Book Reviews: The Wise Can Learn From The Otherwise
Review by M. Miles (m99miles@hotmail.com)
Peter BYRNE (2000)
Philosophical and Ethical Problems in Mental Handicap. London: Macmillan, isbn 0-333-80116-4. New York: St Martin's Press, 0-312-23460-0. xiii + 175 pp.
Hans S. REINDERS (2000)
The Future of the Disabled in Liberal Society. An ethical analysis. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, isbn 0-268-02857-5. xii + 280 pp.
SEPASITIANO (James Schwartz), with Ching Madduma & Adam Gudalefsky (2002)
A Person is a Person, Vol. 1, No. 1. Hong Kong, PRC: Interaid Inc. 164 pp. Contact: Adam Gudalefsky, 100 Tsui Ping Road, Kwun Tong, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, PR China.
From antiquity, wisdom literature has derided the conduct of fools and praised the learned. The latter often felt they were surrounded by fools, whom they seldom suffered gladly. Their witty dismissals of dunces have been preserved for posterity by more talented students. Seldom did a wise man give a kindly hint, like that from Al-Khalil (718-786 CE) of Basra, the inventor of Arabic prosody. Having a student who seemed incapable of learning, Al-Khalil finally set him the task of scanning the verse: "If you cannot accomplish a thing, leave it and pass to another which you can accomplish." The student tried the exercise then went away for good. Al-Khalil commented, "I was quite astonished that, with all his stupidity, he perceived my drift in proposing to him that verse." Such a polite exclusion arose perhaps because Al-Khalil himself had a son "whose intellect was very backward", whom he treated with kindness. [1]
Greater tolerance of autistic male behaviour has surfaced occasionally in women's history. A remarkable Tamil poem shows the goddess Minakshi as a girl washing the crockery and pots (which consist of all the worlds). This is a daily task, because her husband Shiva repeatedly messes up the universe, which Minakshi must once more sort out and clean. Shiva "wanders through the courtyard of space / destroying your work again and again, / and then comes before you / dancing. // You never get angry. / Every day, / you just pick up the vessels." [2] In thirty words, Minakshi becomes a global icon for all who deal with 'impossible' children (or husbands).
Philosopher and Parent
Peter Byrne, author of
Ethical and Philosophical Problems in Mental Handicap, is professor of ethics and philosophy of religion at King's College, London, and also father of Gareth, "diagnosed as autistic by his third birthday". From paternal experiences Byrne learned a different perspective on some philosophical issues, such as whether humans with severe cognitive and relational disabilities count as 'persons'. "On the philosophers' account human beings who have not yet attained self-consciousness and autonomy, or who will never attain them, or who have lost them are not to count as persons" (p. viii). Byrne aims to rebut this view and to "fuse the experience of being the parent of a disabled child with the responsibilities of a philosopher to offer a discursive argument on matters of ethical and social import" (p. xi). Byrne is no sentimentalist. He neither claims to have worn his two hats successfully, nor thinks he will persuade those contemporary bioethicists who argue for a radically different perception of people like Gareth. Yet the attempt has to be made.
In chapters 1 and 3, Byrne sets out, with admitted simplification, some views expressed by James Rachels, Jonathan Glover, R. Frey, Michael Tooley, Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer -- 'the usual suspects' one might say. Byrne does not avoid combative phrases such as "the likes of Frey, Glover and Rachels" (p.15); but the philosophy professor mostly keeps a firm grip on the parent of a vulnerable son. This is not from any conviction of the superiority of philosophical perceptions. Byrne believes that the "effort to determine what our moral perceptions are and to formulate such moral rules and principles as give best expression to their rationale is an achievement of wisdom and self-knowledge. (This is one reason why skill in this task is not a function of the philosophical training given in contemporary universities. It is, rather, a function of development and maturity as a person)." (p.47) He specifically doubts whether contemporary moral philosophers possess "the kind of moral wisdom" that would enable them "to distinguish moral insight from illusion." (p.71)
Byrne's detailed attempts at rebuttal of the usual suspects' arguments can hardly be summarised, as philosophical debate must be allowed all its space and words. Yet three observations are possible. First, Byrne does engage at the expected professional depth, taking arguments through many stages plus the counter-arguments he expects from his adversaries. Secondly, he has made reasonable efforts to write clearly and with a minimum of jargon, thus providing access to many people interested in these topics but not trained in philosophy. Thirdly, he sticks to the uncluttered line that, "just in virtue of being human a fellow creature has claims upon us of a stringent kind" (p.49). So it is not required that we find some special value in the disabled person (e.g. that she can do this or that, or is loved by God, or whatever), in order to argue for her equal worth. "It is in the light of the humanity they share with us that we must say they are our moral equals" (p.50). Of course, he then proceeds to rebut charges of 'speciesism'.
