[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

At one point when Marcia had just left the room I turned to Andrew and asked, “So how’s your relationship with your unconscious?” He gestured, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, to the window. I thought for a moment and replied, “I’ve been told of of Native American men who would sit on the shore of a lake and watch the water and the sky, all day, for days on end.” At this he nodded vigorously and emphatically.

Here I want to make just a quick mention of a story I remember from when I was a child who read the World Book encyclopedia. This is about the chemist Kekulé who made the breakthrough discovery concerning the molecular structure of aromatic compounds and famously explained years later that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail.

So there’s our ouroboros from the masthead again. I actually count that as a coincidence here, the real point being that scientific discoveries do from time to time spring from the direction of the unconscious — and as it happens Shift Journal owes its existence to Andrew Lehman’s long-ago obsession with serpent mythology. This is a seemingly random fascination to begin with but one which ultimately led to his Orchestral Theory of Evolution. Stay with me here; we’re just a just a paragraph away from being back to autism and disability ….

The upshot then when one studies serpent/dragon mythology in historical context is not only that the ouroboros is a reference to cyclical time, to events having a way of coming back ’round again, but that serpent energy in general is female energy. Whether the story is St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland or the Knight in Shining Armor slaying the Angry Dragon, what’s being recalled — yea, though the victors who write the history books would have us believe it’s the victory of Good over Evil — what’s being recalled and commemorated is the succession of patriarchal social structure over matriarchal (and significantly for our purposes, more autism-friendly) social structure. Now I realize no one who dialed in today was braced for a lecture on superordinate gender-defined social structures, and I apologize for that. But I ask you, what is “the social model of disability” if not a critique of patriarchal values and a suggestion that another option we might consider, you know, is matriarchal values?

What Andrew Lehman’s work does then is provide a framework in which for one style of consciousness — the one out of which the social model has arguably come — autistic is inherently a legitimate way of being in the world. This is obviously not the default style of consciousness at the present time, and much to our frustration today this ouroboros swallows its tail in evolutionary time. It moves slowly, leaving us epically “Tired,” as Lydia Brown has recently reminded. It makes for a scale of change that’s difficult to see from the perspective of any individual lifespan, certainly unless one knows what to look for. But this is the larger, big-picture context Andrew Lehman’s work makes available to every contributor whose words appear at Shift Journal: just as our familiar serpent and dragon myths describe the previous “shift” as it plays out in Dreamtime, Shift Journal is documenting the leading edge of the current one as it plays out in real time.

So. To wrap up this section, something I’ve been curious about ever since I realized how my first obsession transformed from jazz music (for 11 years) to archetypal psychology (for 7 years) in the space of one electrifying paragraph in a Michael Ventura essay, is just how many seemingly random autistic serial obsessions are not at all unrelated and do succeed one another by way of such a spark, one you can actually watch as it flies along a perfectly logical but completely unforeseen path from the last obsession to the next. All as if there’s something else that remains unidentified, stringing together behind the scenes what are in fact related obsessions. Unlike with Kekulé, what happened in Andrew’s case is that once the serpent obsession had run its course, the fascinations which succeeded it involved his wondering whether humans, consciousness, and the prevailing neurology were or are objectively different under matriarchal social structures.

What followed was years of apprenticing himself to the science that concerns itself with that question. It’s work that deserves to be vetted by better-trained minds than are likely listening to me today. I’m telling the part of the story I feel competent to tell at the moment, but the science — along with a copiously referenced twelve-page bibliography — is there for anyone qualified to do peer review.

Theories of course are made of hypotheses and hypotheses must be testable in order to be science. One of the easiest ways to hook into that science sometimes even as a layperson is to look at what a theory predicts, and The Orchestral Theory of Evolution yields a long list of predictions as recorded in the book, 28 of which appear at Shift Journal in an early post titled Predictions.

One thing Andrew has been keenly aware of all along is that since Evolution, Autism, and Social Change is a cross-disciplinary work true peer review will have to come from more than one discipline. Whenever I think about that I’m reminded of the prediction I ran across years ago that we might expect future scientific breakthroughs to come from just such outsider discipline-hoppers because most scientific fields are now so mature that simply keeping up with the literature in one’s chosen field is a full time job, leaving little room for the necessary creative reflection and reverie. My impression is that this has not necessarily been borne out in general, but then it may be that there simply aren’t enough cross-disciplinary thinkers out there — let alone enough time for reflection and creative reverie.

That then is the story of the inception of Shift Journal. It began with an obsession with serpent and dragon mythology, and Shift is not the most significant, thoroughly developed, or potentially far-reaching piece of work to come out of the story.

Recently presented online as part of a webinar sponsored by Autism NOW and The Arc.

(part 3 and more to follow …)

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[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

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related: Evolution, Autism, and Social Change

related: Predictions

related: Why Serpents, Dragons, and Shift (part 1)

I like to tell people that Shift Journal “is a big-picture endeavor” in part because I’m a fan of dry understatement. When one reads those earliest entries at Shift, it turns out that that sweeping claim about genetic justice wasn’t the half of what was being introduced. There are after all eight category headings along the bottom of the masthead; besides the Autism heading there are those for The Internet, Society, Politics, Evolution, Art/Play/Myth, Language, and The Unconscious — and yet all these are intended to relate back in one way and another to autism. Shift was conceived by its founder to be a forum for big-picture discussion of autism’s role not only in contemporary society but in evolutionary time.

All appearances aside, Shift Journal is first and foremost The House That Andrew Lehman Built. Mr. Lehman owns a web design firm, Andrew Lehman Designs, which is where Shift Journal came together under his direction. At that time he had for twelve years also been a serious amateur evolutionary theorist, an auto-didact first teaching himself evolutionary biology, both its science and its history, as well as neuropsychology and parts of other fileds such as physical anthropology, and then sifting through endless scientific papers with what can accurately be called obsessive dedication. He corresponded with and received encouragement from academics such as Simon Baron-Cohen, and documented what occupied him in a series of blogs, most recently prior to Shift Journal at Neoteny.org. The culmination of all this came to be a new theory of evolution complementary to Darwinism, centered around heterochronic theory and the ebb and flow in human populations of neotenous characteristics such as autism. It describes how relative hormonal levels in the mothers’ blood across generations and in response to both short and long-term environmental factors actually orchestrates the distribution of neotenous traits across populations which in turn influences if not determines the social structure of human societies. For those and other reasons he came to call it The Orchestral Theory of Evolution.

Why exactly “Shift” then as the title of the site, as well as the significance of that ouroboros in the masthead is intimately tied into that dozen years of work that led up to its launch. The obvious question of course is why Andrew is not presenting with me today, and the answer is that he had a stroke in the spring of 2010, about seven months after we had launched, and just days after his work was published in book form as Evolution, Autism, and Social Change: A New Feminine Theory of Evolution That Explains Autism. While the stroke has not impaired his ability to comprehend spoken language, it has put him in the position of having to re-learn the skills of reading, writing and speaking. All this happened in the midst of brain surgery undertaken to head off the growing risk of an aneurysm, so it was something he both was and was not able to see coming.

Recently presented online as part of a webinar sponsored by Autism NOW and The Arc.

(part 2 and more to follow …)

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]
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related: Why Serpents, Dragons, and Shift (part 2)

Item

Once in the cockpit of his F-11F though, Peewee Cobb’s whole character changes. The instant his hands and feet are on the controls, he’s as fast as his aircraft and as powerful as its armament.  He has superb reactions and eyesight.  Is rated superior in rocketry and gunnery.  Can outfly anyone in his squadron, including the Lieutenant Commander who leads it.

Item:  An acquaintance reports that a woman he has worked with is in person quiet, charming, and sweet, yet also confusing.  Her signature quirk is a shrug which comes frequently but seems neither to punctuate anything in particular, nor to be in response to anyone or anything that’s been said.

Some of the work they’re involved in gets hashed out and coordinated not in person however but online, via text, in listserves.  “In a listserve,” her observer notes, “this woman is a predator that takes no prisoners.  The same person in a different medium becomes a different person.”  He interprets the shrug as “some sort of tip-of-the iceberg evidence of the turmoil underneath,” and goes on to speculate that without the “analog signal,” the nonverbal back-and-forth of which the shrug is a part, “Instead of the tip, we get the Iceberg Whole.”

Item:  Another woman, a friend of ten years, becomes my partner in a long-distance courtship which is conducted at first largely by email.  As would be expected, new dimensions of her personality become available to me, and yet in person some of them remain largely unavailable.  We recognize these dimensions as being a “text-only persona,” and speak of her as such.  This persona becomes a third person in our courtship, and later, in our marriage.

A decade on, we become part of a far-flung online posse that’s in touch throughout the day and finds the experience so valuable that it migrates to a new social software platform when the first becomes unreliable.  Occasional discussions arise around the novelty and the pleasure of relating to each other in real time, via text-only personae.  Some find socializing this way to be more compelling and rewarding than relationships away from the keyboard have been for them, ever.

For some, even “text-only persona” doesn’t seem adequate to describe the experience.  In part as an exercise in geek humor but also to some extent in earnest, the phrase “text-based life form” is floated as an alternative and retains some currency.  Many in this group identify in fact as misfits, but these are not underachievers.  They’re professionals, climbers and rising stars in their field, coalesced out of a pool of attendees and presenters at annual conferences.

These text-only personae and text-based life forms then, the unlikely inhabitants of the Iceberg Whole—have they been here, quiet beneath the surface, all along?  There’s now a means for them to converse with one another, at any rate, a means for forming communities and coming to self-awareness—for only the first time, arguably, since the invention of text 5,000 years ago.  Or were the Icebergs Whole present prior to the creation of the written word?  Were they perhaps responsible for the creation of the written word?  How about for the creation of the internet, this other-than-analog means of communication that’s bringing the written word on a par with the spoken word—in terms of interactivity and real-time involvement—for the first time, ever?

