I think there are about three major strategies that people have used to justify violence and oppression in human societies: threat, disgust, and disablement.[1]

Threat is a pretty straightforward one.  We take a group of people and construct them as threatening Others (with a capital “O”): people who are not like us and who are threatening to us.  We come to believe that those Other people are violent, dangerous, and savage. Whenever we feel that we are threatened by some Other, we become more collectivistic and cohesive.  We place greater trust in our politicians and military leaders, those who protect us from the Others, and we become less tolerant of internal dissent.

There’s also disgust.  This can be a bit counterintuitive to postsecondary-educated Westerners; we’ve learned that morality is all about harm, human rights, and so forth.  As long as nobody’s harmed, it’s acceptable; if there’s harm, it’s amoral.  However, many people seem to believe that some things are natural and morally right, while others are disgusting and wrong.[2]  This allows these people to oppress those they believe to be unnatural or disgusting, or those who they believe do unnatural and disgusting things.

Finally, there is the strategy of disablement.  When we disable other people, we portray them as inferior, as lesser than ourselves.  We might argue that this inferiority makes them less deserving than ourselves, or we might argue that the inferiority of others gives us special obligations to protect and guide them.

Let’s take Nazi propaganda against the Jews as an example of how all three strategies can be used at once (even if they seem to contradict one another).  First, the Nazis portrayed the Jews as a threat: according to the Nazis, the Jews were engaged in some kind of bizarre global conspiracy.  This conspiracy of the Jewish capitalists was apparently responsible for Germany’s defeat in World War I.  As such, the Jews were a threatening Other: they were a fifth column, an internal enemy.

But that didn’t stop the Nazis from also using disgust in their propaganda.  One film, The Eternal Jew, is particularly infamous for using shots of filthy Jewish people from the Polish ghettoes to create disgust.  The film also compares Jews to rats and to plague.

These disgust-provoking scenes are also notable for their disablement of the Jews: their depiction of the Jews as an inferior, subhuman race.  The Jews weren’t just disgusting and filthy; they were disgusting and filthy because they were subhuman and incapable of civilization.[3]

I want to focus a bit more on this strategy of disablement.  Once we start looking, we can see it everywhere, including in:

• European justifications for colonialism. Colonial peoples were portrayed as being less able than Europeans; they needed guidance, and therefore colonial conquests were justified.
• Historical justifications for sexism. Women were portrayed as weak creatures, who needed protection from men around them.  Women were thought to be uninterested in serious matters, and exceptions to this rule were dismissed as hysterics, because women were also thought to be irrational.
• Justifications for domestic racism in America before the civil rights era. Black people, immigrants, and other minority groups were depicted as less intelligent and less able than the dominant groups in society.  Indeed, IQ testing was misused to back up these arguments.
• Justifications for economic inequality and social class divisions, because educated upper-class individuals can look down upon the uneducated, unachieving masses as inferior.

And there are many other cases besides.  Now, usually, people have responded to this disablement by challenging it on empirical grounds.  Women and specific racial groups have argued that no, they are in fact just as able as anyone else, and they’ve gone on to prove it.

Unfortunately, this response implicitly accepts the argument that ability should be related to a person’s value.

Today, so-called “high functioning” autistic people could probably make a case for why we don’t deserve to be treated as inferior: we could argue that our difficulties are caused by society, and that we therefore have every right to be promoted to the status of able people.  If we showed that many of our difficulties were caused by the environments around us, we could probably not only retain access to services but even expand the supports available to us, because these supports would not longer be provided just as charity but as social justice.

But I don’t want to try making that case, because it would leave others trapped in disablement, just as autistic women and autistic people of colour were left behind in disablement when the feminist and civil rights movements triumphed.

I also don’t want to try calling disability “diversability” or any such thing.  It sounds nice, but it still conveys the idea that we are only valuable because of our abilities.

First, I think we should just stop making a priori judgements about whether a disability lies within a person or not.  In societies where women are denied education and denied opportunities in the labour market, women are disabled.  In societies where autistic people with sensory sensitivities are forced into crowded and chaotic environments, autistic people with sensory sensitivities are disabled.  I believe that disability arises from the interaction of the environment and the person.  When disability is seen to arise from this interaction, the disablement justification (which relies on the idea of disability as internal to the person) stops working.

Second, I think it is about time that we got rid of disablement as a mechanism of oppression altogether.  I think that a person’s abilities (or lack thereof) have nothing whatsoever to do with their moral value.  I think that we need to clearly separate the question of a person’s moral worth from the question of their ability.  This would be a truly revolutionary change: we would not merely stop applying the disablement justification for oppression to the latest group in a long procession, but we would remove the justification altogether.

Footnotes

[1] I know it’s a bit simplistic, but I genuinely do think these three can cover most cases.

[2] Take the example of homophobia.  Obviously, homosexuality doesn’t harm anyone as long as any sex occurs between consenting adults, and we infringe people’s rights through homophobia not vice versa, so there’s no moral case for homophobia that I could ever take seriously.  But interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be any obvious selfish motive: most homophobes don’t really get anything out of homophobia.  (If anything, homophobia is often counterproductive.  Consider: straight men who condemn gay men are just going to force the gay men to pass as straight men.  That’s going to make it harder for the straight men to find female partners.)  Why, then, are so many people homophobic?  The only explanation I can see is that there are people who genuinely believe that homosexuality is disgusting and unnatural.

[3] The depiction of the Jews as disgusting, inferior subhumans stands somewhat at odds with the campaign to depict them as sophisticated members of an international conspiracy, but Nazi propaganda sometimes tried to deal with the obvious contradiction by trying to suggest that the Jews’ true nature was subhuman, while their sophistication was some form of mask.