My interest in human adaptation follows from my efforts to understand neurodiversity. This topic has occupied my attention informally for nearly 30 years and has become, within the last decade, a focus of inquiry for me across a series of autobiographical, theoretical, and empirical papers. I was forced to take on this topic during the youth of my daughter, who began exhibiting unusual behaviors early in life, ultimately being diagnosed with a number of what are known as mental illnesses and neurodivergent conditions: Asperger’s syndrome, Tourette’s syndrome, severe chronic anxiety, depression, oppositional defiance disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as they are known in the diagnostic community. The charming manner in which she would, as a child, arrange her dolls and other belongings in well-ordered patterns in various rooms of our house eventually manifested itself in other ways that began to get our attention. Ultimately, it led us to consult with medical, psychotherapeutic, and psychological interventionists who provided various combinations of pharmaceuticals and interactive therapies designed to temper her extreme tendencies, which at times could be alarming and destructive.

Through our experiences with trying to provide her—and concurrently, to provide her younger brother, my wife 1 , and me—with a more satisfying life, I came to understand these conditions from a very personal standpoint. Like other parents of my generation whose children went through a diagnosis, at times I thought that the specialists were talking about me while explaining the results. The more I learned about her makeup, the more I reflected on my own personality, particularly following a major panic attack in 1999 during a conference presentation I was making that resulted in my own diagnosis of severe chronic anxiety, a condition for which I have been taking medication ever since.

That episode and the learning curve that followed my initial resistance to the idea that what was described as “mental illness” could occur in my very own family led me to interpret my own tendencies in light of my daughter’s condition. The result was an understanding that much of what characterized her—anxiety, Asperger’s, Tourette’s, and obsessive-compulsiveness—undoubtedly was part of my own makeup. And I suspect that more than a few people who have attempted to manage, maneuver, manipulate, and supervise me over the years would add an oppositional-defiant temperament to the mix as well.

In conjunction with this recognition, I began writing about neurodiversity—at the time using the term “mental health”—from a very personal standpoint. I began with an autoethnographic reflection (Smagorinsky 2011) in which I related my own and my family’s experiences. I argued that although people like my daughter and me are undeniably cut from a different and in some ways less socially acceptable cloth than are most people, we are not deficient, disordered, abnormal, or sick or other characterizations commonly applied to those who experience the world in socially atypical ways. Rather, we had a makeup that, in the right contexts, actually made us assets to social groups and communities of practice, not to mention ourselves. To give one example from my own experience, the combination of Asperger’s and obsessive-compulsiveness can lead a person to pursue topics of interest in extraordinary and systematic detail and engage with them with an intense focus that is available to few who are not on this spectrum. We see the world in a grain of sand rather than as one big beach.

In my career as a researcher, this frame of mind, in contrast to being the debilitating abnormality that typically is “suffered” by those with Asperger’s, is a tremendous asset that enables me to investigate a line of inquiry exhaustively. In the process I might exhaust some of the people around me, but my publication record has made me, in the academic world in which narrowness and intense focus are rewarded, a valued member of the university culture. I’ve begun referring to this facet of my personality as a quality, my Asperger’s Advantage, rather than the disorder it is generally considered to be (Smagorinsky 2014). There might be accompanying traits, such as interactional bluntness, that some people find dissonant in polite company, but that trait can be tolerated, if not universally welcomed or particularly humored, in a productive university faculty member.

This disposition has enabled me to think deeply about neurodiversity, and to do so through the vehicle of writing, a confluence that has served me well in the production-oriented world of the publish-or-perish environment in which I work by choice. My initial autoethnography was well received and opened the door to my scholarly investigations. In my autoethnography, I had made a brief reference to Vygotsky’s (1993) studies of defectology, which I review in detail in Chap. 2 of this volume.

As someone with Asperger’s, I was not content to write my autoethnography with a second-hand account of Vygotsky’s (1993) defectological writing provided by Kozulin and Gindis (2007), my introductory source at the time, and be satisfied with my achievement. Rather, I had to read the whole volume in order to grasp the full breadth of his thinking on a topic that had entered my obsessive mind, and begin writing in relation to this reading (Smagorinsky 2012a, b). These papers hardly satiated my interest, but rather they fed my appetite for understanding Vygotsky’s ideas in light of neurodiversity, an issue that he had addressed only peripherally in sections scattered across his writing—in his critiques of Freud’s focus on the past rather than on the future, and in Freud’s and others’ attention on the individual rather than on the social group (e.g., Vygotsky 1927).

This writing also brought me in contact with the work of my colleagues Kyunghwa Lee and Joe Tobin, who were studying other social aspects of human difference. Kyunghwa was interested in how youth from non-White racial classifications were overrepresented in learning disabilities assignments (e.g., Lee 2008), and Joe was in the process of conducting a cross-national study of preschools that enrolled deaf children (Tobin, Valente, & Horejes 2010–2014).We scheduled a semester of discussions with graduate students and occasional visitors. It was a seminar series that included deaf participants, the sort of persons with whom I had had infrequent opportunity to interact during my life. My sensitivity to the problem of secondary disability made me extremely attentive to our deaf participants’ needs, such as their need for others to make eye contact with them while they spoke in sign language—even though the vocal sound that translated their signing physically emanated from another person, often in a different part of the room where they could see the signing clearly. Although the deaf speakers and listeners had to make adaptations of their own in order to participate in the discussions, it was incumbent on the rest of us to make adaptations as well.