Sure, the first use of writing was for keeping tax records and warehouse inventories—much as the first use of computers and the internet was to facilitate the interests of the powerful.  Yet culturally, along with the rise of computers, we’ve seen such a turnaround in the fortunes of the “geek” that most people under forty have no awareness that as recently as the 1970’s, being labeled one was about as empowering as being outed as a homosexual in Eisenhower’s America.

And now?  Yea, though the verbally gifted, the extroverted, outgoing tips-of-the-icebergs have overrun Twitter and Facebook and the rest of the internet with incessant inane chattering, surely it’s still the geeks, the Aspergian Tribe, the text-based life forms who built the joint and maintain it, those who are native to it, sometimes more familiar with its hacks than with those of analog reality, who are the ones who need the internet’s other-than-analog means of expression in order to recognize one another, experience themselves as a community, and maintain this tide of good fortune so recently come their way.

He’s a cliché now but even three decades ago a shy, geeky, pencil-necked kid who turns predator when faced with a cockpit full of gauges, buttons, and switches was still little more than a figure of fun in a book about real men—at best only a bitter-comic promise of possibility.  Now we see he was a proto-video gamer, and millions of shy, awkward kids have not only torn up the scenery in first-person shooters from beyond Ensign Cobb’s wildest dreams; they’ve done so as part of a community—which as they transition into their working years forms the basis for a social network potentially every bit as useful as the sports- or fraternity-based Good Old Boys’ versions to which they might formerly have had limited access.

In doing so they are making good on their lineage—as a group—for perhaps the first time in human history.  The same goes for those leveraging their text-only personae for professional networking.  How far back this lineage goes is anybody’s guess; it may reach back well beyond the paleolithic.  It’s a point I keep coming back to, that these people represent the oldest and most secret of all secret societies; at least throughout recorded history, its members seem not to have even known one another.

While it’s always an iffy proposition to imagine that we, yes, we in our lifetimes, are straddling a cusp that marks an epochal change, it does seem that after what may have been millennia in complete or relative silence and isolation, the arrival of the internet may mark the beginning of a re-membering, a calling-home of the children for the sort of minds who brought it into being.

Such a homecoming could well take centuries more to play out, but something Icebergian may be rising.  Those who set their store by the tip-of-the-iceberg and the analog signal will find it easy to see this rising as some Rough Beast whose hour has come round at last; wars are fought over just such matters of perspective, and for those who are paying attention this war is already being waged—and on more than one front at that.  What we are likely to see most of, however, is more and more adults whose text-only personae have grown up with far more opportunities than ours did.  Where that leads us, we’ll just have to wait and see.

The Internet and the Iceberg Whole first appeared at Shift Journal on September 25, 2009.

“Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking is to be the project’s foundational anthology, featuring submissions by Autistic authors speaking about neurodiversity, Autistic pride and culture, disability rights and resistance, and resilience (known collectively by the community as having loud hands). The anthology is the first of a projected series featuring contributions from Autistic writers stressing the preservation and celebration of Autistic culture and resilience. The Loud hands website will host shorter and multi-media submissions along the same lines, along with additional materials and videos, and serve as a focal point for the project and community.”

“With an overarching commitment to undoing the cultural processes and ghettoization that make autistic people strangers to ourselves and spectators in our own stories, The Loud Hands Project consists of multiple prongs organized around the theme of what the Autistic community refers to as ‘having loud hands’ — autism acceptance, neurodiversity, Autistic pride, community, and culture, disability rights and resistance, and resilience.  The focus is on cultivating resilience among autistic young people and empowering the Autistic community writ large in building communities and cultures of ability, resistance, and worth. To quote Laura Hershey: ‘you weren’t the one who made you ashamed, but you are the one who can make you proud.’”

For further details including a roadmap for the ambitious future of The Loud Hands Project as well as an opportunity to contribute see the project’s IndieGoGo site here.

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2012/01/09/introducing-the-loud-hands-project/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/12/20/la-times-scooped-by-shift-journal-seven-times/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/12/20/la-times-scooped-by-shift-journal-seven-times/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 06:00:38 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=7474 Directly in the title of the fourth and final installment of a series on autism which has been by turns both predictably biased and reasonably informative, the LA Times last Friday ventured to print with a startling new assertion:

Autism hidden in plain sight

“What happened to all the people who never got diagnosed? Where are they?” the article asks, later continuing, “Evidence suggests the vast majority are not segregated from society — they are hiding in plain sight. Most will probably never be identified, but a picture of their lives is starting to emerge from those who have been.”

Groundbreaking news? Certainly in some quarters, and props to the Times for bringing it to them. Longtime readers of Shift Journal however may have a nagging sense that they’ve seen that language, somewhere … already.

___

… thinking here was a writer capable of bringing attention to the under-the-radar autism we had found to be hidden in plain sight.

– Reverse Van Winkle, 11/27/09

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Pandemic autism that’s hidden in plain sight, an autistic spectrum populated overwhelmingly by undiagnosed fellow travelers and autistics-in-hiding—if this is an accurate description of autism’s full spectrum, then where are all these supposed autistics?

– Covert Ops in Autistic Self-Advocacy, 2/19/10

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Autism has been here all along.

Considered as an evolutionary condition with far-reaching social implications, its full presence and impact remain hidden in plain sight, unrecognized and uncredited.

– Shift Journal sidebar, rewritten 3/27/10

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My premise all along – as reflected in the sidebar as well as many earlier entries – has been that autism is far-reaching in its social implications, and that its full presence and impact remain hidden in plain sight, unrecognized and uncredited. I mean this in both of the senses I’ve just described, in terms of the role autism may have played in cultural innovation throughout history, pre-history, and evolutionary time, and also in terms of the present-day spectrum and contemporary culture.

– The Autisitc Cohort as a Distributed System, 1/21/11

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But then this is how most humans react – with denial – apparently, when that which has been “hidden” in plain sight all over the land suddenly shows up in the neighbor’s backyard, or in polite conversation – or on the teevy news shows.

– What’s So Funny About Wikileaks and Autism? 1/28/11

___

Whatever the answer, it’s a question I come back to over and over. Whether I happen to be chasing phantoms just at the moment or not, the notion of everyday autism everywhere, hidden in plain sight, consistently overlooked and misidentified, is one that’s haunted me for over a decade now.

– If Not Us, Then Who? 2/11/11

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That said, the ideas that drive me to be involved here are that there is a huge undercurrent of autism in modern society, that there is no meaningful dividing line between diagnosed autistics and the rest of us, that autism is such a significant part of who we are as a society and as a species that we would not recognize ourselves without it — and that all of this is hidden in plain sight, visible only for those who have eyes to see.

– Waiting for the Fireworks, 3/18/11

Shift. Journal of Alternatives: Neurodiversity and social change. Autism views before they’re news, since 2009.

While the above is presented (mostly) tongue-in-cheek, readers interested in an actual in-depth, ahead-of-our times, book-length theory describing autism’s place in human society and evolution are invited to download or purchase site founder Andrew Lehman’s Evolution, Autism, and Social Change.

[image via Wikimedia Commons]

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/12/20/la-times-scooped-by-shift-journal-seven-times/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/12/13/pieces-of-suicide/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/12/13/pieces-of-suicide/#comments Tue, 13 Dec 2011 09:00:19 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=7428 There’s a little back-and-forth echo that’s popped up between this site and Julia Bascom’s. This entry aims to amplify that little echo. Here’s Julia yesterday at her blog Just Stimming, after having thanked readers for recent comments and explained a bit about not having posted much lately:

“In the interest of directing you to something similar to read, an idea that needs to go viral, I’d like to link you to The Unbroken Spectrum: Stockholm Syndrome, over at Shift Journal. I did not write it. It’s important.”

The chain of echo runs backward from there to Julia’s Speech (without a title) republished here at Shift yesterday, to the “related” item I had placed at the bottom of her essay, which was my Stockholm Syndrome post that Julia was linking to. Their related-ness comes of the fact that they treat the same subject from different angles. Julia’s take opens outward from a more personal perspective while mine centers on parallels between hostages and autistics and expands to take in the whole of the spectrum. Both though deal with the breathtaking, terrifying extent to which autistics have been unable to avoid internalizing judgments made about us.

What strikes me tonight in fact, reading both pieces side by side again is how autistics are actually exquisitely sensitive socially. So much so that we are uniquely vulnerable to being “gaslighted,” to having our sense of reality undermined and replaced with one that better serves the purposes of others not like us. This exquisite social sensitivity has been explored by Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg in The “Intense World Syndrome” Theory of Autism, where she quotes researchers who conclude, “the autistic person is an individual with remarkable and far above average capabilities due to greatly enhanced perception, attention and memory. In fact, it is this hyper-functionality which could render the individual debilitated.”

There’s more though. Once you’ve been rendered “debilitated by your hyper-functionality” in a sort of no-fault, passive process in which no one does anything to you, that’s when “debilitate” becomes a transitive verb requiring an object. And that object is you. It’s at this point that you become a hostage to society, not because you lack sensitivity, but precisely because you are so exquisitely sensitive, so eminently programmable — even when that program, reflecting the judgments of others, is self-destructive.

Yes of course we have strengths. We know better than you they’re what keep us alive. Know this though: much of what many of us do in order to live in the world is just pieces of suicide, just as Stockholm Syndrome hostages will self-betray and will a bit of themselves to die inside in order to stay alive in their captor’s world; just as autistics will smack their heads against the wall because it’s ultimately less painful than trying to convince themselves, let alone everyone else, that they are maybe, possibly, worth something just the way they are.

