This weighty tome by Andrew Solomon, "one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2012" according to the New York Times, is a fascinating read—chock full of gripping testimonials from a wide range of parents and their children, afflicted and/or blessed by their disabilities, describing how they struggled to adjust to the demands of society. At the same time, the author, a senior write for the NYT, has an agenda which on the surface looks quite innocent: to shape the reader’s view of disability towards greater tolerance of the ‘other’. A prominent liberal and gay public figure, his work is a kind of pinnacle of secular postmodernism, where everyone has a niche or slot, where all are equal and all lifestyles are equally valid, including families headed by 'two mommies', 'two daddies', or in the case of the author 'three mommies and two daddies'.
Though the idea of homosexuality itself as a disease/ disability has long been dismissed in the West, Far from the Tree (FftT), Solomon’s Odyssey through the hostile world of disability, which took a decade to research and write, is framed by his personal mission to come to terms with his ‘gayness’ and the depression it caused, which he resolved by building a gay extended family, a kind of validation of this postmodern worldview. He skirts around the obvious elephant-in-the-room -- gayness is a disability too, a denial of family, the individual on his own.
This is ironic in that the author makes clear the vital role of the family—the old-fashioned nuclear mom-and-pop family—in bringing up healthy individuals. This old-fashioned family is the microcosm of society, and a tolerant, loving family (hopefully) will ensure a tolerant, loving society, or so the theory goes. Solomon and his husband John Habich have sired four children, two each, though Andrew is actually parenting only his own son, the youngest of the brood, conceived using a third-party egg implanted in a (lesbian) friend's womb. He admits this is a kind of sci-fi utopian family, only possible in this hi-tech age. Living in New York/ London, and earning a substantial income from the likes of the NYT also helps.
Solomon's inspiration is to understand the relative importance of parenting vs genetics in the world of the disabled—15% of the population, excluding homosexuals. The latter, now called 'gay', were given a clean bill of health by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973. As US state after state approves of gay marriage, gayness appears to be no less valid as a personal identity than being left-handed, deaf or ‘straight’. In fact, it looks like the family itself is being transformed in the image of Solomon’s extended alternative family—test-tube conception (now using third world wombs, which can be rented by gay/ straight couples), and the unravelling of biological and actual parenting, given that half of marriages end in divorce and half of children are born to single mothers. Gays can now adopt in some states/ countries (in the 'collective West'), and the tentacles of the law reach out to enforce nondiscrimination laws even to the school system and the Boy Scouts (though most self-professed gays only ‘come out’ in their late teens or twenties).
This is no less than a revolution, as Solomon acknowledges and of which he approves. Human rights activist and transman Shannon Minter calls gender "a matter of subjective opinion ... [that should be] disestablished as a legal concept", a position which Solomon says "question[s] the basic structuring principles of human society". The author defends his own revolutionary family by appealing to evolution itself: "Just as species diversity is crucial to sustain the planet, this diversity strengthens the ecosphere of kindness." The ecosphere of kindness? Surely this is the ultimate in anthropomorphism.
But this scenario, rather than somehow proving the validity of our secular postmodern order, in fact is a rocky foundation for any new world order. The author inadvertently proves this with his many testimonials from disabled individuals and their families. The problem kids generally come from broken families, and of the 300 interviewees, all the success stories come from old-fashioned families and most involve relying on religious faith.
The politics of identity
Solomon looks at apples and oranges, ranging from the purely genetic or at least physical (deafness, dwarfism) through to more complex cases (autism, schizophrenia, criminality, transgenders, prodigies). The former have a physical defect but their brains are fine and they can generally compensate for their disability using their other senses. MSD (multiple severe disability), Down syndrome, autism and schizophrenia affect the brain, causing more severe problems and a lifetime of dependency. Prodigies, offspring from rape, criminals and transgender children have no basis for comparison other than they are not among the majority. Nonetheless, it is instructive to consider how parents affect and relate to their unusual children, no matter the source of their exceptionalism.