This phenomenon gave me a new imperative, to investigate the problem of adaptation as one shared by whole groups rather than individuals of difference. This chapter serves as my effort to consider adaptation as a social, rather than solely an individual problem. I first review Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the role of adaptation for species, social groups, and individuals, all of which influenced Vygotsky’s (1931) attention to the problem of adaptation for people of difference. Not surprisingly, Vygotsky viewed this issue as a social problem not confined to the individual of difference but shared by those in the environment of development.

Co-adaptation in Evolutionary Theory

Most conceptions of evolution and adaptation are motivated by Charles Darwin (1859), a naturalist who was not concerned with human adaptation yet whose ideas have been used to conceptualize social theories of competition and survival. Darwin’s contemporary Herbert Spencer (1857), a sociologist who asserted a libertarian perspective on human culture that presumed the “survival of the fittest” in human competition, popularized the notion of social Darwinism in the wake of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Ironically, Spencer’s attention to individual monetary competition and Vygotsky’s Marxist perspective on collective human labor shared this same source. Given my interest in the role of the social group in accommodating people of difference, it should come as no surprise that I am Vygotskian rather than Spencerian in my appropriation of Darwin to consider the problem of human adaptation.

Fundamental to Spencer’s (1857) social Darwinism is the assumption that people are inherently in competition with one another for social and material advantage. His ideas were robustly incorporated into the perspective of US industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie (1889), who said that “while the law (of competition) may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.” Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton (1883) further founded the notion of eugenics: the idea that superior human races can be genetically and socially engineered through selective breeding and thinning out the weak. The belief that the strongest survive fits the machinery of American capitalism quite well, or at least its most selfishly motivated version of capitalism that allows for the ruthless pursuit of wealth without regard for the health and welfare of others in society. This conception, while often practiced among industrialists and financiers, is not, however, the only way in which either naturalistic or social Darwinism is practiced.

Stetsenko (2011) argues that Darwin, instead of emphasizing individual competition for survival, was concerned with a species’ collective history in that “The relational and historical character of nature, interlinking all living forms through their history clearly comes through in that Darwin employs the notion of co-adaptations of organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life” (p. 29; emphasis in original). She proceeds to quote Darwin’s lament that “our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings” overlooks interdependence, the conjoint and reciprocal reliance on others that contributes to the present and future welfare of creatures living in ecological balance. Animals, including humans, do not live in harmonious bliss, given their need to eat and survive, which pits them in competition in what Darwin (1859) called “the Struggle for Existence.” He uses this term “in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny” (pp. 63–64).

Darwin (1859), then, was less individualistic about survival than those who claimed to adapt his principles from nature to society. Nature, he argued, provides many examples of mutual interdependence from humans who domesticate dogs to the symbiotic relations between many animals, such as suckerfish who attach to sharks and both groom them and live off the effluvium of their kills. Darwin was among the first to note the complex webs of dependency in nature, exclaiming, “the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!” (p. 74).

People’s domestication of animals is not always as reciprocal as are their customary relationships with their pets, as is evident in People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ (http://www.peta.org/) ongoing crusade to persuade people to treat animals used for food, research, and other purposes more humanely. Surviving in light of the human need for food and medical advances complicates the ethics of occupying a crowded planet, including its many and varied human occupants. This ethical component, however, at least in human societies, provides the imperative for accommodating, rather than competing against, other inhabitants of a social and natural space.

Stetsenko (2011) notes that Vygotsky’s developmental approach views human growth as a function of engagement with and adaptation to the environment, both in its physical and social senses. This view, she argues, is Marxist in origin, given that it relies on collective labor rather than individual competition. Again, the issues are complicated, in that the USA is a capitalist rather than socialist or communist society, making Marxist arguments problematic in this context, an issue to which I will return.

Vygotsky’s conception of collective labor is both historical and immediate. Cultures organize their practices in relation to the environment and through tools designed to enable them to survive its vicissitudes (Tulviste 1991), a process that involves continual transformation and creation to optimize human possibilities. This collective activity is fundamental to social life, resulting in what Stetsenko (2011) refers to as a process in which human development becomes a “socio-historical project and a collaborative accomplishment…a historical becoming by people as agents who together change their world and, in and through this process, come to know themselves and their world, while ultimately becoming human” (p. 33; emphasis in original). This point is saturated in the Marxist perspective that capitalism is fundamentally dehumanizing, a problem that Marx believed would lead to its inevitable extinction, superseded by communal social life, an endpoint that has yet to be realized.

From this viewpoint, human society is not necessarily competitive at the individual level, given that intentional, volitional group efforts are available, if not embraced by all. Society need not be ruthlessly oriented to the accumulation of wealth, as those working in Spencer’s tradition tend to assume in emphasizing the competitive nature of capitalist societies. A selective reading of Darwin (1859) could easily support Spencer’s human version of the struggle for survival. Darwin wrote, for instance, that “the competition [for survival] should be most severe between allied forms, which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature” (p. 76). Within the same niche, he notes, one species of rat or cockroach might drive out others filling the same ecological niche. What is different about people, however, is their vast within-species differentiation such that they create unlimited societal niches that don’t necessarily pit one individual or subgroup against the other for survival.