What Julia and I are both saying I think is that there is a cost accounting that isn’t being done here. It’s an accounting many autistics are acutely, painfully aware of — how much self-betrayal in order to have a place here, how much death in order to make this loved one happy — but of which non-autistics remain either blissfully unaware or, well, this is part of the problem too.

Autistics don’t really know how aware of this dynamic any given person is. Many of us though are aware that knowing-and-not-telling brings power, and that power is seductive, for all kinds of reasons. So having this seductive dynamic out there without being able to talk about it, without being able to hold others responsible to not require our piecemeal suicide, it’s … destabilizing. It makes trust near impossible. Which in turn makes intimacy near impossible. And that among other reasons is why, as Julia says, “It’s important.”

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

related: Speech (without a title)

related: The Unbroken Spectrum: Stockholm Syndrome

related: The “Intense World Syndrome” Theory of Autism

related: Cost Accounting

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/12/13/pieces-of-suicide/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/12/10/still-half-drunk-with-delight/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/12/10/still-half-drunk-with-delight/#comments Sat, 10 Dec 2011 07:42:39 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=7357 Bee Swarms Mimic Human Brain Neurons to Make Decisions

Swarms of bees and brain neurons make decisions using strikingly similar mechanisms, reports a new study in the Dec. 9 issue of Science. In previous work, Cornell University biologist Thomas Seeley clarified how scout bees in a honeybee swarm perform “waggle dances” to prompt other scout bees to inspect a promising site that has been found.

– Bioscience Technology, Friday, December 9, 2011

Granny Weatherwax’s beehives were tucked away down one side of the cottage. Some were the old straw kind, most were patched-up wooden ones. They thundered with activity, even this late in the year.

Tiffany turned aside to look at them, and the bees poured out in a dark stream. They swarmed toward Tiffany, formed a column, and—

She laughed. They’d made a witch of bees in front of her, thousands of them all holding station in the air. She raised her right hand. With a rise in the level of buzzing, the bee-witch raised its right hand. She turned around. It turned around, the bees carefully copying down every swirl and flutter of her dress, the ones on the very edge buzzing desperately because they had farthest to fly.

She carefully put down the big sack and reached out toward the figure. With another roar of wings it went shapeless for a moment, then re-formed a little way away, but with a hand outstretched toward her. The bee that was the tip of its forefinger hovered just in front of Tiffany’s fingernail.

“Shall we dance?” said Tiffany.

In the clearing full of spinning seeds, she circled the swarm. It kept up pretty well, moving fingertip to buzzing tip, turning when she turned, although there were always a few bees racing to keep up.

Then it raised both its arms and twirled in the opposite direction, the bees in the “skirt” spreading out again as it spun. It was learning.

Tiffany laughed and did the same thing. Swarm and girl whirled across the clearing.

She felt happy and wondered if she’d ever felt this happy before. The gold light, the falling seeds, the dancing bees … it was all one thing. This was the opposite of the dark desert. Here, light was everywhere and filled her up inside. She could feel herself here but see herself from above, twirling with a buzzing shadow that sparkled golden as the light struck the bees. Moments like this paid for it all.

“This is the part about autism I can never explain. This is the part I never want to lose. Without this part autism is not worth having.“

Then the witch made of bees leaned closer to Tiffany, as if staring at her with its thousands of little jeweled eyes. There was a faint piping noise from inside the figure and the bee-witch exploded into a spreading, buzzing cloud of insects which raced away across the clearing and disappeared. The only movement now was the whirring fall of the sycamore seeds.

Tiffany breathed out.

“Now, some people would have found that scary,” said a voice behind her.

Tiffany didn’t turn around immediately. First she said, “Good afternoon, Granny Weatherwax.” Then she turned around.

“Have you ever done this?” she demanded, still half drunk with delight.

___

Excerpted from Terry Pratchett’s A Hat Full of Sky, second of the Tiffany Aching books, chapter fourteen.

With a deep bow to Julia Bascom’s The Obsessive Joy Of Autism, which is currently taking Mark Zuckerberg’s Mansion of Mirrors by storm.

Thanks to Meredith L Patterson, @marydydd, for making my day with the tweet pointing to the study mentioned above:

Flocking and swarming #algorithms, *bitches*. bit.ly/vJNASY

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/12/10/still-half-drunk-with-delight/feed/ 1 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/11/08/darmok-and-jalad-at-tanagra/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/11/08/darmok-and-jalad-at-tanagra/#comments Tue, 08 Nov 2011 06:00:32 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=7159
The following is a mashup of two blog posts from two very different spheres of experience, presented without comment save for this:

One is a brief, humorous account of the television-viewing habits and nerdy shorthand shared by a software developer and her sympatico husband. The other, in the inset paragraphs, is an excerpt from an explanation of a young autistic boy’s reliance on a similarly television-based shorthand, delivered by his mother to the boy’s classmates. Together all the more suggestive of the notion that “Nerdery,” as is observed below, “is a continuum.”

_____________________

I’m finding comedy works best to keep me from dwelling on how much longer I’m going to be on an elliptical machine, treadmill or what-have-you. So earlier this week it was an old standby, Office Space. (If you haven’t seen it, suffice it to say that it’s sort of a cult classic for programmers.) Coincidentally, this was also the same week that someone decided to riff on one of the movie’s plot-points and steal fellow programmer’s red Swingline stapler. Twice.

And so, my foundational analogy successfully delivered, I began addressing some of the common questions that the children had asked about Bud’s behavior.

The first:  Why does Bud repeat things from TV?

“Remember how I told you that language is one of the things that’s difficult for people with autism?” I asked the wacky-haired, toaster-brained group, who nodded enthusiastically.  “Well, that has been true for Bud ever since he was really little.  He learned to talk in a very different way from most people.

“Most people learn to talk by learning one word at a time – like, first they say “Mama,” and then they say “juice.”  And then, when they get a little bit older, they start to put words together and they say things like “Juice, Mama?”  For most of us, our brains automatically learn to talk that way.

I polished off Office Space and turned back to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, riffs from which are unavoidable in the SCA. That’d be like trying to play golf without at least one wink-wink-nudge-nudge reference to Caddyshack.

“But Bud didn’t learn to talk that way.  When he was really little, around the time that most of you were saying “Juice, Mama?,” Bud didn’t talk at all.  When he wanted juice, he just walked over to me and handed me his cup.

“And then, as he got older and he started to use words, he didn’t use one word at a time.  He used his great memory to learn whole sentences that he would repeat back.  So I would ask “Do you want some juice?” and Bud would reply “Do you want some juice?”  And his brain learned that the words you say when you want juice are “Do you want some juice?”

“So, later, when he wanted juice, he would just walk up to me, hand me his cup, and say “Do you want some juice?”  And I would know what he wanted.  This way of talking is called echolalia.  It’s similar to the word ‘echo’ – hearing the same thing back after you say it.”

I heard some soft wows and ohs around the room.  I think I heard a few light bulbs click on.

Bad enough that Dennis & I have already trained each other to phrase “or”-type questions (as in, “Do you want four cheese or meat-lover’s supreme?”) without expecting the answer to be an obligatory “Yes.” Or “True” or “1″ if someone’s feeling exceptionally nerdy. But then I made the mistake of remembering the phrase, “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”

“Now, remember how we said that one of the things that Bud’s brain is REALLY good at remembering things?  Remember how I said he can remember whole TV shows after he’s only seen them a couple of times?  That was true even when he was really little.  So, once Bud learned that saying things like “Do you want some juice?” could actually get him some juice, he started exploring the other chunks of language that he knew, to see how he might be able to use that, too.

“In other words, when he wanted to say something, it was really hard for him to try to put words together to make sentences, but it was very easy for him to think of scripts from TV shows that were about the things he wanted to talk about.

“As Bud got older, he learned to swap out words from scripts – he’d take out the words that didn’t fit, and put in words that fit better.  And as he got even older, he started learning how to put sentences together the same way that you do – he started learning how to make language toast with his hair dryer brain.

“Now, Bud can do both kinds of talking – putting his own sentences together and using scripts.  But because of the way his brain works, it is still easier for him to use scripts.

(If you’re not a Star Trek: The Next Generation maven, here’s the schtick: The Federation has bumped into (yet another) alien race that (surprise!) just happens to be recognizably humanoid. Moreover, the Universal Translator can even babblefish–yes, I just used that as a verb–their language into English words. Problem is, it still doesn’t make sense, because the Tamarians exclusively communicate allegorically–meaning through references to stories from their history. Think of it as tribal knowledge on steroids.)

“It’s especially easier for Bud to use scripts when he is feeling very strong emotions.  When Bud is feeling sad, or angry, or frustrated, his brain is busy trying to deal with those feelings, so he doesn’t have a lot of extra energy to try to put words together.  Instead, he finds the words that somebody from TV was using when they felt the way he is feeling.

“So, how many of you have ever seen Bud get angry and heard him say ‘That’s it! I’m leaving!’?”

I shouted out the words with the tone and inflection that I knew were classic Bud.  Every hand shot up.

“Yeah, he says that a lot, doesn’t he?  That’s Minnie Mouse from The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.  She was REALLY angry and REALLY frustrated.

At first I thought, well, we’re not that bad. But then I realized–particularly after being chagrined at how much of the “Brave, Brave Sir Robin” song I’ve forgotten–that any nerdery is a continuum. Meep! Ummm…how many restroom stops until Tanagra?

