In addition to more than half a million Australians who currently live with an intellectual disability, nearly 600,000 Australians are projected to be living with dementia by 2030. Yet for most of us, our daily lives have become increasingly dependent upon advanced cognitive activity.
Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter exemplify the ways in which new technology continues to draw out and emphasise the life of the mind above all else. At the same time, convenient new tools like online banking and shopping carry a hidden burden of knowledge, memory, and comprehension borne entirely by the individual user. The cognitive demands of active social participation have never been so high.
We seem set on a trajectory of ever increasing reliance on individual autonomy, rationality, and self-awareness augmented by complex technologies. But if our culture glorifies the mental life of the autonomous, empowered individual, what does it offer those whose mental faculties are limited or impaired?
We are living in what ethicist Stephen G. Post has called a 'hyper-cognitive' society — a society which not only demands but idealises the mental life as the essence of personhood and individuality. Post has critiqued our present culture's implicit affront to people suffering cognitive deficits such as dementia:
I associate hypercognitive values with the Enlightenment notion of salvation by reason alone and suggest that this imperils people with dementia. Very simplistically, 'I think, therefore I am,' implies that if I do not think, I am not. In essence, the values of rationality and productivity blind us to other ways of thinking about the meaning of our humanity.
The moral implications of such values are clear. The acclaimed Princeton Philosopher Professor Peter Singer has infamously championed the view that:
The fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference.
Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings. This conclusion is not limited to infants who, because of irreversible intellectual disabilities, will never be rational, self-conscious beings.
It may be no coincidence that an academic philosopher would place elevated moral weight on the life of the mind. But the values put forward by Singer are advanced implicitly by our whole culture: independence, choice, identity, personal narrative.
Perhaps this is why we are so afraid of illnesses and conditions which impair the mind: according to Alzheimer's Australia 63 per cent of Australians over the age of 18 are afraid of developing dementia — making it the second most widely feared medical condition after cancer.
Yet despite our high regard for these mental powers, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, people with an intellectual disability are not receiving adequate levels of assistance for cognition, emotion, and communication. These unmet needs seem obvious, and we should hope to see them fulfilled.
Less obvious are the unmet needs of the rest of society, brought to the fore by illnesses and disabilities that challenge our sense of what it means to be a human person, and force us to confront our underlying values. On a religious level this 'unmet need' has always been implied by doctrines such as the fall of man, which established as a most basic premise the broken and impaired state of all creation.
But outside of a religious context, the difficulties and suffering in life push us inexorably toward the same reappraisal of our deepest values. Another philosopher, Professor Eva Kittay, has written of how her values changed upon learning of her own daughter's intellectual disability:
Loving Sesha and loving the life of the mind forced me to think — to feel — differently about that latter love. My own child could not share its treasures, could not even remotely approach that which had, I had thought, given my life its meaning.
I had to reassess the meaning and value of cognitive capacities as the defining feature of humanity. I discovered that a love for one's child transcended any denumerable set of defining characteristics.
Kittay's realisation has great significance for the present trajectory of our broader society: where is our ideal of the independent, autonomous, intellectual human being taking us? Can the fullness of life really be encompassed by our ever-increasing immersion in the life of the mind?
The fall of man is set in the context of another vital religious concept: Imago Dei. The belief that human beings were created 'in the image of God' has been interpreted in various ways but never explicitly defined according to some particular aspect of the human being.
We can recognise the goodness and value of human reason and human will, without allowing the importance of these mental faculties to eclipse the more profound and mysterious claim that human beings are imprinted with the divine image.
Perhaps it is a special challenge of our age to recognise that 'I think therefore I am' cannot approach the mystery of 'I am that I am'.
Zac Alstin is a freelance writer and part-time research officer for Southern Cross Bioethics Institute in Adelaide. He has an honours degree in philosophy, a graduate certificate in applied linguistics, and an amateur interest in Chinese philosophy.