Contra Contra Scott Alexander on the Social Model Of Disability

Scott Alexander[ recently wrote a piece on the social model of disability. The social model is, in sum, a theory of disability that argues that disability arises from society’s inability or unwillingness to accommodate disabled people and that disability can be best resolved by changes to society. Scott argues that the social model, as taken literally is false, and favors the interactive model, a balanced theory that suggests disability can be best resolved by a combination of medical and social interventions.

Scott, as always, is engaging and persuasive here, but I felt the analysis was shallow. I’m going to argue with one of Scott’s assumptions here, mainly that the social model is meant as a truth claim. Broadly, I agree that the social model, as taken literally, doesn’t map particularly well to the territory. Also, there are issues with coming up with activist, religious, or political models of the world that are purely rhetorical, like getting people confused about what is literally true or not. That said, making non-literal truth claims is a pretty powerful rhetorical tool that shapes our information landscape and determines what big groups of people beleive, think, and do.

So who did come up with the social model? Scott points at those darn hippies:

The Social Model Of Disability came out of the same 60s/70s cultural current that gave us Thomas Szasz’s claim that mental disorders are fake.

This is, super broadly, true, but we can do a lot better. People often point to Mike Oliver, a British sociologist, as the originator of the term. (Actually it was a cool pamphlet he read in 1976, but we’ll get to that.) Oliver, like many early disability advocates, was a wheelchair user. In 1962, he dove into a pool while on holiday and broke his neck. According to this pretty interesting old article / obituary, Oliver was sitting at home feeling sorry for himself and some weird guy showed up at his home and offered him a job. After Oliver protested that he couldn’t drive to the job, the man, presumably a genie of some kind, said he’d come back every day to pick him up.

It kind of matters here that we’re talking about a guy with paralysis—a “disability of mobility” in the parlance. Pretty much all the early disability advocates Scott gestures to, the ones involved in the disability rights movement in the ’60s and ’70s, were mobility impaired. Or, if that’s overstating it, they at least dominated the culture and were the most visible and vocal.

The thing about mobility stuff, and especially being a wheelchair user, is that infrastructure really does matter. Basically, stairs are super bad and ramps and elevators are super good. If you’ve got ramps, good, roll on. If you’ve got stairs, bad, no class or store or workplace for you. Yes, ramps don’t fix your disability in a super literal sense. But for many people in that specific situation, they solve the most pressing problem, which is that you need to get someplace, and your legs don’t work, and wheelchairs don’t do stairs.

Back in the day this was actually an even bigger deal than you think, because we didn’t have those little ramps on street corners at all. (Seriously.) Curbs were just rampless. So wheelchair users really couldn’t get anywhere in many cases, even if their employer was super nice and put in ramps, because even the street corners had no ramps. It was a sad, rampless world. This is also probably why wheely bags weren’t a thing. (Unsubstantiated claim but the timeline works out.)

Back to Mike. In the ’80s, he read a cool pamphlet:

It was around this time that his life had been changed by a UPIAS booklet, ‘The Fundamental Principles Of Disability’, published in 1976, which argued that “the root cause of our problems was the way society was organised and the disabling barriers we faced”. This meant, he said, that he “no longer had to accept full responsibility for my impairment” and “now understood that my personal troubles were also public issues”, an insight that led him to develop ‘The Social Model of Disability.’ Source

Oliver went on to write a bunch of books disability and politics, including The Politics of Disablement (1990). Disability Studies got big around then, and he was likely the first professor of disability studies.

So you might say, hey, Demogorgon, this guy seems to think that disability is caused by society and can be fixed by fixing society. However, I’m going to argue that the social model is posed as a political truth, not a literal truth. Let’s back that up a bit and then we can talk about different kinds of truths. From an essay he wrote in 2004 called “The Social Model in Action: if I had a hammer”:

I have argued that the social model of disability is a practical tool, not a theory, an idea, or a concept.

In the essay, Oliver likens the social model to a hammer, i.e. a blunt tool for hitting things. Specifically, he criticizes his fellow academics for sitting around taking the social model seriously as a theoretical concept. He thought that, as a blunt political tool, the social model should be used for what it’s good at: making political change and winning political battles.

I want to take a step back here to talk about types of truth claims. Not all truth claims are literal truth claims. Besides literal, you’ve got:

• Religious: “God made creation in seven days.”

• Political: “We lost Vietnam because liberals didn’t have the stomach for it.”

• Poetical: I never ran way to the Rainy River. I wanted to—badly—but I didn’t.

Political truths can also be literally true. Someone can accuse a political opponent of manipulating an election, and the manipulation may or may not have actually occurred. Religious truths can also be political truths, especially if you’re going to get burned at the stake for saying God made the world in 70 days rather than seven. Poetic truths are often literally untrue, but are supposed to speak to some larger, other truth. The stories of Tim O’Brien were often literally untrue, but were supposed to articulate experiences he had in Vietnam that he has a hard time otherwise communicating to people who weren’t there. Often, these types of truth claims are trying to convey some kind of vibe or a larger sentiment that’s difficult to break down to literal truth claims.

That doesn’t necessarily give these kinds of claims a pass. At its worst, something like the social model is totally a motte and bailey. You say that all disability is caused by society, but when you’re in a seminar room you say that you never meant to discount the medical stuff. But that’s the stuff of political fights. You win political battles with bumper stickers and pins, not with complicated theories about how the world actually works. People aren’t going to read your book, at least not enough people to matter.

Here is how I think the social model should be regarded. It was originally a political claim. The earliest trace of it is from a literal political pamphlet from an activist organization. Even when it was formalized by academia, the academic that did the formalizing, Mike Oliver, was a lot more complicated and nuanced when articulating it, and that first guy explicitly calls it a political tool and chastises people for taking it seriously.

That said, a lot of people really struggle with types of truth claims. Many people—I know this is hard to beleive—literally think the world was created in seven calendar days. (And, no, that’s not all Christians, Catholic doctrine takes it as a metaphor.) A lot of people, maybe even most, take political claims and slogans as literally true. Most can’t even be literally true, because they’re so abstract and high level that they can’t be evaluated for truth. But that doesn’t stop people from failing to make that distinction. Tim O’Brien pissed a lot of people off by writing stories that, in their opinion, simply weren’t true. And there are many disciples of the social model who don’t get that it’s a political tool. That probably suggests it’s working as a political tool, since it’s clearly sticky, memetic, and simple enough to get inside people’s heads.

Finally, I’ll wrap by revisiting the practicality here from a disabled perspective. The social model is totally useful as a political tool, because a common default is to figure that disabled people are on their own and there’s nothing that can be done. Sometimes that’s true, you’re probably not going to figure out a way to get a deaf-blind person to play MLB baseball with better infrastructure. But maybe you can make fewer people laugh when the Paraolympic Games comes up in conversation, or make people build big websites with standards so they work with braille. People tend to give up too early and just want disabled people to go away. To the extent that that’s not true (it sure as hell was in 1967), it’s because people were hit with the social model hammer. That’s how we got stuff like the Americans with Disabilities Act in the ’90s.