Converting difference to inferiority

Amid the furore over the Mary Ellen Synon article on the Paralympics it may be useful to explore some of the wider issues involved in the controversy.

At the root of the piece is fear - fear of difference, of otherness. For Miss Synon, as for many people, this fear is particularly focused on the issue of bodily integrity - the idea and ideal of unmarred physical wholeness. Anything other than that wholeness is seen as threatening and dangerous.

It is therefore imperative to convert the undeniable difference with which the physically disabled confront the notionally "abled" (to coin a term) into an inequality. They are different, therefore they are inferior - that is the essence of the intellectual operation performed.

Racism (of which Mary Ellen Synon cannot, in my opinion, be accused) enacts the same procedure: the conversion of a mark of physical difference from some notional norm - whiteness, in this case - into a badge of inferiority.

It is, of course, particularly regrettable that it should be a woman, for whose gender this issue of a norm and deviations is particularly acute, who should provide such a classic instance of hierarchical thinking.

In Miss Synon's world, difference is immediately converted into opposition - the disabled versus the "normal" - and this opposition is then instantly turned into a hierarchy - the disabled as inferior to the "normal".

The most difficult operation for those who do not follow this kneejerk procedure is to acknowledge difference without then turning it into an opposition, and subsequently a hierarchy. (Much of the work of the philosopher Jacques Derrida has been devoted to combating precisely this procedure.)

Having made this intellectual journey, the next step for the Mary Ellen Synons of this world is to accuse everybody less "enlightened" than themselves of attachment to a fuzzy liberal notion of "equality" by which they are allegedly denying that the disabled are different - and inferior to the "fastest, strongest" etc.

It is important to resist this intellectual sleight of hand not by appealing to such a generalised notion of equality under which all differences would be subsumed but by acknowledging, and valuing, the difference that the disabled embody.

This is quite different from the claim that everyone is the same - who would want such sameness anyway? - or the shoddy counter-argument that it would be impossible to judge the morality of people's actions, such as those of the Nazis, if one believes we are all "equal" in some abstract sense.

Of course one can always judge - and condemn if necessary - people's actions, as distinct from their conditions. Such arguments are mere diversions from the central issue involved.

"Different but not unequal" might be the best slogan with which to combat the confusion which the apologists for the indefensible seek to sow in this and in many other instances. Keeping the idea of difference in the mind without turning it into a source of inequality goes against the grain of much of the Western philosophical tradition, but it is a necessary part of a balanced and mature approach to living.

The current debacle has at least served to clarify some of these issues. One such issue that Miss Synon's piece raises acutely is that of the visibility of the disabled. They are in no danger of arousing her ire as long as they remain where they are meant to be, in hospitals or homes.

It is only when they have the audacity to present themselves on a public platform, to behave as if their activities were as appropriate to the media gaze as any other, that they come to be seen as a threat.

The fear engendered is perhaps comparable to that caused by the prospect of disabled sexuality, again felt as dangerous and different.

The body, as much contemporary theory has demonstrated (the work of Julia Kristeva is particularly relevant in this context), is the particular site for fantasies of wholeness, completion and totality.

Although in reality it consists of organs and parts, a very primary instinct seeks to insist that it transcends these parts, that it is inviolable and unbreakable. The radical philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, admittedly in a very different context and with a different aim in view, even speak of "the body without organs", the dream of a body that contains no parts, no attachments, whose wholeness is such that it has not even been engendered by earthly parents.

The so-called disabled, when they have the temerity to make themselves manifest, as they did at the Paralympics, confront us immediately with the falsehood of this fantasy, and bring into question the precariousness of this imaginary construct.

Faced with such a challenge to a sense of wholeness, it is perhaps not surprising - though this does not make its publication any more excusable - that a voice should be raised to reaffirm the age-old tradition of the primacy of power, of sheer brute force, over any other consideration in the ethical life.

Terence Killeen is a literary critic and an Irish Times journalist.