Rather, humans may work together to benefit not only themselves or their groups but also other people, perhaps even from different groups. Darwin (1859) found it incontrovertible and ultimately axiomatic that “the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, [is] advantageous to them” (p. 119). Vygotsky and others for whom Marx is a starting point thus consider the role of the social group in ensuring survival, even as many societies founded in Marxism have rapidly shifted to totalitarianism (Snyder 2010), suggesting that Marx’s critiques of capitalism did not necessarily produce a viable alternative in the actual conduct of human affairs. My own perspective is somewhere in between the extremes provided by Marx and Carnegie, informed by the understanding that cooperative societies, or at least subgroups within societies, are possible if not inevitable, and only when ethical imperatives for mutual care become governing philosophies (see Chap. 2’s attention to privileged irresponsibility, the banality of evil, and benign neglect).

Several factors distinguish human evolutionary adaptations from those in nonhuman populations, in particular the availability of cultural-historical adaptations by human social groups, such as the ability to pass down socially constructed knowledge to new generations. I make this observation with the understanding that advances in learning about the complexity of nonhuman life continue to reveal greater intelligence, intentionality, tool use, and social organization than has previously been believed. Vygotsky, for instance, spent a great deal of time distinguishing between people and primates (e.g., Vygotsky and Luria 1993), relying on a knowledge base that now is greatly outdated. He underestimated and mischaracterized the tool use of primates, a phenomenon that researchers have demonstrated in the years following his death (e.g., Ottoni and Izar 2008; cf. Shumaker et al. 2011 for tool use across the animal kingdom; and Wikipedia, n.d.a, for a compendium).

As I have reviewed, people have interpreted Darwin in very different ways. On one hand, his observations about the competitive side of the natural world have been applied directly to human life, with people of superior advantage dominating and at times even eliminating those of lesser or unwanted capabilities, a major project of Stalin in his effort to accelerate the evolution of the “New Soviet Man” in the Soviet Union (Bardziński 2013). This perspective views biological makeup, particularly intelligence, as innate and lacking any sort of malleability. From this standpoint, one is born with physical and cognitive abilities that remain constant across the lifespan. Advantages such as those provided by circumstance—particularly wealth—are viewed in this conception as incidental to one’s life potential and trajectory.

On the other hand, Darwin has been interpreted in terms of social group behavior, exhibited in both the natural and human worlds. People need not elevate themselves at the expense of others, but may work cooperatively to produce group potential for survival and welfare. From this perspective, innate biological makeup is elastic, capable of reshaping and growth through social mediation. Those who embrace this view consider members of social groups to be responsible for one another, with those who may lack some evolutionary advantage such as sight or hearing being included in cultural activities through alternative means, rather than being rejected as nuisances in the drive to generate wealth. The unsighted may never see, but they can be provided with tools such as canes and braille texts that enable them to navigate the material world sufficiently to live rewarding lives, particularly when their lives are validated by those around them. They may further benefit others through the contributions they may make when appreciated for the assets that are too often overlooked when they are viewed and essentialized in terms of what they lack.

Adaptation and Social Environments of Development

Early in his career, Vygotsky (1925/1997a) wrote that “Adaptation is the fundamental and universal law of development and life of organisms” (p. 57), available in two types. First, changes are available in the animal’s biological structure. These changes are produced over time in Darwin’s sense of the evolution of species. The second type of change occurs in behavior, but not in structure. This sort of adaptation is more rapid and flexible, available to individuals but not to species over generations, and it is more a property of mind than body. That is, my thinking is much more amenable to adaptation and change than are my arms or legs, even as both are related to one another.

Vygotsky (1925/1997a) was primarily interested in how mind develops in relation to the environment, calling mind “the most valuable biological adaptation” (p. 57) because it enables a human to gain control over nature. As I have reviewed, it also may produce gains in control over other people, although Vygotsky’s nascent Marxist perspective viewed people as more cooperative than competitive, a principle betrayed by Stalin during Vygotsky’s lifetime and beyond.

At this early point in his career, Vygotsky (1925/1997a) was strongly influenced by Pavlov, the reigning titan of Russian psychology. Within five years, Vygotsky (1930/1997) had distanced himself from Pavlov’s insistence that psychology should investigate the physiology of the brain via the study of nervous associations and related reflexes, unaccompanied by attention to mental phenomena. Pavlov is known today for his “conditioned response” experiments in which dogs were trained to salivate when a light or sound signaled the availability of food. Van der Veer, the translator of the volume in the Collected Works in which this essay appears, is among the current scholars who assert that “conditional response” is the more proper translation, a term that suggests the role of the environment—the conditions under which a response occurs—with far greater agency and flexibility than is suggested by “conditioned” in the traditional translation. The notion of the conditional response, argued Vygotsky, bridges biological adaptation as outlined by Darwin and sociological perspectives available through Marx. In this conception, hereditary biological behavior produces social behavior through engagement with the environment.

