Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability

Perspectives from historical, cultural, and educational studies

David Bolt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317908920
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education
• Index: Social Sciences

Whilst legislation may have progressed internationally and nationally for disabled people, barriers continue to exist, of which one of the most pervasive and ingrained is attitudinal. Social attitudes are often rooted in a lack of knowledge and are perpetuated through erroneous stereotypes, and ultimately these legal and policy changes are ineffectual without a corresponding attitudinal change.

This unique book provides a much needed, multifaceted exploration of changing social attitudes toward disability. Adopting a tripartite approach to examining disability, the book looks at historical, cultural, and education studies, broadly conceived, in order to provide a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to the documentation and endorsement of changing social attitudes toward disability. Written by a selection of established and emerging scholars in the field, the book aims to break down some of the unhelpful boundaries between disciplines so that disability is recognised as an issue for all of us across all aspects of society, and to encourage readers to recognise disability in all its forms and within all its contexts.

This truly multidimensional approach to changing social attitudes will be important reading for students and researchers of disability from education, cultural and disability studies, and all those interested in the questions and issues surrounding attitudes toward disability.

PART I Disability, attitudes, and history

1 Evolution and human uniqueness Prehistory, disability, and the unexpected anthropology of Charles Darwin

David Doat

DOI: 10.4324/9781315849126-3

There is an ableist anthropology that underlies most scientific work on evolutionary theories, one that states that vulnerability and disability have neither function nor positive meaning in the evolutionary process of our species. This is a tacit reason why such thematics are often either left out of conversations by evolutionnists or limited to the controversial issues raised by eugenics. It also implies inappropriate behaviours and attitudes toward disability. In this chapter, I suggest that we should reread the writings of Charles Darwin, for contrary to strong social beliefs among contemporary scientific communities, the founder of the theory of natural selection was neither a strong defender of eugenics nor a social Darwinist. I conclude by insisting upon the legitimacy of a new interdisciplinary research field that focuses on the survival of disabled members in prehistoric human groups. Because ableism conditions modern narratives that have been written about the past (Finlay, 1999), it is only by focusing on new philosophical, scientific, and (pre)historical research that the history of human evolution may appear less ableist.

The ableist anthropology that underlies scientific discourses

We may well be convinced by modern accounts of human evolution (Huxley, 1941; Dobzhansky, 1962; Jones et al., 1994; Mayr, 2001; Dunbar, 2004), especially educational accounts that focus on language, mastering the environment through technology, and the development of human intelligence (Potts et al., 2010; Roberts, 2011). Nevertheless, many of these accounts spread an incomplete vision of humanity, for they do not take into consideration the universal facts of vulnerability and disability.

Because some members of our species are affected by loss of ‘normal powers’ due to disability, they appear marginal and unnecessary in developing the highest human faculties that contribute to the evolutionary success of human beings. Vulnerability and disability seem to be devoid of meaning in most contemporary scientific accounts of human evolution. At best, they are interpreted as the price to be paid in a ‘nasty and brutish’ evolutionary process based on natural selection, survival of the fittest, suffering, and a high death toll (Monod, 1974; Dawkins, 2006). From this perspective, it seems difficult to demonstrate in an evolutionary framework (whereby utility function is essential) the ‘value’ of a ‘severely’ disabled individual. As a corollary, eugenics and human enhancement appear to be the only answers to disability. This is the obvious conclusion, unless the interpretation that disabled individuals do not have a contributory role to play in the development of human ontology is recognised as the result of an ableist (i.e., culturally and historically limited) vision of human beings.

