What would a blind world 'look' like?

May 27, 2005 10:28 AM

What if most people were born blind, and seeing was rare?

Literary mag The Believer has an Idea Share section, which is a collection of (apparently anonymously submitted) hypothetic book premises and themes, shared online in the hopes that someone will make a book out of it. I was particularly intrigued by this entry:

The field of alternative history has been created out of “what if” questions—(“What if the South had won the Civil War?” etc.) This practice should expand to other fields. Alternative Biology: “What if two intelligent species had developed at the same time?” Alternative Sociology: “What if the majority of people were born blind, and seeing was rare?” Sort of an academic sanctioning of science fiction.

I think there's a gold mine of hypothetical scenarios here, and the two examples given are sublime. Let's focus on the blindess one for now - if this goes well, I'll let someone else ask the (paleonto-)biology one (indeed the seed for a book of its own), or feel free to come up with your own alternative science premise.

So, what would a world where most people have no vision faculty be like?

posted by goodnewsfortheinsane to society & culture (43 comments total)

H.G. Wells gave it a shot
posted by IndigoJones at 10:34 AM on May 27, 2005

The idea of two sentient species co-evolving was a recurring minor theme on Babylon 5.

The idea of a few people having a sense that the majority lack has been pretty extensively explored all over S.F.
posted by Capn at 10:44 AM on May 27, 2005

Apparently I'm in the majority in this world, as I missed the superfluous "the" in the first line.

Another reference: Jose Saramago - Blindness. However, this blindess is of the widespread yet acquired kind.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 10:46 AM on May 27, 2005

[fixed superfluous 'the']
posted by jessamyn at 10:53 AM on May 27, 2005

"In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man rules all."
posted by Carbolic at 11:21 AM on May 27, 2005

I suppose they'd constitute a class of diviners. Or they might be hunted and killed, because their ability could be incredibly disruptive to a society designed around sightlessness.

Wowee, here's an ultra-cheesy sci-fi plot: babies are subjected to a vision test (through a brain-activity monitor that issues tactile output, I dunno) at birth. If they can see, their eyes are gouged out or they are killed, since the general concensus is that those who can see have too much potential to circumvent laws and devestate society. But on the fringes of wilderness, shunned from mainstream society, constantly having to defend against (or escape) attempts at their lives, semi-savage...are...the VISIONARIES.

Pulp galore! I can imagine the cover: a scantily-clad Amazon seer is fighting a group of eyeless, clad in drab, monochrome uniform.
posted by ori at 11:23 AM on May 27, 2005

You know, blindness in the Nowhere Man sense arguably applies to the majority.
posted by Loudmax at 11:28 AM on May 27, 2005

fwiw, the seeing would have a significant advantage over the blind and preferentialy consume any shared resources. if the shared resource were limited, the blind would quickly die out. the situation described is therefore unlikely, unless it is transient (caused perhaps by some horrible disease).

day of the triffids is another example of this having already been used (or is that the wells reference above?)
posted by andrew cooke at 11:35 AM on May 27, 2005

So, what would a world where most people have no vision faculty be like?

You might as well ask what it is like to be a bat.
posted by kindall at 11:35 AM on May 27, 2005

I recommend a good short story "Persistence of Vision" by John Varley. It's about a community of deaf-bind people and how they manage to go about every day taks we sometimes take for granted.
posted by ozomatli at 11:36 AM on May 27, 2005

I imagine the sighted would have such a massive evolutionary advantage that they would outcompete their unsighted brethren about as fast as they could breed. Sorry to be boring.
posted by Leon at 11:45 AM on May 27, 2005

"In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man rules all."

I had to read a short story (or novella maybe) in high school that refutes this very claim. It's about a man who stumbles on an isolated community in South America that was congenitally blind. They thought he was insane.
posted by muddgirl at 11:56 AM on May 27, 2005

Thanks jessamyn. I can see clearly now.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 12:08 PM on May 27, 2005

That's correct, andrew, assuming that it's genetically determined. Let's assume that it is not, rather it's distributed randomly on a 95/5% basis. How would blind parents raise their seeing children (if at all), or vice versa?

ori makes an interesting point as well. But let's dig deeper. Aside from the who-eats-who scenarios, what would civilisation and culture be like? Would there be such a thing at all? Assuming an intelligence, on average, comparable to modern humans.