The author's trauma as a gay son motivates his investigation of other difficult childhoods, and ‘gayness’ is implicit in the text as a psychological slot, an identity, as if eternal in human history, though in fact the term was coined less than a half a century ago, and is disputed hotly outside of the western postmodern discourse. Solomon rightly includes only GIDs (gender identity disorder) explicitly in his analysis—those who insist they are not the sex/gender they were born as, and thus for whom sexuality becomes the outsized determinant of their being, requiring physical transformation (much like dwarfs who demand limb extension or deaf persons who get cochlear implants).
Outside of the postmodern discourse, defining oneself primarily according to who one sleeps with is considered reductionist. Just as most deaf and blind persons and dwarfs strive to assimilate, taking advantage of medical advances, marrying hearing/ seeing/ full-sized persons, accepting but not embracing their disability, most people around the world who engage in same-sex relations (for men, commonly referred to as msm or men-having-sex-with-men) also strive to fit in to the regular social order, without claiming special privileges. This dynamic of gaylib identifying everyone practicing msm as 'gay' is identical to the claim by Israel that it, Israel, represents all Jews, even those Jews (of which there are many) who vehemently oppose its very existence.
All disabilities have their “horizontal identities” to provide comfort for these exceptions, where people can find support and relief from social pressures to conform. The most prominent one these days, of course, is the gay pride movement, though it does not play a role in FftT. Solomon documents the horizontal identities of the various disabilities, though this means equating the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) with Mad Pride as organizations catering to horizontal identities. There are even "pro-ana" and "pro-mia" websites offering “thinspiration” for anorexics and bulimics. This is not to denigrate the importance of organizations devoted to helping those with particular disabilities. Given the minimal social support and health system in the US, such organizatons as NAD and CAN (Cure Autism Now) are important lobby and fundraising groups that provide essential help to people who have clear needs. In contrast, the gay lobby has a much more ambitious agenda than NAD or CAN, demanding that the disputable monicker 'gay' be accepted by everyone—both those who engage in msm and those who don't.
There are vertical identities too, passed down from parents (genetically but also socially as in ethnicity, language, religion). Abnormal offspring who don't conform to their vertical identities are forced to abandon them and seek horizontal affirmation of their identities through support groups and likeminded communities. Vertical identities are not so important any more, in a (postmodern) age where nationalism is (for the most part) benign, English is increasingly the world's lingua franca, western pop culture the world’s culture, and the world market regulates our economic and political lives, from New York to Kuala Lumpur.
The distinction between horizontal and vertical is often fuzzy at best, since there are both genetic and social components in most disabilities. Solomon casually refers to religion as just another identity, mostly vertical, though in fact it is the major identity—both vertical and horizontal—throughout history, pre-empting all others, including disabilities and/or sexual preference, certainly for strong faiths such as Islam. This oversight of course reflects Solomon's secular, postmodern worldview, where any personal choice is equally valid—within the confines of law, and where religion is outlawed from political-economic life.
The deaf experience
Solomon traces the increasing prominence and even rise of these communities to the pathbreaking work of feminist/ gay liberation movements in the 1960s, though in fact these movements might consider paying their own dues to the main disability movement—the deaf movement, which traces its traditions in Europe to 1755 when the French Institute for Instruction of Deaf-Mutes was founded, and in the US to the founding of a deaf-support movement by Reverend Thomas Gallaudet in Connecticut, who brought a French deaf man to the US to establish a school. This led to a golden age for the deaf in America, the development of American Sign Language (ASL) and Gallaudet College in 1857 Washington DC, which Abraham Lincoln gave degree-granting rights. The success of Gallaudet’s efforts reflects a happy balance between integration and encouraging a sense of self-respect and acceptance for those unable to hear.
