In May of last year, this blog launched in earnest. I set out to offer a vision of an ability-centered society, to combine academy and culture, to transform my story into ideas that someone somewhere might find useful, helpful, comforting, or appealing. I am proud of all that I have accomplished on these pages. However, to borrow a line from Discovery of Witches: “In every ending, there is a new beginning.”
This month, in a post that is both cocoon and metamorphosis, I want to begin with a sweeping declaration: I am a human. If you’re reading this post you are almost certainly a human too. Though this may seem obvious it needs to be said. It needs to be said because of something I call the Peter Singer problem.
The (Peter) Singer problem is a definitional issue. It arises from the question: what makes us human? It is the deceptively simple task of developing an inclusive definition of all of humanity without diluting the idea of humanness itself. I call it the Singer problem because Peter Singer, a moral philosopher and professor of bioethics, advances a definition based on functional capacity. The problem as I see it is that Singer’s approach to humanity is a definition that excludes many people (and, as he would certainly point out, includes many animals). That is to say that Singer advocates a position based on sentience—roughly, the ability to feel pleasure and pain, as he defines it, absurdly given that many medical conditions inhibit one’s ability to feel pleasure or pain— that strips personhood from many with severe disabilities, advanced neurodegenerative conditions, and other forms of late-stage dementia and grants it to dolphins and dogs, among other animals.
As I argued last month, “definitions that exclude are definitions waiting to be abused. Conversely, definitions of humanity that include, make space for the depth, breadth, width, range, and variety of humanness foster inclusion and development.” However, the problem arises from the fact that Singer is right about one thing—an overbroad definition of what it means to be a living human cheapens and dilutes the meaning of aliveness. It presents a risk to epistemic stability, a concept I have detailed in an earlier post. As a refresher, epistemic stability is a means of defining truth without absolute certainty. A claim is epistemically stable when as a result of an accumulation of weight—as measured in evidence, rigorous support, and the like—it is difficult to move or destabilize that claim. Epistemic stability is a reaction to relativistic nihilism, an idea that can give rise to such risible claims as “alternative facts.” In the case of Singer’s claims, stipulating that at present we cannot measure the exact timing and parameters of brain death and thus shouldn’t pass judgment on it, there must be a constituency of bodies that are brain dead. To think of them as alive dilutes the idea of aliveness. Therefore to include those bodies in the category of human, in our sense of humankind, undermines the epistemic stability of the category and all of the other risks both metaphysical and real-world that entails.
From a young age, I became obsessed with the Singer question for reasons both philosophical and personal. I do mean obsessed, perhaps obsessed in the way that only someone on the spectrum can be. Driven by an urgent need to find an answer, to include the most radically divergent (and therefore the most potentially vulnerable) in this thing we call humanity without diluting the meaning of the very concept, I devoured social science and biology papers as if they were Thin Mints. I hoped, more than thought, that if I could somehow find all of the pieces to the puzzle of what makes a person human I could fit them together and prove Singer wrong without diluting the meaning of humanity into nothingness. In so doing I gradually realized three things. First, that definitions of humanity overlapped (and still overlap) to a startlingly limited degree. Second, that no matter how I shuffled the pieces, no matter how I rearranged the definitions from the various social and biological sciences, no matter how I mixed and matched, no single definition would stick until disparate corners of the academy developed a greater capacity to talk to each other. And third, disability studies was consistently the rocky shores on which my hope for a coherent and inclusive definition of humanity was dashed to bits.
You see, while it may be possible to have a pragmatic, operationalizable fully social model of race or gender the same is not true of disability. The nature of ‘disability’—more properly, the range of biodiversity within the human species—means that at a certain point, the physio-biological realities of disability must be taken into account. While it is certainly true that many of the most pernicious ideas about disability and many of the most frustrating barriers for people with disabilities are results of the social environment, pain and fatigue cannot be deconstructed into oblivion.
So, for all of my effort, reading, and thought I found myself with two problems to resolve instead of one: the Singer problem, and the communication problem I encountered in my reading.