Vygotsky (1925/1997b) elaborated on this process, arguing that human behavior is predicated on the historical ways in which a society has conducted itself and is further shaped by social experience of others, such that a person may read or hear accounts of other people’s experiences in the world and learn them second hand. People can then adapt the environment to themselves in what Vygotsky, relying on Marx, calls the “doubling of experience that is unavoidable in human labor” (p. 68): the use of the imagination to anticipate material consequences for new actions. He thus situates adaptation in not only personal responses to the environment, but the process of imagining future scenarios, understanding their effects conceptually, and taking the most suitable choice based on this experiential knowledge and capacity for anticipating future outcomes (see Smagorinsky 2013).

In this early work, Vygotsky was operating at the level of Pavlov’s theory of reflexes, without positioning the human environment itself as something that may be volitionally changed to adapt such that people with few resources may experience life in fulfilling ways. He took up that project with his work in defectology, the study and education of people of physical (e.g., blind), cognitive (e.g., mentally underdeveloped), and what I would add as neurological (e.g., clinical depression) conditions that produce a poor fit for the construction of mainstream society (see Chap. 1). That aspect of adaptation is central to the issues I address in this chapter.

The Interdependence of Biological, Historical, Cultural, and Social Lines of Development

Lee (2010) argues that biology and culture should be viewed as interdependent in human life, especially given the tendency to argue in Spencerian manner that biology explains cultural difference in deficit terms, an approach that leads to such claims as a bell curve of racial intelligence (e.g., Hernstein and Murray 1994). Just as many dismiss culture in favor of biology to explain human difference and gradations of social value, argues Lee, cultural psychologists are insufficiently attentive to biological factors, perhaps because of the use of biological difference to construct racially hierarchical, deficit-oriented characterizations of society. Drawing on recent work in neurosciences, Lee argues for an integrated conception of human development that accounts for both nature and nurture. She asks, “If adaptation and plasticity are characteristic of human brain functioning, then why are we not doing more to understand the conditions of such adaptation and plasticity, particularly with regard to those who face the greatest exposure to threats or obstacles in our society?” (p. 647). Lee, as an African American woman, is primarily concerned with how youth of color are constructed and treated in educational settings, but her argument applies just as well to any point of physical, cognitive, or neurological difference.

Lee (2010), like Stetsenko (2011), notes that the drive to survive exists at both the level of the individual and the level of the species, both in the immediate communal sense and across generations. Survival, she argues, depends on the adaptive qualities of each organism and the availability of multiple pathways through which survival may be achieved. Pathways may be limited both materially and symbolically. In the corporeal world, one might be limited by geography and weather, as when Laplanders—the indigenous Scandinavian people who live under Arctic conditions—live semi-nomadically in relation to the availability of food sources. Symbolically, speech conventions may discursively limit pathways for those from outside the dominant culture whose members produce its people’s definitive texts, such as when Native American people are used as sports team mascots under such appellations as Savages (Wikipedia, n.d.b), suggesting their location on the lower order of the human species. To Lee, the idea of adaptation through multiple pathways has a basis that is simultaneously biological, environmental, and cultural. Germane to my own argument, Lee finds that human stress—of the sort that contributes to Vygotsky’s secondary disability (see Chap. 2)—is typically brought on by environmental factors and manifested physiologically.

Lee (2010) goes on to state that one’s stress may be manifested at the cellular level to the point that the Lamarckian phenomenon of soft or epigenetic inheritance may occur, in that this stress can be passed down across generations. Although almost everything about the phenomenon of soft or epigenetic inheritance has been debated since it originated with Erasmus Darwin’s 1796 publication of Zoonomia and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s 1809 treatise Philosophie Zoologique, and although the jury for the most part is still out on whether or not physiological changes in individuals can be passed down genetically, there is some evidence that at least a partial intergenerational effect of relatively short duration may be available from individual neurological change (Springer and Holley 2012). Lindley (2010) finds that intentional behaviors such as smoking tobacco may have intergenerational cellular effects. Charles Darwin himself appeared to accept some Lamarckian principles, if tentatively:

We have also what are called monstrosities; but they graduate into varieties. By a monstrosity I presume is meant some considerable deviation of structure in one part, either injurious to or not useful to the species, and not generally propagated. Some authors use the term “variation” in a technical sense, as implying a modification directly due to the physical conditions of life; and ‘variations’ in this sense are supposed not to be inherited: but who can say that the dwarfed condition of shells in the brackish waters of the Baltic, or dwarfed plants on Alpine summits, or the thicker fur of an animal from far northwards, would not in some cases be inherited for at least some few generations? and in this case I presume that the form would be called a variety. (p. 48)

Nonetheless, not all neuroscientists are convinced that Lamarckian effects are real (e.g., Futuyma 2009). I must leave the Lamarckian aspects of these various assertions to those who know better, given my limitations in understanding the science behind the dispute.

Lee (2010) accepts what neurologists such as Immordino-Yang and Damasio (2007) have found regarding the plasticity of human makeup and the availability of somatic (i.e., emotional) influence on neurological makeup. In this conception, one’s engagement with the environment is not a function of two static and impermeable entities colliding, but instead produces an interaction through which both environment and the person are amenable to fundamental change. People act on their environments through the use of cultural tools, which may be material (e.g., digging in the ground with a shovel) or psychological (e.g., believing, as do many Native American people, that the world is animistic and thus people and the biota emerged from the same source and thus nature should not be exploited). Environments may act on people, with stress following from encounters with nature (e.g., hurricanes) and other people (e.g., through discrimination) or a combination (e.g., when following Hurricane Katrina, Black residents of New Orleans were treated with indifference by government officials charged with addressing their dilemmas). To account for the ways in which people enter into complex relationships with their social and physical environments through an integration of physical, cognitive, and emotional capabilities, Lee employs the metaphor of braiding to represent human adaptation.

