One of the most significant leaps in understanding we can achieve, over the course of our lifetimes, is seeing the world as a continuous spectrum rather than as a set of discrete possibilities.
I’ve seen this pattern come up again and again, in my life and in my studies. Allow me to begin with a brief excursion into mathematics.
The ancient Greeks believed that the only lengths were rational numbers. It was not until a certain Hippasus of Metapontum discovered during the 5th century B.C. that the square root of 2 is irrational that the way was paved for the discovery of the real numbers. The real numbers are a continuous set of lengths that by and large describes today’s view of physical space. This new picture of the world, as a continuity, was absolutely revolutionary and crucial to our understanding of calculus and physics.
Hippasus, unfortunately, drowned for making this revelation. This notion was deemed so heretical that it could not be tolerated.
A second field in which this understanding comes up is in social identity, again and again. When I first realized that human sexual attraction lies on a spectrum–perhaps even an infinitude of spectrums–instead of two discrete boxes, I remember being mind-blown. When I first realized that gender is a continuous spectrum, it was yet another revelation. Race, height, intelligence, hair color–all these attributes we use to describe ourselves are simply attempts to chop up a continuous spectrum into discrete segments, a fact that is necessary because of human language but unfortunate because it so often leads to misunderstanding.
Like Hippasus, unfortunately, far too many people in the world today pay their lives for having this heretical understanding of the world.
And, as I’m sure you saw it coming–the continuation of this series of epiphanies for me has been the realization that disability is yet another one of those spectrums. If ability is the capacitance to achieve something, than every one of us is both abled and disabled, and the question is only one of degree.
How do I feel about this? I think the vlogbrothers sum it up pretty well in their YouTube video, “Human Sexuality is Complicated”: “…when the world becomes one of infinite continuums and those false dichotomies break down and those two shiny boxes break apart into seven billion shiny boxes–that’s actually pretty beautiful.”