Disability Attitudes for All Latitudes

Abstract

Attitudes drive our behavior. As individuals and as groups, what believe and how feel about a matter largely determine what do with respect to it. Our behavior further reinforces our beliefs and feelings. Today we'll consider how this circular relationship works with respect to include and those exclude from our marriage beds and neighborhoods, our work and our play. The groups to which belong span the entire human species, several races, many nationalities, innumerable local communities, tribes, clans, and families. We subdivide ourselves by characteristics over which have no control--sex and age--and by some that reflect personal choice or effort--such as socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, business/industrial or occupational groups, professional, scientific, or literary/artistic groups, and so forth. Let's note at the outset that however choose to cohere to some and partition ourselves from others, attitudinally and physically, may be doing violence to the ultimate Unity of Life pointed to by most of the world's religions. The idea that somehow are all fragments of One Being, whether we're billionaires or homeless street people, is almost ubiquitous. The most powerful attitudes of which I'm aware are the worldviews or paradigms that define entire cultures. To see how these are mirrored in disability attitudes, let's review the stages by which humans have come to imagine a global society in which inclusion, not exclusion, reigns supreme. Our history has been divided into several major stages of technical-economic development with correlated worldviews. Briefly: * At our foraging--or hunting and gathering--stage, the group worldview was archaic. [That means don't know details because there were no written records and we've found few artifacts about which to speculate.] Individuals were presumably BIOcentric--focused on staying alive and getting their genes into the gene pool. Even though this epoch saw the familialization of males, the taming of testosterone, eco-masculinists are fond of this period. * At our horticultural stage--farming with digging sticks or hoes, which pregnant women could do without miscarrying--the cultural worldview was magical and were generally EGOcentric. That is, most had developed beyond mere biological survival needs and were aware of having some ability to influence the environment, and of having psychological needs and wishes. Women produced about 80% of the food and got quite a little respect. About 80% of the god-figurine artifacts found from this era are female. Virtually every Great Mother society was horticultural. Eco-feminists like this period. * At the agrarian stage, the worldview was and tended to be ETHNOcentric. When their senses told them their magic wasn't sufficiently reliable, but their intuition supplied symbolic images of something in the universe more powerful than they, the age of mythic religion began. It provided a means for including more in the group one called ones own. Instead of limiting we and us to the family, clan, or tribe, inclusion broadened to all in a larger region who worshiped the same mythic god, often manifested in a king. With this widening embrace of people like us, the ability to identify with progressively larger, more diverse groups, the move toward eventual globalization began in earnest. Since plowing causes miscarriages, it's likely that both sexes agreed that the men would go out to produce the food while the women stayed home to do the child rearing. Since men produced most of the food, they got most of the respect. Virtually all the gods became male--and have written records as well as artifacts in evidence. * The industrial stage is characterized by a rational-empirical worldview and further enlargement of the group with which individuals could identify--nations and federations with vast territories and populations one might never see or meet. …

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