What occurs in economic and political fields of academic research — as has already been highlighted (Kittay, 1999; Nussbaum, 2006) — also happens in biological and evolutionary ones: humans are generally seen as independent agents. The pictures of the Past that evolutionists reconstruct remain essentially ableist in character (Finlay, 1999; Le Pichon, 2007). Human relationships are systematically based on a prescriptive understanding of an autonomous human being, driven by rational interests, and possessing all cognitive and physical faculties. Indeed, this is an anthropological assumption that is theoretically required (e.g., in evolutionary ethics and game theory) to make sense of both selfish and altruistic behaviours in the scope of mathematic and economic modelling (Sober and Wilson, 1999; Bowles and Gintis, 2013). In this type of modelling of human sociality, it is difficult to find a place for persons experiencing social dependency on a daily basis. Altruism is always interpreted as occurring between fully ‘self-supportive’ individuals (or groups of individuals) capable of struggling to survive.

Under this anthropological bias, the characteristics of human beings as always vulnerable and sometimes disabled are never taken into account. Instead we try to hold onto ableist models that produce the ‘best’ theoretical results. By excluding human vulnerability and disability from anthropological and evolutionary concerns, some scholars (Rachels, 1991; Singer, 2011) build their scientific and ethical theories on the philosophical pretence that humans are ontologically independent (i.e., that the cooperation between persons that some insist is interdependence is simply mutual and voluntary cooperation between a priori independent rational individuals).

A fresh look at the works of Charles Darwin: are humans like gorillas?

Because of modern dominant accounts of human evolution and the underlying philosophical anthropology they reflect, human fragility and disability have been left out of the elements that have played a significant and decisive role in our evolutionary history. As the nineteenth- and twentieth-century interest in the concept of ‘degeneration’ demonstrates, the scientific community used to think that the lack of adaptive skills in some individuals might even interfere with the progressive development of a human society in complete and full control of its destiny. It was in reaction to this fear that many eugenic policies based on the theories of Darwin were born in the nineteenth century (Stiker, 1999). Yet the founder of modern biology did not fully subscribe to all of these theories. Although he was influenced by the bourgeois-liberal culture of his time, the ‘concrete suggestions for encouraging reproduction of the valuable members of society or discouraging it by the undesirable members seemed to Darwin either impractical or morally suspect’ (Paul, 2003: 223). Furthermore, judging by his anthropological assumptions, he was aware of the frailty of humanity and of the nature relative to the very concepts of ‘weakness’, ‘force’, ‘ability’, and so on (Tort, 2001; Paul and Moore, 2010). Contrary to eugenicists of his time, then, Darwin had both philosophical and scientific reasons to believe that ‘caring’ for disabled members was neither senseless nor disadvantageous in human groups.

Fundamentally, Darwin’s philosophical anthropology, which is implicit in his scientific writings, differs from that of the theorists of social Darwinism, eugenics, and socio-biology. Although Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, was Darwin’s cousin, neither private letters nor public writings demonstrated that Darwin fully adhered to his cousin’s ideas (Tort, 2008). This is because the anthropology of Darwin takes into account the vulnerability of the human subject. Rather than insisting on individual autonomy, Darwin developed a ‘community selection’ theory (Richards, 2003: 101–109) of the sociocognitive development and moral sense of humans. This theory relies on a keen awareness of human vulnerability and the relational processes that contribute to balance in the interdependency relationships that characterise human societies.

Twelve years after On the Origin of Species, Darwin claimed in The Descent of Man that human beings could not have developed their most admirable mental abilities without the ‘fragility’ characteristic to their organic form. Wondering whether he should not have descended from a gorilla or a smaller and less independent species of ape, Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man:

In regard to bodily size or strength, we do not know whether man is descended from some small species, like the chimpanzee, or from one as powerful as the gorilla; and, therefore, we cannot say whether man has become larger and stronger, or smaller and weaker, than his ancestors. We should, however, bear in mind that an animal possessing great size, strength, and ferocity, and which, like the gorilla, could defend itself from all enemies, would not perhaps have become social: and this would most effectually have checked the acquirement of the higher mental qualities, such as sympathy and the love of his fellows. Hence it might have been an immense advantage to man to have sprung from some comparatively weak creature. The small strength and speed of man, his want of natural weapons, etc., are more than counterbalanced, firstly, by his intellectual powers, through which he has formed for himself weapons, tools, etc., though still remaining in a barbarous state, and, secondly, by his social qualities which lead him to give and receive aid from his fellow-man.

