It is too bad that we often find about the exploits and contributions of fellow men and women after their death. And we usually do this when we read their obituaries. But many go unread, unless they refer to a celebrity or otherwise famous person. Mel Baggs’s obituary in the New York Times last week could very well have been one of these unread obituaries. Her name rang no bells for me. But, as I fleetingly scanned the title, I caught the last five words: “. . . the Essence of Being Human.” So, I read the full title: “Mel Baggs, 39; Explored Autism and the Essence of Being Human.” Now I had to read the whole story.
Mel Baggs was a non-verbal autistic person who expressed herself by blogging and in videos. Her message was that “people who think and communicate in nontraditional ways are fully human, and that humanness is a spectrum, not something that can be reduced to a normal/abnormal dichotomy.” Reading those words “humanness is a spectrum” set a whole range of thought processes in my head.
We are used to employing the term spectrum to refer to the range of symptoms identified with a syndrome or disability; hence, the autism spectrum. Mell Baggs, though, used the word to capture the whole range of conditions, normal-abnormal, typical-atypical, rare-frequent, that we observe in human beings. Mel Baggs wanted to remind us that all kinds of conditions that are found in humans are legitimate constituents of the human spectrum. Her purpose was to help us understand the breadth of our humanness. She wanted to bring more people from the forgotten or misunderstood fringes of our species into the visible part of the human spectrum, the part inhabited by the so-called “normal” people.
The idea that we are all on the human spectrum and thus deserve respect and compassion is unfortunately an idea that has been challenged, even discarded, through out human history with devastating and barbaric consequences. We have used religion, race, gender and ethnicity to push people to the outer bounds of the human spectrum, even to throw them overboard altogether.
Take the case of slavery. It has been justified in the past on the invidious ground that enslaved people deserved this fate because they are less human or not even human at all. “An inferior man … and no fanaticism can raise him to the level of the Caucasian race.” That’s how a Southern senator opined about black Americans in the years after the Civil War. And “inferior man” in this case meant inferior human. And Caucasian race was, for all purposes, the whole human spectrum as far as that Senator was concerned.
Women too would not occupy any significant position on the human spectrum for thousands of years. “A husband has a right of property in the service of his wife, … and the “right of a husband to his wife” and of “a father to his child” comprise the “three great fundamental natural rights of human society.” That’s how a member of Congress saw women on the human spectrum. We still have societies and states that view women no differently than that late nineteenth century Congressman.
Next, take the case of the Nazi final solution project against Jews, Roma, Slavs and people with disabilities. To justify the barbarity of those holocausts the Nazi public propaganda machine would cast doubt on the full humanness of its victims. Underman, sub-man, subhuman were the terms the Nazis used to describe the above people as well communists and anyone else Nazi paranoia deemed unworthy to meet its narrow band of the human spectrum.
In the early twentieth century, a mix of overzealous science and racist bias combined to justify the practice of Eugenics. The goal was to weed out the “unfit” and populate the human spectrum with those endowed with desired traits. Again, a case of purification and cleansing of the human spectrum that could be effected through selective breeding. Related to eugenics is the modern-day push to use medicine and genetics to sculpt babies into the kind of humans favored by their parents. Obviously, such parents believe that certain places on the human spectrum are up for sale.
And finally, the soft, but most present and pervasive, cases of redefining and downsizing the human spectrum are those that put a distance between those with mental, emotional and physical disabilities and the rest. A distance that can be manifested in limited socialization, gratuitous ignorance about their existence, lesser human rights and care. They perceive the world differently, they express themselves differently, they feel about things differently, they move their bodies differently, that’s how these people are different from the rest. These conditions keep them from fully partaking in the world of those in the “normal” range of the human spectrum. But more devastating to these individuals is to feel unwelcome and to sense the distance others keep from them.
The biggest irony in any of these selective redefinitions of the human spectrum is that they are the product of a diminished sense of the other’s predicament, or sense of empathy, or sense for sociality, which are the building blocks for becoming human in the first place. In his acclaimed book “Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny,” Michael Tomasello shows how humans build on biologically endowed capacities to develop bonding, first with their parents and later with others, by understanding the other person’s feelings and intentions. And how this initially limited bonding gradually grows to more extensive and sophisticated relationships based on joint commitments, empathy, fairness, cooperation and regard for social norms. The culmination of this process is the attainment of a uniquely human sense, the sense of “We.”
Mell Baggs dedicated her life to convince us to extend our sense of “We” to all born human irrespective of one’s particular condition.
Let's Reason 
Nicely done, George. It is to me ironic that most of the people that we are congratulating as heroes today, will be back to minimum wages “dead-end jobs” in the not too distant future. That some of us who “are staying safe” will think of them again as the lower class, for working in a supermarket, picking up garbage, cleaning and sanitizing workplaces, driving a bus and changing bedpans.
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