[humanser] On Blindness from the Light Dependent Perspective

[JD Townsend]

New York Times Sunday Review Desk 2014 01 05


OPINION.  Why Do We Fear the Blind?.  
By ROSEMARY MAHONEY.  
The author of the forthcoming book 'For the Benefit of Those Who See:  Dispatches From the World of the Blind.  BRISTOL, R.I.  -- 

A FEW 
years ago, when I mentioned to a woman I met at a party that I 
was teaching in a school for the blind, she seemed confused.  
'Can I just ask you one question? she said.  'How do you talk to 
your students?

I explained that the students were blind, not deaf.  Raising the 
palms of her hands at me, as if to stem further misunderstanding, 
she said: 'Yes, I know they're not deaf.  But what I really mean 
is, how do you actually talk to them?

I knew, because I had been asked this question before by 
reasonably intelligent people, that the woman didn't know exactly 
what she meant.  All she knew was that in her mind there existed 
a substantial intellectual barrier between the blind and the 
sighted.  The blind could hear, yes.  But could they properly 
understand?

Throughout history and across cultures the blind have been 
traduced by a host of mythologies such as this.  They have 
variously been perceived as pitiable idiots incapable of 
learning, as artful masters of deception or as mystics possessed 
of supernatural powers.  One of the most persistent 
misconceptions about blindness is that it is a curse from God for 
misdeeds perpetrated in a past life, which cloaks the blind 
person in spiritual darkness and makes him not just dangerous but 
evil.

A majority of my blind students  at the International Institute 
for Social Entrepreneurs in Trivandrum, India, a branch of 
Braille Without Borders, came from the developing world: 
Madagascar, Colombia, Tibet, Liberia, Ghana, Kenya, Nepal and 
India.  One of my students, the 27-year-old Sahr, lost most of 
his eyesight to measles when he was a child.  (Like many children 
in rural West Africa, Sahr had not been vaccinated.) The 
residents of Sahr's village were certain that his blindness -- 
surely the result of witchcraft or immoral actions on his 
family's part -- would adversely affect the entire village.  They 
surrounded his house and shouted threats and abuse.  They 
confiscated a considerable portion of his parents' land.  
Eventually, the elders decreed that Sahr's father must take the 
child out to the bush, 'where the demons live,' and abandon him 
there.  The parents refused and fled the village with their son.

Many of my students had similar experiences.  Marco's parents, 
devout Colombian Catholics, begged a priest to say a Mass so that 
their blind infant son would die before his existence brought 
shame and hardship on their household.  The villagers in Kyile's 
remote Tibetan village insisted that she, her two blind brothers 
and their blind father should all just commit suicide because 
they were nothing but a burden to the sighted members of the 
family.  When, as a child in Sierra Leone, James began to see 
objects upside down because of an ocular disease, the villagers 
were certain that he was possessed by demons.

In these places, schools for blind children were deemed a 
preposterous waste of resources and effort.  Teachers in regular 
schools refused to educate them.  Sighted children ridiculed 
them, tricked them, spat at them and threw stones at them.  And 
when they reached working age, no one would hire them.  During a 
visit to the Braille Without Borders training center in Tibet, I 
met blind children who had been beaten, told they were idiots, 
locked in rooms for years on end and abandoned by their parents.  
These stories, which would have been commonplace in the Dark 
Ages, took place in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s.  They are taking 
place now.  Nine out of 10 blind children in the developing world 
still have no access to education, many for no other reason than 
that they are blind.

The United States has one of the lowest rates of visual 
impairment in the world, and yet blindness is still among the 
most feared physical afflictions..  Even in this country, the 
blind are perceived as a people apart.

Aversion toward the blind exists for the same reason that most 
prejudices exist: lack of knowledge.  Ignorance is a powerful 
generator of fear.  And fear slides easily into aggression and 
contempt.  Anyone who has not spent more than five minutes with a 
blind person might be forgiven for believing -- like the woman I 
met at the party -- that there is an unbridgeable gap between us 
and them.

