book-review – Planet of the Blind

If, like me, you admire Spinoza, you’re a problem. Here’s a spoonful:

“Those who wish to seek out the cause of miracles and to understand the things of nature as philosophers, and not to stare at them in astonishment like fools, are soon considered heretical and impious, and proclaimed as such by those whom the mob adores as the interpreters of nature and the gods. For these men know that, once ignorance is put aside, that wonderment would be taken away, which is the only means by which their authority is preserved.”

False wonderment and ignorance. The peanut butter and jelly of American society. Yum yum! Donald Trump is selling bibles! Yum yum! The mob can’t get enough. Spinoza of course understood the role of clergy in the promotion of faux miracles. If you truly believe this then you’re the problem. You’re the problem in almost every group. You’re always going to ask “what’s wrong with this story?”

Ernest Hemingway called this sensibility the “bullshit detector” and he was almost right. He meant that first rate writing uncovers or subverts falsities. But what if the dominant narrative of your age is all nonsense? Americans are intensely attracted to victimhood. Everyone is now an undeserving wretch.American fiction is, nowadays, almost entirely unreadable. Every new novel is concerned with sub-Cartesian victimhood. It is unbearable. Do you understand false wonderment? Three divorcees go to a summer house and while walking through a tangle of spider webs come to understand themselves. The interpreter of nature and the gods is Dr. Phil. Self-help tabloid fluoride is in the water.
Yum yum! I’ll get no credit for saying this. I’ll likely be attacked. And don’t read this as an attack on women writers. Men are equally caught up in the sad victim story telling industry. In fact everyone is caught by the shoelaces with this collective hive drone.

Someone recently asked me what fiction I was currently reading. I’m reading about evolution.

The lived circumstances of disability are now at code red in the United States. From the dismantling of the Department of Education (which has historically supervised ADA compliance in schools—from kindergarten to universities) to denying benefits for people who desperately need Supplemental Social Security the disdain and cruelty are “on” as they used to say on the radio. WE are ON WITH 50,000 WATTS OF rock and roll power!

I spent part of this morning walking around the campus of the University of Iowa where I studied creative writing long ago. Later I came back to teach here. The U of Iowa has always been a disability unfriendly place and now, in Trump 2.0 they’ll be free of any corrective government action. This ain’t just the case in Iowa. As colleges and universities ditch their Diversity Programs, many of them are shoving disability compliance under the bus as well.

I’d be in despair if I wasn’t already in despair. Meanwhile I’m reading “After Disruption: a Future for Cultural Memory” by Trevor Owens. It’s just out from University of Michigan Press. He has many arguments in the book and I won’t highlight all of them—the book is nuanced and shrewd. But one salient contention is that the takeover of our public square, pushed as it is by big tech, is powered by the language of “disruption” which of course reminds one of Elon Musk waving a chain saw while high on Ketamine.
The really interesting thing is that according to Owens the premonitory language of disruption was adopted by Silicon Valley from the academy. I confess to never having thought of this. Disruption in feminist studies or disability studies has always meant the ways in which outlier bodies interfere with normative narratives. This much is true and is still true and will always be true. But by adopting the lingo of disruption the Peter Thiels of the world have been able to push the idea that AI and the erosion of the humanities are excellent things. I urge you to read Owens book. But here’s a quote:

“When Silicon Valley co-opted the vocabulary of disruption, it removed the genuinely radical ideas that had come from feminist critical race theory and shifted them into a blunt fear-inducing instrument. While the rhetoric around disruption often comes with a revolutionary sentiment, at its core, disruptive innovation’s roots are in fear. This rhetoric is about making us afraid and pushing us to believe that Silicon Valley has the secrets to how we address the fear of being made obsolete or being replaced.”

One of the interesting things about ableism is that whatever form it takes it occupies the future perfect. There will be time enough to make things right for the disabled but not today. One may fair say “not today” is the motto of the thing. “Non hodie” in Latin. Picture a flag bearing the image of an indolent house cat. Not today will we question our assumptions about discrimination. BTW: ableists also avoid saying “maybe tomorrow.”

If you require accommodations “Non hodie” is the prevailing reply. What’s so demoralizing is that those who ought to be in the fight for disability inclusion are not interested. How can this be? Well, actually, the matter is simple: “there will be time enough to make things right, but not today.” That this “non hodie” includes administrators and faculty tells you how big a muscle ableism really is. But there’s another issue…

And of course there are gaslighting committees—they have names like “Inclusion and Access for One and All” and they meet privately because its all about “non hodie” and private self-congratulation. The folks on these committees don’t suffer from a lack of accommodations. In general they feel pretty good.

Which gets me back to Owens. Feeling good in today’s universities and in the United States has been replaced by resignation, precarity, and a new form of future perfect. Owens expertly explains this contemporary dread. Your embodied disruption is too disruptive. But it all sounds so good:

“Disrupt. Fail faster. Asking, in almost any meeting, “but will it scale?” Over the last three decades the language of Silicon Valley start-ups and venture capitalists has followed digital technologies into a wide range of industries, cultural-memory institutions included. This vocabulary, which historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell call “innovation-speak,” is now a core part of management cultures across the US and beyond.”

I urge disability activists to read this book.