I sometimes have ocular migraines, which are painless disturbances of vision that last about a half-hour.  The specifics of them differ from one person to another.  Mine looks like a bright flickering band of triangular patterns crossing my field of vision, resembling a rattlesnake in glowing colors.  It’s really quite pretty, although it’s inconvenient because I can’t drive or use the computer until it goes away.  Or to frame it more positively, one might say that it is an enforced break from the things of modern life, an opportunity for quiet reflection.

Once upon a time, in a prehistoric tribal society, it’s likely that I would have believed a rattlesnake spirit was visiting me to teach important lessons about my life.  A shaman probably would have told me that it was magical and that I was blessed.  I would have taken for granted that the rattlesnake really existed because I saw it.  Long ago, people did not differentiate between their subjective experiences and the physical world to the extent they do now.  Traces of this way of thinking can still be found in a modern autistic person’s tendency toward abstract contemplation and love for patterns, as Andrew Lehman wrote in his post Superstition and Obsession:

The way autistics process the world is the way we all thought when we were all group dancers and musicians gesturing our encouragements to the dancing band. The me/every had not differentiated into the me and the other. Story had not yet emerged. Abstract thinking was still so abstract that metaphor had not developed into a thing and what a thing represented. For example, a dancer representing thunder was thunder. The world had not yet broken down into parts. There was only everything, connected, and a compulsion to recognize connection, to acknowledge connection and to reproduce connection.

In many ways, we are fortunate to be living in a world with advanced technology and a more mature understanding of science.  Our homes are more comfortable, food is more easily available, medical professionals can treat many of our ailments, and we live much longer.  Still, I sometimes think that perhaps we’ve gone too far in leaving behind the wonder that our ancestors felt when they looked at natural phenomena they did not understand.  From a factual standpoint, we understand much more about our world, and we’ve created many things they never could have imagined; but we feel less connected to our world, with less of an intuitive sense of where we fit into its patterns.  Science has displaced our childlike capacity to be amazed by life’s mysteries.

Even now, there should be a place in our world for the rattlesnake spirit and its kindred.  Instead of being cast aside as useless relics of primitive times, they ought to live happily and productively on in the realm of imagination—that is, the realm of art, play, and myth.  Even if they are not real in the sense that our ancestors would have understood them to be, they can teach us valuable lessons about our lives nonetheless.

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

It is, of course, a sorting task.

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

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

We love to sort.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A daughter, Pleasure.

We look for connections, for explanations, for why.  We really don’t like not having the why of things.  Without the why, we lose our illusion of control, our belief that if we just know the cause, we can keep it from happening to us.

We’ll take fake causes because they act as balms.  They soothe us, allow us to relax, believe the myth that everything is under control.

It’s had me thinking, as I’ve read the comments over at AoA’s credibility post, as the day’s progressed, wondering if one of the key differences in some parents is that whole control issue.  Maybe some of us are okay with not knowing all the whys.  Maybe some of us get that there aren’t finite, neat answers for everything, and that most folks do the best they can.  Maybe some of us get that doctors aren’t infallible and don’t have quick fixes for all of the mysteries and messes of life.

Is that part of it?  Would the die-hard AoAers, those who leapfrog from why to why, from vaccines to monkey viruses to lyme disease to retroviruses to mito damage to all of them in some weird-ass combination, have still been like this if their child(ren) hadn’t been diagnosed with autism?  Are they wired to see conspiracies everywhere or does that add an element of drama and flare that they just have to have?

We root for the underdogs, you know?  We like David and we want him to defeat Goliath.  We cast ourselves as the heroes in our own great adventures, and we need bad guys, right?  It provides a narrative, a structure, a meaning to our lives.  It gives us our why.

I think that stepping away from that need to cast ourselves as David, I think that accepting a nebulousness about reality in that we acknowledge our lack of control is really, really hard to do.  No solid ground, right?  No rock.  No ready answers.

I’m willing to balance, hopefully with some level of grace, but admitting freely more often than not with a great deal of bumbling, like Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, and hope that I can keep all my balls in the air with a little bit of help from my friends and family.  And a lot of reliance on the scientific method.

I don’t know all the answers, and I love the mystery that’s inherent in admitting there’s so very much to be learned.  I hold my beliefs loosely, like balls being juggled in the air.  I hope to find balance.  I hope to maintain a humility in the realization that there are more non-answers than answers and that sometimes I’ll drop a ball or two, or see a ball transform.

It’s okay not to know all the answers, to not have all the whys.
It doesn’t mean I can’t build a good life for my children, my husband, and myself.
It doesn’t mean I can’t work to make the world a better place.
It doesn’t mean I can’t find reasons to laugh, to delight in the world.
It just means I have to let go of illusions, of certainty.
I have to be willing to dance, even if it means I sometimes stumble.

I choose this path.  I choose it with intention.
Do they?  Do they choose their paths with an openness of mind, with a willingness to be proven wrong?
Do they?  Do they work to make the world a better place?  Or do they work to foment drama?

Ideas matter.  Indeed, credibility does as well.  How do they spend their credibility?

Anne Dachel may think this is a battle, a war, to be won:  “It’s going to be a fight till the end—but we will win.”   And she keeps it cast as a battle concerning vaccines and pharma and government as the enemies, with vaccines as the weapon.

Does that even make sense to anyone?  Can rational people read AoA and not see the illogic?  It isn’t, as Dachel and others there would have people believe, a battle about vaccines and a vast conspiracy.  It’s about ideas.  About certainty.  And the illusion of control.

Perhaps people nod and offer them no argument for reasons other than credibility? After all, when your work online is to attack and attempt to destroy the career of any government official or medical expert who takes you on, perhaps it’s more about going along with the bully in order to avoid being a target.