For most of us, sight is the primary way we interpret the world.  
How can we even begin to conceive of a meaningful connection with 
a person who cannot see? Before I began living and working among 
blind people, I, too, wondered this.  Whenever I saw a blind 
person on the street I would stare, transfixed, hoping, out of a 
vague and visceral discomfort, that I wouldn't have to engage 
with him.  In his 1930 book 'The World of the Blind,' Pierre 
Villey, a blind French professor of literature, summarized the 
lurid carnival of prejudices and superstitions about the blind 
that were passed down the centuries.  'The sighted person judges 
the blind not for what they are but by the fear blindness 
inspires. ...  The revolt of his sensibility in the face of 'the 
most atrocious of maladies' fills a sighted person with prejudice 
and gives rise to a thousand legends.  The blind author Georgina 
Kleege, a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, 
more tersely wrote, 'The blind are either supernatural or 
subhuman, alien or animal.

WE take our eyesight so much for granted, cling to it so 
slavishly and are so overwhelmed by its superficial data, that 
even the most brilliant sighted person can take a stupidly long 
time to recognize the obvious: There is usually a perfectly 
healthy, active and normal human mind behind that pair of 
unseeing eyes.

Christopher Hitchens called blindness 'one of the oldest and most 
tragic disorders known to man.  How horribly excluded and bereft 
we would feel to lose the world and the way of life that sight 
brings us.  Blindness can happen to any one of us.  Myself, I 
used to be certain I'd rather die than be blind; I could not 
imagine how I would have the strength to go on in the face of 
such a loss.

And yet people do.  In 1749, the French philosopher Denis Diderot 
published an essay, 'Letter on the Blind for the Benefit of Those 
Who See,' in which he described a visit he and a friend made to 
the house of a blind man, the son of a professor of philosophy at 
the University of Paris.  The blind man was married, had a son, 
had many acquaintances, was versed in chemistry and botany, could 
read and write with an alphabet of raised type and made his 
living distilling liqueurs.  Diderot wrote with wonder of the 
man's 'good solid sense,' of his tidiness, of his 'surprising 
memory for sounds' and voices, of his ability to tell the weight 
of any object and the capacity of any vessel just by holding them 
in his hands, of his ability to dismantle and reassemble small 
machines, of his musical acuity and of his extreme sensitivity to 
atmospheric change.

The blind man, perhaps weary of being interrogated by Diderot and 
his friend as if he were a circus animal, eventually asked them a 
question of his own.  'I perceive, gentlemen, that you are not 
blind.  You are astonished at what I do, and why not as much at 
my speaking? More than any of his sensory skills, it was the 
blind man's self-esteem that surprised Diderot most.  'This blind 
man,' he wrote, 'values himself as much as, and perhaps more 
than, we who see.

I've learned from my blind friends and colleagues that blindness 
doesn't have to remain tragic.  For those who can adapt to it, 
blindness becomes a path to an alternative and equally rich way 
of living.

One of the many misconceptions about the blind is that they have 
greater hearing, sense of smell and sense of touch than sighted 
people.  This is not strictly true.  Their blindness simply 
forces them to recognize gifts they always had but had heretofore 
largely ignored.

A few years ago, I allowed myself to be blindfolded and led 
through the streets of Lhasa by two blind Tibetan teenage girls, 
students at Braille Without Borders.  The girls had not grown up 
in the city, and yet they traversed it with ease, without 
stumbling or getting lost.  They had a specific destination in 
mind, and each time they announced, 'Now we turn left' or 'Now we 
turn right,' I was compelled to ask them how they knew this.  
Their answers startled me, chiefly because the clues they were 
following -- the sound of many televisions in an electronics 
shop, the smell of leather in a shoe shop, the feel of 
cobblestones suddenly underfoot -- though out in the open for 
anyone to perceive, were virtually hidden from me.

For the first time in my life, I realized how little notice I 
paid to sounds, to smells, indeed to the entire world that lay 
beyond my ability to see.

The French writer Jacques Lusseyran, who lost his sight at the 
age of 8, understood that those of us who have sight are, in some 
ways, deprived by it.  'In return for all the benefits that sight 
brings we are forced to give up others whose existence we don't 
even suspect.

I do not intend to suggest there is something wonderful about 
blindness.  There is only something wonderful about human 
resilience, adaptability and daring.  The blind are no more or 
less otherworldly, stupid, evil, gloomy, pitiable or deceitful 
than the rest of us.  It is only our ignorance that has cloaked 
them in these ridiculous garments.  When Helen Keller wrote, 'It 
is more difficult to teach ignorance to think than to teach an 
intelligent blind man to see the grandeur of Niagara,' she was 
speaking, obviously, of the uplifting and equalizing value of 
knowledge.


JD Townsend LCSW
Helping the light dependent to see.
Daytona Beach, Earth, Sol System
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