5: Are We Able to Be Human?

The question that frames this chapter might be deemed a strange one. Why would we even question our abilities to be human? Are there not some essential human capabilities that we hold within us that make us human beings? One wonders if our intrinsic human faculties separate us from, say, plants, animals or machines. Thus, far our thinking together has focused on the phenomenon of disability. What might have occurred to you is another phenomenon lurking in the background of our discussions – ability – the hidden referent of disability. Whenever we describe disability we are also, consciously or not, referencing ability. Disability is often made sense of in popular culture, our educational institutions, health care settings, workplaces and communities as the lack of ability. Disability denotes an absence of ability. And because disability is ability devalued, then the opposite is true of ability; it is readily associated with the better parts of humanity. At the same time, being able has a rather normative quality. Isn't there something visceral, unexplainable about the feeling of being human? Being able to think, breath, learn, speak, dream, love, lust, labour, shop, perambulate, grow, develop, earn and spend are all tacitly accepted as regular, mundane and typical human qualities. The problem with the tacit is that the unspoken is alive with expectations of ourselves and others. These abilities are assumed to be enacted by all human beings. But, of course, this is a rather dodgy view of the human category – or to be more academic – a homogenous viewpoint. To presume that we are all equally mobile, that we intellectually and physically develop in similar ways, hold the same capacities to earn and spend as equal members of consumer society is a mistake often made by our fellow human beings (from politicians to psychologists). We expect these normative human abilities to be lying within us all – ready to be unleashed – given the right social conditions: