442. Scott Williams on Disability and the New World

If you ever get there (big if) will you talk about the disability movements that were happening across the world in the 20th century? I have especially in mind the UK's movement and UPIAS, the first disabled led disability politics organisation that came up with what we now call the "social model of disability", although that specific phrase comes from Mike Oliver, UPIAS used different phrases for the idea like the "social definition of disability" etc.

This movement has in general been forgotten in the modern day. Everyone remembers Stonewall for gay rights for example, but nothing about disability. So having this podcast cover it would be very useful. Although, considering the pace of the podcast, I would hope we have more attention to it by then anyway haha.

Didn’t you say last episode that Aristotle did say that non-greeks were natural slaves due to the climate? Do you agree with Prof Williams’ reading? Or is it still disputed? 

To support his case against “ableism”, Joel Michael Reynolds draws on the concept of the “normate”, which picks out

“the veiled subject position of the cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries. The term normate usefully designates the social figure through which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings.”

He continues: “Social factors always contribute to the creation and maintenance of the normate in any given sociohistorical context.” This would seem to align with Prof Williams’ insistence that we should (always) try to understand the concept of personhood within different sociohistorical contexts ? 
 

If there are many ways to be non-normate - that is, many ways to be disabled - then there may be many ways to be (seen/categorised as) a non-person, or even a non-human. David Livingstone Smith in discussing the “Paradoxes of Dehumanisation” perhaps draws correspondences between colonialism then and there (16th Century Americas) and now (with politicians speaking publicly of “human animals”):

“we dehumanise others because we want to kill them or oppress them, rather than the other way round.”

On a separate point, the justification of empire as a moral mission - of civilising “backward” peoples - also persists. Caroline Elkins, in her history of the British Empire (A Legacy of Violence) , quotes J S Mill, for whom liberty “is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties … We may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage.” 

As Elkins explains, Mill offered “a conception of paternal despotism…liberal imperialism, which denied sovereignty to brown and Black peoples around the world, while holding out the promise of reform.”

Really a great episode Peter ranks as one of my favourites with a guest. Long time listener!

Thanks for pursuing this project and your liveliness and energy!

Looking forward to your exploration of the coming century!

GO DR. WILLIAMS!!!