To Cole (2002), this braiding process is a central aspect of human development. Cole distinguishes natural phylogeny—the evolutionary development of whole species—from evolution, which is infused with cultural mediation:

In so far as it is dominated by phylogenetic influences, development is a Darwinian process of natural selection operating on the random variation of genetic combinations created at conception. But cultural change operates according to a different set of principles: cultural variations are not randomly generated, they are, rather, descended from the successful adaptations of prior generations passed down exosomatically [i.e., through symbolic means]. While natural selection has the final say, in so far as human behavior is mediated through culture it is “distorted” by a Lamarckian principle of evolution. [Acquired] culture becomes a “second nature” which makes development a goal-directed process in a way in which phylogenetic change is not…. Human beings are hybrids. (pp. 316–317)

Cole’s (2002) Lamarckian reference is quite different from Lee’s (2010) in that he is making a cultural-historical Lamarckian claim rather than a biological one (Cole, personal communication, July 1, 2014). Lee argues that one’s cells are altered by a set of emotional of experiences and passed down through genetic heredity. Cole asserts the need for a Lamarckian notion of culture, as opposed to cellular hereditary transmission. What is passed down, while biological at its core, is mediated culturally through the symbol systems that sustain human ways of life, providing cultural groups with a historical purpose in which not only life-forms survive, but ways of living are perpetuated across generations. If survival is available to the strongest, then this principle applies to social groups who assist those who lack what contributes to biological survival in competitive societies, thus gaining strength by cultivating the assets of those who superficially appear characterized by weakness or deficit. Indeed, many scientists assert that the principal reason that a slow, weak, species like humans did not survive their natural environments because of superior intelligence, but they succeeded over generations because they formed societies that pooled their strengths as part of a collective effort to construct lasting communities.

Lee (2010) is interested in adaptation as a whole system rather than a series of separate components that each may be analyzed apart from the others, particularly in terms of how environments may allow for multiple pathways of personal and cultural development for those who are acculturated to see and act on their environments with resilience, knowledge, and agency, and, in many cases, with a collective orientation to problem-solving. This approach requires a conception of human adaptation as malleable, provided that alternative pathways are available. As Daiute (2010) has demonstrated, even those who are considered to be limited in their outlooks by traumatic experiences can become involved in discursive means of envisioning positive social futures through writing and discussing narratives. Cultural practices thus may contribute to the construction of enabling settings that serve those for whom conventional pathways are not apparent or readily available. Such an approach relies on Lee’s (2010) argument in favor of multiple pathways for development and practice such that those with advantage, rather than exploiting those for individual advancement, assist others both to help them realize their personal potential and add to their social group’s prospects for prosperity by cultivating the possibilities of a wider range of its members.

Qualifying Marxism

My reliance on Vygotsky, a committed Marxist if not a dedicated Stalinist, is problematic in key areas. Vygotsky (1993) considered society from a collectivist standpoint. His understanding of Marxist principles is perhaps most evident in his defectological writing, in which he explicitly embraces nascent Soviet communism as the ideal means through which an equitable society is available. His vision of an uplifting Soviet nation, however, was betrayed by Stalin’s repression of dissent in any form (Smagorinsky 2012a), including what was officially interpreted to be Vygotsky’s own departure from orthodoxy. The failure of the Soviet Union to realize its claimed potential of an equitable society free of capitalism’s harsh inequities surely raises questions about the degree to which Vygotsky’s optimistic vision of a society unencumbered by selfishness and personal gain is possible.

In my view, Marxism has made great contributions to critiques of capitalism. However, the social engineering required to produce the Soviet vision of a new human race (Trotsky 1923) appears unlikely to succeed and is ethically questionable from the standpoint of centralizing decisions about what sort of person is optimal and how that sort of person will be created socially, especially given Stalin’s approach of violently winnowing people exhibiting the wrong characteristics (Snyder 2010).

Applying Vygotsky’s optimistic solution to human difference thus requires a skeptical look at the Marxist principles that he endorsed, while also retaining the communal qualities that he embraced and that are available to people, if not practiced or endorsed by all people. Current US society is deeply polarized, with conservative perspectives continuing to assert the ideals of unfettered capitalism and the individual right to liberty and prosperity (e.g., Friedman 1993), no matter how cruelly the pursuit of that right produces struggles for others. Persuading the most emphatic advocates of this perspective seems unlikely, as does convincing them to contribute to the welfare of people whom they consider to be defective and inferior (Trump 2015).

What I do believe is possible is greater attention to Vygotsky’s (1993) perspective on the responsibility of all people for the welfare of their fellow citizens, rather than a remaking of a national people in a mold that fits some but not all. That is, what I offer is not a final solution to the enduring challenges faced by neuro-atypical people, but it is a way to think about considering their potential more than their differences and to think, in conjunction with this view, how channels of activity may become available to them through which to engage in productive, self-affirming, socially valued activity and labor that, in turn, makes the whole society stronger and more likely to benefit from the contributions of the whole of its citizenry.