KWombles’ The Value of Ideas and the Willingness to Let Go of Certainty first appeared at Countering … and is republished here with her permission.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am currently fortifying myself with my second cup of coffee while my back massager hums against my back working at the various kinks and stiffness, and I will shortly be back out there, hacking away at dead hollyhocks, piling them into huge piles so that we may engage in the ritual stripping and spreading of seeds so that I might do this all again in one year.

You ask me, why?  Why do this?  The hollyhocks make me break out in a rash and itch like crazy, they take weeks to clean up after they’ve gone to seed and I hurt worse than usual while doing this.

Ah, this is why:

If we’re good enough parents, we do the hard, back-breaking work whether we wish to or not so that we can have a chance at the rewards.  Not for ourselves, but for our children.  It’s our job, and perhaps if more people went into parenting with that awareness and acceptance that it’s years of hard, often seemingly thankless work, well, they’d handle that work a bit better.

My recommendation when you’re tired of all the work, when you think there’s no hope it will ever amount to anything, is to find something like gardening, so that you will have a reminder that it does all work out; that your efforts matter, that your children will grow and blossom in ways you could never have imagined.  It won’t be the way you expected it to; I have flowers that have now spread throughout a half acre that originated eight years ago from one tiny packet of seeds.  Tending, caring, nurturing matters.

And with that though, I shall go tend, care, and nurture those hollyhocks.

Oh, and one last thing:  Laugh and laugh a lot.  It makes a hell of a difference.

Working, Working … In Which I Make Progress first appeared at Countering …, and is republished here with permission.

]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/07/20/working-working-in-which-i-make-progress/feed/ 0 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/07/16/autistic-grit/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/07/16/autistic-grit/#comments Fri, 16 Jul 2010 05:05:11 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=2666 First, obsessions.  Dr. Michael Burry, according to the profile of him woven into Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, is a man of serial obsessions. His Aspergers diagnosis was arrived at during the course of events described in Lewis’ book (about the roots and beneficiaries of the subprime mortgage crisis) and it came after his first obsession, neuroscience, had run its course.  Dr. Burry was a successful brain surgeon who quit medicine in order to pursue his second obsession, investments management.  Following a stellar payoff, this obsession waned as well, giving way to a third which to all indications was pursued with every bit as much grit, determination and perseverance as the first two.  This third obsession was or is guitars.  No, not playing guitars.  Just owning them, and understanding everything about them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How astonishingly able, you ask?

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

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

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

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

A soft rag-doll figurine perches on her wooden stand atop my kitchen counter.  She’s holding a Cornucopia in one arm, representing the bounties of the harvest, while her other arm points to the closed blinds in a mute reminder that there’s a whole world to be found out there.  She stands surveying the cabinet doors and blank-faced appliances of her domain with the confident air of Hestia the hearth goddess, reduced by today’s commercial society to a bit of kitsch on the Formica.

It was not all that long ago, on the scale of our evolutionary timeline, when our ancestors gave their hearth-gods the place of honor in their humble dwellings.

From a Wiccan perspective, the universe operates in primary process, without opposites: the negation of a thing is still the thing.  Andrew Lehman also has written about the possibility that the universe may have some form of consciousness, whether primary process or something else.  But one needn’t hold pagan beliefs or literally look upon the universe as a sentient entity to recognize that our modern way of life, no matter how far removed from nature it may be, hasn’t swept away all of the ancient traditions and subconscious expectations that grew out of a simpler way of being.  When we close ourselves away inside our climate-controlled boxes, we’re not negating the constraints of season, daylight, and wilderness under which humanity evolved.  On some level of the psyche, there’s still an expectation that our summers will be hot, our mornings will be bright, and our homes will look out over verdant natural surroundings.  In an ever-changing world where, for the first time in history, no aspect of our environment can be taken for granted, we’re left wondering how the random bits and pieces of life can be made to fit together.

Consistent with our particular modes of thought, we have different ways of dealing with the uncertainty of the modern world.  Some of us add structure to our lives by keeping familiar objects close to us, arranging them in precise patterns, and maintaining regular personal rituals as we go through our days.  Others feel anxious mainly because of social rather than physical changes and react by trying to rearrange society into more familiar patterns, such as through evangelism or political activism, while regularly taking part in group rituals.  Such efforts to rearrange society can involve scapegoating minority groups as convenient targets of blame for today’s cultural changes.  The world wouldn’t be such a scary place, this line of reasoning goes, if only there were no immigrants taking our jobs, or gays having the audacity to marry each other, or autistics wanting equal rights and accommodations.

The solid square corners and plain white walls of my kitchen speak of permanence and simplicity, like a monk’s contemplative cell; but even if I could sit at my dinette table all day pondering life’s mysteries, which of course I can’t, the fluttering vertical blinds would still be there to remind me of the unpredictable world on the other side.  My little rag-doll hearth goddess stands smiling with her fruits of the harvest, a symbol that has lost its meaning in an age when anything can be bought at the supermarket year-round.  I drink my tea and listen to my imaginary piano symphony, wondering how the ancient world’s rhythms and the new melodies of our age can be unified in a coherent whole.

It’s all out there waiting, she says, with her silent gesture toward the world beyond the covered glass door.  Waiting for us to learn to hear it.

On Mark Stairwalt’s recommendation, I’ve started reading a book by James Hillman and Michael Ventura, colorfully titled We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—and the World’s Getting Worse.  Hillman studied under the legendary psychoanalyst Carl Jung in the 1950s and went on to become the founder of a school of thought known as archetypal psychology.  He criticized conventional attitudes toward therapy because (among other shortcomings) the focus is on fixing what are seen as the problems of individuals, without regard to whether changes in the social environment might be more appropriate, and without considering the broader context of cultural myths and expectations.