The communication problem struck and still strikes me as a talking past—the communication equivalent of fencers slashing away at each other from every angle and brushing each other with the sides of their blades without ever scoring because the point of the blade is never driven home. This talking past occurs between various sub-disciplines of the social sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and so on—and is particularly pronounced in communication (if it can be called that) between the social sciences and the biological sciences. It is like two simultaneous soliloquies in place of discourse.
The problem at its core is that scientific debate seems to have become something of a simulacra. The signs and symbols of debate exist—opinions are stated, positions are emoted—but there is a disconnect where dialogue should be. It is a problem that reminds me of a snippet of a cartoon program I caught in a hospital waiting room many years ago in which the two main characters stand facing each other having an ‘argument.’ One character repeatedly says “I like cereal” in a voice simmering with outrage while the other replies in an equally exercised tone “I like potatoes.” It has all the hallmarks, symbols, signs, and trappings of debate but lacks any engagement. It is easy to see how this can become a problem in academia.
These two problems are intertwined. After all, it is impossible to develop a definition that is inclusive of all of humanity without diluting the idea of humanness unless diverse corners of the scientific communicate with one another. Further, I had stumbled upon what I would later learn that seminal scholars of disability such as Tom Shakespeare, Jerome Bickenbach, and Martha Nussbaum among others identified the phenomenon of ‘disability
9biodivergence) as a nexus demanding scholarship that speaks across this divide—a nexus that forces a convergence of disciplines across the social and biological sciences.
However, I encountered an enormous problem—I wasn’t interested in disability studies. I was and still am drawn to the idea of transformative empowerment. I wanted to study moments where biology, psychology, and technology converged to generate moments of metamorphic ability leaps—moments like the iconic “You’re a wizard, Harry” in the Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone film, like Hal Jordan manifesting his will into the world using his Green Lantern ring for the first time, like Captain America emerging transformed from the serum capsule—to understand what made them possible.
These habilitative (from habilitation, a process through which we acquire the ability to better fit into the world; a process distinct from rehabilitation and prehabilitation whose goal is about habitat, about being at home in your world) transformations are rare. It isn’t often one spends years running into a wall without so much as a whisper of progress only to find one’s self suddenly doing somersaults over that same wall as if the ability had been absorbed from the air via osmosis. However rare, these habilitative transformations are possible and when they occur they tend to be recognized and celebrated on a societal scale. That is the reason the celebration of miraculous ability acquisition is a distinct YouTube genre—think people putting on EnChroma glasses for the first time or having new cochlear implants activated.
I wanted and still want to help build a society in which we all can have our own realistic superhero-gets-their-powers moment, in which we can all make great habilitative leaps. As I began thinking about how to build a society where those moments are possible I understood intuitively that the Singer question and the communication problem it is entwined with were tied up with these habilitative transformations. The idea of becoming a superhero, superhuman in a moment of transcendent ability must surely be a counterweight to Singer’s function-based approach which allows for the infirm and impaired to be classified as subhuman.
This is the seed from which the Theory of Everyone sprouted fertilized by the two fundamental problems of definition and communication. Through the theory, I hoped to combine aspects of disparate fields of academia with elements of literature, music, art, fantasy, and pop culture to cut through the Gordian knot which held my areas of interest inscrutably intertwined and impossible to weave together into a single coherent tapestry.
Beyond the academic challenges such an undertaking presents, the beginnings of the Theory of Everyone were disheartening because I was told repeatedly that the effort was futile, dangerous even. These warnings combined with the mortal dread that all crips live with, wasting energy. Energy is precious to us in a way that nobody who isn’t a crip can’t possibly understand. No matter how confident you are in yourself, no matter how much hope you feel or how vigorously you protect it —what if I am wasting energy, what if I am strangling away a bit of my life essence, what if I am expending energy I will need later on to ensure my survival?