Adaptation for Neurodivergent People

I next consider the problem of adaptation for cultures that include neurologically diverse people—that is, all cultures, even Stalin’s Soviet Union in which he attempted to expel or eliminate people who did not fit his specific mold for the New Soviet Man (see Cheng 2009). In his volume on defectology, Vygotsky (1993) identified two forms of adaptation (see Chap. 2). Consistent with the general outline of the Darwinian and Spencerian conceptions of adaptation, Vygotsky found the need for individuals to adapt to their environments, and environments to adapt to, and in turn construct more accommodating settings for, children damaged by war. Vygotsky’s population of concern included people of physical difference, primarily young people injured during war, and people whose cognitive development did not match the pace of the typical person. I adapt his perspective to the population of people labeled as mentally ill and thus considered in deficit to those of modal makeup through the discursive and diagnostic labeling of them as abnormal, disordered, deficient, and other terms of diminishment. Although I reviewed these two forms of adaptation in Chap. 2, I return to them here with specific grounding in the issues I have raised in this chapter.

Individual Adaptation

Adaptation may be undertaken by individuals who feel inadequate and become motivated to change such that they feel more fulfilled. Vygotsky (1993) asserted that feelings of inadequacy may serve to motivate a person of difference to appropriate positive new ways of engaging with society. Feelings of inadequacy may thus produce a generative action to alleviate the source of these feelings. Vygotsky (1993) argued, “Via subjective feelings of inadequacy, a physical handicap dialectically transforms itself into psychological drives toward compensation and overcompensation” through adaptation (p. 33; emphasis in original). A person may be incapable of walking yet be surrounded by mobile people and become motivated to find possible means of engaging more actively with the world, so as to experience the potentials afforded by kinesis. As Lee (2010) might argue, finding new means of locomotion requires multiple pathways rather than those restricted by the material and corporal world and the symbolic world that pathologizes immobility as deficiency.

Making this transformation requires a concerted cognitive, physical, and emotional shift from believing in a restricted life to envisioning a greater range of developmental pathways. One might, for instance, begin competing in the growing area of wheelchair sports from individual competitions such as tennis and track to team sports such as basketball and football. Or one might undertake water sports that rely on arms and floats, ramps, and other accessories rather than legs. This approach relies on the principle of compensation, which involves a circumvention of obstacles by means of adaptation that allows for full participation in activities central to a culture’s social life. To Vygotsky (1993), such adaptations enable one to overcome feelings of weakness and deficiency, instead serving as a unique strength with positive implications for social participation.

Such adaptations are not entirely individual, but they rely on positive social assistance and reinforcement from those who construct both the material and psychological environments of participation. In other words, people’s adaptations require a cooperative, supportive perspective on the part of those whose circumstances require them to make few personal adaptations. To Vygotsky (1993), taking advantage of these affordances in order to take part in such compensatory development constitutes a generative response to difference, one that “represents a continually evolving adaptive process. If a blind or deaf child achieves the same level of development as a normal child, then the child with a defect achieves this in another way, by another course, by other means” (p. 34; emphasis in original). If one is to overcome obstacles so that compensatory processes serve this generative function, Vygotsky argued that the discursive construction of difference as “defect” needs to be jettisoned and replaced by both psychological and discursive reconstructions of difference that enable generative action and adaptation. What matters most is that human development not be sidetracked by a physical, neurological, or cognitive point of difference. Rather, one should have opportunities for cultural participation such that “the path of cultural development is unlimited” (p. 169).

Feelings of inadequacy can therefore have beneficial effects when people of difference are treated as productive people adapting to their environments. Those who do not have a typical evolutionary human feature, such as sight, must rely on alternative tools and pathways, a condition that requires two dialectical processes. The person of difference must adapt to the world through alternative cultural tools; and the people in the environment must accept these roundabout mediational means nonjudgmentally and respectfully, and in many cases contribute to their construction and development with a communal frame of mind. To reinforce a previous point, individual adaptation requires social support, both in terms of providing alternative means (e.g., braille, wheelchair ramps) and treating atypical people with dignity and support. Failing to do so contributes to the other possible outcome of engaging without the customary assets that evolution has provided human beings, the secondary disability that consists of appropriated feelings of inadequacy.

Adaptation as Social Responsibility

Individual adaptation requires some accommodations by those who surround the person of difference. To Vygotsky (1993), however, simply assisting with the construction of material work-arounds for people of atypical makeup is insufficient. Of even greater significance is the construction of a psychological and emotional environment surrounding the person of difference. Many people in US society view adaptation primarily as the responsibility of the individual with the fewest affordances for adapting, so perhaps it is unsurprising that people whose makeup and development do not follow the evolutionary norm are expected to lift themselves by their own bootstraps and survive, or else sink in a pit of indifference.

