amanda Baggs’ post:

“Children aren’t born knowing how to behave towards other children. None of them are, autistic or non-autistic. They have to learn that everyone’s dependent on everyone else, that people aren’t better than others just by being better at something, and that tendencies to do bad things to other people are things we all have to fight, not give in to, if we want society to be remotely just to anyone.”

I’d also like to add my own reflections. What happened to Alex Barton happens to many people of all ages every day. Much worse things happen every minute. However, this story shows something obvious but important about human nature.

I don’t know what Alex Barton did to get labelled “annoying” and “disgusting”. It’s possible that all this little boy did “wrong” was to be on the autistic spectrum. Whether he’s autistic or not it’s also possible that this boy was a bully himself and that he was deliberately cruel to his classmates (although it’s extremely difficult to tell whether someone is being hurtful deliberately or not, especially when that person is oblivious to certain unwritten social rules which see obvious to the majority.) I don’t care what he did to make his classmates think he deserved to be excluded in this way. The important thing is that this kind of punishment is cruel and unfair, not just to the person being punished, but also the classmates made to take part in the punishment. It legitimises the idea that some people aren’t “one of us.” It legitimises the idea that some people don’t deserve kindness. It legitimises the idea that some people are unnecessary, worthless and dispensable – that we can throw out people who inconvenience us.

I have long believed that it’s not possible to be cruel to a person if you believe they are really a person. By “believe they are a person” I don’t just mean that you agree that they are a member of the human species – I doubt the teacher and fellow students who were so uncharitable to Alex Barton behaved that way because they mistook him for a well-shaved chimpanzee. I mean that you really believe that their feelings are real; that their rights are real; that they are worthy to be part of the human species and part of whatever society they happen to live in and that they matter in themselves. Another quotation whose author I don’t know: “Sin is treating people, including oneself, as objects.” Nothing justifies treating people as though they don’t matter in themselves, even deliberate cruelty on their part. Nothing can stop a person being a person.

Alex Barton’s teacher and fourteen of his classmates decided that he didn’t matter in himself. Because something about the way he behaved inconvenienced them, it would make their lives much easier if his feelings didn’t matter. This is something very easy to do and I don’t believe it’s something we learn from society. I believe we learn to do it because duping ourselves into believing that other people aren’t as important as us makes life easier for us as individuals. Let me rephrase that more honestly: I know I learned to do it because duping myself into believing other people aren’t as important as me made life easier for me as an individual. At this point, you’re probably thinking “Well, duh!” It’s a pretty obvious truth, when it’s applied to everyone else. However, it’ nigh on impossible to recognise in oneself.

I’m very tempted to recount my own stories of being bullied on here, as other bloggers have done. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong in that if it’s done to show how horrible bullying is and that it should never be done to anyone. The trouble is that this easily leads to the desire to pour vitriol on everyone who bullied me and to forget that they were people. I have done this before. I can still remember one of my bullies doubled-up in agony from a kick in the groin I gave him (later he got his revenge, and then some.) Being a girl, I don’t know exactly how it felt, but I knew that it hurt and that’s enough to know that I shouldn’t have done it. I also know exactly what it’s like to stand in front of a crowd of people and be humiliated because you can’t do something. This was just about the only thing I learned in PE lessons. I knew that feeling intimately enough to know it was wrong to laugh at my bullies when they failed in tests or misspelled simple words. However, it’s more comfortable to think “Physical weaknesses are biological flaws, but intellectual weaknesses are character flaws” or to think “They’ve done this to me. They deserve it.” If I look for a reason why someone – anyone – deserves to be hated, I’m sure I can find it. But if I believe that their pain is as real as my pain, all those reasons dissolve into dust.

Whining about how I was excluded in the past also leads to the desire to hate “neurotypicals”. For the benefit of anyone unfamiliar with the term “neurotypical,” is an adjective used by people with various neurologically-based disabilities (the self-style “neurodiverse” or “neurodivergent” community) to describe people without said conditions. The word was invented because we don’t like to call these people “normal”, as doing so implies that neurodivergent people are abnormal or diseased. However, the word has gradually transmogrified into a term of abuse, as described by Donna Williams and Victoria Biggs. It has come to mean boring and stupid and bigoted and completely indifferent to other people’s rights. I’ve never met anyone who isn’t boring and stupid and bigoted and completely indifferent to other people’s rights at least some of the time (By the way, I don’t define boring as “not interested in the things I’m interested in” but as “unwilling to make the effort to be interested in anything at all” and I define stupidity not as a lack of intelligence, but as a refusal to try to learn). I’ve met a lot of people, both neurodivergent and neurotypical, who are utterly exceptional and whose compassion and tolerance I don’t think I’ll ever be able to emulate. But I know how astonishingly easy it is to think “people who aren’t me aren’t people” and how much easier it makes life. I don’t think it’s cynical to say that even the greatest altruists give into this urge. I think it’s just logical.

Notice I said easier. I didn’t say better. In my experience (and, heck, I’ve been alive almost twenty years – I must have learned nearly everything there to know is by now :-P) thinking that other people are people makes life so much better for everyone. Not just because people I respect are more likely to respond in kind, but because life is so much more interesting when I accept the reality of things outside my own head. There is a sense of perspective that comes with realising the world doesn’t revolve around me. There’s a slight disappointment, but also a profound relief, in the realisation that I’m one six-billionth of the word’s population and that I’m a lot less than one six-billionth as important as I thought I was. And there’s a profound, soul-filling awe at the beautiful variety of the human race.

I think it’s very important that as many people as possible know about this, to make sure that nothing like this happens again to Alex Barton or any other student. However, it’s just as important to remember that Wendy Portillo is person, too. She is not a faceless monster, in an underground lair full of smoking green test tubes and pickled organs, maniacally cackling “Mwahahahaha! We made a five-year-old cry! Stage one of my plan for world domination is complete! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” She is a person and deserves politeness. There is a huge difference between saying someone needs to be disciplined so they can learn to behave better and saying punishing someone because making them suffer makes you feel better about the bullying in your own past, as Bev<span puts very well.

Finally, I want to congratulate the two students who voted against kicking Alex Barton out of class. We could all learn a lot from you.