Chapter 2 concerns 'defining mental handicap'. Byrne now uses his preferred term "cognitive disability", and runs through familiar arguments about classification, terminology, IQ and autism. Chapters 4 and 5 cover 'Euthanasia, abortion and genocide', and 'Cognitive disability and oppression'. Byrne argues vigorously through these topics and disagrees with some conventional wisdom, though the debate often sounds rather 1980s and British. Byrne the Parent finds plenty of irritation with politically correct theorists, and this fuels the discourse of Byrne the Philosopher. The view sometimes expressed, that 'mental handicap' is merely a meaningless label, constructed to smooth out some wrinkles in late capitalist society, may be tolerable in a debate on educational sociology while intolerable to a family that has turned its home life upside down to accommodate an energetic teenager whose observable cognitive and behavioural development has remained at a two-year-old level.
Chapter 6 reviews theological and religious issues. Byrne has earlier stated that he is not a religious believer (p. vii); yet at various points he sounds hopeful that a theological framework might prove useful. He examines views from Basil Mitchell, such as the "dilemma formed from the joint desires to hold on to a traditional belief in the sanctity of human life while getting rid of the religious foundation of that belief" (p.137); also thoughts by Aquinas, David Pailin, Kevin VanHoozer, Charles Taylor, and a motif from Simone Weil that runs through the book. At the end, however, Byrne finds little need for theological underpinning.
Ethicist and Theologian
Hans Reinders is professor of ethics and mental disability at the Free University of Amsterdam. In the preface to
The Future of the Disabled, he thanks a colleague who "continues to remind me that a theologian who tries to write philosophy need not try to become a philosopher" (p. xii). Reinders and Byrne, living in the same corner of Europe and apparently having many interests and views in common, give no sign of ever having heard of each other's work.
Like Byrne, Reinders finds much that is unsatisfactory and mistakenly argued in bioethical debates among liberal philosophers. He reviews in detail the issues of new genetics and prevention, reproductive freedom, the status of persons, the value of life, suffering and justice. Rather than pursuing advocates of controversial views, Reinders devotes more space to identifying weaknesses in mainstream positions, e.g. of John Rawls and H. Tristram Engelhart Jr, and giving space to more congenial thinkers such as Knud Løgstrup, Stanley Hauerwas and Alasdair MacIntyre. The position of people with mental disabilities is a major theme, and some recorded experiences of the father of a severely mentally disabled son are described and discussed (pp.124-38); but unlike Byrne's account, the parenthood here is by proxy. The example is that of Kenzaburo Oë, who described in a novel the moral and ethical dilemmas confronting an immature young man when he learns that his newborn son is severely impaired. These fictional experiences apparently parallel those of the Nobel prize recipient Oë, as told in other works. [3] Reinders makes some useful points about contradictions in the individualising 'liberal society'. To run well, it seems to depend on significant numbers of people willing to devote themselves to the care of others on a non-reciprocal or little-rewarded basis, and who make some sense of the community of suffering, outside and beyond the parameters of 'liberal thought'.
Both Reinders and Byrne are a tad careless of recent sensitivities over public terminology. The traditional 'philanthropic care' viewpoint comes across heavily when Reinders produces, in the year 2000, a sentence starting, "The lame can be trained to use a wheelchair, the deaf can be taught how to use sign language, the blind can learn to read their own alphabet..." (p.207). His point is to contrast these compensatory leaps (!?) with the tiny steps by which people with profound mental disabilities learn and their consequent dismal prospects in a society dominated by expectations of all-singing, all-dancing, consumer-magazine lives. Some cultural unawareness also shows up in Reinders' text, when he writes, "Presumably, living with a physical or mental disability is not a neutral fact for most people, one that is accepted with the same equanimity as the color of one's hair or the size of one's feet" (p.39). Plenty of disabled people do assert precisely that the physical properties of their impairment are neutral; it is the disabling attitude of other people and the ill-designed environment that bothers them. The two examples, hair colour and foot size, are also remarkably inappropriate. A worldwide industry feeds on the desire of millions to regularly re-tint their hair, while the longest and largest historical example of socially sanctioned torture consisted in the crushing of Chinese girls' toes to make 'acceptably' tiny feet.
Against the background of Reinders' book-length arguments and doughty opposition to the theoretical ski-slopes of liberal philosophy, it might seem trivial to question his lack of verbal persuasiveness. Yet the textual battle for the public mind is fought with words, against a billion-dollar advertising industry ceaselessly presenting lithe, bronzed, active, bodies. Raw text may aim behind the images, targeting the individual's hidden consciousness of right and wrong, and core of humanness. It's still a good idea to run the raw text past a spell-checker and a (human) style editor, to improve the impact or at least reduce some irritations.
