Value though is a relative matter, and those same contributors have by and by made it clear that a comments policy would be appreciated, especially if it were to relieve them of the need to be responsive to the sort of comments which have had their fifteen minutes of fame and more already.  It was recently pointed out to me in fact that there seems to be no more than ten or twelve longtime commenters responsible for most all of the concern trolling and nay-saying encountered on neurodiversity blogs.  While the argument for kicking them to the curb would be no different were their numbers far larger, this seems as good a time as any to let them go their way as we go ours.

Below, see Shift Journal’s comments guidelines, effective Labor Day weekend, 2010.  These will have a permanent home on their own page, linked to from the sidebar, and are subject to change as time and circumstances unfold.  In effect then this post stands as an archive version, as it will not be edited to reflect future changes.

We are at work here.  What that work may be will vary with when and who you are visiting, however workplace rules for visitors apply here as they do in the brick-and-mortar world.  It is commonly understood for instance that when visiting a brick-and-mortar workplace, one is not at liberty to pop into this or that office or cubicle in order to inform the occupants that they are not doin’ it right.  Such behavior might reasonably be met not with discussion, but with a call to building security and an armed escort to the parking lot; similarly inappropriate comments here will be removed from the premises by means of that virtual trap-door known as the delete button.  To the extent this is at all a departure from standard social media practices, it is aimed at supporting the notion that Shift Journal’s primary mission is reflective.

Readers and contributors alike are invited to reflect on the nature of autism past, present, and future; the opportunities here are for expanding and refining vision and perspective rather than restricting them. Contributors are well aware that there are raging controversies in the larger autism world.  Shift Journal seeks to occupy a position that is removed from the front lines of these controversies—a still, calm center or “safe space” where offense and defense are not vital concerns.  Friction will arise between contributors as it will at any workplace; however engaging with outside detractors is not a priority.  Autistic is assumed here to be a legitimate way to be in the world.  With this as a given, contributors can go on to craft and float ideas; to play with possibilities; to store and share language that can be carried into conflict, or used to build fresh understandings of autism in contexts other than—and larger than—the current “autism wars.”  Comments which further this mission are welcome; comments which detract from it are not so much unwelcome as they are irrelevant.

If there are truly egregious errors which must be called to our attention, visitors are invited—as one might do with a brick-and-mortar outfit—to use the contact form.  Genuinely constructive criticism, offered thus away from the grandstand view of the comments section, is much appreciated—and may result, even if we disagree, in a request for you to submit in publishable form.  Concern trolls and naysayers on the other hand—however well-intentioned—are encouraged to assert their relevance by the digital equivalent of picketing across the street.  Nothing, after all, would announce to the world that we’ve all arrived as would the establishment of counteringshiftjournal.com.  ;-)

(Thanks to Rob Beschizza and Ron Gruber—and commenters—in this post at Boing Boing for helping me to clarify my thoughts here.)

Present and future contributors are asked to consider that in coming months especially we may or may not see some extra-tempting softballs in the comments, which somehow just beg for a reply.  Be warned that if you get to them before I do, and you have chosen to reply, I may well delete your reply along with the comment which tempted you.  Just sayin’.

Imagine, just as an exercise, that beyond the one percent of the population diagnosable with autism, there is another four percent whose cognitive style is describable under the less rigorous category of the Broad Autism Phenotype, or BAP

Now imagine this progression extending not only into the future, but also in the opposite direction, spread over evolutionary time, over millions of years and thousands of generations.  Out of autism we may have come, and into autism we may be returning. This is the vision, in part and in my own words, of the man who launched this website a year ago now, Andrew Lehman.

April of this year saw two watershed events in Andrew’s life.  One was the publication of his book, Evolution, Autism, and Social Change, which pulled together the ideas he had been working out for years at Neoteny and elsewhere into an elegantly coherent whole.  The other event was an urgent, pre-emptive operation to head off the threat of a brain aneurysm which had been a closely surveilled, mostly quiet companion for some time.  While the surgery was successful, it has left Andrew with higher priorities and more pressing challenges than participating in online discussion.

The five entries with which Andrew launched Shift are gathered here; parts of these posts and others here made their way in some form into his book.  While I was invited to be the only other ground floor contributor besides Andrew, I’d like to recognize that his intention for Shift was that it be a commons for contributors, a place where many and conflicting viewpoints could be sorted through by readers.  For all that Andrew has a longtime and diverse following at Neoteny, we were both outsiders to the online autism community; I at least had little idea what a thoroughly polarized battlefield it was, or what we must have looked like wandering out onto this scarred, cratered landscape, earnestly soliciting contributors.

By March of this year, I had taken stock of what I felt was and was not already being done well in online autism discussion, and posted a handful of entries outlining where I believed Shift Journal could fill in the gaps.  Andrew responded by suggesting that I insert my name as Editor and Publisher; I took his suggestion (unnecessarily hi-falutin’ as this title still seems), thus concluding an eight-month dance I refer to as the Velvet Shanghai—eight months, apparently, being how long it took Andrew to see me convince myself that this site was as much my child as his, and that I actually had time to both manage and contribute to it.

While time constraints continue to be an issue, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Andrew Lehman for placing this project in my hands.  Some years ago, somewhere on one of his blogs, he noted that seeing possibilities (such as this one, I presume) and laying the conditions for them to come into being was something for which he seemed to have a talent.  It is a privilege to have been included in such a process.  Thank you, Andrew.

Readers who browse the site by category headings know that some of these categories describe areas which contain few entries, while others are overflowing.  Though it might seem more practical in the short term to modify them, for now these category headings are markers of unfulfilled potential, of attention yet to be paid.

It is not a small thing to absorb or even to entertain the implications of the idea that we live in cyclical time, that out of autism we may have come, and into autism we may be returning.  In the entry which to my mind serves as a keynote for this site, Andrew wrote that “Autism … rights represent the third wave of genetic justice,” following as it does on the movements for civil rights, and for women’s and gay’s rights.  Much of the discussion here recently has centered on this struggle; one of my observations in March was that Shift Journal could serve as a center of gravity for the reflective task of self-definition that underlies such movements.

So this is where a good deal of energy and interested contributors are coming from today; tomorrow or the decade or later after, here or elsewhere, we may see similar energy focused in other areas.  Shift Journal is a big-picture endeavor; we are surveying a large territory, it’s a project not to be wrapped up or even comprehended in the space of a single year.  In this sense Shift is not even so much about the content already available here as the entries yet to come.  Watch this space—or better yet, send along a submission to help shape it.

Back to this notion of returning to autism, I want to direct attention to the ouroboros, the tail-swallowing snake up there in Shift’s masthead.  I’ve never discussed the figure-eight aspect with Andrew; that may or may not simply be artistic license, but the ouroboros itself refers to (among other things) cyclical time.  In the West, we tend to view time as something irrevocable, marching on, in a single unwavering direction.  Rightly or wrongly, we interpret even the tenets of evolutionary theory to imply only progress, so that no one—not even the most staunchly regressive conservative—wishes to go backwards in evolutionary terms.

The concept of evolutionary time entertained here is, again, cyclical rather than linear.  A return to autism—while prevalent biases and preconceptions may say otherwise—is no more a regression or backwards turn than is the return of clock hands to the same positions every twelve hours.  If your sensibilities insist on a vision of progress, imagine a spiral, circling into and plumbing the depths of mysteries.  Given our limited lifespans in the face of evolutionary time, all this remains metaphor in any case.  Even Andrew’s offering of a new evolutionary theory will likely need generations in order for its measure to be taken in scientific terms.

In the meantime, that theory—and this website along with it—provides a framework in which the legitimacy of autistic experience is a given.  We can now set about seeing what we might build on that framework, while also learning to recognize the staggering extent, historically and in everyday life, of what has already been created out of autistic experience.  There’s plenty more as well, as I’ve said, to tuck into—and there’s always an open call for contributors—but even if we don’t get to it all again this year, those tasks alone should be enough to keep us busy.

Girl finds boy, girl gets boy, girl loses boy.  So go the first three-quarters of the tale of mortal Psyche and the immortal Cupid.  At this point in the story the gods have made clear to both Venus and Psyche that they must come to terms with one another.  Venus of course has had it in for Psyche all along because Psyche’s beauty is a bit too much of a threat for the goddess.  And now on top of this Psyche is pregnant by none other than Venus’ own son, thus threatening to make the goddess of beauty a grandmother.  The above paragraph, taken from Josephine Preston Peabody’s 1897 retelling, describes the first of four tasks the furious Venus assigns to Psyche as she seeks to be reunited with Cupid.

It is, of course, a sorting task.

Here is Tyler Cowen again, from the now-renamed The Age of the Infovore:

One strong feature of autism is the tendency of autistics to impose additional structure on information by the acts of arranging, organizing, classifying, collecting, memorizing, categorizing, and listing.  Autistics are information lovers to an extreme degree and they are the people who engage with information most passionately.

We love to sort.

Or I do, at any rate.  I’m away from home tonight, or the image above would be of the shelf in my office where I have a row of neatly stacked plastic boxes, each with a printed label bearing the name of one or another category of computer peripheral, cable, cord, or other tiny-ish pieces of hardware.  I am most proud of, and inordinately amused by the label on the box of miscellaneous bluetooth paraphernalia, which reads Blueteeth.

Other parts of the office have been in a state of partially sorted disorganization for months.  It’s almost as if I need to know I have sorting to be done, as much as I need to have it done.  My computer hard drives mirror the state of my office, though as they collect clutter more quickly, they tend to get the lion’s share of sorting attention—especially as the office itself completely disappears from my awareness when I am clicking through drives and folders, whereas both computers are always beckoning even when my back is to them.

I’ve been thinking today though about the shape of the satisfaction that grows and clarifies itself as you apply yourself relentlessly to a sorting task, the way things feel as the tags and categories get set and the loose ends find their places.  I’m not synaesthetic, not much or typically anyway, but I do feel that I can almost touch and see the sense of satisfaction I get from sorting, just by thinking about it.

On the other hand, if I could hear that building sense of satisfaction just by thinking about it, I was pleased and surprised today to find that it does seem to sound much like this …

… which turned up today (now yesterday) at the inestimable Boing Boing.  I’ve just been looping it in my free moments ever since.  Yes, obsessively.

Oh, and Psyche?  She got her man back, and became immortal.  And made Venus a proud grandmother.

A daughter, Pleasure.

This is something that was first brought home to me as a young person, while attending a summer jazz workshop run by one Jamey Aebersold.  Years before anyone thought to market anything so deliciously self-conscious as a “fantasy rock and roll camp,” Aebersold was hosting real jazz camps, a week at a time, for small group or big band, for ages 14 to adults.  By real jazz camps, I mean very few of us in attendance needed to be marketed to in order to get us there, nor did we have many illusions or starry-eyed dreams about what we were there for.

Aebersold was also, in one of the great non-musical jazz traditions, a sly and impish put-on artist.  While he came by his Kentucky drawl honestly, he used to love to stand up in front of an auditorium with that drawl in overdrive, talking about the necessity of mastering the relationships between “skiles and cards” (scales and chords).  The takeaway was that even a (supposedly) backwards hick and unlikely but consummate jazz geek like him could become competent as a player, or more to the point, that any of us as well could earn the respect of our peers and our betters.  The effect was to even the playing field; while there were inevitably a few attendees who seemed “cooler” than the rest of us, their coolness paled in relevance to the actual work at hand, and it might well be lost altogether if they couldn’t actually play.