“Sometimes, when he’s frustrated because he can’t get what he wants, he might use a script from Dragon Tales.  It’s from a show where Zak and Wheezie want to play the wolf in a puppet show of The 3 Little Pigs.  If they can’t be the wolf, they don’t want to play.  So they say “No WOLF, no Zak and Wheezie!”  But Bud usually changes the words when he uses that script.  So on a day when he’s frustrated because Mrs. Nee tells him it’s not snack time, you might hear him say in the very same way as Zak and Wheezie, ‘No SNACK, no Bud-NOS.’

“But, as I said, when his emotions are really strong or really difficult, he usually doesn’t change the words at all.  He just uses the words from the script because they really capture the emotion he’s feeling.

“So if you hear him say something and the words don’t match what’s going on at all, don’t think about the words he’s using.  Try to think about the feeling that might go along with those words, and it might help you understand why Bud is saying them.  Sometimes, you can even ask him, ‘Bud, who said that?  What made them say that?’  And very often, he will explain it to you.”

A thoughtful silence filled the room.

[image via Gifts for a Geek]

related: On Literal Thinking

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/11/08/darmok-and-jalad-at-tanagra/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/10/17/it-should-be-easy-for-everyone/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/10/17/it-should-be-easy-for-everyone/#comments Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:38:34 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6993 Just a quick companion piece here for Zygmunt’s account of his grappling with the social justice system of extroverts — a group that if not provably neurologically distinct, certainly seems to have its own style of consciousness. A lot has happened in the world of “deserval” in the nearly two years since Extroverts and the Concept of “Deserval” was written. Public consciousness is increasingly occupied with questions of who deserves what; as I write this morning the Occupy Wall Street movement has entered its thirtieth day with related protests underway in dozens of other American cities, while this past weekend several European cities had tens and hundreds of thousands of people in the streets demonstrating for economic justice.

In drawing a distinction based on number, the protesters’ rallying cry “We are the 99 percent” is drawn from the same well as last December’s entry Which War Are We In: Good vs. Evil, or The One vs. The Many? That post also brought up the significance of distributed, decentralized systems, which was a theme I was following closely at the turn of the year as governments around the world were coming to terms with Wikileaks and the distributed network known as the internet. In the New York protests and in others modeled on it elsewhere, one signature move is exactly this turning of a decentralized face toward the authorities, with no discernable leaders and as yet no specific demands. As calls for the occupants of Zuccotti Park in New York to narrow and unify their objectives along ideological lines poured in from groups both opposed to and “concerned” for the movement, I couldn’t help but think of the spat I barged into a couple months ago, when the call was going up for the neurodiversity movement to unify its goals and objectives in like manner.

With all this in mind, that both the neurodiversity movement and those who fly the banner of “We are the 99 percent” are engaged in a struggle of The One vs. the Many, I wanted to throw out three quotes I’ve run across recently, in order to encourage consideration of neurodiversity in light of what’s being learned by and from the ninety-nine percenters.

The first and most lengthy comes from Mike Konczal’s Rortybomb, one of the Top 25 Best Economic and Finance Blogs from this year’s Time Magazine roundup. Konczal has done something fascinating with the We Are The 99 Percent tumblr. “At the site,” as he relates, “people hold up signs that explain their current circumstances, and it tells the story of a whole range of Americans struggling in the Lesser Depression.  It is highly recommended.” He goes on, “In order to get a slightly better empirical handle on this important tumblr, I created a script designed to read all of the pages and parse out the html text on the site … After collecting all the text on all the pages, the code then goes through it to try to find interesting points.”

Note: before getting hung up on literal thinking here, remember that while autistics may represent far from ninety-nine percent of the population, autism itself represents the fact that there is more than one way of being in the world. There are in fact many, Many legitimate ways of being in the world, and this is where we join the battle of The One vs. The Many.

Back to Konczal’s statistics, he comes up with a graph of the age distribution of those who had posted (about a thousand at the time) along with the twenty-five most frequently occurring words describing the relevant concerns of posters — and what he then does with and notices about those words should be not only disturbing but familiar to anyone living as or raising up an autistic person.

So if the 99% Tumblr was a PAC, what would its demands look like, and what ideology would it presuppose?  Freddie DeBoer is discouraged after reading the 99% tumblr. He’s concerned it reflects a desire for restoration of the glory days of the 90s-00s, which concerns him because “this country cannot be fixed by wishing to go back to the economics of 2005.”  Concerned that the solidarity is one that, at most, is a I-got-mine-you-go-get-yours form of neoliberalism (as he imagines it, “I went to college and I don’t have the job and the car and the lifestyle I was promised”), DeBoer is worried that We Are the 99% isn’t “a rejection of our failing order. It is an embrace of it in the most cynical terms.”

With all due respect to DeBoer, the demands I found aren’t the ones of the go-go 90s-00s, but instead [a] far more ancient cry, one of premodernity and antiquity.

Let’s bring up a favorite quote around here.  Anthropologist David Graeber cites historian Moses Finley, who identified “the perennial revolutionary programme of antiquity, cancel debts and redistribute the land, the slogan of a peasantry, not of a working class.”  And think through these cases.  The overwhelming majority of these statements are actionable demands in the form of (i) free us from the bondage of these debts and (ii) give us a bare minimum to survive on in order to lead decent lives (or, in pre-Industrial terms, give us some land).  In Finley’s terms, these are the demands of a peasantry, not a working class.

A peasantry, not a working class. My takeaway here, aside from the heartbreaking, infuriating implications for we ninety-nine percenters in general, is that autistics in particular have been denied similarly actionable demands all along, in the form of (i) free us from the bondage of uninformed, unreasonable expectations regarding our behavior, expectations that can never be met without informed and reasonable accommodations, and (ii) give us the accommodations, understanding, and respect we need in both our physical and social worlds (yea, though “territory” both cheap and dear to many will have to be turned over or shared in the process) so that we may lead decent lives.

My takeaway is that autistics have been living like peasants all along.

Here I’ll pause to say that I follow Ari Ne’eman on Twitter and that save for two occasions I have never, ever known him to share or comment on anything not directly related to his work and his concerns as the first openly autistic presidential appointee, serving on the National Council on Disability. And yet twice in the days since the Occupy demonstrations began I have seen him making mention of them, wondering what will come of it all. And so of course I don’t know that I’ve seen Mr. Ne’eman’s focus waver at all actually.

***

My second quote is from Jack Crow, who appeared in this space not long ago with Advice for Children, Unsolicited. I introduced Jack to Shift Journal from a comments thread on his blog The Crow’s Eye; he is one of the few people I’ve ever met who got what this site is about immediately with little more than a sentence’s worth of explanation. Here he is developing an idea that actually has appeared in two posts that I’m aware of; I’ll combine them here into one train of thought:

At the point of resistance, where we meet others who want to struggle, who want to fight, who have reached the apex of a necessary question, our origins matter less than our aims.

“What is that question? ” you might wonder.

I’ll gladly tell you. The question is, “Why shouldn’t everyone have it easy?”

I mean, everyone. If you can ask this question, I kindly submit to you that you are all the way there.

So why not take the next step?

Why not resist?

***

6. A coherent message which can be simplified to this: It Should Be Easy For Everyone. This conservatarian/bootstrapper ethic which dominates our culture and society has got to be fucking attacked, and mercilessly. Hard work and poverty don’t improve character. They break lives.”

It Should Be Easy For Everyone.

It should be easy for everyone.

It should be easy for autistics.

It Should Be Easy For Autistics.

***

The final quote I have is from technologist, science fiction author, and journalist Meredith L. Patterson aka @maradydd on Twitter where her profile describes her as “angry young mathematician.” Her words might well have been posted with the hashtag #contextfree, but I expect if you’ve read this far it’s safe to let them speak for themselves:

@maradydd Meredith L Patterson
The *whole point* of privilege is “Everyone deserves X.” Do not forget this.
14 Oct via web

[image via We Are The 99 Percent Tumblr]

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/10/17/it-should-be-easy-for-everyone/feed/ 1 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/10/12/thinking-in-binary-recently-at-reddi/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/10/12/thinking-in-binary-recently-at-reddi/#comments Thu, 13 Oct 2011 04:43:43 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6969 This conversation (below) along with a parallel comment on another thread caused me to dig up a Douglas Rushkoff quote that keeps coming back to me:

“The digital realm is biased toward choice, because everything must be expressed in the terms of a discreet, yes-or-no, symbolic language. This, in turn, often forces choices on humans operating within the digital sphere. We must come to recognize the increased number of choices in our lives as largely a side-effect of the digital; we always have the choice of making no choice at all.”

And this was exactly the invitation extended in the post being discussed below: to make no choice at all; to respond with neither a yes or a no, but to entertain the premise it described.

We have largely lost this art of entertaining ideas. The only correction I would suggest to Rushkoff’s observation is that the “discreet, yes-or-no, symbolic language” of blacks and whites and ups and downs, the 0′s and 1′s that underlie the entire vocabulary of our digital realm, is one that’s been in development at least since Descartes and ye olde body-mind dualism. The “binary” of computer programming languages was thus arguably a cultural choice forced on early programmers whose “analog sphere” had been trending binary for generations.

And never mind autism during the Enlightenment; when we look at contemporary autism through these binary, either/or lenses, we get exactly the goofy, paradoxical absurdity described so well earlier today by Neuroskeptic, in Mountains of Mental Disorders.

It’s not just the digital realm described by Rushkoff that’s “biased toward choice.” And it’s not a bias, in any realm, that favors autistics, or — as Neuroskeptic seems to make clear — those who would understand autism.

*******

Were autistics, as atheists and agnostics, the engine that drove the European Enlightenment?

Redditor 1: No, smart people did.