The vicissitudes of the deaf are revealing. The age-old tolerance of deaf people in most cultures and the western golden age of the mid-19th century gave way in the late 19th century, the hi-tech era of industrial modernity, to a project to force deaf people to ape their speaking cousins. The rise of the oralist movement was appropriately spearheaded by the inventor Alexander Graham Bell (who had a deaf mother and wife),culminating in 1880 in the banning of sign language, the forbidding of marriage among the deaf, and even the call for their sterilization.
Imagine the trauma that resulted from this ‘tough love’. It is impossible for a deaf person to learn to speak normally, making them sound at best clumsy and clownish. Bell's obsession with wiping out the prospering deaf culture and forcing assimilation meant that 80% of the deaf were forced to learn only oral language and lip reading (allowing only a partial and awkward communication). Many could never learn these difficult skills enough to function, leaving them totally isolated, deprived of their ASL. This nightmare continued for more than 50 years.
At the same time as Bell got on his self-righteous high horse, persecution increased for those with a proclivity for msm, which was given the clinical name 'homosexuality' in 1869, culminating in Nazi Germany's genocide against all 'disabilities', including Jews. This looks shocking in retrospect, but is only the logical extension of Bell's forced assimilation/ sterilization of the deaf. Homosexuality in history went from being a sin/ crime to a disease, and in today's postmodern world, a life-style. The same can be said of Jewishness.
After WWII, it was proved that sign language is every bit as legitimate a means of communication as any other language, and what is most important, it should be taught in early childhood in order for the child's brain to master the grammar of language. 'Sign' allows quick language develop in those crucial early years, leading to better oral language acquisition (which is an artificial, intellectual activity for the deaf and can only be mastered later) and a more developed intellect. Oral language can only supplement the deaf person's experience. As for the relationship of the deaf child to hearing parents, parents can be accepting of their child, learn Sign and speak awkwardly to him/her (learning a language after the age of 11 means you always 'speak with an accent'), and encourage the child to achieve his/her full potential, or force the child to speak (awkwardly) and strain to read lips. Of course, both approaches are needed: both respect for the disability and assimilation as much as possible.
Totalitarianism old and new
The rise of the Nazis and their persecution of the disabled (including homosexuals and Jews) corresponded to the fad of eugenics throughout the industrial West (hence, Bell's call for sterilization), where individuals were no longer even cogs in the machine, but dispensable widgets. It is only fortunate that the technological means to mass produce designer babies and test for and abort fetuses with physical challenges was not available before the West was rudely woken up to the dangers of hi-tech totalitarianism.
And I mean totalitarianism, for that too is the logical end of the Enlightenment project to replace God with Man-machine, where individual widgets are allotted identity slots and dealt with accordingly—and forcibly. The Nazi campaign against Jews and homosexuals led to a reaction by both groups which was turned out to be yet another totalitarian development, pushing Jews into the Zionist slot and those practicing msm or fsf (females-having-sex-with-females) into the gay slot, though Zionism is effectively the negation of Judaism, and msm/fsf is not an identity at all, as humans are inherently bisexual, and sexuality a mystery. It can be 'fluid' as emphasized by the faddish "sexual fluidity" and "genderqueer" demands of some activists today, who demand that people be allowed "to express revolutionary feelings, to communicate their individuality".
In both cases, a small minority have highjacked 'personal identity' in a secular age obsessed with individualism at the expense of community, family and spirituality, and demand in a very totalitarian way that anyone who wants to call him/herself Jewish or who practices msm follow their agenda, declaring war on critics by censoring/ outing people, and in the case of the latter, promoting promiscuity and sex as a despiritualized activity (though gays are hardly alone in this agenda). Both embrace capitalism and the western project to 'civilize' the world in the West's image. What is this but 'totalitarianism with a human face'?