Jamey Aebersold’s instrument was alto saxophone, but he typically didn’t take part in the evening faculty concerts.  The one year I remember that he did, he announced that he would cover the Jimmy Van Heusen standard It Could Happen to You, drawing scattered laughter with the afterthought, “That’s what prisoners say.”  And then he launched into what slowly built to an intense, blistering tour-de-force of technique and passion that turned up the electricity in that hall to an almost uncomfortable level, raising hairs on end and taking most of us by complete surprise.  It ended with a standing ovation, not just because of the performance itself, but because of the incongruity of performer and performance.  The mouse had roared, and we had gotten the message loud and clear:  if that socially awkward, beak-nosed 40 year-old nerd up there could do that, why, so could the rest of us.  That night especially, we respected the hell out of Jamey Aebersold.

A few months ago I wrote about an autistic ethos as exemplified in Information Technology (IT) circles, and I’m going on at some length here about the Aebersold workshops because they too exemplified this ethos. The coin of the realm in “real” jazz circles, as in IT, is respect, respect awarded on the basis of sheer competence—not the ability to maintain a stage presence, work a crowd, put on a good show, or even to sell records (need I point out the similarities to the social demands heedlessly placed on autistics?).  I’m not naming any of the faculty because I don’t expect their names would have any meaning here (though Tom Harrell would be an instructive example), but they always seemed to be the pick of the crop; always a few notable, world-class names but without fail they were musician’s musicians, the sorts who were regularly hired by notable names.  Whether they were working and recording or had retired to the security of a university position, they were above all players who had the respect of their peers.

So.  The first year I went, sometime in the late 1970’s, there was a question-and-answer session.  Someone stood up and began speaking earnestly about the consistently poor choices that were nominated and voted on in the Playboy Jazz Poll, and what could be done about it?  Maybe half of us there were underage males, so there was immediately a certain tension in the air at the mere mention of Playboy—not to mention at the naivety of anyone who would take the Playboy Poll seriously in the first place.

While it may have been somewhat relevant in the 1950’s or early 1960’s, by the late 1970’s it was clear that the sort of people who took Playboy seriously had by and large been left behind by the musicians themselves. By then what the poll measured was which jazz artists were being marketed effectively, and there was a wide gap between them and the ones who had that bond of mutual respect, that shared autistic ethos.

Whoever it was who replied knew just how to break the tension—and how to answer the question fully and completely in just a very few words.  Before the Playboy situation would get better, he offered with a dismissive shrug, and I quote, “… a lot of people will have to die.”  The room exploded in laughter, and we moved on to the next question—but what remained was a feeling of collegial well-being, that we were all in the right place, with the right people, with the right priorities.

I’m happy to report that here in 2010, Google can not seem to even identify for me the year in which the Playboy Jazz Poll finally went away.  And my wife’s old flame Kurt, a sometime jazz promoter in NYC, has assured me that the scene remains alive and well, regardless.

All of which is not to suggest that we be ugly with our wishes, or even that we should make a point of keeping a bottle of whiskey on hand so that we may run it through our kidneys before dribbling it over the grave of this or that recently departed nemesis.  It is to remind that advancing the values of neurodiversity is a long-term, multi-generational project, and that as such, it’s more about winning the hearts and minds of those who aren’t even paying attention yet than it is about keeping up the battle against detractors.

I had a quick pang of panic and regret here as I realized I haven’t left much room for suggesting what I do think ought to be done, but the fact is I’ve already described it.  As a well-run IT department does, or as the jazz camps I attended did, what needs to be done is to demonstrate mutual respect based on those things which matter to us. We need to exemplify an autistic ethos by busying ourselves with what we deem important, be it switching all the servers over to Linux with a minimum of fuss, interference, and downtime; ignoring our smug, guitar-playing pals with their cultish reliance on playing by ear alone, and instead—yes, obsessively—learning our skiles and cards upside down and inside out; or be it building out and realizing an autistic culture that knows its own worth, with or without outside validation.

As necessary as it can be to engage in conflict with others—when non-consenting autistics are subjected to dangerous or nonsensical treatments, or when the legitimacy of autistics generally is actively and actually being undermined—it’s worthwhile to keep in mind that much of what’s out there in the way of opinion and viewpoint amounts to little more than autism’s version of the Playboy Jazz Poll:  it’s nothing with which we need occupy ourselves.  Caitlin Wray’s essay from yesterday is a good example of this approach; she’s simply moving forward, neither waiting for nor demanding consent from those who would prefer her life and her son be invisible.

Whatever space we’re going to occupy with our minds, it ought to be space that is attractive to younger minds and to minds yet unborn, and more immediately, to those who are newcomers to autism blogs.  Making it attractive, as Caitlin does, should be our business.  Add time, and patience, to such a space, and I think there’s reason to believe it’s going to prevail as the place to be.  The inexorable fact is that people who will never change their minds will nonetheless die. In the long game they are irrelevant; their best hope is to bait us into playing the short game, into making them seem relevant by throwing our energy at them, wasting it in worry and agitation.  Even a many-headed Hydra though, if neglected long enough, will grow old and die.

Time is an ally here, if we allow it to step in and do what time does.

I still remember the wonder I felt when I learned that visible light is just the narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum to which our eyes are sensitive, that light was part of a greater whole, and that we were in fact able to map and make use of that whole that lay beyond ultraviolet and infrared, in every frequency from radio waves to gamma-rays.  I’ve already expressed my frustration with the spectrum model for autism; I do think it’s far too static and two-dimensional.  Even so though, it was what was available to me when I first really began paying attention.  And now that I think about it, it was much the same wonder that I felt, about unsuspected vistas of unbroken spectrum; only this second time around, instead of electromagnetic energy it was autistic.

Some political thinkers have much the same frustrations I do with the limitations of a spectrum model—as applied to the political spectrum of left to right, or liberal to conservative.  Among those who do still find it useful though, there is a concept concerning windows onto spectrums which has some currency these days, and also offers some parallels with our views onto the autistic spectrum.

What has come to be called the Overton Window measures what politicians perceive to be the range of acceptable policy options from which they can choose without risking their office come election time.  Within that window, one officeholder might lean right, one left, or a single politician might weigh two fairly distant positions on a given policy.  The distance between these two farthest positions, assuming each elected officeholder feels that they can be re-elected by voting these positions—this distance is the width of the Overton Window.

Maybe more important than its width however is where exactly this window sits on a spectrum.  If the window itself moves far to the right for instance, its rightmost observers may find themselves voting for policies which in years prior might have seemed outrageous, radical rightist pipe dreams—while defending those policies as being born of common, everyday wisdom.  Likewise, its leftmost observers may find themselves voting for policies which are for them shockingly moderate and even rightist—all while being pilloried by a savvier right for being “radically” leftist.  Like the old song says, It Could Happen to You.

One thing assumed by this theory is that the window necessarily stays narrow—that there not be all that much difference between all the positions available to politicians.  This assumption was based on observation, and as far as I know, what goes into keeping the window narrow has not been looked into.  I suspect, for what it’s worth, that the political Overton Window could be widened by removing corporate money from the election cycle, doing away with our winner-takes-all electoral college, moving to instant runoff elections, opening up the two-party system to any number of “third” parties, and by busting up media monopolies and allowing our news organizations to once again operate as something other than profit centers.

Autism as well I suggest has its own Overton Window which for years could be mapped pretty much directly onto the original DSM diagnosis and its immediate successors.  This too was a narrow window, but in time other diagnoses came to be recognized as autistic as well, on and on until now even those without diagnoses are claiming recognition as autistic.

Autism’s Overton Window in other words has been expanding continuously—to the left.  This, I believe, is what is taken to be a threat by those who are heavily invested in the traditional, right side “definition” of autism.  Every addition to the leftward spectrum is perceived as a subtraction from the rightward spectrum.  Evidence that the window’s rightward edge is actually receding to the left and allowing autism’s right side edge to slip out of view may be lacking, but the anxiety is there; the simple fact of increased attention paid to autism’s hidden, “occulted” left side is enough to trigger it.

My suggestions for maintaining a wide Overton Window in politics may or may not have correlates in the autism world, but I’m guessing they do.  Corporate money, even from non-profits, may well be working to delegitimize the attention paid to autism’s right-hand spectrum in particular.  Consider the opportunity costs of and the damage wrought by Jenny McCarthy’s corporate-sponsored turn as an Autism Mom.  Consider the way if-it-bleeds-it-leads sensationalism colors autism “news” reporting.

And finally, this is the painful ironic twist that set me to writing on this topic in the first place:  unlike in politics where there are finite numbers of budget dollars or votes to be had, there is no inherent reason for even widely disparate poles of the autism community to be attended to at one another’s expense.  All such reasons it seems to me are ones imposed or imported from the outside, bringing with them a sour whiff of divide-and-conquer.

An ever-increasing multitude of diverse, self-aware, unashamed, educated, articulate, capable, and by neurology and by definition empathetic autistics—a multitude that blends into society while also “getting” autism—is the strongest natural ally that those autistics who are not so blessed will ever have outside of, hopefully, their own families.  To stand in the way of this multitude’s members being recognized, welcomed, and/or oriented to their place on the spectrum is not in the best interest of anyone save those who would profit from the struggles of autistics.

So how about we drown out those profiteers first?  How about we zero their sum before we worry about yours and mine.  There’ll be plenty of time for infighting, insecurities, and intramural politics afterward—I promise you—if we still feel like it.

That’s what I’d like to do here, at least with one example.

James Hillman tells the story of the reception given to a decades-ago archaeological discovery which lent unprecedented support to the stories told of the Maccabees, Jews who rebelled against efforts to eradicate their culture and religion (and whose victory has been celebrated ever since in the festival of Hanukkah).  The archaeologists’ finds were welcomed excitedly by Christian leaders, who viewed them as being of great significance because they represented confirming evidence for the truth of what to many had “only” been apocryphal stories.  In contrast, the excitement of Jewish leaders fell well short of that of their Christian counterparts.  What explained this in Hillman’s view was that the validity of Jewish cultural identity does not rest on any crucially literal facts such as a virgin birth or a resurrection—and that this in turn is reflected in the importance Jewish culture attaches to literal historical facts.

Even if, say, a Moses didn’t really part the Red Sea or receive the Ten Commandments direct from YHWH, those stories are not so central to the validity of Jewish identity as a literal and miraculous Jesus is central to Christianity’s legitimacy.  For all that devout or literal-minded Jews might believe in the stories of the Tanakh they are not in such a precarious position, in terms of their identity, as are believers in Jesus who have so much less reason to identify as Christians if Jesus was not really born of a virgin and risen from his tomb after three days.

Jews, in short,  know who they are regardless. They are “The People Who Wandered for Forty Years in the Desert,” even if they cannot document this with archaeological evidence, and even if it did not happen exactly as described in the Torah.  And, they’re okay with that—this approach has served them well, preventing much instability and insecurity from coming into their world with the rise of scientific thought.  Christians however, unless they are merely admirers of the teachings ascribed to Jesus, bet their identity on the fact that his birth and death as described in the Bible really happened.  For all that Christianity has historically been at odds with Science then, this is oddly enough where they find common ground: evidence-based reality matters deeply to both.  Hence the excitement of Christian leaders over any evidence that corroborates even non-miraculous stories from the Holy Land—let alone, say, the validity of the actual remains of Noah’s Ark.