Redditor 2: The guy is autistic and is trying to claim the enlightenment for his own. The Enlightenment figures were hardly autistic. Many owned political positions or sought them out and were socialites even if they were only socialites among other intellectuals.

Redditor 3: this, EXACTLY

Author: Ableist much, guys?

Redditor 4: Ah, yes. Nobody agrees with you and so we must be discriminating.

Author: Disagreeing about the Enlightenment is legit. Implying that autistics cannot be smart and capable is ableist.

Redditor 4: I think the main argument is that many of the influential people were socialites and politicians.

Author: Then you know about autistic obsessions with pattern-finding and with specific subject interests. There ain’t no social joy in the world like that between autistics who share a special interest, and during the Enlightenment we were minting new special interests as fast as we could identify the patterns that wove them together.

Redditor 4: I could see that. But to say that the entire enlightenment was driven by autism is kind of a big leap without proof, considering Autism wasn’t officially recognized until around the 1940s and any speculation about people before that is based on reported behaviors rather than any actual clinical observation.

Author: Homosexuality was considered a mental disorder not so long ago, and still is in some quarters. Shift Journal is all about the big leaps; go back and read the first month or so. No one sails to new lands without consenting to lose sight of the familiar coastline.

Redditor 4: The only impact homosexuality has on the lives of homosexuals is from discrimination and possibly hemorrhoids.

Author: Not following your lead sentence, and am not sure I need or want to.

Redditor 4: I’m saying that to diagnosis someone with autism the person needs to exhibit at least six symptoms of impairment (at least two in social impairment, at least one in communication impairment and at least one in repetitive behavior). There were many reasons homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder and none of it had to do with impairment.

Author: I get your first point now but I think among the religious right you can still find the social construct of homosexuality as an impairment. Your reading of the DSM requirements is correct (though oddly subject to correction, once again, with the next edition). My point is that autistic impairment is in significant part a social construct; your citation of the DSM seems not to recognize this.

Redditor 4: I’ll probably look into it more. I just skimmed the article, but it is an intriguing thought. From what I read though the first part seems to draw conclusions from a premise that doesn’t support that conclusion.

Author: Um, how about “Autistic people do fine without belief” sted “have trouble,” k?

I was reminded of this when I ran across a letter published a couple days ago by Jon Ronson, who is among other things the author and filmmaker responsible for The Psychopath Test, both a book and a documentary. Predictably enough Ronson hears from people who are curious to know whether he ever gets emails from psychopaths, and this past Saturday he posted one such letter. It appears to have come from an extraordinarily self-aware psychopath who describes his experience as a self-referred patient at a mental health agency, for a course of treatment which lasted upwards of four years.

My case was rather unusual in that I self-referred. The mental health agency had not had a walk-in of this kind before. In the lead up, I had found myself becoming overwhelmed with a predatorial instinct that I could not shake – I’d sit, watching crowds of people go by, driven to mania by what I saw as their limitless inferiorities. Plans were set that, once enacted, would be very difficult to walk back from.

The age-old caveat here of course is that the Devil hath power to assume a pleasing form, that psychopaths as master manipulators are fully capable of painting just such a potentially disarming and thoughtful picture of themselves. So sure — keeping in mind also the Devil’s power to plant that fossil record that’s duped the paleontologists all these years — take the letter for what it’s worth. The reason I bring it up here is that once one starts comparing the language and reasoning used by this psychopathic letter-writer, and the language and reasoning put forth by the neurodiversity movement, striking similarities become apparent. At which point one must consider whether it is more likely that the irregular army of self-advocate autistics which has emerged over the past decade is engaged in a collective act of psychopathic manipulation (and I’m well aware this point of view does in fact have its fans) … or whether science and society have managed to misunderstand both autism and psychopathy in a similar fashion.

Yes thearapy was transformative, though it is possible to overstate its impacts. I will always see the world through different lenses to much of the rest of the world. My emotional reactions are different, my endowments are impressive in some respects, not so in others, much like other people.

It is also the case that, being ‘normal’ takes a degree of energy and conscious thought that is instinctive for most, but to me is a significant expenditure of energy. I think it analogous to speaking a second language. That is not to say I am being false or obfuscating, merely that I will always expose some eccentric traits.

Seeming contradictions and ambiguities bedevil those who observe both psychopathy and autism from a wide angle. Ronson for instance is on board with businessman and radio host Thom Hartmann’s long-standing assertion that American-style corporatism functions as it does because it incentivizes the best and brightest psychopaths to compete for the most elite corporate CEO positions. And as psychopathy emerges as the worm in the corporate apple, it’s turned out that many of the best minds of each generation bear fruit not in spite of but precisely because they are autistic. What, then, might the analogous, unambiguously positive contributions of the psychopath be?

Well, lets look at what (bright) psychopaths are naturally quite exceptional at… We are good at identifying, very rapidly, extreme traits of those around us which allows us to discern vulnerabilities, frailties, and mental conditions. It also makes psychopaths supreme manipulators, for they can mimick human emotions they do not feel, play on these emotions and extract concessions.

But what are these traits really? – Stripped of its pejorative adjectives and mean application, it is a highly trained perception, ability to adapt, and a lack of judgment borne of pragmatic and flexible moral reasoning.

In a sense, one can almost see psychopathy as a mirror or photo-negative image of autism, each occupying opposite ends of a particular axis. As it happens, Ronson is also big on the notion of psychopathy as a spectrum. He recounts alarming himself over the number and extent of psychopathic traits he learned to recognize in himself and in others, and eventually runs up against the same absurdity encountered by those who attempt to draw a clear and consistent line across the spectrum, between autism and not-autism. Unlike those burdened with cobbling together the next DSM, Ronson is not above playing this absurdity for laughs.

And then, who wouldn’t want to know a psychopath such as this.

These days I enjoy a reputation of being someone of intense understanding and observation with a keen strategic instinct. I know where those traits come from, yet I have made the conscious choice to use them for the betterment of friends, aquaintences, and society. People confide in me extraordinary things because they know, no matter what, I will not be judging them.

I do so because I know I have that choice. After years of therapy I am well equipped to act on it, and my keen perception is now directed equally towards myself.

Continuing, the letter-writer relates that he anticipates the same accusation encountered by countless autistics who are able at least some of the time to “pass

Its true that I do not ‘feel’ guilt or remorse, except to the extent that it affects me directly, but I do feel other emotions, which do not have adequate words of description, but nevertheless cause me to derive satisfacton in developing interpersonal relationships, contributing to society, and being gentle as well as assertive.

Such as statement might tempt you to say ‘well obviously you’re not a real psychopath then’. As if the definition of a psychopath is someone who exploits others for their personal power, satisfaction or gain.

Not only does the choir respond, “As if the definition of an autistic is someone incapable of feeling empathy” (or lacking an imagination), I’m also reminded here of a recent citation by Michelle Dawson @autismcrisis:

“different people may acquire moral values through different mechanisms” http://j.mp/nNUmHA survey-based study of empathy etc in Aspergers

“Different people … different mechanisms” and the struggle we have with accepting those differences speaks more to me of a conflict between The One (acceptable kind of person, kind of mechanism) and The Many (legitimate ways of being in the world) than it does between Good and Evil, and yet it is with Evil that psychopathy is explicitly identified. Implicitly, much the same association still holds for autism. Make no mistake, my own brushes with psychopathy have been harrowing enough that I’m not lacking in respect for its destructive power (nor for that matter is Mr. Ronson). And were I of a mind to, I could Eeyore away many a night bemoaning the Good that autism has cost me and mine, and will cost us yet. But when something is taken to be Evil, the ways in which we are able to experience it are few, and unattractive, and most importantly unfruitful.

What power, beauty, and fruitfulness we are capable of, I suggest, lies not in fighting the good fight but in taking care in how we conceive, recognize, and experience events and conditions from psychopathy to autism and beyond. It may well be that what evil has been perpetrated to date lies more in our own sins of omission, in our failure to take such care, than in any supposed quality inherent in that which we’ve chosen to fight against.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he did not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle of surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the question had ever been entertained before, “No, I like it well enough.” It would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told me that when he met him sauntering through the village in his small close-fitting cap, and whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise.

His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he was considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as indeed it does to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light. He had never heard of such things before. Could he do without factories? I asked. He had worn the home-made Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could he dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country afford any beverage beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves in water and drank it, and thought that was better than water in warm weather. When I asked him if he could do without money, he showed the convenience of money in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most philosophical accounts of the origin of this institution, and the very derivation of the word pecunia. If an ox were his property, and he wished to get needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be inconvenient and impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature each time to that amount. He could defend many institutions better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they concerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to him any other. At another time, hearing Plato’s definition of a man — a biped without feathers — and that one exhibited a cock plucked and called it Plato’s man, he thought it an important difference that the knees bent the wrong way. He would sometimes exclaim, “How I love to talk! By George, I could talk all day!” I asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he had got a new idea this summer. “Good Lord” — said he, “a man that has to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he will do well. May be the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then, by gorry, your mind must be there; you think of weeds.” He would sometimes ask me first on such occasions, if I had made any improvement. One winter day I asked him if he was always satisfied with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive for living. “Satisfied!” said he; “some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with another. One man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be satisfied to sit all day with his back to the fire and his belly to the table, by George!” Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him to take the spiritual view of things; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate; and this, practically, is true of most men. If I suggested any improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered, without expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet he thoroughly believed in honesty and the like virtues.

There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man’s, it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported. He suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all; who are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy.