As Hillman sees it, fantasy is an essential part of our lives.  All of us constantly put together narratives in our minds from one moment to the next, telling ourselves stories to make sense of our experiences.  While these stories may seem like a new reality to us, they originate in the experiences of our ancestors and in the specific patterns, or archetypes, that our culture recognizes as ways of existing in the world.  The evil gang member destroying the community is one such archetype.  The repentant ex-offender humbly making amends to the society he has wronged is another.  Many different narratives come into play during the course of a person’s life; but like tattoos that have been covered with new ink rather than removed, our previous stories remain part of us forever, even when we construct new mental images to take their place.

As discussed in Monday’s post here on Shift regarding independence and supports, there are multiple cultural narratives addressing what it means to be autistic; and although they have been much disputed on the Internet and elsewhere, they’re not necessarily incompatible with each other.  A generation ago, it was commonly believed that autism was a rare condition and that every autistic person would need a lifetime of constant assistance.  A more recent view—another archetype—describes autism as a spectrum made up of large numbers of people who are active participants in the community.

How can we reconcile these views, so often regarded as opposites?  I’d advise looking farther back in history, to a time long before any of the modern world’s concepts of autism existed.  Our tribal ancestors simply took it for granted both that everyone would participate in the community and that everyone would need assistance from the community throughout their lives.  These concepts were seen not only as entirely consistent with each other but as essential to the tribe’s well-being.

Andrew Lehman suggests that our perspective on autism could benefit from a closer look at the child-rearing practices of aboriginal matrifocal cultures, where young children spend large amounts of time with many adults.  The children take part in the tribe’s rituals and cultural activities, including art, storytelling, and dancing.  They feel the rhythms of their community on a deep and meaningful level because they have been part of it from their earliest days.  More understanding of these cultures could lead us to discover, as Hillman would have it, that the new stories we seek to guide us have been part of our ancestral consciousness all along.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How often have we seen that so far?

Direct links here or here.

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

In what I thought was an amusing bit of irony, I acquired it in a Yankee Swap at a Christmas party several years ago, after its fantastic powers evidently had failed to make much of an impression on its former owner.  My contribution to the swap, if I recall correctly, was a gift basket someone had sent me with fruitcake and other stuff I wasn’t interested in eating.  When I came away with the little tree, it seemed a fair enough trade.

Every now and again I pick up the Prosperity Tree and shake it to ring the bells.  Not because I’m superstitious enough to imagine that I’ll win the lottery, which I don’t play anyway, or that some other miraculous good fortune will suddenly show up on my front porch.  But I do think it’s worthwhile in today’s hectic society to pause for a moment and reflect on what a prosperous life might mean.

Once upon a time, our ancestors had a much slower-paced existence governed by the natural rhythms of the days and seasons.  Finding enough food to keep the tribe alive was often a struggle; but they still had time to dance, to create art and music, and to consider their relationship to the world around them through their myths and rituals.  Prosperity would have been a very simple concept in those days and would have meant no more than having a good hunt or discovering a patch of tasty berries.  It might have been commemorated by a cave painting, a dance in the moonlight, or a ceremony honoring the tribe’s gods for their benevolence in creating such a wonderful world for the people to enjoy.

A couple of weeks ago, along with the usual advertising fliers and utility bills, I got my quarterly 401(k) account statement in the mail.  Stocks had gone up since the last statement, as illustrated by a rising bar graph on the first page.  Some of the news articles I’d been browsing reported that the economy could be recovering from last year’s doldrums.  I tossed the statement into a pile of stuff to be put away later in my file drawer while briefly contemplating the possibility that in another twenty years or so, I might have enough money for whatever our culture has decided is a prosperous retirement, assuming that future corporate and political leaders haven’t found new ways to wreck the economy (not to mention random computer screwups of the sort that occurred last week).  These thoughts did not leave me feeling inspired to paint a mural of the New York Stock Exchange on a wall of my suburban cave.

There’s no doubt modern humans enjoy far more material comforts than our tribal ancestors ever could have imagined in their wildest dreams.  But the ways in which we acquire them have become too abstract for us to comprehend, too far removed from anything that we evolved to recognize as cause for joy and celebration.  It is no coincidence that we have such high levels of depression, anxiety, and related conditions, even as our lifespan and standard of living far surpass those of past generations.  We no longer feel confident that we know our place in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is an excerpt from a summary of a theory about religion from Jesse Bering at the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen’s University in Belfast. The quote is from a story by Helen Phillips in New Scientist “Is God good?” in the September 1 2007 issue, number 2619, pages 32-36. Link to story online, here.

I’m not so sure that I would want to have a mind that contains a “theory of mind” module that seeks to attribute intentionality and meaning even where there is none. I think there’s a word for such a state of mind; isn’t it “delusion”?

If the “cognitive system underlying theory of mind” is also the neurological basis of religious belief or religious sentiment, then I (an atheist) am very glad that I don’t (apparently) have one.

Lili Marlene’s The dark side of theory of mind? first appeared on November 17, 2007 at Incorrect Pleasures, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.  Both in this post and in at least one other of hers still slated to be reproduced, Lili Marlene and Andrew Lehman can be seen to be plowing similar ground; for instance on autism contrasted with a cognitive style that “attribute[s] intentionality and meaning, even where there is none,” see Andrew Lehman’s Superstition and Obsession.

But the Navy has “boot camp”, just like all the other services, and they do have to get you ready, if needed, for war.  They have to make you learn to “Obey,” as priority one, and “Obey without question, without hesitation” being priorities two and three.  American boys being the spoiled little brats they are, it takes a lot of beating down, as with a blacksmith’s hammer, to forge a fighting man.  Heat is applied, then pressure, rinse and repeat.  It tempers the steel.  If you screw up, the Company Commander punishes everyone, and he reminds them to thank you later.

