The History of Disability

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at tsoft.com
Thu Jul 26 08:49:19 PDT 2001


I understand your sentiment, but the advocacy of complete ignorance is impractical, because pregnant women, assisted by doctors, may want to know the conditions of their own pregnant bodies & fetuses for reasons other than selectively aborting socially undesirable ones. The same fetal diagnostics used for selective abortion may be also used to improve medical treatment of fetuses during gestation & neonates & infants after birth. In general, economic development, progress in public health, & advance in prenatal & postnatal care -- the same social conditions that have given us a possibility of selective abortion, infertility treatment, etc. that are problematic -- have also given disabled fetuses a better chance of survival.

....Dialectical, in short.

Knowledge is not our enemy; social relations that unnecessarily disable us & make disabled lives more difficult than otherwise are the problems -- the problems that we can eliminate politically.

Yoshie ---------------

Exactly. Dialectical. In some aspects of life, knowledge is an illusion of control. Often the decisions and problems of life depend on other things.

By complete co-incidence I am reading, Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound.

If you have never read it and have the time, (it's short), read it.

The play is about the dilemma of foreknowledge of a life. Prometheus is foreknowledge. Humans knew their end once, and in exchange for fire, Promethus took that knowledge away and gave hope in its place.

Zeus had forbid Promethus this, yet he did it anyway. So the play opens when Hephaestus, the lame smithy, takes his forged chains and braces and nails Prometheus to solid rock, in the desolate crags of the Caucasus.

On another thread `Ethical foundations of the left' they are going on about argument. What this play shows, is that argument is not the foundation of ethics. Drama is the foundation of ethics.

In my view for here and now, ethics is about money, because with enough of it all dilemmas are resolved.

Chuck Grimes



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