Part 1 …

Source: Henry David Thoreau, Walden

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/10/06/thoreaus-visit-from-a-canadian-woodcutter-%e2%80%94-conversations-pt-2/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/10/06/thoreaus-visitors-excerpt-1/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/10/06/thoreaus-visitors-excerpt-1/#comments Thu, 06 Oct 2011 05:00:41 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6905 Rather than trying to spark a debate over postmortem diagnoses, the primary intent here is to showcase and encourage an appreciation for Thoreau’s fascination with and delight in his neighbor who was in any case a striking character. Thoreau is modeling a sense of wonder that’s all too lacking in this age of diagnosis and treatment.

———————————————-

… Beside, there were wafted to me evidences of unexplored and uncultivated continents on the other side.

Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man — he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry I cannot print it here — a Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too, has heard of Homer, and, “if it were not for books,” would “not know what to do rainy days,” though perhaps he has not read one wholly through for many rainy seasons. Some priest who could pronounce the Greek itself taught him to read his verse in the Testament in his native parish far away; and now I must translate to him, while he holds the book, Achilles’ reproof to Patroclus for his sad countenance. — “Why are you in tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?”

“Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?
They say that Menoetius lives yet, son of Actor,
And Peleus lives, son of Æacus, among the Myrmidons,
Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve.”

He says, “That’s good.” He has a great bundle of white oak bark under his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning. “I suppose there’s no harm in going after such a thing to-day,” says he. To him Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not know. A more simple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed to have hardly any existance for him. He was about twenty-eight years old, and had left Canada and his father’s house a dozen years before to work in the States, and earn money to buy a farm with at last, perhaps in his native country. He was cast in the coarsest mould; a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression. He wore a flat gray cloth cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and cowhide boots. He was a great consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a couple of miles past my house — for he chopped all summer — in a tin pail; cold meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which dangled by a string from his belt; and sometimes he offered me a drink. He came along early, crossing my bean-field, though without anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit. He wasn’t a-going to hurt himself. He didn’t care if he only earned his board. Frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he boarded, after deliberating first for half an hour whether he could not sink it in the pond safely till nightfall — loving to dwell long upon these themes. He would say, as he went by in the morning, “How thick the pigeons are! If working every day were not my trade, I could get all the meat I should want by hunting-pigeons, woodchucks, rabbits, partridges — by gosh! I could get all I should want for a week in one day.”

He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and ornaments in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground, that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps; and instead of leaving a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with your hand at last.

He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian French, though he spoke English as well. When I approached him he would suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees he would exclaim — “By George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I want no better sport.” Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked. In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the chickadees would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers; and he said that he “liked to have the little fellers about him.”

In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he answered, with a sincere and serious look, “Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life.” But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child. When Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and contentment for his portion, and propped him on every side with reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore years and ten a child …

Part 2 …

Source: Henry David Thoreau, Walden

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/10/06/thoreaus-visitors-excerpt-1/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/09/29/welcome-the-crows-eye-readers/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/09/29/welcome-the-crows-eye-readers/#comments Thu, 29 Sep 2011 09:40:53 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6846 We’ve been getting a significant traffic bump from the recent comments thread and/or the blogroll (thanks, Jack) over at political blog The Crow’s Eye, and since it may not be readily apparent what the relationship between these two sites might be, I want to bring into focus some of what Jack’s readers might find relevant here. The immediate connection is that I noticed a post of his this week that had nothing to do with autism as such, but which advises a characteristically hard look at the uses and misuses of social graces. Social graces being a well-worn friction point between autistics and society, it’s a topic we’ve touched on more than once. Struck by the parallels between the Crow’s Eye post and two entries in particular at Shift, I asked if I might republish Advice for Children, Unsolicited.

Jack not only assented, but proved to be that rare newcomer who gets what Shift Journal is about with no explanation needed, commenting ”It’s interesting to read you on the conflict between the medical establishment (Big Autism, the attempt to cure the condition) and those struggling as persons who happen to be autistic.” I don’t know how notorious we can claim to be at Shift yet, but if the contrarian group blog Corrente is accurately and ironically described as ”the notorious C-list blog that everyone hates and no one reads,” that may not be a bad way for folks from Left Blogistan to understand Shift’s position in the larger world of autism — but the relevance, I think, only begins there.

For one thing, as Jack set the table for me to expand on in the comments thread back at The Crow’s Eye, there are parallels between the way the conservative movement can be seen to draw energy from repressed and projected homosexuality, and the energy that’s available from similarly repressed and projected autism. Just as As Joanna Russ pointed out one intersection of politics and sexuality by noting that ”Homophobia isn’t there to keep homosexuals in line. Homophobia is there to keep everyone else in line,” the intersection of politics and autism-phobia is in the same neighborhood, just one block over.

Consider that very few gay people these days grow to adulthood without knowing what homosexuality is, even if they can’t talk about being gay. Imagine how terrifyingly confusing it must have been though to grow up gay when large swaths of the population didn’t even have a vocabulary for that experience. That’s the sort of energy generated today by people who are autistic and don’t know how to talk about it — energy that feeds into our political and personal lives in ways at least as significant as repressed homosexuality.

Many of course don’t wind up repressing and projecting; one turned up in the comments thread at Jack’s. Justin offered that he has effectively self-diagnosed as an adult, and related that “the realization after reading a bit more that I probably am [autistic] was an interesting set of moments for me.” He went on: “In the context of this post, I wonder how much of the combination of the two [autistic characteristics he'd identified] affect my own politics.”

Shift Journal is predicated in part on the notions that there are a lot of Justins out there (most without any clue that there’s a closet to be in or out of), that the autistic spectrum extends well into what we think of as the general population, and that we’ve yet to take measure of the implications, political and otherwise.

More that may be of particular interest to visitors from the political blogosphere: Shift Journal was created by a political activist, Andrew Lehman, founder and co-director of The Peace, Justice and Environment Project, and now sidelined by a stroke. The impetus for Shift seems to have been at least two-fold: one was a generous effort to provide me with a platform for the ideas I had been sharing with him via email; two was as a vehicle to promote the book he was writing on autism, evolution, and social change which was finished in time for release on the day his medical situation took him out of commission. Third I think was to provide a commons for discussions such as the one we’ve sparked here.

Andrew’s book is grounded in evolutionary theory and years of dedicated auto-didactism; anyone wishing to dive headfirst into the possible relationships between autism, evolution, and social change can download it from his website. While my perspective owes more to field observation, rumination, and a smattering of cultural anthropology, I can say Andrew and I agree on shift as an operative word. As he and I were the only two contributors at launch, and as Shift’s focus has naturally meandered as other contributors have come on board, those looking for political fodder may find the best hunting in the early months of the archive, though there are examples throughout and not only from Andrew and myself — when you find them though, I’ll warn you, Shift is a big-picture endeavor, lacking the feel of hand-to-hand combat and reactive grappling you can find at Jack’s place. If The Crow’s Eye is the hashassin, the foot soldier, and the misericorde Shift Journal — at least when its attention is turned beyond the contentious arena of autism politics –  is the unarmed aerial surveillance vehicle offering, hopefully, the lay of the land and an idea of what’s over the horizons.

For starters then, and to close what’s necessarily a quick and dirty hello to you all, here’s Andrew from this site’s de facto keynote entry, Emergence:

Autism and Asperger’s rights represent the third wave of genetic justice. Civil rights, the first wave, established the language, strategy and tactics for creating social change. Women’s rights and gay rights manifested integral aspects of the social structure conflict between matrifocal and patrifocal frames of reference, championing the rights of all peoples. The neurodiversity movement heralds the hidden, central theme of changes underway. The physical, neurological and behavioral features of autistic and Asperger’s children and adults are confounding to a society unaware that these individuals are the third wave of a massive social movement.

related: Advice For Children, Unsolicited

related: comments thread at The Crow’s Eye

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/09/29/welcome-the-crows-eye-readers/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/26/how-extensive-is-autisms-penumbra/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/26/how-extensive-is-autisms-penumbra/#comments Fri, 26 Aug 2011 07:27:20 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6633 My fascination with autism from the start has had to do with what might be termed autism’s penumbra.  In Autism & Oughtism’s post on avoiding the confusions engendered by this concept she explains, “The penumbra of a term refers to its ‘edges’; where the definite cases meld into the maybe. For the purposes of autism, you’d find the penumbra of autism where it moves firmly away from ‘classic’ autism, and starts to slip into harder-to-diagnose cases of high-functioning autism (such as in mild instances of Aspergers or PDD-NOS). (If that term ‘high-functioning’ bothers you, hold your horses until the end.)”  As anyone much familiar with autism issues knows, this territory between “classic” and “high-functioning” sends many a horse a-charging, and generates more than its share of emotional, defensive dialogue.

Personified, this area in fact would be quite the drama queen — and thus pleased, I think, to hear A&O referring to it as if it were the entire penumbra, rather than just an edge or beginning of it.  For the purposes A&O sets out, this matters not a whit.  Her effort is to clarify the terms involved in the arguments bracketing one edge of the penumbra, and in this she succeeds.  I think it says more about all of us then rather than A&O in particular, that in an essay that’s all about the careful use of language, this word is misused — and that the misuse and its implications are not apparent unless we take time to think about them.

The penumbra refers to the entirety of the partial shadow, the whole of the area that is partially lit.  Merriam-Webster has it as “a space of partial illumination … between the perfect shadow on all sides and the full light.”  The penumbra of a term does not refer to its edges; it refers to a much more extensive area — and yes all this would of course be mere nit-picking, if not for the possibility that this misconception is mirrored in our perceptions of autism’s presence in the world.  There are for instance no rules of proportionality governing how extensive a penumbra may be in relation to “the perfect shadow” at its edge; a penumbra may well be much larger.  Whole realities then can be defined out of existence by the repeated, unthinking misapplication of a concept such as “penumbra.”