It happened to some other guy first, while our boy Normie just watched.  They went to this guy’s bunk after lights out, threw a blanket over him, carried him to the showers, and gave him the standard issue “blanket party,” which consisted of being wrapped in a blanket and thrown in the shower, and guys with cloth bags filled with bars of soap flogged you with them.  And that was just for getting caught talking while “in formation.”  It happened to someone else when it was revealed that he hadn’t been taking showers, and the Commander had pronounced him a “scrounge.”  It was evident when the fuzz line of his T-shirt neck hem consistently failed inspection.  When Normie heard that this guy had gotten an “Undesirable Discharge” and sent home, he was very, very afraid the same would happen to him, and he would never be able to face his father again.

Well, he managed to avoid being the honored guest at a blanket party, but did manage to accumulate a lot of demerits in other ways.  One day, he was marching along, really letting his body carry out the orders, while doing a little talking to his inner self.  That’s something he had always done, this inner dialogue thing.  He failed to hear the order to “About – march!” (reverse direction), and his only friend and bunk mate got punctured between the eyes by the sight on his rifle.  He felt really bad about it, but much worse after the Commander got right up in his face and shouted all kinds of nasty things, and then handed down his punishment, something of interest to the entire company.

That was really the beginning of the end of his involvement in that company.  Nobody likes to take a 10 mile march, on top of everything else, just because some jerk-off screwed up.  Things snowballed, and he was transferred to MIC, Military Indoctrination Company, for further instruction and evaluation.  They were about to decide his fate, whether they would kick him out as an Undesirable.  The heat and pressure was immense – they broke him, but this was exactly the result they wanted, as they could now pour him into a new mold.  By every outer measurement, he became like everyone else, and he finally graduated from Boot Camp, 6 weeks after the guy he had joined with, under the “buddy system”.

He was assigned to attend a Class “A” School, to become a Personnelman, an office worker and keeper of enlisted service records.  While on leave between assignments, he first heard of the “Gulf of Tonkin incident”, and the wisdom of his choice of the Navy was apparent.  With the Army or Marines, even the Air Force, the likelihood of going to ‘Nam was extremely high.  His deal with the Navy called for him to spend his entire enlistment at a shore station, in Norfolk, Virginia.  Nice duty station, at the office where all enlisted men of the Atlantic Fleet were assigned sea duty billets, EPDOLANT, or Enlisted Personnel Distribution Office, Atlantic Fleet.

After his promotion to Seaman, he got married.  The less said about that, the better.  When he was promoted to 3rd class, he was reassigned to the office of CINCLANTFLT, or Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet.  He was the only enlisted man in an office consisting of 2 Lieutenants, a Commander, a Captain, and CINCLANT himself, the Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, who later became Chief of Naval Operations, and then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Admiral Moorer congratulated him when his son was born, one morning after he brought the Admiral his coffee.  He did all the typing, and had a “Secret” clearance.  As “squared away” as a sailor had to be to work at CINCLANTFLT, he had no problems there.  His uniform was always crisp and clean, and he was always freshly shaved and showered.  No problems with his co-workers either, as they were all officers and gentlemen, and he was as servile as required.  He really liked the brand-new IBM Selectric they gave him to use, so much better than the clunky old style!

But the Navy reneged on their deal with him, saying that “current personnel requirements dictated that blah, blah, blah,” and they had to reassign him to a sea duty billet, on a ship supposedly going to Vietnam.  Well, he had only found out a few months before that he had a major back problem, they called it “scoliosis”, that caused him a lot of pain while sitting to type for hours on end.  When the Doctors told him that it had shown up in his initial physical, before he had actually joined, but hadn’t told him the results, it really pissed him off!  He told these Doctors that they could either fix it, or let him out.  They explained the procedure; that they would have to install rods in his back, he’d be in the hospital for at least 6 months, and he’d probably come out worse off than when he started.  That’s when he knew he “had” them – they weren’t about to offer that surgery, because if he spent 6 months recuperating, there wouldn’t be enough time left on his current enlistment for him to be sent to ‘Nam.  He spent the next year fighting for his second Discharge. (He had already re-enlisted once.)

When he got out, he rejoined his wife and 2 children, and finally got a job as a parts clerk at a car dealership.  After 6 months or so of that, his mother’s new husband helped him get a job at an iron ore mine where he also worked.  After only a week on the job, he got into a terrific accident, was lucky he didn’t blow himself up in a fuel truck crash, but after only 5 months of recuperation, returned to work, and continued working there for about 3 years.  It was there that a friend first “turned him on” to smoking weed, and for the first time since Boot Camp, he was able to find his way back to his inner self.  He began to remember who he was…

Disclaimers:

1. My real name is not, and never was, “Normie”. Mine was worse.

2. This is not to be considered an “autiebiography”. Large portions have been left out, and the author doesn’t guarantee that he didn’t take some “poetic license” here and there. More of an encapsulation.

3. It’s also not to be construed as any sort of encouragement of drug use, even by adults, but especially by minors. I believe it would be disastrous for a person who had not yet achieved a level of emotional maturity to try anything at all. There are real dangers involved in that scene, especially for one who might be seen by others as vulnerable.

Normie appeared originally at Clay’s Corner, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

For a year before he went himself, he had walked two of his sisters to school every day.  It wasn’t very far, they lived on the corner of the same street as the school, it being in the middle of the block.  The older of these two, (there was an oldest, who was by then attending junior high), decided to set him up with an even worse appellation, by telling him that the older girls he obviously wanted to impress would respect him if he dug up some worms, and chased them with them.  Sounded plausible; he did it.  And was forever after referred to as “Wormy Normie” while he attended elementary school.  Maybe not everyone knew of it, but enough to give him grief.  This sister even spread it around the family, on a Christmas visit to their grandfather’s house. So all the cousins knew.

