Davis

So much of writing about disability has focused on the disabled person as the object of study, just as the study of race has focused on  the  person  of  color.  But  as  with  recent  scholarship  on  race,  which  has  turned its attention to whiteness, I would like to focus not so much on the construction of disability as on the construction of normalcy. I do this because the “problem” is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the “problem” of the disabled person. A common assumption would be that some concept of the norm must have  always  existed.  After  all,  people  seem  to  have  an  inherent  desire  to  compare themselves to others. But the idea of a norm is less a condition of human nature than it is a feature of a certain kind of society. 

Lennard Davis

"If the concept of the norm or average enters European culture, or at least the European languages, only in the nineteenth century, one has to ask what is the cause of this conceptualization? One of the logical places to turn in trying to understand concepts like “norm” and “average” is that branch of knowledge known as statistics. It was the French statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1847) who contributed the most to a generalized notion of the normal as an imperative. He noticed that the “law of error,” used by astronomers to locate a star by plotting all the sightings and then averaging the errors, could be equally applied to the distribution of human features such as height and weight. He then took a further step of formulating the concept of “l’homme moyen” or the average man. Quetelet maintained that this abstract human was the average of all human attributes in a given country. Quetelet’s average man was a combination of l’homme moyen physique and l’homme moyen morale, both a physically average and a morally average construct. With such thinking, the average then becomes paradoxically a kind of ideal, a position devoutly to be wished. As Quetelet wrote, “an individual who epitomized in himself, at a given time, all the qualities of the average man, would represent at once all the greatness, beauty and goodness of that being” (cited in Porter 1986, 102). Furthermore, one must observe that Quetelet meant this hegemony of the middle to apply not only to moral qualities but to the body as well. He wrote: “deviations more or less great from the mean have constituted [for artists] ugliness in body as well as vice in morals and a state of sickness with regard to the constitution” (ibid., 103). Here Zeuxis’s notion of physical beauty as an exceptional ideal becomes transformed into beauty as the average. Quetelet foresaw a kind of utopia of the norm associated with progress, just as Marx foresaw a utopia of the norm in so far as wealth and production is concerned. Marx actually cites Quetelet’s notion of the average man in a discussion of the labor theory of value. The concept of a norm, unlike that of an ideal, implies that the majority of the population must or should somehow be part of the norm. The norm pins down that majority of the population that falls under the arch of the standard bell-shaped curve. This curve, the graph of an exponential function, that was known variously as the astronomer’s “error law,” the “normal distribution,” the “Gaussian density function,” or simply “the bell curve,” became in its own way a symbol of the tyranny of the norm. Any bell curve will always have at its extremities those characteristics that deviate from the norm. So, with the concept of the norm comes the concept of deviations or extremes. When we think of bodies, in a society where the concept of the norm is operative, then people with disabilities will be thought of as deviants. This, as we have seen, is in contrast to societies with the concept of an ideal, in which all people have a non-ideal status.2 In England, there was a burst of interest in statistics during the 1830s. A statistical office was set up at the Board of Trade in 1832, and the General Register Office was created in 1837 to collect vital statistics. The use of statistics began an important movement, and there is a telling connection for the purposes of this essay between the founders of statistics and their larger intentions. The rather amazing fact is that almost all the early statisticians had one thing in common: they were eugenicists. The same is true of key figures in the eugenics movement: Sir Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and R. A. Fisher.3 While this coincidence seems almost too striking to be true, we must remember that there is a real connection between figuring the statistical measure of humans and then hoping to improve humans so that deviations from the norm diminish. Statistics is bound up with eugenics because the central insight of statistics is the idea that a population can be normed. An important consequence of the idea of the norm is that it divides the total population into standard and nonstandard subpopulations. The next step in conceiving of the population as norm and non-norm is for the state to attempt to norm the nonstandard—the aim of eugenics. Of course such an activity is profoundly paradoxical since the inviolable rule of statistics is that all phenomena will always conform to a bell curve. So norming the non-normal is an activity as problematic as untying the Gordian knot. MacKenzie asserts that it is not so much that Galton’s statistics made possible eugenics but rather that “the needs of eugenics in large part determined the content of Galton’s statistical theory” (1981, 52). In any case, a symbiotic relationship exists between statistical science and eugenic concerns. Both bring into society the concept of a norm, particularly a normal body, and thus in effect create the concept of the disabled body. It is also worth noting the interesting triangulation of eugenicist interests. On the one hand Sir Francis Galton was cousin to Charles Darwin, whose notion of the evolutionary advantage of the fittest lays the foundation for eugenics and also for the idea of a perfectible body undergoing progressive improvement. As one scholar has put it, “Eugenics was in reality applied biology based on the central biological theory of the day, namely the Darwinian theory of evolution” (Farrall 1985, 55). Darwin’s ideas serve to place disabled people along the wayside as evolutionary defectives to be surpassed by natural selection. So, eugenics became obsessed with the elimination of “defectives,” a category which included the “feebleminded,” the deaf, the blind, the physically defective, and so on. In a related discourse, Galton created the modern system of fingerprinting for personal identification. Galton’s interest came out of a desire to show that certain physical traits could be inherited. As he wrote: one of the inducements to making these inquiries into personal identification has been to discover independent features suitable for hereditary investigation. . . . it is not improbable, and worth taking pains to inquire whether each person may not carry visibly about his body undeniable evidence of his parentage and near kinships. (cited in MacKenzie 1981, 65)