How many radio stations would there be? Would VOIP have taken off much sooner?
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 12:14 PM on May 27, 2005

Hey, ori, I like to think your cheesy-sci-fi-sighted-people would be called the VISIONAIRES rather than VISIONARIES (though maybe the Visionaires were actually a 60s pop group.)

In the interests of answering the question, I guess those gals at Salem were thought to have powers noone else had and things didn't turn out too well for them.
posted by penguin pie at 12:22 PM on May 27, 2005

Thanks, goodnewsfortheinsane you hooked me with that one.

Here's an idea: Wouldn't there be much less noise pollution?
posted by drakepool at 12:30 PM on May 27, 2005

I bet the sighted kids would be forced to hide their abilities for their own safety and so that they could fit in with society--maybe even be pressured (by parents, peers, even theirselves) into psychologically denying that they can see (walking around with thier eyes closed all the time?) to fit in with the group consensus of how the world works.

See also the X-Men series and spin-offs for how society and genetic oddballs don't get along so well--"sworn to defend a world that hates and fears them!".
posted by Asparagirl at 12:31 PM on May 27, 2005

Sort of an academic sanctioning of science fiction

I think this is missing the boat. "What if" has been, since before we were born, just another word for "science fiction". The lack of "what if" is a primary reason Star Wars is not generally considered science fiction even though it features futuristic technology like spaceships.

I know people not really interested in science fiction often see SF as meaning adventures set in space, but many enthusiests, particularly the writers themselves, see "what if" as the very definition of science fiction.

Orson Scott Card (a reasonably big name in science fiction) recently pointed to "Sunshine of the spotless mind" and "Being John Malkovich" as his favourite science fiction movies. I suspect a person who, seeing those films, didn't realise they were watching science fiction because there were no spaceships, is also a person who would think that "what if" scenarios are an academically sanctionable varient on of science fiction, ie getting it backwards.

The "what if" scenarios mentioned have already formed the basis of well-known science fiction stories, some pulpier than other :-) (and to those already mentioned, probably add "Day of the Triffids" to the list).

I don't mean to start a tangent, and I'm not in the slightest trying to belittle pulp-swashbuckling-in-space stories (I love Starwars), it's just incredibly bizzare to me to see someone point to the very definition of science fiction (as viewed by the people that create it), and notice that this science fiction thing is a goldmine of interesting ideas, and then view it as some kind of new varient on science fiction on the grounds that it has merit... kind of implying that science fiction is something else. It's just... weird.

Welcome to the wonderful world of science fiction :-)
posted by -harlequin- at 12:35 PM on May 27, 2005

The field of alternative history has been created out of “what if” questions—(“What if the South had won the Civil War?” etc.)

Historian Robert W. Fogel won a nobel prize for economics by applying this idea

I learned to call this "counter-factual history" It's an imaginative tool to learn about ...well I did strong> below...

"A student of economics and statistics at Columbia, Fogel earned
the M.A. degree in 1960. His thesis, The Union Pacific Railroad: A
Case in Premature Enterprise, led to his 1964 book, "Railroads and
American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History."

The book contradicted accepted history and held that railroads had
played an insignificant role in American economic development and
that lesser innovations had contributed more. It was a pioneering
volume in the new field of "cliometrics," which used economic
theory, quantitative methods, hypothesis testing and
counterfactual alternatives, as well as traditional economic
history, to understand economic features of past societies."
from this Fogel Article
posted by drakepool at 12:49 PM on May 27, 2005

Related recommendation: Collections of science fiction short stories, rather than books, are the best source of distilled "what if" reading out there. There is not the time or space for character development, or epic adventures, or labyrinthine plots or intrigues, or lavish descriptive detail, just a quick story dealing directly with the consequences of a "What if".
Wam, bam, thank you Mam. :)
posted by -harlequin- at 12:51 PM on May 27, 2005

If the vast majority of the population were blind, they'd presumably have adapted to their environment such that sightedness wouldn't be necessary to them--that's just plain ol' evolution. Why would it matter that people were sighted, and why would the blind people care, or even believe them when they started talking about what things "looked" like? Why would a community become sightless through evolution unless sight was an unnecessary component to the propogation of the species? If we're talking about a sudden thing that all renders most of the population sightless, that'd be different, but a community that's sightless by default probably wouldn't be affected one way or the other.
posted by LionIndex at 12:55 PM on May 27, 2005

The sighted would only out-alpha-male the blind if blindness was suddenly thrust upon society the way it is. If people had been blind as far back as people could remember, there wouldn't be a whole lot of things in place today where sightedness would be an advantage.
posted by 23skidoo at 12:58 PM on May 27, 2005

"I define subjunctivity as the intellectual state whereby one can imagine, think reasonably about and communicate "what is not." Because humans are a symbol-using species, we can fashion virtual worlds out of words. We have developed the means to invent and describe realities that do not exist, yet we can think about them as if they were in existence"
more about an interesting statement of subjunctive plausibility
posted by drakepool at 1:02 PM on May 27, 2005

23skidoo:
If people had been blind as far back as people could remember, there wouldn't be a whole lot of things in place today where sightedness would be an advantage.

I don't really think so. If people had been blind forever, then sight would be the equivalent of a powerful and reliable sixth sense in our sighted society. It doesn't matter that our society is set up so we get along without that sixth sense, having such a thing would have significant advantages. Even the obvious small stuff (such as being able to learn how to better read someone's emotional state (without them even saying word, or even knowing they are under any scrutiney at all!) and being in a blind society, never having developed any guards on how emotions affect their facial expression) strikes me as a massive advantage, akin to limited telepathy in our society.
A lot of our visual emotional reading may be hardwired in our brains (eg babies can recognise the significance of a smile without being told), and in a blind society that could be absent, but even so, people easily learn to recognise the body-language of animals they spend a lot of time around, so I think it's safe to compare sight to telepathy :)
posted by -harlequin- at 1:28 PM on May 27, 2005

John Wyndham's Day of the Triffids has this scenario as one of its basic plot points. (Not the born blind part, but vision as a valuable rarity).
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:32 PM on May 27, 2005

LionIndex and 23skidoo make good points. It's hard to step outside the box and think of this in a non-seeing human way; we're probably just too biased to easily construct a mental image (notice the biased metaphor) of this species, maybe especially so because besides being blind, they are much like us.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 1:34 PM on May 27, 2005

Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
Amazon
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
..."circle of recent critics hospitable to postmodern currents
of thought who nonetheless seek to recover something of
value from the dark ruins of the once-heavenly city of
Enlightenment discourse.

Chief among them is Jurgen Habermas, whose
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity_
(MIT Press, 1987) is a narrative of the history of
Enlightenment philosophy and its deconstruction by
postmodernists. Habermas's solution is not to junk the
Enlightenment wholesale, but to begin again--this time,
however, not with the philosophy of consciousness, with its
pernicious subject-object split, but with intersubjectivity
instead. For Habermas, objectivity is a chimera,
intersubjectivity is prior to the subject-object opposition,
and communication thus prior to cognition."
from here
posted by drakepool at 1:58 PM on May 27, 2005

I think LionIndex and 23skidoo are pointing in the right direction. Most of the other suggestions above betray their sighted biases. (Mine probably will too).

Would the small sighted population even be able to communicate what this sight is? And would anyone else understand?

If sight could be figured out by a mostly blind society, it would be through analogies to hearing and touch. Like touch, sight gives information about the shape and size of an object. Like hearing, this information can be gathered from a distance.

If the culture understood sound enough to grok it as vibrations in the air, the scientists might presume that sight involves analogous vibrations. If they had sonar equipment or if their hearing evolved to a point where echoes could be 'read' to glean size and shape information, sight might just be completely superfluous (especially since it would be no help at all in the unlit caves). One might even assume that sight is the ability to 'hear' much higher frequencies than the average human, and this wouldn't be so far off, would it?

Interesting questions would be about how being blind would affect this humanity's science and arts.

Would a touch-based literature have been invented?
If there is the whole sonar thing, would we have sound mirrors that let us hear how others hear our shape?
How would math/geometry be affected?
Are there technologies/discoveries that aren't directly related to sight and light that nonetheless wouldn't come about without sighted scientists/philosophers?

enough.
posted by nobody at 1:59 PM on May 27, 2005

Good questions nobody!

