Book review: Robert Chapman (2023) EMPIRE OF NORMALITY: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

Exposing the Empire of the “Normal” Mind

Robert Chapman’s book, published by Pluto Press, is a trenchant, clear and maddening read which exposes and challenges the taken for granted assumptions about “normality”. This is expressed by the pathology paradigm through which autism and other neurological differences have been perceived for nearly two centuries.

Movingly, there’s a sense that things weren’t always thus… Before the “clock time” of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, Chapman notes that most societies before the 1800s were sometimes able to accommodate difference rather than judging it against a metrical yardstick, which became the norm due to the great, but also obsessive and decidedly creepy, scientist Francis Galton. Before then – while Chapman does not ignore real discriminations that existed – the focus was on seeing health as ‘a matter of harmony or equilibrium [either] within the individual, or between individual and either the environment or their community.’ Ancient Chinese medicine, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek and the Ayurvedic tradition in India, while evidently having the limitations of their times, were ‘nothing like the systemic disability segregation’ that came later in the 1800s.

Chapman is measured and critical – if not especially detailed – about the actual record of Communist regimes, chiefly those of Lenin and Stalin, but nevertheless forwards a committed Marxist analysis of how our sense of “normality” and enforced conformism is dictated by capitalism. I am convinced, as clearly, Marxism was not a template or rulebook that the Soviet dictators actually utilised, but rather distorted it and used it for promotional value.

This book builds on Mark Fisher’s crucial insights about people internalising and blaming themselves too much for problems which are actually externally imposed by capitalist realism. Chapman rightly calls it a ‘fascistic fantasy’ to wish away neurodivergent disablement and illness and that we need to accept that they will always exist. Chapman is strong on defining the industrial and human impacts of Fordism, which was a major workplace enforcement of conformism and neurotypicality, as well as creating burnout and boredom. The manipulation of workers and their moulding into ‘man machines’ saw corporations utilising the PR techniques of Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. Mentions of B.F. Skinner echo the piecemeal behaviourist educational moulding that Laura Tisdall reveals in her excellent book about the 1940s-70s British education system.

There’s a fascinating section where Chapman develops a nuanced critique of the increasing use of prescription drugs from the 1950s and related debates concerning over-medication (pp. 95-96, 105-106), culminating in references to Arlie Russell Hochschild’s work on the ‘Commercialization of Human Feeling’ and C. Wright Mills on the ‘personality market’ (111-112). This reflects on how workplace exploitation in itself created problems that led to alienation and increased reliance on drugs.

Chapman critiques the 1960s Laingian anti-psychiatry movement, which was so easily coopted by right-wing libertarian Thomas Szasz, author of The Myth of Mental Illness (article 1960, book 1961), giving him ammunition to claim that mental illness itself was a ‘myth’. A section on eugenics builds on Adam Pearson and Angela Saini’s BBC documentary Eugenics: Science’s Greatest Scandal and Adam Rutherford’s recent work in exposing this appallingly extant movement that Galton founded. If anyone’s in any doubt about the sway of the ‘autism as damaging’ pathology paradigm, learn how Deborah Barnbaum argued, as recently as 2008, in The Ethics of Autism, ‘that, once prenatal diagnostic technology is capable, there will be a moral obligation to abort autistic foetuses on the grounds that being autistic is inherently incompatible with living a good human life’.

While Chapman follows the typical Marxist pattern of offering rigorous diagnosis of the malady, but not proposing detailed remedies, he does see the major path forward in the work of Peter Sedgwick’s PsychoPolitics (1982), a socialist attempt to recognise mental health illnesses, but seek alternative community organisation beyond the state apparatus. This approach is shared by Franco Basaglia in Italy, Hel Spandler and Mark Cresswell and the West German Socialist Patients Collective. In parallel is a sound account of the Neurodiversity movement which emerged in the 1990s, led by Jim Sinclair, Judy Singer and Harvey Blume; their politics of Neurodiversity has been furthered by Nick Walker and others who’ve contributed to the paradigm shift in the 2010s towards neurodivergence being respected.

Chapman notes significant earlier progress in the late 1970s with the Black Panthers recognising ‘disabled liberation as bound up with collective liberation’. This is a prelude to his necessary and ambitious focus on intersectionality at the end, with many alliances with other groups needed for his proposed neurodivergent Marxism to work. He does not entirely ignore our planetary environment, which has been ransacked and made to fit the needs of capitalist development, whether American, Chinese or European. However, that this really only emerges in the conclusion suggests a fuller book is needed to explore how neurotypical thinking hinders any serious long term ecological action.

This impressive book, with its far-reaching and impressively constructed argument, persuades you that some form of reformed Marxist thinking, combined with other lenses, is vital to begin making the world a better place. Chapman grounds the book with a notably personal introduction which reflects on his own life experiences. There are promising signs in how neurodivergence is being more accepted, but we can’t be complacent: as Chapman argues, we need fewer ‘diversity consultants teaching companies how to exploit more neurodivergent workers’ and more ‘neurodivergent workers organising as neurodivergents to radically change the structures and expectations of the workplace.’ (p.161)