Am I autistic? Are you oughtistic?
I have a son, now eight years old, who was diagnosed at the age of two and a half as Autistic Spectrum (Not Otherwise Specified). He is sitting in front of me as I write, watching a YouTube gameplay video (he is currently into Spore, but occasionally still backslides into Plants Versus Zombies and Cat Simulator). Needless to say, he is almost exactly like me.
I have little doubt that if I were shrunk down to eight years old today I would be diagnosed as something. Disturbingly, schools today have psychologists-in-residence, so being diagnosed is an occupational hazard of being a kid, especially for boys. As already described, I escaped all this by growing up in the 60s, and being Catholic. The only diagnosis I recall clearly (apart from that of being made from puppy-dogs' tails, as already mentioned) was Original Sin: i.e., like all Catholic kids, I was routinely diagnosed as evil and thus deserving of eternal torture in a Lake of Fire. That was quite enough to be going on with, thank you.
To be honest, the question of whether I am autistic or not, or whether my son is, doesn't bother me that much. It's just a label, and not a particularly eloquent one. My son tends to do the hand-rubbing thing when excited, and was a very late developer linguistically, and is socially clumsy, but that's about it. He's not noticeably incommunicative, nor lacking in affection. Quite the opposite, in fact. The condition he appears to share with me is one which I have long since anatomised as follows:
(1) Failure to use language as a habitual medium of thought. The only time I think in words is when I am highly stressed (where words, including meaningless mantras, serve as a more or less conscious and deliberate escape valve for surplus adrenalin) or when I am planning some sort of public discourse, such as a speech, or a defensive excuse to be wielded in an Interview with the Boss. The rest of the time, abstract notions, sensations, imagery and emotions are the small coin of everyday thinking, not words. A pre-language or proto-language of neurological symbols, which need to be laboriously translated on-the-fly, with greater or lesser success, every time I open my mouth. Less verbal automaticity, in sum.
(2) A consequent dislike of conversation, which is viewed as an exhausting activity with diminishing returns, and avoidance of social situations where I might be required to converse. The beginnings of mild social phobia. A (presumably related) admiration, acquired early in life and demonstrating remarkable persistency, for animals and, more generally, non-verbal creatures, especially birds and insects. A tendency to view "successful relationships" as those that involve the least amount of talking.
(3) A consequent impatience with verbal imprecision and illogic, deriving from the ingrained habit of translating verbal discourse back into the native mental language of logical symbols in an early stage of processing. In extreme or pathological cases this presumably manifests as the literalism often associated with the autistic. In other, less morbid variants it may come across as hairsplitting pedantry. In my own case, more often than not it's just feeling uneasy, disturbed or upset whenever I come across strongly expressed opinions that appear to be at least partially constructed on the basis of shaky unexamined assumptions or semantic equivocation.
(4) A habitual feeling of despair and impotence associated with the achievement of personal goals for which protracted verbal negotiation is presumed to be necessary, such as whatever counts as a socially acceptable expression of kindliness or affection. Taken with the above, this may have the result that sexual relationships are both overvalued (in that they are hypothesized to require less actual speaking, and allow more direct expression of physical affection, than "normal" relationships, which makes them even more desirable than they would otherwise be), and, simultaneously, regarded as difficult or impossible of attainment. The medieval Courtly Love ethos would thus be fundamentally autistic in its origin.
(5) An absent or - more plausibly - impaired sense of identification with the tribe. I will have more to say elsewhere on tribal instincts and behavior. Suffice to say here that I believe human brains come pre-programmed to learn and reproduce tribal behaviours, many of which are transactional in character. Children observe and imitate those behaviours in adult role models which are perceived as conferring social advantage. For example, a girl sees female TV characters rolling their eyes, learns contextually to associate this action with an attitude of contempt, and hence, an assumption of social superiority; she then reproduces the behavior in the (not unreasonable) hope that, used properly with the right contextual cues, it will confer superior status. An autistic person, while still retaining the imitative instinct, finds it hard to distinguish those behaviour patterns worth imitating from contextual noise, i.e. behavior patterns that confer no social advantage. (Anecdotally, I still remember that in early childhood I was much more focused on imitating the behavior of animals and birds than that of fellow humans. Whether I actually went through a phase of squeaking I cannot now recall.) More to the point, there is an impaired sensitivity to in-group and out-group markers, and the sense of tribal or peer-group membership or loyalty tends to be absent or diffuse, with the concomitant danger of various forms of ostracism supervening.
(6) A tendency to put things in numbered lists.
It is, admittedly, frustrating to be asked, as expats like myself often are, "what language I think in", or even more bizarrely, "what language I dream in" (do other people talk in their dreams? In mine, people occasionally open their mouths, but what comes out more often than not tends to sound like a jammed vacuum-cleaner, or a Wilhelm scream in a glass jar, or like Joyce's impression of thunder in Finnegans Wake, and not at all like any identifiable human language). Nevertheless, until recently I suppose I always took it for granted that I was on the mildly socially handicapped lower fringes of normal in some respects, and just plain irretrievably fucked-up in others, but that if one wanted to draw lines, the only significant division was between socially impaired and socially "normal". Now, I begin to wonder whether, as openly hypothesized by some, there is actually a continuum of psychosocial function with autism at one end and Williams Syndrome and/or various Cluster B disorders at the other; and whether, in addition, there may be social and/or biological forces at work that tend to pull people towards one or other end of the spectrum, and if so, whether such forces may be gender-sensitive. (That Word again.)
In everyday terms, however, I tend to go with autistic vs oughtistic. Which is to say, individualist versus collectivist, aesthete versus moralist, or if you want to go all Myers-Briggsy, perceptual versus judgmental.