This brings me to a book I mentioned last month, Professor Michael Muthukrishna’s A Theory of Everyone. One of the reasons it was a great pleasure to read Professor Muthukrishna’s work is that he has begun disentangling and resolving parts of these questions, particularly to the extent that he has provided a framework for rigorous cross-disciplinary examination across the social sciences and in so doing, I feel that it has vindicated the raison d’etre of my project (as well as laying a rigorously researched foundation).
He has also detailed an action plan on how to account for the human condition. Professor Muthukrishna lays out four laws of life, which he describes as “interconnected ways to carve up the world.” The laws are the law of energy, the law of innovation, the law of cooperation, and the law of evolution. He engages fundamentally in the habilitative project in that he imagines through the lens of interdisciplinary social science defined by his four laws a different way that everyone can inhabit or be habilitate to the world we all live in – our bodies, our minds, our communities, our universe. Instead of trying to paraphrase what Professor Muthukrishna has said so clearly I will briefly quote his work to give you an overview:
The law of energy: “The ultimate ceiling on biomes and complexity of all lifeforms is the availability of energy that constrains what we are capable of doing… We cannot move without energy, cannot do anything at all… the efficiency with which we can find and use… sources [of energy] that constrain what we are capable of doing.” However, “energy, when abundant… is to the human what water is to the fish” in David Foster-Wallace’s metaphor.
The law of innovation: “Life innovates new ways to efficiently capture and control available energy in competition with other life.” “Technological innovations [have] allowed us to do
more with less. But each innovation, both biological and technological, [has] required organisms to work together.”
The law of cooperation: “When there is sufficient energy to exploit and more that is reachable with the help of just a few more helpers, we can make the leap and work together to capture it… by working with others… you can increase your chances of success… The optimal level of cooperation is the level where you have a high probability of winning the spoils and your share of the spoils is larger than the share you could have got in a smaller group or larger group. We typically don’t calculate this consciously. Instead, we get there through trial and error, partial causal models, and selection.”
The law of evolution: “The exploitation of energy, the way in which we innovate, and the mechanisms of cooperation are typically not intelligently designed solutions but rather the product of millions of attempts, with successes outcompeting failures.”
Those who know me well may be able to see how Professor Muthukrishna’s work aligns with my thinking as laid out in my scholarly work and here on this blog to an uncanny degree. A clear example is my energy expectation formulae, a phenomenon of social conciousness I laid out thusly on this blog in September of 2022:
“Energy expectation formulae mediate social exchange and facilitate social interaction. They manifest in every goal-oriented human interaction and are unique to both people and situations but operate within boundaries established by the cultures in which they occur. That is to say that there’s a reason you – and the entire audience – are almost never surprised by judges’ reactions on talent shows. Being on the same wavelength is a thing, or at least it is when estimating the conversion of ability into output…
A world without energy expectation formula would be one of inaction and paralysis as they are a precursor to coordinated action [to the extent that it would endanger us as a species]. That is to say that energy expectation formulae exist because they must. If we were incapable of guessing at our own and our counterparts’ capacity to transform energy into action we would be in stasis.”
As you can undoubtedly see, two of the laws laid out A Theory of Everyone—the law of energy and the law of cooperation—are central to my concept of energy expectation formulae. The analysis that both Professor Muthukrishna and I put for is similar from diagnosis to consequence. Further, I believe we are engaged in similar projects because habilitation is ultimately about energy. Habilitated beings are best-energized beings. Energy abundance flourishes when a being is habilitated to its dsurroundings.
Professor Muthukrishna’s work provides responses to many of the key questions and problems we independently identified. However, it raises two new questions:
- How, in light of this, do you define what constitutes a human other than we are animals defined by these four laws? (Professor Muthukrishna is defining every living thing)
- Given that definition, how do we within the full range of human diversity leverage energy as best as possible the way that we construct, foster and incentivize ability?
Those are questions for the next phase of this project that will define this blog in its new form. Those are questions for The Habilitation Game. The new blog based on the habilitation game will launch in January. Thank you to all who have followed the blog and been on this journey with me. Your interest, encouragement, and engagement have been invaluable fonts of joy, inspiration and, most importantly of all, energy.