Lennard Davis

Galton made significant changes in statistical theory that created the concept of the norm. He took what had been called “error theory,” a technique by which astronomers attempted to show that one could locate a star by taking into account the variety of sightings. The sightings, all of which could not be correct, if plotted would fall into a bell curve, with most sightings falling into the center, that is to say, the correct location of the star. The errors would fall to the sides of the bell curve. Galton’s contribution to statistics was to change the name of the curve from “the law of frequency of error” or “error curve,” the term used by Quetelet, to the “normal distribution” curve. The significance of these changes relates directly to Galton’s eugenicist interests. In an “error curve” the extremes of the curve are the most mistaken in accuracy. But if one is looking at human traits, then the extremes, particularly what Galton saw as positive extremes—tallness, high intelligence, ambitiousness, strength, fertility—would have to be seen as errors. Rather than “errors” Galton wanted to think of the extremes as distributions of a trait. As MacKenzie notes: Thus there was a gradual transition from use of the term “probable error” to the term “standard deviation” (which is free of the implication that a deviation is in any sense an error), and from the term “law of error” to the term “normal distribution.” (1981, 59) But even without the idea of error, Galton still faced the problem that in a normal distribution curve that graphed height, for example, both tallness and shortness would be seen as extremes in a continuum where average stature would be the norm. The problem for Galton was that, given his desire to perfect the human race, or at least its British segment, tallness was preferable to shortness. How could both extremes be considered equally deviant from the norm? So Galton substituted the idea of ranking for the concept of averaging. That is, he changed the way one might look at the curve from one that used the mean to one that used the median—a significant change in thinking eugenically. If a trait, say intelligence, is considered by its average, then the majority of people would determine what intelligence should be—and intelligence would be defined by the mediocre middle. Galton, wanting to avoid the middling of desired traits, would prefer to think of intelligence in ranked order. Although high intelligence in a normal distribution would simply be an extreme, under a ranked system it would become the highest ranked trait. Galton divided his curve into quartiles, so that he was able to emphasize ranked orders of intelligence, as we would say that someone was in the first quartile in intelligence (low intelligence) or the fourth quartile (high intelligence). Galton’s work led directly to current “intelligence quotient” (IQ) and scholastic achievement tests. In fact, Galton revised Gauss’s bell curve to show the superiority of the desired trait (for example, high intelligence). He created what he called an “ogive,” which is arranged in quartiles with an ascending curve that features the desired trait as “higher” than the undesirable deviation. As Stigler notes: If a hundred individuals’ talents were ordered, each could be assigned the numerical value corresponding to its percentile in the curve of “deviations from an average”: the middlemost (or median) talent had value 0 (representing mediocrity), an individual at the upper quartile was assigned the value 1 (representing one probable error above mediocrity), and so on. (1986, 271) What these revisions by Galton signify is an attempt to redefine the concept of the “ideal” in relation to the general population. First, the application of the idea of a norm to the human body creates the idea of deviance or a “deviant” body. Second, the idea of a norm pushes the normal variation of the body through a stricter template guiding the way the body “should” be. Third, the revision of the “normal curve of distribution” into quartiles, ranked in order, and so on, creates a new kind of “ideal.” This statistical ideal is unlike the classical notion of the ideal, which contains no imperative that everyone should strive to be perfect. The new ideal of ranked order is powered by the imperative of the norm, and then is supplemented by the notion of progress, human perfectibility, and the elimination of deviance, to create a dominating, hegemonic vision of what the human body should be. While we tend to associate eugenics with a Nazi-like racial supremacy, it is important to realize that eugenics was not the trade of a fringe group of right-wing, fascist maniacs. Rather, it became the common belief and practice of many, if not most, European and American citizens. When Marx used Quetelet’s idea of the average in his formulation of average wage and abstract labor, socialists as well as others embraced eugenic claims, seeing in the perfectibility of the human body a utopian hope for social and economic improvement. Once people allowed that there were norms and ranks in human physiology, then the idea that we might want to, for example, increase the intelligence of humans, or decrease birth defects, did not seem so farfetched. These ideas were widely influential and the influence of eugenicist ideas persisted well into the twentieth century, so that someone like Emma Goldman could write that unless birth control was encouraged, the state would “legally encourage the increase of paupers, syphilitics, epileptics, dipsomaniacs, cripples, criminals, and degenerates” (Kevles 1985, 90). One problem for people with disabilities was that eugenicists tended to group together all allegedly “undesirable” traits. So, for example, criminals, the poor, and people with disabilities might be mentioned in the same breath. Take Karl Pearson, a leading figure in the eugenics movement, who defined the “unfit” as follows: “the habitual