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Sensory disabilities like deafness and blindness are disabling because the world is not oriented to people with sensory disabilities. I am reminded that the De
by retrac 9mo ago
Sensory disabilities like deafness and blindness are disabling because the world is not oriented to people with sensory disabilities.
I am reminded that the Deaf have their own mythology. American Sign Language is distinct; it's not English. Accordingly it has its own culture, including its own myths. Many of them are fables and stories from the western tradition slightly adapted. But some are original.
One common theme in American Deaf mythology (but I'd bet it's told elsewhere too) is stories about a world which is visually oriented. There's an ASL word for this world but English doesn't have one. Sometimes it's translated as Eyeth a.k.a. "Eye-Earth".
It's more than just a world where everyone is deaf or where everyone communicates in ASL. It has something like spiritual meaning to some of those who tell stories about it; in that world the Deaf are not disabled, not in the social way that matters.
- UltraSane 9mo agoNo, deafness and blindness are disabling because they provide critical long range data. Being able to see is essentially a superpower if you are blind. Same with hearing.
- throwway120385 9mo agoOnly in that narrow viewpoint. Most people talk about disability in the context of a society because much of what we encounter in our day to day is created by other people. The sights, sounds, smells, and experiences in our world are frequently because of others. So in that context, if the dominant culture makes it a point to create experiences that require hearing or sight to consume, then yes it's a disability. But if we adapt some or all of what we do for people who don't have those senses, then we can make it less disabling.
- suddenlybananas 9mo agoWhile it's good for society to accommodate those with disabilities as much as possible, we shouldn't pretend it isn't detrimental to be unable to see or hear. You don't need to believe obvious falsehoods in order to accommodate people.
- fwip 9mo agoYou've set up a straw man here - nobody in this thread is claiming that it's not detrimental to be missing a sense. The point is that disability exists within the context of the world we live in, and the society we've built is one that largely assumes people have both sight and hearing.
- xigoi 9mo ago> Sensory disabilities like deafness and blindness are disabling because the world is not oriented to people with sensory disabilities. Implying that they wouldn’t be detrimental if the world was “oriented” differently.
- retrac 9mo agoSince I'm the person who wrote that I can explain what I meant. I have never had to deal with a giant cat stalking me and being unable to hear it. I do routinely have to deal with intercom systems which I cannot hear, though. The world most humans inhabit is human-made. And the human-made environment can be remade.
- fwip 9mo agoAh, I see the disconnect. In this discussion, "disabling" is not the same as "detrimental." Disabling is when you are unable to do important activities that others can do. I'm not an expert here on the subject, but this is my understanding. For a simplified example, imagine two government buildings, one with and one without an accessibility ramp. A person in a wheelchair is able to access the former, even if going up the ramp takes longer than the stairs. Not having the option to take the stairs is still detrimental to the person, but they're still able to access those services. The second disables the person, as they're no longer able to access important services because they are unable to take the stairs. Accommodations help keep "detrimental" from meaning disabled. The voice at the street crossing that says "walk", curb cuts, and closed captioning all help people participate in daily normal life, despite having those sensory disabilities. There are other designs that are more holistic as well - for example, if those same government services are accessible online, or the agent makes house calls, it naturally makes the services more accessible to more people. (Note: I'm not saying that this specific example is a good idea - just as an example of "how we design our society affects how people can participate in it.")
- UltraSane 9mo agoSight and hearing evolved to incredible acuity because they give enormous survival advantage.
- wizzwizz4 9mo agoMeh, my formidable powers of foresight aren't really a superpower. Few people listen until things have progressed far enough that they see the things, too, by which point there are rarely many interventions available. And every time we do intervene early, that's "you said this would happen and it didn't happen!", making it harder to convince people the next time. And when things do turn out more-or-less as predicted, I "made a lucky guess" because "there was no way you could have known that". In the land of the blind, why would anyone pay attention to this weirdo's ramblings about "rain-clouds"? Obviously they're just feeling changes to temperature, pressure, and humidity. Oh, and they know what shapes things are? Wow! So does everyone else who's touched the things. Sure, that "how many fingers am I holding up?" party trick is pretty neat (probably cold reading), but not something we should make policy decisions on the basis of. You underestimate the extent to which humans are social creatures. See also: H. G. Wells's story The Country of the Blind. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Country_of_the_Blind
- UltraSane 9mo agoVision is absolutely a superpower if everyone else is blind. Just think how far you can shoot something with a rifle and scope. Guns are useless to blind people. A person who can see has an enormous advantage over a blind person in a fight. Try to imagine a military where everyone is blind fighting against another where everyone can see.