We might say that while Christianity is based on facts (however unprovable), Judaism—or at least the identity of Jews as a people—is based on story.  Advantage Judaism, I suggest—for not having to be on pins and needles over every twist and turn in the archaeological or any other scientific record.  “Nothing” after all, as Edward Abbey pointed out, “could be more reckless than to base one’s moral philosophy on the latest pronouncements of science.”  Science of course progresses by reversing itself.  Open to self-correction as the scientific method is, to hitch one’s identity to what science says about you is simply to ask to be jerked around, each generation forced to stand and salute whatever passing truths support contemporary scientific theory.

Also crucial here is that Jews have been in charge of defining themselves all along.  Many more powerful forces have tried to define them as vermin and worse, but even when those perspectives were literalized into pogroms and death camps, Jewish people themselves have been remarkably successful at not internalizing definitions imposed on them from outside.  True, some do buy into outside opinion, but even they are arguably the exceptions who prove the rule in that they are set off from the rest of the population via the long-recognized cliché of “the self-hating Jew.”  While autistics have our counterpart specimens, we have yet to similarly set them apart with their own label; I suggest that when we do, it will be a sign that we are defining health and wholeness on our own terms.

Somewhere I have seen it eloquently expressed that story may be all there is, that the universe itself may be made of nothing but story.  I suggest at any rate that this is an insight which Jewish culture has grasped and put to good use, and that autistics have much to learn from their example.  All of our origin stories, for instance—our stories of how the various autisms came to be and got their names—are set in clinics, featuring doctors and diagnoses.  And then we wonder why we keep banging our heads against the Medical Model.

Multiple origin stories are allowed.  Even the Bible has two; this is what kept alive the story of Adam’s starter wife Lilith, whom I’ve suggested is autism’s founding matriarch—but there’s plenty of room for others back there in the misty reaches of time.  I’m sure there are multiple matriarchs, and patriarchs as well, other mythical and not-so-mythical ancestors to whose tribes we belong, if we only knew.  Re-member-ing those tribes should be our business.  There are historical ancestors and contemporary stories to be recognized, recovered, and returned to autism as well—if in fact “autistic” is the most apt term for us.  With aut-ism’s etymological roots planted into the notion of “self,” we are entitled to doubt this; it is in any case not a term we chose for ourselves.  I offer no specific suggestions, only that names can be spells, cast off as well as cast.  Just as we can have multiple origin stories, we may well have other, truer names besides autistic.

We are not the people who wandered the desert for forty years (though the intriguing argument has been made that for us it may have been more like forty-thousand years), however “We are the people who … ” is a sentence we need to learn how to finish for ourselves, and not with one answer but with many.  There is much that properly should be based “on the latest pronouncements of science,” foremost at least where autism is concerned being the efficacy of treatments, therapies, and “cures.”  But as much as I look forward to being informed by what light scientists can shed on autism, what science focuses on this decade or this century will not be what it chooses or is able to focus on in the next, or the next.  There’s no more need to allow our very identity to be dragged willy-nilly along whatever haphazard trail of shiny objects happens to catch the eyes of present or future scientists than there is for the identity of any other people to be dragged along at the end of any other leash.

To date of course, we are the people who have allowed exactly this to happen.  It is still within living memory that scientists were explaining us by way of our “refrigerator moms.”  Rather than putting science on probation for a century or three for that gem, still so many of us unquestioningly take the position—the recklessly precarious position—of looking to neuroscience and psychiatry to tell us who we are.

We are the people, I believe, who can do better than that.  We are made not of brain scans, test scores, and clinical evaluations, but of stories—and it’s time we started learning them.

We can suppose that Dr. Burry’s heirs are thankful for the order of his obsessions; a man who spends the first decade or more of his adult life obsessed with understanding guitars rather than medicine or markets would likely not leave such a substantial inheritance as Burry has so famously provided.  As things stand, he is a wealthy eccentric with all kinds of guitars he doesn’t know how to play.  In an adjacent universe he’s maybe a guy who invests the modest profits from his music store, where he “operates” on ailing guitars while bent over a repair bench.

If you are at all unclear on the nature of autistic obsessions, they can come serially as with Burry’s or they can be lifelong, and are not unlike sexual fetishes in that they are visited upon one rather than chosen.  You might grow up to find that you’re a “leg man” who ogles like a champ … or you might, with equal enthusiasm, wind up pouring over endless financial prospectus statements like Michael Burry did—a feat which allowed him, and him alone, to create the goose that laid the golden eggs.

When obsessions lack utility we tend to view them as symptomatic of pathology, disorder, or at best eccentricity.  When they are successfully monetized, we tend to say that so-and-so “has found his or her calling,” that they “really appreciate the value of hard work and perseverance,” and/or that they are a “genius.”  This is, I suggest, a distinction without a difference.  Oh, the products of different obsessions can be starkly and profoundly different, absolutely.  But to contend that this divergence means there are equally divergent types of autism, or that an autistic obsession which leads to a broadly influential or effective product was never autistic to begin with?  This reveals far more about one’s own prejudices and preconceptions than about the actual nature of autistic obsessions.

Common to all obsessions however profitable is a long-familiar quality which has caught the attention of psychologists who’ve begun to look at its importance as compared to talent, aptitude, and intelligence; that quality would be grit.  Reading through even one prospectus is such an immensely tedious task that virtually no investor ever even tries.  Reading through dozens of them, as Burry did, takes grit—uncommon tenacity, persistence, dedication.  For argument’s sake then—and because I believe there is significant truth to be glimpsed by following this line of thought—I’d like to suggest that when we observe anyone who displays sustained determination and perseverance in the pursuit of mastery over a subject, a field, or a skill set, our default assumption should be that this grit is autistic in origin.  I’m not asserting that all grit comes of autism, only that our first assumption ought to be that it does, that far more of it than we suspect does, and also that there is nothing so terribly or insultingly “wrong” with identifying exceptional perseverance as an autistic character trait—yes, right up there alongside “perseveration”—even in those we do not know to be autistic.

Granted, my example Dr. Burry, no mudblood he, has his autism pedigree, his official diagnosis.  We do know him to be autistic—but there was never anything inevitable about his being diagnosed.  It happened only because his child came to be diagnosed, and once familiar with autism’s characteristics, Burry made the initial connection for himself.  For every Michael Burry then, there are how many men and women like him who go to their graves undiagnosed?  Burry, remember, spent years rubbing shoulders with doctors—specialists in fact in the workings of the brain—and yet not a one of them, apparently, ever saw fit to see him recognized as autistic.  How much less likely then that autistic people in other situations are being accurately identified.

Then there is the issue of the “mudbloods,” a term I’m stealing from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, where it refers to those who while not full-blooded wizards, are wizards nonetheless, even if they are not always willingly recognized as such by their full-blooded peers.  For every undiagnosed Michael Burry, I suggest, there are countless more people who display some, most, or all of the characteristics of autism, but fall short in the intensity or consistency of that display, enough so that they miss being diagnosable only, as it were, by various technicalities.  I ask you to consider that these “mudbloods” make up a larger group in fact than do diagnosable autistics, even if all such “officially” autistic people were to be identified and counted.

What this all means, if true, is that autism is far more deeply woven into the fabric of society than we have yet recognized.  Instead it goes unnamed, or presents as geekiness, nerdiness, introversion, or eccentricity—also obsessiveness, perseverance, stick-to-it-ness … in a word, grit.  All this and more, I suggest, is autism.  If you wish to focus your life and energies only on ameliorating the disabling aspects of autism, blessings be upon you—such energy and dedication, appropriately applied, are in far too short supply.  But it is simply dishonest and misleading to insist that autism as a whole does not extend beyond, and by comparison even dwarf the traditional notion of autism as a disability.  That this is received as threatening news to many peoples’ worldview and self-image is perhaps understandable, but that makes it no less true.  What we have been observing since the discovery and naming of autism, it has always seemed to me, is the diminutive “tail” of autism-as-disability wagging the astonishingly able “dog” that is autism in the whole.

How astonishingly able, you ask?

Given that 1969’s True Grit is the Western shoot-‘em-up that defined that word for American audiences, I’ve been running over the characters in my mind.  Each of the three protagonists displayed a particular brand of grit.  Mattie’s was fueled by her need for justice and loyalty to her murdered father; La Boeuf’s by his sense of duty and pride of office.  I’m willing to argue however that the grit exemplified by John Wayne’s hard-drinking, hygiene-agnostic, socially abrasive Rooster Cogburn is an autistic grit.  He may have been a lawman like La Boeuf, but he alone seemed motivated by obsession, driven by forces that were beyond circumstance.  “Going after bad guys” was simply what he did.  Drunk or sober, it was his special interest.  That’s autism, that’s where it gets its traction on the world, all dramatized right there on your Silver Screen in the unlikely anti-hero Cogburn, a conspicuously impaired “one-eyed fat man.”

I submit that the least-recognized and least celebrated yet most common and widespread type of grit, the kind that has kept mankind lurching forward for these past several hundred years of scientific, social, and artistic progress, is autistic grit.  This is the grit of obsession, of enthusiasm, of enthusiasmos—of “being possessed by the god,” as the Greeks had it.  Watch that scene in True Grit’s trailer where Wayne’s Cogburn charges at four armed, mounted men all by himself, a pistol in one hand and a rifle in the other.  That’s not heroism, nor is it foolhardiness.  What that scene portrays is a man deeply, enthusiastically in love with his obsession, enough so that he will risk his life in its service.  This is the sort of commitment and dedication (or alternatively, “possession” by forces which originate beyond one’s personal circumstances) that when applied across the spectrum and history of human experience, moves mountains, fuels the engine of cultural evolution, and ultimately steers the course of humanity.  And its name, I am suggesting, is autism.

Speaking of Classical deities, to take all this in and accept it is to upset a bigger apple cart than the one so jealously guarded by those who would limit autism’s boundaries to impairment and disability.  To entertain the notion of autistic grit as foundational to cultural evolution is also to discount the heroic myth of that grit which is summoned solely by sheer willpower, the heroic grit called forth by those who haven’t an autistic bone in their body.  This would be the much-celebrated myth of Hercules, the archetypal Great Man, the original Army of One.

It is this Herculean mindset—unlike Cogburn’s, always a resolutely sober one—which seeks to slay autism and banish it from the earth, marching as to war, to the imagined cheers of parents everywhere.  It is this mindset which sees autism as nothing but an impediment to the One True Way forward for families and for humankind—as opposed to the multitude of crooked paths which has gotten us all this far.  Autistic grit, on the other hand, is a reminder of the mostly-forgotten reality familiar enough to the Greeks—that the heroic is only one way, and that there are other and in most cases better ways of being a family and of being human.

So it was then that every time I was headed into New England, I would warn my significant other that I was on my way into “truck-unfriendly territory,” that in other words I expected to have “special challenges” communicating the next evening, because who knew when or where I’d be able to find a phone from which to call her.  If everything is bigger in Texas, everything in New England is smaller, to the point that there are comparatively few places besides on the interstate for a big truck to be, much less to find a payphone.  There are many reasons cross-country drivers do not like the east coast in general, but while say, the New Jersey Turnpike is not a fun road to drive on for anybody, the whole of New England is particularly unfriendly for big trucks.

This has gotten me thinking about other challenging or unfriendly places and situations for big trucks, and the implicit parallels there are with challenging or unfriendly places and situations for autistic people.  What I find most striking about this though are the very different ways we view trucking and autism.  I’ll get to that.

