Feb 28, 2025
What I said in the comments section of Freddie’s new post:
I’ve been teaching design and disability for the last dozen years and am the parent of a teenager with Down syndrome. Much has changed in the small world of online rhetoric and in elite university practice in that time, as you’ve documented. In the last couple of years, I’m finding students CAN see how improbable the ballooning ADHD numbers are, CAN recognize the social media distortions of self-dx, etc. They’re caught in it. But they do see something’s off, and most of them crave good hard conversations about how to make sense. My main conclusion is this: when we jump from tangible reasonable accommodations to the vague and immaterial need to get “beyond” access, focus on stigma, medicalize ordinary human variation, it’s partly a signal that schools and cultural institutions have abandoned any sustained attention to the question of suffering. Is suffering a given, non-optional part of life? Or is it a glitch in the body-as-machine? How do we distinguish our ordinary suffering from the unacceptable, and what do families and cultures and states do about it? Philosophical and ancient wisdom traditions are ready with insight, but schools don’t teach these domains. So we stretch the logic of accommodations far beyond what it can hold. We speak in the thinnest therapeutic language for all our troubles. We resign ourselves to the ever-receding goalposts that hold something like “belonging,” because we can’t imagine shoring up forms of life outside the machines-and-markets shape of the modern world.
I’ll just add here some lengthier context for my fellow professors and teachers trying to navigate this weird terrain we’re in, if my counterparts want to accompany students and ward off their own bitterness. (I see and hear a lot of bitterness.)
Consider that:
— The history of the ADA is a rights-based movement that had, at its core, a strong claim that people are more than patients. Human dignity, of course, is an old idea. But global industrial modernity brought us a heritage of institutions and asylums built to manage people with disabilities, and the 1960s-era disability rights movement was mostly an effort to redress those ills. No more hiding people away from civic life.
— More than half a century later, rich countries’ welfare structures have guaranteed a lot of tangible goods for that (re)-entry into civic life, and the public-private mix of technology, design, and policy is a fascinating nexus of human creativity and meaningful invention. Ramps, curb cuts, closed captioning. The software-hardware mix of a smart phone is a life-changing tool for my friends who are blind or deaf, who have no finger digits or one arm, all kinds of atypicalities. We should preserve our wonder at these tools. (And, yes, we should question what policy guarantees properly belong at the federal or municipal level, what states can effectively accomplish, how to keep the core structure of the family in all deliberations.)
— Our era also contains deep and unresolved paradoxes. The legacy of the disability rights movement unfolding in high technocratic modernity means that 1) today is a great historical moment to live as someone, say, with Down syndrome, while 2) Down syndrome is being designed out of the world. Today the resources and forms of assistance for mental health disorders are abundant, while many nations debate medically assisted suicide for treatment-resistant depression, even in teenagers. Technologies help mediate both tangible inclusion and the eugenic culling of human dependence from the imaginary of the common good. If you want to help students see how quickly linear narratives of progress fall apart, Down syndrome could be your Exhibit A.
— Demedicalizing disability in the rich countries of the West has been met, in the 21st century, by a countervailing force and additional paradox: the remedicalizing and indeed pathologizing of all human variation. But instead of shaming students for being narcissistic sheeple attached to victim narratives, remind them: Only under the presumption of a mechanistic body chained to a machines-and-markets world does it make sense to medicalize all our ordinary variation and troubles. Who benefits from this picture of the human? In the near term, maybe a provisional sense of community by means of diagnosis. But in the long term? Industry. It’s industry that benefits.
— Disability does its best work as a stress test for naturalized presumptions about the human person. What is human needfulness, at the site of the body and as a guaranteed feature of any person’s life-in-time? What sense should we make of our suffering, bodily and otherwise, and what philosophical, religious, psychological and other resources might assist us? As Wendell Berry said long ago: The future will be divided between people who want to live as creatures and people who want to live as machines. We can help our students see both the goods of inclusive design and the larger unresolved project of understanding needfulness as a constitutive part of the common good. If you really want to help course-correct alongside the next generation, you might start by verrrry slowwwwly teaching chapter 2, “An Anthropological Solution,” in Carter Snead’s What It Means to Be Human. Bellah, Taylor, Sandel, Habermas: it’s all there, beautifully synthesized.
You can subscribe to a weekly digest of these posts here.