(Darwin, 1874: 63–64)

Patrick Tort, a specialist in Darwin’s works in France, highlights that Darwin observed that the individual strength of a gorilla, its ability to defend itself, represented an obstacle for socialisation and that a similar disposition in the human subject would have checked the acquisition of the highest mental qualities (Tort, 2008). Human vulnerability appears as a selected advantage that calls for union in the face of danger; it calls for cooperation and mutual aid (Tort, 2008); and it contributes to the correlative development of intelligence by assuming the protection of people who cannot defend themselves. In other words, for Darwin, our evolutionary victory is not solely dependent on higher cognitive abilities, culture, technology or language. It also appears necessarily linked to our vulnerability, interdependency, and inclination for social care, which have consistently pushed humanity to compensate by relying more on what is cultural, technological, and symbolic (Finkelstein, 1998: 28).

John Dewey, one of the founders of pragmatism, proposed an interesting evolutionary take on this subject:

We may imagine a leader in an early social group, when the question had arisen of putting to death the feeble, the sickly, and the aged, in order to give that group an advantage in the struggle for existence with other groups; — we may imagine him, I say, speaking as follows: ‘No. In order that we may secure this advantage, let us preserve these classes [whether disabled or not]. It is true for the moment that they make an additional drain upon our resources, and an additional tax upon the energies which might otherwise be engaged in fighting our foes. But in looking after these helpless we shall develop habits of foresight and forethought, powers of looking before and after, tendencies to husband our means, which shall ultimately make us the most skilled in warfare. We shall foster habits of group loyalty, feelings of solidarity, which shall bind us together by such close ties that no social group which has not cultivated like feelings through caring for all its members, will be able to withstand us’. In a word, such conduct would pay in the struggle for existence as well as be morally commendable. If the group to which he spoke saw any way to tide over the immediate emergency, no one can gainsay the logic of this speech. Not only the prolongation of the period of dependence, but the multiplication of its forms, has meant historically increase of intelligent foresight and planning, and increase of the bonds of social unity. Who shall say that such qualities are not positive instruments in the struggle for existence, and that those who stimulate and call out such powers are not among those ‘fit to survive’?

(Dewey, 1898: 326)

Here, the ‘less able’ coincides with the human who does not make paying attention to human vulnerability, interdependence, and mutual caring practices central in her or his life. The concept of ‘care’ to which I refer does not assume that any relations between care receivers and care providers are asymmetric (and paternalistic). As David Bolt writes, ‘While there is a received understanding that disabled people are dependent on non-disabled people, the reverse is frequently unacknowledged but also true, as has been portrayed in many works of fiction that blur the distinction between non-disabled care-provider and disabled dependant’ (Bolt, 2008: para. 11). On the other hand, ‘caring practices’ must be distinguished from ‘curing practices’, for they do not (only) refer to the medical field. Indeed, parenting, socio-educational development, professional activities, religious and cultural commitments, political affairs, friendship, and so on, imply different relationships of care among humans. More broadly, care is a corporeal potential that involves meeting the needs and maintaining the world of our self and others. It is ‘committed to the flourishing and growth of individuals yet acknowledges our interconnectedness and interdependence’ (Hamington, 2004: 3). Care could yet be defined as a human practice that includes ‘everything we do to help individuals to meet their … needs, develop or maintain their … capabilities, and avoid or alleviate unnecessary or unwanted pai...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Editor Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction—DAVID BOLT
• PART I Disability, attitudes, and history
• PART II Disability, attitudes, and culture
• PART III Disability, attitudes, and education
• Epilogue: attitudes and actions—DAVID BOLT
• Contributors
• Index