The New Noble Savage

Culture is a powerful force, there is very little doubt about that.  It is often intangible and peripheral, everything in one’s environment exudes a broad spectrum of what a society of people values and does not value.  As Charlton explains in his book Nothing About Us, Without Us, the Western world shows its lack of value for disabled people not through laws of exclusion (i.e., Jim Crow Laws, etc…) but through aesthetic medicalization, paternalistic tendencies, and an almost total ambivalence in building design, education and human resource management.  The Western attitude toward disabled people—a term that has come to encompass a broad range of physical, psychiatric, behavioral and cognitive diseases, disorders and disturbances—is largely shaped by the hypersexualized, visual media.  It is because of the Western obsession with the corporeal aesthetic and, if it can be said, mental aesthetic that individuals who possess corporeal, psychiatric, behavioral or cognative deviations from what is considered to be “perfect,” “whole,” or “normal,” are subjugated to our culture’s bias toward standardization, medicalization, and stylized perfection. 

Since the advent of early-Christian art—in which demons are portrayed as being crippled, or pocked with boils, welts, humps, bumps and other various aesthetic “abnormalities”—we, in the West, have feared and thought of disabled people as being afflicted or tortured by God, Nature or, not until more recent history, genetic material.  This fear and long tradition of viewing disabled peoples as some how being afflicted has lead to a dogmatic paternalism equitable to the idea of “White man’s burden,” the vestiges of which are still harbored by some cultural and political elites.  There are a lot of parallels between the struggle of First Peoples for cultural, legal and political legitimacy and the Disabled Peoples’ Movement (DPM).  In fact, the DPM cannot be detached from other significant Human Rights movements of the last 200 years.  However, it has only been in the last 20 or 30 years that the DPM has seen its nearly two centuries of advocacy come to fruition with the passage of legislation like the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA).  So, is disabled individual the new “Noble Savage?”

In the Western tradition, the human body has been the crux where science, morality and the highly idealized and stylized image meet.  The variations of theme of the body, has been used as often as a symbol as it has been as a means to separate “us” and “them.”  During the era of U.S. chattel slavery and the middle passage, the variation on skin color was used as a means of segregating “those that were chattel” from “those that had the potential to own slaves.”  Our culture (predominately United States) attaches morality to the body; drug addicts, for example, are often seen as lacking morals rather than being afflicted by a serious disease to be aggressively treated.  Similar attitudes are adopted toward sexually promiscuous women, where as sexually promiscuous men are aggrandized.  To be a disabled person—again, used to encompass the broadest range of social, psychiatric, physical, behavioral and cognitive diseases, disturbances, and disorders—is to find yourself firmly in the grip of the moral, scientific, and hypersexualized idea found in the Western tradition as it relates to the variation on the theme of the body.  Often times, the aesthetically gripping or what perception leads us to believe is unacceptable or displeasing is, from birth, medicalized and, thus, immediately “treated” with a scalpel.  Our institutions, those responsible for social cohesion and enforcement of cultural values, literally segregate those individual’s who don’t fit the mental aesthetic of the status quo through the continued use of, for example, forced institutionalization of the mentally ill and “special” classrooms for children who’ve experienced environmental and psychiatric trauma or suffer from acute medical or genetic/chromosomal conditions (i.e., ALS, cerebral palsy, Down’s syndrome, fragile X, etc…).

As Susan Sontag, postmodern social critic and multimedia artist, points out in her book Illness as Metaphor, Western (again, predominately American) culture often utilizes sickness or medical anomalies to relay cultural values.  Much like the traditional use of the shade black as a literary vehicle to convey negativity, sickness and medical anomalies can have powerful and culturally loaded connotations.  The use of the word “cancer” or “AIDS,” as a literary device, is so powerful they are almost a taboo.  At the height of America’s tuberculosis epidemic, the bacterial infection of the lungs or sub-cutaneous tissues, was commonly and medically referred to as “consumption” because of its affects on the corporeal aesthetics—it literally “consumed” the afflicted individual from the inside out.  “Consumption,” “AIDS,” and “cancer” have come to symbolize the finality of Earthly existence in a culture that places a premium on the perfection of the “meat-self” and that is uncomfortable with its degradation and the teleological outcome of all carbon based life. 

Sick and disabled people, when represented in the simulacra of Western media, usually are objects of sympathy, veneration, and/or fear.  Or, they embody the zeitgeist of the jaded perception of futility and nihilism that permeates modern nomadic-cyber culture.  Tony Kutchner, playwright, social critic and Gay Rights activist, embodies the former through the character Prior Walter.  The later is, perhaps, best manifested by the character Switters in Tom Robbins novel Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates.  What these characters share is an authentic, first person perception of being disabled and the human experiences that correspond with said illness or disability.  For both, the exclusion they experience from their respective cultural cohorts stems not from their illness or disability itself rather, it stems from the aesthetic manifestations of the illness of disability.  For Prior Walter, it is the displeasure his long time partner experiences due Prior’s rapid weight loss, pharmacological regimen, and the uncontrollable excretion of body fluids ranging from feces and seamen to vomit and blood.  Switters exclusion is a result of his use of a wheel chair for mobility, not from the disuse of his legs.   

The cultural handling of disability is a paradox.  It negates the ethical frame work established during the Enlightenment by Descartes and later by Locke and Rousseau that all that is required to be human is to acknowledge that we are human; to doubt and to think.  Western culture assumes that disabled and ill people are somehow subhuman or, less than a “whole human.”  This idea is rigidly enforced through our media rich environment, cultural mores and norms and is, thusly, projected onto disabled people without their consent.