Cartoonist and Development Agents
The artist Sepasitiano (Br. James Schwartz) has used cartoon strip, storyboards or comic books through the past decade to communicate and discuss issues about disabled people in South America, East Asia and South Asia, with collaborators Sr. Ching and Fr. Adam, who offer short training courses across Asia and Europe for people interested in befriending "people who happen to be 'slow'". The inter-cultural range of this team's theological and philosophical understanding, together with its hands-on experiences with people having cognitive disabilities, has culminated in
A Person is a Person, touching many of the issues tackled by Professors Byrne and Reinders. The depth of treatment is hardly equivalent, in 163 pages of cartoon strip and speech bubbles; but the accessibility is vastly wider. [4] The device of showing television journalists tracking stories about disability at home, in school, and in the community, means that many points of view can be heard as they interview disabled adults and children, siblings, frontline teachers, professional counsellors, and mothers.
One of the journalists reflects in mid-flight that doing the right thing by our disabled neighbour is "not something that can be taught, pounded or punished into people, but it has to be lived" (p.81). An advocate for 'inclusive education', walking the investigators round a school, suggests that "sometimes it's more important to understand the needs and behaviors of 10-year-olds than it is to understand the characteristics of mental retardation, learning disabilities, or orthopedic impairments" (p.89). The TV company boss angrily shows his reporters a newsletter article advocating that, "Those people who are so mentally defective that they cannot live in society should, as soon as they are identified as defective, be humanely dispatched" (p.160). A group in school, all of whom have a disabled brother or sister, discuss their feelings. "What would you say to families with a new baby with mental retardation?" Kids come back with: "Don't worry. Calm down. Take the kid home and start living. There are a lot of ups and downs ahead. Don't be regretful." (p.68)
Boddhisatva and Dummy
The meanings of severely disabled persons, for the humans around them, are discussed in each of the worthwhile books reviewed here, without an ultimate conclusion; they propose no tidy, final solution such as 'humane dispatch'! In a liberal world where desk-bound philosophers are free to speculate on new ethical responses to genetic technologies, there should perhaps be more representation of people from the behaviourally-strange world, to sit on the other side of the desk and gaze silently at those who are wondering whether to kill them. A similar challenge was recorded over 2000 years ago among the Jataka, successive incarnations of the Buddha. In Muga-Pakka-Jataka, the Buddha was reborn in a palace, and was soon horrified by seeing cruel justice meted out to criminals by his father the king. Complicity in cruelty would certainly result in further eons of tortuous incarnations, so the babe resolved to reveal no sign of intelligence but to remain "deaf-dumb and crippled" (muga-pakka).
The king and courtiers did not accept this act. For sixteen years they tried early childhood intervention, Montessori, special education, mainstreaming, inclusion, and hired any number of consultants and specialists with foreign degrees and fancy techniques. The queen also begged, pleaded and wept before the silent child. By intense mental concentration, the Buddha remained unmoved by all these efforts. Then the prognosticators told the king the case was hopeless and the boy should be taken out the back and killed. (But the story did not end quite like that). [5]
People with profound cognitive disabilities still gaze out at a lunatic world divided among those dying of over-consumption, those dying of malnutrition, those amusing themselves while the city burns, those building bigger weapons to flatten smaller countries, and those wrapping texts around all these activities. The silent gazers at least maintain some moral distance from the evils of cleverer people. There is much to learn from them yet.
NOTES
1. Ibn Khallikan. Biographical Dictionary, I: 496-97, transl. Mac Guckin de Slane, Paris, 1842. Al-Khalil was one of the earliest among parents of such children to leave some remarks in the historical record.
2. Paula Richman (1997) Extraordinary Child. Poems from a South Asian devotional genre. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, p. 9. Themes and activities of early childhood run through the poems. God in the little child is worshipped and protected amidst the toys in the kitchen and back yard (pp 11-14).
3. Kenzaburo Oë. A Personal Matter, transl. J. Nathan (1969), New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Ibid, A Healing Family, transl. S. Snyder (2001), Tokyo: Kodansha International.
4. Cartoon strip has elsewhere been used with remarkable transcultural effect while portraying deep philosophy, in Zhuangzi Speaks, adapted and illustrated by Tsai Chih Chung, transl. B. Bruya (1992), Princeton UP. Reading some modern philosophers' glib suggestions for the 'humane dispatch' of their less skilful fellow humans, one may recall Zhuangzi's master butcher: "My knife glides in and out between the bone joints, moving as it pleases; the cow suffers no pain and in the end, doesn't even know that it's dead." (p. 30)
5. The Jataka (1895-1907). E.B. Cowell (ed), Cambridge UP. Reprinted, 1993, Delhi: Low Price Publications. isbn (set) 8185557713. The Muga-Pakka-Jataka is No. 538, in Book XXII. While the development of powers of 'mental concentration' has been a traditional emphasis within Buddhism, and this seems to disadvantage people with cognitive disabilities, there has been another Buddhist tradition in which the slow-witted student perseveres to spiritual enlightenment without ever reaching intellectual heights. This strand stretches from early legends as far as modern times. See: Kato Shoshun (1998) "A lineage of dullards". Zen master Toju Reiso and his associates. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 25 (1/2) 151-165. At:
http://www.nanzan-u.ac.jp/SHUBUNKEN/publications/jjrs/pdf/515.pdf
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