Much Of The Arday Commentary Misses The Point

One version of the transatlantic ruling class's response to the Arday scandal is this piece at The Atlantic. The author, Tyler Austin Harper, represents himself as capital-B Black, but looking at photos, it seems he could easily pass for white. Still, let's grant that he's a descendant, however distant, of African slaves -- he's nevertheless of a distinctly different class from Jason Arday, who was a member of an entirely new socially engineered class of UK immigrants from former British colonies created by the postwar Labour government.

So about the only thing Harper has in common with Arday is that they share a certain amount of African DNA, but they're from two entirely different classes in two different countries. Nevertheless, Harper sees himself in precisely Arday's situation:

I will confess that, until yesterday, I had watched the Arday saga unfold with some combination of amusement and distress. Amusement because of the undeniable comic absurdity to the revelation that the best and brightest minds at Cambridge had been so easily deceived by a man who claimed to have run nine marathons in about as many days on a fractured fibula, and who maintained that his future had been predicted by a Brazilian shaman. Distress because I could relate to some of the things that Arday might have experienced.

I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, about what it is like to be the beneficiary of affirmative action in elite spaces. I have seen, firsthand, the way a specific kind of white progressive treats Black men who have overcome obstacles. They cannot conceal a certain blend of pity and glee when they learn, for example, that my biological father left before I was old enough to walk, or that I was raised for a time by a single mother. It is a look that says, How far you’ve come, and how kind I am for helping you go further.

But in these same paragraphs, Harper distingushes himself from Arday in a key way: Arday lived in a fantasy world; Harper doesn't. I'm not a medical professional, and I can work only from the other lay observations I see of Arday's case, but more important than his skin color is the problem that Arday was seriously mentally ill. In trying to get some sort of handle on Arday's autism, I started out by asking Chrome AI, "Does a person whose life is dominated by fantasy have high-functioning autism?"

AI immediately slapped me down and said nobody says high-functioning any more, it's Level 1, 2, or 3 Support. So I revised my question: "What medical support level would apply to an autistic person whose life is dominated by fantasy?" It answered,

Medical professionals look at how the fantasy life interferes with the individual's ability to navigate the real world:

Level 1 (Requiring Support): The individual experiences a strong internal fantasy world or intense interest in fictional universes, but they can easily switch back to reality when needed. They can maintain a conversation, work, or attend school, though they may need help organizing tasks or managing social awkwardness.

Level 2 (Requiring Substantial Support): The fantasy life actively interferes with daily functioning. The individual may frequently talk about their fantasy world in social settings where it is inappropriate, struggle to focus on any topics outside of this fantasy, and show clear distress or behavioral meltdowns when forced to disengage from it.

Level 3 (Requiring Very Substantial Support): The individual's attachment to fantasy severely limits their ability to function or communicate safely in reality. They may struggle to distinguish fantasy from real-world dangers, require constant supervision to complete basic self-care, or completely withdraw from human interaction in favor of their internal world.

As a non-professional relying only on public information on Arday, I've got to say that he seems to have had real difficulty in switching from fantasy to reality; the discussion of his memoir that I linked yesterday showed that he'd completely reconstructed his life experiences based on a pop version of Spartacus and some soap operas and consistently gave this version when interviewed. He pretty clearly "talk[ed] about [his] fantasy world in social settings where it [was] inappropriate, struggle[d] to focus on any topics outside of this fantasy, and show[ed] clear distress or behavioral meltdowns when forced to disengage from it" -- i e, he took his own life.

Beyond that, if we look at his outcome, I think it's also reasonable to say his "attachment to fantasy severely limit[ed his] ability to function or communicate safely in reality". For an outcome other than the one he had, he almost certainly should have had better supervision. This also continues to raise for me the question of whether he was ever capable of doing any sort of basic intellectual work at the undergraduate or graduate level.

Arday's problem wasn't racism. His problem was that people were enabling him despite clear, serious symptoms of mental illness. They were doing it to further an agenda, but this agenda was different from the one on this side of the Atlantic. Harper fudges this difference:

Arday was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals, for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness. And he was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough—which is to say, not white enough.

The right would have us believe that the Arday scandal is a story of affirmative action taken to its most caricaturish conclusion. Many progressives see it as something else: a racist witch hunt in which self-righteous zealots with suspect motives hounded a man to death.

As I said yesterday, the closest parallel in the US to the Arday case is Claudine Gay, who resigned as president of Harvard after allegations of plagiarism. However, these were much milder than those against Arday, and they didn't appear alongside any fantastical statements by Gay about her life story that called her mental stability into question. Nor did Gay fall especially far; she remains a well-paid member of the Harvard faculty, and she didn't take her own life. Arday's situation is uniquely extreme and says little about racism in the US except in comparison.

What I can only surmise as a non-professional from public information is that Arday's autism put him somewhere in medical support levels 2 or 3, which suggests that even to perform basic intellectual tasks and form goals consistent with a high-flying academic career, he needed extensive assistance. He simply couldn't have functioned at that level without near-constant supervision.

That says to me that we should be looking for a Svengali, "an authority figure or mentor who exerts undue, usually evil influence over another person." So far, nobody has suggested this, but I'm certsin something like this will emerge. But here's where Harper gets things completely wrong:

It is impossible to know what is in someone’s head or heart in their final moments. I have to imagine, though, that Arday understood well enough the world he had entered and how its rules tend to work: When you are Black, some people will open the door for you far wider than they should. And when that door abruptly comes swinging shut, you will be offered no second chances.

Arday's problem wasn't that he was black (or Black). His problem was that he had a severe disability, and he'd gone well past the point of being able to cover up for it. Realistically, if it becomes clear by age 40 that you aren't capable of switching from a fantasy world to the real one when necessary, there's not a lot of hope you can function well as an adult. Second chances don't come into it.