The notion of individualism is built into US culture and fits comfortably with its capitalistic economic system. Presidential candidate Herbert Hoover (1928) expressed this value just before his election, saying that after the Great War,

We were challenged with the choice between the American system of “rugged individualism” or the choice of a European system of diametrically opposed doctrines—doctrines of paternalism and state socialism. The acceptance of these ideas meant the destruction of self-government through centralization of government; it meant the undermining of initiative and enterprise upon which our people have grown to unparalleled greatness…. [Individualistic values] go to the very roots of American life in every act of our Government. I should like to state to you the effect of the extension of government into business upon our system of self government and our economic system. But even more important is the effect upon the average man. That is the effect on the very basis of liberty and freedom not only to those left outside the fold of expanded bureaucracy but to those embraced within it.

Hoover’s (1928) concern was primarily oriented to business interests and governmental intervention, but his attention to “the average man” suggests that all Americans, or at least the men who comprised the dominant sex of the era, are individuals first and foremost, free to pursue happiness independent of governmental paternalism. Like most people of his time, Hoover had little understanding of neurodiversity, so my references to his speech are not designed to impugn his sensitivity on this matter. His emphasis on individualism, however, corresponds well with the Spencerian doctrine of survival of the fittest embraced by the most famous capitalists of his day (see, e.g., Miller’s 1922 biography of Henry Ford), and of those contemporaneous with the writing of this chapter (see Paul 2011).

This individualistic orientation, while undoubtedly serving the machinery of the economy, has made life difficult for those who by circumstance are not among society’s fittest for survival. Not everyone is born equal, at least in terms of their biological and neurological assembly (my concern) or their socioeconomic situations (Lee’s [2010] concern with racial and cultural minoritized group members whose lives have been affected by discrimination). The assertion that rugged and fit individuals are society’s best hope creates demands for adaptation that in effect produce an underclass of people who are left to flounder in the midst of people more capable of adapting their conduct, yet who feel little social obligation to do so. Of course, not all are so heartless, even as many do consider themselves to have little responsibility for the welfare of others, seeing no personal advantage in assisting others materially or affectively in navigating a world built for the typical majority, producing the sense of privileged irresponsibility alluded to in Chap. 2. Those whose makeup departs from the evolutionary norm are viewed as inferior and are vulnerable to appropriating this assumption, and this secondary disability of feeling of lesser human value becomes far more debilitating than the original source of difference.

In contrast to this notion of rugged individuals surpassing their circumstances to advance their interests in life, Vygotsky (1993) asserted that the challenge is social and distributed. This insight relies on the Marxist principles of the value of productive labor and the role of mediating settings in human development to provide channels for participation in cultural practice that legitimize one as a valued member of society. In taking Vygotsky’s perspective, I of course run the risk of coming across to some as anti-American, or at least anti-capitalistic. I am neither, though aspects of Americanism and capitalism undoubtedly produce the inequities that Marx found so problematic that he believed that at least one of them, capitalism, could not be sustained over time.

Vygotsky (1993) continually asserted the potential of people lacking conventional biological functioning. The blind, he said, only understand that they lack something when the people around them treat them as different and thus deficient. Rather than viewing the blind as being faulty, however, he considered them as competent, capable people who needed alternative, multiple mediational pathways (cf. Lee 2010). Through the creation of future-oriented mediational settings, alternative pathways of development may be opened and cultivated by means of a positive social updraft in which to immerse themselves. This postulation transforms the notion of a “defect” into a condition that could conceivably lead to enhanced engagement with the world. Examples include both designed (see Part 2) and informal (see Part 3) activities through which participants take on important roles that allow their personal and social assets to be cultivated, in spite of differences that might limit their possibilities for inclusion in other settings and activities.

This attention to settings and legitimate cultural practice was a critical dimension of Vygotsky’s concern for children lacking normative means of engaging with the world. Rather than segregating children to protect them and others from their points of difference, however, he urged their integration into collective life. Focusing solely on what they lack, he believed, would lead to little progress toward this end. Rather, he thought settings must be constructed in such a manner that each person’s strengths are cultivated and honored. To Vygotsky, this approach required the majority to consider social consequences primarily in their integration of all people into the social whole.

Vygotsky (1993), like Lee (2010), found that cognition and affect are fundamentally related to one another, to the whole of one’s body, and, by extension, to the whole of the mediational context. One’s biological makeup is thus inseparable regarding how one feels in relation to how one is treated by others. This attention to the role of affect in overall human development is manifested in his attention to what my colleagues and I (Smagorinsky and Daigle 2012) have called meta-experience: the manner in which experience is experienced so as to frame new experiences (see Chap. 2). Those who are treated as defective carry this experience to new experiences in ways characterized by feelings of inferiority and low social status. These feelings frame new experiences such that the belief in one’s inadequacy becomes reinforced continually over time.

Yet Vygotsky believed that by treating the evolutionarily different as part of the whole of society’s collective work, people may develop the higher mental functions characteristic of general cultural ways of engaging with the world. When difference is institutionalized as defect, society constructs a Matthew Effect in which those with the greatest resources proceed, unencumbered by consideration of the needs of the neediest. As a result, those with the fewest resources are left to adapt to a world that demonstrates little interest in their welfare. They thus are brimming with potential that is suppressed by surrounding beliefs that focus only on their differences as deficits, to both their own detriment and the disadvantage of people who might benefit from their less-obvious abilities.