Speaking of New Jersey, there is a set of docks there that I used to go to, a closely spaced row of eight or ten dock doors which was a constantly shifting puzzle in terms of whether or not any given full-size tractor-trailer would be able to back in to any available spot.  Depending on who was backed in to which doors and how long each of those trucks was, the hole you were assigned for your trailer might well be impossible to get into, due to that law of physics which states that at least without a good deal of scraping and crunching, two solid objects may not occupy the same space at the same time.  But you never knew until you tried.

I used to sit there with other trucks lined up behind me, watching skilled drivers try for 30 or 40 minutes to get into a spot which only became accessible when someone else finally pulled out.  This happened because those docks were built long before industry lobbyists grew the allowable legal length for trailers from 40 to 53 feet—all while there was never any room to expand the maneuvering area for those longer trailers.  This is a problem in many places in many states, but those docks were the most memorable because they regularly presented what was actually an impossible task, one which social pressure required you to attempt anyway—because that’s the way it had always been done, and other people were waiting on you, and no one who could do anything about it gave a damn that it was not a reasonable situation.

In New York City back then they still allowed 53-foot trailers to come off the interstates and deliver directly to customers.  My first time in, I beat the morning rush over the George Washington Bridge, got some advice on the radio as to which avenues were and were not recommended as southbound routes in the pre-dawn darkness, and arrived in lower Manhattan with my load at the appointed hour.  It was raining, so my mirrors were next to useless.  The receiving dock was on a one-way cross street, from which I’d have to blind-side in. While doing this, I’d be blocking what was becoming a steady stream of traffic, but even once backed in, the docks were recessed only about twenty feet into the building.  Nose to tail, the truck and trailer were better than seventy feet long.

I was able to get that trailer snug and square with my dock, avoiding by inches the cars parked inside in front of an adjacent dock, but to do this I’d had to bring the tractor straight in line with the trailer rather than jackknifed as I’d wanted. My front tires were actually up onto the sidewalk across the street. No problem, I thought; I’ll just unhook the tractor and park it next to the trailer so the cars can get by.

Here is what was extraordinary about that morning.  Before I had time even to climb down out of the cab, cars just started climbing up onto the wide sidewalk, edging around the nose of my tractor, and back down onto the street.  Two of those cars were NYPD patrol cars.  I never did unhook that tractor.  And as apprehensive as I always was about taking a load into one of the boroughs, after that day I never failed to love being there once I was over that bridge.  There is—or was—nothing in the world like driving a big truck in New York City.

I could go on far longer than necessary here.  For every aspect of the landscape one learns to avoid with a big truck—the low overpass, the weight-restricted bridge, the too-tight corner, the uneven ground that can strand a bobtail tractor, the steep grade taken too fast and the runaway truck ramp, the twisty-curvy shortcuts (even the legal ones) you’d best stay off of, the tunnel you cannot take your truck into—I could tell you stories.  And they’d be stories you’d likely never have imagined if you’ve only ever been around drivers of cars.  And yet if you’ve ever driven a car on an interstate highway, there you were, shoulder to shoulder with these limited, restricted, one might even say (compared to you there in your agile little four-wheeler) impaired or low-functioning vehicles.  You’ve probably only ever thought of them as really, really big.  And if you drove a car back in the nineties, I expect you took for granted access to every payphone you passed, whether or not there was truck parking nearby.

For all the things a large commercial vehicle cannot do though, and as big as they certainly are, it never occurs to us to think of them as vehicles afflicted with a disorder.  There are simply places and situations which are challenging or even prohibitive for big trucks.  We make allowances for that, and life goes on.  Maybe most importantly we learn to stay out of their way, to make room for them and let them get their work done.  In the United States in fact we built an entire interstate highway system expressly for the use of the military and for commercial transport. Difficult as this is to imagine now, as those highways were originally conceived passenger cars were never expected to make much use of them; civilians were actually expected to stick to the two-lane roads on which they’d always driven.  So if you drive to work on an interstate highway, consider what a hash you regularly make of truckers’ productivity, swarming uninvited into their workplace twice every weekday like you do.  We’re all pretty much low-functioning during rush hour, aren’t we?

Rather than focus on autism as a disorder then, I would suggest that there are simply places and situations which are challenging or prohibitive or “unfriendly” for autistic people—a population which at least in modern times has never benefited from any large-scale equivalent of an interstate highway system, so that nearly every place and situation on earth represents a potential challenge of some sort, or is in fact prohibitive of autistic people altogether.

It really is a wonder, in such a world, that we get any work done at all.

While the researchers look to differences in language and culture to explain differing views of color and space, one of the confounding aspects of autism is that people who share more even than a culture and a language can have profoundly different views of what the autistic spectrum consists of and looks like, as well as where it starts and ends.  Even so, when we confront others who do not share our views on autism, it can certainly seem as if the challenges are similar to those of communicating with a foreign culture—right down to the tendency to be the Ugly American who seeks to be understood by speaking English, only more loudly than usual.

Clearly to some extent then there is a language and culture clash of a different sort going on among those who pay attention to autism; what I want to focus on for now though is simply the examples given in the article of how profoundly different our perceptions of colors and their relationships can be.  For instance, in the English-speaking world, red and pink are distinctly different colors with their own gradations of shade, whereas blue and light blue are understood to be shades of the same color.  However in Russia and in Russian, blue and light blue are linguistically and conceptually distinct from one another—just as are red and pink among English speakers.  Blue and light blue are not, in other words, different shades of blue to a native Russian; they are different colors from one another.

There’s more.  Believe it or not, the McCarthyites of 1950’s America were way ahead of us on this.  They feared the Red Menace, the Soviets and the Red Chinese above all, yes, but also “the left-wing pinko press” and the “pseudo-pinko-intellectuals.”  The McCarthyites alone had the keen cross-cultural insight to figure out the ChiComs and tip us off to pink as a shade of red—a secret the Chinese had kept for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years before Marx and Mao.  For the Chinese, pink has always been “light red.”

In addition to color, the article continues, spatial perception varies among cultures.  Having once spent some time in a job which involved getting driving directions from people who were not used to giving driving directions, I can attest that spatial perception varies among individuals to a degree that is truly jaw-dropping. The researchers at any rate describe cultural variances which suggest that spatial conception can be organized in even more fundamentally different ways than can color, enough so for example that those who only orient themselves in terms of “north, south, upstream, downstream” may be utterly lost when communicating with another who instead uses only descriptors such as “in front of, in back, left of, and right of.”  And vice-versa.  Witness the tragicomedy that is me or my wife trying to give driving directions to one another.

Transposing all this to how each of us perceives a notion such as “the autistic spectrum” is something of an abstract task, but the tune still plays in a different key, I think.  There is supposedly a running battle in autism circles for instance as to whether autism “is” or “is not” a disability.  This seems roughly as meaningful as a “battle” over whether or not the colors described above are part of the same spectrum, shades of one another, or not.  The idea that autism could “shade” from disability to gift or neutral trait depending on situation or context seems quietly self-evident to some, and an abominable, irresolvable contradiction to others.

In circles where autism is not a frequent subject of conversation, I have seen people reject out of hand the notion that certain strengths and abilities could “be” autism, because for them there is insufficient disability or pathology involved—just as for someone who speaks only Russian, light blue cannot be blue because it clearly does not contain enough … blue.  In both of these examples, the actual nature of the autistic spectrum does not even come into view; what takes center stage instead is simply our own perceptual biases and limitations.

Add the dimensions of space and time to our differing notions of the spectrum, and it really does turn on its end and become a Tower of Babel.  I tried to grapple with this in ++ungood, where I pointed out first of all that we’re all constantly in motion back and forth across and sometimes entirely off the spectrum (Julia Bascom recently tackled this from yet another direction).  I’d maybe amend that to say that the spectrum is also constantly moving around beneath us, sometimes in the direction we’d like, sometimes not, and sometimes, we’d just like it to stop.  If this imagery is all starting to sound a little unwieldy, maybe that only highlights the larger point of that entry, which was that the language we’re currently in possession of to describe the experience of being autistic is almost entirely inadequate to the task.

I’m beginning to think the metaphor of the spectrum is similarly inadequate to the task of describing autism. I’m not quite ready to swear off using it, but I’m definitely ready to find something more apt, something not so susceptible to the sort of apparently intractable perceptual roadblocks described here.

My theory is that these people have seen autistic family members at odds with society and losing the battle, and have decided to take what they see as the easy path – siding with neurotypical society and adopting the value system of their neurotypical age peers, adding a few explicitly anti-autistic features just to make it clear what side they are on. It’s an attempt to be normal that paradoxically appears to lead to mental illness and alienation from family. Life is a constant battle for those who refuse to consider acceptance as an alternative. You make your choices and you live with the consequences.

There are elements here of self-hatred, yes, certainly of self-betrayal. I can recall in my own experience being confronted with incentives to go this route, and dismissing them again and again with the thought, “That’s just a piece of suicide.” For all that this is the case though, what Lili Marlene has described is more of a defense mechanism, one built around identifying with “neurotypical society” and adopting its value system. We already have a term for this. It’s called Stockholm syndrome.

As critics like to point out, this syndrome—much, I might argue, like autism itself—is perhaps even more so than autism at least as much a social construct as it is anything “real.” It does however refer to a recognizable human dynamic, a “piece of suicide” in which those who feel they lack power take on the values of those who seem to have power over them, all in order to avoid the threat of a more complete death. Allow me then to re-construct the conditions under which Stockholm syndrome can occur, simply by substituting one handful of nouns for another.

Here, according to the FBI, are those conditions followed by their restatements altered so as to apply—instructively if not perfectly—to autism in society.

A person held in captivity cannot escape and depends on the hostage taker for life. The captor becomes the person in control of the captive’s basic needs for survival and the victim’s life itself.

An autistic person in society cannot escape and depends on society for acceptance. Society is in control of the autistic’s basic needs for social legitimacy.

The hostage endures isolation from other people and has only the captor’s perspective available. Perpetrators routinely keep information about the outside world’s response to their actions from captives to keep them totally dependent.

The autistic—especially when unaware that he or she is autistic—endures isolation from other autistics and has only society’s perspective available. As there is no “outside world,” there is no response or accountability regarding society’s actions. Society acts as perpetrator, judge, and jury, a self-contained, self-justifying package.

The hostage taker threatens to kill the victim and gives the perception as having the capability to do so. The captive judges it safer to align with the perpetrator, endure the hardship of captivity, and comply with the captor than to resist and face murder.

The society threatens to deny social legitimacy—employment, sexual companionship, freedom from humiliation—to the autistic and demonstrates the capability to do so in ways both large and small. The autistic judges it safer to align with society, endure the hardship of isolation, and comply with society than to resist and face the hardship and humiliation of reduced social legitimacy.

The captive sees the perpetrator as showing some degree of kindness. Kindness serves as the cornerstone of Stockholm syndrome; the condition will not develop unless the captor exhibits it in some form toward the hostage. However, captives often misinterpret a lack of abuse as kindness and may develop feelings of appreciation for this perceived benevolence. If the captor is purely evil and abusive, the hostage will respond with hatred. But, if perpetrators show some kindness, victims will submerge the anger they feel in response to the terror and concentrate on the captors’ “good side” to protect themselves.

The autistic sees society as showing some degree of kindness. Kindness serves as the cornerstone of Stockholm syndrome; the condition will not develop unless society exhibits it in some form toward the autistic. However, autistics often misinterpret a lack of abuse as kindness and may develop feelings of appreciation for this perceived benevolence. If society is purely evil and abusive, the autistic will respond with hatred. But, if society shows some kindness, autistics will submerge the anger they feel in response to the terror and concentrate on society’s “good side” to protect themselves.

