Moab IV and the Power of Helping

 A long time ago, I watched Star Trek The Next Generation. At the time, I remember despite liking the show overall, I was a bit disappointed with Geordi La Forge as disability rep, because his disability basically has no practical effect on his life due to advanced technology.

But that's the thing. We're already working on technology that will work similarly to Geordi's visor. It'd be more notable if a blind character in Star Trek didn't have a technological way to see, given their overall technology level.

And while I'd like to for once see a fictional blind character who is realistically blind - not exaggeratedly helpless for comedic or horror purposes, not given some way to compensate, and not having their visual impairment randomly forgotten about whenever it's not plot relevant - I have to admit that Geordi's portrayal does bring up some good discussion points about disability. Especially in one episode, The Masterpiece Society.

In this episode, while investigating a space phenomenon, they discover a colony it's endangering on a planet called Moab IV. The colony are humans, but have deliberately isolated themselves from the rest of humanity because their founders wished to create a perfect eugenic society. 

Naturally, Geordi La Forge isn't particularly happy about this, especially when the representative they're speaking to admits they would have eliminated him before birth if he'd been conceived in their society. He discusses how, instead of eliminating him for being "defective", the Federation instead provided him with a visor, and begins describing how it works. As he does, he realizes that the visor's technology holds the key to a solution to saving Moab IV.

At the time, I felt a bit dissatisfied with that ending. Geordi doesn't save them with anything innate to his blindness, nor even with an invention he created. His visor was made for him as a child, most likely by a sighted person. In fact, the real-life research and engineering efforts going into making technology that would be a precursor to Geordi's visor is primarily headed by sighted people.

But recently, I realized something. Even without him needing to do anything himself, Geordi's very existence, and the existence of other blind people, is what motivated people to invent the visor.

And in real life, seeing the needs of disabled people and striving to meet them has led to many other technological advances, including many that have helped people who don't have those disabilities. Typewriters were initially invented for a blind person to write more legibly, and ended up being a mainstay of all office workers and the basis behind the design of keyboards. Speech recognition technology was invented for people with hand movement disabilities, and are now used routinely by people wanting to type or issue computer commands while their hands are busy. Text-to-speech was invented for blind people and is now frequently used for multitasking as well. Closed captioning was designed for deaf people, but has since become a feature used by people in noisy environments, people who are watching a video on mute, language learners, and children learning to read. And thought controlled devices, a mainstay of science fiction, are currently being designed for use by people with locked-in syndrome.

Among neurodivergent people, most of the pushback against eugenics has traditionally come from arguments hinging on the idea of the ND person themselves doing something that helps everyone else, something their ND traits helped them do. And there is something to that - many ND people have talents that heavily overlap with skills needed in STEM and creative fields.

But not all do. And even if they do, some are too disabled to effectively make use of those talents. This raises a question the neurodiversity movement has often been uncomfortable with - what if an ND person really doesn't have any exceptional talents? Are we still better off with them existing than not?

And I think The Masterpiece Society is a good answer to that. Because Geordi didn't need to be the one who thought up the answer. The plot would've worked just as well if Geordi had had comorbid intellectual disability in addition to his blindness, and the chief engineer was a sighted guy who cared about Geordi and learned how to maintain his visor for him. Geordi saved Moab IV by existing, by having unique needs and being known to people motivated to meet those needs.

Our ancestors have always sought to help disabled people. Long before we were humans, we, like other apes, would've shared food with injured or disabled individuals and did our best to help them. What has changed over time is our ability to understand the nature of disabilities and tailor our efforts to match the specific needs of the individual, not our desire to help. And as our technology has grown, our ability to help has grown apace.

And that's something that makes even the most profoundly disabled people useful to society - as long as we have people motivated to care for them and explore better ways to meet their needs.