Discussion

Up to this point I have primarily provided a general overview of the problem of adaptation for the whole atypical population, without a specific focus on the population that has been of greatest theoretical and empirical interest to me, those whose neurodivergence makes them stand out from the perceived norm. This range is quite broad, and the degree of conditions varies, making it difficult to identify a small set of practices that could accommodate all. I will therefore identify what I hope are representative practices that social groups could incorporate into their offerings and operations to provide inclusive environments through which positive social updraft is available for those whose neurological makeups produce a variety of ways of processing their surroundings and acting on them.

My focus on the problem of adaptation includes those undertaken by both individuals and social groups. Individual variation makes simple suggestions difficult to formulate. I will therefore direct my attention to how groups can adapt to reduce stigmas associated with difference, in the process minimizing the secondary disability of feelings of shame, inferiority, and other affective responses that, as Vygotsky (1993) argues, become increasingly enervating over time, providing negative meta-experiences that reinforce one’s sense of low social stature and deficiency. Among the broader adaptations required by society is the willingness by the public to invest in such programs, often through taxation, an adaptation toward which many communities and individuals within them are virulently hostile (see Norquist 2015). This problem is exacerbated by the current climate of antagonism toward public institutions in general, from schools to the government itself (e.g., Beck 2009). Once again, the tensions that capitalistic nations such as the USA experience between individual liberty and shared responsibility complicate any efforts to institute programs that benefit people of difference.

My broad approach would be to provide channels of activity that enable participation and validation for people of difference. Often, these opportunities are available in extracurricular activities, particularly at the club level. The young woman with multiple diagnoses of mental illness studied by Cook and Smagorinsky (Chap. 9; cf. 2014), for instance, similar to the youth studied by Black (2008), became involved in the online anime community, although on her own time rather than through school-sponsored activities. Given her family’s level of support, she was able to use her own computer and related tools to produce digital art, compose fan fiction, and participate in many other validating activities with online friends. But many young people struggling with neurodiverse atypicality lack the levels of affluence and support available in her home. Schools and community centers could sponsor clubs that allow students to pursue such activities in the company of like-minded peers such that their confluence of interests, rather than their points of difference, becomes the means through which they engage in producing ideas and texts that are highly valued in such settings.

Roles for neuro-atypical children and youth might also be available in more mainstream extracurricular activities. The story of passionate autistic basketball fan Jason Mcelwain (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2IU1h9sG7U) became an Internet sensation when he, in his role of high school team manager, was put into the final home game of his senior year and, in a four-minute rampage, scored 20 points. Obviously, this event would be difficult to replicate, but I am more interested in the ways in which his coach and team made him feel a part of the team throughout the season, leading up to this inspirational moment. Positions such as team manager, participant in drama productions in appropriate assignments, and other possibilities are available for neurodivergent youth.

Perhaps more complex possibilities would involve sponsored activities that directly concern youth of difference, modeled on the Dynamic Story-Telling by Youth (DSTY) organized and managed by Daiute (2010) for young people who had experienced trauma during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Rather than further pathologizing their trauma, Daiute’s workshop focused on the construction of positive social futures through narrative writing and the social support available in the group settings. Instead, then, of including her participants in activities such that they fit in with either broadly or locally normative activities, Daiute directly addressed their trauma through a culturally valued medium. Providing such a setting in a community would require the participation of counselors trained in managing therapeutic environments rather than being conducted by well-intentioned but untrained personnel or community members, and it would undoubtedly require some sort of legal counsel given that students’ narratives could implicate others in painful experiences. The potential of such an activity, however, might be worth whatever investment in resources is required to maintain it.

The cultivation of seemingly obsessive interests is often discouraged by adults, who seek to broaden young people’s horizons; yet for obsessive-compulsives, deep immersion in a topic or activity not only suits their personalities but may produce intensive understandings. Adults, for instance often discourage young people from having narrow reading and writing interests, believing instead that broadening horizons is preferable. Yet those with Asperger’s or obsessive-compulsive personalities (or both) often become very frustrated when not allowed to pursue their narrow interests, such as reading all of the books by a single author, or reading entirely within one genre, or reading solely about one topic. Allowing people’s makeups to violate social norms in such a fashion might suit their development much better than requiring them to adapt to perceived normative ways of being, as exhibited in Chap. 11, which provides a look at Suskind’s (2014) memoir of his autistic son’s obsession with Disney characters. It seemed unsettling at first but eventually served a powerful developmental role in his socialization.

Organizing such programs and possibilities often follows from the initiative of dedicated individuals who are sensitive to the needs and interactional styles of neuro-atypicals. What communities need is a broad, systemic commitment to inclusion that provides incentives and support and structural means of achieving it. This project may well face conflict from (1) those who believe that public institutions such as schools have a socializing purpose designed to normalize conventional ways of being rather than to cultivate seemingly obscure interests and pursuits, (2) those who oppose taxing the public to support extracurricular activities, (3) those who advocate individualism to the extent that all adaptation becomes the responsibility of atypical people rather than social groups, and (4) those who simply believe that people who appear weird should be shunned and avoided rather than accommodated. One of our primary goals in this volume is to argue against such conceptions and provide alternative ways of conceiving social life in the hope that we can contribute to some degree of change in perception and process, transforming society into a place of greater acceptance and accommodation for the full range of citizens they serve, without pathologizing them or reinforcing the deficit-oriented ways in which society tends to construct difference.

Note

  1. 1.

    Now, my ex-wife.