criminal, the professional tramp, the tuberculous, the insane, the mentally defective, the alcoholic, the diseased from birth or from excess” (cited in Kevles 1985, 33). In 1911, Pearson headed the Department of Applied Statistics, which included Galton and the Biometric Laboratories at University College in London. This department gathered eugenic information on the inheritance of physical and mental traits including “scientific, commercial, and legal ability, but also hermaphroditism, hemophilia, cleft palate, harelip, tuberculosis, diabetes, deaf-mutism, polydactyly (more than five fingers) or brachydactyly (stub fingers), insanity, and mental deficiency” (ibid., 38–9). Here again one sees a strange selection of disabilities merged with other types of human variations. All of these deviations from the norm were regarded in the long run as contributing to the disease of the nation. As one official in the Eugenics Record Office asserted: . . . the only way to keep a nation strong mentally and physically is to see that each new generation is derived chiefly from the fitter members of the generation before. (ibid., 39–40) The emphasis on nation and national fitness obviously plays into the metaphor of the body. If individual citizens are not fit, if they do not fit into the nation, then the national body will not be fit. Of course, such arguments are based on a false idea of the body politic—by that notion a hunchbacked citizenry would make a hunchbacked nation. Nevertheless, the eugenic “logic” that individual variations would accumulate into a composite national identity was a powerful one. This belief combined with an industrial mentality that saw workers as interchangeable and therefore sought to create a universal worker whose physical characteristics would be uniform, as would the result of their labors—a uniform product. One of the central foci of eugenics was what was broadly called “feeblemindedness.”5 This term included low intelligence, mental illness, and even “pauperism,” since low income was equated with “relative inefficiency” (ibid., 46).6 Likewise, certain ethnic groups were associated with feeblemindedness and pauperism. Charles Davenport, an American eugenicist, thought that the influx of European immigrants would make the American population “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature more given to crimes of larceny, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality” (cited in ibid., 48). In his research, Davenport scrutinized the records of “prisons, hospitals, almshouses, and institutions for the mentally deficient, the deaf, the blind, and the insane” (ibid., 55). The association between what we would now call disability and criminal activity, mental incompetence, sexual license, and so on established a legacy that people with disabilities are still having trouble living down. This equation was so strong that an American journalist writing in the early twentieth century could celebrate “the inspiring, the wonderful, message of the new heredity” as opposed to the sorrow of bearing children who were “diseased or crippled or depraved” (ibid., 67). The conflation of disability with depravity expressed itself in the formulation “defective class.” As the president of the University of Wisconsin declared after World War One, “we know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation” (ibid., 68). And it must be reiterated that the eugenics movement was not stocked with eccentrics. Averell Harriman’s sister, Mary Harriman, as well as John D. Rockefeller, funded Davenport. Prime Ministers A. J. Balfour, Neville Chamberlain, and Winston Churchill, along with President Theodore Roosevelt, H. G. Wells, and John Maynard Keynes, among many others, were members of eugenicist organizations. Francis Galton was knighted in 1909 for his work, and in 1910 he received the Copley Medal, the Royal Society’s highest honor. A Galton Society met regularly in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In 1911 the Oxford University Union moved approval of the main principles behind eugenics by a vote of almost two to one. In Kansas, the 1920 state fair held a contest for “fitter families” based on their eugenic family histories; a brochure for the contest noted about the awards, “this trophy and medal are worth more than livestock sweepstakes. . . . For health is wealth and a sound mind in a sound body is the most priceless of human possessions” (ibid., 62). County fairs like these also administered intelligence tests, medical exams, and screened for venereal disease. In England, bills were introduced in Parliament to control mentally disabled people, and in 1933 the prestigious scientific magazine Nature approved the Nazis’ proposal of a bill for “the avoidance of inherited diseases in posterity” by sterilizing the disabled. The magazine editorial said “the Bill, as it reads, will command the appreciative attention of all who are interested in the controlled and deliberate improvement of human stock.” The list of disabilities for which sterilization would be appropriate were “congenital feeblemindedness, manic depressive insanity, schizophrenia, hereditary epilepsy, hereditary St Vitus’s dance, hereditary blindness and deafness, hereditary bodily malformation and habitual alcoholism” (cited in MacKenzie 1981, 44). We have largely forgotten that what Hitler did in developing a hideous policy of eugenics was just to implement the theories of the British and American eugenicists. Hitler’s statement in Mein Kampf that “the struggle for the daily livelihood [between species] leaves behind, in the ruck, everything that is weak or diseased or wavering” (cited in Blacker 1952, 143) is not qualitatively different from any of the many similar statements we have seen before. And even the conclusions Hitler draws are not very different from those of the likes of Galton, Bell, and others. 

Lennard Davis

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