What do we mean by Interdependence?
We know that “interdependence” isn’t a word that’s used a lot in casual, everyday conversation.
Especially not in the U.S.
So, what do we mean when we talk about “interdependence?”
Separating Fact from Fiction: Are we Human or are we Independent?
Though it may seem like a technical term, “interdependence” captures something fundamental to the human experience.
That is, regardless of the size or complexity of the groups we form, humans persistently relate to one another. We communicate, interact, and form ties that bind.
Inevitably, for as long as we relate to one another, we will always rely upon each other.
At various points in our lifespan, humans become dependent on others for care. At nearly all other stages, we are the ones on whom others, whether our children or elders, rely.
The curious fact of life has been dubbed “the inevitability of dependency.” Here, we will call it the reality of dependency, for it hardly “happens upon” someone, but rather is always there as an objective, empirical reality.
Rather than dependency coming into being, what instead tends to change are the conditions for its perception. In many cases, these conditions are “dis-abling” in nature. Only when we get injured, suddenly in need of a wheelchair or a set of crutches, do we recognize our reliance on the built environment, and the ramps, elevators, and other adjustments that accommodate ambulatory capacities. Likewise, only when we develop a flare-up of chronic ulcerative colitis do we recognize our reliance on health insurance coverage. But these dependencies were just as real as they were before our needs arose.
To recognize the reality of dependency is to shine a light on our essential sociality. The concept of “interdependence” recognizes that social realities and outcomes are contingent on relationships between two or more people, situations, variables, or entities, as well as the more complex social systems in which these forces interact.
In this light, the needs, concerns, and experiences of disabled individuals provide the basis for an inclusive and liberatory practical ethical paradigm. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson put it in Disability Studies: “disability is the most human of experiences, touching every family and -- if we live long enough -- touching us all.”
Indeed, we spend only a small slice of our own lives as seemingly independent, autonomous individuals. Yet still, even in these moments, we rely on others for many, if not all, of the luxuries to which we attribute our flourishing.
In a curious twist of fate, however, much of the world in which we actually live is built atop an assumption of our fundamental independence.
To some, the misapprehension in these moments reflect “the myth of independence.” To underscore their systemic and political nature, they are understood here as constituting an ideology of independence. The ideology of independence creates a de facto hierarchy of moral personhood in which disabled individuals — among others who rely, to whatever extent, on others for access or to have their basic needs met — scatter the lower rungs.
The Ideology of Independence and Its Discontents
In the United States, the ideology of independence underpins the design, implementation, and enforcement of law and policy. It creates, as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha articulates in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, a moral hierarchy in which one’s value is equated to their productivity and self-sufficiency.
The ideology of independence gives rise to the “medical model” of disability, which accords to disabled individuals a marginalized status of inferiority; worthy of care and support only to the extent they could be provided through a profit motive.
The pervasiveness of the ideology of independence can be attributed to the marginalization of the reality of dependency. For many, the term “dependency” may conjure the history of paternalistic, institutionalized caregiving rebuked by activists in the Disability Rights Movement (DRM) of the late-20th century. Activists in the DRM advocated against the “medical model” of disability which rendered disabled individuals as defective or incapable of self-determination; merely passive recipients of care. The DRM successfully won for disabled people the same rights and opportunities enjoyed by nondisabled people.
However, these gains left unchallenged the prevailing ideology of independence. As Congress wrote at the outset of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), “the Nation’s proper goals regarding individuals with disabilities are to assure equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for such individuals.” This goal may work well enough to assert disabled individuals’ legal rights, but it leaves open the question of what else is needed to ultimately secure dignified lives for disabled individuals.
Despite the transformative impact of the DRM, the disability rights legislation passed in the late 20th century maintained the hierarchy of value which marginalizes those with support needs, or who may otherwise attain neither independence nor economic self-sufficiency.
Interdependence and its Implied Possibilities
A more recent thread of scholarship has sought to reframe the reality of dependency as under an ideal of interdependence. Disability justice, as the “second wave” of the movement for disability rights, has centered “interdependence” as an antidote to the ideology of independence and its discontents.
Recent scholarship on the diversity of caregiving experiences highlights the relationship of reciprocity between the caregiver and care-recipient which so often emerges from care work. Activist and writer Mia Mingus writes of interdependence as central to “access intimacy;” the feeling of mutual trust and validation that obtains when one’s access needs are recognized by others. In Care Reimagined: Transforming Law by Embracing Interdependence, Stetson University Law Professor Robyn M. Powell urges us to reframe care as something shaped by people with disabilities, but ultimately provided under a “collective responsibility inherent to human existence.”
Focus on care, and specifically the systems of policy and law which shape the quality, accessibility, and instrumental efficacy of caregiving, has enabled this scholarship to wield practical political significance. Focused scholarship on an “ethics of care”, or “care ethics,” began in 1982, when Carol Gilligan, the feminist psychologist and ethicist, challenged the field of moral psychology to replicate its gendered findings under different conditions. Whereas moral psychologists had previously studied practical ethics from an individualistic perspective, Gilligan encouraged a more relational basis.
Heeding the call, the feminist philosopher Eva Feder Kittay has contributed significant scholarship over nearly three decades to developing an ethics of care with practical political implications. Kittay’s work is grounded in the lived realities of dependency and caregiving, which she experienced as the mother of, and caregiver for, an individual with significant cognitive and intellectual disabilities.
In her most recent contribution, Kittay writes that Care Ethics, when fully realized, is an “egalitarian politics of care” regulated by the ideal that “all are equally entitled to the care they require to enable them to flourish, according to their own lights.”
Care, as the motive force behind this egalitarian politics, is to be provided “so that one can flourish according to one’s own lights.” From this perspective, a just society is “one in which people with different degrees of precariousness, need, and dependency can live together on terms that fairly embrace the concerns of all.”
Kittay offers two duties incumbent upon those who seek care-driven justice.
The first duty concerns that from which care-givers must refrain. That is:
1) In caring for those to whom they are responsible, caregivers must not prevent others from receiving the care they need.
The second, but no less important, duty concerns what each individual must do on behalf of the broader society of which we are a part. That is:
2) “[To] promote a social/political and economic order in which those who need care can receive it, and those who need to care for another are not depleted, exploited, or dominated as a consequence.”
These two duties alone imply responsibility-generating relationships between the caregiving and the cared-for, caregivers to one another, and the broader society to both the care infrastructure and the care workforce that comprises it.
The eternal recurrence of the same simple fact — that the flourishing of any one person is often held up in the responsibilities that groups of people have toward one another — throws into stark relief the relevance and importance of interdependence as an ethical ideal. An ideal of interdependence can provide a useful framework for understanding both what we owe one another and how we ought to satisfy those obligations.
When pursued as a normative ideal, interdependence can help bring the reality of dependency out from the shadows and into proper focus. By placing the relational being at the center of morality, law, and policy, an ideal of interdependence can create meaning and worth for all, out of the many.
In starting The Interdependent Futures Lab, our objective was to contribute to making the world work at least for those with the greatest access and support needs. We consider ourselves to be rowing in the same direction as the second wave of the disability justice movement. Our work will embrace the reality of dependency while striving to actualize the ideal of interdependency.