What is the likelihood that the seeers (three vowels in a row, what a joy it is to know what letters are), if they survived and figured out how to work together for an extended period, developed a sighted-scientific stance and figure out the true nature of light and how it affects seeing people? Then they who are 'in the know' are left preaching to people who will probably never fully grasp what they're talking about, and the sight-entists might be ostracised as witches or fully ignored. In a sense that's quite a metaphor for actual this-world science, and how hard it has been (and still is) for some concepts to 'sell'.

Or is my sight-bias betraying me right now?
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 2:11 PM on May 27, 2005

If people had been blind forever, then sight would be the equivalent of a powerful and reliable sixth sense in our sighted society. It doesn't matter that our society is set up so we get along without that sixth sense, having such a thing would have significant advantages. Even the obvious small stuff (such as being able to learn how to better read someone's emotional state (without them even saying word, or even knowing they are under any scrutiney at all!) and being in a blind society, never having developed any guards on how emotions affect their facial expression) strikes me as a massive advantage, akin to limited telepathy in our society.

Yeah, but telepathy creeps people out. On some level, we don't trust it. We tend to either write it off as bullshit, or complete evil, and rare is the person who seems to embrace it as completely normal. You get this extra information that no one else does, how do you explain how you got it? If you're honest, people think you're a little nuts. If you're not honest, you seem like a sneak or a cheat somehow. Same thing with being sighted in a blind world. Would the face reading thing be an advantage? Sure, but that alone's not going to be enough to dominate society as a sensory-minority. Plus, there's disadvantages too. If you're sighted you're going to be more comfortable with your eyes open, but blind people live in the dark all the time. It doesn't matter to them that the sun isn't up, they can get around just fine. Sighty McLookerson is all stumbly around after the sun goes down and it's pitch black outside.

I mean, shit would be drastically different. Instead of Edison being the badass for perfecting the lightbulb, you'd have some other dude working on sonar or some crap that lets you know how close people or things are to you so you can move around better, and not have people get the jump on you.
posted by 23skidoo at 3:01 PM on May 27, 2005

A Philosophy Of Blindness
posted by drakepool at 3:03 PM on May 27, 2005

I read a book once which compared our wonder at bat navigation by sonar, to a highly advanced bat species wondering at a species ability to navigate by detecting the reflection of electromagnetic radiation from objects.
posted by tomble at 3:16 PM on May 27, 2005

Wearable Bionics used by the Blind
posted by drakepool at 3:35 PM on May 27, 2005

23skidoo:
If you're not honest, you seem like a sneak or a cheat somehow.

But a wealthy sneak or cheat that just seems always be on the money :-) People don't trust Bill Gates, and think he's sneaky and underhanded. Being thought of as a sneak can hold you back if you have nothing else going for you, but if you are a telepath, and you care to, you will rise and rise in society regardless of whether some people wonder if you are a sneak. Others will think you are a fantasic judge of character, and a person with great insight. You don't need to dominate society, but the advantages would be significant.

I also don't think there would be the disadvantages of sight as you describe them - the premise was people have always been blind. If you are raised in a sightless society, you are raised to be independant of sight, and this goes far beyond skills that might get a little rusty if you stop using them - when sight was taken away from you by the sun going down* on a moonless cloudy night, it wouldn't matter because the entire society is constructed to make that situation work for you. Getting from A to B, food, trade, everything would be set up so that sight was not the slightest bit necessary to do well at these things. Sight would only bring additional advantage, those advantages many, and the disadvantages minor, if any.

*If you live in a hot part of the world, the society could well be nocturnal
posted by -harlequin- at 3:43 PM on May 27, 2005

Time to pick nits-

The quote is:
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
[In regione caecorum rex est luscus.]