Interestingly, this totalitarian essence to modern capitalist society was somewhat slowed down under the influence of the Soviet Union (which is loudly denounced as totalitarian, a case of the pot calling the kettle black), which defeated the Nazi menace (a fact airbrushed out of the West's history books) and competed with the West for ideological ascendancy. The underlying totalitarian nature of modernity became more obvious after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when US empire no longer had to mouth promises to deliver social justice, or to refrain from directly invading countries that continued to resist its 'tough love', and exported its social agenda more forcefully around the world.
Also interestingly, even as this social agenda demands gay and other rights and denounces anti-Zionism as racism, the rise of designer babies, advances in prenatal testing, and the liberalization of abortion rights have for the most part eradicated certain disabilities, especially Down syndrome (93% of parents in the US/UK now abort such fetuses), deafness (cochlear implants in infancy provide at least rudimentary hearing for most), dwarfism (extended limb lengthening (ELL) can add 12 inches to one’s stature). Many other disabilities are detectable in the fetus and abortable. Autism and schizophrenia are increasingly well treated with anti-psychotic drugs, though their incidence is increasing sharply these days in the West. This ironically makes the (totalitarian) agenda of enforcing conformity to the western secular world order—carried out in the name of freedom and democracy—all the easier.
Did the Nazis win WWII? In a sense, yes, where the American empire and its bland postmodern allies are seen to be merely carrying out a more elegant version of genocide of undesirables (including native peoples, in the first place, Palestinians). Though deaf, dwarf, Down syndrome and even schizophrenia support groups bemoan the loss of unique subcultures, their days too are numbered. The only winners are the new-old disabled msm (gays) and Jews (Zionists).
No one dares to contemplate the Nazis' supposed 'final solution' for the Jews anymore (even questioning the historicity of the term lands one in jail), though Israel apes the Nazi agenda in Palestine to such an extent that it raises the eyebrows of even many Israeli Jews. There is some talk of a 'gay gene' and occasional flutters in the media about the ability of the new selective-abortion eugenics to eradicate 'gayness', though there really is no need for concern, given that msm is found throughout the animal kingdom and clearly plays an important (if difficult to decipher) role in Nature and by implication in human social evolution.
The blind leading the blind
The author's inspiration in writing about the lesser ‘disabilities’ is infused with the sensibilities deriving from these greater ones, to the point of celebrating both himself as a "pioneer .. like Christopher Columbus landing for the first time on the wilder shores of love", and his 'three mommies, two daddies' extended family as a "science fiction utopia".
Just what makes someone a member of either tribe is a subject that thousands of tomes have explored. Solomon quotes (Jewish) scholars David Feldman and Lynn Goldsmith that, "A prodigy is a group enterprise," which could be said of gays and/or Jews. Indeed, many musical prodigies, one of Solomon's categories, are Jewish and/or gay. (Solomon interviewed Evgenii Kissin, Scott Frankel, Gabriel Kahane, who fit both categories.)
A high percentage of disability activists Solomon interviews are Jewish (including, here, for instance, Jonathan Shestack founder of Cure Autism Now, Betty Adelson founder of Parents of Dwarf Children), which confirms an important role that Jews play in liberal regimes, where they “actively participate in politics, political mobilization and opinion formation” (see Benjamin Ginsberg's The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State). Furthermore, not only are a disproportionate number of prodigies gay, but so is a high percentage of schizophrenics and other disabled. And gender reassignment doesn't affect this. Half of transwomen and one-third of transmen self-identify as gay or bisexual.
"The Jewish people have contributed greatly to America. No group has had such an outsized influence per capita," said Vice-President Joe Biden at a Jewish American Heritage Month celebration at the White House in May. The reasons for the 'outsized' statistics concerning both Jews and gays are complex, requiring a separate study of psycho-social evolution. As generally privileged groups (well represented in, even dominating certain professions in the arts, the economy and politics) with powerful political lobbies, self-styled gays and Israel-firsters are increasingly in control of the social, economic and political agendas of the West, which in turn shapes and to a large extent controls social, economic and political agendas around the world.