To those who might feel that “humiliation” is an inadequate substitute for the literal death threatened by the sort of hostage-takers encountered by the FBI, I would point out that humus is the Latin root that gives humiliation its motivating power. It is not for nothing that we speak of “dying of humiliation;” the humus it refers to is the self-same dirt of “six feet under.” If you are still unclear what humiliation has to do with autism in society, see The Unbroken Spectrum: Ridicule.

There’s plenty more to be said here, I believe; Lili Marlene may well have hit on the richest vein yet in this series. My intent here though has simply been to provoke thought, to evoke a small shock of recognition at the similarities between the situations of hostages and autistics in society. If there’s a more specific take-away to be gleaned from the above, I suggest it is that we might look with a more skeptical eye at the kindnesses bestowed by society upon autistic people.

Beyond that, I would point out that for all that documented cases of this syndrome are known to go on for years, and undocumented cases we can only assume, for entire lifetimes, those are individual tragedies. To the extent that what Lili Marlene and I have described here happens to the autistic population as a whole, this is a systemic, collective tragedy which whether it is engaged in unknowingly or with cowardice aforethought, “appears to lead to mental illness and alienation from family”—perhaps on a scale we can hardly begin to measure.

What’s your movie?
Are you takin’ a trip to the moon?
Are you playin’ the rustic buffoon?
Or is it the brilliant but ruthless tycoon?
What’s your movie?

At any rate, even when we build our entire lives in refutation and rejection of them, these are our defining stories.  Even should our parents—or our forefathers—lie to us or leave out relevant facts, those lies and omissions become part of their stories’ archetypal resonances, unsuspected but still there, still defining (or misdefining) us in ways which may not be recognized for decades or centuries.  Even millennia later, long after the lives and lessons of countless literal ancestors have been distilled and sublimated into actual myth, such buried truths can out, in ways we might never imagine.

Andrew Lehman has proposed that autistics are among other things genetic time-travelers:

Parents with diverging ethnic threads with little or no lineage contact for tens of thousands of years send their children speeding off into the past. When they return, emerging from the womb with characteristics of both parents, they often carry with them additional features retained by the last common ancestor of the breeding pair.

That last common ancestor of autistics as it happens would have been a member of a matriarchal culture, a culture maintained and reinforced by the socio-biological realities of its time, and one in which women—matriarchs—by and large set the tone.  This, as opposed to the tone set in the patriarchal cultures in which monotheism took root and thrived.  It was the Desert Fathers, after all, who directed and starred in the original production of “Father Knows Best,” which went on to become the extremely successful, many-chaptered series we know as the Torah or the Old Testament.  Right in the beginning of this series is an official version of our culture’s origins, the story of Adam’s rib, Eve who was made from that rib, and their famous departure from the Garden of Eden.

What’s your movie?
The artist who’s misunderstood?
The bad guy tryin’ to do good?
Or just the nicest damn fella in the neighborhood?
What’s your movie?

Close readers have long noticed that in Genesis 1:27 the phrase “male and female He created them” contradicts the later account of Eve being formed from Adam’s rib.  Who then, if not Eve, was this first woman?  Her name was Lilith.  I did not make this up; rabbis did, by way of a practice known as midrash, a form of professional commentary on the Torah employed by rabbis to explain and expand upon just such niggling details.

Lilith, the rabbis explained, was the worst sort of woman, a she-demon responsible for among other things making babies die and men have wet dreams.  Oh, and she was the talking serpent who tempted Eve with the apple.  The actual problem was that Lilith insisted on equality with Adam.  She remembered her matriarchal past, knew her own value, and was willing to share her position with Adam, but not to give it up. It’s a story memorialized in popular culture just over a decade ago.  As CNN’s Donna Freydkin has it:

The festival is named after the legendary Lilith, who refused to obey Adam and instead bolted from the Garden of Eden … McLachlan herself would not cave in to concert promoters and radio stations refusing to play two female acts back-to-back … The first Lilith Fair was born a year later.

So what exactly, so far, does this have to do with autistics?  Maybe a good deal; maybe not so much.  So far, it depends on how useful Andrew Lehman’s theories turn out to be, and only time will tell there.  Even before I made this connection with his work though, I just recently made the offhand claim that autistics are children of the mythological Lilith, all in the context of the observation that in Gwen McKay’s words, “autistics tend to be less inclined toward conventional religious belief.”  In trying to remember where I first ran across that notion, all I could come up with was four separate facts which I had apparently put together on my own some years ago, and then attributed to a single writer.

What’s your movie?
Are you the long-suffering motherly matron?
Or would you settle for a fashion plate?
Or are you the schemer we all love to hate?
What’s your movie?

If it turns out there was such a writer, I’ll be happy to step aside—and invite them to post here.  In the meantime, for your consideration and for now without sources, here are the four items which led me to connect autistics and Lilith:

1)  Just as we now have parents who claim, “There was a vaccination, and suddenly my child is no longer my child,” there was a time when parents would claim, “Suddenly my child is no longer my child, because fairies came in the night, stole my child from its crib, and replaced it with one of theirs.”  In both cases the child in question is autistic—my point here being that among people who believed in fairies, autistic children contributed to and provided evidence for the myth that fairies stole human infants and left changeling children in their place.

2)  Much as Victorian culture made over Eros from an awesome, consequential god into a ridiculous cherub, it also made over fairies into creatures far different from their origins.  Historical, pre-Victorian accounts of encounters with fairies describe them as human in size and appearance, yet strangely difficult to communicate with, and as having a sort of otherworldly affect.  Perhaps the heart of fairy lore was spun around wandering adult autistics who were close to nature and gifted with animals, and to whom magical powers were attributed by profoundly teleological thinkers.

3)  Fairies themselves were sometimes thought to have been descended from Lilith, as she was an adventuress full of the reproductive vigor God had given her, and did not always merely leave men with wet dreams.  She had many children, so the stories went, and their descendants were known as the fairy folk.

4)  Autistics, as I wrote the other day, seem to lack the sense of personal shortcoming and guilt that is so handily explained and reinforced by the Original Sin which came of those two fateful bites from the Forbidden Apple.

What’s your movie?
Are you playing the Talk of the Town?
The prince who gave up a crown?
Or are you standin’ up singin’ as the ship goes down?
What’s your movie?

In the spirit of Mose Allison’s What’s Your Movie? then, I propose that one defining story, one mythological heritage, or one “movie” that is available to us as autistics might well be that we are the Children of Lilith, time travelers and holdouts from an age prior to the ascendancy of Yahweh and the prophets.  Moreover, especially if Andrew Lehman is correct, it may be that we are as available to that story as it is to us; we may be playing our parts in it whether or not it feels comfortable or would be our conscious choice to do so.  The Desert Fathers after all were well-satisfied to see matriarchal culture fade away in the first place; it may be that their figurative sons and daughters can only be displeased to see it fading back in—and this may be the archetypal background against which today’s “autism wars” best make sense.

Like Abbey reminds us, circling overhead for some years now in his long-promised reincarnation as a sedate and humble turkey buzzard, choose your parents with care.

Not surprisingly then, the folkloric notion that autistics are Children of Lilith—descended from Adam’s first wife and thus not subject to that sense of personal shortcoming and guilt that came of being ejected from the Garden—is one I’ve always found charming.  Not that Lilith hasn’t been thoroughly demonized over the centuries by those (Michelangelo included) who are wedded to the notion that Adam’s first wife be damned, everyone has a little Original Sin in them.  Over those centuries though, autistics have mostly remained either marginalized or invisible enough that how they were perceived or what they “meant” didn’t much matter, at least not to non-autistics.

“Over the centuries” is a time scale that gets considered in relation to autism more on this site than at any other place I’m aware of.  Some of my first entries here suggested that autism may be a force that drives cultural evolution, with my thinking along those lines extending back no more than 40,000 years or so.  My colleague Andrew Lehman in turn has described autism as an evolutionary condition, an expression of a socio-biological feedback loop or pendulum swing which plays out over many more thousands, even millions of years.  Here, he depicts the current position of autism in that progression as if it were tracing the course of a roller-coaster:

Perhaps 1,000 generations later, we’ve hit bottom. The roller coaster is starting again up hill. Our future is filled with child-like creators as the autistic begin a much delayed return.

If this is so, with evolutionary time like geologic time moving so slowly as to make a single moment out of a fistful of adjacent centuries, we might look slightly backwards in time as well, to see what evidence there might be that this roller coaster has already started up hill.  What comes to my mind immediately is the Enlightenment, the second blow in the one-two punch (the Renaissance being the first) that put an end to the Dark Ages—and which was made possible by precisely the rejection of teleological thinking that is characteristic of autistics.  Even back in the Renaissance, we have Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man setting the stage, “[holding] forth the possibilities for a comprehensive new order of knowledge relying on human understanding without reference to divine revelation.”

In our lifetimes we have seen those who are excited by all things scientific characterized as geeks and nerds—the same terms which we apply to many of our various autistic obsessions and perseverations.  It is not so outrageous, I suggest, that we ask whether the Enlightenment (and the Renaissance) might not be credited to the much delayed return of autism as described above.

Leaving aside for now the child-like creators such as Shakespeare and Mozart, or those heavenly skeptics Copernicus and Galileo, look at the thinkers:  Bacon, Descartes, Hume, Jefferson, Newton, Spinoza, Voltaire. They were among the first to insist on looking beyond “because the Lord hath made it so” as sufficient explanation for the world around us.  I realize I’m expanding on the somewhat more narrow matter of teleological thinking, but even Jefferson—autistic, autistic Jefferson—found it necessary to take a razor blade to the Bible and create his own version of the Gospels, one with all the “woo” removed.  And for that matter, some of the values attributed to that proto-hippie Jesus (mercy, for instance, along with gentleness and the aversion to throwing a first stone) might be seen as early re-appearances of an autistic mindset (and yes, hippiedom too may well have been, especially at the outset, an autistic creation).

So.  Ironically enough then, when I was first learning about Autism Speaks (less than a year ago), I made some inquiries about whether there appeared to be any Christian affiliation or backing to that organization—not because I suspected them of mercy or gentleness, but because I wondered whether they were “on to” the cross-purposes at which autism and Christendom seem to be.  Arguably this is a sleeping dog I’d best let lie, and not write about at least in public.  It’s not as if autistics don’t have enough to deal with as it is.

I’d rather though that we—or the generations that follow us—not be blindsided by that dog, should it awaken years on down the road from today.  I’m certainly not sounding any call to the barricades but the fact is, I think, that if the percentage of diagnosed autistics continues to grow for whatever reason, or perhaps simply if the neurodiversity movement grows beyond a certain point, sooner or later our numbers will be cast as a threat to the faithful. When that happens—and again, this is nothing I necessarily expect in my lifetime—the forces that may be arrayed against us have the potential to make Autism Speaks look like a clique of third-graders with a playground grudge.

I realize that there are faithful among the autistic, and again, we seem to be good enough at factionalism that we don’t need yet another reason for disagreement.  It’s worth remembering that the Enlightenment thinkers, as men of their times, were by and large professing believers themselves, one way or another.  What I would hope might come of my bringing all this up is that we would begin to get a sense of what our lineage may be, as autistic people alive today in the Year of Our L— … well, in the year 42010, as poet Gary Snyder once put it, “reckoning roughly from the earliest cave paintings.”