When he complained to his father, who had divorced and left his mother a year or two before, his father told him to tell people, “The name’s ‘Puddin’ Tame’, ask me again and I’ll tell ya the same.”  To him, that did not sound plausible as a way to make friends, and he chose not to do that one.  When he brought it up with his father again, years later, his father told him, “If it had been up to me, I would have named you ‘Percy’.”  Apparently, his father was a devotee of the “A Boy Named Sue” philosophy.  It took him umpty-dozen years before he figured out that both of his parents had occasionally taken out their vengeance for each other, using him as a pawn.

In school, he found that he was far ahead of his classmates in reading; it was really tortuous for him to hear them “sounding out” their words.  And it annoyed him when the teachers usually wouldn’t correct their pronunciation, because she figured at least they were reading.  But he also found that when it came to arithmetic, he just wasn’t getting it.  He invented his own system of putting dots on the numbers, to aid him in addition.  It took him a lot longer, but at least this way he had a shot at coming up with the right answer.  It did get to be cumbersome though, when his 6th grade teacher thought it would be interesting to make up long columns of 4 and 5 digit numbers.  You’d think he’d eventually learn how to add, say, 5 and 38 in his head, but you’d be wrong, because his mind just couldn’t work that way.  He had to count the dots.

The real cause of his problems wasn’t known at the time, and he didn’t stick out too much as being different, because in elementary school, friends are only friends until somebody gets hurt, or angry about something, and then they make a big point of avoiding each other.  So his experiences didn’t seem too different, except that he was unusually quiet, for a boy.

Junior High was kinda brutal.  There was this thing that, if somebody came up and put their hand near your face, and you flinched, they were allowed to call “Two for flinching!” and punched you in the upper arm, hard, twice.  They were doing it to everyone, but it seemed they were doing it to him even more.  It was like there was this formal ‘rule’ that everyone had to do this.  Who comes up with this stuff?  Ah well, at least he got through before somebody came up with “wedgies” or “swirlies”.

For Senior High, the last 3 years, he had transferred to a small rural school, because he had gotten into an argument with his mother at a bar she had dragged him to, and then told him to “Go home”.  He did, but not to hers.  He was past the age where he could decide which parent he wanted to live with, and he made his decision.  Of course, at the new school, the pecking order had to be established, but he defaulted every challenge, having decided not to join in their reindeer games.  He had made a few friends, a very few friends, but not the long-lasting sort.  He was glad to graduate, even though he knew he would have to get out of his father’s house, as his sisters had, as soon as they graduated.

continued….

Normie appeared originally at Clay’s Corner, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

Social constructs after all are a necessary shorthand, sets of agreed-upon rules by which we navigate the social world.  Money for instance is only an immense collection of colored strips of paper save for the meaning we have collectively agreed to assign to it.  This tends to be most starkly apparent during times of calamity or upheaval; as one fictional character noted while watching America’s War Between the States settle into an ongoing cold war, “Now I don’t mind chopping wood, and I don’t care if the money’s no good….”

Autistics themselves are arguably born into a world where our “money,” our currency and legitimacy as people, is to various degrees “no good.”  In this state of permanent calamity though, often enough there will be situations that highlight the arbitrariness of such an arrangement, calling it into question.  Shift contributor Clay experienced one a few weeks ago.  In a post whose title had the word “recovered” set in irony quotes (as in recovered from autism), he described the experience of finding that many of the autism “symptoms” he had experienced during a lifetime of working shoulder to shoulder with others seemed to be mysteriously abating now that he is retired, more solitary, and under less stress.

As autism is itself diagnosed only on the basis of behavior, Clay’s experience points up the ridiculousness of speaking as if autism is a “thing” which can be “had” in the same sense that one can have gallstones or gout—both being of material construction rather than social.  And of course, autism is not a thing which can be had, though most all of us speak of it as if it is.  “She ‘has’ autism,” we say, when the truth is that she behaves and experiences the world in an autistic manner.  Such a distinction may seem to matter only to lawyerly types, but it is language like this that both builds and disguises our reality, so it bears paying attention to.

This point is not lost on abfh, who recently took on the stereotype of the “autistic meltdown,” wherein as she describes, “a slight change in routine supposedly triggers some kind of massive brain short-circuit and an instant eruption of violent rage.”  As she points out though, “…there’s no scientific evidence to support that belief, no matter how the word might be defined.”  From research studies to brain imaging studies to the diagnostic criteria themselves, the autistic meltdown is absent, unknown save as an anecdote.

When autistic people do have unpleasant reactions to stress and overload, abfh proposes, it is for the same reason anyone else does:  an “underlying, dangerously-high stress level” brought on by sustained exposure to an unfriendly environment.  In other words, there are no “mysterious autistic brain cooties” at fault; the problem is not intrinsic to autism but rather to the pervasively enforced culture shock autistic people live with every day.

My contribution along these lines was to examine how “the autistic spectrum” is a crippled and crippling phrase, one as inadequate to describe the dynamic range of autistic experience as Big Brother’s Newspeak was to describe the lives of the citizens of Oceania.  “Autistic meltdown” is similarly damaging, and from here it shouldn’t be hard to infer how the entire vocabulary of autism is impoverished, or missing altogether in many areas, to the point that using it uncritically to describe our own autistic experience can amount to undermining and betraying our own best interests.

I expect there are Northerners and Southerners alike who may blanch (and also that any others who recognize the name Virgil Caine may raise their eyebrows) at my comparison of autism to the post-Civil War American South.  So I want to emphasize that at least in regard to the lyrics of the song I’m quoting (The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down), the comparison is fitting and absolutely appropriate.  I’ll make a passing reference here to a social construction that came out of the post-war Reconstruction and has much in common with the stereotype of autistic people being self-evidently slow or “retarded.”  This would be the image of Southerners as ignorant rubes, when in reality such characters are perhaps more colorful but no more common or ignorant than the closely related Northern rube.