The parallels between the lesser and greater disabilities are eerie. Consider dwarfs (Little People, LPs), who suffer an increase in depression in adolescence, which is significantly higher for LPs with average-height parents, much like the case of gays. LP Association (LPA) meetings can traumatize the individual dwarf at first, forcing him to stop blaming his disability and tp deal with his personal flaws, but they can also become an escape, obviating the need to integrate/ assimilate in such a way as to allow happiness, self-esteem, again, much like gays (and Jews who embrace Zionism).
The whole point of encouraging greater human rights should be to do away with stifling ghettoes, to create conditions of social harmony among all citizens. But gay organizations demanding recognition of 'gay' as the norm, and Zionist organizations effectively demanding genocide of Palestinians, are not the same as the LPA demanding tolerance of LPs as disabled people. Some dwarfs even reject the need for the LPA and prefer direct assimilation, marrying average people, refusing to allow what they have (a disability) to determine who they are (a person). Gays take note of Bruce: "Sometimes when I watch another dwarf, I feel like we're pretending to be adults. It's a life project coming to grips with, really, how you look. If I could do it over, I'd want not to be a dwarf. It's been too difficult," (and he had accepting parents). Yet Solomon argues that, though being blind and being gay are different, both "result in having a selfhood that others perceive as undesirable". Well, yes. Maybe the whole gay agenda is problematic (just as is the Zionist agenda for Jews).
Solomon argues Foucault would have regarded ELL for dwarfs as form of torture by society that insists on conformity. But is the amelioration/ eradication of the disability an act of cowardice/ self-hatred, and should the victim instead wear his disability with pride and fight for disabled rights? Why does he have to flaunt his disability to fight for a more tolerant society? This hand-wringing over ELL and cochlear implants is a false dilemma—of course it is better to have more senses and greater physical capabilities. What's conformist about that? That Solomon is himself conflicted about this is indicated when he argues that "decisions to maximize health (however complicated a category that word may reference) and avoid illness (ditto) do not necessarily devalue those who are sick or otherwise different." The same argument goes for gays and Jews. Why can't they just fight for human rights, rights for everyone, as human beings?
So reader beware. Though Solomon is an intrepid voyager, the voyage is fraught with peril. And the map he uses is full of large holes, even as he celebrates our arrival at what he sees as the 'promised land' of gender-neutrality and disability-friendliness. And even as our legal systems adjust to accommodate it, modern-day eugenics promises to eradicate the need for most of this tolerance (except the gay and Jewish cases). In any case, the author seems blissfully unaware that Christopher Columbus is viewed by most of the world as the greater bringer of genocide, a destroyer of cultures and individuals, the source of disease and violence beyond all conception in the history of mankind.
As butch women and macho gays do their push-ups and join the marines to kill wogs (and get raped in alarming numbers by their marine comrades), the West is exploring uncharted and highly dangerous waters on this gender-neutral 'voyage of discovery', led by what Joseph Massad calls the "Gay International", opposed still by the likes of Russia, China, and the Muslim world. Natives on distant horizons who have the misfortune of being accosted by the western voyagers should be on their guard, as like the North American natives of yore, they are in the gunsights of our latter-day Columbuses. The 'gay ghetto', like the Jewish ghetto of yore, is not dissolving itself in a new era of tolerance, but on the contrary, is determined to expand around the world, complete with gay tourism and the importing of third world spouses and designer children to privileged but aging gays in the West. The gay world itself is a kind of parody of our postmodern reality, where anything goes, all behavior (short of homicide) finds its empowerers, and where physical reality trumps spiritual traditions, which are dispensed with or reformed beyond all meaning.
The value of disability
If we start from the human being as in the first place a spiritual being, whose spiritual identity (both vertical and horizontal in Solomon's lingo) trumps all others, then we can ask 'Does disability have some purpose in the scheme of things?' Solomon's interlocutors all came to "a belief in something bigger than one's own experience. The most common source of coherence is religion, but it has many other mechanisms. You can believe in God, in the human capapcity for good, in justice, or simply in love." Most of the people he interviews were at first upset, angry, etc, but sooner or later accepted their responsibility and many found their lives transformed for the better.