A&O does make reference to this problem’s inverse, noting, “If a penumbra is too large, it can – arguably – eclipse the function of a term, but that is a different argument from putting forward examples where it is hard to determine high from low functioning autism.”

Who exactly, and on what grounds, I have to wonder, decides when a penumbra is too large?  God forbid that we allow reality to eclipse the function of a term, and face the uncertainty and inconvenience of coming up with new, more robustly functional terms, concepts, and paradigms that better reflect actual experience.

“Well, see, this penumbra is too large, so we’re agreeing to downsize it.  We’ll just imagine the penumbra of a term refers to its edges, and skip right on by.”

We are of course groping our way towards new concepts with terms such as “BAPpy” and “the autistic cognitive style.”  But parts of the tech community are way ahead of the autism community here, even without any new vocabulary with which to speak about it.  We can tell ourselves that the prevalence of autism in the tech world is such an open secret there because “so many” autistic people are drawn to that sort of work.  But I am suggesting that it is at least as true that penumbral autistics are simply more comfortable being out of the closet in tech culture, and that our actual prevalence is far more widely and evenly distributed than we suspect.

We are the oldest, largest secret society in the history of mankind.

Who is to say the majority of our members do not reside in the penumbra, in the half-shadow, unseen, and uncounted?  Who is to say we are not vast in number yet still closeted and thus taken for granted in our effects on society?  Who is to say it isn’t time, and past time, to re-imagine ourselves a good bit less narrowly?

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

related: Reality or Law?

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/26/how-extensive-is-autisms-penumbra/feed/ 4 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/19/autism-in-the-mirror/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/19/autism-in-the-mirror/#comments Fri, 19 Aug 2011 09:36:55 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6589 Comedian Glen Wool, musing on the sacking of the middle classes and treasuries of the United States and other nations by the looting class, has suggested that newspapers be divided into just two sections:  one would remain known as “the business section,” while all the rest might now be best understood as “the consequences.”

Likewise, musing on the historic changes experienced by autistics over the past two decades, I would like to suggest that on the one hand we have the advent of the internet, and on the other we have the consequences — and that those consequences are more properly termed “neurodiversity.”

I began this week at Shift with a densely packed retort to an imagined attack, and the sinking realization that I’d actually boot-strapped myself into the middle of a heated, already in-progress conversation about neurodiversity — a heated conversation I’m just not much interested in having.  If you’ve not been keeping up, Autism & Oughtisms found itself in the middle of a skirmish last week and fired off a round without declaring exactly where it was aimed.  Hearing that musket ball whizzing over my head, I loaded up and traded a couple more volleys with A&O (at one point receiving marquee billing from @drbrocktagon; thanks Jon!) before we figured out what was going on.  And not that I don’t stand behind what I said, or that we don’t disagree thoroughly on certain matters.  For that matter, so far as I can tell I don’t much agree with anyone involved in this particular set-to.

But back to the treasuries and the banksters, it’s funny, in that I’m avidly following maybe a dozen writers online, both amateurs and professionals, regarding the ongoing transfer of wealth in the world — and am spoiling for a fight when it comes to that discussion — yet when it comes to intramural skirmishes regarding how we are to define neurodiversity, what it ought or ought not include or signify, or even when it comes to more organized efforts to establish brand neurodiversity — and I am acquainted with some of these people, and think well of them — I’m just not compelled to get involved.

Though it has its precedents in the labor, women’s, civil, and gay rights movements, I do have a sense that the neurodiversity movement is a new thing under the sun.  It may well be that those attached to those earlier efforts felt the same way, and in a sense they are all the same effort, but this one to me seems to have the deepest roots, both in time and in human consciousness, and thus came the longer way than the others to bask under that metaphorical sun.  If it’s here at all, it will have its own momentum; overt, high-energy efforts either on its behalf or against it don’t seem all that relevant.

As Thelonious Monk famously said “When asked where he thinks modern jazz is going … ‘I don’t know where it’s going.  Maybe it’s going to hell.  You can’t make anything go anywhere; it just happens.’” (Which is not to say he didn’t continue playing, and influencing other players …)

Less than a decade after that interview, the autonomy of the invisible suggested there by Monk was being formally explored in the writings of James Hillman, whose archetypal psychology informed some of the more outlandish claims I made in this space last Monday.  I keep coming back to the notion that Hillman’s work and neurodiversity have some surprising parallels.  As my interest in Hillman was first piqued by seeing his writing offered up as an analog for Thelonious Monk’s music, I’m reminded that they can each be disorienting to newcomers — as evidenced by A&O’s comment to me that as an atheist, she didn’t know what to make of the religious language I was using.

Hillman does use a lot of religious imagery, though mostly that of Classical Greece rather than of Christendom, and not because he’s a believer (far from it) but because why reinvent the wheel or let your atheism get in the way when the Greeks already did most of the ethnographic work of documenting the ghosts that haunt the human mind?  The signature feature here being the plural, the pantheon, the multiplicity of ghosts, of gods, the diversity in styles of consciousness recognized and celebrated in Greek thought.  And what do we have in neurodiversity but tentative steps toward the recognition and celebration of a corresponding diversity of styles of consciousness in the modern world?  Gods as styles of consciousness is Hillman’s formulation, but note the congruence here with autistic rock star economist Tyler Cowen’s apt phrase, “autistic cognitive style.”

Despite their not being identical, that Hillman and Cowen would come to such similar formulations is at least as remarkable and as significant, I suggest, as Kanner and Asperger each arriving independently at the word “autism.”

One might even entertain the thought — an act which we forget is distinct from “believing” — that something in the world is moving autonomously to bring this language to the surface just now,  just as that very autistic cognitive style has gone and created a mirror in which to at long, long, eons-long last, see and reflect back on itself.

A mirror we know as the internet.

[image via geograph/Creative Commons]

related:  Steve Silberman/Squidalicious:  Disability rights/neurodiversity advocates should be fighting ignorance, not each other.

related:  Response to A&O’s reply re: “Cornering Slim Shady in the Round Barn” and the definition of Neurodiversity

related:  Reply to “Cornering Slim Shady in the Round Barn” re the definition of Neurodiversity

related:  Cornering Slim Shady in the Round Barn: On “Pinning Down” Neurodiversity

related:  Acceptance of Diversity within Neurodiversity (?)

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/19/autism-in-the-mirror/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/15/repl-to-aos-reply-re-%e2%80%9ccornering-slim-shady-in-the-round-barn%e2%80%9d-and-the-definition-of-neurodiversity/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/15/repl-to-aos-reply-re-%e2%80%9ccornering-slim-shady-in-the-round-barn%e2%80%9d-and-the-definition-of-neurodiversity/#comments Mon, 15 Aug 2011 05:05:04 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6558 Thank you for the kind words, A&O, and the thorough, thoughtful, and gracious reply.  It’s a pleasure disagreeing with you.

My view is that neurodiversity is polycentered, that it legitimately has multiple definitions.  This is not the same as saying it lacks definition.  The point I want to get across is that an insistence on a unified, monocentric definition will inevitably distort and disappear much of what actually makes up the whole.  From a standpoint of strategy, I do understand the value of message discipline, of having a message and sticking to it come hell or high water.  I would like to have seen this concern of yours more apparent in the essay to which I was responding; re-reading it just now, I don’t find it anywhere.

The world you’re seeking seems to be one where God is in his Heaven and all’s right with the world.  To the extent I’m proud, it’s in imagining that I’ve exchanged that worldview (which is certainly the one I was raised to have) for one more polytheistic, one which does not conflate The One with The Good, and which sees legitimacy in The Many.  There’s a D. H. Lawrence quote I recently ran across that sums it up at a personal level:  “The human being is a most curious creature.  He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.”  Many gods, many souls, many perspectives, many definitions.  Yes, cats and dogs living together, and more besides.

So I think this is the level at which we are odds.  It’s not at the level of neurodiversity, and does it or does it not have or need a definition.  It’s at the level of worldview, on the battlefield of The One vs. The Many.  Notions about polytheistic psychology have been around for about half a century, neurodiversity as a concept for maybe fifteen years, and much like Billy the Kid and Oscar the Wilde in the mind of one James Luther Dickinson, they “have rented a duplex inside my head.”  As Dickinson was proud of his tenants, so I am proud of mine.

I am taken by your emphasis on penumbras, but I would suggest, again, that the model might be not of single, discrete centers with large, deceptively overlapping penumbrae, but of swarms of associated centers, constantly in motion in three dimensions, at times eclipsing one another, at times merging and splitting, and at times breaking off individually or in groups to form or join other swarms, each yes with their own large penumbrae, and all this unfolding over timespans as short as moments and as long as eons.  Definitions then need be playful, provisional, and bestowed with a light touch, or they become restrictive, manipulative, and false — or to put it another way, such definitions come to serve the worldview of those who deploy them rather than those they describe.

You may claim that in your response this is exactly what you are trying to prevent, however you are offering no choice but to accept the terms of a monocentric worldview before neurodiversity can even begin to be protected.  How is this different from a mob-style protection racket?  “Nice little movement you got here.  Be a shame if something were to happen to it …”

Consider the examples I offered of other distributed systems which do not lend themselves to easy definition as players on the world stage:  the bittorrent protocol, the Tor network, Twitter, LulzSec, and Anonymous.  It’s not an accident that they’re all creatures of the internet, as the internet itself is a creation of the autistic cognitive style.  The creator of bittorrent for that matter is a diagnosed autistic.  Like begets like, and the reason you’re moved to pull your hair out over neurodiversity’s definition is the same reason Authorities condemn cutting off internet and phone service during protests in Cairo while turning around and deigning it necessary and allowable in the San Francisco Bay area.