- philipswood 9mo agoIn a blind culture there probably are no guns at all - so your hypothetical sighted-person-amongst-the-blind would need to be able to make his own. Then again, just throwing rocks might be pretty effective.
- UltraSane 9mo agoA slingshot or bow and arrows would be amazingly effective if everyone else was blind.
- mikepurvis 9mo agoMaybe, but that isn't really what the GP post is talking about. At the level of mythology, the eye-earth is place where people of that group belong without judgment or limitation. No different from Harry Potter or Narnia or any other fantasy place one might imagine going where they can be with their people. In any case, I'm not sure this even survives transposing to other senses that humans are weak in, such as smell (like prey animals) or magnetic direction (like migratory birds). A human who randomly had these would indeed be seen as superpowered, but that wouldn't become a statement that all regularly-abled humans are now disabled for missing the "critical" long range sense.
- kazinator 9mo agoI wonder whether all the animals of Eyeth are also deaf, and how they are doing? Deaf predators must have a field day sneaking up on deaf prey. As life evolved on Earth, so did the senses that life forms possess, and that happened for a reason. If you hare missing some senses, there is a sense in which you are set back millions of years of evolution. It's not just about human society, but biology. Someone with no sensory disabilities, sent into the wilderness, has better chances of survival than someone with such disabilities, other factors being equal. That has nothing to do with society, which is absent from that scene. Civilization is the best place for people with disabilities, even if it is geared toward those without. For that matter, it's better for animals with disabilities. People help disabled pets lead quality lives; wild animals with disabilities don't live long.
- UltraSane 9mo agoThank you for writing this so I didn't have to.
- kayodelycaon 9mo agoI’d like to add a quick sidenote . I wouldn’t read too much into the logic of mythological worlds and realms. Their purpose is narrative, not scientific. They don’t even need to be internally consistent. No one expects Greek mythology to make scientific sense. Other mythologies should be seen from a similar perspective and understood that they are narrative, not logical. Applying a scientific viewpoint to such mythologies results in a new narrative. The scientific view is always wrong unless scientific correctness is part of that world’s narrative. I add this because a lot of people don’t know narrative purpose. To put it briefly: Other peoples worlds aren’t wrong when they don’t match “what makes sense in the real world”.
- engineer_22 9mo agoThat's fascinating, is this explained in detail somewhere? How did you learn about this?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- retrac 9mo agoI'm learning ASL. That led me to learn about Deaf culture in North America. The stories that the Deaf have told each other, and have passed down. A world where everyone is deaf is one of the first stories you'll learn about; I'm not even sure when I first encountered it, but it was in that context. One common modern version of the fable is told with an astronaut who finds that they've landed on a parallel Earth where everyone is Deaf and sign language is the norm. The book A Study of American Deaf Folklore by Susan D Rutherford is a bit dated now but interesting in exploring the functions and roles of myths here.
- MBCook 9mo agoReminds me of The Country of the Blind by HG Wells. It’s about a guy who finds his way into a valley in a mountain range where everyone has been blind for generations. At first he thinks that he’ll have “a superpower“ because he’s sighted. Instead the people of the valley view his sight as an illness.
- UltraSane 9mo agoIt WOULD have been a superpower if he hadn't told anyone he could see.
- graemep 9mo agoThat think him mentally ill because they do not believe he can actually see and think him deluded. If he had kept quiet in the face of scepticism he would have had a huge advantage. I see it as a story about people's unwillingness to believe in something that is outside their own experience and that of their society.