Practicing Neurocosmopolitanism as a Spiritual Virtue
The Neurodiversity Paradigm
and Neurocosmopolitanism
from Neurocosmopolitanism: Nick Walker's
Notes on Neural Diversity, Autism, and Cognitive Liberty
The neurodiversity paradigm is a specific perspective on neurodiversity – a perspective or approach that boils down to these fundamental principles: |
Neurocosmopolitanism consists of approaching neurodiversity in the same spirit in which the true cosmopolitan approaches cultural diversity...To embrace the neurodiversity paradigm is to refuse to pathologize neurocognitive styles and experiences that differ from our own, and to accept neurodiversity as a natural, healthy, and important form of human biodiversity – a fundamental and vital characteristic of the human species, a crucial source of evolutionary and creative potential...Neurocosmopolitanism goes beyond this baseline of acceptance, as cosmopolitanism goes beyond mere tolerance of cultural differences. The neurocosmopolitan seeks to actively explore, engage with, and cultivate human neurodiversity and its creative potentials, in a spirit of humility, respect, and continual openness to learning and transformation. |
Practicing Neurocosmopolitanism as a Spiritual Virtue
Practicing neurocosmopolitanism is one way that open and relational (process) thinkers can practice what they preach. The practice is, in the words of Nick Walker, "to actively explore, engage with, and cultivate human neurodiversity and its creative potentials, in a spirit of humility, respect, and continual openness to learning and transformation."
Open and relational (process) thinkers believe that the entire universe is embraced by an inclusive Love whose very life is enriched, not depleted, by diversity: diverse kinds of entities and creatures throughout the universe, diverse forms of life on planet earth, diverse ways of being human beings among humans. Differences make the whole richer.
The inclusive Love (God) is cut off from the diversity by the boundaries of a simple unity. The Love is the living whole of the universe, understood as living subject in whose life the multiplicities are gathered into a complex unity filled with contrasts. Nick Walker’s website, Neurocosmopolitanism, shows how a practice of neurocosmopolitanism is good for society. Open and relational thinkers propose that it is good for God, too. Without neurodiversity God could not be as fully God.
To practice neurocosmopolitanism is not to pretend that you understand autistic people; it is to honor the mystery of their lives and, for that matter, the mystery of all lives. No one is enframeable. All are unique and often, in the uniqueness, quite beautiful. If the Love in whose heart the universe emerges delights in the uniqueness, we can do the same.
-- Jay McDaniel
Practicing neurocosmopolitanism is one way that open and relational (process) thinkers can practice what they preach. The practice is, in the words of Nick Walker, "to actively explore, engage with, and cultivate human neurodiversity and its creative potentials, in a spirit of humility, respect, and continual openness to learning and transformation."
Open and relational (process) thinkers believe that the entire universe is embraced by an inclusive Love whose very life is enriched, not depleted, by diversity: diverse kinds of entities and creatures throughout the universe, diverse forms of life on planet earth, diverse ways of being human beings among humans. Differences make the whole richer.
The inclusive Love (God) is cut off from the diversity by the boundaries of a simple unity. The Love is the living whole of the universe, understood as living subject in whose life the multiplicities are gathered into a complex unity filled with contrasts. Nick Walker’s website, Neurocosmopolitanism, shows how a practice of neurocosmopolitanism is good for society. Open and relational thinkers propose that it is good for God, too. Without neurodiversity God could not be as fully God.
To practice neurocosmopolitanism is not to pretend that you understand autistic people; it is to honor the mystery of their lives and, for that matter, the mystery of all lives. No one is enframeable. All are unique and often, in the uniqueness, quite beautiful. If the Love in whose heart the universe emerges delights in the uniqueness, we can do the same.
-- Jay McDaniel
How Autism Feels, From the Inside
one and only one person's story
What is it like to live with Asperger’s syndrome? Jordan Kamnitzer tries to answer that question in “Perfectly Normal,” this week’s Op-Doc. It’s beautifully directed by Joris Debeij, who frames Kamnitzer’s experiences and ideas with evocative cinematography and editing, giving us a beautiful but challenging glimpse into another way of being. In a related essay, the writer Eli Gottlieb describes it as “a rare filmic experience of the sensory overload of autism … as Jordan, the articulate middle-aged subject of the film, speaks about his own condition, the music skitters and booms, rapid jump cuts intensify the sense of danger, and in this swelling moment of uncertainty, the viewer experiences a fleeting sense of what it might be like to live in a condition of permanent, anxious neural flood.” Gottlieb grew up with a severely autistic older brother, but even after 40 years, “find[s] his emotional and cognitive process as fundamentally mysterious as ever. The impenetrability of autism, with its seemingly endless variants and its essential “otherness,” is its hallmark. All this renders Jordan’s testimony that much more useful and intriguing. He is a reporter at a hinge-point of consciousness, able to inhabit his condition while describing it for us — whether we are “neurotypicals” or lodged somewhere on the spectrum — with remarkable precision and insight.”
-- NY Times