Consider at any rate that we—autistics—may well be able to count a majority of Enlightenment thinkers as having had an autistic cognitive style themselves.  It may have been us, people more like us than any others alive today, who pulled Europe out of the Dark Ages—all while the Church gritted its teeth and dug in its heels. By the time “diagnosis” finally supplanted “heresy” as a more efficient means of discrediting those who might effectively question the tenets of religious thought, the “damage” we know as the Enlightenment was done.

That feat, that act of a sleeping giant awakened after centuries and more of stony sleep is where I end up anyway, when I think about non-teleological thinkers. Who else would it have been, insisting as we do on an evidence-based reality when it comes to bio-med and vaccines today, who else would it have been but us back then who went charging off with ten-thousand fresh new geeky, nerdy obsessions, all in search of the evidence-based reality that now forms the baseline against which much of the world still kicks, screams, plots, and schemes.

This may be who we are.  This may be among the things we have done, only to let the credit slip away over a century or two of redefinitions, reframings, and diagnoses.  We may have gone back to sleep, we Children of Lilith, but not so deeply this time, I don’t think.  We—or our children’s children’s children—shall see.

Which as it happens is not a bad metaphor for this pale end of the autistic spectrum that “shades out to normal.”  In my previous entry at any rate, we looked at psychological projection among those with an autistic cognitive style.  The gist of it was that for those who are uncomfortable with and in denial about their own autistic traits, autism seems to loom large in the world around them, and can appear for all the world to be an urgent external threat.  Whether as leaders or as followers, such people can all-too-ironically become invested in “stamping out” in the world that which is native to their own character.

Two commenters wanted it known that that denial and projection seem to be absent in a certain group of autistic people who can be just as bent on “defeating” autism.  Lili Marlene put it this way:

I’m not convinced that we need to look to an unconscious process – projection – to explain why some substantially autistic people hate the autistic characteristics of others. For a start, I’m happy to acknowledge that some aspects of autism are hard to like. I would also argue that for some self-hating part-autists they are so clearly opposed to aspects of their own psychology that they are better described as self-haters who love to share the hate around than projectors. My theory is that these people have seen autistic family members at odds with society and losing the battle, and have decided to take what they see as the easy path – siding with neurotypical society and adopting the value system of their neurotypical age peers, adding a few explicitly anti-autistic features just to make it clear what side they are on. It’s an attempt to be normal that paradoxically appears to lead to mental illness and alienation from family. Life is a constant battle for those who refuse to consider acceptance as an alternative. You make your choices and you live with the consequences.

It’s hard to find much to add to that.  This from one of César Vallejo’s poems comes to mind as the kind of thought which might torment such people:

Well, on the day I was born, God was sick.

A quick Googling of that line turns up the fact that Robert Bly regards it as the voice of a naïve male who is still projecting his own shadow – but onto a God who’s turned in a subpar day of work, rather than onto others in this world.  What we do in any case when we encounter such a person, generally, is turn away. Their clear message is, “I was not meant to be this way; I am God’s own mistake,” and the politest, most comfortable thing to do then is to put their self-described “defect” as well as those of others out of mind, to ignore it as best we can.

Even in cases which seem to contradict this message, in for instance the case of a Jonathan Mitchell, who steadfastly puts himself in the public eye as a self-pitied autistic person, the actual takeaway for observers is that they learn to look away from Jonathan’s oh-so-horrible burden.  It’s not polite, after all, to stare.  In this way people are taught that autism is “not supposed to be,” and people, being generally polite, well-meaning sorts, learn to oblige by not seeing autism whenever they encounter it in a social situation.

This is so even when and where autism is celebrated with pride, and there are of course people – whether or not they are aware that autism is a word which applies to their way of being in the world – who do celebrate their autism with pride, or who simply take it in stride.  This too however can change, depending on the situation and context, on what stage of life they are in, and on what it is that’s at stake, be it sex, love, employment, or getting to be one of the kewl kidz.  Yes, even for autistics this can sometimes matter.

The larger point then is that all three of these groups I’ve outlined so far – subjects of ridicule, projectors, and self-haters – all overlap and blur into one another.  So long as one isn’t locked into projection for the long term, it’s possible to slide across all three roles and more in the space of a single day, not to mention a lifetime.  All of which provides a sort of theater which tends to obscure the fact that there’s a lot more autism about, and closer by, than we realize.  That final idealized goal in fact, of “absolutely normal person,” may well be one at which no one can ever actually arrive….

Autism itself, I propose, can be regarded as either egosyntonic or egodystonic, and when it is experienced as egodystonic, whether diagnosed or intuited, autism is subject to the same defense mechanisms as is any other unwelcome psychological fact.  I further propose that the implications of this may be far-reaching, and in any case have yet to be considered.

Now, whether we happen to have a clinical condition or not, the fact is that we are all egodystonic to some extent in that we all have character traits with which we are not all that comfortable.  What I want to focus on here is a curious and rather spooky defense mechanism that often kicks in when there are aspects of our character with which we are unable to achieve any sort of comfort level.  Psychological projection is a trick the mind plays on itself which allows our own unwanted character traits to be perceived as if they are “out there” in the world rather than inside us as individuals.  Once they have been “cast out” in this manner, they retain their disturbing nature, but can then be seen as external threats having nothing to do with oneself.

Much as it seems we are treading in the land of woo here, projection is a well-established phenomenon in psychology, one of Freud’s discoveries which has become so widely recognized that it’s no longer thought of as being all that Freudian.  Moreover, projection can operate not just on a personal level but on a group and even national level as well.  All this said, it is a strange beast, both to experience and to observe.  For examples we need look no further than recent headlines; several from just the past four years were collected earlier this month at Alternet under the title, 7 Gay Sex Scandals of Career Anti-Gay Crusaders.

For all that we are moved—and rightly so—to hoot and cluck over the hypocrisy and dishonesty revealed in such scandals, it’s worth recognizing that these career anti-gay crusaders are in the grip of a terrifically effective self-delusion as well.  This is the case to such an extent that it can be said their right hand truly does not know what their left hand does, or perhaps that their big head knows not what their little head does.  That, at any rate, is how spooky an animal projection is.  The level of personal discomfort or egodystonia these men have with their own sexuality is so high that their awareness of it can actually become unconscious.

Given, then, that the stigma which currently applies to autism is at least as strong as the stigma which currently applies to homosexuality (which has at least been de-listed as a disorder for decades now), is it reasonable to ask whether projection operates in society to any comparable extent in regard to autism?  I propose that it is, in at least five areas:

1)  Career anti-autism crusaders.  This is the obvious parallel, and one I had intended to bypass for now.  Having realized however that I have the makings of a list here, I’ll simply include it and move on to …

2)  Autism researchers.  Hans Asperger was a man who claimed, rather than projected, his own tendencies to be like the subjects he studied.  While I don’t have a citation handy, I recall that he explicitly stated that he recognized some of his subjects’ Aspergian qualities as being very like his own.  Given however that autism research that is oriented towards the eradication of autism will be attractive to those who do project their own autism (in the same way that anti-gay stances and careers are attractive to those who project their own homosexuality) this seems an eminently reasonable question to raise.

3)  News media that uncritically report stories painting autism to be a result of injury or harm, without fact-checking, perhaps because reporters find it all-too-literally “self-evident” that autism is a form of damage.  News reporting, after all, involves the imposition of order on information, an activity—as Tyler Cowen points out—appealing to those with an autistic cognitive style, and therefore a line of work likely to have such people over-represented in its ranks.

4)  Parents or others genetically connected to autistic children who may find their own unacknowledged autism so abhorrent that they are willing to subject their younger kin to any equally abhorrent and irrational treatment simply in order to “make it go away.”

5)  Everyday people.  This is the group I’d intended to write about when I first set out, my larger theme being how it is that the autistic spectrum can appear to be missing a swath which connects it with the larger population.

Along those lines then, and in furtherance of my analogy with sexual orientations, I want to point out that sex researcher Alfred Kinsey demonstrated that sexual orientation, very like autism, does exist on a continuum or spectrum, one which he designated as running from 0 to 6.  Kinsey, in other words, was able to identify seven different shades of sexual orientation (as confidentially reported by his subjects), and yet we all know that virtually no one will publicly admit to being “just a little bit” gay.  The parallel here is that virtually no one will admit to being “just a little bit” autistic either.  None of this is particularly rational of course—but it doesn’t have to be.  It was less than a century ago in these United States after all that many states operated under the infamous “one-drop rule,” in which one forfeited one’s status as a “white person” simply by having an ancestry which included a single “drop” of “Negro blood.”

What this sort of irrational taboo makes for in the case of autism, I suggest, is a population of closeted, projecting autistics acting as a passive, approving, and unskeptical public who in turn—because they are for example relatives of, reporters on, or researchers and “experts” involved in the lives of certified autistic people—are deferred to by others as opinion leaders on autism issues.  This then enables the work of anti-autism crusaders and movements which subject already-identified autistic people to outrageously inhumane, unsafe, and therapeutically meaningless treatments, deny them needed vaccinations, and in fact threaten them with slow-motion genocide by way of eugenics.  Once set in motion, this dynamic self-reinforces in a vicious circle, further motivating those who occupy paler swaths of the autistic spectrum to hide and deny their own commonalities with and similarities to the population of identified autistics.

The autism of diagnosed autistics, in this light, can be seen to be functioning as a scapegoat.  The perceived defects or sins of the people, otherwise known as hidden, deniable autism, are loaded—or projected—onto a goat, otherwise known as obvious, undeniable autism, and that goat is then driven towards a tall cliff edge, a ritual otherwise known as “saving our children,” or “fundraising for the cure,” or whatever.  And everyone (well, almost everyone) feels better, until it all has to be done again, because The Dread Autism (along with The Dread Gay) is in most all of us to begin with, and we are just not comfortable with that.

So, ‘twas ever thus, at least since—though perhaps not prior to—the days of patriarchal desert gods and actual flesh-and-fur scapegoats.

And so it goes, still—though perhaps not for so much longer.

I’ve mentioned recently how autistics are mankind’s inbuilt participant-observers; it’s a point I’d like to expand on in a future entry; as participant observation has been the predominant methodology among cultural anthropologists for nearly a century, this arguably makes autistics into an entire population of accidental “anthropologists on Mars,” to use Temple Grandin’s phrase.  For now I’ll just note that as an adopted child in an extended family that placed a high value on social skills, participant-observer is not a bad description for my role in that family.

Perhaps once a year then as a child, I had the opportunity to travel into the field as an anthropologist, that “field” being a holiday or summertime visit to the home of my mother’s sister.  Here too were my three cousins, all boys, one slightly older and the others a little younger.  They seem extraordinary to me still in that not one of them has to my knowledge ever been mean-spirited, unkind, or less than gentlemanly to any person directly.  Politeness is an imperative that was drilled into them, as was the necessity of a savoir-faire that lacked any connotation of suaveness.  Their father was an unpretentious, loud-voiced man with a Rhode Island accent who negotiated the sales of entire fleets of aircraft, most notably, it was impressed on all of us,  to manners-conscious Japanese buyers.  The bar being thus set, it was expected of his sons that they unfailingly display exemplary social competence, regardless how foreign or unfamiliar the situation.

What confused me about this for years was that ridicule of others was used as a teaching tool in my cousins’ family.  The first of this I remember was the “Newfy jokes” beloved by their father, whose climb up the corporate ladder had included a stint in Canada—Newfies being Newfoundlanders, still the butt of jokes among Canadians for their odd prosody and tendency to travel blithely through life in their own, out-of-step manner.  As a child, I never quite “got” the appeal of Newfy jokes, even after it was explained to me, approvingly, that they were very like the more popular Pollock jokes with which I was familiar.