And then, this is a subject for another essay or three or a hundred, but in addition to the devalued personal currency of those who are identified as autistic, there is also a sense in which the prevailing culture has plundered or “taken the very best” from autism, among whom I would include those studied by Michael Fitzgerald, along with those more informally collected, for instance, over at Incorrect Pleasures.  In any case, as Tyler Cowen has observed:

“… many of the autistics with relatively high social status don’t want to affiliate with the concept or, more frequently, they are genuinely unaware that they might qualify as autistic in some manner.”

Social constructs then can divide, disenfranchise, and stigmatize just as easily as they can create or build up. If you are successful enough, if your social status is high enough, then you do not “count” as autistic, and your achievements and contributions are not credited to the social construct known as autism.  Thus, —however unintentionally—do the “upper,” unidentified classes of the autistic population patronize, devalue and “steal from” those who have been identified as autistic—whose abilities and accomplishments, however solid, are forevermore taken to be the exception rather than the rule.

At any rate it is the culture that prevails, as we know, the “winners,” who write the history books; alternative views tend to find more roundabout expression in popular culture, art, and music.  In response then to the question, “What kind of autism do we ‘have’ in the world in this year of 2010?” it is not inaccurate to say, “We have Virgil Caine’s Autism:  autism that has been plundered, punished, robbed of its pride, and relegated to second- or third-class status through the imposition of social constructs about which autistics were not consulted and in the making of which we had no hand—save perhaps in our tacit or frightened silence, should John Calvin’s god have chosen us to enjoy a high social status.

As for that privileged class known as the non-autistic, just as it’s one thing to win a civil war, it’s one thing to prevail as a culture of extroverted, socially oriented, highly verbal types—and quite another to pathologize and write off as illegitimate those over whom you have prevailed, co-opting and taking credit for their achievements and contributions, and treating those who cannot be assimilated as if they were diseased. Such treatment says far more about the winners than it does about the autistic.

So.  Strange as it sounds and all exceptions aside, consider that the autistic population’s situation today has more in common with the post-bellum South under the carpetbaggers than it does with any Hippocratic notion of “First do no harm.”  That this is as much a comment on the power of social constructs as it is on the shortcomings of modern psychiatry is no less reason to move autism out from under psychiatric care and into a situation better suited to its nature.

There are limits to my empathy with the South.  I have seen the electoral maps that show the GOP diminished to a regional Southern party, beholden to the one-time Confederate states and no longer able to exert national influence.  If this diminished status holds, it is for good reason.  What it is of the South that “will rise again” remains to be seen, and it may well be a rough beast.

At the same time, as rough a beast as it may seem to some, I offer that what Cowen calls the autistic cognitive style, faithfully reconstructed and risen to a place of rightful recognition is just the sort of slumbering giant whose time has come round at last.

I suppose I ought to comment on the current topic of debate, the disappearing trajectory of Asperger’s (syndrome, disorder, call it what you will).

I expect I could make all manner of historical comparisons and cite a number of sources, all of which I will subsequently have to do when I am writing up my research anyway.  But (if I am allowed to start a sentence that way) I shall fall back into the land of analogy and go back to a geographical fable.

Once upon a time there were two countrymen, explorers both.  One went away across the mountains to live in a foreign country but the other stayed at home.  However each of them discovered a stream, the one who lived in a foreign land found that the stream got stronger and even though it went through a number of rapids on the way it became a mighty river which he gave a name to.

The other explorer’s stream seemed to meander on through deep woods and almost petered out.  The explorer who tried to follow this stream was almost forgotten until one day a third explorer, familiar with the big river named after the first thought that neglected stream had water in it of a very similar hue and consistency to that in the big river on the other side of the mountains.  This new explorer thought that the second explorer had been neglected and so named this newly rediscovered stream after him.

As time went on and more and more explorers followed these two streams, as they became rivers, down towards the sea, the rivers seemed to merge as they overflowed into the flood plain at the far end of the mountain range which divided the two countries.  They seemed to merge, and then separate, and merge again sometimes leaving isolated oxbow lakes in the way that mature rivers are wont to.  Indeed it became difficult to say whose river was contributing the most water flow.  People argued as to which of the names given by the explorers the delta should be named after.

Then one day, one day, somebody decided that instead of settling the issue by following the streams down to the sea, where the river had become so wide it had lost all distinction as it merged with the tide, they would try and follow each river to its source.

At last they discovered why the waters were so similar:  because both streams had the same source at the watershed.  One flowed an easy path down one side of the mountain into the country the first explorer had moved to whilst the other flowed down the other side through secluded woods until it emerged at the bottom of the mountains onto the plain shared by both countries alike.

It was the same water all along, and the explorers names?  Kanner and Asperger.

A Tale of Two Rivers first appeared at in regione caecorum rex est luscus and is reprinted here with permission of the author.

Imagine that ten years from now autism and Asperger’s are still on the rise.  It is discovered that aboriginal matrifocal societies often exhibit what Gregory Bateson described as primary process.

“Primary process is characterized (e.g., by Fenichel) as lacking negatives, lacking tense, lacking in any identification of linguistic mood (i.e., no identification of indicative, subjunctive, optative, etc.) and metaphoric.  These characterizations are based upon the experience of psychoanalysts, who must interpret dreams and the patterns of free associations.” (Bateson G (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind.  Balantine: New York, p. 139)

In other words, some ancient matrilineal societies may exhibit a less robust “theory of mind” than moderns.  Connections between matrifocal aboriginals and modern autistics are made.

The recapitulationists of the early twentieth century that emphasized three-fold and four-fold parallelisms make a new kind of sense.  In other words, there emerges a connection between the scales of human societal evolution and individual ontogeny insofar as aboriginal society child rearing practices inform how modern society can raise the children of its high testosterone women.  (I hypothesize that the women in early matrifocal societies are high testosterone and high estrogen.)