It's from Erasmus.

muddgirl- the story you remember was in the first comment. Worth the re-read.
posted by IndigoJones at 3:46 PM on May 27, 2005

23skidoo:

I should probably make clear - I completely agree sight would creep people out the way an equivalent for us such as telepathy would - if they found that their thoughts and emotions could be read like a book by these few, and they had little idea how to defend against that prying, and no idea when it was even happening, they would feel paranoid/violated/helpless/spiteful or even all at once. But part of the reason they would feel those things is precisely that the other person clearly had an advantage over them that is so large it is completely unfair, going well beyond the acceptable limits.
posted by -harlequin- at 3:51 PM on May 27, 2005

"the brain begins to act like a hand"
posted by drakepool at 4:09 PM on May 27, 2005

If you are raised in a sightless society, you are raised to be independant of sight, and this goes far beyond skills that might get a little rusty if you stop using them - when sight was taken away from you by the sun going down* on a moonless cloudy night, it wouldn't matter because the entire society is constructed to make that situation work for you. Getting from A to B, food, trade, everything would be set up so that sight was not the slightest bit necessary to do well at these things. Sight would only bring additional advantage, those advantages many, and the disadvantages minor, if any.

What are the advantages, if everything is set up so that there is no need to be able to see? I mean, seeing people's facial expressions, I'll grant you that. But what things are blind people going to make that have a visual component to them, and why would they add that visual component? What things are the sighted people going to see, and how will that be a major advantage?
posted by 23skidoo at 4:28 PM on May 27, 2005

The advantages would include telepathy, engineering, searching, comparing, evaluating, advantages in probably most things. Because sight is not needed to function well doesn't mean it wouldn't help, often immensely, where availible.

To try to explain this better, I think that it is because the society is built around not having sight that would make sight such a big advantage, not the other way around. The society would be so radicially different from ours that sight would open up radially different ways of doing things, that in turn make radically different things possible. That's big.
posted by -harlequin- at 4:48 PM on May 27, 2005

Because sight is not needed to function well doesn't mean it wouldn't help, often immensely, where availible.

It doesn't mean it would help, either. Maybe blindness is needed to function well in their society.
posted by 23skidoo at 5:42 PM on May 27, 2005

23skidoo:
It doesn't mean it would help, either. Maybe blindness is needed to function well in their society.

can you give a concrete example

I think a more intresting question is how such a society would come about. Suppose there was a pathogen which ate the eyes of most people, but somehow the genetic buliding blocks of the eyes didn't suffer?
posted by delmoi at 10:09 PM on May 27, 2005

such as being able to learn how to better read someone's emotional state

That assumes people would have developed visual expressions when no one was reading them. It's not impossible, but it doesn't seem that likely, really. We would probably have developed more non-linguistic information sharing on olfactory or sonar levels instead. Actually, we often look to people's eyes for information: why would human beings have eyes at all if 95% of them were blind? What scenario would have led us to develop the organ to see with, without actually seeing? I think you'd have to have two different species to get that, and then as others have said, the sighted would probably 'win.'

re: people being afraid of telepathy, I don't think that's true - it's just not been effectively shown to work, and is certainly a common fantasy. But if a sixth sense were to develop in some way - if people could reliably and simply receive information, and especially if scientists could make sense of it, I don't think it would be denied. We accept that bats & dolphins have senses we don't.

In one way, it's quite amazing how similar most animals, and all humans, are, in terms of which senses are available. But if 5% of the population had an additional sense, there would be some scientific/non mystical / critical thinking types who were sighted, whereas the telepathic rarely seem to be the sort who will spend a lot of time in a lab trying to work out the mechanics of their capacity.

Our civilization is heavily based on sight. We generally consider it the most important sense. some people who desperately love music might choose blindness over deafness, but pretty much everyone still thinks that sight is the more useful of the two (taste & smell are almost just nice little extras, and touch is absolutely primary). If we'd developed without sight, it almost seems necessary that we'd have developed some other sense in its place (such as bats have). If we didn't, if we lived in a world where all animals had not developed eyes, but only the other four senses, then it seems hard to explain how one in twenty would then suddenly get eyes. seems like you have to go with those 'light sensitve patches' that evolutionary theorists describe as the precursors to eyes, and then it would be genetically determined... yeah, I'm still having trouble seeing a good way to explain the 95/5 split without a rampant mutilation or disease...
posted by mdn at 4:48 AM on May 28, 2005

What about a planet that was too bright with visible light?
&
This is a 'what if?' question that requires you to overhaul everything....

This is an idea I started with: It's a fact we see the world upsidedown already, because our vision has compensated..instead of seeing the ground as the sky, which is what is actually there...we see the reverse...
posted by drakepool at 5:42 AM on May 28, 2005