As the boys grew to be teenagers and moved on to college, the foibles of their more socially clueless friends—and interestingly enough, my cousins often had such friends—were recounted by my uncle to uproarious laughter at the dinner table.  Any chance encounter, in fact, with someone who conspicuously failed to pick up on a social cue or was otherwise dense socially could provide such an entertaining story, and while this laughter might to all appearances be good-natured, it was clear these stories would not be recounted in the same way were their subjects present at the table.  The subtext was not lost on any of us: being the subject of such a story was a fate to be avoided at all costs.  Ridicule, then, demonstrated before three boys who did indeed have the wherewithal and flexibility to make a priority of their social skills, seemed to be extremely effective as a teaching tool.

Distilled, refined, and deftly applied as that ridicule was though, I can’t say that those dinner table lessons were not of the same substance that brings schoolchildren to bully the kid who doesn’t fit in, all in the name of “maintaining group identity,” or however the child psychologists are explaining it these days.  This is not to speak ill of my uncle in particular, but rather to remind that in a highly verbal, socially-oriented society such as we live in, the taboo-driven impulse to punish or “disappear” character traits that do not lend momentum to social cohesion is one that isn’t left behind in the schoolyard.  It merely acquires respectability and is woven into the collective fabric of our lives.

So, were any of my cousins the least bit autistic then by God the world will never know it, as its expression was shamed out of them in their youth.  I should make clear here that neither generation of this family, like most other families, would ever knowingly look for amusement in the travails of diagnosed autistics.  In this sense a diagnosis of autism functions as a restraining order against societal ridicule of autistic behavior, though one limited only to the most glaringly obvious cases, and violated often enough as it is.

By extension then—given endless permutations of similarly motivated ridicule and shaming at work in billions of families, workplaces, and friendship circles—consider how an entire swath of the autistic spectrum can thus be made invisible by the very people who occupy it, simply because it is a pale enough swath that they can make it invisible, and because we as a society have incentivized them in no uncertain terms to do so.

The second mechanism that promotes the illusion that the autistic spectrum does not seamlessly shade out to normal—the illusion that it is not in fact normal for untold numbers of people to be at least somewhat autistic—is characterized by a lack of the sense of humor that makes lighthearted ridicule possible, and also by having its source not in any imperative of group identity, but rather in one’s sense of personal identity. Rather, though, than double the length of what I’ve already written here I will address psychological projection in a subsequent entry.

The thrust of the joke is a familiar one and shouldn’t be lost on anybody, though for those who’ve not been following the ongoing implosion of trust and privacy among Facebook users or aren’t familiar with the arguments for open-source software, the references may be a bit obscure.  XKCD’s creator Randall Munroe has for five years now been capturing the zeitgeist of precisely the crowd among whom I’ve long been expecting autism to “join the mainstream,” as I wrote in the open letter to Joel.  This would be those who take to internet culture as ducks take to water and “who need the internet’s other-than-analog means of expression in order to recognize one another, [and] experience themselves as a community….”  Whenever something happens that’s idiosyncratic to a crowd like this, chances are there’s an xkcd comic that has anticipated and commented on that situation already.

For today’s offering then, Munroe contrasts two scenes occurring seven years apart, each containing a brief exchange between the same two characters.  It’s an old joke set in a new context, ringing yet another change on the theme of “how times change.”

And, it casts the character who’s labeled as “probably autistic” as the one who has the last laugh.

How often have we seen that so far?

Direct links here or here.

(The second half of the punchline, for those not familiar with it since childhood, is “… playing ‘My Heart Bleeds for You.’”)

That solid decade is one I outlined in a post here.  It came to an end last summer, when I struck up a correspondence with Shift Journal’s founding editor Andrew Lehman.  In receipt of an email from me which contained the seeds of half a dozen or more observations that eventually made their way into entries on this site, he wanted to know why I hadn’t been writing elsewhere.  The answer, related to the fact that I had regularly been met with incomprehension and/or hostility when trying to express my perspective among friends, acquaintances, and most of my family, was that I honestly had felt like I’d had only one thing to say—and that I obviously hadn’t been doing a very good job of it.

Maybe because of this, once I did start contributing posts, I’ve taken care to only dance around this central observation.  Close readers may insist that I’ve stated it plainly enough, but not so plainly, I think, as I did in conversation a couple months ago.

There’s an endocrinologist whom I see once a year or so for surveillance of a low-maintenance, low-drama, not terribly complex medical condition.  This being the case, there can be little enough to talk about when we meet, but I look forward to these appointments simply because I enjoy this doctor’s company and get the sense that she enjoys mine.  With my new news this year being that I was involved in a joint venture with a serious amateur evolutionary theorist whose work relied heavily on endocrinology, we spoke briefly about autism, about my step-daughter’s Asperger’s diagnosis, and the subject of the proposed changes to the DSM came up.  Having expressed my opinion that folding the Asperger’s diagnosis into that of autism in general was a good thing, I got the sense that the doctor tended to agree, but that autism not being part of her specialty, she wasn’t entirely familiar with the issues.  She wanted to know my reasoning.

The first part of my answer came straight out of my having been recognized as a fellow traveler by some of those who’ve been in favor of this change to the DSM for some time.  “Because there’s too much dividing-and-conquering going on between the two [diagnoses] …” I said.  Sensing that she “got” this and that it seemed to accord with her views as a person if not as a medical professional, I continued, “… and because there is no clear dividing line between autism and Asperger’s … just as there is no clear dividing line between autistic people and the rest of the population.”

Now, all I know for sure—and this I knew before I checked in for my appointment that day—is that my endocrinologist is a good listener.  But she nodded in agreement, looking me in the eye, as if I had confirmed her own suspicions.  We spoke a bit more about this site; I’m sure simply out of politeness she jotted down the url, and the appointment was over.

As for me though, even though I’d been posting here for half a year already, it felt like the first time I’d come right out and said it:  that there is no clear dividing line between autistics and the population they are born into.  Some of this clearly had to do with it being part of a face to face conversation, one which had occurred without the other party becoming uncomfortable for one reason or another.  As I’ve thought back though to the “one thing I had to say” yet was unable to adequately express for an entire decade, that was it.

Now saying it, even if it seems the cat has had your tongue for ten years while you thought it over, does not make it so.  And really, it had been said, in some or another off-the-shelf autism book my wife and I read years ago, that the autistic spectrum “shades out to normal.”  I’ve written in an earlier entry that this observation (which confirmed my own) seemed staggering to me then as it does now, and yet like my own initial efforts, it seems to have gotten swallowed up in a flood of less relevant fears and prejudices.  I’m not here today though to prove any points or make any cases—I’m here simply to offer, to re-offer a perception, and to confirm that perception in those who may have had it but thought they were the only ones.

It strikes me in fact that much of what’s been posted at Shift has to do not even so much with what autism is—this has largely been Andrew Lehman’s department—as with how it is to be perceived.  Not that this isn’t important work, and a sort of work that needs doing in any number of fields.  Long before I knew from autism, one of the sharpest analogies I’d ever run across regarding the absurdity of arbitrarily defined perceptions came from Wendell Berry’s book-length essay on modern agriculture The Unsettling of America, where he points out that:

We are invited to “see seven states from atop Lookout Mountain,” as if our political boundaries were drawn in red on the third morning of Creation.

Consider that diagnostic categories, maybe especially so where autism is concerned, are similarly arbitrary boundaries.  We are invited to see how many states from atop DSM Mountain, as if those diagnostic boundaries were drawn in red on the third morning of Creation?  When those boundaries are moved, added to, or done away with—again, perhaps particularly in the case of autism—what’s at stake has little to do with what is actually being divided, and everything to do with how certain stakeholders see fit to arrange our perceptions.

And yet and again—hear me clearly—there is no clear dividing line between autistic people and the rest of the population.

In ++ungood it was proposed that the notion of any person having a single, unchanging place on a static autistic spectrum is wholly inadequate as a way to describe the experience of being autistic.  Inadequate, because in the course of a single day one can move into and out of any number of environmental situations and/or social contexts which either will or will not elicit behavior identifiable as autistic.  These situations and contexts can moreover be intensified, aggravated, or avoided depending on one’s socio-economic situation, which in turn can change throughout the course of a year or a lifetime.  More to my point here, autistic tendencies can be and routinely are hidden, disguised, and denied expression, often only to a certain degree; when possible though, they are for all practical purposes made entirely invisible, at no small cost in terms of energy and self-sacrifice.

What motivates such expenditures and sacrifices, I suggest, are the penalties assigned to those who slide too far down into the uncanny valley, into territory from which one appears not quite “right” in terms of social interaction.  Perhaps foremost among these penalties is denial of access to sexual companionship, but they extend into all areas of social congress.  The benefits of social acceptance are many and profound, and the incentive to “pass,” to move—by hook or by crook—across and if possible off the autistic spectrum, is immeasurably high.  Lili Marlene recently touched on the absurdity of being “instructed” in sociable behavior by well-meaning relatives at Christmas gatherings; what such “helpful” souls fail to realize is that society’s incentive system is already so strong and so pervasive that such encouragement simply amounts to piling on, to gratuitous and unhelpful “late hits” on which no penalties are ever called.

At any rate, the autistic spectrum itself can thus be mapped more or less directly onto the near slope of the uncanny valley.  To move off the spectrum is to move up the slope, into safe territory, onto the flatland where no one’s social behavior is perceived to be somehow “off,” and so no penalties are levied.  This mobility, the astonishing reality that autistic people do in fact move up that slope, and in stressful or unguarded moments (but also sometimes in sweet, blessed solitude) back down it—this is the unacknowledged drama of the autistic experience.

What’s more, unlike the sine-curve smoothness of the valley slope as depicted by roboticists in graph after published graph, the uncanny valley as experienced by autistics is a craggy, jagged mountainside, full of impossible passes, treacherous footing, and terrifying abysses—not to mention the odd sunny, secluded grassy knoll or wildflower-strewn meadow.  There is one animal, at least on this continent, which best personifies the archetypal survivor in this environment, and that is the Mountain Goat, Oreamnos americanus. A long-running recurring meme at Digg is to post pictures of these goats matter-of-factly clinging to cliff faces or perched on some ridiculously pointed summit, each example seemingly more impossible than the last.

When autistic people achieve similarly unlikely positions—socially speaking—they are generally dismissed as never having been autistic in the first place.  Like as not, there is no “seeing is believing,” no trip with binoculars to the autistic Rocky Mountains to convince skeptics that the pictures of autistics scaling the valley walls aren’t courtesy of Adobe Photoshop.  And yet here we are, Oreamnos uncanni,

… “bringing the strange” that freshens the gene pool and enlivens the meme pool, stealthily expanding human possibilities, all while the high plains natives, perhaps too busily enthralled with aliens, robots, and the supernatural, never suspect those who walk among them. (Notes on Five Spectrums)

The correlate here is that autistics are mankind’s inbuilt participant-observers, with one foot in this social world, and one in someplace quite Other—how Other depending on how far down in the valley we range. According to Andrew Lehman, for autistics, this may also be the valley of primary process, cognate with the timelessness of the collective unconscious, and thus someplace indeed not wholly human, and yet also the fount and foundation of humanity itself.

In this sense then, there may well be something of the two-spirit about autistics, the human spirit conjoined with the other-than-human spirit.  In literal terms, this sort of talk may well be nonsense—Woo™, as KWombles would have it—but even as we wait for the evidence to fill out our evidence-based reality, we live in a world already long filled in with perceptions; we can consider where the roots of those perceptions lie and yes, how to manipulate them for ourselves.