“God will never give you more than you can bear,” is a saying often quoted by both Christians and Muslims (the former, based on 1 Corinthians 10:13 "He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear", the latter more explicitly "On no soul do We place a burden greater than it can bear." Quran 23:62). Facing any crisis by trusting in the grace of God, we survive and prosper. Whether or not the parents were practicising Christians (none of the interviewees were Muslim), the parents who found peace and whose exceptional children did best were those who helped their offspring deal with their disabilities and look beyond them, achieving contentment and even happiness.
Christian parents looked to their spiritual community to give them support and love. Audrey, a single black mother (alcoholic husband died early), whose father was a bishop of the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, refused to give up on her son Dashonte, a gang member, angry and without a father role-model, who looked like he was slipping into a lifetime of crime. "In the end, his mother had believed him into becoming who he had sometimes pretended to be. Her gift for faith proved strong enough to achieve redemption not only in the next world, but also right here in this one."
Susan, the secular mother of a Down syndrome son Adam, rediscovered her religious Jewish roots: "Judaism really works for us because it has struggling and mystical stuff built right into it." She takes comfort from the Talmudic concept that God exists in dialogue. "God exists between people. The day Adam was born, my life became purposeful. God exists between us. I knew that soon after he was born, but Judaism gave me a vocabulary for it."
Rising to the challenge means recognizing the indomitable human spirit imprisoned in the child's malformed body. Crissy, the mother of Kiki, suffering from a severe form of dwarfism: "I was always really shy and self-conscious about the way I looked or I didn't feel so good about myself. Here I have this child who is the epitome of self-esteem under the most extreme circumstances. It's just a source of wonder to me." When Crissy was diagnosed with breast cancer, requiring surgey and radiation, she was able to take it in stride: "I'm like, 'This is just another thing to deal with and overcome. Just keep moving.'" Ten-year-old Kiki's response: "My mom is always taking me to the doctor and now I'm taking my mom."
While liberals like Solomon can also be advocates of the rights of the disabled, there is little in the system of state regulation to cheer sufferers. As cutbacks force more and more disabled onto the street, prisons fill up with disabled people—75% of incarcerated juveniles have a mental health diagnosis (vs 20% of the general teen population), and 80% have learning disabilities. The retributive nature of the US penal system means that many youth are put in adult prisons, a sure way to turn them into hardened lifetime criminals. The only hope for most people is support from their religious community or charities and foundations.
Dealing with a disabled child forces the parents to focus not on their own plans for the child, but on their adapting to 'God's plan', i.e., the reality they are faced with in the form of the child, and finding their personal 'truth' through conformity with 'the will of God', i.e., reality, using their own abilities to make that reality as uplifting as possible. This excludes a life of glamor and wealth (unless the child is a marketable prodigy). The existence of the disabled child is a reminder to all around him/her of the mystery of consciousness and the miracle of life, that the purpose of life is not material riches, but spiritual uplift and fulfilment, and that this is possible for all, regardless of abilities, and is the true source of well-being. Said Cris, mother of MSD sufferer Liam: "Doing this—talking all about myself and the hardest parts of our life with you—is something I can give back to the world ... It helped me see how terribly much I love our son."
The most difficult disabilities are autism and schizophrenia, where there is little reciprocity, and where what seemed to be a normal child becomes in some cases a zombie, a living ghost who may act out dangerously, possessed by uncontrollable brain activity, requiring constant anti-psychotic medication. Finding a purpose in caring for these victims is hardest. The testimonials Solomon provides of those families touched by these two disabilities are uniformly depressing. If suicide (or liver damage from medications) doesn't get the victim, s/he can now live almost a full lifespan, as can Down syndrome people, who used to die in childhood, in most cases burdening the parents till they die.