It’s not neurodiversity’s self-contradiction that’s at issue here, any more than the internet is at fault for playing host to moving swarms of shifting valences — though governments the world over are using this as an excuse for much anti-democratic policy they’d never otherwise be able to implement.  What’s at issue is their inability, along with the rest of the monocentric world to come to terms with the presence of distributed networks which are beyond their control, and whose accurate definition calls into question the prevailing worldview.

If as they say Jesus was the Word made flesh and history’s most successful Jew, the Internet is autism made wired, weak central coherence set up on routers and switches, set loose in the world for everyone to hop on and take a ride — and thus perhaps already, the most successful neurological disorder in history (even manic depression has never spawned its own infrastructure).  So you see it does come back to the theology that sets our worldviews.  The monocentric take gained ascendance by my count in 395 A.D., when the edict came down that Christianity was to be the official state-religion of Rome.  “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath …” was (according to Swinburne) the dying cry of the polycentrists.  And yet here we are again in this twenty-first century, bringing color back, and riling up the authorities much as Jesus is said to have done back in the day.

So perhaps in your eyes I’ve now moved from proud to grandiose. I do think there are big issues in play here, bigger than my individual pride, and larger than autism and neurodiversity per se.

An earlier version of the above first appeared as a comment at Autism & Oughtism, on Reply to “Cornering Slim Shady in the Round Barn” re the definition of Neurodiversity.

[image via Flickr/Creative Commons]

related:  Reply to “Cornering Slim Shady in the Round Barn” re the definition of Neurodiversity

related:  Cornering Slim Shady in the Round Barn: On “Pinning Down” Neurodiversity

related:  Acceptance of Diversity within Neurodiversity (?)

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/15/repl-to-aos-reply-re-%e2%80%9ccornering-slim-shady-in-the-round-barn%e2%80%9d-and-the-definition-of-neurodiversity/feed/ 2 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/12/cornering-slim-shady-in-the-round-barn-on-pinning-down-neurodiversity/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/12/cornering-slim-shady-in-the-round-barn-on-pinning-down-neurodiversity/#comments Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:12:16 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6465 Neurodiversity.  In contrast to the proprietor of Autism & Oughtisms [A&O] who reports first hearing the word less than a year ago, it’s been a little over a decade for me. It merited one sentence in the writeup I’ve posted describing the paltry extent of congenial thought my then wife-to-be and I turned up from a year or so of wearing out the Netscape browser and the Altavista search engine:  “We were aware, for instance, that the term neurodiversity had been coined, but this seemed a distant and isolated fact.”  To think that just these few years later it’s a word — a word — that can inspire such an impassioned rant as that turned in recently at Autism & Oughtisms is remarkable.  Not remarkable enough, however, to wait around for.  For the reasons described, we pretty much turned our backs on the autism world and got about the business of raising the kids, one diagnosed, and one we’ve recently learned has identified as autistic all along — just matter-of-factly, without angst, fear, or trepidation.  That in itself, to me, justifies the decision to turn our backs.

As you see then, I’m late to the party.  No veteran of the autism wars me.  And while a tiny, shining handful of those veterans have allied themselves with this site, we are thriving in spite of being roundly ignored by nearly all the disability bloggers who fought to bring the word neurodiversity to prominence — I have the unanswered emails to prove it.  So to find myself presiding — and not by my own design — over a site which might seem to have been directly addressed by A&O regarding this word to which Shift has hitched its SEO strategy, well, it’s amusing to me if not to others.  At the same time though, it is somewhat emblematic of the error I think A&O is making about the nature of what’s being discussed.

I’m struck by the way both in the essay itself and in the comments we exchanged on it A&O seems determined to get at the heart of neurodiversity, to expose precisely what its “top value” is, to stare it down until it reveals its irreducible, singular center — and if not, to declare it illegitimate for lacking just such a center.  It has me in mind of something I’ve written about styles of consciousness:

But yes, when you are able to comfortably entertain multiple, competing and contradictory notions of truth or reality, when you can face ambiguity without needing to do anything about it, your overall style of consciousness might be said to be polytheistic.  When you behave as if there are not all that many right, healthy, or justifiable ways to be human, when you see differences as deviations from an ideal rather than variations on multiple ideals, when you discount gray tones for black and white, when you focus on the literal rather than the metaphorical, your overall style of consciousness might be said to be monotheistic—yea, though you are still tossed around and toyed with by various lesser gods, just like the rest of us.

I know A&O would prefer that the arguments presented be grappled with, but if we step back a frame of reference or two, I think what can be seen is that much of the controversy over neurodiversity takes place against a background of prior assumptions — or all-encompassing styles of consciousness — which in turn tweak our views on the nature of the world.  When The One clashes with The Many there will of course be arguments — good and bad — to be chewed over, but in the long term the only decisions that count are the ones made by successive generations, by newcomers whether they are just coming of age or just coming to learn about autism.  As I’ve said at some length already, “… it’s more about winning the hearts and minds of those who aren’t even paying attention yet.”

In the short term, that of a generation or two, I think that battle is won or lost through example.  (The battle for gay marriage for instance isn’t being won by good arguments so much as by young people looking with fresh eyes upon increasingly available examples of out, loving gay couples — young people who care not a whit about being seen “to take this holier-than-thou line” or about whether they’ve achieved sufficient objectivity to choose “the correct voice.”)  And in the long term, who knows, it may well — as Andrew Lehman suggests — have to do with socioeconomic shifts in the sorts of parents who are able to get together, the sorts of offspring they engender, and the kinds of examples to which those succeeding generations in turn respond.  Either way, while I can bear witness to the drama of A&O feeling caught between the two — and it doesn’t look like fun — the arguments to me are simply the byproducts of the friction produced by two styles of consciousness at odds with one another.

This friction is also prominently on display right now as Central Authorities the world over struggle to come to terms with the distributed nature of social software and peer-to-peer networks.  Time and again, from the record companies to governments to private security contractors, the nature of what they’ve suddenly been forced to focus on eludes them.  Where, A&O, is the heart of the bittorrent community, or of the Tor network?  What pray tell is the “top value” of Twitter?  Serve up the head of LulzSec on a platter, “pin down” the idea behind Anonymous, and you’ll be welcome in any police barracks in any country you please.  Good luck.  As those last two groups have been reminding us lately, “You cannot arrest an idea.”  There is no Real Slim Shady, there is no secret cabal of lizard-people running the planet, and there is no true beating heart of neurodiversity to be placed on the table and examined under a magnifying glass.

You’re shadowboxing, from where I stand, A&O, while complaining about the lack of solid targets, and the carpal tunnel pain “caused” by their absence.

As that physician in the old joke advises the patient who complains, “Doc, it hurts when I move my arm like this” …

Don’t do that.

I do love a passionate, articulate rant, probably more so than the next guy, and I could hardly ignore a post which came days after your first appearance here, and which seemed to be missing only the phrase, “We’re lookin’ at you, Shift Journal” (not likely true, but self-dramatization seems to be the order of the day).  I salute your willingness to struggle with ideas, and I hope you’ll allow me to repost work of yours in the future.  But I’m not here to win your heart or mind, or free you from whatever circular dilemma you feel yourself to be in.  So by all means, “hop off the bandwagon and openly state your belief.”  No one’s drowning you out; your thoughts are not even in the minority overall.  No one is claiming that acceptance will “eradicate the objective problems faced by many autistic people.”  No one owes you a “a clear non-self-contradictory definition of neurodiversity.”

And easy as this is to say with my relatively comfortable life and family, no one, as Steve Silberman recently made poignantly clear, is owed a life without suffering.

There’s more to be said here about the coerciveness inherent in the notion of a cure, and the false equivalency that’s set up whenever one proposes that the alternatives can be equitably “balanced.”  Rather than try to outdo Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, I’ll close with three of her posts on this theme:

Autism, Disability, and the Obligation to Get Well, Part One

Autism, Disability, and the Obligation to Get Well, Part Two

Neurodiversity, Self-Determination, and the Magic Pill

[image:  Charles Dana Gibson]

related:  Response to A&O’s reply re: “Cornering Slim Shady in the Round Barn” and the definition of Neurodiversity

related:  Reply to “Cornering Slim Shady in the Round Barn” re the definition of Neurodiversity

related:  Acceptance of Diversity within Neurodiversity (?)

related: Emergence

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/08/12/cornering-slim-shady-in-the-round-barn-on-pinning-down-neurodiversity/feed/ 2 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/07/21/standby-for-a-communique-of-vital-import/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2011/07/21/standby-for-a-communique-of-vital-import/#comments Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:11:35 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=6221 A Wild Communiqué Appears!

Floating in over the transom this morning came an inspired, rambling, two-part missive, part neurodiversity manifesto, part invitation to a flash mob, part lulzsensical call-to-arms — and part heartfelt plea for integrity and respect on the part of Autism Awareness Washington.  Apparently situated in the American Northwest, the author is identified variously and whimsically, and writes from behind whatever anonymity the secure email service Hushmail is able to offer these days.  While sent not to Shift Journal but to a friend of the site, it seemed appropriate to dispense with the usual permission-seeking and share simply on the authority of editorial fiat.  Followers of Lulzsec and Anonymous will notice some similarities in tone and style; followers of pop singer Ke$ha may be reminded of the droll mock-seriousness (or is it?) with which she declares, “We are taking over.  Better get used to it.”

The long and the short of it is that this anonymous communiqué is a romp, though one with a message, and put together by an individual who has more than passing familiarity with the issues and personalities of the neurodiversity movement.  More power to Faerie Prince Omega, the anonymous leadership of the Cortical Executive Functionaries, and the Neo-Typicals of the Divergent Spectrum.  The sooner they – the sooner we – take over, the better.