It's not very scientific, but then, freaks who are defending their freakery against imminent extinction rarely are.
I am trying to stay alive, you see.
I have little doubt that if I were shrunk down to eight years old today I would be diagnosed as something. Disturbingly, schools today have psychologists-in-residence, so being diagnosed is an occupational hazard of being a kid, especially for boys. As already described, I escaped all this by growing up in the 60s, and being Catholic. The only diagnosis I recall clearly (apart from that of being made from puppy-dogs' tails, as already mentioned) was Original Sin: i.e., like all Catholic kids, I was routinely diagnosed as evil and thus deserving of eternal torture in a Lake of Fire. That was quite enough to be going on with, thank you.
To be honest, the question of whether I am autistic or not, or whether my son is, doesn't bother me that much. It's just a label, and not a particularly eloquent one. My son tends to do the hand-rubbing thing when excited, and was a very late developer linguistically, and is socially clumsy, but that's about it. He's not noticeably incommunicative, nor lacking in affection. Quite the opposite, in fact. The condition he appears to share with me is one which I have long since anatomised as follows:
(1) Failure to use language as a habitual medium of thought. The only time I think in words is when I am highly stressed (where words, including meaningless mantras, serve as a more or less conscious and deliberate escape valve for surplus adrenalin) or when I am planning some sort of public discourse, such as a speech, or a defensive excuse to be wielded in an Interview with the Boss. The rest of the time, abstract notions, sensations, imagery and emotions are the small coin of everyday thinking, not words. A pre-language or proto-language of neurological symbols, which need to be laboriously translated on-the-fly, with greater or lesser success, every time I open my mouth. Less verbal automaticity, in sum.
(2) A consequent dislike of conversation, which is viewed as an exhausting activity with diminishing returns, and avoidance of social situations where I might be required to converse. The beginnings of mild social phobia. A (presumably related) admiration, acquired early in life and demonstrating remarkable persistency, for animals and, more generally, non-verbal creatures, especially birds and insects. A tendency to view "successful relationships" as those that involve the least amount of talking.
(3) A consequent impatience with verbal imprecision and illogic, deriving from the ingrained habit of translating verbal discourse back into the native mental language of logical symbols in an early stage of processing. In extreme or pathological cases this presumably manifests as the literalism often associated with the autistic. In other, less morbid variants it may come across as hairsplitting pedantry. In my own case, more often than not it's just feeling uneasy, disturbed or upset whenever I come across strongly expressed opinions that appear to be at least partially constructed on the basis of shaky unexamined assumptions or semantic equivocation.
(4) A habitual feeling of despair and impotence associated with the achievement of personal goals for which protracted verbal negotiation is presumed to be necessary, such as whatever counts as a socially acceptable expression of kindliness or affection. Taken with the above, this may have the result that sexual relationships are both overvalued (in that they are hypothesized to require less actual speaking, and allow more direct expression of physical affection, than "normal" relationships, which makes them even more desirable than they would otherwise be), and, simultaneously, regarded as difficult or impossible of attainment. The medieval Courtly Love ethos would thus be fundamentally autistic in its origin.
(5) An absent or - more plausibly - impaired sense of identification with the tribe. I will have more to say elsewhere on tribal instincts and behavior. Suffice to say here that I believe human brains come pre-programmed to learn and reproduce tribal behaviours, many of which are transactional in character. Children observe and imitate those behaviours in adult role models which are perceived as conferring social advantage. For example, a girl sees female TV characters rolling their eyes, learns contextually to associate this action with an attitude of contempt, and hence, an assumption of social superiority; she then reproduces the behavior in the (not unreasonable) hope that, used properly with the right contextual cues, it will confer superior status. An autistic person, while still retaining the imitative instinct, finds it hard to distinguish those behaviour patterns worth imitating from contextual noise, i.e. behavior patterns that confer no social advantage. (Anecdotally, I still remember that in early childhood I was much more focused on imitating the behavior of animals and birds than that of fellow humans. Whether I actually went through a phase of squeaking I cannot now recall.) More to the point, there is an impaired sensitivity to in-group and out-group markers, and the sense of tribal or peer-group membership or loyalty tends to be absent or diffuse, with the concomitant danger of various forms of ostracism supervening.
(6) A tendency to put things in numbered lists.
It is, admittedly, frustrating to be asked, as expats like myself often are, "what language I think in", or even more bizarrely, "what language I dream in" (do other people talk in their dreams? In mine, people occasionally open their mouths, but what comes out more often than not tends to sound like a jammed vacuum-cleaner, or a Wilhelm scream in a glass jar, or like Joyce's impression of thunder in Finnegans Wake, and not at all like any identifiable human language). Nevertheless, until recently I suppose I always took it for granted that I was on the mildly socially handicapped lower fringes of normal in some respects, and just plain irretrievably fucked-up in others, but that if one wanted to draw lines, the only significant division was between socially impaired and socially "normal". Now, I begin to wonder whether, as openly hypothesized by some, there is actually a continuum of psychosocial function with autism at one end and Williams Syndrome and/or various Cluster B disorders at the other; and whether, in addition, there may be social and/or biological forces at work that tend to pull people towards one or other end of the spectrum, and if so, whether such forces may be gender-sensitive. (That Word again.)
In everyday terms, however, I tend to go with autistic vs oughtistic. Which is to say, individualist versus collectivist, aesthete versus moralist, or if you want to go all Myers-Briggsy, perceptual versus judgmental.
It's not very scientific, but then, freaks who are defending their freakery against imminent extinction rarely are.
I am trying to stay alive, you see.
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