Icilda, an African-American Jehovah's Witness, whose son Marvin has autism, confirms the notion that a religious outllook is necessary to see parents through: "Our church was the biggest comfort and still is. Everyone there was very, very supportive." Icilda's triumph against the odds made her an inadvertent public figure, who has helped hundreds of parents come to terms with their situation. FftT is worth reading if only for the hundreds of inspiring stories attesting to the resiliance of the human spirit in the face of terrible disappointments and trials, and how people can turn personal tragedy into a triumph of the spirit.
There is no easy answer to the problem of disabilities. Given long lifespans for disabled and the inexorable increase in both autism and schizophrenia, this means that the numbers of disabled are still increasing, despite the increase in abortions of fetuses identified as likely to produce disabled children. The advances in screening and in genetics creates a dilemma, even with autism: "If you remove the capacity for someone to become autistic, would that also remove the things that make us interesting as human beings? Maybe the same genetic structures also produce creativity and diversity," argues Joyce Chung, a National Institute of Mental Health official.
Have we finally arrived?
Has the battle for discrimination-eradication and gender-neutrality been won? The social upheavals of the past four decades have already led to radical equality and visibility for self-proclaimed gays and transgendered people. But that has not been enough. There are demands for schools to accommodate not only the gay agenda (whatever its untested, ahistorical merits), but "sexual fluidity" and "genderqueer[ness]". It is not right, so the argument goes, to slot people into male/ female—they should be able to flit back and forth at the whim of the individual, protected by the law.
But what is this but commodity fetishism taken to its extreme by narcissistic individuals? 'The consumer is always right.' 'Give him/her a penis or take it away, and then give it back if s/he changes his/her mind.' Solomon sympathizes with this. At the same time, he professes unease with 'designer babies' free of nasty disabilities for the rich. Yet, he went ahead and produced his own designer offspring, acknowledging that it cost him an arm and a leg, so to speak. It is very easy to lose one's way on this voyage of discovery.
Gays and Jews can take a leaf from the experience of deaf people. They can have their own languages, their own culture, but only in the context of the overall culture. There is no room for Israel-firsters in American culture, just as gays must acknowledge their place within the wider mom-and-pop culture and the need to discretely fit in without destroying the social fabric. Only GIDs have to define themselves according to their sexuality, and even there, the best results for the child are when the parents quietly accept the problem early, allow the child to cross-dress and then begin medical procedures at the right developmental moment, i.e., assimilate.
There is no question that western society is in crisis. Half of children in the US are now born to single mothers. Half of marriages end in divorce. The alarming increase in the incidence of autism and schizophrenia is a barameter confirming that our voyage of discovery of “the wilder shores of love" is a rocky one, potential fatal for society. There is no place for latter day Columbuses, whose reckless disregard for the wisdom of past civilizations risks sinking the ship of state.
Premodern society was organized around spirituality and the mom-and-pop family (or at least an extended family where there were father figures both to protect daughters and to provide role models for sons). While it lacked our hi-tech marvels, it also lacked many of our problems. The disabled/ abnormal were not isolated—the severely disabled died, but for those able to function, the family and/or community cared for them and encouraged them to assimilate, in some cases even attributing special powers to them. Of course, this scenario varied considerably from society to society, given traditions and the standard of living. As Foucault documented, modernity changed all that, with special institutions to isolate those who didn't fit in, and then eugenics (prenatal selection and abortion) and hi-tech equipment and drugs, where individuals are treated apart from their social context.
People are in the first place spiritual beings, not gay, Jewish, blind, dwarf, etc. These are secondary characteristics. In the same way, society as an economic order is in the first place an integral part of Nature, not above or apart from it, and what we do to construct its economic foundations must fit in with Nature. This is not totalitarian, but an acknowledgment of the natural order.
See also Essays on Gaylib and Feminism ebook by Eric Walberg