Imagine that ten years from now these connections are being made.  High testosterone mothers (and perhaps high testosterone, high estrogen mothers) are provided specific guidance on how to raise their children using aboriginal techniques.  The web becomes filled with the various ways children are guided into adulthood within an environment suited to their unique bodies, minds and brains.  Autism rates don’t dramatically decrease but fully functional, socialized children with autistic (matrilineal aboriginal) bodies, minds and spirits are discovered to be making unique and profound contributions to society.

World culture drifts in the direction of raising children using aboriginal conventions.

The result two generations from now is a dramatic drop in commercial innovation and industrial production but a skyrocketing in aesthetics, programming and mathematics.  Art and the abstract sciences burn up the planet’s online bandwidth with an amateurization of professions formerly available to the very few.

Our consumer economy is crashing.  What will take its place?  Consider this just-so story as one alternative direction.

…

Proceed to author’s FREE book download on this subject (The book is called Evolution, Autism and Social Change). 10 minute introductory video here. ]]> http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/01/07/neurodiversity-primary-process-and-theory-of-mind/feed/ 2 http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/01/01/autism-as-a-secret-society/ http://www.shiftjournal.com/2010/01/01/autism-as-a-secret-society/#comments Fri, 01 Jan 2010 11:38:52 +0000 Mark Stairwalt http://www.shiftjournal.com/?p=1004 The idea that autism is humankind’s oldest and largest secret society is one I’ve suggested on this site more than once; here I’d like to explicitly make the case for that idea. Members of secret societies, it’s true, are generally presumed to be able to recognize one another; that requirement I typically sidestep with the qualifier, “… so secret in fact that its members do not even know one another.” Beyond this detail however the case still holds up well enough, at least to serve as a useful way to understand autism’s hidden presence in society.

The attributes I focus on where autism does qualify rather splendidly are that secret societies are also generally presumed: a) to have a public face or image which serves to camouflage and divert attention from the full extent of its activities and effects in the world; and b), to have actual effects in the world, with responsibility for those effects being hidden from public knowledge either by being attributed to other causes, or by never being recognized as having been “caused” in the first place.

A third attribute might be that there is an intention on the part of secret society members to remain hidden in their existence or their activities. Here too autism qualifies, in more ways than one though not of course for the usual reasons, and only in part. The argument I’m making then is that autism functions as a secret society, an argument which is quite apart from the question of how many and which people have intended this arrangement.

In terms of a public face or image which serves to hide autism’s true nature then, one need look no further than the world’s worst public relations firm, the well-funded autism “advocacy” organization Autism Speaks, which this past year managed to roll up every negative stereotype about autism into one ad campaign based on a public service video spot titled I Am Autism. While depicting autism itself as a capable, sinister force intent on the destruction of families, the campaign managed to portray autistic people as helpless, ineffectual objects, wholly incapable of any discernible positive effect on the world. On the other hand, from the Bilderberg Group to Abraham Vereide’s evangelical mafia “Family”, no secret organization could wish for better public relations cover to throw investigators off the scent of their true capabilities.

When it comes to documenting actual effects of the presence of autistic people in the world, what can best be done in this space is to direct attention once again to the work of Professor Michael Fitzgerald, who makes the argument and presents the evidence that autistic achievers have been here all along, responsible for an untold amount of human achievement over the centuries. Author Tyler Cowen is also illuminating on this subject, explaining here how our attention to autistic capabilities and accomplishments can be diverted simply because of the pervasive selection bias:

Often outsiders don’t see the cognitive strengths along the autism spectrum because they focus excessively on what is highly or easily visible. Autism in the modern world is often about “diagnosis” and “treatment,” and that creates a selection bias. Medical professionals control the familiar definitions of autism and they meet those people or parents who come to them for help. It’s no surprise that these people and their doctors are focused on life problems. At the same time, many of the autistics with relatively high social status don’t want to affiliate with the concept or, more frequently, they are genuinely unaware that they might qualify as autistic in some manner.

Some of my own previous essays at making autism’s actual effects in the world recognizable can be found here, here, and here. Getting over that selection bias is the hard part; once one learns what the possibilities are, what becomes pervasive is the sense that autistic achievement and contribution to civilization have been prevalent throughout history, that what Cowen calls “the autistic cognitive style” has always been with us, and that in fact our history would be unimaginably different without it. If you’re looking for an example of an  authoritative,  name-brand observer who has made this leap past the selection bias and reported back from the other side, one can do no better than Dr. Hans Asperger as relayed by Uta Frith in her book Autism: Explaining the Enigma:

The term “autistic intelligence” was coined by Asperger. He believed that autistic intelligence had distinct qualities and was the opposite of conventional learning and worldly wise cunning. Indeed he thought of it as a vital ingredient in all great creations in art and science.

As for the collaboration of autistic people in the effort to keep attention away from this insight, the last sentence from the paragraph quoted above bears repeating: “… many of the autistics with relatively high social status don’t want to affiliate with the concept or, more frequently, they are genuinely unaware that they might qualify as autistic in some manner.” Keep in mind that “autistics with relatively high social status,” as well as those who simply live workaday middle class lives all unawares of their affiliation constitute a presumed majority of those who possess an autistic cognitive style, and are no less autistic for not being diagnosable according to DSM-IV criteria—said criteria measuring various sorts of societal and social impairment rather than autism per se.

And then there are those autistic people beloved of groups like Autism Speaks such as blogger Jonathan Mitchell, who goes out of his way to “undiagnose” prominent presumed autistics such as Thomas Jefferson, Bill Gates, and Albert Einstein by offering alternative explanations for behavior consistent with autism—the stated motivation for this undiagnosing being that undue expectations are imposed on the majority of autistic people when such examples of high achievement are held up for public inspection.