As evolved creatures, we are not so many generations removed from our forbearers who responded instinctively to the perception of the non-human in the human.  As shamanism was in part about the manipulation of these perceptions; as that manipulation came in the form of theater; as all the world is in fact a stage; and as even KWombles would not refuse to attend or respond to a play simply because it isn’t reality, we would do well to be awake to the ways autism is already being delivered and consumed as theater, however unconsciously.

For one example of how we might have a freer hand in shaping and delivering that theater, how for example we might re-imagine spectrum and valley in terms of set design and stagecraft, see above.

Or if that doesn’t suit you, by all means set about re-imagining autism’s dramatic elements on your own. Because you know, the storylines in which autistics are invited to star—The Changelings; Born Without Souls; I Am Autism; The Little Boy Who Couldn’t; It Came From Planet Thimerosal—aren’t really all that inviting, are they?

And no one—certainly not all on their own—is likely to change that for us.

Autism and the uncanny valley is a subject I’ve been wanting to revisit all along; I’ve long had a suspicion that much of society’s seemingly willful ignorance regarding autism, not to mention its fear, stigma, and outright revulsion is a matter of what I’ve thought of as false positives triggering the uncanny valley response.  The speculation on the part of the originator of the phrase, Japanese robotics scientist Masahiro Mori, was that the response is an instinctive one having to do with self-preservation.  Those who are quick to pounce on circular, self-justifying logic might well see this speculation as validation of their prejudices against autism, so presentation of these ideas has seemed a tricky matter.

Forty years on from Mori’s coinage of the term, it turns out that speculation is indeed the key word, though I’m not the only one to be wondering about the connection between autism and the uncanny valley response.  An excellent recent article which surveys the current state of thought and research regarding the uncanny valley finishes with the thought that “human-looking robots could be valuable tools in psychology and neuroscience, helping researchers study human behavior and even disorders like autism.”

If you’d like to test your own uncanny valley response, the article is headed by a wide-ranging, snappily-paced, and yes, beautiful slideshow of various robots bearing varying degrees of human likeness; the meat though is in the quotes from various robotics experts who are intimate with the notion of the uncanny valley, yet find it difficult to define satisfactorily, let alone make use of as a theory.  Much, need it be said, like autism itself.

I‘ve no further comparisons to draw right now, but for those who are intrigued, I want to highlight some quotes from Erico Guizzo’s Who’s Afraid of the Uncanny Valley, which appeared earlier this month at IEEE’s Spectrum.  Guizzo leads us into the thicket with this handful of questions:

As a kind of benchmark, the uncanny valley could in principle help us understand why some robots are more likable than others. In that way roboticists would be able to create better designs and leap over the creepiness chasm. But what if there’s no chasm? What if you ask a lot of people in controlled experiments how they feel about a wide variety of robots and when you plot the data it doesn’t add up to the uncanny valley graph? What if you can’t even collect meaningful data because terms like “familiarity” and “human likeness” are too vague?

He quotes the conclusion to the 1970 paper by Mori, a roboticist, not an evolutionary biologist:

Why do we humans have such a feeling of strangeness? Is this necessary? I have not considered it deeply, but it may be important to our self-preservation.

We must complete the map of the uncanny valley to know what is human or to establish the design methodology for creating familiar devices through robotics research.

A recent Popular Mechanics article by Erik Sofge which discusses some of the problems with the theory is quoted:

Despite its fame, or because of it, the uncanny valley is one of the most misunderstood and untested theories in robotics. While researching this month’s cover story (“Can Robots Be Trusted?” on stands now) about the challenges facing those who design social robots, we expected to spend weeks sifting through an exhaustive supply of data related to the uncanny valley—data that anchors the pervasive, but only loosely quantified sense of dread associated with robots. Instead, we found a theory in disarray. The uncanny valley is both surprisingly complex and, as a shorthand for anything related to robots, nearly useless.

From the same article:

Cynthia Breazeal, director of the Personal Robots Group at MIT, told [Sofge] that the uncanny valley is “not a fact, it’s a conjecture,” and that there’s “no detailed scientific evidence” to support it.

Sofge also talked to Karl MacDorman, director of the Android Science Center at Indiana University, in Indianapolis, who has long been investigating the uncanny valley. MacDorman’s own view is that there’s something to the idea, but it’s clearly not capturing all the complexity and nuances of human-robot interaction. In fact, MacDorman believes there might be more than one uncanny valley, because many different factors—in particular, odd combinations like a face with realistic skin and cartoonish eyes, for example—can be disconcerting.

From a study by Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro and collaborator Christoph Bartneck, Guizzo offers:

The results of this study cannot confirm Mori’s hypothesis of the Uncanny Valley. The robots’ movements and their level of anthropomorphism may be complex phenomena that cannot be reduced to two factors. Movement contains social meanings that may have direct influence on the likeability of a robot. The robot’s level of anthropomorphism does not only depend on its appearance but also on its behavior. A mechanical-looking robot with appropriate social behavior can be anthropomorphized for different reasons than a highly human- like android. Again, Mori’s hypothesis appears to be too simplistic.

The paragraph following this one is troubling if applied to autistics in that it assumes, correctly, that robots are infinitely malleable, endlessly adjustable in terms of behavior modification, while autistics—yea, though these limits and boundaries are tested endlessly—are of course not.  Still though, there’s common ground here in terms of challenges faced, potentials for new insights, and more.  Elsewhere in his conclusion Guizzo relates that “Ishiguro recently told me that the possibility that his creations might result in revulsion won’t stop him from ‘trying to build the robots of the future as I imagine them.’  I for one admire his conviction.”

Autistics of both the future and the present could do worse than to maintain such resolve—and self-esteem—in the face of societal revulsion that seems at times to be all too similar.

These two styles of consciousness were what was in conflict a few months ago when the big kerfuffle was raised over whether neurodiversity means denying that autism is a disability, and in particular whether one nominee to the National Council on Disability who is associated with the neurodiversity movement, Ari Ne’eman, agrees “or not” with the view that autism is a disability.  The thing is, there’s never been any question whatsoever as to whether or not Mr. Ne’eman views autism as a disability.  He most certainly does, as does anyone who is paying attention.  What was actually in dispute was whether or not autism, though recognized as a disability, can also be recognized as being anything else or besides.  What was really being contested was whether or not autism, if acknowledged as a disability, could then also be better understood as something other than a disability.

This of course is a different kettle of fish, but it was not on the whole how the argument was framed or joined.  It was accepted and met, at least generally, as if it really were a question of whether or not Ari Ne’eman agreed or not with the view that autism is a disability.  Entered into on those terms, this is an argument that cannot be won by the neurodiversity community.  Having accepted the frame as it was given to us, in which it appeared Mr. Ne’eman had dug himself into a hole, it was all too easy to assume that the task at hand was to dig him out of it—thus allowing ourselves to be lowered into a hole, one not of our own making, like puppets on strings.  I touched on this at the time in Geeks and Nerds: Autism’s Proxy Warriors, but I have a recent commenter to thank for giving me the opportunity to demonstrate how to re-frame this issue in the midst of debate.

The commenter was responding to the opening sentence of last Friday’s post,

Whatever else it may be, autism is a way of being in the world.  It is a style, a manner of behaving and perceiving, and of being perceived.

His reply was to comment,

Whatever else it may be Autistic Disorder is a disorder, a medical disorder, which severely restricts the lives of many who carry that diagnosis.

And there you have it, the either/or setup.  This is a challenge to either agree or disagree with a patently true statement, one that’s spoken (we can only assume) with a conviction and fervor attainable only by a Master of the Obvious.  If you’re not on your home turf and confident that you can handle your adversary, the pedantic, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth tone taken here may not be advised—it will without a doubt make you unpopular at parties—but the technique, of re-framing the argument so that you’re not left sputtering in the face of a false choice you’ve unwittingly signed on to, that’s a trick I think is worth sharing:

Your definition is certainly among the things which autism is. May I assume that since you repeat the words, “Whatever else it may be,” you are signing on to the notion that autism is subject to multiple interpretations? I’d suggest at any rate that whether autism *can* be understood in other, complementary, or even contradictory ways–including those experienced and reported by autistic people–has more to do with the perspective of the observer than with anything intrinsic to autism. You’ll find no argument here, in other words, over whether or not your definition is “right.” Your conflict–assuming there is one–seems to be more with the idea that there can be more than one valid way to experience, understand, or perceive autism. This is a discussion which as KWombles implies above, is better taken up in the arena of philosophy. Like you perhaps, I find the struggle between the One and the Many to be a compelling one–and make no mistake, that’s the only conflict I’m seeing here. I suggest it has far less to do with autism than you may think.

Given worthier opponents, or responsive ones, this can be more of a challenge, but stepping back and finding the frame in which an argument is being made gives you advantages.  It allows you to decide whether or not you want to continue arguing within that frame, and it gives you the opportunity to choose and substitute a frame that can give you the upper hand, or at least move the discussion to a more fruitful topic.  It may even give your antagonist a chance to rethink their position without losing too much face—assuming, of course, that you don’t write up the exchange you’ve had with them and post it on the internet.

The real question, again, isn’t whether autism “is” or “is not” any one particular thing.  The question is whether or not autism is, in Walt Whitman’s sense, “large.”

Do we as autistic people contradict ourselves?  Very well then, we contradict ourselves.  We are large; we contain multitudes.

Having considered and concluded that this is so, this should become the frame within which we are willing to take on all comers:  the idea that it’s acceptable for autism to be many and contradictory things.  This, I suggest, is what we can communicate, rather than falling into the trap of explaining how our positions make sense within a frame in which they do not, in fact, make sense.  There’s no point in insisting that there be “nothing about us, without us” if we allow others to frame the terms of any discussion or debate in which we are included.  That way is nothing but a slippery slope to cooptation, one that will leave us spinning our wheels, wondering why our duly noted, perfectly well-constructed, airtight arguments gain so disappointingly little traction.

It bears repeating one more once.  If the neurodiversity movement is to live up to the broader premise of value-in-diversity it carries within its name, we need to be able to recognize, define, and enforce the terms on which we are willing to engage in discussion—and those terms have to include the value of diversity, of a multiplicity of mutually tempered perspectives, as a basic assumption.  Tempting as it is, we shouldn’t be so willing to be drawn into debate on terms that are disadvantageous to our positions.  Rather than putting energy and attention into rearguard actions, what we should be doing is putting neurodiversity’s detractors on the defensive by insisting that they make the case for their so far unchallenged notion that there ought to be One True Way to view autism in the first place.

(Should the answer turn out to be, “Because some of us are less than comfortable with life’s ambiguities,” perhaps these individuals can be directed to consider whether their discomfort itself constitutes a disability … or not.  And why.)

No one though, no institution, scientist, doctor or any other authority figure is going to give us permission or encouragement to exercise control over which conversational frames we will and will not accept.  There’s nothing to be gained by waiting for some respected authority to step up and cover our backs for us on this.  Capital “A” Authority, by definition, is already invested in the idea of a One True Way, of which it considers itself official guardian and keeper, however subject to change that Way turns out to be.

Learning to recognize and manipulate frames on our own then may, or may not be the difference between banishing the stigma and misinformed fear, prejudice, and pity that defines autism for too many—or settling into making fascinating points and compelling arguments that don’t get us very far, for another few decades.

I can tell you for sure though that it’s a lot more fun than uncritically accepting the frames we are routinely handed by others.