Well, not exactly, but if pretending to be part of a group is really the only way to express solidarity with anyone anymore, I guess I’ll roll with it.
For those incurious souls who didn’t find it necessary to follow the CNN headline Blind Masseurs Jump from Bridge , the facts are these: the South Korean government passed a law in 1963 that said only blind people could be licensed as massage therapists, ratifying a tradition that has existed in Japan since the eighteenth century and in South Korea since the early twentieth. The health ministry recently decided to overturn this law in response to a lawsuit brought by unlicensed sighted masseurs. Blind masseurs have been staging protests, some deadly , claiming that sighted competition will drive them out of the only profession open to them.
The reversal of the ‘63 law is unfortunate. Disabled adults need some kind of protection against unrestricted competition, which, left to itself, would sift them to the unemployable dregs of the labor pool. All other things being equal, I far prefer an organic tradition to the legal gymnastics of something like the ADA. (Having invoked the shibboleth of "organic tradition," I should furthermore point out that one reason there are so many guerrilla sighted masseurs running around the country is that, during the 90’s financial crisis, the government offered free massage training to the unemployed.)
It is providential that the story broke this week, because it reads like a textbook argument for one bulletpoint I would want to see on any manifesto of postmodern conservatism : a deep suspicion of "rights" talk. Blind Koreans claim a right to some kind of employment; sighted Koreans claim they have a right to enter any profession they’re good enough to make a living at; if it were simply a matter of whose "right" is less coercive, the sighted masseurs would have the stronger claim. Enter postmodern conservatism: the only way to resolve which rights we care about and which ones we don’t is to have some kind of moral framework in the background, and, if we’ve already gone through the trouble of settling on a moral framework, we should really just pass moral and legal judgments based on that and eliminate the distracting middle-man of rights language.
I don’t think it’s controversial to say, in a choice between a world in which blind Koreans are unemployable and a world in which a few thousand sighted Koreans are forced to become hair stylists instead, the latter is to be preferred. Is the old South Korean law discriminatory? Yes, but do we really care?