So there it is. As autistic people we may as yet lack the ability to recognize one another—or ourselves, for that matter—as members of a secret society or even as being autistic in the first place. We may lack the intention to hide our full and true nature and the extent of our contribution, though we work to do so daily. In doing so though, we maintain a public face—with an ample assist from so-called “autism advocacy” groups—which serves to hide who we are and what difference we make. And that difference, that actual effect we have on the world, is profound, pervasive, and rooted in a cognitive style which may well extend back into our prehistory as a species of bipedal apes.

And virtually no one is aware that this is going on.

Autism is the largest, oldest secret society in the history of mankind, so secret in fact that members—as yet—hardly know how to recognize one another.

Google returns 7,480 hits on the other hand for “He’s autistic, you know,” while “She’s autistic, you know,” currently appears all of 7 times.  You’ll be hard pressed to find even one instance where those words are not used to explain what was seen as odd or otherwise inexplicable behavior.  The common usage, in other words, has little overlap with the way Canadians use the same phrase to identify their countrymen whom no one suspected to be Canadian.

I predict this is going to change in coming years, and has in fact already begun to change.  “He’s/she’s autistic, you know,” will come to refer also to those whom almost no one would suspect of being autistic.  This is possible because there really are that many people whose life, work, and play is marked by an autistic cognitive style, if not by all the markers for a definitive diagnosis of autism—and because there really are that many of us who assume that anyone whose behavior is not sufficiently odd or inexplicable must therefore not be in any sense autistic.

Joining me in this perception about the prevalence of unsuspected autism is economist Tyler Cowen.  His most recent work, a remarkable synthesis of insights about autism and economics, has this (and much more) to say about why our assumptions are out of calibration:

Often outsiders don’t see the cognitive strengths along the autism spectrum because they focus excessively on what is highly or easily visible. Autism in the modern world is often about “diagnosis” and “treatment,” and that creates a selection bias. Medical professionals control the familiar definitions of autism and they meet those people or parents who come to them for help. It’s no surprise that these people and their doctors are focused on life problems. At the same time, many of the autistics with relatively high social status don’t want to affiliate with the concept or, more frequently, they are genuinely unaware that they might qualify as autistic in some manner.

People with high social status and “good life outcomes” will come to be seen as having been autistic all along, in a way that has the potential to cast the current hysteria over the “autism epidemic” in a very different light. Those who are most sensitive to this coming change though, and are feeling it perhaps earlier than others are those autistics who find their social status and life outcomes lacking when compared to those of these “newfound” autistics and their happy socioeconomic outcomes.  It’s not hard to anticipate that blame will be cast on those of us whose achievements fall short of others to whom we will inevitably be compared:  “If they could overcome their autism, why can’t you?”

The appropriate response to this framing of the issue isn’t to run, hide, and deny the emerging reality; it is to frame that reality—that of autism’s prevalence across all levels of society—more accurately, more humanely, and more usefully.  For all the solemn pronouncements which might be made about how no one should ever have to justify their autism, produce compensation to society for their autism, or be expected to “overcome” it for the convenience or benefit of others, there is another way to re-frame autism which to be honest is just a lot more fun.

For pointers, I suggest looking first of all to America’s finest news source, The Onion, and again to America’s northern neighbor, Canada.  From The Onion, we have the classic headline (though the story itself seems no longer available) “Quirky Canada has own government, laws.”  This was a “human interest” news report that documented with breathless astonishment that there were actually significant differences in the ways in which Americans and Canadians govern themselves, even though both countries for example enjoy very similar television programming.

Carrying this torch today is the Canadian comic who likes to promote Canada as an ideal tourist destination for Americans, seeing as how the language, food, and customs of Canada are all but identical to those in the United States—these familiar qualities, he says, being exactly what Americans seem to prefer in a foreign country.  Delivered in front of a Canadian audience, if you didn’t know, this line draws ready and knowing laughter.  Even little Canadian children, I suspect, recognize that there’s something ridiculous about the low comfort level Americans have with other cultures.  Not coincidentally, these are children who do not grow up feeling as if they can be blamed, just because they’re Canadian, for not being an Avril Lavigne or a Jim Carrey.

I’ve always admired The Onion for finding the humor in even the darkest experiences, and for not shying away from difficult topics; one example was their response to the misdirected fear and suspicion toward “outsider” teenagers that followed the Columbine High School shootings.  This came in a cheerily scathing article, Columbine Jocks Safely Resume Bullying, published the September after the shootings, just as students were returning for a new school year.

Thanks to stern new security measures, a militarized school environment and a massive public-relations effort designed to obscure all memory of the murderous event, members of Columbine’s popular crowd are once again safe to reassert their social dominance and resume their proud, longstanding tradition of excluding those who do not fit in.

What I’m getting at is that we, the self-aware autistic community, have yet to make full use of humor as a teaching tool, a defensive weapon, and a means of bonding with others who share our perspective—and of showing the world some long-overdue attitude.  It would not surprise me in the least if The Onion’s writing team sees not just the Columbine aftermath but the whole world from an autistic perspective—but the point is that they speak as comedy writers, not as autistic people.  We need to be using humor in this way ourselves, from an explicitly autistic perspective.

One obstacle to using humor for our own collective interests is maybe that we do not yet see ourselves as a Nation such as, say, O, Canada does.  One way I think we’ll know we’re getting there—getting to see ourselves as a people with roughly common concerns, sensibilities, perspectives, and/or senses of humor—will be when we hear some prominent person’s name mentioned in conversation, and find ourselves saying or at least thinking to ourselves, “He’s/she’s autistic, you know.”

(hat tip to muskie and her Institute for the Study of the Neurotypical, established in 1998)